You're AVin a laugh

Referendum time. Uncertainty, ignorance and divisive opinion stalk the land as giant billboards loom over us. It's time to decide how we elect our members of parliament.

Or, at least, it's time to decide on the formal voting system for the election of members of parliament. The actual decision making process is far more complicated than the anti-AV camp would have you believe AV is (and that is very complicated indeed, they want you to think that the AV system is as complicated as a maths problem your eleven year old child is asking you for help with, as frightening as the question 'what do you think?' is when asked of any man in the vicinity of a partner and a changing room and, worst of all, that it's foreign, and not funny foreign like 'Allo 'Allo or friendly foreign like a Greek taverna selling chips, no, proper frightening foreign, like a bearded backpacker with a grudge and a burka), consisting as it does of one part what scandal your MP has been implicated in, one part how shifty and sweaty they look on television and one part politics. Next to that, the mechanics of election is an absolute breeze.

The alternatives are the current system of first past the post, and the proposed system of an alternative vote. Previously of course everyone thought that the alternative vote was one for the attention seeking transvestite candidate, but it turns out to mean an alternative to first part the post.

So, with first past the post you essentially vote for the candidate that you think is least likely to screw up the constituency or the country, while cheerfully ignoring the many dull but worthy candidates on the ballot paper.

AV is a much more sophisticated proposition, giving as it does a chance to list the dull but worthy types as your second or third candidate in a show of condescension unparalleled since Victorian industrialists patted small children on the head prior to tossing them under a loom.

We are being told that the danger of AV is that if enough people try to spread their democratic munificence, we'll end up with some bonkers party getting a seat in Parliament. That this is coming from some conservatives is an irony that has not gone unnoticed.

The real challenge of AV is that instead of voting for the single candidate that you find the least repulsive, you have to choke back the gagging reflex and come to terms that you're expected to give your approval to three folk who are actively seeking election.

The media were ready to make much of the pro-AV camp not being able to make the thick British public understand AV? However, the British public have been soaking up the Eurovision song contest for decades now and are quite at home with sophisticated voting systems thank you very much. Moreover, the BBC did a fabulous job of explaining how AV works using biscuits, and showing how the nation's favourite biscuit can be determined using preferences. ITV used crisp flavours as an example and that is all you ever really needed to know about those two broadcasters.

With that angle to the story dead on it's arse, they have dusted off the cliché that politics makes strange bedfellows and show pictures of really quite gruesome types smiling through gritted teeth and explaining that although they are in different parties, they agree that such and such a voting system is the best way forward.

What it actually comes down to is which politician you want to annoy the most and in this case it's not so much first past the post as a dead heat that not even a photo finish will determine. The big political fear is that there will be a very poor turn out and that this will be held up as evidence that the new system, if chosen, does not have a mandate. The reality is that just like AV the public needs more choices, because we're all familiar with different types of voting systems; we want to express a preference for a dance off, a bush tucker challenge or, my favourite, a swimwear round.

Comment on: There's not much of the NHS left to cut

Comment on:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/apr/16/lucy-mangan-nhs-frontline-cuts

The proposed NHS reforms have created more concerned quacks than were heard from the village duckpond when news got round that the Droitwich duckfucker had broken out of Dudley nick and was heading home to indulge his foul fowl habit.

But, really, what did you expect? A new Government gets in and makes changes to the NHS, that’s what Governments do. Political parties rarely give the priorities in their manifestos as standardising the membership regulations for gargoyle fancier societies, bringing back sweets in jars and resurrecting betamax as the video format of choice. No, a new Government decides that they will put the country back on its feet and an essential part of that strategy is reducing the availability of beds. In hospitals.

It’s easy to have a go at the NHS managers, because nobody likes a bloke in a suit who tumesces every time he hears the term ‘vision statement’.

Nurses? Nurses we like. Nurses with their starched uniforms and dedication. Moreover, men of a certain age get a faraway look in their eye and go all unnecessary in the trouser department whenever they hear the theme tune to ‘Angels’. See also: ‘Carry on’.

Surgeons? Surgeons we admire because anyone who has ever tried to put together an Airfix Harrier Jump Jet (buy them now before the Government axe the 1/32 scale armed forces as well kids) and has ended up with a glue-smeared canopy and more bits of the kit stuck to their fingers than are stuck together, or who has tried to fix something by taking the back off it and faffing around with a screwdriver, only to have parts left over when you’ve finished the job, respects anyone who can poke wet, wild and wobbly things and still have a breathing patient and shoes free of bloodstains at the end of it all.

