Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from 2016

Upsetting the Status Quo

It’s been a bad year for music fans.  David Bowie, Prince and George Michael are just some of the stars that have left us, along with one of the founding members of a band that have been rocking for half a century. Just a few days before Christmas, I headed up to Glasgow to catch the mighty Status Quo live. Billed as “The Last Night of the Electrics” tour, it really was a ‘last chance to see’ gig, with the band finally coming to the end of 50 years of rock’n’rollin’ on the road. Notably absent was one of the two original members of the blues and boogie combo – Rick Parfitt. Fellow founder Francis Rossi and the band delivered an evening of hits galore, shout-along crowd-pleasers one and all. I can think of very few bands that can do a couple of hours on stage, only play songs everyone knows by heart, and still have to miss out some of their greatest tunes. Parfitt was recovering from a heart attack, and had finally announced a couple of months before that he wouldn’t be return

A life less linear

Big news as we plunge, screaming, towards a Brexity, Trumpy, 2017 with no idea how to stop - I’m obsolete. Technology has finally beaten me. It was inevitable, really. I’ve previously stated that people who don’t file their music alphabetically (by surname) are destroying the very fabric of civilised society. I’ve no desire to Snapchat. There’s still a radio/cassette player in our kitchen that is ‘digital’ in that you have to use your fingers to press the buttons. I’m trying hard to adapt to the fast-changing, technological, future that’s bunging a new and baffling development in my direction on a daily basis. For instance, we recently got one of those TV stick gadgets that allows you to stream programmes via the internet. Very clever. Unfortunately, I keep forgetting about it. You can’t see it, the remote is so small it’s hard to find and none of the programmes are in the TV guide that we buy each week, then circle what we want to watch with a biro. There are masses of TV sh

School’s out forever!

To everyone exiting gleefully from their educational establishments for Christmas – Yay!  I’ve just finished studying too, and I’ve learnt a lot… about myself. Back in that dim and distant time known as 2015, I embarked on a distance learning course to bag myself a marketing qualification. Excluding the usual one day, work-related, courses that inevitably crop up (Photocopier training, learning how to stay awake during budget meetings, advanced spreadsheet wrangling) this was the first ‘proper’ bit of studying I had undertaken in over 30 years. Last time I read a text book properly, Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minster, there were four TV channels and my greatest concern was if I could fit two albums on a TDK AD90 cassette. I started off with the boldest of intentions. Instead of the sheet-of-A4 studying plan, I created a spreadsheet. Gone was the thick ruled notepad, replaced by my computer’s word processing powers. Unlike my O and A-levels, I was going to work hard on this

Here is the Huws/Bye Bye Barrow

I’ve previously praised Peston, but there is another stalwart of The News that deserves a journalistic high-five. Step forward, Welsh word-wizard, Huw Edwards. Ah, News at Ten. Despite the fact that there are 24 hour, rolling, news services on the telebox, the 2200 one feels... proper. Like all the other reports were just working their way up to it, but this is the real one. Consider whatever it is to now be officially confirmed. Since 2003, this most important of news broadcasts has been fronted by Huw Edwards, the 55 year old Welshman lending the whole thing a sense of gravitas and professionalism. Except when the camera cuts back to him after something he finds amusing. In which case, watch out for one sardonically raised eyebrow. Whilst Robert Peston is honoured with the @robpestonhair Twitter fan account, there’s a very particular one for Huw. @HuwsAtTen noticed something metronomically fascinating about Huw’s News and only tweets about that, very specific, thing. And wit

Ho! Ho! …No? Humbug, anyone?

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas! Unless you’re an “expert” – in which case you’re a parental monster. A recent article in this paper, titled “Parents urged to stop pretending Father Christmas is real”, reported on a piece in The Lancet Psychiatry journal. Apparently, this cheery item, by a psychologist and a social scientist, suggests that parents should stop saying Father Christmas exists, in case this hideous lie damages their relationship with their children. Merry Christmas, everyone! Yes, these cheerless souls are indeed advising you that you’re a bad parent for lying to your kids that Santa is real. I gracefully accept my position as a grumpy guardian of society, standing up to the irritations and rank stupidity of the world, ensuring my glass is always at least half empty and generally being the one that lowers the enjoyment factor of any situation. I was horrified to see a photo on Facebook from a niece last week, who already has her Christmas tree up and

