Birthday cards

There are certain reliable images that you can have for birthday cards. Cake is good, so is booze, and some kind of gaily wrapped prezzie is always an acceptable image.

Then you get the cards that break down on gender lines, or rather gender stereotypes.

For women, shoes feature a lot. As do those amusing cards featuring either a black and white photograph of some 1950’s housewife and an amusing caption along the lines of ‘Daphne knew she was growing old when she only got off her tits on ketamin at the weekend’, or a cartoon of a woman and a caption about binge drinking or binge chocolate eating being more fun than anal.

For men, sports are where you can traditionally turn. Vintage golfing images or images of footballers in long shorts and longer moustaches from the days when they were happy to play for half a crown a week and people thought ‘superinjunction’ was something to do with Crewe railway station.


Vintage is still big business, taking a vintage travel poster and slapping ‘happy birthday’ on it usually works a treat, because men, by and large, are genetically programmed to like trains, boats and young women in flimsy dresses drinking alcohol in foreign parts far removed from the restraining influences of vicars, aunts or anyone who knows your reputation.

Browsing the racks there’s another sort of card that appears as a genre – the image of a sports car racing the steam train. The sports car is usually in the foreground (winning the race?) with the train in the background.


This is the perfect card for a gent. He may not be getting a train set or a sports car for his birthday, but he’s got a card that shows both and he can imagine himself behind the wheel or on the footplate, as his temperament dictates.


Quick quiz – if you were presented with such a card, would you consider yourself to be driving the car, driving the train or as a passenger on the train? And what about the person who gave you the card?

It depends to an extent on the illustration. Is one alone in the car or does one have a lady companion? Does the train look like it might have a really good restaurant service?

a) I am driving the car. I have personal freedom and I like the smell of petrol. And I don’t mind paying lots for it. And I quite like petrol garage sandwiches. And porn.

b) I am a passenger on the train. I appreciate the idea of swishing through the English countryside knowing that, according to all the books I have read and films I have seen, it is only a matter of time before I am embroiled in a murder or an act of espionage. I will use that time to drink an entire bottle of claret.

c) I am the driver of the train. I am not on strike because it is a steam train and I am an enthusiast. I am also not on strike because as well as coal I am feeding into the boiler any evidence from the bank raid it took to fund the restoration of the steam engine.

d) This is the one I always go for. I am racing in the car to intercept the train at the next station, its final stop before it crosses the border. On boarding the train I will take my seat in the restaurant car and smile to myself as my car, now driven by a close associate who just happens to be a world class racing driver, sets off with some vile foreign agents in pursuit. The secret plans are safely in my possession, the wine list looks acceptable, my sleeping berth is a double and a woman who looks JUST like Gillian Anderson has just taken the last available seat in the restaurant car, opposite me.

I concentrate more on the idea that the woman looks JUST like Gillian Anderson rather than the fact that the seat opposite me was the last one to be taken.

Of course, thanks to a section of society that likes to take things that are great, and turn them into things that are shit, the last restaurant car on a regular service is now a thing of the past. Apparently first class passengers will now be served ‘airline means’ at their seats. I can see how this is cheaper than running a kitchen and providing tablecloths, service, china and civilisation, but it was interesting to note how everyone pronounced the words ‘airline meal’ in a certain tone.

I am sure that in business class and first class travel on certain airlines it’s possible to still get a decent meal with china and food you could identify. Personally, I love the idea that when you fly you get little trays of plastic with food in them, plastic cutlery, and sachets of salt and sachets of sauce. It adds to the novelty and, to be fair, nobody expects a working kitchen at 35,000 feet. But a train, a train is different, on a train the expectation rather than the exception should be a dining car.

(It’s got to be time to fight back and here’s how. First Class picnics. OK, you know your flight or your train or whatever. Waiting for you at check in or the ticket barrier will be your First Class picnic. A box of delights that will contain all you need to make your journey a transport of delight. For trains you get a small linen tablecloth designed to fit across your table or seatback tray, along with china and cutlery. For aeroplanes the only concession is plastic cutlery and that your bottle of decent red comes in the form of a dozen or so tiny plastic sachets that you can take through security.)

What the card does not show is the motor car racing a steam train across a level crossing – or trying to. A few tonnes of athletic metal and flesh vs several hundred tonnes of flaming, smoke-breathing steam train and heritage? Inside illustration: a single wheel, on fire, rolling down the road.

Say cheese

What, I wonder, would cause the most unease if, during a dinner party, you revealed that you had purchased an artefact central to that dinner party second hand on eBay? Charity shops, of course, won’t take any kind of food processor or food preparation gear because no matter how well scrubbed, there’s always the danger that listeria bacteria lurks in the blender.

I reckon that a second hand barbeque has to be up there. God knows the grill of mine is ‘seasoned to perfection’, that is, has not been cleaned properly in months, my cleaning routine consisting of sterilising the thing with flame from the gas burners, relying on the gristly globules to burn themselves off and chipping off the worst of the smoking residue with a rusty prong.

