Slouching towards Thatcham

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2010-05-18T12:37:00.002+01:00

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He who hesitates

2010-05-12T22:59:00.068+01:00

Apple opened its doors for iPad pre-orders in the UK on Monday, promising shipment by May 28th. Fool that I am, I deliberated, cogitated and digested, confirming in my own mind that I really did need - okay, really, really want - one, and then mulling over Heather's offer to defer purchase until my 40th birthday in September. (I did give that some consideration. Really I did. I even went so far as to agree to wait, although I must admit I was 95% certain she wouldn't take me up on it.)

Anyhow, I finally got round to placing my order this afternoon - the 32GB Wi-fi only model, in case you were interested - only to discover that, yet again, demand is far outstripping Apple's ability to manufacture and distribute the hardware. As a result of dithering for 48 hours, I now find that Apple have shifted shipping dates on new orders back ten days to June 7th. That's 26 - count them, 26 - days of waiting.

It's like the bad old days of the 70s/80s, when mail order companies would routinely advise you to "please allow 28 days for delivery".

What's the old saying about "he who hesitates is lost"? Or, at least, majorly incovenienced? Idiot, idiot, idiot. Why didn't I place the order first thing on Monday morning?

Yes, I know I'm being pathetic and childish. I know it's only another ten days, when I knew I was committed to waiting over two weeks anyway. But the whole point of being an early adopter and accepting that you will be paying a premium - for the initial version of a gadget which will be superseded within months with a vastly improved model anyway - is that you're, well, early. It's like paying for front row tickets on opening night and then arriving half an hour late and sitting ten rows back.

Now if you don't mind, I'm just going to sneak off to a quiet corner and throw a toddler tantrum Zac would be proud of.

Election 2010: the morning after the night before

2010-05-07T08:05:00.000+01:00

After two hours' sleep, I would be lying if I said I was at my sharpest at this moment, but let me try and work out what's happened since I went offline at 4am.

The consensus opinion appears to be that we are heading for a hung Parliament in which the Conservatives will have the most seats, but not necessarily the keys to the kingdom. Forecasts project that David Cameron will fall around 20 seats short of being able to form a majority Conservative government. But such are the vagaries of the British electoral system that Cameron may find himself frozen out of Number 10 by a potential Labour/Lib Dem coalition. Whether Gordon Brown would stay as Prime Minister in such a scenario remains to be seen - the possibility of a palace coup should not be ignored.

While it hasn't quite been a bloodbath, there have been a number of high-profile casualties. Northern Ireland First Minister Peter Robinson was an early victim, as was Lembit Opik. The public paid for Jacqui Smith's husband to watch two porn films on expenses, but the former Home Secretary has ultimately paid with her seat. Other Labour ministers and senior names have also been removed by the Tories' 'decapitation' strategy, although Schools' Secretary Ed Balls survived by the skin of his teeth to hold onto his seat in Morley & Outwood, denying writers a plethora of pithy headlines such as "Labour loses its Balls" and "Balls castrated". (His wife, the Secretary of State for Work & Pensions Yvette Cooper, retained a large majority in the neighbouring constituency of Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford despite a double-digit swing to the Tories.)

As became clear early on, the Lib Dems' opinion poll gains from the three televised debates largely dissipated when push came to shove at the ballot box, with just a 23% share of the popular vote, and as many - in fact slightly more - losses as gains in what has been a topsy-turvy and largely disappointing night for Clegg's party. Opik is gone. So too Evan Harris in Oxford West & Abingdon - a safe 7,683 majority over the Tories being overturned as he failed to gain re-election by the narrow margin of 176.

The Green Party will be celebrating as leader Caroline Lucas earned their first ever seat in the House of Commons with her win at Brighton Pavilion. However, BNP leader Nick Griffin flopped in Barking, seeing his party's share of the vote in that seat fall compared to the 2005 election. I'm not shedding too many tears about that one, I have to say.

Okay, I think I've caught up on the headlines. Over to the live coverage.

6:33am: At long last Sheffield Hallam, Nick Clegg's seat, finally declares its result after a long, chaotic and controversial night, returning the Lib Dem leader to Parliament. With 85 seats still to declare, the running score is: Con 271, Lab 220, Lib Dem 47, Others 27.

6.40am: Clegg talked about patience and the need to get the 'right' government in his acceptance speech. From that, I'm assuming there will now be several days of behind-the-scenes negotiations as Clegg angles for Cabinet seats and promises of electoral reform. It's beginning to look like we may not know the final outcome of this election until next week, and there is no guarantee that we will not require a second general election in short order if the situation cannot resolve itself.

7.04am: Gordon Brown arrives at Downing Street looking somewhat the worse for wear, and is immediately bombarded with the question "Are you going to resign, Mr Brown?" The Prime Minister, who is staring at projections of having two million fewer votes and 46 fewer seats than the Conservatives, chooses not to answer. Can't imagine why.

7.15am: I wonder how the series of conversations between Clegg and Cameron and Clegg and Brown might go. "Hi, Gordon, Nick here. I think Home Secretary would suit me well, don't you? And then I want half a dozen other Cabinet posts for Lib Dems, I get to pick out the curtains, and for God's sake try to smile a bit. No? Hang on a minute, I've got David on the other line - I'll get back to you."

7.30am: Update on my watch-list:
- Newbury: Conservative hold, with increased majority
- Oxford West & Abingdon: As mentioned above, shock gain by the Conservatives from the Lib Dems
- Corby: Labour majority of 1,517 overturned by the Tories' Louise Bagshawe, who becomes the new MP for Corby with a majority of nearly two thousand
- Brent North: Safe Labour seat, not expected to declare until at least 9.30am (evidently everyone fancied a bit of a lie-in)

7.37am: Okay, bored now. Paxman talking to Michael Gove, Shadow Schools' Secretary, who is trotting out the Tory party line of thinly-veiled disgust - actually, make that not at all veiled disgust - at the notion that Gordon Brown has the constitutional right to attempt to form a coalition government, despite being roundly thrashed in the parliamentary vote and being forced to sit in the corner wearing a conical hat with a big 'D' on it. Many viewers waking up to this will be wondering how the bloke who finished second gets first dibs ahead of the chap who beat him. To be honest, even those of us who have some working knowledge of parliamentary politics are pretty confused.

7.49am: And now it's the turn of Mandelson, Prince of Darkness to peddle the Labour position. Paxman is exercising his full repertoire of eye-rolling, grimaces and eyebrow-raising - impressive stamina at the fag end of a very long night. Mind you, the over-the-shoulder shot that shows Jezza's expanding bald spot does him no favours at all.

7.58am: Zac has just marched into the living room and demanded that he be allowed to watch ZingZillas. Who am I to say no? Not much is going to happen over the next few hours in terms of resolving the big picture, so I guess it's time for a cold shower, some coffee and then drag myself into work. As I switch over to CBeebies, the current state of the parties is: Con 286, Lab 235, Lib Dem 50, Others 27. Byeee!

Election night: 3.00-4.00am

2010-05-07T04:00:00.001+01:00

Okay, one more hour ...

3.05am: A bit of a lull in proceedings. Results continue to trickle in at a fair clip, but the narrative isn't really developing much at all. We think the Tories are doing quite well, but no one knows if they're doing well enough, despite the frantic spin being peddled by the various talking heads.

3.15am: Current state of play: Lab 89, Con 87, Lib Dem 13, Others 23.

3.17am: David Miliband is a slimy weasel, isn't he? Paxman utters my word of the hour: "king-maker". Let's go!

3.20am: Paxman to Liam Fox, Shadow Defence Secretary: "It's twenty past three in the morning. Can we just have a straight answer?" Oh, really, Jeremy? You know you're not going to get anything other than evasion and obfuscation. Why not just ask him whether he has ever led prayer sessions to 'cure' homosexuals, like Philippa Stroud?

3.23am: A thought. Wouldn't it be funny if Nick Clegg had turned his phone off, or was in a spot with no mobile reception? Can you imagine what that would do to Brown and Cameron's blood pressure?

3:30am: No one's rising to the bait. Everyone's studiously avoiding the use of the word "king-maker". Boo! The BBC studio panel is starting to repeat the same talking points they were discussing an hour or so ago. It's like watching Sky Sports News, but without the 'goal of the week' competition.

3.31am: Andrew Neil is now talking to Al Murray and Bill Wyman. That's my cue for a toilet break.

3.35am: Alastair Campbell's bad week continues, as the Lib Dems take Burnley from Labour.

3.38am: Back to Fiona Bruce in the vertigo-inducing BBC studio attic. The poor lass has to tell us in a slightly-but-not-at-all-different-really way that she thinks we're heading for a hung parliament, but nobody really knows. The latest scores on the doors are: Con 122, Lab 107, Lib Dem 20, Others 24.

3.41am: Dimbleby does his best Murray Walker impression as we await the result from Carlisle: "Anything could happen tonight because anything is happening." I have to take my hat off to him, though. A couple of missteps, but he's done incredibly well fronting a live, unscripted and wholly unpredictable programme for nearly six hours (so far). I'm having enough problems operating a keyboard in the privacy of my living room. Incidentally, the Tories take Carlisle from Labour courtesy of a 7.7% swing. That's a big win for the Cameron Crew - it must have been quite a long way down on their list of target seats.

3.45am: Rumours of a recount at one of the seats on my watch-list, Oxford West & Abingdon. Could be a big shock for the Lib Dems, as Dr Evan Harris's majority at the last election was a healthy 7,683. It would be consistent with the current trend though, which seems to indicate that the Tories are doing rather better in the south of the country than they are in the north.

3.53am: There were reportedly three hour queues at polling stations in Sheffield Hallam, Nick Clegg's seat. That's not a minor misjudgement: it's a gross error.

4.00am: We now have declared results from nearly half the parliamentary constituencies, giving us the following clear-as-mud picture: Con 148, Lab 121, Lib Dem 23, Others 25.

Right, I'm off to bed for a couple of hours. Kids permitting, I'll be back around 6am.

Election night: 2.00-3.00am

2010-05-07T03:10:00.000+01:00

Right, I'm armed with one final coffee. Pretty sure this will be the last hour for me before I need to grab a bit of sleep.

2.05am: The sense I'm getting is that the Tories are doing a lot of damage to Labour, but perhaps not enough to secure an overall majority. And the Lib Dems are doing no damage to anybody. Beyond that, I'm committing to nothing. How's that for in-depth analysis?

2.15am: Toby's grizzling in his cot upstairs. I know exactly how he feels.

2.20am: Of the four seats I have a personal interest in, Newbury has already declared as a Tory hold with an increased majority, Oxford West & Abingdon is forecasting a declaration around 3am, Brent North at 4am and Corby at 5am. How the hell am I supposed to plan my sleep around that lot?

2.25am: Toby now crying. Time for another feed. Now I mention it, I'm feeling a bit peckish too. Oh, hang on, another big name casualty: Lembit Opik's out on his ear. I'd forgotten he was an MP; I thought he'd become a professional Z-list celebrity dater.

2.41am: Um, some stuff is happening. A run of three results in which Tories capture marginal seats from Labour. It's not looking good for Gordon.

2.48am: Jeremy Paxman unleashes attack-dog mode on Lembit Opik. Clearly not much love lost there.

2.57am: Over to Witney for the declaration in David Cameron's seat. Oh, this is brilliant. Not because there's any doubt over the result - we know he's going to win with an enormous majority (nearly 23,000 as it turns out) - but because we have a proper line-up of candidates. Ten in all, including candidates for the Monster Raving Loonies and the Wessex Regionalists. No surprise as Cameron's opening salvo gently implies that the earlier polling station fiascos are somehow Gordon's fault personally. The BBC studio pundits had been predicting a fairly equivocal speech from Cameron given that more than two-thirds of constituencies have yet to declare, but his words are fairly strong without being complacent: "I believe it is already clear that the Labour government has lost its mandate to govern our country. What is clear from these results is that the country wants change. That change is going to require new leadership." The cameras cut away at the end of the speech, so we don't get to see whether Cameron's next move is to speed-dial Nick Clegg.

Okay, that's 3am. Now what? This is quite good fun, this. Not quite the same as doing live text commentary on the football or cricket, but fun nonetheless.

Election night: 1.00-2.00am

2010-05-07T02:03:00.003+01:00

Okay, it's 1am and I'm still here (just). Not sure how long it will be before I fall asleep over my keyboard, but anyway ...

1.03am: The Tories win their first seat, gaining Kingswood from Labour with a 9.4% swing. Now that's interesting, because it suggests that the prospect of a Conservative majority government remains very much alive. Way too early to tell one way or the other, of course. I suspect the word of the hour will be "bellwether", which is what Kingswood is.

1.08am: "Downing Street source - Brown to seek coalition if hung parliament." No surprise. So Gordon will not be going gentle into that good night, then. Is that the sound of scraping fingernails I hear? And Neil Kinnock has just used "bellwether" too.

1.14am: The Tories hold Putney with a significantly enhanced majority over Labour in this marginal - 10,053 versus 1,766 in 2005, a swing of 9.9%. I suspect the mood in Conservative Central Office is currently considerably brighter than it is with their Labour counterparts.

1.20am: If you're a geek like me who's into the nuts and bolts of an election, Wikipedia is a wonderful source of information. I've got Wikipedia and BBC tabs permanently open on my browser to dive into the detail of each constituency as each result is announced

1.21am: Alastair Campbell really being made to squirm by Andrew Neil. Pretty sure I can see Neil's teeth marks in his neck. It's not been a good week for Tony Blair's former king of spin, what with Burnley being relegated from the Premier League too.

1.26am: As has just been noted on the BBC coverage, every Labour talking head is saying lovely, fluffy things about the Lib Dems and gently hinting (in ten foot high pink neon lights) that they will be more than happy to offer a coalition deal to keep Brown in Number 10. I now have two horrible images in my head: (1) Noel Edmonds putting down the phone and saying to Gordon, "Deal? Or no deal?" and (2) Brown pulling down his trousers and bending over. Not good.

1.27am: Oh dear, I think Dimbleby must be getting tired, as he's just misread the swingometer twice in a row (declaring swings from A to B when it's actually B to A).

1.32am: City of Durham is, we're being told, the Lib Dems' top target against Labour. Get on with it, will you? Instead we switch over to Kirkcaldy, where Gordon Brown at least has the satisfaction of holding on to his own seat. Has any reigning PM ever been unseated at a general election? I don't know. After some frantic bashing of the F5 key, Wikipedia is telling me that Labour has held Durham with an almost identical majority to 2005. That's got to be bad news for the Lib Dems; Durham was, I believe, Nick Clegg's last campaign stop.

1.36am: It's all happening now as results start to come in from some of the tightest battleground seats. Battersea turns from red to blue, with a Labour majority of 163 becoming a Tory one of 5,977.

1.41am: Actually, I take back what I said earlier about bad news for the Lib Dems. As it stands, it looks like Nick Clegg has a fair chance of being in the position of king-maker later today, and if he ends up being courted by both Cameron and Brown he will be in a very strong position, even if the Lib Dems end up with fewer seats than 2005. Oh, the oddities of the British electoral system.

1.45am: Sadiq Khan holds on to Tooting, despite a 3.6% swing to the Tories.No joy for Wolfie Smith and the Tooting Popular front, either. (If you're under 40, that's a reference to the old BBC comedy Citizen Smith.)

1.52am: Times columnist Caitlin Moran on Twitter (@caitlinmoran) has just come up with the most succinct and accurate election analysis so far: "My professional view: absolutely fucking no-one has a titting clue what the pissing screw is going on."

1.57am: Oh my God. I was predicting the Conservatives' Richard Benyon would increase his 3,460 majority in my home constituency of Newbury, but over 12,000? I'm with Caitlin Moran on this one. Despite all the pseudo-statistical prognostications by the 'experts', it's very clear that the only thing predictable about individual results is that they are totally unpredictable. So there.

1.59am: I'm a bit disappointed that the early "bellwether" flurry didn't develop into anything more. Oh well. Four hours down, 90% of seats still to declare. Another coffee? Or admit defeat and go to bed? Decisions, decisions ... maybe 20 minutes more ...

Election night: In the midnight hour

2010-05-07T00:02:00.081+01:00

It's shortly after midnight as I start writing this pseudo-live blog - barely two hours since the polling stations closed - and there are already several major talking points developing as the outcome of the 2010 UK general election slowly unravels. I have no idea how long it will be until I run out of steam (and caffeine) and crawl into bed, but here goes anyway.

To start with, I was switching back and forth between the BBC TV coverage and an episode of the HBO vampire-based series True Blood. On the one hand, a load of blood-suckers; on the other, True Blood. (It's late, I'm tired - if you want decent jokes, go watch Jimmy Carr on Channel 4's Alternative Election Night.)

I'm trying to ignore the exit poll, which predicts the Conservatives will have the most seats in Parliament, 19 short of an overall majority. For all kinds of reasons, these are frequently inaccurate - most notably in 1992 when all the exit polls seriously underestimated John Major's share of the vote. The last hung Parliament was in 1974, and lasted just eight months.

The word of the night - at least on the BBC - is clearly "caveat". I wonder how many people watching actually know what the word means?

There is clearly going to be a big controversy - possibly even a legal challenge - about the fact that long queues formed at some polling stations shortly before they closed at 10pm. In some cases, people were shut out; in others, people were allowed to cast their votes after the official closing time, by which point it would theoretically have been possible for people to have heard the result of the exit poll. Such scenes are unprecedented, at least in this country. Did I fall asleep and wake up somewhere in Africa?

Statement by the Electoral Commission: "The Electoral Commission will be undertaking a thorough review of what has happened. There should have been sufficient resources allocated to ensure everyone who wished to vote was able to do so." Looks like someone will be getting a bit of a kicking in the morning!

The first three constituencies to declare were the three Sunderland ones - two of which were Labour strongholds. The scramble after each one to interpret the results "if this was repeated across the rest of the country" and attempt to predict the national picture is laughable. I imagine mathematicians everywhere will have been tearing their hair out. Except for the bald ones, that is.

12.15am: Toby crying. Time for a feed. Back soon.

12.25am: Feed done. Nothing appears to have happened in the meantime. Ho hum. Oh my God, now David Dimbleby is attempting to sound knowledgeable about Twitter and Facebook. Oh dear.

12.30am: Nearly an hour and three quarters since Houghton & Sunderland South became the first seat to declare, and we still have only three results (all in Sunderland), none of them in the marginals which will be key to the outcome of this election. I'm filled to the gills with coffee, and I'm getting bored of all the talking heads. It occurs to me that this whole process would be much more civil if (a) results could be spaced more evenly through the night and (b) we got to see the marginal seats first so we could all get more than two hours' sleep tonight. I know it's impracticable. I'm just saying ...

12.45am: Obviously, I'm trying to get a view of the big picture and the race towards the magic number of 326 seats which would give one party an overall majority. But I also have an eye on four seats in particular:

- Newbury, my constituency. The Tories hold a narrow majority over the Lib Dems here

- My parents are in Brent North, a reasonably safe Labour seat

- Oxford West & Abingdon. During my undergraduate days, I campaigned alongside Dr Evan Harris, who is the sitting Lib Dem MP with a sizeable majority

- Corby, where the Tory candidate is the chick-fic author Louise Bagshawe, who I know from her time in Oxford University's political circles. Labour held this seat in 2005 with a narrow majority of barely 1,500

12.50am: The Lib Dems win their first seat in Belfast East, deposing Northern Ireland's First Minister Peter Robinson with an extraordinary 23% swing. (The Tories are still seat-less.) It's the first genuine shock of the night; our first genuine Michael Portillio/Stephen Twigg moment. At last, nearly three hours in, it's starting to get exciting.

12.52am: Seriously, why should I give a toss what Maureen Lipman and Alistair McGowan think? Funny that former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil didn't recognise McGowan's impersonation of him, though!

12.58am: At last, the pace is starting to pick up. We now have nine seats declared, with Labour leading the Tories by a 5-0 scoreline. It won't last, of course. We see this pattern in every election, as many of the Conservatives' safe seats are in rural areas who won't declare until much later in the day. I was going to go to bed by 1am, but I think I'll stay up for a bit. Things are just starting to get interesting ...

Election day

2010-05-06T08:15:00.049+01:00

So, after three live televised debates, thousands of minutes of television coverage, millions of column inches and God knows how much frenetic online chatter, we finally arrive at the day of reckoning. Today is General Election day in the UK.

This will be the fifth general election since I became eligible and - due to my mildly nomadic existence with first university and then work - the fourth different constituency I will have voted in.

I'll be voting after I get home from work this evening. Newbury is a marginal seat with a Conservative majority of just 3,460 at the last election in 2005, when Richard Benyon (the Shadow Minister for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) overturned a small Lib Dem majority, so my vote does matter.

In previous elections, I have often stayed up into the small hours until the overall outcome is clear. In 2005, that was 4.28am when Corby in Northamptonshire gave Labour the 324th seat they needed to form a majority government. (Incidentally, the Conservative candidate for Corby this year is the chick-fic author Louise Bagshawe - who famously defected briefly to New Labour in the mid-90s - who I know from her time in university politics at Oxford.)

This time round, with two young children and a full Friday schedule, I'm not quite that committed. My current plan is to settle down in front of the TV after I've voted, see what the (notoriously inaccurate) exit polls are saying, then wait up to see the first few results before heading to bed around midnight. There I'll have the TV on mute to cast an eye on how things are progressing during the small hours.

And tomorrow morning we shall see what we shall see. It promises to be the closest election since 1992 - the last Tory win, incidentally - and possibly the first hung parliament since the ill-fated eight-month Wilson Labour/Liberal government of 1974.

Interesting times.

Swaps!

2010-05-05T13:34:00.000+01:00

In yet another instance of reliving my childhood, I bought a Panini World Cup sticker album yesterday - for Heather, not for me, honest!

It brought a load of memories from when I was 11 or 12 flooding back. Buying a new pack or two of stickers from the newsagent before school every morning. The excitement of discovering and then carefully attaching a new player neatly into his allotted spot, mixed with the disappointment of finding that you had just got Ray Clemence again. Clutching an ever-growing stack of 'swaps' (including nine spares of the aforementioned Clemence, say), carefully arranged in numerical order and ready to be bartered in the playground for Little Jimmy's unwanted foil Arsenal badge. Memorising the players of each team on each page and their individual statistics. The pride you felt once you were finally in a position to send off for the last few stickers needed to complete your album.

Ah, innocent times.

These days, there's no need to find a playground to engage in swaps; eBay serves as an excellent substitute (and one which doesn't run the risk of you being placed on the sex offenders' register). But the sense of anticipation which comes when you open a fresh pack of stickers hasn't gone away.

There are many, easier ways of preparing for a major football tournament. And with football websites two-a-penny, there are certainly more accurate, up-to-date and cheaper ways of getting to know the 32 teams who will line up in South Africa in 36 days' time. (Even taking advantage of retailers' multibuy offers on sticker packs, it would cost around £55 to complete the Panini album, assuming no duplicates whatsoever.)

But you know what? It doesn't matter. Whether it's childhood nostalgia or the simple thrill of assembling and then completing a collection, the humble, outdated sticker album still has a place in my heart - it certainly does in my household.

The hard part

2010-05-02T11:13:00.000+01:00

After a week away, it's back to the grind of refocussing on what I eat and monitoring my weight and exercise levels.

During our five days on holiday, I was pretty good but nowhere near as strict as I could have been with myself. Normally I'm terrible when we're away, eating with abandon and expecting to put on weight at around a pound a day. This time, however, I avoided major pig-outs - I didn't single-handedly empty the buffet at Pizza Hut and made sure I had two large plates of salad and a limited amount of pizza - and consumed the grand total of no chocolate, no ice cream and three individual sweets. Sure, we treated ourselves to desserts with dinner, and I snacked more than I normally would (treating myself to nuts and flatbreads rather than sweets), but overall I think I managed to strike a reasonable balance without being too draconian.

The good news is that I have ended the week at exactly the same weight - 16st 10lbs - at which I started it. The bad news is that towards the end of the week, despite not going overboard with the eating, I could feel some of my high-sugar symptoms returning. That was pretty dispiriting, as it showed how little it takes to push me back over the edge, but I suppose now I know what to expect in the future and have a better idea of what I need to do to keep things in check.

It's not that I'm feeling down or demotivated, but a bit of that initial rush of adrenalin-fuelled I-can-do-it optimism has worn off, as it always does. I now know how much - or little - leeway I have to keep my symptoms under control. I'm having to face up to the fact my weight seems to have stabilised, having lost just two of the seven pounds required to attain my target of 16st 5lbs by the end of June. And it's cold and wet outside, which (literally) dampens my enthusiasm for heading out for a brisk walk later.

But I know that what I need to do remains unchanged. I need to go back to restricting what I eat and upping my exercise regime, and stay focussed on driving my weight down. Things were going well pre-holiday and I was feeling noticeably better for it, so it's down to me to just grit my teeth and get on with it.

The honeymoon period is over. Now for the hard part.

The last resort (part 2)

2010-05-01T23:46:00.004+01:00

If the sign of a good family holiday is that you're all knackered by the end of it, then Butlins was a surprisingly good holiday (at least, surprising to me).

Having already recorded my initial, positive impressions at the mid-way point of our holiday, and having now been home 24 hours, here are my reflections on what made this a good holiday.

Firstly, it provided me with a timely opportunity to do some father/son bonding with Toby. Having only just stopped breast-feeding, Toby had previously spent the vast majority of his time with his mother. But, armed with bottles of formula and without work impinging on my days, I got to spend lots more time just sitting around with my younger son, communicating with him and just getting to know him a bit better. It's a small thing, but a really important one for me. (Conversely, Heather got to spend some decent one-on-one time with Zac, something she hadn't really had the time and space for since Toby's birth.)

You want cute? I'll give you cute

Butlins' proximity to the beach - literally, across the road from the front gate - was also a big selling point. Zac had loved his previous experiences with beaches, and this was no exception. Whether it was playing in pools of water, wandering out to investigate the sea, or just generally messing around in the sand as kids do, he lapped it up. (Toby, on the other hand, just blinked at the bright sky.)

Watch as I miraculously suspend globules of sandy water in mid-air. No strings, honest!

I'm sure I left the sea out here somewhere ...

Where did he come from?!?

And when the weather wasn't so good, there was plenty of stuff for young kids to do indoors too - stage shows (Zac continues to show a preference for Angelina Ballerina over Bob the Builder), swimming, fairground rides and - Zac's favourite - the amusement arcades. (I found it mildly perturbing that he sussed out how to play the Deal Or No Deal machine within five minutes.)

