China's Shiny Button

At this point in the F1 season in 2009, Jenson Button was leading the championship. Fast forward a year and the story is the same. But what's more surprising is that Button now has 2 wins driving for McLaren whilst Hamilton has none. Lewis is becoming so desperate to emulate his older (and wiser?) team-mate, he's even taken to growing a daft beard. Give it up Lewis - you look like you rested your chin on a freshly painted table.

China saw not only Jenson win again, but the Red Bull team once more score a pole (this time with Vettel) only to see it slip away, with Seb only managing 6th and Webber 8th. And what a race it was - rain coming and going and two safety car periods, plus the new Red Baron (step forward Fernando.. Oh, you already have) getting a start that was just a bit too nippy for the stewards. Mind you, 4 pit stops and a drive-through penalty still saw him finish in 4th, so it wasn't exactly a wasted afternoon. Hamilton and Vettel tried to drive along the same bit of pit lane at the same time and have been reprimanded by the stewards. As this doesn't actually mean a penalty of any sort, I guess they had to stand in the corner of the naughty room for a bit without talking and think about what they did. Or something.

Massa is probably still wondering what the hell happened when naughty 'Nando decided to overtake him on the pit-lane entry. Let's face it - even a clairvoyant wasn't going to see that one coming.

Button again showed his level head by staying out on the slick tyres in the early rain and successfully managing his tyre wear whilst those around him started having problems. Cheeky super-slow driving before the restart after a safety car period went un-penalised and a small off-track excursion with 5 laps to go proved unable to curb him either, although the last few laps saw Hamilton reel him in, but by then both of them looked like they were driving on a skid-pan, or attempting to avoid the pot-holes on an average British A-road, so knackered were their intermediate tyres.

Honourable mention to another driver outperforming his supposedly better team mate. Nico Rosberg's stock is now sky high following the fourth race of out-qualifying and then finishing ahead of his team mate, one M. Schumacher. Not many of Schuey's former team-mates can say that. Come to think of it... can ANY of them say that? 3rd place for Nico saw him emulating Button's knack for clever use of his tyre choices and leaves him second in the Championship too. Nice work, fella!

So Jenson's back to the front. At the end of 2008, would you have said Button would have a championship under his belt with one team, and now be leading it with McLaren against Alonso in Ferrari, Schumacher and everyone else? I'd have laughed at you. A lot.

Mind you, I'd probably still laugh at you now.... but not because of Formula 1...

Hello to Claire, who has become follower number 4 of this blog and wants to get married at one of the poles (my Geography isn't very good. Nor is my memory. I can't remember if it's North or South). You're bonkers, but I like your style! Welcome.

(A nice new 3CD box set called 12"/80s: Electro Pop dropped through my letterbox last week. Jolly good it is too. There are quite a few I've never heard before, including the 12" version of Landscape's Einstein A Go Go. Way cool. Right now, The Art Of Noise are Close To The Edit. Hey!)

A fisful of change at the shops

A recent day out reminded me how much the retail experience has altered during my lifetime – and it’s not all good. I could stop typing this, and buy a fridge, in a matter of seconds. The shops are shut and it’s 9pm, but I could still place the order and arrange delivery. I haven’t got to wander round a white-goods retail emporium trying to work out which slightly different version of something that keeps my cider cold is better. It’ll be cheaper, too. But in amongst the convenience, endless choice and bargains, we’ve lost some of the personal, human, touches that used to make a trip to the shops something more than just a daily chore. Last weekend, we visited a local coastal town. Amongst the shops selling over-priced imported home accessories (who doesn’t need another roughly-hewn wooden heart, poorly painted and a bargain at £10?) was one that looked different. It’s window allowed you to see in, rather than being plastered with stick-on graphics and special offers calling ...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

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