But I think that the number one device that would case second-hand fear would be a fondue maker. (Maker? Machine? Heater?) It is that perfect storm of dairy in an unnatural form (melted…ugg), kitch association (if a couple own a fondue kit (Kit! That’s it, it’s a kit!) then it doesn’t automatically mean they also own a sauna and are swingers, but it’s a safe enough assumption), and the ghosts of a thousand sad cheesy meals that might have been cooked using that kit.

It also poses the fundamental question, what sort of person sells their fondue kit, and what sort of person buys it? The solution to the last question is – somebody who has invited you to dinner thinking you are the sort of person who likes fondue. Prey that that is the extent of their gross character misjudgement and that they haven’t assumed you also like ‘foudue’.

Volcano skies

Another volcano has erupted over Iceland, causing budget airline owners to go on television and talk about ash, explaining how it is more important that they be able to fly incredibly complicated and fragile machines through volcanic ash clouds in order to ensure stag and hen parties get to their destination than it is to ensure the safety of anyone living underneath the flight path.

If aeroplanes can fly through clouds of volcanic ash with no ill effect, how come you’re not allowed to smoke in the toilets of these same aeroplanes? I mean, if they are robust enough to stay aloft in a cloud of volcanic ash, I presume that a single B&H sparked up in the bog is not that much of a big deal, right?

The volcano has once again spoiled ‘the big getaway’. Are we to take from this that volcano’s are seasonal? It even meant that President Obama had to leave Ireland early. Didn’t Air Force One visit Europe last year when there was volcanic eruption going on? Possibly volcanic eruption is the ultimate deterrent to stop other aeroplanes sneaking up on it or something.


Looking out the window, I’m not sure if I’m looking at a volcano sky or just a normal vivid, polluted sunset. Apparently when Krakatoa erupted the skies were crimson for weeks. If anything, the skies seem clear of anything remotely resembling a special effect. Which is a good thing, I’ve seen the pictures from Iceland and have no desire to spend day after day scooping sooty talc off my lawn.

Certainly, in terms of stopping air traffic an erupting volcano has done the trick once again. The secret volcano base is, of course, the lair of choice for the supervillan. Usually however their plot to bring travel chaos to the civilised world involves lasers, missiles, computer hacking and at least one tank of piranha fish rather than a straightforward eruption.

What’s interesting is that the people stranded at the airports seem to kip under red Cross blankets or the sort of tin-foil sheets used to wrap marathon runners or chicken. Between the climate and industrial unrest, I’m amazed that every airport doesn’t have a thousand of those foam camping mats stockpiled in a room somewhere. Air travel is supposed to be romantic and glamorous. Christ alone knows that the budget airlines are doing their best to dispel this image by charging you for a sandwich on a sixteen hour flight, but checking in the passenger’s suitcases so they a) have to fly with you but b) don‘t have a change of clothes when they wake cold and gritty on the airport floor is either supremely stupid or the sort of evil genius that is deserving of an undersea volcano base.

Getting the wind up

As I hammered yet another chock into the ground in an attempt to stop my fenceposts resembling a metronome in the wild winds earlier this week, I counted myself lucky that I was at the benign end of the blow.

This, of course, has been something of a crisis week for wind. In unlucky America twisters have been leaving a trail of very-much-not-CGI devastation on a grand scale across some huge States. At the same time winds have been blowing volcanic ash from Iceland towards Europe and towards Europe’s runways in particular.

The North of the country got the worst of it and listening to traffic reports brought home how vulnerable to climate the power and transport infrastructure is. As well as power cables being brought down cutting supplies to homes and railway trains, bridges, roads and passes were closed to high-sided vehicles, cars with trailers, motorbikes and – get this – pedestrians! They weren’t even trusting people to be able to cling onto the safety rail and make it to the other side of the bridge.

Also cancelled were the ferries that serve the Scottish islands

In this busy world, a lot of busy people seek isolation. But they seek it on their terms. Connected via their smartphone to their friends and by rolling news to world events, the idea of ‘turning off’ can mean a relaxing stroll somewhere with no mobile signal, or ‘Norfolk’ as it is commonly known.

However, it must take a particular sort of person not to be made anxious when the power goes down and the wind is shrieking. ‘Scottish’, is one description ‘Possessing a wood burner and an Aga’ is another.

Guinness, The President and Irish credentials

After The Queen turned her nose up at a pint of the black stuff last week, you can almost imagine the whoops of delight in the Guinness marketing department as both Prsident Obama and the First Lady got stuck into a pint of Guinness in Irish pub in Moneygall.

The President then did his bit for the Irish tourist board by explaining that the stuff tastes a lot better in Ireland than it does in America. This is true. Best Guinness I ever had was in Castletownbere, in McCarthy’s Bar.