Want to save the NHS some money? Easy. Here’s three ways to make a start.

People responsible for their own injuries have to pay for their own treatment. If you have the money to indulge in a ‘sport’ that involves making a bungee jump using a rope that’s past its twang-by date, you have the money to have your feet sewn back on to your ankles, and you have the money to pay the bonus to get a surgeon who knows the difference between L and R. This measure specifically excludes smokers and drinkers, who paid the tax that built the very hospital that they are being treated in. In fact…if you don’t drink and smoke you should have to pay a National Insurance premium, because others are bravely doing more than their fair share to pay for your iron supplements because you are a bloody vegetarian or something.

Replace the entire ambulance fleet with Toyota pick-up trucks. Is anyone still using these for the purpose they were actually intended for; letting builders, serial killers, illegal immigrant smugglers and sheep rustlers move stuff around under a tarpaulin? So many folk in Libya are using them as mobile machine gun platforms that I’m wondering if the latest versions come with an iPod dock, sat nav and a mount for an M2 Browning.

Look, if somebody can get tossed into the back of one of these things and get driven to a field hospital after being on the wrong end of some horrific atrocity, then surely we could use them in cases where somebody needs to be taken to hospital because they have a headache in their tummy following an ill-judged experiment involving ‘prawn surprise’.

People who believe in homeopathy don’t get any real drugs. Ever. So, you have some hard to diagnose complaint that conventional medicine doesn’t understand…like ennui? Luckily, your local aromatherapy store has just the thing, and a few drops of essential oils in your bath later you are feeling better and, bonus, are irresistible to foxes.

Great, waste your own money, but not mine, and certainly don’t bed block the bloke who has just had a lapse of concentration at his lathe. The bonus is that this can save a shedload of money, because you can extend it to people who have a belief in the healing power of prayer (‘I’m going to prey really hard that your arse reattaches itself after that hunting accident…no luck? Oh dear.’).

Finally – people who appear on the Jeremy Kyle show have their organs harvested. No? Oh, OK, people that appear on Bargain Hunt and Cash in the Attic are on the compulsory pre-mortality register as well.

Review: The Busconductor Hines

Glasgow is a gritty city. There's grit everywhere, like dirty urban sand. Where the hell does it come from? A sound bet is that the abrasive climate of biting wind, driving rain, hail, snow, sleet and the other character forming elements of Scottish weather is eroding the sandstone, granite and, that particular feature of cities, dirty concrete, the same way that the sea grinds down cliffs, seashells and pebbles to make a beach.

Cities have their own brand of dirt. Out in the countryside mud is the dirt of choice. And cow dung, and of course the inescapable plastic bag stuck in a hedge, but mostly mud. In cities, dirt comes in the form of a patina, layered on top of buildings that were, in a fit of optimism, built out of light-coloured stone. This allows for that particular urban effect of the building being streaked with dirt as the result of rain falling through the layers of pollution stacked up above the city sky like soggy strata before finally hitting the buildings as mostly water, but containing a proportion of whatever pollution is popular that day, and trace elements of pigeon.

Years ago, this pollution was generated by the soot from a million dirty coal fires, which Glaswegians huddled round for warmth during Scottish winters (duration: September to May). In modern times, the coal fire has been replaced by the three bar electric fire. It is important that only two bars of this are ever lit, not because of issues of economy but because of that peculiar Scottish belief that you should never feel too cosy or comfortable. This progress means the pollution from domestic heating has been moved out of the city and is all produced, in truly modern style, by one huge coal fired power plant, with a bloody big chimney belching pollution into the sky, situated in what used to be a pretty Glen.

The architecture is specially designed to collect dirt. The bold Victorian monuments to civic pride in the city centre ideal for collecting pigeon shit, the tenements that Glaswegians inhabit are a graveyard for litter, the grit blown by the breezes or gales of the windy elements of the elements into the tenements, piling up in wee drifts in the stairwells, stairwells painted the unhealthy pinks and green of the municipal pallet that consists of colours never found in private homes or healthy bodies. Municipal green is also the colour of the uniform that the bus conductor, Hines, finds so demeaning, ill fitting and uncomfortable, but which he chooses to wear all the time.