Formula 1’s Abu Dhabi desert showdown

Andy Murray may have ended the year as men’s world number 1, but there’s another Brit still fighting for the World Champion title in 2016. In any other year in Formula 1 history, Germany’s Nico Rosberg would already be a couple of weeks into celebrating his first title at the pinnacle of motorsport. He must be rueing F1’s decision to expand the 2016 championship from the previous season’s 20 races to 21, leaving him with one final battle against his team mate, and rival, Lewis Hamilton. Hamilton is 12 points behind, with 25 available for a win. There are various permutations that could see Lewis take his 4th title (and 3rd in a row) in the heat of Abu Dhabi. The headline-grabbing one is nice and simple though, and shows the level of challenge he faces – even if he wins, Rosberg needs only to come 3rd to take his first title. True, Hamilton has won the last couple of races, is at the top of his game, and may well be the most naturally gifted driver behind the wheel of a multi-

NHS wail about email fail

“Set up a distribution list!” they say. “It’ll make life easier”. Good idea – unfortunately, someone at the NHS managed to send an email to 840,000 colleagues… Ever prepare a carefully worded email, hit ‘send’ and then wondered if you included all the people you intended in the ‘To’ field? Never mind – you can always forward in on to anyone missing with an apologetic “Sorry!” at the top and a smiley face to prove you’re a good sort really and it was a genuine mistake. Better than doing it the other way round, and including someone you didn’t mean to. What if it was irrelevant to the recipient? Embarrassing. What if it was highly relevant? “Peter is the single worst employee we have, and his shirts give me a headache. Surely that’s grounds for dismissal?” and you sent it to me… sorry, him? Devastating. (Especially as they’re nice shirts really.) Most of the time, it’s just great entertainment value. You get to see all sorts of interesting stuff when people unintentionally reply

The highs and lows of bloging

A strange thing happened last week. After posting about BBC3's Doctor Who spin-off, Class, An unprecedented 600+ views occurred in one day, taking me past the 80,000 total views point for this blog. Chuffed, I was. When I got up the next day and looked at the stats, a steady stream of views was still happening... and had been all night. This continued at steady rate, with over 2000 during the course of the day, in fact. Followed by a sudden and almost complete crash in numbers, back to normal. 30-odd hours of massive visitor numbers, then nothing. Statistical error? Shared by Class fans? Who knows. In the end, the post received 2722 views, making it the most viewed post ever (by more than double), trouncing the previous Queen gig remembrance from July. The more normal, modest, visitor rate has now taken the numbers up to 2900 so far this month, making this the most successful month ever. Baffling. The cynic in me suspects a glitch in the matrix, whilst the wannabe write

Going Underground

The US presidential election and Brexit must have made me more nervous than I’d realised. It seems I’ve created an underground bunker without realising I was doing it. Still – we’ve all done that at some point, right? No? Ah... In that case, the fact that I have inadvertently turned my cellar into a rudimentary survival shelter, just in case it all kicks off, demonstrates a severe case of bunker mentality. Fretting about Donald and his wall, and Hillary and her emails, clearly made me more paranoid that I thought about the possibility of WW3 kicking off. Whilst attempting to find a specific size of imperial washer the other day (turns out I’d mis-filed it in the nut cabinet – Tsk!) I was struck by what a lot of jam and chutney we have in the cellar. And I do mean a LOT. There are boxes of boiled-up sugar and fruit and more boxes of boiled up vinegar and fruit. We’re still only part way through 2015’s output too. Then there’s the plastic containers holding pasta in various for

A touch of Class

BBC3’s latest Sci-Fi creation, Class, popped-up online a couple of weeks ago, with a familiar feel and a very recognisable guest appearance. Christmas is jingling it’s way towards us with alarming speed. This means (apart from eight weeks of festive songs on a loop in the shops) that the great Xmas day TV tradition is just around the corner. It’ll soon be Doctor Who Day, when an implausible plot with a snowy twist, celebrity co-stars, and a liberal dose of feel-good-factor burst forth from out goggle-boxes, temporarily distracting us from overindulgence, present-based disappointment and trying to avoid the washing up. The Doctor has made an early visit this year though, with a brief cameo appearance in BBC3’s new Sci-Fi drama, Class. Whovians will be familiar with Coal Hill Academy, where the main characters go for education, shared teenage angst, aliens and unexpected death. Originally just a good old-fashioned school with a grumpy time-traveller hanging around, it featured