But it probably won’t endear him to the Orish bar owners in America, of which there are a lot. Certainly in NY City there appears to be a city ordinance that every block must contain at least one bar with a neon shamrock in the window.

But it was good to see him actually drink the stuff. Most politicians just take a half inch out of the top and leave the rest. Looking at the President on telly, it appears he downed a third of a pint in one gulp. If he had then wiped his mouth with his hand and commented ‘Christ, I needed that!’ then the scene would have been complete.

Also, having just rid the world of Bin Laden, the man deserves a pint, no?

What’s obvious from the telly is the tremendous personal charisma the guy has. Could it be that the American President is beloved? Certainly is in Ireland.

Random notes on the NHS

Hospitals, big ones especially with their cafes, post offices, different buildings, people hurrying from building to building, inhabitants and visitors, are like villages.

There are four distinct tribes that can be observed around the hospital village. The first is the doctors, wearing their passes round their necks like an identity-concious Mr T. The second are the swiggers. Ever wondered why the makers of fizzy drinks make so much money? It's because of all the hospital staff swigging the stuff. Every second person is walking around with a bottle of coke or seven up in their hand. Obviously the long hours and need to keep concentration mean that you need sugar and caffeine.

The third tribe are the smokers, or rather, the stupid smokers. The whole village is a non smoking area. Never mind not being able to smoke in the buildings, you can't smoke in the car park or anywhere on the premises. Not that the signs saying this stop the smokers from doing just that. Presumably they are too stupid to read the no smoking signs, just as they are too stupid to read the health warning on the cigarette packers, possibly the reason they are in hospital in the first place. Or maybe they are hear for another reason. Certainly the heavily pregnant lady I saw pulling on a fab outside the pregnancy unit could have been here about her pregnancy, some sort of smoking related problem, or maybe she was being tested for being stupid enough to smoke while pregnant.

The final tribe are the fatties. Leaving the hospital last night I had to squeeze past a family of three that filled the corridor. There was mum, daughter and son. Each of them looked amazingly overweight, the kids looked exactly like the fat kids hat Gary Larson draws in his 'Far Side' cartoons, they had that kind of fat where their elbows where starting to lose definition in the fat of their arms. The kids were not even teens yet I'm guessing, probably mum was booking them into the cardio clinic.

Driven to distraction

The thing about being off work is that you get to be around and about during the day when you normally wouldn't be. What the bloody hell is everyone doing driving round in the middle of the day? Going to Tesco by the look of it. The sheer volume of cars constantly on the road is staggering. The thing is that with the global economic meltdown, folk will be hanging on to their old motors, but will still, presumably, be driving like loonies. The whole thing will be like the shittest version of the Goodwood festival of speed ever.

Night thoughts

I once read in a Calvin and Hobbs strip that the reason the night is dark is so that people can worry free of distraction. Too bloody right. For reasons far to complex to go into (I am cutting down on the amount I drink and hence not sleeping as soundly as was my habit), I've woken up once or twice recently in the dead of night, too early to do anything useful like get up and potter, too late to put on the light and read oneself back to sleep. My main occupation during these periods has been to have thoughts as dark as the world outside my tightly drawn bedroom curtains.

Dark as it might be, it's not as dark as the sleepless hour I once spent in Norfolk, where the nearest light pollution comes from an oil rig off the coast of Denmark. The benefit can be seen on a moonless, cloudless night, when the upturned bowl of the heavens is both beautiful and terrifying and makes you wonder if somebody slipped something into your soup or whether all that can actually be real.

If you're not quite awake, then its time to exploit that lazy half of your mind that loafs around, occasionally getting you into trouble with Fraudian prompts. Your subconscious forms the function of your own personal Wikipedia meets IMDB. It's true, if you can manage to just keep the right side of consciousness, so that you have control over your thoughts but can keep the door to your subconscious ajar, then faces, names and events from the past long consigned to annoying anonymity can be accessed or, even better, made up. The only drawback is that anything thus accessed seems to fade along with the morning dew, leaving one with an unexplained nostalgic melancholia that one normally passes off as an unusual reaction to last night's take away.

But the night is really made for worrying and for magnifying fears. In the daylight hours that creaking garden gate might mean that some well meaning friend is dropping by with a chilled crate of some fresh and cheeky white that he is too excited about to delay trying, who doesn't like to drink alone and who has brought along his portable digital radio, already tuned to Test Match Special. Set up the deck chairs, throw away the tasting notes and get ready to have opinions almost as ill informed as those of Geoff Boycott.

At night however, the creak is a different proposition. At the very least, it's a concern that a squeaky hinge means you have one more chore for the weekend, only slightly offset by the cheering thought that you'll get to sniff WD40 again, perhaps the most pleasing aroma to be associated with anything mechanical since Phillipa Forrester quit Robot Wars. Going up the sliding scale of irrational worries we have concerns about midnight badgers and, if you decide to go straight to paranoid loopyness, werewolves.

