Category: Random

The Guardian has an article today about the increasing acceptance of homosexuality in society that is worth a read: Without Prejudice. It’s generally a pretty well worked-through piece, even if it has a tendency to represent things in perhaps too cheerful and happy a way. Here’s one of the more randomly bizarre questions it asks:

But do these advancing levels of acceptance leave us in a position where it is easier to be gay in the UK than it is to be black, or even female?

The answer to which is patently no –on the whole – because (1) there simply isn’t a consistent experience of being gay in the UK (some areas / industries / cultures are gay-tolerant, some gay-positive, some are patently and overtly not), (2) gay teenagers are still some of the most at risk of bullying, homelessness and suicide statistics, and because (3) there is still a massive amount of institutionalised homophobia and stereotyping both from outside and indeed inside the ‘community’.

On the other hand things have got considerably better. When I was at University you could almost feel the tides turning – and turning quickly. But there is another aspect to this rapid change in cultural beliefs regarding homosexuality and gay issues that I think the Guardian has missed. I remember when I first noticed (around ten years ago) that the frequent reference to – and tacit acceptance of – gay issues in TV shows like Friends seemed to be having much more effect on the hearts and minds of people around us than any of the dedicated and necessary campaigning and fighting of the oppressive late eighties. It seems to me that the media won the war for us, and that’s troubling in and of itself.

And it’s not just who won the battles that is alarming (because there’s no guarantee that they won’t start reversing their position – particularly in the increasingly right-wing USA), it’s also the speed in which the battles were won. I think we have to be aware of the fact that political and social life doesn’t just naturally have a tendency towards liberalism and socially inclusive politics. A rapid social swing in that direction (while wonderful in the short-term) makes me concerned about the possibilities for an equally rapid swing towards more repressive and less gay-friendly ideologies. Let’s let these changes bed in a bit before we start saying the war has been won.

In the meantime, The Guardian’s article is a bit of a charter for complacency, because as the man said, “Rights have to be defended all of the time because rights are under attack all of the time”. And looking back on the last twenty years, perhaps the lesson is not that we are naturally destined to be accepted as equals, but that – in the future if not now – the media will be the battleground upon which all ideological conflicts will be won.

I’m sitting in Foyles‘ café on the second floor of the massive and esteemed London book store and I’m having one of the most pleasant moments of my life. The café has a nice murmur of activity meandering around me. I’m sat with my laptop on an old school-like table. I’ve eaten some refreshing food, and am tapping away to myself while simple book-loving folk slip past unhurriedly. Most beautiful of all is the album of simple melancholic bluegrassy adaptations of Christmas carols that is playing in the background. It’s sedate, slow, respectful and humble – unlike the desperate to be happy, frantically cheery hysteria of most Christmas music. It’s all tremendously comforting.

On the wall is this rather lovely poster which has a review of the store I’m in from “The Bookman’s London” (1952) by Frank Swinnerton. It’s cast in this lovely typeface (I think it’s Parable). Anyway – I tried to find a source online for the (rather indifferent, but still apt) review and there wasn’t one. So I thought I’d transcribe it so that if anyone else looked, it would be be there for them to reference. So here’s Mr Swinnerton’s review of one of the world’s finest and oldest (and most randomly organised) Book Shops:

Towards the Oxford Street end stands one of the really extraordinary enterprises of the book world – Foyles. Two brothers began this shop within the memory of many who are living now. By sheer genius they made it the busiest centre for the sale of books known to me. One may go at any time of day into any of the departments – and there seems no end to them – and find everywhere a packed concentration of students seeking books and advice. The atmosphere is that of great, preoccupied busy-ness; the assistants are inexhaustible encyclopaedias; whole ranges of cheap classics, new school books, histories, dictionaries, novels and in fact everything, as far as everything can now be obtained, is at hand for the student’s need. There is, of course, a rare book department in Foyles, where those more exclusive in taste can rove; but for the most part this is a store for men and women of small means in search of essential tools. As an institution it is overwhelming.

Oh and if you are one of the more exclusive in taste, you might be interested to know that Mr Swinnerton’s book is in fact now itself a bit of a collector’s item (albeit not a very expensive one): Walter-Saxen Rare Books.

An interesting line about the selves manufactured by spies (that seems to me to have currency for all people who have cause to narrativise their lives in one way or another) from John Le Carré’s rather blandly-titled (but also rather good) new novel Absolute Friends:

But who is Mundy Three, when Mundys One and Two have gone to bed? Who is this third person who is neither one of the other two, who lies awake while they sleep, and listens for the chimes of country bells he doesn’t hear? He is the silent spectator. He is the one member of the audience who doesn’t applaud the performances of his two familiars. He is made up of all the odd bits of his life that are left over after he has given the rest away.