Still laughing

Like many others, I was saddened to hear of the death of Jimmy Perry last weekend. Comedy writers of his calibre are rare indeed. There wasn’t a great deal that me and my Dad had in common. I had a minor, grudging, appreciation for classical music that I tried not to show, but beyond a shared enjoyment of custard, we mostly couldn’t have been more different in our views on the world. Clearly, anything I decided was cool was pretty much an aberration from his point of view: Clothes, my taste in ‘music’ (“You can’t even understand the words!”) and even haircuts. The slightest hint of bad language on the TV meant it was immediately turned off, and Top of the Pops was endured, but only if the volume was down sufficiently low that I had to guess what the songs were. If that makes it sound like I didn’t like him, then I’m doing him a massive injustice. I loved my Dad, and the last couple of paragraphs (bar the TOTP reference, perhaps) probably apply to many young people as they reach

Jarre live – French, fancy

I went to a rave last week. The music was supplied by a slightly mad French pensioner. Welcome to 40 years of Jean-Michel Jarre. If you were vaguely interested in avant-garde/ambient music, and had an ear for the relatively new-fangled synthesiser sound, you’ll have been impressed by JMJ’s Oxygene album, boldly announcing the Frenchman’s arrival into the big time, late in 1976. Spooky skull-in-a-peeling-planet-earth cover and all, this gently pulsing masterpiece set him off on a career involving numerous awards, spectacular and record-breakingly vast outdoor concerts in unusual places and more the 20 albums. The most recent of these, Electronica 1 & 2, saw him collaborate with an impressive who’s-who of current and veteran musicians, and his first visit to the Top 10 album chart in a quarter of a century. He’s not exactly been growing old gracefully, either. Some of these recent tracks are firmly in the techno/dance/rave category, with relentless beats and decidedly up-te

Clowns are no laughing matter

We’re only a couple of weeks away from Halloween, but the creepy stuff has arrived early this year - in the unlikely form of a clown invasion. If TV has taught me anything, it’s that the end of the civilized world will either involve everything shutting down due to malevolent sentient computers, an alien invasion, or zombies rising from the grave to devour us all. Computers is certainly plausible – my phone is already able to adapt for my fat fingers missing the keys, so destroying mankind is an obvious next step. Aliens? I’ve not see any evidence, but Cumbria has lots of uninhabited bits they could be hiding in, plotting our downfall. As for Zombies – if the end of the world comes from an attack by the undead, at least our destroyers will be smartly dressed, as not many people get buried in jeans and a T-shirt. But are we really heading for Clownpocalypse? If you’ve kept up with the media this week, you could be forgiven for assuming that the end is very nearly nigh, such has

Coffee snobs leave me cold

To chill or not to chill? That is the question. Except some of my colleagues already seem to have the answer when it comes to their precious ground coffee. Before I go any further, I should make it clear that I love a good cup of coffee. I’m a cappuccino man myself, but I’ll forgive you your lattes and espressos, and I’ll bite my lip if you’re a skinny macchiato freak. I’ve even had a bit of barista training, so at the very least I’m permitted to express an opinion on the subject. It’s a national obsession, after all. Every high street features an alternating display of big-name coffee shops, vying for our Grande money and sweetly enquiring “would you like any pastries with that?” Drinking coffee is now as British as a cup of tea, fish and chips and curry (free business idea there– open a restaurant selling that combination and you’ll be rich in no time). I’ve got a coffee machine in my office at work, and some colleagues do too. Sometimes it’s hard to get near the sink in th

Time for the wasps to buzz off

Wasps: wearing the same stripy jumpers as bees doesn’t fool anyone - they’re the soccer hooligans of the insect world. It definitely feels decidedly autumnal this week, which means two scary and unpleasant things are pretty much over; me wearing shorts, and the preponderance of angry, irritable, wasps who want one last fight before winter arrives. If there’s a defined scale of despicability, our waspish chums are right near the top, battling it out for the “pointless but ruddy annoying” award with the daddy-long-legs. These surly, benefit-free, bee impersonators have seemingly no redeeming qualities. This is largely because flying at your face isn’t something that generally starts you off well in the likability stakes. Having the ability to sting and repeating the face-flying thing guarantees it, and also encourages violent retribution. Sitting next to the open window in my office has allowed me to observe their modus operandi first hand, over an extended period of time. I c

Welcome to The Great British Bluff Off

GBBOpocalypse, by the brilliant @jimllpaintit In case you’ve been asleep since 2009, there’s this rather successful baking TV show and everyone’s really upset about it changing channels. Confused? I can help... BBC1’s monstrously successful baking-in-a-tent-with-double-entendres competition, The Great British Bake Off (or GBBO as it’s legion of oven-obsessed fans call it) has been hitting the headlines recently. Currently mid-way through it’s seventh series for The Beeb, devotees have tears running down their baps following the announcement that it’s producers are selling it to Channel 4 after a reputed £75m deal was baked-up. That’s a lot of dough, and presenters Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins have sensationally decided not to follow the money, along with judge Mary Berry. Her fellow judge, Paul Hollywood, announced on Thursday that he was switching channels, but the icing on the cake for this story could yet be that Channel 4 have basically pastry-forked out for a large, empt