Night thoughts travel in packs. If you're not careful they can crowd out any rationality. The best strategy is to try and displace them with something. Erotica is the blunt instrument of derailing negative thoughts, but even then you need to be careful, as in the dead of night pleasing thoughts about the check out girl at the local grocer can turn to the dread concern that you forgot to buy olive oil the last tine you were there. Practical thoughts, such as convincing yourself that now is just the right time to unknot that tricky issue you have been trying to think through at work, are a mistake, as if you do hit on a solution you'll never remember it and if you don't, then the realisation that the project is irrevocably fucked is not going to help matters.

The solution is to be ruthlessly positive. The only thing that irrational night thoughts understand is irrational sunny thoughts. Corny but effective. You probably won't remember exactly what you were thinking about when you wake up the next morning, but you may well spend the morning suffused with a quite irrational sense of well being. Much to the annoyance of everyone around you.

Branded for life

It's not surprising that the economic prosperity of your town, village, hamlet or postcode can be linked the sort of shops you have on your high street and the number of boarded up windows among them. What might be more of a surprise is that it is a sign of economic prosperity when you have a KFC in your post code rather than the sort of fried chicken shop that aspires to be a KFC. Rule of thumb - when you see a Dallas Fried Chicken place open, it's time to worry and when you see something called Tennessee Fried Chicken set up shop, it's time to Google 'estate agents' and when you see your first 'Alabama Fried Stuff' it's time to Google 'petrol bombs' and reclaim your neighbourhood.

Why this snobbery though? Presumably they fry chicken in places in America other than Kentucky, and probably do it quite well. Any Southern state will probably be no stranger to fried fowl. What might be more worrying is an incongruity such as 'Vermont fried chicken', although that's more intriguing than anything else, standing as it does next to 'Paris rolled sushi'. (Yet who could resist nipping into a place called 'Alaska Fried Blubber', and asking for seal and chips?).

Where does this brand snobbery come from? There is a genuine gap in the market between the global brands that dominate food and drink - peddling mass produced stuff that's made in a giant factory that, if the conveyor belt were to be set up in a slightly different way, could probably just as easily knock out tractor tyres - and the artisan brewed beverage or humanely reared (and presumably Swiss clinic slaughtered) beefburger. This is the gap plugged by local or national, but not international, brands, that try and look like their global step-parent.

If that's the case we're in trouble because it means that coke is an aspirational drink. (it's always coke that the local competition seeks to emulate, never pepsi. I think this is because coke is the more readily recognised international brand and comes in those jolly red and white cans and iconic bottles whereas pepsi...isn't that the one Michael Jackson drank? Best example of a local cola I ever tried was 'Corsica cola' which actually tasted way better than coke).

Today, the competing beverages such as Panda Pop or whatever have been more or less replaced by supermarket own brand value versions of cola, lemonade and so on. If you want to find local competition you have to try independent local shops and even then you're more likely to come across the global brand, but the foreign version that's been brewed up abroad. And it does taste different. Which is odd because the supposed strength of a global brand is that you can drink a coke in Thailand and it'll taste the same as it does in Manchester. Of course that's rot, the recipe for fizzy pop is syrup, gas and water but when the water comes via a bucket from a river where children are washing goats upstream, then the third world version is doing to have a special tang. And that's something we should be thankful for.

But it's odd that rather than celebrate diversity, the preferred business model appears to be to emulate uniformity. Possibly this is because you're more likely to go into a place that looks sort of familiar because, having been there once, you're unlikely to return. Luckily, the other aspect of the business model for these places is to stay open after the pubs are shut and sell chips to very drunk people.

Maybe this snobbery can be traced back to the emergence of chain burger places on the high street. Prior to the arrival of macdees the national chain was Wimpy. Crockery, cutlery, waitresses. It could never last. About seven seconds after the burger chains started to establish themselves the emulators arrived; 'starburger' being just one. Starburger was where you went to eat if, horror of horrors, if your town was not considered worthy to have a chain burger place. You could sit in starburger and pretend you were in a chain burger bar, you could even litter if you wanted to give it that authentic feel.

What's kind of sweet is that these places seek to emulate but not duplicate their inspirations. It's not like pirate goods at a dodgy car booter, presumably because it's harder to pack up a restaurant when trading standards come knocking than it it to bundle your fake trainers in a suitcase and leg it, and possibly because anyone considering doing this has learned their lesson from the sub plot of 'Coming to America'. What would be good to see is this approach applied to 'fake' goods. Who of us could resist a tee shirt branded 'Nikf'?

Of course, the snobbery could just arise from these places being patronised by the sort of people that cause the reflex unkind thought: 'chav' or the considered unkind thought: 'morlocks'.

Brands, marketing and a right royal thirst

Brands are important. Global brands protect their image fiercely, cracking down on shoddy, knock-off counterfeit versions of their products that are knocked up in sweat shops by children, with trading standards officers swooping or swooshing on market stalls and car-booters and confiscating trainers, hats and whatever else they think will make good Christmas presents for those members of the family they do not like, but feel obliged to gift to. (They never, however, drink any of the confiscated counterfeit booze, although they do use it to clean the grease off their bike cogs).