Faster! Faster!

By the time we set off for home on Friday lunchtime, Zac was so tired he could barely stand up, wandering past the big soft play area he had scrambled up and down so enthusiastically on Monday with little more than a weary glance. I think that counts as a success.

We're already talking about going back next year, by which time hopefully Toby will be mobile and able to start enjoying some of what this type of holiday has to offer. And his brother will be a year older and able to participate in even more stuff. I'm really hoping Zac will take Toby under his wing and show him the ropes; we'll certainly give him every opportunity to do so.

So, Butlins gets the big thumbs-up from me. It may be a touch chav-tastic, but it really was a great place for a toddler to spend a few happy and tiring days. And it wasn't bad for the parents either.

The only problem is that we now all need another holiday just to recover from this one ...

The last resort (part 1)

2010-04-28T13:48:00.002+01:00

It would be fair to say that, prior to the birth of our sons Isaac and Toby, Butlins would have been pretty much our last resort in terms of holiday destinations. But, as they say, having children is a life-changing experience, and if there is one thing that demonstrates just how much my life has changed over the past two years, holiday choices are as good a discriminator as any.

Pre-kids, Butlins would not have even registered on our radar for manifold reasons, including:

1. What's the point of staying in one place when there's a big wide world out there to explore?

2. It brings to mind images of the 80s sitcom Hi-de-Hi.

3. It's full of chavs.

But here we are at Butlins in Minehead - halfway through our five-day stay as I type this (on my iPhone, a painfully slow experience) - and I have to admit it's been pretty good so far.

Sure, it's much more crowded and downmarket than the distinctly middle-class experience that is Center Parcs. And, yes, it is overflowing with chavs, and the Welsh, and even Welsh chavs. But before I come across all snobbish (OK, OK, too late), it's absolutely fine for what it is - which is about half the price of Center Parcs. Fair enough, the accommodation isn't a patch on Center Parcs, the range of activities more limited, and you could never pretend that you were in a little isolated bubble far from the madding crowd (there's a Tesco five minutes' walk from our front door). But when you have an excitable toddler and a young infant, there's a lot to be said for having all the facilities you want a short stroll away, and for having entertainments and activities which are slanted towards pre-schoolers and pre-teens, rather than catering for older kids and adults.

So far, Zac has worn himself out in the soft play area, on the rides in the funfair for smaller kids, swimming in the pool, playing on the old-style amusement arcade machines and generally running around everywhere at top speed.

Never mind that there's nothing in particular for Heather and I to do - with the boys, it's not as if we have the opportunity to do anything anyway - but then it's satisfaction enough watching your toddler having so much fun that he doesn't know what to do next. And that's kind of the point, isn't it?

Hi-de-Hi

2010-04-25T19:00:00.005+01:00

I've written previously about our first experience with the family-friendly world of Center Parcs, which we visited a year and a half ago. Tomorrow all four of us will be squeezing into the car to head down to Butlins in Minehead - or 'Center Parcs for chavs', as I may have uncharitably referred to it on more than one occasion.

Actually, I am really looking forward to it. It will be lovely to have a few days of proper family time, away from the stresses and responsibilities of the real world. Minehead came recommended to us by some local friends, with the added bonus of being right by the beach, Zac's favourite place in the whole wide world.

Mind you, I still can't quite get the mental image of the fictional Maplins holiday camp from the 80s sitcom Hi-de-Hi out of my head, which was supposedly based on Butlins. As long as Su Pollard isn't cleaning our room, I'll be okay with that.

I'll report back upon our return.

A man with a plan

2010-04-14T13:49:00.000+01:00

I had my first appointment at the diabetes clinic this morning. The nurse wanted to put me on medication straight away, but I asked to defer for a couple of months to see if I can control my symptoms with a combination of diet and lifestyle changes. (She said the probability was "at least 99%" I will have no choice but to use medication, but if there's even a 1% chance I can avoid it - once you are on tablets, there is no going back - I want to give myself that opportunity.)

As a result, I am now formulating a firm plan for dealing with my diabetes. My next blood test will be in 12 weeks or so, and if things don't improve significantly I will probably have no choice but to start popping pills - so the clock is ticking.)

To be fair, I already had a pretty good idea of the key things I needed to focus on, having already gathered some initial advice from my GP and by scanning the wealth of online resources, such as the Diabetes UK website.

The three key things for me - all, obviously, interlinked - are as follows:

1. Diet: This is easy, at least in principle; a bit trickier in reality. Given my somewhat less than healthy diet recently, a dietician would have a field day with me. At least that means there's a huge upside, as there are a number of obvious quick wins I can focus on which will improve my diet enormously. In truth, a diabetic's diet is little different to what you would tell someone to do if they needed to lose weight: cut down on fat, cholesterol and portion sizes; try to avoid 'empty' calories (e.g. chocolate) which give you sugar but little else; grains, oily fish, fruit and vegetables are good, as are reasonable portions of starchy carbs.

Basically, less pie and chips - more pasta and salads. I've already started doing a lot of this over the past two weeks. Obviously, sustaining it is a trickier deal, but so far so good.

2. Weight loss: In addition to controlling my glucose levels, one of the obvious benefits of managing my diet more sensibly is, of course, weight loss. The less overweight I am, the more efficient my body should be at processing glucose, and the less likely I am to keel over from a heart attack. (Diabetes significantly increases the risk of heart disease.) Having already lost over a stone in the past two months (largely as a result of my diabetes), I'm already off to a good start, but I've been trying to work out what my ideal weight should be, or at the very least set a pragmatic target.

To this end, I calculated my Body Mass Index (BMI) over the weekend, which told me I need to be under 210lbs (15st) to be merely 'overweight' (as opposed to obese) and no more than 175 lbs (12st 7) to be 'normal weight'. Having started out only just the right side of 18st after Christmas, that immediately had the theme tune from Mission Impossible playing in my head. Although I got down to 15st 3lbs five years ago - when I was walking 15-20 miles and going to the gym three times every week - the last time I weighed less than 210lbs was when I got married in 1997, and I have no idea when I was last as low as my maximum 'normal weight' of 175lbs. (13? 14? Certainly before I was fully grown.)

Now I don't realistically think I could ever be as low as 175lbs - I'm way too thick-set for that - but I suspect that somewhere around 195lbs (just under 14st) would be my theoretical target weight. For now, I think my medium-term objective has to be to get from my current weight of 16st 12lbs down towards 16st - I don't doubt that will require considerable and sustained effort on my part - because otherwise I'm beaten before I've even started. Losing - and then keeping off - the best part of 30lbs in nine months would be a pretty decent effort, wouldn't it?

3. Exercise: Along with diet, this is the other big lifestyle change for me. During school, university and my twenties, I did sports regularly and still struggled to control my weight, but over the past three or four years exercise has become increasingly sporadic - and correspondingly my weight has ballooned - to the point where I have never been this unfit, and I realistically know that even a gentle half mile jog will leave me puffing, beetroot-faced and with a host of muscle twinges (assuming I can still actually run that far). So my starting point is, let's face it, poor.

This is definitely the biggest challenge of the lot for me. Focussing on diet and weight does not require a significant investment in time; exercise does. The literature recommends I should be doing 30 minutes of moderately vigorous exercise three to five times a week. This is quite easy in theory, trickier in practice. But I need to find a way to make the time in my week to aim for a brisk walk on average every other day, just to start building some base fitness. I've bought myself a heart rate monitor - well, it's a gadget, isn't it? - to help me get the most out of whatever I do without overdoing it. The biggest single problem I have is constant and severe cramping in my calves - a symptom of my high sugar levels - which is really most unhelpful. It's frustrating, but somehow I need to break the cycle and get myself out there.

Which is why I'll be leaving work early this afternoon to make the time to go for a walk, even though my calves are still as tight as an overstretched drum skin.

So, overall I have two new, stretching targets for the end of June (that's 11 weeks today):

Weight: Start point 16st 12lbs, target 16st 5 lbs - i.e. lose half a stone

Exercise: 33 sessions (i.e. three per week), starting at a minimum of 800 and rising to 1,000+ calories per week. Calorie expenditure target for the 11 weeks: 10,000 (about 900 pw).

As the cliche says: no pain, no gain. Off we go.

Day 1 of the rest of my life

2010-04-04T23:19:00.003+01:00

I'd been aiming to be 17st 2lbs by Easter, and so I should have been pleased when the scales flashed back 16st 13lbs - fully three pounds better than my target - this morning, meaning that I have shed 14 pounds in just eight weeks.

Of course, I now know that there is a medical reason for my dramatically successful weight loss, which came with my diagnosis of diabetes earlier this week. Unexpected and significant weight loss is often a symptom shown by people developing the condition. (As the body does not convert glucose effectively, it starts to burn its reserves of glycogen instead, leading to weight loss and fatigue.) So I can't really take the credit for the noticeable improvement to my waistline - call it a disqualified success, if you will.

In my last post on Tuesday, written a couple of hours after my initial diagnosis, I was quite upbeat. Since then, I had my blood tests done on Thursday, which showed a fasting glucose level of 16.3 - more than double what it should be - and confirmed the diagnosis of type 2 diabetes (type 2 being less serious than type 1).

In truth, my outlook hasn't changed: I'm still feeling positive. I know I need to manage my diet more carefully, and it's now even more important that I get my weight down. An appointment with the diabetes clinic next week is my first step in determining my plan for the coming months and getting my glucose level down to something like 7 or 8.

This is the easy bit. I have had the sudden jolt of the bad news, and the wave of determination and even enthusiasm that comes with it. I'm already taking little steps to make my diet healthier, and with the days growing longer and warmer it will be easier for me to ensure I take brisk walks into town or around the estate on a regular basis.

The hard bit will come once that initial wave subsides and I have to face up to the fact that this is not a brief phase or a crash diet to drop a few pounds pre-holiday. This needs to be a permanent lifestyle change to maximise my chances of a full life and minimise the prospect of my children having to deal with their father's early demise.

I've always known I needed to be lighter and fitter, but lacked the willpower to turn good intentions into actual outcomes. Now the choice is a little more stark. In truth, there is no real choice.

So, for now it's the first baby steps on a long journey. Step one is to get to the end of April, be doing at least three lots of moderately vigorous exercise a week, and aim to get my weight down to 16st 9lbs - that's a pound a week. We'll worry about step two and onwards when we get there.

It starts right here, right now: the rest of my life. Off I go.

An epiphany of sorts

2010-03-30T12:50:00.004+01:00

I have posted a couple of times in recent months (here and here) about being increasingly conscious of the fact I am getting older and increasingly susceptible to health issues (not least the small matter of, you know, dying).

I have also written - most recently here - about my most latest attempt to lose weight and the surprising ease with which I have been succeeding (14 lbs in less than seven weeks as of this morning).

This morning, I've been to the doctor and discovered that the two are not unrelated.

I have diabetes.

With hindsight, I cannot believe I hadn't put two and two together already. I have a family history of diabetes - my mother developed type 2 diabetes in her fifties - and, having just done a quick bit of research on the subject, it is clear that I have developed pretty much every symptom of the condition - the vast majority of which I was already aware of. (Although, in my defence, you can also put many of them down to having recently had a baby.)

An on-the-spot urine test supported my doctor's initial diagnosis. (I will have blood tests done later this week to provide a definitive answer, but given my existing symptoms there can surely be little doubt.) I don't yet know whether it's type 1 or type 2 - apparently, around 85% of diabetics have the more easily-treatable type 2 - so a quick return visit to the doctor to find out more is in order.

It's not the end of the world. According to Diabetes UK, 2.6m people in the UK - that's about 4% of the population - have been diagnosed with diabetes, with a further half a million undiagnosed. The course of treatment - insulin and a healthy lifestyle - is long established. And as long as I am sensible about things (historically not always one of my strongest suits, admittedly), there is no reason why I should worry unduly. After all, my mother's still going strong nearly 20 years after her initial diagnosis. Sir Steve Redgrave isn't doing so badly either.

There are many, many worse things I could have been diagnosed with which would have had a far more limiting impact on my lifestyle and life expectancy, so you won't catch me complaining about the hand I've been dealt. Maybe I could have prevented or delayed the onset of the condition by being a bit healthier over the last few years, but there's no way of knowing and no point second-guessing myself. After all, with a family history of diabetes, I have known for a long time that I was at high risk of developing it. Now I do have the condition, all I can do is deal with it.

In the meantime, I'm going to process the news internally and handle it the way I normally handle this sort of thing. For one day I'm going to abandon the diet and I'm going to eat comfort food. Lots of it. Bring on the ice cream.

Wordle

2010-03-29T14:45:00.003+01:00

I've always been a sucker for things new and shiny, and I've just been introduced to Wordle - www.wordle.net - a web-based tool which you can use to generate your own word clouds from random text or any blog/RSS feed.

It's a great way of pictorially giving a sense of what a blog, document or other piece of text is about. For instance, here's one for this blog which gives you an immediate impression of what's been on my mind recently:

Is it me being a geek, or is this not extremely cool? I'm just saying ...

Four seats or two?

2010-03-27T10:32:00.001Z

And so it begins again.

Now that we have Heather's new car - a sensible family estate - my thoughts start to turn towards replacing my own car.

When I bought my current car (a BMW 3-series saloon) nearly two-and-a-half years ago, it was always with a view to it being our main family car until such time as we had a second child or it reached 50,000 miles (the milestone beyond which dealers start to get sniffy about part-exchanges). Having ticked the first box with the arrival of Toby, I am on course to hit the magic 50k mark shortly after Christmas, which gives me five to six months to make a decision and place an order.

Broadly speaking, the decision facing me is whether I want a car with four seats, or one with two.

Two seats equates to something small and sporty for me. (I've got the recently-updated BMW Z4 or possibly the new TT squarely in my sights.) There are obvious disadvantages to this, in particular the fact that we would have no back-up to carry the boys if Heather's car has any problems. But in the past I have always alternated sensible cars with fun ones - Citroen Saxo, Peugeot 306 GTI-6, Lexus IS200, Audi TT and my current 3-series - and the (admittedly selfish) desire to have something fast and impractical is a strong one.

Four seats means buying something large and family-friendly, that will carry everything we need for two adults and two children to go away for a week. We can probably just about manage it in Heather's car (a Focus estate), although it might be a tight squeeze on long journeys - we're away for a week next month, which will be a good test of how practical and comfortable that is.

Going for another family car would mean either a large saloon (a 5-series or Audi A6, say), a large-ish estate (just no, okay) or - whisper it quietly - a 4x4 or SUV (probably something like a BMW X5). I've never been a fan of big cars - my 3-series is about as big as I would ever really want, and more than roomy enough on the inside - so I would take some convincing before heading for the next size up. But the arguments in favour of having two cars suitable for the family are also quite strong: Heather's car would then be the day-to-day family car, with mine being used for longer trips when the extra space and comfort are at a premium.

That's the dilemma, really. Buy a car for the family that will be a compromise solution for me 50 weeks of the year, or get one I love which is utterly impractical. Four seats versus two; head versus heart. Decisions, decisions. I can see a long summer with much hand-wringing ahead of me ...

Shopaholic?

2010-03-17T09:11:00.000Z

There is definitely something of a role reversal in our household insofar that it is only me (as opposed to Heather) who truly believes in the restorative powers of retail therapy.

Many has been the time that Heather has thrown open her wardrobe and declared despairingly that she has nothing to wear. (When she does it, she's not being melodramatic - she really means it.) I have toddled dutifully off with her to Oxford or London or some other high-density retail location for the day, during which time she will only find one item of clothing she wants - and I will buy ten on a whim. Such expeditions typically end up with one of us grumpy and the other feeling not a shred of guilt. (I'll leave you to work out who's who.)

We have fundamentally very different approaches to shopping, she and I. Heather tends to only buy things she needs. It's not that she pursues a spartan lifestyle by any means - and it isn't as if I'm not forever encouraging her to treat herself to some new clothes or a book or some other trinket - but she lacks the basic impulse to go out and splurge.

Me? I'm actually reasonably conservative in the sense that I don't spend beyond my means. However, I do earn more than enough for me to enjoy a sizeable disposable income - and my philosophy has always been that I work hard enough for what I earn, so I might as well spend some of it on stuff that makes me happy.

I freely admit that my expenditure has probably increased at a near-exponential rate over the past ten years or so as my spending power has increased. We average at least two Amazon deliveries every month. I have more clothes than I need, but at least I have something to wear for every occasion. And our house contains more than its fair share of gadgets and other consumer technology: some of it 'essentials' (my definition) such as TVs, Sky+ and computers; others more discretionary, such as my iPhone, iPod, PS3, SLR, video camera and other assorted gadgets.

This has been a particularly good week in terms of acquisitions, with a new lens for my camera, a new Playstation game and Heather's new car being delivered. (It's not mine, but surely it's reasonable to get excited over the arrival of any purchase of this magnitude, no matter whose it is?)

Being able to order pretty much anything you want 24/7 online is manna from heaven for someone who buys as often and as impulsively as I do. Amazon is probably the most regular beneficiary of my attempts to help the UK spend its way out of recession - particularly now I can place orders on the go with a couple of prods of my iPhone touchscreen - but I have also used the internet to buy everything from fridges and TVs to ISAs and car insurance, and even cars. (We have bought our last three new cars via an online broker, saving ourselves a very tidy sum in the process. See, it's not just about spending.)

Is my spending out of control? No. I know Heather would prefer it if I spent a bit less, but our credit cards are paid off in full every month, we go on our family holidays and there is still enough left to put some aside in savings. I'm sure as Zac and Toby grow older we will need to spend more on them and less on us (okay, okay, me), but for the meantime I'm enjoying myself while I still can.

I know I can dial the spending back when I need to. I can give up the spending splurges any time. Honest. Now if you'll just excuse me, I'm off to see what I need to do to pre-order an iPad ...

An embarrassment of genre riches

2010-03-10T17:00:00.001Z

TV trends often go in cycles, and 'genre' shows seem to be very much on the up at the moment. Although the failure rate is high - the cancellation of the new Knight Rider and the oh-so-disappointing US version of Life On Mars were not great losses; Dollhouse, however, was killed well before its time - there is still a wealth of quality genre programming (both American and British) available on UK screens, either currently or due for broadcast within the next few weeks. Here's what I'll be setting my Sky+ box for:

1. Caprica (season 1), Sky1: A rarity in that the UK is seeing first-run episodes of the Battlestar Galactica prequel 3 days ahead of US audiences. I'm generally wary of prequels - Enterprise, for instance, was poor, and I have never understood the longevity of Smallville - but Caprica is a stunning piece of small screen drama. Taking both visual and narrative cues from the likes of Goodfellas and Grand Theft Auto, the show is packed with weighty philosophical themes (can a computer-generated avatar really be alive?) and contemporary allegories, from religious fundamentalists carrying out acts of urban terrorism to a generation of youth becoming lost in their own virtual worlds. At its best, science fiction poses difficult questions about the world we live in; Caprica is a challenging inquisitor. There are only 2 more episodes to air before a mid-season hiatus - if you do nothing else, catch it before it disappears.

2. Doctor Who (s5), BBC1 (from April 3): The baton - well, three batons, really - has been handed over. Russell T Davies to Steven Moffat. David Tennant to Matt Smith. Catherine Tate to Karen Gillan. Moffat pens taut, simple drama/horror perhaps better than any Who writer past or present, having produced some of the new series' most memorable moments: the Hugo Award-winning stories The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, The Girl In The Fireplace and Blink (an episode which prominently featured Carey Mulligan, since Oscar-nominated for An Education), and Silence In The Library/Forest Of The Dead. How will Smith and Gillan fare versus their illustrious predecessors? Can Moffat transfer his episodic magic to a full season? We will soon find out, but my money is firmly on the regenerated 11th Doctor being a runaway success.

3. Lost (s6), Sky1: Airing in the UK just three days after US transmission, Lost's final season remains just as demanding on its viewers' concentration as ever, with the new story-telling mechanic of the 'flash-sideways' posing as many questions as are being answered. With only a couple of minor missteps along the way, Lost has consistently baffled, challenged and at times frustrated viewers with a complex narrative which even now, as it hurtles at breakneck speed towards its closing hours, feels as fresh as it did in those opening moments when we first witnessed the aftermath of Oceanic 815's crash on the mysterious island. We demand answers - and, slowly but surely, we are starting to get them.

4. True Blood (s2), FX: The series based on Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire Mysteries remains a glorious mish-mash of blood, sex and mystery in America's deep south, all beautifully observed and rolled together with a style and confidence that makes the vast majority of mainstream hour-long dramas look plain dull. And, in an advertising-heavy world which has all but seen the death of the great title sequences of yesteryear, True Blood's opening credits rank right up alongside HBO stablemate The Sopranos. There is no higher compliment.

5. Ashes To Ashes (s3), BBC1 (from late March, TBC): Yes, yes, yes: it isn't as good as the original Life On Mars. But it's still bloody brilliant. Politically incorrect and an unashamed throwback to its audience's youth, ATA has always been more about rollocking good fun than the science-fiction conceit which threw Alex Drake back to the 80s. The might of the Hollywood machine - Harvey Keitel and all - made a terrible, soulless hash of LOM, underlining just how difficult it is to do this kind of thing well. Gene Hunt will shortly be firing up the Quattro for the last time - we won't realise quite how much we miss him, Alex, Ray, Chris and Shaz until they are gone.

6. V, Sci Fi (from April 13): Despite an alarming ratings slide during the initial four-episode run- something which seems to afflict all new genre shows these days - I am really looking forward to seeing this remake of the classic Kenneth Johnson-penned mini-series, due to land in the UK next month. The original was a whip-smart Nazis-as-aliens allegory focussing on how ordinary people band together to resist a seemingly all-powerful oppressor, which sadly descended into a by-the-numbers mission-of-the-week episodic series. I'm hoping for the former rather than the latter, obviously.

7. FlashForward (s1), Five (from March 22): Returning in a fortnight's time, this series (based very loosely on the Robert J Sawyer book of the same name) started spectacularly but had started to lose a bit of pace by the time it went on hiatus. The basic premise remains strong - what would happen if everyone in the world blacked out for a couple of minutes and saw a glimpse of their future lives? - but the plot needed an injection of 24-style pacing to move things along with greater alacrity. Hopefully that is what we will see, although the murmurings coming out of the US suggest that a second season is far from certain. Enjoy it while you can.

8. Heroes (s4), BBC2: Another series very much on the bubble, Tim Kring's vision of ordinary people suddenly blessed with extraordinary abilities has struggled to recapture its initial magic and yet still has much to offer, not least an array of specially commissioned additional online content which includes comic books, webisodes and RPGs (role-playing games). Heroes has mapped out an impressive canvas for telling complex, multi-faceted stories which can be enjoyed either as a standalone TV series or as a more immersive online experience, which may well provide a template for future series to adopt and build upon.

Beyond this list, I haven't mentioned Being Human and Vampire Diaries (among others too numerous to list here), both of which come highly recommended by many genre fans but which I have never got round to watching. There just aren't enough hours in the day - still, it's a nice problem to have when you have programming of this quality to select from. It's a good time to be a genre fan right now.

Mission (almost) accomplished. Next!

2010-03-06T08:19:00.003Z

I'm pretty much exactly halfway in my latest attempt at dieting, with the aim of shedding eight pounds by Easter (target weight: 17st 5lbs).

It must be said, things are going pretty well. I have just weighed myself and the scales - with whom I am now back on first name terms after a major falling-out over Christmas - declared my current weight as 17st 6lbs, which means I am just one pound short of my target with four weeks still to go.

I've given myself an encouraging pat on the back and am now optimistically reassessing my target; I'm thinking 17st 2lbs, which represents a further pound a week to Easter.

By the time Heather's dad and family arrive from Perth on their holiday in late May, I want to be lighter than I was when we last saw them two years ago: pretty much bang on 17st, from memory. That would essentially mean losing a stone in total in just over three months, which I would be very happy with.

I don't see why I can't achieve that, as I don't actually feel I've got out of second gear so far. I've certainly been concentrating on eating more sensibly at work and cutting out the snacks, while allowing myself one day a week where I treat myself to whatever I fancy (a denial-and-reward routine which has worked well for me in the past). But I still haven't actually managed to squeeze any exercise into my evenings, which I know is something I need to do regardless of the weight loss because I have never felt as unfit as I currently do.

So, really I've done pretty well in spite of my continuing laziness by just applying a modicum of self-discipline. Can't complain. Anyhow, no point dwelling on the negatives; I prefer to think of it as having an extra gear in hand for when I need it down the final stretch.

Now it's time for my breakfast of gruel and water. Honest.

Rules for dads

2010-03-03T08:33:00.002Z

In my previous post last week, I outlined five basic rules of parenthood. In general, though, it's not so much parents as fathers who need the most help when it comes to this parenting lark. So here are ten additional rules that all dads should take heed of.

(A health warning: tongue is inserted firmly in cheek here, but many fellow fathers will recognise a grain of truth in most of the following situations.)

Rule #1: If you're not doing something, you should be. You may not know what it is, but there is definitely something. (It will be written on a list somewhere, even if it's one that only exists in your wife's/partner's head.)

Rule #2: Watching The Gadget Show or playing Call Of Duty while occasionally talking to your child does not qualify as 'quality father/son (or daughter) time', no matter how interested they are in what you're doing.

Rule #3: Even if you are the sole bread-winner, change every nappy and are the CEO of a multinational industrial conglomerate, as a father you are the least important person in the household (and that includes any and all pets). Deal with it.

Rule #4: You will lose every argument with your children. If you're already in a long-term relationship, you should be used to that by now, though. (Zac's current ace-in-the-hole is to fire up the death stare and ask "Why not?" with utter conviction when told he can't do something. It's really quite disarming.)

Rule #5: The slightest whiff of criticism of your partner's abilities as a mother is a straight red card offence. However, expect to be told on a daily basis about all the things that you do, don't do, should do more/less of or just plain do wrong. It's a mother's God-given right. Grin and bear it.

Rule #6: Under no circumstances - irrespective of how many times your sleep was interrupted during the night or what time your children dragged you out of bed in the morning - ever mention to your wife how tired you are. Unless your ears need clearing out, that is.