So there’s this TV show called The Million Pound Property Experiment. It’s presented by these two charming young men called Colin and Justin. Evidence suggests that the two young men in question come from a dimension that – let’s just say – is big on musical theatre. One of them (Colin) is quite fluffy and conciliatory (“We like Colin! Yay Colin!”), but the other one (Justin) is a bloody nightmare. Watching him in action is like watching a drag act on cocaine with foot-long claws hacking and slashing her way through a room stuffed full of fluffy bunnies, kittens and happy smiling teddy bears. I’ll give you an example. When the programme started they had this really decent guy working with them as a project manager. He was a bit of a curmudgeon at times, but he seemed pragmatic and mostly reasonable. And Justin just wailed at him and scratched at him like one of those impossibly unreasonable small children that you kind of pick up and watch quizzically while they writhe and kick and scream that they hate you. Nutter! And I’m not the only one who thinks so – you only have to read the vaguely homophobic thread over at Digital Spy to see how stunned and amused people are by his behaviour. And that’s discounting the whole Popbitch thing. Which we won’t mention, obviously. Oops.

That’s not to say – of course – that the buildings they end up producing aren’t beautifully assembled, but the most galling aspect is how relentlessly they ignore everyone who tells them about the prices in the area or that their design ideas are inappropriate for their market or that – you know – children could – you know – die if you build it that way. So week after week they get profits in the region of £1000 just because they’re snotting drama queens. It’s scandalous! Great television, though…

How to talk about thoughts about work (in public) that I need to articulate and work through a bit without said thoughts taking on a political dimension – feeling like part of some attempt to game social reality. How to deal with personal frustrations (or let those frustrations go) without projecting perceived inadequacies onto other people. How to reconcile the satisfaction of a work that will result in something made with the desire to work on a subject that you’re passionate about. How to know when one is doing that. How to think about what’s next without sorting out what is. How to handle the frustrations of watching other people do work in places where you used to be the only person who cared. How do deal with people communicating things you want to communicate but didn’t think you should. How to not sound shrill and callous and vengeful and bloody. How to not sound desperate and flighty and trivial and fake. How to tell whether your impression of things is a lie or not.

These being an adequate representation of the conundrums I find myself dealing with on a Tuesday evening, because it would of course be too much for me to scratch out any kind of mental peace.

My head, unfortunately, is far from in the position to do its best thinking. My blood feels like it has thickened to the consistency of thick pressurised loam, to be forced at pressure through brain-flesh, capillary and straining vein. Mental clarity is unlikely to be found in such a state. So I shall have a bath and go to bed. In the meantime: Conundrum vs. Conundra.

Right. For a whole range of reasons, I’m getting increasingly interested in finding out how many weblogs there are in the UK. If we could demonstrate that a large number of UK-based webloggers exist, then it could have a whole range of effects: it could encourage publishers to find constructive ways to engage with the community, could encourage UK-based people/companies to get more involved in building weblog-based software (or to spend time thinking around Denton-esque micro-publishing ventures like Gawker, Fleshbot and Gizmodo). All kinds of stuff.

Now there’s no really useful way of effectively measuring these things, but it occurs to me that we’d probably be able to motivate a good number of people to make themselves known as weblogers if everyone who read this post stuck up a mention/plug for one or more of the major geographical portals onto their sites. So I’m going to wander off now and check that I’m listed on:

• The Eatonweb Portal
• Globe of Blogs
• Weblogs.co.uk (which runs the extremely useful UK Blogs Aggregator)

And please – if you’ve got ten minutes and are interested in helping to uncover the lost continent of UK webloggers out there, then stick something on your site about this too.

After watching a particularly interesting episode of The Art Show, I now plan to go and visit the work of David Shrigley currently being displayed on the London Underground. Here’s a detail from one of the displayed works:

Soon it will be time for the annual Bloggies – the weblog equivalent of the Oscars (voted for by the community that makes them, heavily slanted towards blockbuster-sites that get bums on seats, vaguely ridiculous and highly entertaining). The best mock fights are always around the LGBTQA+ category (which I won once a long, long time ago), particularly when Sparky or Ernie are in the game. This year – however – I will be heavily promoting Trash Addict for that particular dubious honour.