Kinky Friedman once wrote that the three most recognisable brands in the world were Elvis, Jesus and Coca Cola. Two blokes famous for making comebacks and a fizzy drink as the most recognised brands globally? Probably true. I reckon more people have heard of Elvis than Microsoft, even today.

But lets allow for some regional input here. The Queen. That’s a pretty famous brand in the UK. So much so that when one says ‘The Queen’ one instantly knows which Queen you mean. You don’t have to bother with the full ‘Queen Elizabeth II’ title and then bang on about dominions and being defender of the faith. The Queen is the longest serving monarch alive today and as such, pretty much defines the brand. Other European countries have royal families that work, go on bicycles and are seen as ‘modern’. The Commonwealth is lucky enough to have a monarch who realises that subjects have certain expectations of their monarchy and works hard to fulfil it.

Possibly one of the reasons The Queen is so embedded in the consciousness is the ubiquity of her image. She’s on more than tourist tat souvenir tea towels; she’s on coins, currency and stamps, she’s everywhere.

Also a dominant brand is Guinness. Other stouts are available but chances are that if you walk into a pub and fancy a pint of the black stuff, you order a Guinness, not a pint of stout. The Guinness image probably runs The Queen a close second in terms of penetration of the national consciousness, ask people to picture a Guinness and they will instantly picture a pint glass of black beer with a white head, possibly with a shamrock in it if the barman is a tit or a crudely drawn cock if he is a wag. Other images associated with the brand are baffling but universally acknowledged as ‘clever’ tee vee adverts, as well as a huge back catalogue of ‘classic’ adverts for the brand, dated by their exuberant claims for the benefits of drinking the stuff. Advert: makes you strong, gives you iron, there’s a baby in every bottle. Reality: like all alcohol it keeps the working classes pissed and poor.


These two great brands came head to head yesterday as The Queen visited the Guinness brewery in Dublin. The brewery has a museum inside it – ‘the Guinness experience’ – and I have to say it’s well worth a visit if, hitherto, you thought that ‘the Guinness experience’ was the monumental bowel movement you experience the morning after a night of binging on the stuff. You see how it’s made and then end the tour in ‘The Gravity Bar’, a pleasant bar situated at the top of a tower featuring panoramic views of Dublin. You have a pint of Guinness and wander off to do some shopping for Guinness branded souvenir tat.


The Queen looked round the brewery and ended up in the bar, where the barman pulled a pint and put it on the bar in front of her.*

Now, with the world’s press watching this had obviously been too good a marketing opportunity to miss. The sight of The Queen sipping from, or even grasping, a pint of Guinness would have been on the front page of every newspaper in the UK.

Of course, no woman of The Queen’s age or class is going to drink from a pint glass, so she was never going to sip it (thought if her grandson had been there I’m sure he’d of downed it in one, burped the national anthem and demanded another) never mind take a long pull and remark ‘that hit one’s spot’ or similar.

(Although, as anyone who has drunk in a Young’s pub will know, the late Queen Mother had a go at pulling a pint at a Young’s pub, as did the Prince of Wales. The photographs of these events hang like portraits on the wall of every Young’s pub. What’s interesting is how natural they both look doing it. The Queen Mother was of course an Edwardian lady, but she looks for all the world like somebody who could be landlady of the greatest little boozer you have ever visited, keeping the place going while her husband is away during the war. Charles looks very much like a work-experience student working behind the bar, trying to do a good job while the adults are in charge. Which is not a bad job description for being Prince of Wales.)

It would be good to record that The Queen looked at the pint as if the barman had just placed a steaming shit on the bar, with a ‘and what has this to do with me?’ expression.

The reality was infinitely sadder for the Guinness marketing anoraks. She regarded it that the trademark amused curiosity and pleasure that she exhibits whenever she visits some backward country and they place a local delicacy in front of her, be it a Cornish pasty or some sort of fermented yam concoction that the village head man chews and then spits up into a baboon skull drinking vessel.

Surely Guinness missed a trick, if they had served a small sample in a champagne flute, I reckon it’s evens she would have tried it. Guinness would have had their photograph, a new market would have opened up as the sort of women who only drink sherry would be thinking ‘well if The Queen likes it…’ and started drinking Guinness out of flutes, which Guinness could also manufacture and sell. Imagine it, The Royal Guinness; two champagne flutes with the harp logo and name on and a can of the stuff to fill them, all in a presentation box with ‘that’ photograph. That’s Christmas sorted.

*I wonder what happened to The Royal Pint. As previously mentioned, the place was full of hacks. One suspect it went the way of all alcohol when journalists are present. South. Quickly.