Rule #7: When your other half gets all teary-eyed and emotional because they've had only three hours' sleep for the fourth night in a row and have just had to deal with a poo-up-the-back incident, the only correct response is to be understanding and supportive. However, if you go all emo, you are being a drama queen. Man up and crack open a beer like any self-respecting, emotionally-stunted male should.

Rule #8: Whatever you most want your child to be is the thing they will be least inclined to do. (For instance, I want Zac to be as interested in sports as his parents are, but the moment I put the football on he runs over to the TV, switches it off and goes back to his macramé. Okay, I'm exaggerating. But only slightly.)

Rule #9: If, like me, you delivered your own baby BBA (Born Before Arrival of midwife/ambulance/other person who has some vague idea what they should be doing), this automatically confers a degree of coolness upon you as a father, no matter how uncool you really are. Dine out on it while you can. The effect wears off as quickly as your holiday tan.

Rule #10: The 'illusion of free will' is a reality. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Or a free evening out with the lads. Or a free round of golf. Everything comes with a price tag. It's just that you can't always see it.

The formula to calculate 'free' time (where 'free' means time for which there is not some quid pro quo child/mother-related action required in return) is as follows:

Free time (in hours) = 0

Think about it. For every boys' night out there is an agreement (either explicit or implicit) to babysit for a girly shopping trip. Your Sunday round of golf is worth its weight in chocolate. Even that new Wii controller will be offset by an afternoon pushing the pram around Mothercare. It may not always be obvious, but like taxes you will end up paying somehow some day.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go. I'm pretty sure I'm contravening rules 1, 2 and 10, and I'm heading for another slap-down from rule 4.

Rules of parenthood

2010-02-22T10:44:00.001Z

As the proud father of boys aged two years (Isaac) and one month (Toby), I have learned to accept my place as the fourth-most important person in our household. I've read the books (well, some of them, anyway), I've compared experiences with other mums and dads, and I've decided it's a shame no one ever tells you what the real rules of parenthood are, the ones that really govern our lives as parents and that most of us end up discovering only through painful experience.

Off the top of my head, here are five valuable and immutable rules of parenthood:

Rule #1: Newborn babies are public property (just as pregnant mothers' bumps are). So when complete strangers descend on you in Waitrose, peer into the pram and engage you in conversation when all you really want to do is pay up and go home, just smile and remember that you're only the parent and have no rights as such.

Rule #2: Keep the remote control - and any other valuable gadget with buttons - out of reach. You may think it's difficult to delete the contents of your Sky+ box. To a child it's, well, child's play.

Rule #3: There is no better negotiator in this world than a 2-3 year old toddler. By this age, they possess significant native cunning (and aren't afraid to use it), they have enough vocabulary to state exactly what they want, they are well practised in the art of mega-tantrums and they know they can punch/pinch/slap you in public without fear of retribution with the might of disapproving onlookers and the Child Protection Agency on their side. Just learn to be gracious in defeat: it makes life much easier.

Rule #4: You will always need to do an emergency nappy change when you are already running late for that important doctor's / dentist's / hairdresser's / insert as applicable appointment.

Rule #5: Here is the formula for calculating how long you need to get ready to leave the house with children:

Time required (in minutes) = n(t+15) + x + r

Where n is the number of children you have, t is the time (in minutes) it used to take you to get ready pre-children, x is the number you first thought of, and r is a random number between 5 and 60 to cover emergency nappy changes, toddler tantrums and returning to the house to retrieve wallets / birthday presents / favourite toys. It doesn't really matter, because you'll still be late anyway no matter what.

There are many other rules governing parenthood; I'm sure you will have some of your own. Feel free to share - after all, us parents are in this together ...

Diet, here we go (again)

2010-02-11T10:29:00.000Z

At the beginning of December I weighed in at 17st 7lbs, with the ambition of emerging post-Christmas no heavier than that.

Fail.

By New Year, I had gained about three pounds, to which I had added a further three by last weekend, tipping the scales at 17st 13lbs.

In my (admittedly feeble) defence, there were some mitigating factors. The three major snowfalls we had - one the week before Christmas, two in the first half of January - left me housebound and suffering from cabin fever, and with that a concomitant need to comfort eat for long spells. And then there was my two weeks of paternity leave after Toby's birth, which afforded a welcome opportunity to spend some quality time in the kitchen and cook proper meals- tasty, but not exactly conducive to weight loss.

With hindsight, it was no surprise I gained a significant chunk of weight. (Still, it could have been worse: one more pound and I would be starting from 18-something, not 17.)

Anyhow, I'm now back at work and back on the wagon, with my dieting mojo fully restored. Sensible eating and a gentle (to begin with) programme of exercise are the orders of the day. 17 st 5 lbs was my pre-Christmas target, so by my reckoning a pound a week will get me to my target by Easter.

Willpower on. Let's go.

A long time in parenthood

2010-01-26T15:13:00.004Z

It was Harold Wilson who said "a week is a long time in politics". Well, it's a pretty long time in the world of parenthood too.

Today is Toby's one-week 'birthday', and already the circumstances of his sudden arrival are starting to feel slightly surreal. (We have joked about marking the spot on the living room floor where he was delivered with a ceremonial 'X'. Me, I'd go for one of those round plaques you see on the side of famous people's homes.)

Apparently, in certain circles I am now unofficially 'Superdad' or alternatively 'The Coolest Dad In Town' (I'm thinking about filing for the latter as a personal trademark). I have to admit, though, I don't feel particularly super; I've certainly never been cool. In fact, looking back, the sum total of my achievements appears to be (a) I was there, (b) I didn't pass out and (c) I didn't drop Toby. So, I wasn't down the pub, I stayed awake and I am overqualified to play cricket for England. Hey, if people think that's cool or super, then who am I to question them?

So, what's happened this week while I've been at home with my feet up? (Yeah, right, ha ha.)

Well, Toby has taken to breast-feeding like a real natural, eating for England at every possible opportunity, a trait clearly inherited from his dad. (I'm thinking about putting a vending machine in his room.) He also seems to have settled into a three-hourly routine during the night, which is good news. He seems pretty bright and alert too; he is certainly awake for more of the day than Isaac was at a week old.

You talking to me?

Speaking of whom, Zac has taken everything in his stride reasonably well. Given that he's always been a real mummy's boy, he doesn't seem too jealous for the most part (although he keeps demanding a cuddle whenever he sees Toby being fed) and he's even being quite helpful at times. When Toby cries, Zac will wander over to the crib, peer in, say "Toby's crying. I'll sort it", and then give it a rock. Quite cute, really. He might get a bit more antsy once I'm back at work next week and he can no longer demand both our attentions, but he's doing okay.

Heather is understandably tired but seems to be recovering well, and managing the sudden transition back to night feeds without too much trouble. She's certainly pleased to be able to see her feet and tie her own shoelaces again. And it has helped that she has had a steady stream of friends coming to visit too.

Finally, me. I'm having a really good time. Other than finishing a few bits and pieces, I've been able to take my mind off work and actually enjoy my paternity leave. I've been able to spend some quality time with Zac - well, I appreciate it, I'm not so sure he does - taking him to playgroup sessions a couple of times and generally keeping him out of Heather's hair. Being home during the day also means I have time to indulge in proper cooking - a saltimbocca last night, and I'll be hand-making gnocchi tonight - in between all the household chores. (How can one small baby get through so many clothes in one day?) And I've even had the chance to start catching up on my large collection of unread books and unwatched TV programmes.

Just chilling with my dad

All in all, it has been about as smooth a first week as we could have ever hoped for.

What's next? Well, I don't go back to work until Thursday week, so we're hoping to get out and about a bit more over the next week. We're taking Toby down to see Heather's mum for the first time tomorrow, then hopefully the three of us (minus Zac, who will be in nursery) will head into Oxford for lunch on Thursday. And then I've got dinners to plan, and photos to sort out, and ...

It's a busy time, but I wouldn't change it for anything.

And then there were four

2010-01-20T18:08:00.008Z

If this was a cricket scorecard, it would have read: Liew c Liew b Liew.

Allow me to explain.

Long story short, by the time I got home at 6:30 last night, Heather had been having regular contractions for a couple of hours, so we knew we were in for an eventful evening. Having phoned my parents - who had been on yellow alert for more than a fortnight - and asked them to head westwards out of London, we decided to settle in and have as normal an evening as possible under the circumstances to take our minds off things. Which meant putting Zac to bed, followed by takeaway curry in front of Countdown and Hustle on TV.

So far, so mundane.

The grandparents pitched up at about 9:30, quickly followed by our midwife, Amanda. A quick physical exam suggested everything was fine and we were still several hours away from serious action, so Amanda headed off, suggesting we all get some sleep.

We were preparing for bed at around 11:10 when, without any warning, all hell broke loose. Two huge contractions sent Heather scrambling downstairs while I dashed around phoning Amanda, grabbing towels, firing up our birth playlist on the iPod and so on. Although things had moved on too far too fast to make use of the birthing pool, fortunately everything else was proceeding without complication. Textbook stuff.

The only problem was I hadn't actually read the textbook. I had literally just been settling down with the book to revise the details I had so studiously memorised when Zac was born when I was suddenly called up to perform my practical exam. And as the contractions came harder and faster, it became clear that Amanda wasn't going to get here in time. I was on my own.

Fortunately, earlier in the evening I had watched an episode of the American TV drama Brothers & Sisters which - instructively - featured a birth scene. They didn't actually show the detailed process, but I nonetheless followed carefully as a group of actors in matching, pristine surgical gowns glided purposefully around a delivery room in beautifully choreographed slow motion to the strains of Coldplay's 'Fix You'. Surely that's all you need to know to deliver a baby yourself? (The sequence also featured the father-to-be collapsing in a car park as he rushed to the hospital, with what turned out to be a non-fatal heart attack. I thought it best not to try and replicate that particular bit.)

Anyway, I had enough of my wits about me to project an air of calm reassurance for Heather (in truth, there simply wasn't enough time for panic to set in), to remind her about her breathing at the appropriate moments, and to be in position as the baby manoeuvred itself into launch position with one contraction, crowned with the next one, and finally with a deft wriggle of the shoulders slithered gracefully out where I was waiting to make the catch with a towel at the ready. A quick glance at the clock to note the time of birth, and a pause to register which song was playing on our randomised playlist - Sinead O'Connor's classic version of Prince's 'Nothing Compares 2 U', in case you were wondering - and job done.

Amanda arrived five minutes later. Which was good, because (a) I got to cut the cord without having to worry about cleaning up the surrounding mess and (b) I really didn't fancy filling in the paperwork myself.

(Incidentally, I wonder if there is a separate name for the male equivalent of a midwife - 'midhusband' doesn't really sound the part, does it?)

By 1 o'clock, everything that needed to be done was done (including a beer for me to balance the slide down from my adrenalin high). We started the evening as a household of three; we ended it as a family of four.

Toby, aged 15 hours (and a bit)

This entry and the series of blogs preceding it comprise the birth journal of Tobias Alexander Liew, who was born at 11:27pm on Tuesday 19th January 2010, weighing 8 lbs 9 oz. Welcome to your life, Toby. Make it a good 'un.

Overdue

2010-01-18T13:13:00.000Z

No, I'm not talking about library books or utility bills. Yesterday was D-Day - as in our due date.

It came. It went. And today is just another day closer. So now we enter a period of indeterminate length which could be a mere smattering of hours or as long as two weeks, with the worst case scenario being an induced birth.

It's a period which can best be characterised by one word: boredom. Tedious, mind-numbing boredom. Like responsible parents, we've made all the preparations we need to make. And socially, we've been cramming in as much as we can over the last few weeks (the weather hasn't helped on that front), but we haven't planned anything beyond yesterday. Which means we are currently gazing into the abyss of a social vacuum - yes, I know it's a mixed metaphor - with nothing to look forward to as a distraction. We can't really stray too far from home. And even though we're planning a home birth, I need to be sober enough to drive to the hospital in the event of any complications.

Fundamentally, all that remains is to sit and wait patiently, silently cursing the weather forecast which is still predicting heavy snow for Wednesday.

I've never quite been sure why we place such importance on the expected date of delivery. Of course, it's important in terms of determining the timing of pre-natal checks, scans and so on, but its calculation is fairly arbitrary, being simply the date 40 weeks from the mother's last menstrual period. The statistical reality is that under five percent of births - in other words, fewer than one in 20 - occur on the due date. If there's one thing you can be reasonably sure of, it's that the baby won't arrive on the expected date.

(Hmm, I know way too much about this.)

Anyway, we've been in this position before, as Zac was also a late arrival (by 12 days). It was a situation we worked around in our usual way: by going out to dinner pretty much every night until Zac arrived. (I've never shifted the weight gained as a result of that, but hey.) However, with a two-year old to look after, that's not such an easy option this time around - although, obviously, that's why God created the takeaway and then bettered Himself by following that up with the invention of delivery services. (I'm betting He then invested heavily in Domino's Pizza shares. Well, you just would, wouldn't you?)

So there we are. We sit. We wait. We use the birthing pool as a spa bath. Speaking of which, it's time to empty, clean and refill the pool again tonight. If that doesn't invoke sod's law and induce labour, I'm not sure what will.

Still, at least this is one situation where being overdue doesn't involve the accumulation of fines or threatening letters to send in the debt collectors. Small mercies and all that, eh?

It's Groundhog Day

2010-01-13T17:25:00.000Z

When I looked out of our bedroom window this morning, it was almost as if I was experiencing my own version of Groundhog Day, because it looked very much like the view I had exactly one week ago.

View from our bedroom window - 8am today

Fortunately, whereas last week we had upwards of 20cm of snow, today it was more like 5-10, which made clearing the driveway and road much easier. According to the forecast, we will get some respite over the next few days as it should warm up a bit and we will hopefully get a proper thaw. Which will be good, as no one has ever bothered clearing the main road through our estate, meaning it has been more ice rink than road for the past week. It will also be nice to be able to buy salt again!

On the birth front, we are at T minus four days with no dramatic happenings to report. Heather had a pre-natal check-up yesterday which was uneventful. We emptied, cleaned and refilled the birthing pool last night. (We've been using it most evenings for a leisurely soak, which has been most relaxing.) And things are generally as chilled (ho ho) as they can be given the erratic and extreme weather. Contrary to my initial assumptions, it doesn't look like the baby is going to be early; or, at least, not overly so. It's really just a case of not getting overly stressed. Or overly bored. Or just overweight (okay, make that even more overweight).

Zac's still being extremely clingy with Heather. He understands there is a baby on the way, and on some level he senses that this will have a big impact on his life. It's a real shame the weather has stopped us doing more stuff together - just the three of us - over the past month, as he will never have our permanent, undivided attention again. Mind you, the new baby will never know what that's like anyway, and hopefully Zac will get something out of being involved with him/her anyway.

Life will never be the same again. More rewarding, I'm sure. More hectic, certainly. I'm still looking forward to it immensely, though - just as much as I did the first time around. Unlike shovelling snow, this is one thing I'm happy to be experiencing all over again.

A slippery slope

2010-01-07T13:36:00.000Z

Weather-wise, it's been an interesting couple of days, that's for sure.

The snow started here at about 4pm on Tuesday and began settling almost immediately. By late evening we had a blanket of maybe 3-4cm.

Tuesday, 7pm

By yesterday morning it was over 20cm - not as bad as the Met Office warning of 40cm, but still more than enough to render our road pretty much undriveable and to make my decision to work from home an easy one.

Wednesday, 7.30am

I spent much of the morning with several of our neighbours clearing driveways and our road - our house is at the top of a fairly steep slope in the middle of an ungritted estate. (Who needs gym membership, eh?) And thankfully, although it snowed persistently for much of the afternoon, we didn't have a significant fresh fall overnight, so there was only a thin dusting of snow on our road this morning.

Anyway, it hasn't been all work and no play. Zac took a bit of coaxing to venture outside - he has an intense dislike of the cold - but, once he did, he had a whale of a time, trying out (and, for the most part, falling off) his sled, running up and down the freshly-cleared road and even happily wading through knee-deep snow.

Our little Antarctic explorer

The boy doesn't know how lucky he is! How often have we gone four or five years without a proper snowfall, and now we've had three in the past twelve months. (Global warming? Arctic oscillation? Whatever.)

Having done some digging and even some work, I ventured out after lunch to visit the shops in town. Clearly, many other people had had the same idea several hours before, because both supermarkets had been cleared out of both milk and bread. I did, however, manage to secure all the major items on our emergency shopping list, so we're good to go until the weekend at least. Although - just my luck - I managed to catch the worst of the afternoon snowstorm on my way home. Still, it was all very pretty.

Wednesday, 3pm

Most importantly, from a birth perspective everything is still on track. The birthing pool was delivered Tuesday lunchtime (about three hours before the snow began), has been assembled and filled, and is now being maintained at a pleasant 37 degrees Celsius. The newspaper delivery man has been up our road this morning in his front-wheel drive car, so it's clearly not impossible for our midwife to get to us (or, in the event of an emergency, for us to get out). And Zac has been outside again this morning, trying to throw snowballs, falling over on the slippery ice patch on our driveway, but nonetheless loving every minute of it.

Indeed, as I type this the sky is blue and the sun is shining brightly. It's (just) warm enough to melt the snow, which means we will probably have problems with icy roads after everything refreezes tonight - our road is already, literally, a slippery slope - but I'm feeling much less stressed about the impending birth today than I would have been if Heather had gone into labour yesterday morning.

In fact, the only thing irking me at the moment is the fact that this is my third day in a row working at home and I'm starting to suffer from cabin fever. Still, I'd much rather stay here than be virtually alone in the office worrying about whether or not I can get home!

Waiting

2010-01-04T14:46:00.000Z

T minus 13 days and counting. At least now we know for sure which decade the baby will be born in.

As we're now within two weeks of Heather's due date, I'm effectively on call 24/7 and ready to make a mad dash for home from the office at the first ring of my mobile. (Note to self: assign a suitably comical ringtone to Heather tonight.) So, no alcohol - well, maybe just a little.

Our birthing pool is being delivered tomorrow, ready to be assembled and filled with water. Once that's done, we are basically all ready to go for the planned home birth. In the event of complications requiring a transfer to the Royal Berkshire, we have packed hospital bags. And the baby seat is currently sitting in the hallway; it will be taking up residence in the boot of my car as of tonight.

Other than that, the plan from my end is to minimise the amount of time I spend away from home between now and the birth. Fortunately, there is very little I actually need to be in the office for over the next couple of weeks - I've already turned down a two-day trip to France this week and am mulling over the wisdom of a two hour-plus drive over towards Bedford next Wednesday, but other than that the plan is to work from home a couple of days a week, and leave the office no later than 4pm on other days to avoid the evening rush hour (meaning I should never be more than half an hour from home). Everything else in my diary is either movable, doable by phone or expendable. It means planning my work-flow for January is a complete nightmare, but that's just tough. The world will, I'm sure, manage to muddle along without me for a couple of weeks.

So, other than a couple of small, non-essential tasks - such as baby names! - we're as ready as we're ever going to be. The only major job remaining is the hardest thing of all: to sit and wait.

Tum-te-tum.

Taking stock

2009-12-31T18:32:00.000Z

So, here we are. December 31st, 2009. The last day of the Noughties. In a few hours' time we will say farewell to the old decade and hello to the new one.

It should somehow feel like a day of great importance: a momentous day, a noteworthy day. After all, the last time we stepped over the threshold into a new decade, everyone was wondering whether computer systems were going to crash, planes were going to drop out of the sky and the very heartbeat of our modern world was going to suddenly stop. (What an anticlimax that turned out to be.)

Instead, today seems not unlike many other days - unexceptional. Cold and grey; a normal working day (for those people not extending their Christmas holidays); a day when ordinary people do ordinary things.

I suppose, at least, it is a time for a moment's retrospection. For the past couple of weeks, certainly, newspapers and TV programmes have been busily producing their 'top' and 'best of' lists: our favourite TV programmes of the decade, the greatest songs, the top sporting moments, the best new gadgets.

Making a list comprising a round number of anythings feels a bit too much like hard work, so I'll settle for reflecting on how life chez Liew has changed over the past ten years.

Obvious changes first.

On New Year's Eve 1999, Heather and I were living in our first house in Oxford. Ten years on, we have moved twice, first to Lane End, and from there to our current house in Thatcham. Of course, there are now three of us - Isaac turned two earlier this month - and our second child is now only a matter of days away.

I've worked for four different companies during the decade, having left Royal Mail in late 2000 and ending up at 3M (since mid-2005), via stops at Tesco and BBC Worldwide. I've now been at 3M for four-and-a-half years, my longest tenure at any of the five businesses I have worked for. And while I don't necessarily feel that this is my final resting place, I certainly don't have quite the same itchy feet I did ten - or even five - years ago.

Heather and I have had some great holidays too - travel has always been important to us both. We have whiled away hours lying on a beach in Jamaica or St Lucia; covered thousands of miles in a car in California (my all-time favourite holiday), New Zealand and Canada; stood atop the Great Wall of China, the Empire State Building and the Grand Canyon; marvelled at magnificent architecture and/or art works in Bangkok, Paris, Florence and Barcelona - to name but a handful. It's been a great few years. Hopefully we will take the new arrival to see his extended family in Malaysia and Australia in 2010.

What else? We've owned six cars between us during the Noughties, ranging from our little Citroen Saxo (the first car we ever bought) to my old Audi TT. By my count, on my own I've also accumulated nine mobile phones, three Playstations, two iPods and a partridge in a pear tree during the decade, not to mention the three home PCs, three digital cameras and three Sky satellite receivers we own or have owned between us. (Sign of the times, eh?)

But all that is a collection of either material goods or experiences. How have I changed as a person over the past ten years?

I'd like to come up with some staggering insight into my personal development here, but the fact is, after 39 years on this mortal coil, I'm just an older - and hopefully slightly wiser - of the 29-year-old who saw in the new millennium. I suspect that anyone who hadn't seen me for ten years would say that I haven't changed much. A few grey hairs and a lot more pounds, certainly. But fundamentally I'm still the same quiet, self-conscious, socially awkward person I've always been, albeit one who is a little more sure of his place in the world after an additional ten years' life and career experience. I'm a bit less patient than I was and quite a bit more irascible than I used to be. (I am, in fact, turning into a bit of a grumpy old man.) And I'm certainly starting to feel both my age and my mortality, a combination of minor health issues and the death this year of one of my best friends from university, Sam Best-Shaw.

If one thing has changed me more than anything else, it has been becoming a father. I'm definitely less self-absorbed and more responsible than I used to be, and I have learned to see things through a child's eyes. People say that having children allows you to experience a second childhood yourself, and I have certainly found that to be true. For all the sacrifices we have made, all the sleepless nights we have had, all the worries and doubts, it has been worth the trouble many times over.

So that's it. No stunning insights, a minimum of cod psychology. Ten years of my life which have been more about evolution than revolution; not in a bad way, though. I'm happy, and that's more than enough for me.

Anyhow, Happy New Year, everyone, and may 2010 and the new decade bring you good cheer and fortune.

What's in a name?

2009-12-29T18:01:00.001Z

Another box ticked today. (Well, sort of.)

After dropping Zac off at nursery, Heather and I headed into Oxford to do a bit of shopping and - importantly - have a spot of lunch at our favourite restaurant (the Liaison Chinese restaurant on Castle Street, if you're ever passing that way).

I say importantly for two reasons.

Firstly it was perhaps the last opportunity for the two of us to go out to lunch together before we embark into logistically challenging two high-chair territory.

And secondly, as we discovered during Heather's first pregnancy, a restaurant table represents a very pleasant environment for the discussion of baby names.

So, as we tucked into our grilled dumplings, cheung fun and Singapore noodles, two lists were produced and names were revealed in turn. (It was a bit like the recent football World Cup draw, only without Charlize Theron.) Some names were vetoed by one or the other of us, and there were occasional squeals of joy as we discovered a few names which were common to both our lists. (You should see how excited we get when we play snap.)

At the end of it all, we had two combined shortlists: one containing exactly a dozen boy's names; the other, coincidentally, twelve girl's names.

For what it's worth, there had been quite a lot of overlap between us when comparing boy's names - to the extent where we've now both agreed on a favourite - and none whatsoever with our lists of girl's names. When Isaac was born, it was the other way round: we had to sleep on it overnight before deciding on his name, whereas if 'he' had been a 'she' we already had both first and middle names picked out.

Which, presumably, means we will have a daughter now ...

Green light

2009-12-28T08:29:00.000Z

Three key milestones passed yesterday.

Firstly, Arsenal beat Aston Villa 3-0 to pull clear of the Midlands club in the Premier League title race. That's not directly relevant to the matter at hand, but it's still a notable event in my world.

Secondly, Heather completed the 37th week of her pregnancy, which is important because it means a planned home birth is now viable, barring any unforeseen complications. (Cue lots of online research into birthing pools.)

And finally, we had a home appointment with our midwife, A (commonly referred to locally as the 'mad-wife'), to check on the baby's progress and go over our birth plan - which basically is the same as last time: entonox, tick; pethidine, tick; vitamin K, tick; proud father to cut the cord, tick.

If it all started to feel particularly real for us on Boxing Day, it's doubly so now. All the detail and emotion of that evening when Zac was born are coming back to me now, from the mad rush to fill the pool to the exhiliration of feeling his head for the first time as he started to 'crown'.

Zac also got to hear the baby's heartbeat for the first time, so he's very much part of the experience now too. If he doesn't yet understand quite enough to be excited, he is certainly curious and very much aware of the presence of 'baby' in mummy's tummy. The poor thing won't know what's hit him; as a proper mummy's boy it's going to be a bit of a shock to him when he isn't automatically the primary focus for Heather any more.

So, 21 - now 20 - days to the due date, and we have a green light. Time to get our skates on ...

End of days

2009-12-26T18:16:00.001Z

No, it’s not the biblical apocalypse. But it does feel like the end of an era, or at the very least like this particular phase of my life is drawing irrevocably to a close.

It’s late on the afternoon on Boxing Day as I write this. My parents and brother are driving home after spending Christmas with us, having been waved off by an almost tearful Isaac saying “see you soon” hopefully. More relevantly, I’m now looking at an empty dining room, which has been cleared in preparation to accommodate a birthing pool.

That means the next time we eat at the dining table (now residing in the garage) we will, hopefully, be a four-person household, not a three.

The combination of that thought and the sight of the currently empty room have suddenly made the whole impending birth thing very, very real. At least in my head, a line has been crossed from which there is no going back.