Hines, bus conductor, husband and father (and trying heartbreaking hard to be a good and loving husband and a dependable and doting father, though trying less hard to be a good bus conductor), is not healthy. The source of his physical ills are to be found in his tin of tobacco, from which he incessantly rolls his own fags. Essentially the man is forever smoking one enormous, never-ending cigarette but, out of deference to the laws of physics he has chosen to do this in tens of thousands of instalments of home-rolled ciggies.

The source of his psychological ills are a lack of motivation (ironic for somebody working in transport) and a nagging feeling that he's somehow letting his wife and child down.

Hines is anonymous and unnoticed by the travelling population, but he recognises that he is at the centre of, and star of, his own desperate existence, with the power to redeem or damn himself. Hines is a good example of somebody who knows exactly what's required to improve their lives and the lives of this he loves, but who either won't or can't make the effort for reasons that are sometimes a mystery even to him. He's a frustrating character but a principled one, trying in his own way to be honest and maintain some sort of dignity in what can be challenging circumstances (busses). He is flawed, fallible and acutely human.

This is a cross-section of a man’s life, mundane, desperate and even on one occasion amusing – never has the preparation of that traditional Scottish dish of mince and onions been so lovingly described.

Review: Whisky galore

Accents are funny things. Think of a Welsh accent and, unless you’re welsh, you probably think of a blend of coal-dust and valley-dwelling simpleton blended with the sort of ready access to phlegm that is a pre-requirement of pronouncing all those words with too many ‘L’s in them. The Irish accent can be southern, all deedily deedily, or northern, used to shout sectarian claptrap. The English accent is a different proposition altogether. If asked what an English accent was like, most people would affect a posh voice and trot out a home counties drawl, all gymkanas and strangled vowel sounds. But of course Brummie is an English accent too, as is scouse or East Anglian, although that last is too close to folk music to be rightly considered an accent.

The Scottish accent is usually played by its stunt-double, Glasweigan. But the odd thing about the Scottish accent is that the further north you go, the clearer and more musical it becomes until, in the highlands and islands, the soft and marvellous accent is possibly posher and clearer than anything the English can attempt, but with an added musical lilt that lifts it into the realms of the otherworldly, much like the people that softly speak it. Probably this is because when the weather is wild, the people can’t be and while the climate may be foul, your neighbours at least should be civil to you.

What’s quite uncivil is war. Even here in the remotest parts of Scotland, the second world war is making its ugly presence felt, touching even the smallest and remotest of communities. The young men are either going into the services or into the merchant marine, the morale is the island is scrutinized by officious officials from the mainland who consider the combination of abuse, banter and complaint that flows around the hotel bar as more than the simple ABC of conversation but rather a threat to national security and, worst of all, there’s rationing. And not just any rationing, we’re not talking about powdered egg or a lack of curved yellow fruit, no, we’re talking alcohol rationing, in particular, whisky!

Whisky galore describes the drink in such loving detail that it will have you reaching, grasping and gasping, for a dram. The first half deals with the whisky drought on the island and the cruel effects of the rationing on the inhabitants as they euologise about the drink they are denied. The longer the drought persists, the more the topic is discussed and the more acutely the lack is felt. And when the drought breaks, in the form of a genteely shipwrecked cargo ship that is transporting boundless bottles of bounty to America, exported to help the war effort, the transformation is startling as the islanders are soaked in scotch and good humour.

Whisky is the 40% proof life blood of this little community. Nothing gets done without it, especially those activities that require inspiration and moral courage and poetry in the soul, such as wooing, standing up to your mother and composing poetry. Luckily it also assists the more mundane pastimes of sitting down and blethering and, of course, binge drinking.

The novel also offers an interesting take on sectarianism, with one island being protestant and the other catholic and the only resulting tension being that each set is shamed into being devout by the other, believing that an observed lapse would lead to a loss of face. The protestants in particular have a hard time of it ‘keeping the Sabbath’ essentially entailing, as it does, a day of enforced inactivity – something of a religious trial when the activity concerned is a spot of rowing combined with a little light salvage.

‘Galore’ is, in and of itself, such a marvellous word. One simply cannot associate it with anything negative. ‘Nazis galore’ for instance, is a phrase one is unlikely to see. Ah, but whisky galore is glorious, as musical as the language, as wild as the landscape and as rich in flavour as a truly great scotch, with a ruggedness balanced by notes of wet heather, warm peat fires and warmer characters.