Social network mobility

A few years ago the BBC did a series of programmes about foster parents. One foster mum featured explained that the longest period she had fostered a child for was something like twelve years, while the shortest was one night, when she had fostered a toddler overnight while his mum went into hospital.

Christ, can you imagine, being so alone that nobody can look after your kid for you for one night.

I think that's what annoys me so about social networking on sites that use the term 'friend' so loosely. Not that I have a problem with social networking generally, I like the idea of common interests and sharing achievements and having others comment on your thoughts and all that, I like the idea of sharing tips and passing on reviews. What I don't like is that by clicking on a name you can designate somebody as your friend.

Let's be clear, the only time you are likely to have more than a dozen friends is when you're at school, and that's only because you share a common interest in Top Trumps and chocolate with so many of your peers.

But I guess it would be too complicated to rename all those 'friend' buttons, and 'that girl you wanted to shag when you were both teenagers reunited.com' is too long a URL.

But why no 'enemy' button. Social networking sites seem to draw the line at 'ignore'. Again, totally useless in real life. They should at least have a 'bloody huge irritant' button. Obviously, this and a 'friend' button cannot be mutually exclusive, as somebody can easily occupy both categories through the simple purchase of an iPhone and the desire to tell you all about it.

Listmania

If you want somebody to do something, put it in a list. Lists have much more natural authority than long, rambling and slightly preachy paragraphs of prose. The ten commandments for instance, the original list, ten things you should not do. Can you imagine if it wasn’t in the form of a list? Moses would have come down from the mountain with, well, some stuff about coveting and something about a false idol, which would just leave everyone wondering if this was about some new Simon Cowell show.

Lists are interesting, it’s good to be at the top of certain lists (‘most popular’) and not so good to be at the top of other lists (‘most wanted’). What people look for in a list is themselves, whether it’s their neighbourhood being described as a desirable area, or a reflection of their skills or status. Being on a list in whole or in part validates us, especially if it’s printed. That’s why when you chance across an article listing ‘the five symptoms of Denge Fever’ or something, you come away convinced that you have contracted some vile malady and are left wondering if the local chemist sells powdered lizard feet or whatever the bloody cure is.

A couple of weeks ago ‘Country Life’ magazine published an edition containing a list of thirty nine skills that youths should have by the time they leave school, recognising that a formal education can be a narrow one and that while it might equip one well for spelling or adding up, as well as doodling in exercise books or looking out of a window daydreaming to the point of drooling, one needs skills beyond those picked up in the classroom.

I read the list and thought it was an entirely reasonable set of expectations, my only criticism being it omits some core skills, such as knowing what wine to serve with swan.

This from the May 4, 2011 edition of ‘Country Life’ magazine.

Every young man and woman should know how to:

1. Cook three different dinner party menus
2. Say 'Can you help me please' in Arabic, Cantonese, Urdu, Spanish and Russian
3. Play a musical instrument, even if it's just the tom-toms or a mouth organ
4. Ride a horse to jackaroo standard
5. Be a 'tech whisperer', able to fix and set up the latest technogadgets
6. Talk about five classics of English literature with authority and passion
7. Perform resuscitation on someone who has stopped breathing
8. Know how to grow carrots from seed, distinguish five native trees, identify 20 flowers and arrange a bunch
9. Handle a shotgun, skin a rabbit, gut a fish and pluck a pigeon
10. Repair a bicycle puncture and fix the chain
11. Dance the eightsome reel, waltz to Strauss and bop to Lady Gaga
12. Taste the difference between Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay and know how to mix a mojito or margarita
13. Write a memorable thank you letter
14. Recognise music by Mozart, Elgar and Handel.
15. Put up a shelf and change a plug
16. Tie a bow tie, bowline and Bloody Butcher
17. Sail a boat across the Solent
18. Carve a joint of meat
19. Tell the difference between Gothic, Baroque and Palladian architecture
20. Make a speech, entertain an audience with a joke or an anecdote, and sing at least two songs by heart
21. Drive a tractor, reverse a trailer, renew engine oil and change a wheel
22. Find their way round five capital cities
23. Host a party and put others at their ease
24. Sustain a 10-shot rally at tennis
25. Build a bonfire and lay a fire
26. Perform three good card tricks
27. Identify five constellations and find the North Star
28. Score a cricket match
29. Talk knowledgeably about five British landmarks
30. Uncork and pour a bottle of Champagne
31. Iron a shirt, sew on a button and sew up a hem
32. Amuse small children for at least an hour with magic tricks and storytelling
33. Read a map, pitch a tent and pack a rucksack
34. Be authoritatively acquainted with at least one work by da Vinci, Constable, Degas, Turner and Canaletto
35. Manage a bank account
36. Slip away from a football riot
37. Address a member of the Royal Family
38. Complain effectively but politely in a restaurant
39. Deliver a lamb.