Anyway, the standard debate around categories will start emerging shortly, so I just thought I’d get my thoughts in on the localisation issues quickly and early and see what people thought. Currently they’re organised roughly like this:

• Best Asian
• Best American
• Best Antipodean (Australia and New Zealand)
• Best Canadian
• Best European / African
• Best Latin American

There seem to be a few problems with his grouping to me – firstly there’s no category for the Middle East, and I think this year that’s going to be a more obvious omission than ever given Salam Pax and all the webloggers around Iraq and Israel. Secondly, having separate categories for Antipodean, Canadian and American weblogs, but not one for British/Irish ones seems rather random considering that both Canada and Australia/NZ have much smaller populations in general and smaller weblogging communities in particular than the UK and Ireland. And finally, the grouping of Europe with Africa seems to make the possibility of Africa weblogs becoming seen rather unlikely. So here’s my proposed reworking:

• Best American or Canadian
• Best British or Irish
• Best Australian or New Zealand

• Best African
• Best Asian / Far Eastern
• Best European (non UK/Ireland)
• Best Latin American
• Best Middle Eastern

It’s two more categories than last year, but it seems more convincing to me. Any thoughts / contributions / suggestions / improvements / comments?

So I’m sitting in the BBC canteen in Broadcasting House with one Matthew Webb, who is (I fear) the husband part of our particular TV husband-and-wife Research and Development team. I say that because he sits really quietly and reads things and grunts while I freak out about stuff and try and kick him under the table. In this particular aspect – as in many others – it feels much like my parent’s marriage (except with heated and even occasionally productive debates about social software, recommendations engines and the like).

Anyway, he’s unusually chatty on this day and I think I’m being unusually stoic and calm. I’m tucking into a slab of over-cooked BBC roast-pork with mixed vegetables that have been boiled into submission while he’s chomping on some kind of grey-looking sandwich from the shop that doesn’t have the scary woman with the thrusting money-demanding hand at the cash-till. I’m probably using a plastic knife because they never have any metal knives – my theory being that with the BBC’s internal politics (in other departments, obviously) being what it is, a metal knife would simply prove too much of a temptation. And – while we look out over the bright panorama of London towards the distant hills of Hampstead, across the emptiness of Regent’s Park – Matt starts talking about fog, the diffraction of light (I’m not a physics graduate, so apologies if that makes no sense) and the possibilities of enormous hovering spherical mirrors.

And it was in this fashion that I became witness to the genesis of an UpsideClown story that oozes Borges and Ong called: The Mirrored Spheres of Patagonia. Since Matt and I talked initially, he took his story seed and doused it liberally in Gro-fast, psycho-tropic substances, a small amount of cat-pee from an animal with prostate difficulty and had it bitten by a passing radio-active spider. Or so I can only deduce from its scale, complexity and total disconnection from traditional human forms of communication. A choice excerpt follows:

“The basis for Patagonian civilisation, the discovery that turned a relatively simple agricultural community towards greater and greater complexity, was the perfection of their science of optics. Every citizen carried a telescope, and at intervals in their cities vast mirrored spheres were winched into the air. Smaller spheres were placed outside windows, and similar ones inside all rooms and scattered in all public places. Strung between cities and villages were magnifying lenses, repeaters, also winched up. From what we’re told it seems that this infrastructure allowed any citizen – from anywhere – to view any other point in the empire.”

At which point I can only say that my competing ideology – that we should bio-engineer human beings to produce nano-enhanced packet-switching uber-networked skin-flakes that were able to sense the nature of the thing they were adjacent to and capable of determining their three-dimensional location in space with relation to nearby flakes with the effect of producing an accurate and 3-D explorable model of the world and all its surfaces that could tell you what and where everything was at any given moment of the day or night – was significantly more fun. And moreover (you will note with respect) had the advantage of not defying any major laws of physics and helping you determine which parts of the world were particularly in need of a hoover.

This may sound like a bit of an advert, but frankly I don’t care. You have to be able to express joy in the things you like – I think – whether they be commercial or not. Only let me say that I have received no money or free merchandising for the following glowing endorsement. None at all. Not even the tiniest sliver of perfectly ripe brie…

Every year shortly before Christmas I pop into Neal’s Yard Dairy and get a selection of cheeses to take up to my family in Norfolk. It’s become a bit of a ritual. There’s something really primal and satisfying about bringing food back for a significant meal – particularly one so associated with the winter solstice and the rebirth of the sun (oh and all that Christian stuff I guess). So to do my part, I go into Covent Garden’s most well-stocked and sensually stimulating shop, sample a dozen cheeses (they’ll let you try everything) and then buy a representative sample.

This sounds more like an advert than I’d feared, but let me continue anyway… The wonderful staff will recommend the Stilton that’ll be at its best at exactly the right time, they’ll tell you how to store your cheese (FYI: in a cellar or on a window-ledge – not in the fridge because it’ll dry it out) and they’ll even label each perfectly paper-wrapped block of cheese you buy – so that you can order them again or look them up later in your favourite cheese tome (I bought my father a book of cheese so that he can investigate the whole issue in more detail – I believe it’s been a tremendous success). In a nutshell – it’s one of the most pleasant experiences of my year and I heartily recommend it. Plug over. Well, nearly…

It occurs to me that this is an ideal topic for a random poll, so here we go: What’s your favourite cheese?