Of course, we have always known this time would come. Heather is due on January 17th, a date which has been seared into our minds for several months now. And it’s not as if we haven’t started making preparations. But you have to understand that for so long that date has been a barely visible blip on our personal horizons, and as time has marched on we have had the not inconsiderable dual distractions of Zac’s birthday (December 6th) and Christmas to attend to.

No longer. Now there are no other events to plan. The timeframe is measurable in days rather than weeks, and final arrangements are a matter of real and increasing urgency rather than abstract items on a to do list.

It may still be as much as a month away - or it may be mere hours - but a time will soon come when our lives are transformed and made, at the same time, both more complex and more wonderful.

I have never felt so unprepared.

Gulp.

The world didn't end

2009-12-22T17:54:00.000Z

Never underestimate Mother Nature. If anyone had before, the tens of thousands of people who had nightmarish journeys home or who, like me, spent last night sleeping in cars, offices, hotels or the bedding department of John Lewis certainly won't underestimate her again.

I know of several people whose drives home took anywhere between three and seven hours. Others left their cars behind and opted for the train, or walked distances of up to seven miles. 60 people in our office stayed overnight, with one of the chefs coming back in to cook dinner for them. (I'll never complain about the restaurant again.)

Not everyone got caught out as harmless sleet turned into heavy snow in the blink of an eye, but the window of opportunity was a small one. In Bracknell, the abrupt change in the weather happened at 2.50pm. Anyone who left by 3.00 had a relatively clear run home. However, by the time I left at around 3.20, it was way too late. By then, everyone else on our industrial estate was also trying to leave en masse, resulting in gridlock. Worse still, the falling snow had already formed a slippery layer on top of the previous night's ice, making any stop-start manoeuvre on even the most gentle gradient an, erm, interesting exercise in Newtonian mechanics - particularly for anyone who, like me, was driving a rear-wheel drive car. As a result, what started as a merely annoying traffic situation was compounded by difficult and dangerous driving conditions.

Now I'm not normally one to get overly stressed, but I have to admit that hysteria was not far away as events gradually unfolded around our increasingly futile attempts to pick Isaac up from nursery. Firstly Heather phoned from Henley to say she was stuck - it's a one road in/one road out town surrounded by hills - so I told her to turn around, as a freezing car is not where a 36-week old pregnant woman wants to be spending the night. By this point it was becoming obvious that I was also going nowhere fast; a quick call to a colleague, J, who had left 15 minutes before me but was only a few hundred yards further up the road confirmed my worst fears. So Heather asked one of our local friends to pick Zac up, but she couldn't get up the steep hill to the nursery. Having spun my wheels, slid and bounced off the kerb several times already, I decided to cut my losses and ditch the car at the nearest hotel, but even then it took me an hour to cover the last 100 yards to get there.

By the time I had tramped back to the office it was 6.30 - it had taken over three hours to cover 1.5 miles - and I was cold, wet, hungry and muttering every expletive I have ever learned.

Thankfully, Heather had spoken to the nursery owner who had offered to take her 4x4, borrow a car seat from a neighbour, and drop Zac - who by now was the only child left at the nursery - at a friend's, which took a massive weight off both our minds. (So, thank you, Nicola from Acres of Fun for going way above and beyond the call of duty to deliver our temporarily parent-less son to familiar and comfortable surroundings.)

I hitched a lift with A to Bracknell Central Travelodge, where we settled in for the night with some much-needed food and a bottle of wine (possibly two). It was 1am by the time I got to bed, and I was wide awake at 5.00, watching the BBC News and worrying about how Zac, never a good sleeper at the best of times, was doing.

To cut a long story short, I eventually extricated my car, although it needed the help of A (to whom, also heartfelt thanks), two shovels and three random strangers to push me up out of the car park and from there up the hill to freedom. I was home by 11am, Heather soon after, and we set off to rescue Zac fearing the worst and hoping for only moderate collateral damage at best.

The funny thing is, despite our worst fears about Zac getting scared and playing up about our absence - we had both had visions of him screaming tearfully through the night - he was absolutely fine. Indeed, although he was pleased to see us, he was more upset at the idea of being separated from our friend and her son than he was by the fact that he hadn't seen us last night.

Which, I guess, just goes to show that it is possible for us to be away from him for an entire night - it is the first time in his two-and-a-bit years he has spent a night without both of us - without it being the end of the world. (At least, not for him, anyway.)

So I guess the moral of this story is two-fold. Firstly, don't assume you can outrun the elements. (In future, I'll think twice before glibly heading into work on a snowy day.) And secondly, that kids can be remarkably adaptable and unruffled even in stressful situations - sometimes far more so than their parents.

6 of the best: 80s cop shows

2009-12-11T15:20:00.001Z

I was laid up in bed with some kind of not-swine-flu virus a couple of weeks ago, and spent several happy hours revisiting one of my favourite TV shows from my teenage years. Moonlighting (which is currently airing every weekday on CBS Drama in the

) ran for 66 episodes between 1985 and 1989, introducing us to a thinning but not yet bald Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd with a hairdo you could have used as an umbrella. The show was considered ground-breaking in many ways, from its rapid-fire, dialogue-heavy scripts to an experimental style which would, say, see characters address the viewers direct or burst into song.

In fairness, the show is now starting to show its age. Clothes and hairstyles, naturally, look somewhat dated. Some of the tricks to break down the ‘fourth wall’ which were considered innovative at the time seem positively de rigueur by modern standards. And the plots feel terribly slow and drawn-out when set aside, say, 24, or anything from the CSI stable. (Mind you, the procedural crime-solving element of Moonlighting was never really more than a means to an end.)

Nonetheless, Moonlighting remains tremendous fun to watch. I’m currently about three-quarters of the way through season one, just as the show was really starting to find its stride and, racking my brains, there hasn’t really been anything like it since.

In fact, to my mind there was a period during the middle to latter part of the 80s which represents a golden age of

television, at least in terms of police/detective/spy-type shows. (The UK also got in on the act, emerging from an era of late-70s tough guy shows like The Sweeney and The Professionals into one which more frequently featured female leads, such as Juliet Bravo, The Gentle Touch, Dempsey and Makepeace and C.A.T.S. Eyes.)

With that in mind, here are six

examples of the genre from the 80s that I have not seen since their initial

broadcast; not necessarily the best, but ones which, like Moonlighting, I would love to see again. In alphabetical order …

Automan (13 episodes, 1983-84)

Inspired by the success of Tron, this series featured Lucille Ball’s son Desi Arnaz Jr, a DeLorean car and Chuck Wagner as the eponymous computer-generated, crime-fighting hologram whose sidekick, a skittish ball of light named Cursor, had a habit of looking under ladies’ skirts. Automan, frequently posing under the pseudonym Otto Mann, would assist Arnaz’s character Walter, a police computer geek, in solving a variety of crimes. And that was about it.

It was, as you might expect from the above description, exceedingly silly and played with tongue firmly inserted in cheek. It was certainly not the best piece of television ever; it was, however, good fun, something which is too often missing from contemporary, angst-ridden shows.

The show also featured Robert Lansing as a police lieutenant; who would go on to co-star as a CIA-style handler in …

The Equalizer (88 episodes, 1985-89)

Edward Woodward was the star of one of my dad’s favourite shows, Callan, and his Equalizer character of Robert McCall could easily have been Callan’s doppelganger, a spy who had tired of the spy game and returned to civilian life as a private investigator and defender of the defenceless, a semi-retired James Bond, if you will.

The show was often criticised for excessive violence - by modern standards, it is tame - as McCall, although far from an unemotional character, frequently chose to fight fire with fire. Certainly it didn’t soft-soap in its view of the world, with much of its action taking place at night and frequently eschewing the standard happy ending for something more downbeat and ambiguous. As such, the show always had an edginess to it that contrasted sharply with the ‘bright lights, big city’ setting of LA-based shows, or the exoticness of Magnum, PI.

The Highwayman (10 episodes, 1987-88)

“There is a world, just beyond now, where reality runs a razor thin seam between fact and possibility; where the laws of the present collide with the crimes of tomorrow. Patrolling these vast outlands is a new breed of lawman, guarding the fringes of society’s frontiers, they are known simply as ‘Highwaymen’ - and this is their story.”

Set in the near future, this short-lived series is probably best described as Knight Rider meets Mad Max, with a Wild West feel to it. The title character was one of a small number of law enforcers, each equipped with a futuristic truck, patrolling the country, solving crimes and investigating other strange occurrences.

The Highwayman featured three well-known genre stars in its regular cast: Sam Jones, star of the 1980 film Flash Gordon, played Highwayman, and was joined by V’s Jane Badler and Tim Russ, who would later appear in Star Trek: Voyager.

Leg Work (10 episodes, 1987)

Cancelled before it ever had a chance to establish its niche, this series was unique at the time for having two female leads: Margaret Colin and, nearly a decade before her Oscar-winning turn in Fargo,

Frances

McDormand.

There was much to admire about Leg Work. Here we had a private investigator, Claire McCarron (Colin), who relied on empathy and intelligence rather than physicality or an excess of testosterone, traits underlined by the running joke of her owning a Porsche which was always broken and which she could barely afford to keep repaired.

It was also the first prime-time show I can remember that centred a story on AIDS at a time when the disease was still very much a taboo and poorly understood subject, and handled it in an unflinching and empathetic fashion. The show deserved better than the mid-season cancellation it received as US audiences abandoned it due to its lack of crash-bang-wallop; entirely missing the point that a huge part of its appeal was that it was so different from the norm.

Midnight Caller (61 episodes, 1988-91)

Gary Cole starred as Jack Killian, the San Francisco cop who turned late night radio talk show host after accidentally shooting and killing his partner.

Midnight Caller provided a different twist on the cop-turned-PI theme by focussing on the social rather than procedural aspects of the ‘case of the week’. Through his KJCM radio show, Killian comes into contact with all manner of people in need, addressing tough issues from neighbourhood drug-dealing to child abuse. There was nothing glitzy about the show, which regularly peered into social subcultures through a slightly jaded lens. And yet through it all, the thoroughly cynical Killian cannot help but reach out to and help his audience with a hand of hope.

Cole has had a distinguished career since, including notable turns as Sheriff Lucas Buck in American Gothic and vice-president ‘Bingo’ Bob Russell in The West Wing, but Midnight Caller remains his finest work. And the show also featured a young Mykel T Williamson, years before his Forrest Gump role as the shrimp-loving Bubba Blue.

Downbeat and yet resolutely optimistic, Midnight Caller spoke to those of us who recognised that, while we live in a far from perfect world, there is something inherently good about people everywhere, a sentiment perfectly encapsulated by Killian’s signature sign-off, “Good night, America, wherever you are.”

Sledge Hammer! (41 episodes, 1986-88)

As a send-up of the long procession of ‘on the edge’ film and TV cops such as Dirty Harry and Hunter, this sitcom presented us with a wonderfully over-the-top caricature of a policeman of Inspector Gadget or Clouseau-level incompetence, for whom violence was the first (indeed only) option.

Played purely for laughs – and with a wonderful balance of seriousness and knowingness by David Rasche - the series lovingly poked fun at all the staples and cliches of the cop show genre, presenting us with a sexist, shoot-first buffoon of a hero who talks to and sleeps with his gun, and yet is somehow utterly sympathetic. If Lethal Weapon had been a comedy, this is what it would have looked like.

And that’s my six, the majority of which have sadly not found their way to DVD yet. I’ve excluded several well-known and excellent series such as Hunter, Miami Vice, Scarecrow and Mrs King, TJ Hooker, The Fall Guy and Cagney and Lacey, as well as others which I have been fortunate enough to catch again thanks to the marvel that is multichannel TV (Knight Rider, Remington Steele, Street Hawk and Magnum PI, to name but four), but there you go – six slices of a bygone age that will always hold a special place in my heart.

Blogging: good for the soul?

2009-12-09T13:00:00.000Z

I've been busier than normal at work recently, which means I've updated my blogs (the other, sports-based one is here) much less frequently over the past few weeks. There's nothing particularly unusual about that; there are always periods when I go into blog silence for a while, either because of workload or simply because I don't have anything in particular to say.

The thing is - and I'm feeling this more than usual right now - when I'm not blogging, I really miss it. I mean, I don't crave it in an I'm-addicted-and-I-need-my-fix sort of way; it's more of a nagging itch, a desire to put fingers to keyboard and put some tangible and permanent form to whatever is foremost in my thoughts at that moment in time.

And, let's put this into context, it's not an activity which takes up an overwhelming portion of my time - as of yesterday, I had posted 119 times across my two blogs in 2009 - slightly more than once every three days - which is hardly a prolific rate of output. In an average week I spend no more than a couple of hours - that's about one episode of X Factor or Strictly Come Dancing - blogging, which doesn't seem excessive, does it?

I've previously written my thoughts about why I blog, and the reasons I gave there are still valid: it's more about the self-satisfaction I get from writing a piece than it is about how widely it is read and appreciated, and it's a productive way to blow off steam for a classic introvert like myself, who naturally prefers writing to something more extroverted like (as my colleague A does) performing on stage.

The real point is: blogging makes me happy; it's good for my soul. A bit like chicken soup. And like that hearty dish, I'm sure many people will consider what I write to be relatively bland, but that's fine because the only thing it needs to do is make me feel good. And that it does.

'Tis the season

2009-12-09T11:11:00.102Z

As one season ends, so another begins.

It was finally Isaac's turn to have his second birthday party on Saturday (actually, a joint party with Amelia). It was the last in a series of parties which have gone on over the past several weeks, but that didn't stop him enjoying it tremendously. Like his peers, it's clear that, at the end of his second year, Zac understands and appreciates the concept of a party now; equally obvious that he understood when we told him it was now going to be his turn turn throughout last week. (Wandering round the house singing "Happy birthday to me" is a bit of a giveaway ...)

Anyway, a good time was had by all. Heather had booked a half-hour music session - Zac's favourite - as part of the party, which all the kids seemed to enjoy, and we even had the majority of them sitting down to food together, which is virtually unprecedented.

And, of course, he has had fun since the party tearing into his haul of presents. (Although I must admit we have put a fair few away to give to him at Christmas - possibly even later - instead. Once you've watched him open and get excited about five new toys, there isn't much point giving him even more to open as he just develops that wide-eyed kid-in-a-candy-shop look and doesn't know where to turn next.)

Now that birthday party season is over, it means we can start thinking about Christmas. (We make a point of keeping the two separate, so the one doesn't spoil his enjoyment of the other.) So I will be spending the next few days trying to work out where on earth I put all the decorations after last Christmas. In the meantime, Zac is already running around excitedly pointing at all the "lights flashing" on our neighbours' houses. I'm planning to let him help put up the tree and decorations at the weekend - something he will love, but potentially a recipe for chaos and disaster.

No doubt we'll also attempt another visit to Santa's Grotto. Our first trip a couple of weekends ago was less than successful. First Zac showed minimal interest in Santa arriving in his horse-drawn carriage, and then he flatly refused to even join the queue of kids to see him. (Mind you, why would a two-year-old want to wait to spend thirty seconds sitting on some strange bloke's knee? Knowing Zac, he'd probably grab my phone and immediately call Childline to report a suspected paedophile.)

Hmm.

Once Christmas is over - and hopefully not before! - we will go into full-blown baby preparation, with Heather being due on January 17th. Which means that we face a future in which, over a period of a few weeks from early December to some time in January, we will transition smoothly from Zac's birthday to Christmas and New Year, and then to number two's birthday.

In the past, I had always hoped that my children wouldn't be born too close to Christmas (or to each other), so that they wouldn't have two celebrations back-to-back and then a long gap to next year. But the thought of having a month or so of continuous joy within the family to cheer up a dark and dank winter doesn't seem so bad now. (Although I can imagine we will be knackered by the end of it.)

'Tis the season to be jolly, indeed. It's certainly something to look forward to.

The weigh-in

2009-12-02T22:18:00.040Z

A month ago, I said I was going back on a diet with the aim of losing at least five pounds (from 17st 10lbs to 17st 5lbs) during the month of November.

Well, I weighed myself this morning, and the scales said 17st 7lbs, so while I have lost weight, I'm two pounds short of my target.

I'm disappointed with the result, but strangely not overly discouraged. I said I was going to eat less and stop snacking - which I have managed on the whole, although I've slipped a few times as the desire to comfort eat has overcome my dieting willpower. Seven out of ten on that front, I'd say.

What I have failed to do is exercise properly. The bike remains untouched, and while I have made an effort to do little things like use the stairs at work, I've been pretty poor on the whole. Awarding myself two out of ten is probably on the generous side.

On reflection, my five pound target was certainly achievable with some more consistent effort, particularly on the exercise front. (Certainly my fitness needs some attention, as I was huffing and puffing terribly this evening after climbing 125 steps at Edgware Road tube station.) But what's done is done. If I can lose three pounds just by generally eating sensibly (albeit with the odd relapse), then there's no reason why I can't keep it going and lose a bit more before the festive season kicks in with a vengeance.

So, anyway, 17st 7lbs is where I currently stand. I think I'll aim to at least get down to the original target of 17st 5lbs before Christmas, and then limit the damage over the holidays. I figure that if I can start 2010 no heavier than I am today, then that's at least a reasonable starting point.

Here goes.

The prostitute and the politician

2009-11-15T19:20:00.001Z

Introducing the real Belle de Jour

Over the course of the last six years, during which she has written a best-selling book which has spawned a successful TV series (The Secret Diary Of A Call Girl), the celebrated call girl-cum-blogger Belle de Jour has successfully maintained her cloak of anonymity.

When you think about it, that in itself is a seriously impressive achievement in a twenty-first century world in which it is now virtually impossible for anyone of any notable interest to hide anything for six hours, let alone six days. And yet Belle has kept her identity secret - via a combination of careful planning, discretion (not even her agent knew her true identity) and a well-concealed money trail – which has eluded the attempts of the world’s journalists to out her.

Other anonymous bloggers have been quickly identified and exposed, often within days. But Belle has kept the newspapers, literary critics and a curious public in the dark. It has variously been thought that she was a well-known author under a nom de plume, a man writing titillating male fantasy for other men, or an entirely fictional creation.

For six years, we have all been chasing wild geese.

Until today.

In an interview with India Knight - one of the staunchest critics of Belle's books - in today's Sunday Times, Dr Brooke Magnanti, a 34 year old Bristol research scientist, has finally stepped out of the shadows and publicly claimed her alter ego.

The interview makes interesting reading. She is as articulate and intelligent as you would expect from someone with a PhD and a pre-Belle de Jour history of scientific blogging. And she also seems fully responsible for her own actions. One of the most common accusations levelled at Belle has been the way her blog has seemingly glamorized the sex trade, but she in no way denies the less salubrious side to prostitution; it is more that her experiences – some real, some fictional - were at the other end of the scale. The simple facts as Brooke/Belle relates them are that she became an escort as a means to make ends meet without the need for skills or training. It’s not necessarily a solution most of us would have adopted, but it suggests a degree of pragmatism over aspiration in terms of career choice.

Now, the exact nature of truth is always an elusive thing, and it can often be difficult to separate it from carefully crafted, self-serving fiction. Indeed, in the hours since the newspaper’s publication, several people have already come forward claiming to have been previously aware of Belle’s hidden identity, and the suspicion is that Brooke Magnanti’s revelations, rather than being purely voluntary, are little more than pre-emptive action. (The interview mentions the looming threat of a whistle-blowing ex.)

Regardless, it’s hard to criticise. Belle de Jour remains who she has always been; the only real difference is we can now put a name to her.

Palin bends the truth (again)

Another high-profile woman whose book, Going Rogue, is due to be published this coming week, is already guaranteed a place at the top of the bestseller lists.

Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice-presidential nominee. The darling of the conservative right, with her gun-totin’, moose-huntin’, anti-abortion hockey mom image. The embodiment of all that is evil to many others.

The Palin PR machine is already in overdrive. For instance, she will appear on Oprah tomorrow as part of a promotional tour which could easily – and probably accurately - be interpreted as the first step of a three-year campaign for the Republicans’ 2012 presidential nomination. Already we have seen teasers of some of the juicier morsels from her book, from which it is clear – if we did not know already - that Sarah Palin is a woman who (a) ensures nothing she does remains anonymous and (b) clearly believes in “blame first, accept responsibility later (preferably never)” as a modus operandi.

In Going Rogue, Palin squarely refuses to accept any responsibility for the Republicans’ failure at the polls last November, instead pointing the finger unwaveringly at John McCain, his aides and anyone else unfortunate enough to stray within her blast radius. Her abysmal performance in an infamous TV interview with CBS’s Katie Couric – memorably lampooned by 30 Rock's Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live (and easily found on YouTube) - is explained away by Couric’s supposed bias and 'badgering'.

Judge for yourself whether the exchange below is a result of bias and badgering, or the performance of a barely articulate individual who is dangerously out of her depth.

Palin: "Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and on our other side, the land … boundary that we have with … Canada."

Couric: "Explain to me why that enhances your foreign policy credentials."

Palin: "Well, it certainly does because our … our next door neighbours are foreign countries. They're in the state that I am the executive of ... We have trade missions back and forth. We … we do … it's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where … where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is … from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to … to our state."

So, you tell me: Belle de Jour or Sarah Palin. Who, really, is prostituting themselves here? Who is distorting the truth more? And who would you trust? The established bestselling author recounting her time as a high-class escort, or the soon-to-be bestselling author attempting to rewrite history to further her unbridled lust for higher office?

See it through a boy's eyes

2009-11-11T16:05:00.002Z

I was watching last year's Christmas episode of the excellent 30 Rock last night - just the right side of diabetes-inducing levels of schmaltz - and it's got me thinking about how having a child has completely changed my attitudes towards the holiday season.

(As an aside, isn't it funny how easily conditioned we have become in the UK to watching watching seasonal episodes of US programmes out of sync? It doesn't feel at all odd to be watching a Halloween, Thanksgiving or Christmas episode in the middle of summer.)

Anyway, Christmas.

It's not that I've become all bah-humbug about the most wonderful time of the year (as the old Andy Williams song goes), but it would be fair to say that, for me, the magic had gone out of it some time ago. I think it happened at the point I realised that I was earning enough money that, if I wanted something, I could simply go out and buy it. And that's usually exactly what I would do.

To avoid present-giving disappointment, we now have an embargo in place where I am not supposed to buy myself anything after the beginning of November; instead it is added to my Christmas wish list. Which is fine, and I do understand the need for it - after all, it saves a lot of fiddling around with receipts and returning unwanted gifts - but it also means that I end up having to wait up to eight weeks for something I could easily have bought myself today. And then consequently leads to me rushing out to buy all the things on my list that weren't given as presents.

Honestly, I'd really rather have cash or some small token gift to unwrap on Christmas morning. It's the thought that counts. Really.

However, Christmas is a bit different when you see it through a boy's eyes (that's Jamelia, for those of you who have spotted that I'm inserting song titles at every possible opportunity). Last weekend I took Isaac to our local garden centre to burn off a bit of excess energy - boy, does he have plenty of that! - and discovered that they had just put out all their Christmas stuff, ranging from illuminated snowmen for the front garden to cuddly toys (that's Roachford, for eagle-eyed 80s pop spotters) to £250 artificial trees with built-in blinking lights.

Ordinarily, I'd have turned up a snobbish nose and walked straight out again, but to see Zac's reaction when confronted with a veritable forest of colourfully-lit trees - he stood there for fully five minutes rapt with attention and repeatedly exclaiming "Wow!" - made my day. And it was the same when he discovered the baubles, and the model Christmas villages, and the animatronic polar bears. (I'm not joking - see below.)

He lapped it all up; in the end, I had to physically drag him out after an hour so we could go home for lunch.

This year will be the first time - he's two in early December - he will have any real understanding of the concept of Christmas, so it's his first experience of all things shiny and garish. (He already gets the idea of presents, although he hasn't yet realised that not all wrapped-up boxes are meant for him; I spent a lot of time trying to stop him from unwrapping all the decorative presents placed under the trees!)

Already I'm busy picking out various odds and sods he might like - I bought a couple of small baubles he took a fancy to at the garden centre - and accumulating a variety of stocking-fillers for him to tear into on Christmas morning. Military campaigns have been less precisely planned.

So now, for the first time in years, I'm really looking forward to Christmas, as opposed to dreading fighting the screaming hordes for the last Nok Tok talking doll in an overcrowded shop playing incessant seasonal muzak. (We've already ordered all his presents online, anyway.) Not because anything has changed with me; I know I will - gratefully - receive the usual array of books, CDs, DVDs etc (and then buy everything else later) on the day, but because I know Zac is going to love all the seasonal rituals, from the opening of wrapped presents to the excesses of Christmas lunch (he loves a good roast; he takes after his father).

The pleasure may be an entirely vicarious one, but I'm still more excited about this Christmas than any other in years. That has to be a good thing. (Fine Young Cannibals, incidentally.)

Twitter in newspaper form? How quaint (and potentially brilliant)

2009-11-06T11:14:00.001Z

I've just signed up to Twitter Times, a recently launched service which takes a ‘new media’ outlet (Twitter) and offers its users an ‘old media’ solution for sifting through their feeds for popular news and blog posts from people they follow, delivering it in the form of a personalised newspaper, sorted by recency (is that a word?!?) and frequency.

Project leader Maxim Grinev explains the basic principle behind the service, saying, "From the massive volume of daily news the most interesting ones are those actively discussed by people you follow, your friends, respected persons and celebrities you admire."

It is still in its testing phase, so some of the functionality is apparently a bit ropey, but I’ll happily forgive its teething problems if it manages to develop into an effective and relevant filter for interesting content. I only follow about 90 people on Twitter, but this equates to 250-300 tweets dripping through my feed on a typical day, which means I tend to skim my feed a few times a day and will only actually read or click through on links for maybe 20%. No doubt I am missing some hidden gems in the 80% I ignore, but life’s too short to carefully read them all and if Twitter Times can help me unearth these without having to spend the whole of my life physically attached to my phone/PC, then I’ll become a happy and regular subscriber.

(Incidentally, I read an article earlier this week that claimed the average Facebook user spends three days a year on the site. Okay, once you have recovered from the sensationalist headline and done the maths that’s actually only 12 minutes a day, but it’s nonetheless easy to see how easily and insidiously social media can take over your life – and how potentially valuable a tool like Twitter Times can be to help social media addicts reclaim their lives.)