Review: The wicker man

By and large, pagans are annoying, combining as they do the unholy trinity of the self righteousness of a religious group that considers itself misunderstood, the smugness of a religious group that feels that they are the true religion and hence are privy to The Answer, and their unique element of dressing and behaving like characters at a live fantasy role playing weekend.

Pagans essentially fall into two groups. The first of these is pagan lite. These are the ones that you see at festivals, who once read a book about ley-lines but have yet to realise that there is more to being a pagan than black mascara, piercings, lots of bad silver jewellery and arseing around at Glastonbury.

These are the sort of people who complained bitterly for years that they were being denied freedom of religious expression because they couldn't get access to Stonehenge during certain festivals and, when English Heritage relented and allowed them access to the site on the solstice, celebrated their religious freedom by sitting cross legged on a rock playing a flute, badly, and guzzling Merrydown, all the while being studiously ignored by the 'real' pagans, that is; blokes in beards and white sheets who claim to be Druids and, because of health and safety regulations, are confined to 'sacrificing' a leg of lamb, all the while wishing for a return to the good old days when they would be up to their elbows in virgin.

The pagans in 'The Wicker Man' are quite a different proposition altogether. Some have beards, some drink cider but all are from what one might call the fundamentalist end of pagan religion.

The plot concerns a staunchly Christian Highland police sergeant who receives a letter reporting that a child has gone missing on a remote Scottish island, famous for it's apples and isolated nature. Sergeant Howie investigates and discovers a closed community practicing the pagan faith and particularly fertility rituals at every opportunity, especially those that require flouncing round a maypole or bonking. The Sergeant does not approve, but al fresco group sex is the least of his problems as he uncovers what he suspects is an island wide conspiracy.

Howie is, literally, a man alone, stranded friendless on an island. Small islands can be weird places, they don't even have to be surrounded by sea. Anyone who has been to a remote farming community, insular and cut off from the world by a sea of wheat or beet will know that they can be peculiar places, home to a peculiar people. That effect is enhanced here because the whole island is a farming community and, surrounded by the Atlantic, there really is no escape.

The sense of menace and tension grows with every turn of the page and every turn of events. Howie's paranoia, justified or not, is ramped up to a degree that the reader starts to feel a little of it themselves. There's a very uncomfortable suggestion that what's happening to Howie could happen just as easily to the reader. Anyone who has stopped in the middle of nowhere to fill up with petrol or ask for directions and felt somewhat uncomfortably cut off from the rest of the world, without even the comfort of a mobile 'phone signal, will recognise the sense of isolation.

Along with this growing sense of peril is one of anticipation. The book is called 'The Wicker Man' and one wonders just who or what the wicker man may be. The revelation is a true moment of horror, possibly only working because the tension has been building throughout the book.

The oddness of the place, a Scottish island that grows fruit and the oddness of it's inhabitants (these are not 'pagan lite' folk) is subtly conveyed. The island's Laird, Summerisle himself, is as suave and charismatic as you could hope for in somebody who may just be behind all the shady goings on, his cool confidence only faltering in his last exchange with Howie.

A disturbing and thought provoking novel that moves from thriller to horror in chilling increments. Not one to be read on a caravanning holiday in the back of beyond, but certainly one to be read.

Comment on: 'Dearly beloved...fight'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/apr/09/arguments-over-wills-lucy-mangan

Wills are a sort of socially acceptable bribery, giving people things so that they might remember you fondly. Or at all. Because let's face it, for many people their greatest achievement is that at least they were never successfully prosecuted for engaging in an act of self-pollution in front of the wet fish counter at Morrisons.

Leaving vast sums to good causes is seen as eccentric, and The English admire eccentricity. God alone knows there's little enough to be proud of if you're English these days, so that's the way to play it, be proud of the little things. The problem is one of prohibitions on pride; one is not allowed to be proud of the things that made England great, like toil, a rigid class system, heavy machinery, the smell of swarfega and the simple application of a water cooled, belt fed machine shotgun to quell a civil disturbance. Now, essentially, one has to rely on made up stuff, like Marmite. Reading about somebody giving away money you had no chance of inheriting has exactly the same comforting sensation as dissolving a rollo under your tongue.

And it's rare, because arranging Revenge From Beyond The Grave is well beyond the capabilities of most people. (Unless you're Doctor Phibes, or Major Gander C.B., T.D.)