Lists are popular in magazines, you can compile one by gathering random suggestions from the office, they don’t cost anything to compile and, crucially, they don’t require any fact-checking or invite legal challenge unless they are of the ‘rare breed ducks that some famous footballer has shagged’ variety

It’s also gratifying to compare your own life skills and abilities to those listed. If the magazine has got its demographic right then the reader should feel pleasingly smug at having some, most or all of the skills listed. So much better than those ‘personality’ quizzes in the glossies that you take, score ‘mostly c’s’ on and discover that, apparently, you are a psychopath and not a kleptomaniac at all, something of a surprise given that you shoplifted the mag.

The other thing about lists is that they are endlessly adaptable, this one from the 2010 February/March edition (Number 49) of ‘The Chap’ magazine listed the qualities a husband should possess.

Chap husbandry
A prospective husband should possess at least five of the following qualities

A duelling scar obtained in Heidelberg
A picturesque war-wound, but not a libido-threatening one
The ability to hit a playing card at twenty paces with a Webley
The ability to late cut between first and second slip
A set in Albany
A hint of danger
A cruel set to the lips
A goodish DSO or a decent MC
A square jaw
A poetic forehead
A strong head for absinthe
A Himalayan peak named after him
Fluent French and passable Arabic
A mother who isn’t a very good cook
A talent to step into a play when the actor pulls out at the last minute and steal the show
Sang-froid, savoir-faire and noblesse oblige
Being able to drive and navigate at the same time
Two Olympic gold medals
A talent for the trombone
Millions of pounds

Flavour of the month

What better way can there be to indulge a vice than by legitimising it. This is why magazines like 'Decanter' exist, so that journalists with black teeth and no points left on their driving license can share their thoughts about booze with the sort of people who use their ability to tell the difference between chardonay and merlot to justify the making of that distinction at half eleven in the morning on a week day on a regular basis.

And why not go one better than getting a magazine about your hobby delivered once a month and actually get your hobby delivered once a month. There are, for instance, schemes you can join where once a month you get a crate of the 'wines of the world' delivered. I've never seen the point in getting a crate of booze chosen by somebody else, as there's always the lurking suspicion that it just happens to be whatever was going cheap at the cash and carry that month. Worse still, one would live in horror of opening the crate to discover that this month has been designated 'wines of Latvia', 'a taste of Croydon' or something similarly ghastly. This is often delivered with tasting notes and these are important because without those you are just a bloke that has booze, and random booze at that, delivered once a month.

The same might be said of book clubs. Once a month you are reading something that has been chosen by somebody else and instead of a tasting note you are expected to give your opinion while in a group of people all trying desperately to sound as though they read it all the way through, understood it and are not in fact relying upon the Wikipedia entry, the film adaption or, if you really want to live dangerously, the soundtrack to the film adaption and nothing else.

The '...of the month club' is endlessly adaptable. At the dull end of the market is the 'mobile phone bill of the month', then you go through stuff that you consume, like food and drink (the fruit of the month club is an especially interesting proposition. I love the idea of some sort of fruit arriving in the post, possibly packed in straw, and not having bloody clue what it is, how to eat it or even how to pronounce it). And of course at the slightly sinister end of the market for the sort of people who buy 'true crime' magazines, you could be posted a random, blood stained object and have to work out for yourself what horror you've just become implicated in.

The one thing that the format of a monthly delivery of something chosen by somebody else has going for it is novelty. Given half a chance, I'd probably eat the same seven meals every night of the week year in, year out. If you think seven sounds pretty good, bear in mind that I'm counting at least one dish twice, because pie and chips is different to chips and pie, right? So why not have pie clubs, where once a month you get a pie of a flavour not of your choosing delivered. For instance, I always go for chicken and mushroom, always, and why not? But am I denying myself a more fulfilling experience?

Is there anything so really wrong in eating the same seven meals since I was twenty anyway? Especially when you consider that what I am actually seeking to do is perfect the recipes for those meals. The latest challenge is pasta sauce and it's now reached the point where I am adding so many extras to the recipe that, technically, I'm not sure that it can be classed as a sauce any more.

I'm also staring to wonder if the ability to experiment with cooking breaks down along gender lines. Blokes are far more likely to deviate from the recipe simply because they can comfortably think things like 'humn, no tomatoes in the house, and I can't be arsed to walk to the shops, I'll use bacon instead'. Women have a different view of diet, considering that different daily fillings in a baked potato constitutes variety.

Judging a magazine by it's cover

While magazines in the past were generally content to contain nothing more than articles with pictures to illustrate the words, or pictures with words to explain the images (or, in certain glossy cases, lots of pictures, very few words and what words there were preporting to be from readers who had had quite exciting erotic experiences that they felt they had to share with other readers, when the reality was that the apex of an erotic experience for a reader of such material was actually a crafty hand shandy parked up in a in a lay-by between sales meetings while perusing it), magazines today come with all sorts of free stuff attached to the front of them, CDs and DVDs being the most common cover mounts because they are handily flat, while stuff like golf balls and fresh veg you don't see so much of.