Personally, I think Twitter Times is a great concept which marries new and old media to simplify our ever-expanding world. It’s a bit like the Ellis Island of Twitter, processing millions of entries and turning away the undesirables. Whether it proves to be truly effective or ends up being overtaken by better, more agile me-toos remains to be seen, but Grinev should be applauded for attempting to provide a much-needed service which addresses a growing issue for people like me, for whom there never seem to be enough hours in the day to keep our Facebook statuses up to date, or to catch up with contacts on LinkedIn, or to write our blogs, or – perish the thought – to venture outside into the big wide world every now and then.

Diet - a four-letter word, but a necessary evil

2009-11-04T22:34:00.142Z

Right, you heard it hear first. No more half-hearted mucking around. I am officially back on the diet again for November.

Despite playing sport regularly throughout school and my twenties, I have always been slightly overweight, even at my best. And, in common with many people, my weight has been gradually creeping up over the years, bringing a load of health and self-image issues with it.

As an adult, my ideal weight is probably somewhere slightly north of 14st, a benchmark I haven't been below since the age of 16. I can't recall when I first topped 15st - it was probably some time during my A levels - but I can remember with some horror the first time I realised my weight had crept above 16st - it was the summer leading up to my 20th birthday, and I had piled on about 20 pounds while rehabilitating a knee injury.

Although I managed to lose all that weight over the summer, I have been fighting - and slowly losing - a yo-yo battle against the bulge ever since. After a couple of bad years, I lost about 15 pounds to settle at around 14st 7lbs before our wedding in 1997. I gained maybe 20 pounds during my MBA (1998-9), topping 16st once again. And since then, I have oscillated up and down either side of, initially, the 16st mark - and more recently 17st.

In fact, the last time I was even remotely in sight of 15st was four years ago, which was the last time I was 100% focussed on losing weight and getting fit. At the time, I was going to the gym regularly and walking 15-20 miles a week while winding down before my departure from the BBC, having just returned from completing the Tongariro Crossing in New Zealand. And while no one would ever have mistaken me for a marathon runner, it was the fittest and lightest I had been for a fair while, tipping the scales at 15st 3lbs.

That was then, though; this is now. Since 2005, my weight has steadily increased, a trend occasionally interrupted by post-Christmas bouts of half-hearted dieting, to the point where I returned from our late summer getaway in Cornwall having put on five pounds in five days to attain a new personal worst of 18st 1lb. That meant I had gained 40 pounds -nearly three stone - in four years.

Okay, I've managed to lose all that bonus weight already just by returning to a sensible eating pattern, but even so that's pretty depressing, particularly knowing we are about to enter the diet-unfriendly Christmas party season.

As I see it, my problem is threefold. Firstly, I'm getting older, which makes it harder for me to lose weight. Secondly, I need to eat less and avoid my not infrequent tendency to graze without thinking, something I tend to do more when I'm bored. (It has been a relatively quiet time at work for the last few months, which doesn't help.) And lastly, I've stopped doing any kind of regular physical activity.

While I can't do anything about the ageing process, I can control the other two. And the lack of exercise really hit home last night when I went out bowling with work and returned with aches and strains all over my body which reminded me just how unused I have become to any remotely strenuous exertion.

So, the not-exactly-rocket-science plan for the next four weeks is:

1. Locate willpower, and switch to 'on' (and then keep it on for more than a week at a time)

2. Eat less - and in particular stop snacking

3. Dust down the exercise bike, walk rather than drive into town, use the stairs at work etc (but not be too discouraged if there is no immediate step-change in my fitness)

This morning, the scales reported my weight as 17st 10lbs. I want to have lost (at least) five pounds by the end of the month - i.e.achieve a target weight of 17st 5lbs - a significant but achievable amount. Then, after hopefully limiting the damage through December, I need to try to get down under 17st by, say, next Easter; I reckon that will equate to a target loss of nearly a pound a week once I have put my Christmas weight on.

That's still 30 pounds or more shy of where I ought to be, but I can't really get my head around such a big task at the moment. One step at a time.

There we go. I have set down my target in writing now, rather than half-committing to it in my usual, wishy-washy fashion. So here goes.

Now where did I put those carrots?

Riding the crest of a (Google) Wave

2009-10-16T16:14:00.006+01:00

I’m probably more excited about this than anyone sane really ought to be, but I now have access to the preview version of Google’s new collaboration tool, Google Wave.

Over the past couple of weeks, Google has sent out invites to 100,000 people, who in turn are allowed to invite a further eight people to join them in this initial testing phase. I’ve been invited by one of the 100,000 (one of our e-channel team in the office), which makes me one of a (relatively) small community of fewer than a million people worldwide who have access to this public beta release.

Have I said yet how excited I am about this?

Here’s why. According to the blurb at wave.google.com:

Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Basically, it is an online tool which combines aspects of the functionality of email, instant messaging, collaboration tools such as NetMeeting and Google Docs, and allows groups of people to message, chat, and work collaboratively on documents and projects together – and here’s the killer - in real time.

The possibilities are endless.

At work, project teams based in disparate locations can work on presentations and reports together at the same time, without needing to send updated copies back and forth or worrying about version control – a bit like NetMeeting, but where everyone can simultaneously control the desktop and edit on-screen content. (If, like me, you work for a multinational corporation and regularly have to deal with counterparts in different offices or even countries, the benefits should be obvious.)

And outside of the workplace, I can see all sorts of possibilities for collaborative blogging and publishing. In particular, Wave's 'playback' functionality, will allow you to join a conversation late and watch the history of an edited document replay in front of you. (How cool is that?)

Those are just a couple of examples of how Google Wave could revolutionise the way we collaborate with others on both work and personal projects. I’m sure many more will develop as Wave and its users become ever more sophisticated.

While Wave will never replace face-to-face communication, it could easily represent a quantum leap in terms of facilitating remote co-working and information sharing. I’m looking forward to getting to grips with it.

Electric Dreams - a journey through four decades of technology

2009-09-24T09:06:00.000+01:00

As a rule, I don’t normally promote organisations I’ve previously worked for, but as someone who is both a self-confessed gadget freak and has an interest in all things historical, I thought others of a similar bent might be interested in a new three-part series called Electric Dreams, which starts on BBC Four next Tuesday (September 29^th) at 9pm.

The premise is simple enough. It takes a modern, tech-savvy family of six in Reading – one which has five mobile phones, six televisions and seven computers between them – and transports them back to 1970, a time when most homes had only a single black-and-white television (affording access to three – count them, three! – channels) and a single dial phone. During each programme, they are then progressed through the 70s, 80s and finally 90s, with new technology being introduced into their home at the rate of a year per day.

Having listened to an in-depth preview of the series on this week’s Guardian Tech Weekly podcast, the programme promises some interesting observations on the impact technology has had on our lives and the way we interact as families – some of it good, some not so good.

If nothing else, it will be an interesting trip down memory lane, to a time when teasmades and freezers were the new must-have gadgets, the Welsh made home computers (anyone remember the Dragon 32?), and YouTube was part of the plumbing that connected your toilet to your drains.

I’ve just used my mobile phone to remotely programme my Sky+ box to record the series, and in true 21^st century style I’ll probably get round to watching it in about six months’ time …

Holiday perspectives

2009-09-23T08:32:00.000+01:00

With the school holidays over, we took ourselves off to Cornwall for five days last week, for what will probably be the last time as a family of three.

On a friend's recommendation, we booked ourselves into the Bedruthan Steps Hotel, located between Newquay and Padstow on the north coast. (If you're ever heading to Cornwall and looking for a family-friendly hotel, the Bedruthan is fantastic - a short (though steep) walk from a good beach, separate children's meal sittings and entertainments, plenty of indoor and outdoor play areas, baby monitoring, basically everything a parent could possibly want.)

Being mid-September, we didn't have any great expectations weather-wise - I'd have been more than happy with a couple of dry days - but in the end we couldn't have asked for better. It was warm, dry and largely sunny throughout, enabling us to get down to the beach whenever we wanted, as well as incorporating visits to the zoo, the aquarium and Padstow (where Rick Stein's restaurant is: a pretty but really very dull little town). With the hotel looking after the catering, we didn't have to worry about preparing any meals for Zac; he was able to burn off his abundant energy splashing around in the sea, building sandcastles, or playing with any of the hotel's many child-focussed distractions: the soft-play room, the giant trampoline, the see-saw and swings, or - best of all - going up and down repeatedly in the lift (go figure).

(In fact, the only thing we didn't really manage to do was to get ourselves out to eat at Jamie Oliver's Fifteen Cornwall in nearby Watergate Bay, but that was relatively minor in the greater scheme of things.)

Holidaying with a small child in tow is certainly very different to doing so without one. Before Zac came along, we spent most of our spare time travelling across the world from Washington DC to Wellington NZ, at least 2-3 foreign holidays every year, always haring around everywhere seeing as many things as we possibly could in the limited time available. We have stood on the edge of a volcano crater in Tongariro and in the remains of Pompeii, a town devastated (and subsequently preserved) by another volcano, Vesuvius. We've towered above the surrounding land on the Great Wall of China, and peered into the abyss of the Grand Canyon. We've seen great displays of art: the Sistine Chapel in Rome, the Mona Lisa in Paris's Louvre, Picasso's Guernica in Madrid, MoMA and the Guggenheim museums in New York. In short, we've had a great time just doing stuff.

Now, though, things are very different. The biggest thing I want from a holiday is to see my boy smiling, laughing and running around excitedly. If that means spending 15 minutes every morning and evening getting in and out of lifts, that's fine by me. My needs are very much secondary compared to his, and if it's a cliché to say that you see the world differently through a child's eyes, then that's only because it's absolutely true. He is busy exploring a whole new world around him, and if it's now a part of my job description as a father to help him discover his surroundings, then that's a role I'll gladly accept. I've seen my fair share of wonders in this world; it's time I helped my son see the myriad of little miracles in his small but ever-expanding universe.

Some things never change, though. After five days of cooked breakfasts and three-course dinners, I have returned home having (as usual) gained weight at the rate of a pound a day. So it's bread and water for me for the next few weeks ...

Halfway house

2009-09-04T15:22:00.000+01:00

It's my 39th birthday today.

I can't remember when exactly, but there must have been a turning point at which birthdays stopped being a cause for celebration and started becoming a reminder of how another year had passed without fulfilling any of my big life goals.

There's a Lily Allen song ('22') out at the moment whose lyrics really resonate with me:

When she was 22 the future was bright

She's nearly 30 now and she's out every night [...]

It's sad but it's true how society says her life is already over

There's nothing to do and there's nothing to say

The average life expectancy for a UK male is now 77.7 years which means that, statistically at least, today my life is half over. I may live longer than that; conversely, like my friend Sam, my life could end much sooner and more abruptly than that.

When you're younger, you feel invulnerable. The future looks bright, you've got your whole life ahead of you, and you're most likely at your peak health-wise. I know I felt like that; I wasn't especially fit, but I played a lot of sport, had loads of energy, and the spectre of arthritis, cancer and a million and one physical ailments were tiny dots on a distant horizon.

Over the last two or three years, though, I've been reminded that this is no longer the case. While I'm not in bad health, I've put on a lot of weight which I can no longer easily shed. I can't sleep on a hard floor any more - as I have done to help Isaac get back to sleep on a number of occasions recently - without waking up with backache. I've been diagnosed with a couple of (relatively minor) conditions which occasionally cause me slight physical problems, and four times I've developed what could have been early symptoms of cancer but have thankfully proven to be innocent inconveniences.

So I'm no better or worse than many men of my age; I'm hardly a paragon of virtue, I should really lose 20-30 pounds, but there are plenty of people in a worse physical condition than me. Basically I can essentially live the life I want to live the vast majority of the time; I just can't do everything I would like to do.

Having just re-read the last few paragraphs, I sound like an aspiring Victor Meldrew, don't I?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not at all unhappy. Waking up this morning to be greeted by a loving wife and a beaming son wanting to blow out the 'dandles' on my 'dir-day dake' was the best present I could possibly have asked for. But what I've gradually come to realise over the last few months is that I need to spend less time worrying about the day-to-day stuff, and more time concentrating on the things that actually make me happy.

There is a well-known theory developed by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow called the 'hierarchy of needs', which serves as a model to explain human motivation. The hierarchy is usually expressed as a pyramid, with each level following on from the one below it.

Maslow postulated that as humans fulfil their needs at each successive level, their motivations shift to the next level in the hierarchy. For instance, once you have met your basic 'physiological' needs (e.g. a roof over your head, food and water, basic health), you move on to 'safety' motivations (getting a job, having a basic level of fitness etc) and so on.

What I've realised is that I've been stuck in the 'esteem' phase for quite a while. I suspect many professional people do: get good qualifications, get a job, get a better job, climb the greasy pole, get a pay rise, get a promotion, don't stop until you've climbed as high as you can possibly go, retire.

And that's the nub of any unhappiness I have every birthday. I'm not one of those people for whom my career is the be-all and end-all of my existence. Sure, in my twenties and early thirties it was a big focus for me, as I moved up Maslow's hierarchy from 'safety' (first job) to 'belonging' (move jobs, get married, cover the mortgage) to 'esteem' (get my MBA, keep moving jobs, more disposable income). If I look at where I am now, I have a job I enjoy (most of the time, anyway), my work-life balance is pretty good, I have a young family, and I earn more than enough to pay the bills, buy stuff I want to buy and still put something away for a rainy day.

In Maslow's terms, I'm ready to move from 'esteem' to 'self-actualisation'. Or, at least, I will do if I give myself permission to do so. It's the itch I'm desperate to scratch evey year.

It takes quite a bit of effort to put the nagging guilt to one side, though. There is constant pressure to do more at work (especially in these recessionary times). There are always bills to be paid, chores to be done, all the minutiae of everyday life. And there is always tomorrow to do everything on my aspirational wish-list. But you know what? The world doesn't stop if I don't do all the day-to-day stuff right now. And if I keep waiting for tomorrow, it will never come.

I think that's one of the reasons I've started writing so much again recently: it's how I am most comfortable expressing my creativity. I find the process of writing a blog relaxing and fulfilling - it's certainly more fun than filling in yet another spreadsheet! I've always wanted to write a book - I've started and stopped twice before, paralysed by fear of failure - and yet the other night I sat up for two hours at 3am beginning the process all over again. (Third time lucky, eh?) Why not? Publication, which is more of an 'esteem' need, is not my goal; I write because the simple act of writing is satisfying enough in itself. Self-actualisation is the name of the game.

So, anyway, I stand here today at the theoretical halfway house of my passage on this mortal coil. Maybe I've wasted some opportunities already, but I still have a whole load of life left to do the things that really matter to me.

It seems like a pretty good place to be. I'll take that. It's certainly reason enough for me to celebrate rather than mope today.

Why social networking is a good thing

2009-09-02T08:19:00.001+01:00

It’s partly the geek in me, but there’s something about the social networking phenomenon which intrinsically suits my nature as someone who has always been a writer rather than a talker.

Until recently, the term ‘networking’ generally had a more business and career-related connotation: it was about having the right conversations with the right people at conferences and trade shows, or handing out business cards while collecting those of others who might prove useful contacts in the future.

Not any more.

‘Social networking’, as the name suggests, is much more about maintaining and expanding your network of friends, keeping you in touch on a more regular basis, and enabling new connections to be made with other people who share a common interest, whether it be pregnant mums-to-be, fans of the same TV programme, or fellow gamers. (You’ll probably be aware of many of the names and buzzwords already: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Bebo, LinkedIn, Club Penguin, the blogosphere, and so on.)

But whereas in the ‘real’ world one would collect business cards, addresses and phone numbers, now one accumulates ‘friends’ (as you do on, say, Facebook and MySpace) or ‘followers’ (Twitter’s measure of personal currency).

As an example, this is me. I’m not particularly exceptional: ordinary 30-something guy, office job, a few deep interests, with a slight tendency to be a relatively early adopter of new technologies (i.e. mildly, but not World of Warcraft-level, geeky).

I have my ‘real world’ networks, of course. Family. Friends from university nearly 20 years ago (sadly, I’ve lost practically all touch with my old school friends). Current and former work colleagues. Friends I’ve made through sports. Friends of friends, that sort of thing.

But then I also have my ‘virtual’ networks. Some of my real world friends are here: social networking becomes a way of keeping up to date with people I see infrequently or who are now living on the other side of the world. (For instance, I have a good friend who now lives in New Zealand, who I have seen three times in the last six years, but with whom - thanks to Facebook - I am able to maintain some level of communication at least weekly.) But they are also places where I interact with people I have never met (and probably never will), but where friendships have formed because they are, say, fellow Arsenal fans. In many ways, these can be as close as - if not closer than - my ‘real’ relationships: I have a couple of online friends who I communicate with on an almost daily basis.

So, anyway, at the risk of looking like a bandwagon-jumper, here are the various social networking tools I have signed up to (most used first):

- Twitter, which I use in part to keep up with a handful of friends and to let them know what I’m doing, but mostly as a means of virally picking up and sharing relevant news

- Facebook, which is more about communicating and sharing photos with a wider circle of friends

- Blogger, where I have both this, my personal blog, and a ‘Sporting Reflections’ blog where I indulge my twin passions of sports and writing

- At work, I have recently started using Yammer (like Twitter, but with private company networks) and an intranet-based blogging tool to share ideas

- LinkedIn, for professional networking

- Audioboo, which is the voice-recording equivalent of Blogger

- I am also registered on MySpace, Friends Reunited and a couple of football-related forums, but I no longer use these actively (there are only so many hours in the day …)

Of course, online networking will never be a substitute for genuine human interaction, but in a world where our personal contact list of friends, acquaintances and business associates is flung further and wider than ever before, social networking allows us to maintain at least a basic level of interaction with large numbers of people in a way that has never been previously possible. That can only be a good thing.

Why do I write?

2009-09-01T10:09:00.005+01:00

Personal motivations are not always easy to explain.

We were at a barbecue on Sunday afternoon when, unprompted and completely independent of one another, two friends (R & A) went out of their way to compliment me on my other, sports-related blog. A even went so far as to ask if I had ever considered trying to get myself published.

A little well-meaning flattery never did anyone any harm, and I went home that evening with my chest metaphorically puffed out, grateful for the fact that two busy, well-educated and highly literate friends (R works in the City; A is a doctor-in-training) not only took a few minutes of their time to read my occasionally coherent ramblings, but thought enough of them to spontaneously praise them.

When asked why I choose to write, my typically inarticulate response was to shrug and say, “I just like to write, that’s all.”

Equally pertinent was the follow-up question: where do I find the time? After all, with a young toddler who is somewhat high maintenance when it comes to (not) sleeping, a reasonably busy job, and a constant lack of time which is a source of permanent frustration and complaint, it’s a question I often ask myself.

I suppose the simple (and obvious) answer is that it is something I am motivated enough to do that I prioritise it over other activities: I watch less TV than I used to; I spend less time conquering virtual worlds on the Playstation; I read less. (I also spend less time doing household chores than I ought to, as Heather is constantly reminding me, but then who doesn’t?)

And the fact is that writing a blog post takes less time than many people imagine, particularly when it is something that comes from either the heart or a deep interest rather than a sense of obligation. (That’s my excuse for why it takes me so long to produce stuff at work, anyway!)

On average, I will post once a week to each of my two blogs; sometimes more, often less. A typical post will be between 800 and 1,000 words and take on average 45 minutes to write, rarely more than an hour (unless the topic requires some heavy research). That’s a similar length to your average newspaper article, which I daresay journalists rattle off more quickly than I do and with the added pressure of print deadlines to meet.

(As an example, I’ll do a word count and time-check at the end of this blog.)

So, in reality, I spend a couple of hours – the duration of a football match – blogging in an average week. Not so much, really.

I’ve found that the simple act of putting finger to keyboard on a regular basis keeps the writing ’muscle’ well-practised and in good nick. I’m still not someone who can bash out a piece from start to finish in one seamless motion – I’d be rubbish if I had to write on a typewriter – but I’ve definitely learned how to crank out readable output more quickly than when I first started blogging. My style is somewhat, er, ‘organic’ (for which, read ‘chaotic and disorganised’): my modus operandi is that the absolute maximum I will start with is a theme, a couple of key discussion points, and a picture of what I want the final paragraph to be, but other than that I allow the structure and flow to evolve on its own. Start with an idea and the words will follow would be my motto. I know it’s not how all the manuals advise aspiring writers to approach their art, but it works for me. With experience, I’ve learned to trust my own voice and ability, and just enjoy the process of watching a blank page fill with a narrative which gives me a huge sense of satisfaction when I finally hit the ‘publish’ button.

And that in itself is perhaps the best way I can answer the question of my personal motivation for writing. Some people write to share or show off their expertise on a particular topic as a way of enhancing their reputation; others chase ‘hits’ on a blog or website as a means of validating some kind of personal currency. I do it because I find it is a good way to blow off steam, because it is a way for me to express myself creatively, and because I find it personally satisfying. Everything else – readers, comments, praise - is a nice bonus, but it is not a primary motivation. Many people write for others; I write for me.

So there you have it. I just like to write, that’s all.

(Word count: 790. Time: 41 minutes. See, it doesn’t take that long, really.)

Casanova's sports day

2009-08-21T13:02:00.003+01:00

As well as being Heather's birthday yesterday, it was also Isaac's first sports day at nursery.

Amusing is, I believe, the word I'm looking for, as a variety of one and two year olds were asked to sprint/toddle for twenty metres, with varying degrees of success, compliance, refusal and even tears.

(We won't dwell on my performance in the dads' hopping race. Suffice to say that trying to shift 17-plus stones' worth of weight on one of two dodgy knees was never going to result in a Usain Bolt-like performance. Move along, please.)

The afternoon also showed a lot about my son's character. He's not really one to go with the crowd, spending much of the afternoon roaming off in random directions. He then impatiently wriggled away from the start of his first race because it was taking too long to get everyone organised, before eventually gambolling away at a fair but not exceptional speed with the aid of his mother's hand.

Zac is many things: compliant is not one of them. He definitely seems to be more intelligent than most at this age, but with that comes an inquisitive mind and a tendency to want to understand and challenge whenever he is asked to do something; he's not wilfully disobedient, but he isn’t one for blindly following instructions either. I quite like that, although it can be hard work as a parent trying to get him from A to B sometimes.

And he is definitely starting to differentiate between Heather and I now. I think she summarised it best the other day when she said that he comes to her for attention and comfort, but when he wants to impress and seek approval he comes to me.

He really is so much fun at the moment, soaking up everything like a sponge and parroting everything you say back at you. Music has been his big thing for a while now; he instantly recognises his favourite songs, and regularly sings or hums in time (and in tune) with pop songs (current favourites: Lily Allen’s ‘Not Fair’, Lady Gaga’s ‘Poker Face’ and Irene Cara’s ‘Flashdance (What A Feeling)’, nursery rhymes or even the theme tunes of his favourite TV programmes. He is pronouncing polysyllabic words properly, having graduated from ‘ma-ee’ and ‘da-ee’ to a clear ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’ - cute during the day, less so when shouted at you at 1am. And the phrases he has been taught at nursery, such as ‘Oh, dear me’ and ’Sorry, mummy’ remain an endless source of amusement.

On top of that, he is showing signs of becoming a real boy too. Okay, he’s not really shown any interest in football yet. But he loves rough-and-tumble physical play, and is starting to get very attached to his train track set and his building blocks. (I’ve been trying to teach him how to build a tall but stable tower; he hasn’t quite understood the principle of scaffolding yet, but I’m working on it.)

Funniest of all, he is already an incorrigible flirt. Whether it is a 2-year old girl or a 70-year old granny, he knows how to turn it on for the ladies. There is always a smile and a twinkle in his eye, and his favourite trick when meeting a female while out walking is to find a daisy or a dandelion and offer it to her. He’ll go far!

Sam Best-Shaw, RIP

2009-08-13T17:45:00.002+01:00

I've just returned home from the memorial service for Sam, my friend from university who died last month with a brain tumour.

I've written elsewhere about how much it has affected me to lose a friend - albeit a recently distant one - of a similar age, and a fellow parent. More than I'd like to admit, certainly.

And so I found myself, along with maybe a hundred of Sam's friends and family, at his local church on an otherwise random Thursday afternoon. It was good to see so many making the small but not insignificant effort of attending to pay their respects; good too to see other old university friends who I hadn't met up with in some time, one of whom I hadn't seen since my stag night 12 years ago. (Although there is something especially sad when you look around the church and realise that half the people there are from the generation before: to my mind it goes against the natural order of things for the old to have to mourn the young.)

But anyway. We sang. We listened to stories and recollections from Sam's life. And we remembered.

And once the first memory was stirred, so many came flooding back. Countless evenings drinking cheap beer in the Union bar. Sam's rickety room on staircase 15 with the uneven floor, and the month it got taken over by the Lib Dems as their campaign base for the council elections. College discos (they were called 'sweaties', for obvious reasons), balls and other events. Summer afternoons punting zig-zaggedly on the Cherwell drinking Pimms, or at the Parks watching cricket. Our ritual end-of-term night out at a local Chinese restaurant called Dear Friends, where we would order dishes with the aid of a random number generator and then stay up all night playing games. Conversations about music ranging from the banal to the surreal: tracing all the historical references in Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start The Fire', for instance, or arguments about why the Stranglers were, as Sam would vehemently argue, the best band in the history of pop. (Hearing 'Always The Sun' playing out of the speakers as the last act of the service was the final straw for me, bringing tears to my eyes and triggering a second wave of memories.)

But then, of course, that's the point of a memorial service: you remember. And in the rekindled personal memories of a hundred or more people this afternoon, Sam lives on.

It's not much, but then again maybe it is.

Samuel Stevenson Best-Shaw

Husband of Elena

Father of Adam and Rebecca

1971-2009

RIP

One giant leap

2009-07-20T19:13:00.001+01:00

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Although a total of 12 men have walked on the moon to date, it is the first, Neil Armstrong, who still captures the imagination the most.

Through the wonders of the internet, it is possible to relive the experience in real time thanks to a website called We Choose The Moon. This fascinating site combines NASA video and radio footage, and also videos shot by the lunar astronauts themselves, to provide an enthralling minute-by-minute account of one of mankind's most remarkable moments. I've had it open on my PC today - as someone who wasn't born until the year after the event, it's the next best thing to actually having been there.