Folk have enough trouble organising their lives on a day by day basis, even when they are there to make informed decisions in real time, so for the majority of people death is a disadvantage bordering on disability. Part of the problem may be a sense of perspective, if you are the sort of person who displays grief of operatic proportions just because your supermarket no longer stocks your favourite flavour of packet soup, then chances are you are unlikely to maintain the focus needed to be able to devise a fittingly fiendish plot against anyone you consider ever even slightly slighted you.

And that is what a great will is all about - not the simple option of working out what your grasping relatives really, really don't like, then leaving all your money to the society for the advancement of vegetarianism or something equally bloody pointless and, when the will is read to them, having a photograph of their shocked and sick faces taken and e mailed to you at your.name@afterlife.co.uk (look, if God is an Englishman, it stands to reason that heaven will have a .co.uk address, right?) because hey, you never know, and what fun to see the disappointed faces, like the ultimate satisfying Antiques Roadshow moments, when prim and greedy people are told that their priceless po that Queen Victoria was said to have tinkled in is obviously a fake - but something sweetly complex.

A great will should set a series of tasks and labours for your feckless relatives through which they will learn lessons about life, each other, the true nature of what is valuable and that you can't put a price on happiness, the true test of which will be whether they stab the solicitor to death with his own fountain pen in a spite-fuelled explosion of rage when, with a smile, he reveals that yes, they now inherit...but that all your wealth was spent on financing the quirky tasks recently performed and that the sum total of the estate is now a single saucy seaside postcard found at the back of your desk.

Wills can be a tricky thing, as can making one. Possibly that's why a made up statistic of people who should have wills have yet to make them. It could be that they don't know how to divide their spoils; for instance you want to be fair and hence divide your collection of classic seventies porn mags evenly between your three nieces, but at the same time hate the idea of breaking up the collection. Much more likely is you just think you're immortal. That's why 'make a will...NOW' posters should be placed prominently at places where we have a brush with mortality and death can feel nearer than normal, like a doctor's waiting room, an aeroplane encountering turbulence or the check out line at Ikea.

Hangover

Drinking on a school night is, I have concluded (and I've done my research) a Bad Idea.

No, that's not quite right. Drinking at any time is a good idea. Having an alcoholic beverage is a conscious decision and one is normally in a position to make the right decision about what drink is suitable for the occasion. Basic rule of thumb is: champagne for celebration, scotch for desolation, wine for embrocation and gin for utter inebriation. And tequila, when not in Mexico, if you're a twat.

So, drinking is always a rational choice. But the second glass and onwards can the subject of clouded judgement. What I'm driving at here is that having a hangover and having to go to work is bad.

I'm currently typing this on a train and I have a dreadful feeling that I'm sobering up. Normally, this is a process that happens overnight. You have a few drinks, fall into bed and wake up feeling various flavours of rough, ranging from a sensation of being slightly crinkly round the edges all the way through to requiring what the Victorians would call a 'purge' and what we would describe as needing a small pine tree shoved up the arse and vigerously twisted in order to ever feel fresh again.

Waking up still drunk, but about to sober up at work, is unpleasant. I have the first indications of an impending headache and am feeling the same sense of trepidation that a Polynesian mariner might if he saw fluffy clouds on the horizon that are the heralds of a typhoon.

And sobering up at work is no fun at all. First of all you can't tell anyone. A hangover is not like a proper illness, with everyone making sympathetic noises and asking if it's contagious. It's something that you want to keep to yourself, like an STD, which, ironically, is something one gets because somebody else didn't. It's also something that you want to conceal, and which you have a little paranoid fantasy about. Has anyone noticed that you are behaving oddly. Well, if you eat paracetomol like smarties and drink three vans of cola every morning, nobody will suspect, otherwise, you're busted.

So, obviously the thing to do is try and manage the situation. First thing first, coffee. Even if you don't actually drink the stuff, simply having it near you to draw strength from is a good idea. Unfortunately the place I stopped in at this morning, which is a fantastic little cafe, has their coffee machine set to 'molten', meaning that the stuff will actually be cool enough to drink in about 2016. The cafe itself smelled at once delightful and repugnant. The wondrous smells of bacon and sausage and scrambled egg, the actual taste of which nobody can really appreciate before the day gets into double figures.