Feline like a break from the ads

Adverts - you can’t escape them. How can you avoid the seemingly endless overload of selling? Fear not, for help is at hand... or should that be paw? We live in a pressurised world, where messages imploring you to try, buy, be cooler, fitter, smarter, trendier, cleaner, happier, calmer and a million other things are full-on and in your face, 24/7. From the moment you pick up your phone in the morning, via the radio, TV, your tablet, laptop, desktop, in the newspapers and magazine, on billboards you pass, inside the trains and buses you ride, someone is trying to sell you something. If only there was some kind of temporary respite. A way to feel, even briefly, less pressurised by the constant messages imploring you to consume. Maybe even something to make you feel a bit happier and calm, in amongst the maelstrom of shiny things parading constantly in from of your tired eyes. Perhaps it could involve cats. Cats are nice, right? If the internet has taught me anything (other than

Stuck on the highway to hell

A tricky dilemma for me this week: I’m British so I should enjoy queuing, but it turns out I really, really, don’t. Especially when it should be easily preventable. Compared to some, I have a sweet commute. I leave my pretty village, drive through lovely countryside with views of mountains, skirt around England’s largest lake, then arrive at work, 25 miles later, on the edge of Ambleside. I could be on the M25. Or Basingstoke. Or somewhere in a tube train, hurtling along below ground pressed against a sweaty guy with an annoying cough who bathes in garlic oil. Sure, there are some occasional annoyances; tourists in 4x4s who seem terrified that there’s a dry stone wall close to their car; Rivers and lakes that sometimes get over-keen and try to muscle in on the roads; Idiots in Audis (I don’t need to qualify that one, do I?). But there is one irritation that outstrips all others and I encountered the latest incarnation of it this week, when a set of temporary traffic lights a

On the hard shoulder of the information superhighway

If you ever look back fondly on days gone by, remember this – there was no internet. The past, therefore, sucks big time. Back in June, I penned a column for your edification in which I contemplated the merits of a digital detox, and spending some time offline and away from screens of various sizes. Weak-willed techno-ponce that I am, I didn’t. The cruel hand of fate (or BT, as they’re also known) intervened last weekend, skilfully converting a non-existent phone connection into a full-blown broadband outage simply by sending an engineer to our house. Cut adrift without the internet piped into our home at high velocity, our coastal location and thick walls also means we have no mobile signal either. Bad enough that this occurred over a Bank Holiday weekend, but we also had a couple of days off work too to supersize our time at home. v The horror of being ‘outernet’ struck quickly. We had to go for a walk to be able to report the broadband fault. “Can you give us an alternative

All washed up

Dark days in the Grenville household – our trusty washing machine has gone for the great spin-cycle in the sky. I’ll miss “Washy”. She managed three house moves and a considerable amount of her life without the curved plastic screen on the front, after a careless handyman broke it. But she soldiered on regardless. True, in her later years she did get quite temperamental. Prone to screeching suddenly, rocking violently from side to side and the timer sounding like it was possessed by the spirit of Ringo Starr, we’d known this day would come since around Christmas. Returning home after a medicinal cappuccino last weekend, we discovered Washy refusing to give up her load of towels and pillow cases, instead keeping them safe in a very hot bath of soapy water. Eventually, we had to prize her door off. I’m not sure who was more hurt. Banished to the back yard, she’s currently glaring at us from under a tarpaulin, wondering why she’s been abandoned. I suspect she never really forgav

Falling in love with Olympic Fu fighter

Anyone who says that their success in the swimming pool was because “I used all of my mystic energy” is already high on my list of Olympic heroes. Sorry, Team GB - You’re doing brilliantly at the 2016 Olympic Games , with a bumper crop of medals and lofty position in the standings, but you aren’t a 20 year old Chinese competitor called Fu. The swimmer has tasted success twice in Rio, with 2 bronze medals, in the Women’s 100 metres backstroke, and as part of the Women’s 4x100m medley relay team. Fu Yuanhani has also become an internet sensation via her displays at the games, but not entirely because of her achievements. With The Huffington Post, Guardian, Daily Mail and many other publications featuring her, Fu has won the hearts of millions in her home country and around the world due to her being a charming combination of down to earth, normal, geeky, nerdy, and providing the internet with some genuinely heart-warming and funny moments. With her follower count on Weibo (Ch