The story of the first manned Moon landing has been well chronicled over the years, but one particular fact caught my eye today, which is that the two computers on the Apollo 11 craft - one in the command module, the other in the Eagle moon lander - each had a total memory capacity of about 160 kilobytes. That was huge back in 1969, but by comparison today I routinely carry a 16 GB memory stick less than half the size of a packet of chewing gum which is equivalent to more than 100,000 Apollo 11 computers. I also use a small portable hard drive (to backup my photos and videos), about the size of a pack of playing cards, with a capacity of 250 GB - that's 1.6 million times what the Eagle had. That's quite a lot!

Even if you halve the comparative time period from 40 to 20 years, I can remember buying a 1 MB memory expansion card - almost as large as a paperback book - for my old Commodore Amiga computer in 1989. I would have needed 250,000 of those to give me the same storage capability I currently have.

Times change, and the numbers associated with technological progress continue to change at an astronomical rate. But still the thought of a man walking on the moon continues to amaze, even 40 years later.

Feelings of mortality

2009-07-13T13:09:00.002+01:00

I've just learned that one of my friends from university died on Saturday night, having been fighting against a brain tumour diagnosed about a year ago. He was 38 - six months younger than me - and a devoted husband and father of two.

Truth be told, the news has hit me much harder than expected.

As a parent, I can empathise but only imagine how his family feels right now. To lose a father and a husband at such a young age through little more than random chance just feels wrong on every level. He will never get to see his son and daughter grow up; they will never fully know how smart and caring a father he was.

From a personal perspective, it had been maybe four years since I last saw him, and after learning of his tumour last September, I hadn't done much more than exchange a few supportive emails. So I haven't really been much of a friend either. That just makes me feel worse.

I don't know why I hadn't been in touch before it was too late. Laziness, perhaps. (After all, there's always a million and one urgent little things to do, aren't there?) Maybe also a bit of denial. This is the first time something like this has happened to any of my friends or direct peers, and acknowledging this raises all sorts of uncomfortable questions about my own mortality.

When you're growing up, you feel like you will live forever. As a child, death is an abstract concept; you've barely lived, so the idea of dying doesn't carry the same weight of loss, and besides it's the sort of thing that only happens to really old people, isn't it? And even as a young adult, you're just discovering yourself as an individual and starting to embrace independent life, and death is, well, the sort of thing that only happens to really old people.

But it's only when someone of a similar age in your own social circle actually dies that it suddenly hits home. My friend was younger than me, healthier than me, and certainly no less deserving than me. He was just unlucky.

It could have been me. You never know, one day soon it could be.

That's a scary thought.

There is always a plethora of excuses for not getting on with the big things in life. A few of them are valid. The assumption that there's plenty of time because you'll be around until a ripe old age is not one of them.

It's too late for my friend. It's not too late for me. If nothing else comes of it, I guess I should remember that.

SBS, RIP.

iPhone and I

2009-06-08T14:41:00.002+01:00

My iPhone is the one item I can't leave the house without. Not because I'm worried that I'll miss ten calls if I leave it behind - hardly anyone calls me on my mobile - but because it's so much more than a phone to me.

In fact, pretty much the last thing it is to me is a phone - what an antiquated, 20th century notion!

So if I don't use my phone primarily to speak to other people, then why is it so important to me?

Well, it's certainly a communications device, just not one I use much for spoken conversation. My phone is the primary device I use for accessing both Twitter (I use a popular client app called Tweetie) and Facebook (the Facebook app has very limited functionality, but it's better than nothing).

It also allows me, via mobile internet, to access most of the information I would normally rely on a PC for. I use Google Reader to consolidate RSS feeds and deliver me news on topics of interest. I run apps which provide up-to-the-minute weather forecasts, currency exchange rates and stock prices with a single button-press. YouTube, Wikipedia, Google, live sport scores etc are all available directly online or via apps which re-present complex content into a more useable format for a four-inch screen. I can even remotely set my Sky box to record a programme from hundreds of miles away. Now that's useful!

The phone's built-in GPS also comes into its own for providing local maps and directions - obviously, it's not as good as a dedicated sat nav, but it's surprisingly effective and has stopped me from getting horribly lost on a number of occasions - or to obtain traffic information relevant to my current location.

The camera isn't much cop, but because it can easily interface with Twitter (via, say, TwitPic) and Facebook, it's still a great way to share quick snaps.

And for less serious moments, the phone's accelerometer and touch screen interface allow it to be used as a variety of musical instruments - I have downloaded piano, drums and guitar apps, for instance - and for games - my current favourites being iShoot (tank artillery shoot-'em-up), Scrabble and Toobz (build a network of interconnecting pipes to allow water to flow without leakage). And I've recently noticed that the new Sims 3 game is also available in an iPhone version, so that's next on my list.

The phone is even sometimes used as a substitute for my iPod when I'm out and about, as its stripped down but perfectly adequate functionality means there's one less gadget to carry, and I can still listen to a decent selection of music and podcasts, as well as watch downloaded music videos and TV programmes.

It's all pretty amazing when you think about it. As recently as ten years ago, to get even close to doing all the things I can do today with a pocket-sized device that weighs less than half a pound, I would have needed the following:

Mobile phone
Laptop (and a phone socket to plug into)
Combination of sat nav and physical maps
Camera (the iPhone has a 2 megapixel camera, which is sub-par even for a mobile but would have been leading edge ten years ago)
Nintendo DS for game-playing
Sony Discman for music (and a case to cart a load of CDs around in)
Portable TV and video player

And a chiropractor to sort out my back after having to heft that lot around!

Even then, armed with several thousand pounds' worth of gear, I wouldn't have been able to communicate with others via Twiter and Facebook; finding news on a laptop would have required much manual searching, as news aggregators and RSS didn't exist; and most people would have thought that YouTube was something to do with plumbing.

Now do you see why my iPhone is the most important and useful gadget I own? It's not just a phone; it's what I use to manage my life and to interact with the entire world around me. What could be more useful than that?

One-and-a-half

2009-06-06T07:54:00.006+01:00

Zac is 18 months old today, and looking back over the last few months it's scary quite how fast he's growing and developing.

A few random observations.

He started talking quite early on, but he continues to amaze me with the breadth of vocabulary he now boasts. One morning recently, for instance, he very clearly asked for "mango", to add to an ever-growing food-related repertoire which includes "cheese", "toast", "apple" and "biscuit". His evening bath is frequently accompanied by a repeating mantra of "bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble". He regularly entertains staff and parents at nursery by waving and proclaiming "buh-bye!" whenever anyone goes by. And part of our bedtime routine has traditionally been to sing 'The Grand Old Duke of York', where he completes the relevant lines with giggling cries of "up" and "down".

Naturally, he understands an even wider range of words too. If Heather's in the shower, she will ask him to pass her a towel, and he does. If asked to flush a toilet, he will. When asked to identify dogs, squirrels, ducks, cars, aeroplanes, clocks and assorted other items in books, he will scour the page until he finds them. And he has understood the word "no" for ages, although of course he chooses to ignore it most of the time!

He's been walking for about four months now, but it's quite something to see how quickly he can move when he sets his mind to it (which is often). His balance is coming along nicely too; whereas a couple of months ago he was very much a wobbly toddler, he is now much more confident on his feet, rarely falling, bouncing off obstacles and continuing on like a running back bursting through a crowd of would-be tacklers.

Most gratifying of all from my point of view - partly because it's one of those activities which has very much become a father-son thing - is his response to music, whether it is nursery rhymes or pop music. We have spent many hours together, often first thing in the morning or last thing before bed, singing, clapping or generally just chilling out; music is usually a foolproof way of calming him down when he's throwing a strop. He plays drums on upturned saucepans, recognises familiar songs after only a few notes, claps along in time, and even sings 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star' spontaneously and unmistakably. It's only a matter of time before he starts critiquing my tendency to be slightly flat when singing to him. (Hmm, Simon Cowell in the making ...)

There are so many wonderful things about watching him grow, expecially at this age where the pace of development is so fast it can be difficult to keep ourselves one step ahead of him. Whatever happened to the helpless little thing who used to do nothing but drink, cry and fill nappies?

No longer a baby, very much a boy.

Massacre? What massacre?

2009-06-04T20:26:00.005+01:00

It was 20 years ago today that Chinese army tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square to bring a dramatic and brutal end to seven weeks of protest.

Officially, 241 civilans and soldiers died in what the Chinese government refers to as simply 'the June 4th incident'. Common wisdom generally puts the number of fatalities much higher than that: certainly several hundred, possibly even a few thousand. We will never know for sure.

What we do know with certainty are the seminal images that were broadcast around the world from what non-Chinese typically refer to with more emotive - and, it must be said, more accurate - descriptors such as 'the Tiananmen Square massacre'.

Just mention the words 'Tank Man' to anyone aged, say, 35 or older, and a picture of a lone protestor standing in the middle of the road, arms outstretched, attempting to stop a line of tanks approaching the square, will instantly form in their mind. (We know that Tank Man was eventually dragged away by the police, and it is widely assumed he was subsequently executed. Certainly, the Chinese government were never able to provide any physical evidence to the contrary.)

The sad thing is that the vast majority of us living outside China know and have seen more of what happened in Tiananmen Square on June 4th, 1989, than the billion-plus Chinese population were every privy to. News, photographs and video images were - and still are - rigorously censored by the authorities.

In the run-up to today's anniversary, the square has been blocked off to prevent any kind of mass gathering, and access to Hotmail accounts and social networking websites like Twitter and Flickr temporarily suspended.

It seems that, 20 years on, the aggressive suppression of information and the curtailment of basic civil liberties such as the right to gather remain standard operating practice for the powers-that-be in Beijing. Even now, in supposedly more enlightened times, they remain just as committed to keeping their citizens in the dark as they have ever been.

And that's the saddest thing of all.

And lead us not into temptation

2009-06-04T11:41:00.003+01:00

The tenth series of Big Brother kicks off tonight, with sixteen housemates due for a nasty surprise, as they will be required to spend their first few days sleeping on the living room floor, with no access to the bedroom or bathroom. (Tee hee.) Any of the housemates who are unable to cope with that will be evicted on Sunday, apparently.

Will I be watching tonight? Yes.

But will I be watching religiously every night, as I have done for each of the past nine series? Probably not. Or at least that's my firm intention.

Why? Life's just too short - especially when you have an 18-month old boy who frequently drags you out of bed on the wrong side of 5am - and the format is, despite the producers' best attempts to spice things up, starting to get a little tired.

Blame whatever you like. Maybe it's Channel 4's desire to avoid controversies such as the racism, bullying and fighting which have marred recent series; great for short-term ratings and media coverage, not so brilliant for the programme's long-term reputation. It could be the growing sense of ennui that comes from watching a show for nine years. (Very little feels truly original now, just variations on a theme - although there were some real highlights last year, such as the head-to-toe bodysuits that jolted housemates with electric shocks.)

Or perhaps it's just that we've grown tired of the never-ending procession of former housemates desperately clinging on to Z-list status. Truly, Big Brother has not produced a 'celebrity' of any enduring duration since the late Jade Goody, who emerged way back in 2002. (Sure, there's usually at least one girl every year who becomes lads' mag fodder, but they are no more celebrities than the football WAGs who appear on other reality shows.)

Certainly each year's winner and the more memorable among the supporting cast of characters tend to be discarded and forgotten increasingly quickly these days. Anyone seen last year's winner since her exit from the house? Anyone even remember her name? (It was Rachel Rice, the Welsh, too-good-to-be-true goody-two-shoes, by the way.)

So, anyway, my plan is to watch the first couple of days and then to tune in only for the eviction shows and the more amusing tasks - I figure that will save us at least five hours' worth of TV time per week, which I'm intending to use partly to catch up on the 150 hours of backlog on our Sky+ box and hard drive. God forbid, we might even do other, non TV-related stuff - after all, it is lovely and sunny at the moment.

That's the plan, anyway. How capable I am of resisting temptation and slipping back into old Big Brother viewing habits remains to be seen. I'll check back in a few weeks and let you know.

Out and about

2009-05-04T21:55:00.009+01:00

So much for the forecast, which had predicted dry weather. Having set off for Beale Park in the expectation of a sunny day, it promptly started raining the moment we arrived. (Fortunately, it did soon stop and there wasn't much more than the occasional drizzle until after we'd left.)

We thought we'd give Beale Park a go on the basis that (a) it's barely 20 minutes from our front door and (b) we were hoping Zac might be interested in some of the animals there.

In the event, although he did briefly show some interest in the alpacas and some of the owls (sadly, his favourite was a large, carved wooden owl which he insisted on hugging repeatedly), he was far more interested in the steam train, the sandpit and the long ramp leading up to the raccoon enclosure. And generally running around everywhere with a new-found burst of speed, usually in the opposite direction to the one we wanted him to go in. Like this ...

Walking is for wimps

Anyway, at least Heather and I enjoyed the animals. Even though a lot of them were hiding from the chilly, damp weater, it was good to see a smattering of varied and reasonably exotic animals there. And you can't really go wrong with meerkats, of course. (The highlight of my day was passing a small child, maybe four years old, peering over the wall of the meerkat enclosure singing the music from the comparethemarket.com TV advert: 'Compare the meeer-kat, dot com'. You can't buy comedy like that.)

They're singing that bloody ad jingle again!

So, we saw some animals. Zac got to run around lots and burn off some of his seemingly limitless reserves of energy. A good day was had by all.

One grouse, though. Beale Park allows you to buy an annual pass to encourage regular visits, which is obviously a good thing. But your season ticket doesn't entitle you to entry on bank holidays, as one disgruntled mother in front of us discovered. Discriminating against your loyal customers doesn't really strike me as very clever marketing policy!

Tickled Pink

2009-05-03T08:59:00.002+01:00

We had a rare evening out last night - with Zac being looked after by his grandparents - going to see Pink at the O2. (No thanks to London Underground for closing the Jubilee Line, forcing us to get there by boat.)

I've always liked Pink without ever being a huge follower - Heather's the fan - but I have to say she was awesome. Whether it's belting out the big anthems like 'So What' or the more introspective moments of something like 'Family Portrait', her voice is always pitch perfect, switching effortlessly between growling snarl to intimate vulnerability.

Pink in 'not scowling' shocker

And the setlist she performed showed off every facet of her repertoire. The opening half of the set was pumped out one after the other at breakneck speed before a gentler, acoustic third quarter gave everyone a chance to catch their breath. To be honest, I wasn't entirely convinced by a closing run which included covers of 'Bohemian Rhapsody' and Gnarl Barkley's 'Crazy' - no major artist with five albums under her belt should need so many covers (four in all), and no one, no matter how good, should ever need to resort to Bo Rap, period. However, no one else in the crowd seemed overly bothered, so who am I to argue?

The highlight of the show, though, had to be the acrobatics - a trademark of Pink's live shows, I'm told - incorporated into three of the closing songs: 'Sober' (see photo below) had her performing somersaults from a trapeze while belting out the chorus, and the two-part encore of 'Get The Party Started' and 'Glitter In The Air' featured some nifty aerial work while suspended from a bungee rope. How anyone can even think - let alone sing in tune - while performing somersaults, spins and all manner of other moves, is beyond me. Mighty impressive, though.

Just hanging around ...

All in all, a great show, both as a singer and as a performer. Acrobatics aside, a Pink gig is great theatre, and she really seems to connect with the audience. (I was pleased to notice that I was neither the only male nor the only over-30 in the crowd.) I'd definitely go and see her again.

Spoilers

2009-04-27T11:30:00.008+01:00

Hooking into online communities - whether it's Twitter, websites like IMDb or Television Without Pity, or even Facebook or MySpace - is a great way of sharing relevant, interesting information quickly with like-minded people all over the world.

On the whole, I find this incredibly liberating. If I see a good news story about, say, Arsenal, I can share it practically instantaneously with friends who might be interested in it. And conversely, they share stuff with me that I might otherwise miss. For an information junkie like me who has a wide variety of interests, my online connections make the process of filtering and assimilating relevant stories far more productive than even news aggregators such as Google Reader - it's like having an army of human editors at your disposal.

Of course, there is the odd downside, primarily 'spoilers'. Spoilers occur when someone who has seen a TV programme or film shares crucial information (e.g. a key plot twist, results of a public vote) with others who have not yet seen it, thereby 'spoiling' their enjoyment.

In the past, containing the spread of spoilers was pretty easy. Journalists would carefully withhold key plot elements from film reviews, and the media had an unwritten agreement not to spoil the revelation of, say, who shot JR (that's JR Ewing on Dallas, for those too young to remember) for UK viewers. Then everyone would watch said event at the same time as it was broadcast, and if you hadn't watched it - and over 27 million in the UK did watch it - then you had scant excuse when the topic was discussed at work/school the following day.

Today, of course, the media landscape is very different. When JR was shot (in 1981), VCRs were in their infancy, let alone the proliferation of technologies - PVRs, Sky+, iPlayer, delayed/repeat showings, downloads etc - which nowadays allow us to watch our favourite shows pretty much whenever and wherever we want: on TV, on a PC, or even on a laptop, portable DVD player or iPod while travelling. Just because you watched something last night doesn't mean I'll have seen it too; for instance, I have been up to four weeks behind on Lost this season, and I probably won't get round to watching season 3 of Brothers & Sisters until long after it's finished (I've seen the grand total of one out of 16 episodes so far).

So while Twitter et al are wonderful because they give me ready access to a wealth of information, there is always the clear and present danger of unwanted spoliers.

It has to be said, most people who are familiar with online etiquette are very good; they know not to post spoilers, or at the very least to flag them with a warning. However, it's all too easy for one to slip through the net - and one is all it takes - particularly when, say, US viewers have seen a show several days or weeks in advance of the rest of the world.

On the whole, I don't mind seeing spoilers, with two exceptions. One is when watching shows which rely on public votes to save/evict a contestant: part of the fun of watching American Idol or The Apprentice is trying to predict who is for the chop this week. The other is finales, where I just don't want to know what the season-ending shock twist or cliffhanger is in advance.

Which is why I'm going to be checking my Twitter account through squinted eyes over the next few days with regards to Heroes. The season 3 finale airs in the US this evening and will not be broadcast in the UK until a week today (two weeks if you're watching on BBC2 rather than BBC3). Which means seven full days of desperately trying to see no evil and hear no evil. For someone who is well practised at picking out key stories of interest in a sea of headlines, that's quite an effort.

And after that, the spoiler opportunities come thick and fast as the majority of US series draw to a close for the year. Somehow I need to try to avoid finding out what happens in Lost, Desperate Housewives and a number of others over the next few weeks. Having already been spoiled on the ending of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, I could really do without another.

So if you see me anywhere in the next few weeks hiding in a corner with my hands over my eyes and ears, there's no need to call the men in white coats. Just don't tell me anything I don't want to hear yet.

EDIT (May 3rd): Rats. I've just discovered the finale isn't on tomorrow, presumably because of the world snooker final; it's actually being shown a week later, on Monday 11th. That's another seven days of spolier avoidance. Fantastic(!)

Say hello, wave goodbye

2009-04-17T18:12:00.000+01:00

It's the nature of television that shows come and go as surely as the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening, but it does seem that an awful lot of the programmes I watch are either gone, going or on the bubble this year.

Battlestar Galactica was a rarity, sailing off into the distance on its own terms after four seasons of, at times, breathtaking television. And while the three-hour finale left many questions unanswered (some deliberately so), the closing image of Bill Adama sitting on a hilltop talking to Laura Roslin's grave had an epic, cinematic feel to it which simply resonated with a melange of emotions. Never let anyone try to tell you that this version of BSG was just people and robots in spaceships.

Pushing Daisies, sadly, is gone after two shortened seasons; it appears that Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles will meet the same fate, although Fox remains tight-lipped. The former was, perhaps, a victim of its own left-of-centredness in a universe which demands that TV shows fit a convenient label; the latter stumbled a few times before finding its feet in the second half of this (second) season, but ultimately lost viewers by delivering a neat, introspective show rather than the crash-bang-wallop expectations of a mainstream audience which associates the Terminator franchise with ground-breaking special effects and bank-breaking action sequences.

Even Heroes - the darling of American TV two years ago - is looking distinctly wobbly. Still frequently brilliant, it has had a few too many missteps in a season which has continued to haemorrhage viewers, delivering a 'big bad' (Arthur Petrelli) in its first half who turned out to be a damp squib, killing off the new but much-loved character of Daphne Millbrook, sidelining Sylar by sending him off on yet another road trip, and too often changing tack every five minutes in a constant attempt to surprise and misdirect the audience. Don't get me wrong, it's still a great show, but it increasingly gives the impression that the genie has escaped from the bottle. Jumped the shark? Not yet, but a distinct fear. One more season before cancellation, I suspect.

On the other hand, Lost, now midway through its fifth and penultimate season, has rediscovered its mojo. After a year or two of seemingly aimless meandering, it now feels like we are heading somewhere definite, and every week it feels like the writers are picking up a dangling thread and tying it off. Kudos to executive producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindleof; Lost is once again event television. More than that, it is rewarding loyal, attentive viewers by resolving the loose ends and making the audience think.

Elsewhere, the American Idol juggernaut rolls on; this season has been worth it for Adam Lambert's performances alone. And as for the reality TV heavy hitters on this side of the pond, The Apprentice remains compulsive viewing, if only for the opportunity it affords to shout "No! You muppets!" at the screen at least three times per episode. (Incidentally, if Idol's Danny Gokey looks like the love child of Robert Downey Jr and JJ Abrams, then The Apprentice's Phillip Taylor is surely related to Chelsea's John Terry.)

What else? Law & Order UK promised more than it delivered; I'm not fussed either way whether it returns or not. Desperate Housewives is still a not-so-guilty pleasure, balancing genuine human drama and farcical comedy better than any show currently on television. And both My Name Is Earl and 30 Rock continue - successfully - to be played purely for laughs, a rarity in an environment where even comedies frequently need a serious side.

And, despite the frequently unfair battering it endured for not being Life On Mars (well, duh), next week sees the return of Ashes To Ashes for a second run. Fire up the Quattro ...

Debt repaid

2009-04-12T22:26:00.003+01:00

It's always nice to be able to return a compliment.

For as long as I can remember, we have been regularly returning to Malaysia to visit my relatives, making the most of their hospitality and goodwill. From putting us up to taking us sightseeing to paying for countless lavish meals out, our extended family has always been generous in the extreme, even to the extent of organising our wedding for us.

So it's been lovely to have them - finally - visit us in the UK over the past three-and-a-half weeks. One of my cousins is studying in Nottingham this year, so her parents, her brother and one of my other aunts took the opportunity to come over. In the first week, we hosted them at our house for a barbecue (fortunately, it was warm and dry), and I took a couple of days off work to do the tour guide thing around London - you've got to love the London Eye, exorbitant though it is - and at Windsor Castle. They then jetted off to Rome on one of these Europe-on-a-coach-in-11-days tours before returning to London, whereupon the family headed off to Nottingham and Manchester for a few days. In the meantime, my other aunt and my parents stayed with us, and we did Oxford and some shopping at Bicester Village before everyone got back together again last night for a farewell dinner.

And that was it, really. Three-and-a-half weeks gone in a flash. All that remained was the airport run and traditional last-minute family photos this afternoon, and then they were gone. Already, barely hours later, it feels a bit surreal - as if they were never really here at all.

It's only gone a small way to returning all the favours they have done for us over the years, but it's a nice feeling to have finally amassed something in the credit column.

And now I'm knackered and off to bed.

I predict a riot...ously good night out

2009-03-09T22:36:00.010Z

It was a win-win all around on Friday night. Zac got to spend the evening with his grandparents, they got to spend time with him, and Heather and I got a rare pass for the evening to go to Wembley Arena to see the Kaiser Chiefs on the final date of their UK tour.

And what a gig it was too. Wembley, with its elongated layout, can lack atmosphere as a concert venue, but from the moment the Kaisers fired up the opening bars of 'Spanish Metal', pretty much the entire crowd was on its feet and belting out the songs in full-throated unison. No gentle ripples of polite applause between songs here.

What followed was 90 minutes of relentless foot-stomping, fist-pumping, lung-bursting magic - it's all heart-on-sleeve stuff; they don't do quiet introspection - with Ricky Wilson barely pausing for breath between songs, racing across the stage and pogoing up and down like, well, as their own lyric goes, a powered-up Pac Man.

Ricky Wilson in 'standing still' shocker

The band raced through a 16 song set which sprinkled in tracks from the latest album 'Off With Their Heads' - all of which sounded infinitely better live than they do shackled by the constraints of tight studio production - with the old favourites: 'Everyday I Love You Less And Less' and 'Everything Is Average Nowadays' early on, 'Ruby' and 'Modern Way' in the middle, and a run of four to close the set which included 'Never Miss A Beat', 'I Predict A Riot' and 'The Angry Mob', by the end of which the not so much angry as deliriously happy mob was doing its best to raise the roof by punching out the chorus at an increasing volume.

A fair few people drifted out between the end of the set and the encore. (I'll never understand why people do that. Did they have trains to catch? Was the gig not entertaining enough? Did they just not know there was going to be an encore?) Those who did missed the emphatic full stop on a mega evening, with a rousing three song coda ending on the Pac Man-referencing, football chant of an anthem that is 'Oh My God'.

It was a brilliant, brilliant night. I've been humming Kaiser Chiefs songs under my breath all weekend and only now, fully 72 hours later, do I feel that I've finally shaken off the hoarseness in my voice. The Kaisers have never managed to replicate the commercial success of their debut album, 'Employment', but the quality of their output - particularly when heard in the flesh - has never wavered, and their reputation as a great live band remains intact.

Roll on the next tour. We'll be there.

One small step for a boy, one giant leap for boykind

2009-03-02T16:43:00.002Z

It's actually a few weeks since Zac took his first steps, but he's such a proficient crawler that he hasn't really had a big incentive to switch to full-time walking.

Until this weekend, that is.

I'm not sure what the trigger was. It could be that he wanted to show off to his grandparents, who were staying with us for the weekend. Or perhaps he wanted to join his peers, several of whom have been toddling around on two feet for a while now. Or maybe he decided it was just time to make the change.

Whatever the reason, he has spent much of the last two days strutting confidently across the room in the manner of John Wayne after a really long day in the saddle. (Although in the picture below he does appear to be doing a version of Peter Crouch's famous robotic dance, or thinking about karate chopping the father who's trying to take photos of him at 5.30 in the morning.)

Anyhow, the genie is out of the bottle and there is no going back. It won't be long before we are having to chase after him everywhere we go; I'm fully expecting he will run like he crawls: at top speed. He's already zooming around the house to reach up and pull books from bookshelves, wine bottles from wine racks, and basically pretty much anything he can lay his hands on.