It used to be that my contemporaries and I would sport our hangovers like duelling scars. No longer. Possibly that was because in my callow youth hangovers were the result of adventures, rather then an ageing immune system and reaching for the bottle because the news on the telly was just too gruesome.

What hasn't changed is the search for a miracle cure. Hangovers remain the one ailment that rational people believe can be cured through deep fried homeopathy. There's only one cure for a hangover - don't get up until eight o'clock the following evening.

If you are unlucky enough not to be able to follow that treatment, then the second best bet is a carefully calculated dose of medication of your choice that is just short of fatal, combined with wotsits. Essentially what you're aiming for is enough pills to mute the demonic jazz/funk crossover band that are playing a residency in your head, and a snack that will, if not take away the horrible taste in your mouth, will at least replace it with something less likely to make you wonder if you actually rounded off the evening catching badgers and licking their arses.

Certainly, there's a gap in the market for a hangover cure. A can of cola with a couple of paracetomol already dissolved in it, a packet of wrongly flavoured crisps (pickled onion flavoured Monster Munch?) and, for that homeopathic touch, a mole on a stick to lick, because folk law says that licking a mole is good for a hangover, and it certainly won't make your mouth taste any worse.

Topical chocolate

In the run up to Easter, the shops are brimming with chocolate bunnies and eggs. What is it about a Christian event that compels one to eat chocolate?

Take Christmas! Traditionally a time not just for the sort of commercial excess that the government hopes will kick-start the economy but also a time of feasting. A time of year when you are not only accepted but expected to have alcohol with your breakfast, when folk who normally watch their weight can be seen adding double cream to just about every dish they cook, including gravy, and where nothing makes more sense after a huge roast dinner than to serve a heavy fruit pudding, with cream, on fire.

These days I have a glass of something fizzy and a bacon sandwich for breakfast but, when I was a child, my breakfast consisted of as much of the contents of my Cadbury selection box as I could manage before the sugar rush made my hands shake so much I couldn't unwrap any more chocolate.

The selection boxes of my youth seemed huge things, as long as your arm and stuffed with many different sorts of chocolate. If you had siblings, then complicated trades were established as favourites were exchanged. Ultimately of course this was futile, it was all Cadbury chocolate, and each different type of chocolate bar was essentially the same product in different coloured wrappers with either a sporting or space theme.

As important as the chocolate were the games on the back of the box. Expensive toys were left unattended, traditional board games that would, later over Christmas lead to bitter division (has a game of 'Risk' ever ended harmoniously?) were forgotten as one hunched attentively over the back of the box, studiously reading the rules for a turn based game, the object of which was usually to get to the centre of the board, thereby making your opponent cry.

Essential to making progress round the board was the colourful six sided cardboard spinner that was used instead of a dice. You cut the spinner out of the back of the box and pierced its centre with a match stick, making it spin. Luckily, back in the day everybody smoked and so matches were never in short supply. Oddly, you never thought 'let's just use the dice from the Monopoly set that's lying open over there', but always went to the trouble of making the spinny thing. These days you could devote a whole hour on QVC to flogging a bit of coloured card and a spent match as some enthused-to-the-point-of-medicated woman bangs on in a slightly shrieky voice about 'crafting'.

You could almost taste the disgust as the parents looked on and wondered how on earth the 99p selection box had become the star prezzie.

Today's selection boxes seem a bit dull by comparison. I think the way forward must be the retro selection box. I don't mean some sort of crap nostalgia trip requiring you to bid on line for antique chocolate that results in your kid exhibiting a baffled expression on Christmas Day when confronted with their Six Million Dollar Man selection box with the contents two decades past their use-by dates. I mean a home made selection box!

All you need is a load of chocolate bars, some cardboard, pens, imagination and a boundless disregard for modern manners and equality legislation.

First things first, the chocolate. You'll need to combat the problem of the shrinking snack. It's not just your imagination, nor the fact that your hands have got larger as you have grown older; chocolate bars are smaller than they used to be, both by dimensions and weight. So, you need to find a way to upgrade the chocolate from bite sized to a respectable portion. The best way is of course a saucepan and some new moulds, but if you're in a hurry glueing two bars back to back using melted chocolate will do the job just as well.

Wrappers should be scanned, enlarged and then printed onto grease proof paper prior to being used to wrap your chocolate bar. Be sure to remove any product information that is not in English and may offend. This is especially important for any product information about a chocolate bar in printed in Arabic. Chocolate may be many things, but the snack of choice of desert dwelling people is not one of them. Replace any nonsense about daily allowances of fat or sugar or amphetamine or whatever with a single letter of the alphabet inside a gold circle. Do not explain why you do this. Children will automatically scent a competition of some sort and start hoarding wrappers. This means you can also remove the 'keep Britain tidy' symbol, your wrappers will not be blowing about in gritty concrete shopping centres, they are going to be safely in a box under some child's bed.

Next up, the selection box. Pick a theme; Christmas is always popular but is it Christmas under the sea, or on the moon, or is it tied to a popular television character, like Brucie? Up to you but if you're stuck for inspiration, you can't go wrong with a picture of Santa in a rocket ship. Ticks all the (selection) boxes.

Right, now the game. It's got to be simple, it's got to turn based and it's got to allow for reversals of fortune and for the lead to change for reasons other than a simple throw of the dice, or rather spin of the twirly thing. Pick your theme; 'lunar space race', 'race car race', 'catch the gypsy' and so on and design your course, remembering to place the all important forfeit squares, such as 'your joke about being able to see some sort of alien ship approaching earth backfires as you spark mass panic across the globe, go back two squares', 'you are suspected of using an illegal diffuser, miss a turn' or the classic 'you arrive at the illegal travellers encampment in the dead of night, but have forgotten your petrol and matches, go back to start'.

Finally the spinner, numbers or symbols or both? Certainly it's numbers for simplicity but symbols add a certain something to the gameplay. I favour the seven sided spinner with a drink symbol meaning that if it comes up, it's time to knock off for a glass of fizz. Remember, you can have that appearing as many times as you like, seven being the ideal in this case.

Sweet Charity

With red nose day once more done and dusted, it’s good to see that various ingenious ways were being used to raise money for a good cause. There’s charity dancing, charity music and charity books.

There are very few words, I suppose, that cannot be enhanced by adding the term ‘for charity’ after them.

‘Dogging’, though, is one of them.

The Glasgow Boys audio tour

The Royal Academy is really doing a good audio tour these days and this one was no exception, making much use of Scottish artist Barbara Rae, essentially ensuring one Scottish voice at least to disquiet the London gallery goers. What really sets a good audio tour apart is the use of music and sound effects. Music, I think, would be a particularly good way to make that other reason to visit galleries - cruising for potential new boyfriend/girlfriend material - a lot easier, if one were to key in the appropriate number for the painting and then dance to the music that precedes the commentary. Like birds or badgers, nothing gives a signal about the suitability of a mate more than how you throw some shapes.

As good as music is, sound effects are the new must have for audio tours, to make it a completely immersive experience. The tennis paintings was glorious opportunity to exploit this. It could really have benefited not from the grunts and whooshes that one associates with the modern day game but with the 'pock', 'pock' of a genteel rally and the gurgle gurgle of Pimms splashing into a glass full of ice and hedgerow, not to mention the swish of crinoline and crease of linen

There should, though, be something on the audio tour for every painting, although I realise that this might result in a long tour. It would be good if the owners of the paintings on loan from a private collection had sixty seconds to explain why they bought the painting in question. With luck it would be a little more interesting than 'an investment' or 'the shade of blue really goes with an armchair I have'.

These small deficiencies, especially the idea of composing a score to visit the gallery to, or even something I experienced in the Whitney in New York City, where a composer had produced a 'sound response' to a painting, makes me wonder if it is not time that the audio guide market was opened up. With the ubiquity of the iPod and iTunes podcasts, might it not be simple enough for early visitors to the exhibition to go, get the catalog and put together a podcast, each chapter either an explanation of the painting (resisting the temptation to just make everything up and also resisting the temptation to pretend to be the owner of a piece on private loan who explains that he bought the piece because he likes to 'self pollute' when looking at it, not just when at home but especially when he visits it on public display and he sees somebody listening to a bootleg audio tour on their iPod turning round with a growing sense of suspicion and alarm) or, better yet, a soundtrack to the thing. Oh, and some banging tunes to groove to.

The Glasgow Boys

You may have assumed, quite reasonably, that the Glasgow Boys, capitalised, is a reference to a collection of Scottish blokes who hang about in pubs drinking pints of heavy and subsist mostly on a diet of scotch pies, Irn Bru and chips. Not so.