A new phase has begun. At times, I imagine it's going to be hell. But it's also going to be lots of fun. With spring - and its promise of longer, warmer days - fast approaching, I'm very much looking forward to getting outdoors with a football and teaching Zac to kick it. (I don't imagine it will be long before he is teaching me, with my two left feet ...)

Incidentally, in a separate but related footnote, I'm currently reading Rohan Candappa's Autobiography of a One Year Old. It's brilliant. I wonder if that's how my little boy looks at his world?

Living in the past

2009-02-25T08:59:00.003Z

As someone who was a teenager during the 80s, I was tickled to read that the original Now That's What I Call Music compilation has been recently rereleased on CD for the first time, to coincide with the 25th anniversary of its initial release.

Here’s the full track listing:

Disc 1
1. Phil Collins - You Can't Hurry Love
2. Duran Duran - Is There Something I Should Know
3. UB40 - Red Red Wine
4. Limahl - Only For Love
5. Heaven 17 - Temptation
6. K.C. & The Sunshine Band - Give It Up
7. Malcolm McClaren - Double Dutch
8. Bonnie Tyler - Total Eclipse Of The Heart
9. Culture Club - Karma Chameleon
10. Men Without Hats - The Safety Dance
11. Kajagoogoo - Too Shy
12. Mike Oldfield - Moonlight Shadow
13. Men At Work - Down Under
14. Rock Steady Crew - Hey You (Rock Steady Crew)
15. Rod Stewart - Baby Jane
16. Paul Young - Wherever I Lay My Hat

Disc 2
1. New Edition - Candy Girl
2. Kajagoogoo - Big Apple
3. Tina Turner - Let's Stay Together
4. Human League - Fascination
5. Howard Jones - New Song
6. UB40 - Please Don't Make Me Cry
7. Peabo Bryson & Roberta Flack - Tonight I Celebrate My Love
8. Tracey Ullman - They Don't Know
9. Will Powers - Kissing With Confidence
10. Genesis - That's All
11. The Cure - The Love Cats
12. Simple Minds - Waterfront
13. Madness - The Sun And The Rain
14. Culture Club - Victims

Now That’s What I Call A Trip Down Memory Lane. Somewhat worryingly, I’ve seen four of the above artists perform live. You can work out for yourselves which ones they are, though. To paraphrase the old Fun Boy Three song: my lips are sealed.

I guess it all makes sense. In recent years, while the parent series has successfully continued, repackaged Now compilations have tapped into a generation’s nostalgia for the decade which gave us New Romanticism, Dallas, Joan Collins’ shoulder pads and, er, David van Day (even the best of times has its darker moments).

I’ve previously commented on the current penchant for TV and film remakes, which has given us everything from the sublime Battlestar Galactica to the ridiculous Knight Rider. Elsewhere, we’ve had 80s reunion tours aplenty (it’s a bit disturbing to realise that the pop idols of yesterday age in exactly the same way you do), and comebacks from the likes of Take That and the Spice Girls. The Pet Shop Boys were given the Outstanding Contribution to Music Award at last week’s Brits. ('West End Girls' is – gulp! – 24 years old this year.) And I noticed a well-known high street fashion retailer has launched a range of T-shirts based on classic properties such as Danger Mouse (yes, of course I bought one).

Is nostalgia a healthy thing, allowing us to relive the happy times of our childhood? Or is it something we use as an excuse to ignore the growing feeling that, as we get inexorably older - and schoolkids and university students appear seemingly younger – we become increasingly out of step with contemporary culture? For while I still listen to modern pop music, am up to speed with Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Twitter, and generally make an effort to keep up to date with popular culture, that’s just the point: it’s an effort.

Deep down, there are some aspects of today’s culture that I just don’t get, and I occasionally catch myself thinking that things were so much better when I was a kid. I'll resist it for as long as I can, but I fear the end result is inevitable: as the father of a small boy, one day he will come to realise his dad is just plain uncool.

That will be a sad day. Still, at least I’ll have all my old Now albums to listen to in my dotage …

Can't get it out of my head

2009-02-20T08:24:00.000Z

I keep finding myself humming The Locomotion because a colleague had his first baby, a girl, earlier this week, and named her Eva. (Little Eva, geddit?)

Anyhow, that segues nicely into one of my personal highlights of the week.

The Brits

Wednesday's annual music awards was, in many respects, fairly predictable. Duffy cleaned up, winning three awards. A big name - this year it was Coldplay - was nominated in several categories and came away with nothing. At least one of the 'live' acts - ahem, Take That - mimed their performance. There was a bit of a fuss over the fact that Leona Lewis - who notched up number 1 singles on both sides of the Atlantic in 2008 - wasn't even nominated for Best Female Solo Artist. The trendy favourites du jour - or those backed by co-ordinated Facebook campaigns (Iron Maiden) - won the big prizes.

In other respects, though, it was two hours of anarchic TV that demonstrated an ability to insert tongue firmly into cheek in a way the Grammys never would. From the moment dancing co-hosts James Corden and Mathew Horne joined Kylie Minogue in performing Can't Get You Out Of My Head to the Pet Shop Boys' closing medley (accompanied by the Killers' Brandon Flowers and Lady GaGa, no less.) There was a terrific live performance by double winners Kings of Leon. And the stage set - replete with cardboard cows, giant rubber ducks and a caravan - was, err, distinctly odd.

Somehow I don't think Sunday's Oscars will be quite this surreal.

Heroes

Heroes is back in the UK with volume 4 (the second half of season 3) next week. Even allowing for the fact that there will be two new episodes shown on Monday, this means we will be two full weeks behind the US, which is a shame. Now the BBC showed episodes from the first half of the season just a couple of days after US transmission, so I'm not sure why we have the two week delay this time around. Boo, hiss.

Whatever happened to the killer album?

It's probably partly due to the fact that iTunes has changed the way many people purchase and listen to music - for instance, I now frequently download a couple of singles by an artist I like rather than buy the full album - but when I do buy an album, I am frequently disappointed. More often than not, I will listen to a new album a couple of times, complain about the proliferation of 'filler' tracks, and then never play more than my favourite three or four tracks ever again.

Over the past four years I've bought probably 50 albums, but I can count on my fingers the number which I will still listen to without reaching for the fast forward button: Employment and Yours Truly, Angry Mob by Kaiser Chiefs; Lily Allen's Alright, Still; Rihanna's Good Girl Gone Bad; Eyes Open by Snow Patrol; We'll Live And Die In These Towns by The Enemy, maybe.

I bought three albums last week. The Sugababes' Catfights And Spotlights was hugely disappointing - two decent singles, not much else, 5/10 at best - I was glad I'd only paid £4 for it. I took a punt on Lady GaGa's The Fame off the back of her number 1 single Just Dance, and it's definitely grown on me after a second and third listen, but even though I'd rate it 7/10, I doubt I'll be listening to more than five tracks in more than a month's time. Finally, Lily Allen's It's Not Me It's You is also worth at least a solid 7/10, but if I fast-forward a year from now, I can definitely see myself plumping for Alright, Still in preference the next time I want to kick back to Allen's razor-sharp lyrics for 45 minutes.

That's the thing about killer albums. They don't come along very often - and with increasing rarity the older I get, it seems - and you automatically find yourself reaching for one you have heard a hundred times over one you bought just last week.

A couple of years ago, I listed my top 100 songs of all time. I really must have a go at naming my top 50 albums too; it would be interesting to weigh up how more contemporary albums stack up against, say, Brothers In Arms or Like A Virgin. I'll need a long think about what I want to listen to while I'm compiling the list, though ...

Valentine's Day

My parents were staying with us over the weekend, and kindly agreed to babysit on Saturday night to allow us to go out. We ended up going out for dinner at Carluccio's in Oxford (where we had a lovely meal), after my first attempt to book the local Thai in Newbury had me snorting in disbelief at their £36 a head 'special' menu - normally, a meal there is about £25 each - and their attempts to book us into one of their two sittings at 6.30 or 9.00pm. Who says Valentine's Day isn't a licence to print money? Restaurants, cards, flowers: everything seems to cost a fortune. Money can't buy you love - when it comes to February 14th, it doesn't seem to buy you very much of anything.

Zac update

Zac continues to develop apace. He seems to have put the challenge of walking to one side for the moment in favour of pushing and/or climbing on everything: he's been clambering on top of his toy box for a while now, but in the past few days he has been leaning on the rocking chair in his bedroom saying "Row, row, row" and then two nights ago he managed to climb and stand on top of the rim of the bath all on his own. Scary.

Other than that, he seems to be learning at an ever faster pace. I taught him how to knock on doors earlier this week, and he now waves "bye bye" energetically whenever he is leaving somewhere, or even to announce that he wants to leave. And then there are the seemingly random things that make him laugh: the latest two are burping (which is good for at least five minutes of non-stop cackling) and pausing a TV programme. No, I have no idea why either.

2009-02-13T13:35:00.001Z

It's early days yet, but I'm loving the growing social networking phenomenon that is Twitter.

If you're not familiar with it, Twitter is essentially like a cross between a blog and Facebook's status update. Entries - commonly known as 'tweets' - are restricted to a maximum of 140 characters, but within that constraint you can let people know what you're doing, share news, pictures and links to interesting web pages (utilising web address shrinkers such as TinyURL), or whatever else you feel like sharing with the rest of the world.

Twitter has fast become a hub for spreading news virally at a pace which traditional media cannot possibly match. For instance, on-the-ground reports and images of last November's terrorist attacks in Mumbai were circulating online via Twitter and Flickr long before the major news outlets had even mobilised - at its peak, eyewitnesses were posting 1,000 tweets every minute. And on a social level, it facilitates the proliferation of information about friends, favourite topics and even celebrities: from my Twitter feed, I follow the activities and recommendations of various cast members from Heroes, Jonathan Ross and the cyclist Lance Armstrong.

Like so many of the best ideas, Twitter is incredibly simple. It makes communication easier and quicker in a way that is accessisble - I can read and write tweets from my mobile - without being intrusive in the way that, say, instant messaging can be.

Anyway, you can find me on Twitter here. Join the club: it's growing fast.

Remakes

2009-02-11T15:08:00.004Z

I was more excited than I probably should have been when I read today that the BBC are producing a remake of Day of the Triffids, scheduled to air later this year.

Remakes, 're-imaginings' or 'reboots' are nothing new. Indeed, over the past few years they have become something of a staple of TV and box office schedules. The small screen has given us Doctor Who, Survivors, Gladiators, Battlestar Galactica, Knight Rider and 90210, to name but a handful. And in our cinemas we have the revived Batman franchise, Ocean's Eleven, War of the Worlds (more on that in a bit) and the upcoming Star Trek.

But Day of the Triffids - perhaps more than any other - sends a tingle down my spine, half of excitement, half of fear. For while I, like many others of my generation, regularly watched Tom Baker's Doctor Who from behind the sofa, DotT sticks in my mind just as much as any Dalek or Cyberman yarn.

I remember well the original 1981 BBC TV adaptation of the John Wyndham novel - and the subsequent nightmares it gave me. With much of humanity blinded by a freak meteor shower, the triffids - giant, carnivorous and apparently sentient plants - roam Britain freely, killing with their poisonous stings.

It was years before I could look a daffodil in the face again without flinching.

Both the original book and the TV version are widely regarded as seminal science-fiction drama, and I was gutted when I missed a re-run of the serial on BBC Four a few years back. But now I will get the chance to see an updated version later this year, which will no doubt have me hunting down the original on DVD ...

I know I shouldn't be this excited. But I really am.

Much less exciting was the two hours we spent watching the Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise version of War of the Worlds over the weekend.

I can't deny that it is a visually stunning film; really and truly, it is hard to imagine how it could have been fully visualised without 21st century CGI. It was also generally well received by critics and generated significant box office takings (close to $600m worldwide).

However, as a story I found it somewhat vacuous and more than a little confusing. Understandably, many of the original story elements needed to be updated - H G Wells' original book deals in Victorian science and technology - but I was still disappointed by how far the film deviates from the original, and also at Hollywood-ised it had become. You see, WotW is a slightly unusual tale in that, in the book, the unnamed narrator is just that: he is more of an observer - the reader's eyes, ears and enquiring mind - than a traditional hero. The filmed version, however, is replete with set-pieces which are seemingly tacked on to meet audience expectations of the spectacular and Tom-Cruise-as-action-hero, just in case the basic story isn't enough to carry their interest.

One sequence in particular - and if you have seen both films you will know exactly what I mean - had me pinching myself to check I wasn't watching the velociraptors-in-the-lab sequence from Jurassic Park.

To top it all off, the ending of the film is pure Hollywood saccharine: Cruise's character and his daughter (who was so annoying I spent the entire final hour rooting for the alien invaders) are reunited with his ex-wife in Boston, to discover his son - who he thought had perished earlier - had in fact survived and preceded them there.

Oh, puh-lease.

What a terrible, terrible waste. A great book - albeit one which, on reflection, doesn't actually translate particularly easily to the big screen - and two of Hollywood's biggest box office names, but a distinctly mediocre film. And that's putting it kindly.

Still, in the interests of balance, I should say that Morgan Freeman's voiceover narration, which bookends the film, is, as ever, wonderful. That's about it, though.

People can be such idiots

2009-02-10T15:33:00.007Z

Given that we are the most intelligent species on the planet, human beings all too frequently demonstrate the ability to do the stupidest things, which suggest that our survival instincts have been irrevocably dulled by too much civilised living.

Of course, there are the Darwin Awards, which annually celebrate the achievements of the spectacularly silly in removing themselves from the gene pool.

But over the course of the last few days, a number of stories - all of them resulting in fatalities - have caught my eye which range from the foolhardy to the murderous.

Don't cramp(on) my style

I can see the attraction of scaling the UK's peaks in the midst of the worst winter for nearly 20 years: the views must be spectacular, and the sense of achievement incredibly uplifting.

However ...

Since the beginning of last week, five walkers have been killed on Snowdon and in the Lake District in four separate incidents. In at least one of these cases, the unfortunate victim was thought to have set out without an ice axe or crampons, which strikes me as a tad ... Darwinian.

Sure, even the most experienced and fully equipped of walkers can be caught out by a sudden change in conditions or just plain misfortune. But to take to the mountains without the most basic of cold weather gear, well, there really is no excuse for that.

Very sad. But, you would think, all too preventable.

Defence? What defence?

Jorge Nogueira da Silva has denied six counts of death by dangerous driving. Based on the evidence which has already been reported, it is hard to see how he has any credible defence.

You will probably remember the story. Da Silva killed David and Michelle Statham and their four children - the oldest, 13; the youngest, just 10 weeks - when his 40-tonne lorry hit their stationary vehicle in a crash on the M6 last October.

The Stathams' car had been at the back of a queue caused by an earlier accident on the motorway. It's alleged that da Silva was distracted because he was using a laptop - found by police in the lorry's cab by the driver's seat with its screen turned towards the driver - to look for an alternative route to circumvent the tailback.

The prosecutor has said, "If he had looked he would have seen the queuing traffic for himself because the road was straight for over a mile before the queue started. He had plenty of time to see the queue because the trucks in front had been there for between one and two minutes before he arrived. For over a mile before the point of impact the defendant was not paying proper attention to the road - it was gross inattention."

The case continues.

Now, dying on a snow-bound mountain is foolhardy, but places only the individuals involved at risk. This is an entirely different kettle of fish.

Burn them at the stake

At the time of writing, the bush fires in the Australian state of Victoria had claimed 181 lives, injured at least 500, and destroyed over 1,000 homes, wiping out a number of small rural towns.

That's bad enough. But police are treating a number of the fire sites as potential crime scenes, and have vowed to try any suspected arsonists for murder.

Bush fires are hard to fully comprehend. They bear about as much resemblance to what we traditionally think of as a fire as a Formula 1 machine does to a toy car. Extreme drought and heatwave conditions, as have been experienced in the state in recent weeks, create tinder-dry conditions. So when a fire does start it can spread at astonishing speed - potentially faster than humans can run - as feather-light burning ashes are scattered great distances, starting fresh blazes which multiply exponentially. Add in unpredictable, swirling winds, and firefighters' attempts to create containment lines - typically they bulldoze or 'back-burn' swathes of bush to remove all combustible material from the path of the fire - have been rendered ineffective as the fires have changed direction.

They are, however, a natural phenomenon: bush fires are actually just part of nature's cycle of renewal. What is not natural, however, is the strange copycat phenomenon of arsonists starting their own fires under the guise of a bush fire. The Australian Institute of Criminology estimates that as many as half of the nation's annual 20-30,000 bush fires are the result of arson.

What possesses someone to do this is beyond the comprehension of most rational people; it's certainly beyond mine. Dying on a snowy mountain is foolhardy; using a laptop (allegedly) at the wheel is criminally negligent. Bush fire arson is a whole different ball game.

Being convicted for murder seems like a comparatively light punishment for people like this. In olden times, they used to burn witches at the stake. Somehow, this would be altogether more fitting for the bush fire arsonists.

White-out

2009-02-06T10:52:00.004Z

This week, a certain four-letter word has never been far from people's lips. Yes: snow. (You were expecting something else?!?)

Spinning in a winter blunderland

It was fun for the first day or so, but it's been a pain in the arse ever since.

Monday wasn't too bad. The snow was a novelty and I had taken the day as holiday anyway. The plan had been to have a lie-in and then drive up to Oxford to do some clothes shopping unencumbered by a screaming one-year old. That unravelled pretty quickly, as it became obvious that the weather and the roads weren't going to co-operate, and Heather returned home with Zac having discovered the nursery was closed.

On Tuesday I managed the drive to work in just 40 minutes, instead of the usual 45. After a couple of heavy snow blizzards in Bracknell, I decided to head home mid-afternoon, only to discover that rain had fallen in Thatcham, melting most of the snow.

Knowing I had no meetings on Wednesday, I opted to stay at home and had the opportunity to do the nursery run with Zac on my own for the first time, which was good.

As for yesterday (Thursday), well, you can read about my (mis)adventures here.

And today, we had a couple more inches of snow overnight, followed by persistent light snowfall for most of the morning. Given that and the blanket severe weather warnings from the Met Office I opted once again to stay at home and follow the deteriorating travel conditions - one hour delays on the A4, apparently - from the warmth of my own house.

It's not supposed to get any better over the next few days, and many local authorities are already running out of salt. Apparently the Highways Agency reckons it needs 25,000 tons of salt a day, and the largest of the three mines used in the UK only produces 30,000 tons a year. Uh oh.

Super Bowl

Super Bowl XLIII was worth staying up for in the end, featuring a stirring comeback and two lead changes inside the final three minutes.

This was the 20th time in the past 21 years I've watched the Super Bowl live. I missed it in 2000 because we were on holiday in Hong Kong, but we managed to watch a delayed transmission of the full game - complete with Chinese commentary - in our hotel room the day after. (Incidentally, the Chinese do not appear to have a word for American football's various technical terms, so the commentary was regularly punctuated with words like "quarterback sneak", "sack" and "tight end". Hilarious.)

Sadly, this year I was on my own. Heather, quite sensibly, decided one of us needed to be awake enough to take Zac to nursery (a futile gesture, as it turned out), so it was a pretty lonely affair as I settled in to watch former American Idol finalist and Dreamgirls star Jennifer Hudson sing the national anthem - while on our road trip in 2004, we actually saw her perform live in Hollywood the week after she was eliminated from Idol - and tuck into my traditional half-time hot dogs. (Super Bowl night is all about the traditions for me.)

I'm really looking forward to the day when Zac is big enough to come out to the park and throw a football around. Some things just need to be passed on from father to son.

Zac update

Speaking of Zac, one of the upsides of being snowed in is that I've seen a lot more of him this week. He's becoming a very chatty boy, often chuntering quite happily to himself - I'd love to know what it is he's saying - and he continues to discover new words, adding "star" and "toes" to an already impressive vocabulary which includes daddy, cheese, keys, toast, bye-bye, night-night and wishy-mishy (washing machine). Bath-time has become an opportunity to play a variety of new games rather than a nightly chore. And it's wonderfully heart-warming when I walk into the room and he sprint-crawls over to me with a big beaming smile on his face, pointing to me and shouting "Da-ee! Da-ee! Da-ee!"

He's a lot of fun at the moment, and hopefully it's only going to get better as he learns to walk with confidence and continues to improve his co-ordination. But, my God, he's growing up fast!

Holding out for Heroes

Heroes kicked off the second half of season 3 in the US this week, although it looks like we will have to wait another couple of weeks before it is shown in the UK.

In the meantime, I've been rediscovering the earlier work of Wendy & Lisa, former members of Prince's band, The Revolution, who are responsible for creating all of the show's original music. Post-Prince, they released 3 albums (which I have buried away in a box of cassettes in the loft) and a series of singles between 1987 and 1990, with a distinctive sound reminiscent of both Prince and The Bangles. I'd forgotten how good they were.

Using your celebrity status for Good(y)

2009-02-06T09:41:00.008Z

Life never ceases to surprise me.

I never thought I'd write a blog defending Jade Goody, but four months ago I did exactly that. And today I feel compelled to do it a second time.

Having been diagnosed with cervical cancer, doctors had given the (in)famous serial reality TV star a 40% chance of survival. After the discovery that the cancer had spread to her liver, bowel and groin, doctors have now withdrawn that prognosis and said they will focus on efforts to prolong her life.

Now, I have previously described Goody as an exceptionable person, an assessment I stand by. But nonetheless, and I am in no way regressing to a state of mawkishness here, this latest news is very sad. In particular, the way some people have questioned her seeking to make money from her plight - in the time-honoured tradition of Z-list celebs - by selling her story to the tabloids is kind of missing the point. It's a bit like tutting at someone's decision to get uproariously drunk in the event of an impending nuclear attack: it's all about the context, not the individual act.

Yet again, Caitlin Moran sums it up beautifully in her Celebrity Watch column in today's Times:

Why should she retreat from public view? Why shouldn't she keep giving interviews? After all, when the Times columnist John Diamond - Nigella Lawson's first husband - had cancer diagnosed, he did not retreat from public view; he wrote a weekly column, for which he was paid, in which he discussed his illness and, eventually, approaching death. It was deemed an informative, courageous act.

Goody's career, her main source of income, is as a reality TV personality. If she chooses to continue working - which is to say, continue being paid to reveal her life to the public - isn't the difference essentially that she is a working-class woman, talking to the mass media, whereas Diamond was middle class, and writing for a broadsheet?

Quite aside from the fact that people's reaction to news of their own terminal illness is different, is it so unfathomable that Goody would wish to earn as much as she could, and as quickly as possible, to give her children security?

Exactly. As a parent, if I had a terminal illness and had the opportunity to generate a large volume of cash to give my son a more secure future, would I do so? Of course I would. Wouldn't you?

Yes, we all remember the "Shilpa Poppadum" comment which sparked the Celebrity Big Brother race row. Yes, it was a terribly distasteful thing to say, knowingly, on national TV. Yes, I - like many others - despised her for doing so.

But let's put it into context. As Boris Becker once famously said after losing a match: "Nobody died." As a member of an ethnic minority, I've been called worse in my time. Prince Harry referred to an Army colleague as "Paki", and the fuss over that has died down pretty quickly. Nobody demanded Prince Phillip's allowance to be curtailed in the wake of his "slitty eyes" comment made on a visit to China. And, most recently, has Carol Thatcher's use of the word "golliwog" in the green room at the One Show (in reference to French tennis star Jo-Wilfried Tsonga) - a comment she refused to apologise for and resulted in her sacking from the programme - caused more than the merest ripple in a teacup? (Indeed, it has been referred to by more than one commentator as being an over-reaction by the BBC.)

What's the difference? Well, on the one hand, you have the third in line to the throne, the husband of the current monarch, and the daughter of Britain's only female Prime Minister. And on the other you have a chav of below-average intelligence from a deprived background, who in most people's eyes has done nothing to earn her money or celebrity status. Unlike the aforementioned three, of course.

Double standards, people?

Don't get me wrong. I totally subscribe to the view that Jade Goody had far outlived her allotted 15 minutes of fame long before the Celebrity Big Brother scandal. I too am bemused at the seven-figure earnings she has gained from Big Brother, the likes of OK! magazine and Living TV creating reality shows around the launch of her new perfume or her hunt for a PA. But, given the nature of her chosen 'career', I have no problem with her doing whatever she does to provide financial security for her family, because it's clearly not all about prolonging the fame thing any more.

And if the tabloid coverage of Jade's cancer story does something to raise awareness of - and potentially funding for - this most terrible of diseases, then maybe her celebrity status may be put to good use after all.

Now why is that such a bad thing?

Snow laughing matter

2009-02-05T09:47:00.005Z

Since the beginning of the week, everyone has been full of the usual mutterings about how the country grinds to a halt the moment we see a couple of flakes of snow - although, according to news reports this is the worst snow the South East has seen since 1991.

Monday was bad enough, with all manner of travel problems: school closures, accident-laden roads, major disruptions to public transport, and the chaos at Heathrow - one runway was closed all day, the other for over an hour - which led to nearly 800 flight being cancelled. All in all, I was quite relieved to have already booked the day off as holiday, even if my planned post-Super Bowl lie-in and shopping trip had to be abandoned.

But after things had started to get back to normal over the past two days, we had another snowfall overnight - about two inches' worth in Thatcham - and, having spent yesterday at home, I thought I'd try to get into work, a drive of nearly 25 miles which involves a combination of sloping, untreated roads to get out of our estate, the A4, the M4 and then some smaller roads to get to the office.

I should have known better.

I encountered my first problem within 50 yards. To get out of our road, you have to negotiate a small roundabout, the approach to which is on a mild incline. With my rear-wheel drive car, I couldn't generate enough traction from a standing start to climb the slope, and eventually had to back up and take a run-up at it which owed more to blind faith than judgement. I had to use the same technique to escape the T-junction to get out onto the main road, and after much slow-motion sliding through the grey, icy slush, I opted for discretion as the better part of valour and decided to terminate my non-essential drive to work there and then.

However, that wasn't the end of it. Having made it back to our close, you have to turn right and negotiate a moderately steep slope to return to our driveway. I executed the turn with due caution, and promptly ground to a tractionless halt, rear wheels spinning hopelessly on the icy, compacted snow, a mere 30 yards from home. It took the help of a couple of neighbours, much shovelling and five stop-start attempts - all but the last ending with my rear wheels attempting a pirouette - to climb the slope before the car finally returned to its resting place, from which I now realise it should never have left.