The Glasgow Boys were instead a school of painters that worked around the turn of the century, who shared a couple of characteristics. The first was that the art establishment of the time would not accept them, leading them to establish their own school, the second was that they congregated in a city in Scotland that, without wishing to give too much away, wasn't Edinburgh.


Looking round the recent exhibition at the Royal Academy, there's precious little to suggest that they actually spent much time in Glasgow. This is fair enough, it's not a city known for it's rolling vistas and dazzling available light. This is why many of the paintings were done in the highlands or, that favourite location of many a Scotsman, abroad.

The audio guide was at great pains to point out that the Glasgow Boys were not impressionists (impressionists in this context meaning a school of painters working at the turn of the last century rather than folk who can do a passable Cary Grant impersonation). Right. So. Just to check, they are painting at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century, were influenced by the Japanese woodcuts that were available in Europe for the first time, romanticising the rural poor, doing portraits of ordinary people rather than commissions of wealthy worthies and capturing the emergence of the middle class. But they are not impressionists, despite producing more images of gardens than you find in a lawnmower catalog? Sorry, but they were clearly impressionists, or at least shared 99% of their DNA with impressionists. You don't have to be French to be an impressionist, although it plainly helps.


There were some extraordinary works on show. 'A Highland funeral' depicts a collection of dour looking Scottish agricultural labourers huddled round the front door of a cottage in the gloaming, the only daylight a brilliant slash of golden sunset high in the sky. Then you notice the wee coffin supported by a couple of kitchen chairs and your next breath catches in your throat. Of all the works on display this was the one that seemed to provoke the strongest reaction, the little crowd that was always in front of it a reflection of the grim little gathering depicted. Intrusion into private grief is something that newspapers have made commonplace, long lens shots of funerals of celebrities or the victims of tragedy or malice being the sad staple of the tabloids, but this is not an image to be glanced at before you turn over to be confronted by an ad for sat navs, the painting was huge and daunting and, like grief, filled the room.

Although hugely impressive, the exhibition was about an awful lot more than dead bairns and weeping celts. There was a fabulous wee portrait called 'Hard at it' depicting the artist on the beach, shaded by an umbrella and labouring at his easel. There were also many pictures of Scottish landscapes, sharing the common characteristic of sporting a coo somewhere in the landscape. Scottish folk love a coo in their landscapes and if you were to have even a chance of selling your depiction of hills or fields or streams or trees, it better have a coo somewhere in it.

Like every successful Scot, the key decision in attaining that success was to get the hell out of Scotland. Hence there are dazzling pictures of Europe and of the Mediterranean. These excursions must have had the Boys sending out for fresh paint, light blue not previously having been a colour they had any call to use.

The boys tackled what are now traditional subjects on the familiar curve of moving from challenging the establishment to become the establishment. Influenced by French painters, they painted farm labourers. Now of course galleries are full of folk in smocks passing round the scrumpy, pulling up sprouts and shaking the sod from their boots, but back then it was avaunt guard to paint a portrait of anyone that wasn't paying you good money to do so.

As well as folk toiling in fields, the Boys painted folk toiling in their gardens, both sweating over shovels and, more importantly, sweating over a service as they played tennis matches. The painting of the tennis match is astonishing, and not just because watching a woman play tennis in what is, essentially, a ball gown is fascinating. Suffused with light (it depicts a garden in France, not Govan), it shows a young woman and a bloke having a knock up while the rest of the gather party sit idly by and watch. You can almost smell the wine and cheese. Best of all the ball boy, dressed in a suit and sporting some rather fetching knickerbockers, is smoking. Now that I'd like to see at Wimbledon.

One minor annoyance was that the catalog had sold out. Luckily, the Kelvinhall Galleries in Scotland, where the exhibition had originated, still had some of theirs left so thanks to the wonders of mail order, I have my catalog. In this case, it was more important than usual to get one, as it is about the only way that you'll get time to enjoy an uninstructed view of the paintings. The gallery was packed to the rafters, it made the Summer Exhibition look depopulated. There were no incidents of gallery rage that I could see (gallery rage being when somebody is so upset that they tut audibly), but I was affected by that precursor to a tut; unkind thoughts about the raincoat of the chap who had just obscured my view.

Finally, the last gallery is worth a mention. The entire room was painted gold. I'm not sure whose idea it was to decorate a gallery like a hip hop superstar's toilet, but the effect was amazing, the whole room looked like one enormous gilded frame. Fantastic idea.