Idiot.

And there we have it: the perfect example of why deciding not to attempt a non-essential journey in such adverse conditions is more sensible than pathetic. Chances are I would probably have made it into work OK - although that's by no means certain given that the M4 is apparently snow-covered in places between here and Bracknell - but with the temperature forecast to remain close to freezing for the rest of the day, there's no knowing how treacherous the roads might be by the end of the day. This is how people end up sleeping in their cars overnight.

Work's important - but it's not that important.

Playing the long game

2009-01-30T08:53:00.004Z

Taking a long-term view of things seems to be the common thread linking what's on my mind this week.

The long con

Actually, we're already two-thirds of the way through the fifth season of Hustle - the BBC's take on Ocean's Eleven - but I've only got round to starting it this week. Our favourite team of long con grifters has lost one leader and regained its original one, shed two team members and gained two others. (Of the original main cast of five, only two - the Roberts, Vaughn and Glenister - have appeared in all five seasons.) Such a dramatic turnover usually sounds the death knell for a series, but Hustle has come back, if anything, reinvigorated and stronger than ever, with fresh character dynamics and a sustained high level of plot chicanery and visual style.

A big part of the fun of Hustle is allowing yourself to be swept up in the gang's latest caper and racing along to try and find the sting in the tail before the big reveal at episode's end. But above all, it's just great fun; the show never takes itself too seriously, which in itself is refreshing.

The long road to Paris

The Tour Down Under finished last weekend, and a certain Lance Armstrong finished a decent 29th out of 122 finishers after an absence from competitive racing of more than three years. Since he announced his return last September, Armstrong has been talking up his campaign to raise money for cancer research and talking down his prospects of winning an eighth Tour de France in July, but you just know the fire still burns inside him.

One thing's for sure: we probably will not really know what his chances are until the middle week of the Tour, because the next six months of racing are nothing more than an extended training programme aimed to build his fitness to a peak in July. The odds are against him, certainly, but only a fool would completely discount the chances of a man who has come back from cancer to dominate his sport.

No matter what, it's going to be one hell of a story, and one that I will be following with great interest, both in the media and via Armstrong's own Twitter profile.

Career crossroads

In a world of redundancies, budget cuts and pay freezes, I should probably be thankful to still have a relatively secure job. But the reality is that I need something to change in 2009, or I will have to make the change myself.

In the style of Pushing Daisies (back on ITV1 tonight), the facts are these: three years, seven months and 17 days ago, I started working as a strategic planner for 3M UK. Today, I am effectively still doing the same job in the same company. This is only the second time in my career I have spent more than three years with the same business - indeed, some time around the end of May, 3M will become my longest-serving employer - and it is the also the only time I have been in the same job for more than 24 months.

In short, I need a change. It's something I've been agitating for with gradually increasing volume for over a year now, but nothing has happened yet (although, to be fair, my boss is having the right conversations with the right people). But the reality is that if I don't start seeing some definite prospects in the next few months - in my head, June 13th, my four-year anniversary at 3M, is the absolute drop-dead date - then it will be time for me to start looking elsewhere, because I know that if I don't change I will get bored, and if I get bored my productivity will fall off a cliff. I've done the leadership courses, and I know I'm identified as a 'high potential' candidate within 3M. But promises are nothing without reality: I feel like I'm standing still, and although I have absolutely no desire to be an MD, I also don't want to keep pacing round in the same circles forever. In theory, I still have two-thirds of my working life ahead of me before I retire - it's a long old game. I need something to look forward to.

Artillery excitement and other things

2009-01-23T15:17:00.003Z

Another week draws to a close, so here are the things which have been at the forefront of my mind these past few days:

Obama inauguration: As the man himself said, "They said this day would never come." It did, and the world is a very different - and, for now at least, more optimistic - place.

iShoot: I downloaded the free 'lite' version of this for my iPhone last week and liked it so much I happily paid for the full game. It's basically an artillery game where you attempt to blow up other tanks using a variety of weapons. Nothing more, nothing less. It's brilliant, and I'm totally hooked.

Battlestar Galactica: BSG returned for its final half-season on Tuesday night (in the UK), and I can't remember the last time I've been so excited about a series' return, even if this week's first episode was one of the most unflinchingly downbeat hours of TV I have ever seen. But that's what makes this show so great: not every problem is neatly solved with a bow on top; not every story has a happy ending. Better still, Lost is back on Sunday, with Volume 4 of Heroes to follow in the next couple of weeks. Gotta love this time of year as a genre series fan.

Money can't buy me love (or Kaka): Oh, how I laughed when the news broke that Manchester City's €100m-plus bid for AC Milan's Kaka had failed. The fact that this was rapidly accompanied by news of Robinho leaving City's winter training camp in Tenerife without permission - and subsequent fine of two weeks' wages (£320k!) - was the icing on the cake. The revelation that City apparently had also tried and failed to sign David Villa, Gianluigi Buffon and Thierry Henry just gave me that pleasant/unpleasant feeling you get when you've pigged out on too much of your favourite food. I believe the word I'm looking for is 'schadenfreude'.

Blue Monday: Apparently this Monday just gone was supposed to be the most depressing day of the year: a combination of Christmas cheer wearing off, bad weather, short days/long nights, holidays being far, far away, it just being a Monday, and so on. I have to admit, it wasn't my best day ever, but somehow I muddled through. However, as I sat in stationary traffic on the M4, I did realise I need to book a holiday soon so I have something to look forward to. Must get on to that.

Taming the tantrum tot: Good God, Zac can throw a strop when he's not happy! A face of perfect misery, rolling tears, a banshee wail, flailing limbs, the lot. Whatever happened to our little baby who used to just cry quietly when he was upset? However, it's interesting to see the things that calm him down; generally, anything on TV that's bright, loud and moving. So, Gladiators, Katy Perry videos and Pink's So What. Go figure.

American Idol

2009-01-12T17:29:00.001Z

So, New Year has come and gone, and Christmas is but a distant memory. (Sadly, the usual seasonal weight gains are still with me, though.)

Which can mean only one thing: it’s time for American Idol to hit our screens again.

I make no apologies for the fact that I’m a fan of a number of reality TV shows, and they don’t come any bigger than the show which can trace its ancestry directly back to the UK’s Popstars and Pop Idol, and which remains the brainchild of two Brits – Nigel Lythgoe and the ubiquitous Simon Cowell.

As well as being a showcase for new US talent, a number of whom – Kelly Clarkson, Jennifer Hudson, Jordin Sparks - have also achieved international success, it is also a ratings juggernaut, regularly topping 30 million viewers and dominating the TV schedules. (By comparison, CSI, the top-rated drama series in the US, achieves a regular audience of around 21 million.)

There is, however, a reason why I religiously watch Idol every year, while ignoring its UK equivalent, The X Factor. It’s all a question of the quality, depth and longevity of its talent.

Obviously, as a country one-sixth the size of the US, the talent pool in the UK is much smaller. Even so, it is fast becoming traditional for the X Factor winner to lose their novelty and become forgotten in the rush to embrace the next year’s winner.

To illustrate the point, here is a potted career history of the winners of X Factor (and its predecessor, Pop Idol) up to 2006:

Will Young (Pop Idol, 2002) – Four number 1s, six other top 10. Four albums: two number 1s, two number 2s. Still going strong. Verdict: HIT.

Michelle McManus (Pop Idol, 2003) – Debut single number 1, one other top 20. Appeared on a You Are What You Eat special. Now presenting on radio station Clyde 1. Verdict: MISS.

Steve Brookstein (X Factor, 2004) - Debut single number 1. Second single peaked at 193. Recording contract terminated. Sang in cabaret on a P&O cruise ship. Now part of the cast of the musical Our House. Verdict: MISS.

Shayne Ward (X Factor, 2005) - Debut single number 1, three other top 10 singles. Both albums to date have gone platinum in the UK, with decent sales in international markets. Verdict: HIT (but in danger of becoming yesterday’s man).

Leona Lewis (X Factor, 2006) - Three number 1s, two other top 5 to date. ‘Bleeding Love’ also reached number 1 in the US, the first chart-topper by a British female solo artist since Kim Wilde in 1987. Verdict: BIG HIT. (Has the talent and profile to become the UK’s biggest-selling export in years, period.)

In addition to the above list, reality shows have also given us Hear’Say and Liberty X (Popstars), Gareth Gates and Darius Danesh (Pop Idol), Girls Aloud, One True Voice, Phixx and Clea (Popstars: The Rivals), and David Sneddon, Lemar and Alex Parks (Fame Academy). Of those, only Girls Aloud and, to a lesser extent, Lemar, have had any significant, lasting impact on the UK pop scene, and most of the others shone briefly (if at all) before sinking faster than the proverbial lead balloon.

Now let’s compare this to the US winners of American Idol (chart positions refer to the US unless otherwise indicated):

2002: Kelly Clarkson - Seven top 10 singles (one number 1). Three top 3 albums (one number 1). Five UK top 10 singles, two top 3 albums. Similar success in several international markets. Verdict: BIG HIT.

2003: Ruben Studdard - Two top 10 singles, one number 1 album, with his other two albums both top 20. Grammy Award-nominated. Verdict: HIT. (Incidentally, runner-up Clay Aiken has released four top 5 albums to date, with global sales totalling over 7 million, as well as starring in Spamalot on Broadway, which makes him an even bigger hit.)

2004: Fantasia Barrino – Debut single reached number 1. Two top 20 albums, totalling nearly 3 million sales globally, with a third album due for release in 2009. Starred in The Colour Purple on Broadway, earning rave reviews. Verdict: HIT. (Seventh-placed Jennifer Hudson recently released her debut album which reached number 2 and, of course, is the proud owner of an Oscar which she won for her turn in Dreamgirls, making her arguably the biggest hit of the lot.)

2005: Carrie Underwood – Seven number 1s on the Country chart. Debut album reached number 2, follow-up topped the album chart; both multi-platinum. Winner of three Grammys and approximately 19 million other awards. Firmly established as one of the biggest names on the country music scene. Verdict: BIG HIT.

2006: Taylor Hicks – one number 1 single, one platinum-selling album which peaked at number 2. Dropped by Arista Records in January 2008. Verdict: MISS. (He was never going to be a mainstream star really.) (Fourth-placed Chris Daughtry’s band Daughtry has achieved two top 5 singles plus a number 1 album, while sixth-placed Kellie Pickler has released two number 1 albums on the Country chart, as well as winning three Country Music Television awards.)

Idol’s two most recent winners, Jordin Sparks (2007) and David Cook (2008) have also had promising starts to their post-Idol careers. Sparks has already registered a top 10 album and four top 20 singles, two of which were top 5. ('No Air' also peaked at number 3 in the UK.) Cook’s debut single and album both reached number 3 on the respective charts, and he also set a record in the week following his Idol win by having 11 singles in the Billboard top 100, the most since the Beatles had 14 in 1964.

Anyway, you get the idea. In terms of pure numbers, there is simply no comparison. And, having seen every season of Idol except the first, I can testify that in terms of that magic combination of talent and marketability, there is no one among the UK set – aside from Leona and, arguably, Girls Aloud – who can hold a candle to their best American counterparts.

The girl next door with the voice to die for? Leona Lewis certainly has ‘it’ and has shown she can break into the all-important US market, but Kelly Clarkson has already been there and done it.

The ‘plus-size’ girl who succeeds in a size zero world? Michelle McManus’s pop career stalled almost before it had started – as far as I was concerned she had, at best, a moderately interesting story married to a competent but mundane voice. Jennifer Hudson, on the other hand, exudes sassiness, won an Oscar for Dreamgirls and made Beyonce Knowles look like a supporting act in doing so. No comparison.

The sweet young man who came out of the closet? Will Young, yes. But Clay Aiken ticked that box and more, from the initial uber-geek look, to a back-story which included teaching autistic children, to the persistent questions about his sexuality (he only officially confirmed he is gay in September 2008, more than five years post-Idol), and, to top it off, he has also fathered a child. Oh, and while Will Young has a very good voice, Aiken’s voice is astounding. Listen to Aiken’s cover of ‘Soiltaire’. Read ‘em and weep.

In short, American Idol may be British in origin – and with Simon Cowell the real star of the show, its beating heart is also British - but in terms of talent and entertainment, it wins hands down over The X Factor any day.

Which is why I’ll be glued to Idol religiously for the next four months. Whereas I can already barely remember 2007 X Factor winner Leon Jackson, and will have probably forgotten his successor, Alexandra Burke, by next Christmas.

Best and worst of 2008

2009-01-05T10:46:00.000Z

Apropos nothing in particular, here's a random selection of my highlights and lowlights from 2008.

People & events

Scariest person: Sarah Palin, Republican vice-presidential nominee. Proponent of old-fashioned blue collar values. Ignorant of the sensibilities and basic facts relating to the no longer old-fashioned world we now live in. Claimed that being governor of a state (Alaska) whose airspace Vladimir Putin flies through counts as foreign policy experience. Scariest of all: she has significant support within the Republican party to run as their candidate for president in 2012.

Funniest person: Tina Fey, former Saturday Night Live writer and creator of 30 Rock, in her return to SNL as a scarily good Sarah Palin lookalike. Able to successfully lampoon Palin's largely inept interview performances without actually having to change much (or in some cases anything) from what was originally said.

'Living the stereotype' award: Karen Matthews. Looked every inch a chav, turned out to be every inch a chav criminal after it was revealed that she had plotted to have her own daughter Sharon abducted in pursuit of reward money. Single-handedly reinforced what most middle-class people think about the UK's sink estates. Nice one.

'Biggest & most pointless bandwagon' award: The Daily Mail, for fanning the flames in the Brand/Ross/Andrew Sachs/Georgina Baillie scandal and creating the perfect excuse for those people who hadn't had a good, old-fashioned whinge about something they knew nothing about since Shilpa-gate. Hello, people: nothing Brand said about Baillie was untrue. In poor taste, perhaps; a lie, no. (For instance she is indeed part of a burlesque troupe called the Satanic Sluts.) Anyhow, Baillie had her 15 minutes of fame, and Sachs will appear on Coronation Street later this year. Meanwhile, Ross is heading back to the BBC and Brand, with his bad boy reputation enhanced, has taken on a multi-million pound role in the next Pirates of the Caribbean film. That'll teach him, eh?

'Most divorced (literally) from reality' award: Heather Mills. Wanted £125m of former husband Paul McCartney's fortune, having contributed absolutely nothing to it during their six-year marriage. Mills' Wikipedia entry says that, among other things, she stated she needed £176k a year for clothes, the ownership of four homes in Beverly Hills, Long Island and England worth a combined £5.7m, £750k to buy an office for her sister, £500k pa for holidays, £186k pa for chartered helicopters, £43k pa for a chauffeur and £191k pa for 'professional expenses'. Was ultimately awarded £24.3m in cash and assets, but not before having poured a jug of water over McCartney's solicitor, Fiona Shackleton. While describing Mills as a "kindly person" the judge concluded that much of her evidence (Mills chose to represent herself) was "not just inconsistent and inaccurate but also less than candid". Which sounds an awful lot like calling her a deceitful liar to me. Good riddance - which is what I imagine Sir Paul himself probably said too.

'Soggy firework' award: CERN's Large Hadron Collider, built to reveal the secrets of the universe (or, more prosaically, to prove/disprove the existence of the Higgs boson). Nine days after the LHC was activated, it broke down and is not expected to be fully operational again until mid-2009. Not so much Big Bang as damp squib. However, see 'Best YouTube video' below.

Entertainment

Best new TV programme: Pushing Daisies. Which ITV invested heavily in and promptly messed up by missing out an episode because they didn't have enough time before Euro 2008 to show them all. And which has subsequently been cancelled in the US after season 2, despite much critical acclaim. Typical.

Worst new TV programme: Knight Rider. An hour-long Ford commercial masquerading as a re-make of the classic 80s show. This is indescribably bad: the acting, the wafer-thin plots, the ADD-fuelled jump-cut editing. I loved the original as a kid and really wanted this to be brilliant; I gave up after two episodes. Naturally, NBC chose to pick up a full season order despite soft ratings. Avoid. Like. The. Plague.

Best radio programme: Fighting Talk, every Saturday morning on BBC Radio 5 Live. Sporting punditry and banter at its best. Contestants' answers may be pre-prepared and Wikipedia-fuelled rather than off the cuff, but it's still exactly the sort of chat you would have with your mates down the pub.

Most & least convincing versions of 'Hallelujah': It may have been the Christmas number 1 in the UK, but The X Factor winner Alexandra Burke's cover of the Leonard Cohen song was functional at best, lacking the poignancy, delicacy and latent sexuality of the original. Vastly inferior to Jeff Buckley’s cover (which an internet campaign pushed to number 2), which Cohen himself declares the definitive version. And not even the best reality TV show cover of the song this year: seek out Jason Castro’s performance on American Idol on YouTube.

Biggest disappointment: Madonna at Wembley. The show itself was actually very good, but she was an hour late onto stage - sorry, that goes way beyond being fashionably rock-and-roll - and there was no encore. I expected better from the queen of pop, impending divorce or not.

Best YouTube video: The 'LHC Rap' posted by CERN employee Katherine McAlpine (alpinekat), in which the aforementioned and some of her mates took us on a guided tour of the Large Hadron Collider, to the tune of a charmingly amateur yet informative rap. ("The LHC accelerates the protons and the lead / And the things that it discovers will rock you in the head"). Over 4 million viewers on YouTube: in one fell swoop, science became cool (at least for a week or so).

Sport

Best moment: 2008 was such a great year from a sporting perspective that I struggled to even distil a shortlist of ten, but if I had to choose one it would be the Federer/Nadal Wimbledon final. Usain Bolt's two world records were the most incredible theatre, but he was head and shoulders (literally) above - and ahead of - everyone else. Lewis Hamilton's last-gasp F1 title win was perhaps the most dramatic moment, but he did it by finishing fifth in the final race. But Federer versus Nadal gave us the undisputed two best players in the world going toe-to-toe in a final of the highest quality; sporting competition at its very finest.

Most over-hyped star: Or, alternatively, 'Peacock of the Year', the ever-preening, self-regarding Cristiano Ronaldo. Don't get me wrong, he is an immensely talented and exciting footballer. However, he's also a prat of the highest order in whose comeuppance I imagine many people would take great delight.

Most under-hyped star: Cycling sprint king Mark Cavendish. Winner of four stages at the Tour de France - a feat no Briton has ever matched - as well as two at the Giro d'Italia and a hat-trick of wins at both the Tours of Ireland and Missouri among his 17 wins in 2008. The forgotten man at the Olympics, where he and Bradley Wiggins failed to add to their World Championship gold in the madison event. And he didn't even make the shortlist of ten for BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Make no mistake: Cavendish was the dominant sprinter in road races just as much as Chris Hoy was on the track. (Runner up: Padraig Harrington. 24 hours before the Open, he wasn't even sure if he would be fit enough to defend his title - he then went and retained it. Like Cavendish, received no more than a mention in dispatches at SPotY.)

A month to forget

2009-01-01T19:18:00.002Z

In so many ways, December really was a month to forget at the end of what has been, on the whole, a good year.

The back half of November had been bad enough, as I'd had first a cold and then some sort of gastric flu/bug in consecutive weeks. Which, coupled to the stresses and strains of a work environment of redundancies, budget cuts and pay freezes, really didn't help.

But then December kicked off with Isaac spending 48 hours in hospital with ballonitis. I caught another cold. Then, a few days after Zac's birthday (one of the few highlights of the month), Heather's step-father had a mild stroke. That was followed by Zac getting another virus the week before Christmas which manifested itself as tonsilitis and a temperature of 40-plus degrees. That weekend I came down with the flu, which knocked me out until Christmas Eve. Then Heather spent the whole of Christmas with a bad cold. And finally my family, having spent Christmas with us, all got flu as well and have spent the last few days in bed.

Like I said, a month to forget.

And that's not including the stress of having four family members - mum, dad, brother, cousin (the last of whom we struggled to get anything more than monosyllabic conversation out of the whole time) - staying over for two days at Christmas. Truth be told, much though I love my folks, I was so glad when we got to Boxing Day evening and we were able to close the door and just be a family of three again. (Although we then had to pack up and drive down to Heather's mum's for a couple of days, which was actually far more easy-going than expected.)
Still, Zac's birthday (where we got everyone together down at Heather's mum's) went well, and he didn't seem too fazed by Christmas, although he was still a bit too young to understand or appreciate it, other than the fact that he suddenly had lots of new toys to play with.

And the last few days of the month, when it was just the three of us, all sickness-free for the first time in about six weeks, have been lovely. Zac has reminded us just what a smiley, joyful boy he is. We have benefitted from him spending two days in nursery post-Christmas: the first day we both went back to sleep until lunchtime, and then drove to Oxford for a leisurely, buggy-less afternoon of lunch and shopping. And, with both physical and mental batteries recharged, I'm now really looking forward to 2009.

2008 - and December in particular - are now consigned to history. Let's see what the new year brings.

Customer "service"

2008-12-11T11:38:00.003Z

I'm not normally one to complain excessively, but when faced with appalling customer service from a corporate behemoth - I'm talking about BT - that's a completely different matter.

If you've ever tried to change broadband suppliers, you may well have had a similar experience to what I've been through during the past five weeks.

In theory, it's quite simple. You phone your current internet service provider to ask for a migration code (MAC), which your new supplier then uses to switch your service over. According to the industry's code of conduct, the ISP should provide you with your MAC within 5 working days.

It should be simple, shouldn't it? But, of course, it's anything but.

Apparently most ISPs have a tendency to drag their feet over issuing MACs, presumably in the hope that most people will eventually give up and stay with them. Now I don't know whether BT is significantly better or worse than, say, Sky or Tiscali or Talk Talk, but what I do know is that I don't exactly have a warm glow about them.

The timeline goes as follows:

Nov 6th: Requested a MAC from BT's Customer Options team. I was told they would email it to me within 5 working days, in line with the code of conduct.

Nov 18th: Follow-up call. Polite service, profuse apologies, and a promise that it would be sorted out within 48 hours.

Nov 20th: Ditto.

Nov 25th: Another call, and a promise that I would either receive the MAC or someone would contact me within 48 hours. Registered a complaint with a manager anyway, expressing my disappointment.

Dec 1st: Still nothing. Emailed BT's High Level Escalation complaints team (hleteam@bt.com) after the phone number I had found for them didn't work. Received an automated email response promising they would get back to me within two working days. They didn't - which I personally find even more offensive than their general inaction. If you promise to call someone back, you call them back; that's basic courtesy.

Dec 11th (today): In total exasperation, I launched a three-pronged approach, thus:

1. I phoned BT again, stating clearly that I expected action within one week, or I would also be switching my landline supplier.

2. I then phoned the Ofcom and registered a complaint which they promised to pass on to BT. (Ofcom doesn't actually have the power to do anything, but by escalating it with the ISP there's more chance they'll actually sit up and take notice.)

3. Finally, I emailed BT's chief executive (ian.livingston@bt.com) directly at 8.58am, politely summarising the various communications I had made, and expressing my disappointment at the lack of any positive outcome or even feedback. I received an email response at 9.01am, a call from his PA at 9.30am, and a MAC by email and accompanying phone call by 11am. (Apparently the MAC had been generated four weeks ago, but never sent to me - go figure.)

That's two hours from my email to a surprisingly swift resolution - after five weeks of frustration. Hopefully that should now be the end of it. Even if it isn't, I now at least have a direct line to someone high up in BT's organisation who has been both responsive and effective. You can't ask for more than that.

Isn't it funny how quickly things happen when you cut out the middle man? Makes you wonder why companies invest so much in customer service infrastructure when the only way to get things done is to contact the man at the top.

Times change

2008-12-11T08:19:00.002Z

... And we change with the times. It's an old Latin saying, and one which remains as true now as it was then.

Reflecting back on Isaac's first year, I always knew that life would change in many different ways, but there are so many things I do now as a matter of course that I would never have done a year ago. Here are ten off the top of my head.

1. Thinking that going to bed by 10pm is normal. (And that staying up after 11pm qualifies as “a big night”.)

2. Waking up at 5.30am on a Saturday after six hours’ uninterrupted sleep and thinking, “That counts as a lie-in.”

3. Being able to do household chores one-handed, while holding a kicking 20-pound weight with the other hand.

4. Singing nursery rhymes in public.

5. Maintaining a normal conversation while changing one of your son’s speciality super-dirty, super-smelly nappies.

6. Taking your boy out for a walk at 8am in the freezing cold and pouring rain, just so he can get some sleep.

7. Taking an hour to do what is normally a ten minute drive, so your son can get a much-needed nap.

8. Planning your entire life around your child’s sleep and meal times.

9. Using words like “botheration”, “drat” and “fiddlesticks” so your child doesn’t learn swear words.

10. Spelling out swear words when words like “botheration”, “drat” and “fiddlesticks” just won’t do the job.

Oliver Postgate RIP

2008-12-09T09:14:00.003Z

A big part of my childhood - and, I suspect, that of many other people in their 30s and 40s - died yesterday.

Oliver Postgate, creator of much-loved children's TV programmes such as Ivor the Engine, The Clangers, Bagpuss and Noggin the Nog, died yesterday aged 83. Apparently he died peacefully.

Postgate was one half of the Smallfilms team, alongside artist Peter Firman. Together, the pair worked in a disused cowshed in Kent - a far cry from today's high-tech CGI production houses - to create classic shows which live on in the memories of millions of children-turned-adults: the marvellous mechanical mouse organ in Bagpuss; the surreal, swanee whistle conversation of the Clangers, (the show inspired the name of the early 90s indie band The Soup Dragons); Postgate's dodgy Welsh accent as Jones the Steam ("Come now, Ivor!").

Bagpuss was voted the top children's programme of all time in a 1998 poll, and ranked fourth (with The Clangers 13th) in Channel 4's 100 Greatest Kids' TV Shows in 2001, holding its own among such exalted company as The Simpsons, Danger Mouse, Grange Hill and Mr Benn.

Contemporary children's programmes may be more sophisticated, exciting and expensive than Bagpuss, Ivor and their ilk, but somehow they will never have the same simple charm of an era when two men in a shed were able to both entertain and shape the lives of an entire generation.

Rest in peace.

Oliver Postgate's obituary on BBC News