Kids' comics have, of course, long been exponents of enticing new readers with a free gift. Now the norm, it used to be the exception and seeing a cheap bit of tat selotaped to the front cover of a comic sent a thrill of excitement and must-have pester power through a young lad keen to start tooting on their 'space distress siren' or, as it might more properly be called, crap plastic whistle.

Comics came with 'space spinners' (plastic hoop), 'club wallets' (cardboard envelope) and other novelties that made the magazine popular with kids and, thirty years on, drives comic collectors to fits of sorrowful rage as they come across another first issue with a mutilated cover where the toy had been ripped off, or to effervesce with joy if they come across one that has not.

Also available as cover mounts, sweets (or, more normally, a sweet, but hey, a sweet is a sweet, right?) or 'space dust' which I'm not sure is a sweet or some sort of junior amphetamine. What was odd was that these toys and sweets were never available to readers in Northern Ireland. Obviously it was considered that it would be unwise to fuel sectarian violence with sugary treats.

Of course, cover mounts were not confined to kids publications. I seem to recall that every single edition of the 'Peoples' Friend' ever published came with a free rain hood. This was genius, women who have a tartan shopping trolly in one hand and the magazine in the other are unable to hold an umbrella as they wait for the bus in the rain, reading hospital romances.

These days the chief exponents of the cover mount are the collectible or the hobby part works. The collectible part works promise you 'strange smells of the world' and have a different jar for you to sniff the contents of every week, or something.

The hobby part works used to be straightforward, you got a magazine that told you about Nelson and the navy and, free with part one, the bowsprit of the 'Victory'. By the time you had worked your way to the rudder you probably had a stack of magazines about eight foot high, a greater understanding of life in the navy in the Neoplionic era than any man alive and a nagging sensation that you missed issue 176 and, with it, a starboard gun port. Could be worse, the magazine could fold before you collect the issue with the glue for assembling the damn thing.

The thing to do is to cut your losses after issue three, go to a model shop, buy a replica kit, glue and paints and then leave the whole thing unmade on a shelf for a few decades. It's the same result as collecting the part work without all the schlepping down to the newsagent, where the danger is that you will be enticed by one of the more edgy, modern, cooler part works, like 'learn to bake' with a different cake tin free with every issue, or 'the family surgeon' with each edition covering some common operation in detail and containing a piece of surgical kit. Just remember to collect the issue with the batteries before you try attempt anything likely to require the defribulator. And remember, Botox is not a toy.

The glossy printed page

Subscription magazines. Consider for a moment just how many there must be and how varied their contents. If you go into any large newsagent you'll see a bewildering array of magazine titles on display, covering not just news and celebrity cellulite mocking, but crafts, hobbies, pastimes and, on the top shelf, special interest. We live in a world where printing is so cheap, and journalism is so cheap, that the market can support two different magazines about crocheting and probably another two about croquet, bought by people who have an interest in crocheting but were in a hurry and didn't stop to read the title of the magazine properly. And that's just at the news stand, where shelf space is finite.

Imagine then just how many subscription magazines there must be out there. For every magazine about model railways on the news stand (a subject covered with an unhealthy degree of fascination in an earlier blog) there must be a dozen others with a limited circulation. I adore the idea that there may even be regional magazines about model trains, after all, there used to be regional railways.

Of course it would not be true to say that there is a magazine for every hobby indulged in by the English. It's much more accurate to say that there are at least two magazines for every hobby. You just know that where there is a hobby the is a difference of opinion about what should be written about it. From jazz to rocking horses, enthusiasts have got something to say. The honourable exception is people who restore vintage machinery in any form, they are too busy sourcing parts or making tea to write about their appreciation of grease nipples. Luckily this very subject is tackled extensively in other literature, with leather covers.

While a portion of the population look forward to that day of the month when their magazine arrives, there is, of course, more to a subscription than the annual cost appearing on your credit card bill discreetly as 'pigeon fanciers' gazette' and opening that plain brown wrapper with trembling hands every month to see if the picture of your bird you sent in has made it in this issue.

While many magazines now come with stuff attached, it used to be that at the start of every year it was enough that the 'part works' as they were called were just magazines, a format that leant itself well to collecting an encyclopaedia type magazine or a cook book on a weekly basis.

The premise was that you'd buy a modestly priced magazine every week, send off for the binders to house same and before long you'd have twenty volumes about Great Serial Killers Of The World or something equally gruesome.

The reality was that you bought the first ten issues and then stopped. The reason for this was simple, the publisher had to get people to buy the magazine, people who had an interest in the subject, and hence had to put all the interesting stuff up front in the first few issues. I used to get a weekly part work called 'the unexplained' and for the first, say, twenty issues it was everything a schoolboy could want to know about the world of the strange. I became the playground authority on werewolves, yeti, UFOs and other weird stuff. But there's only so much cool supernatural stuff out there, even if most of it is made up, that's why 'The X Files' is so, so much better than any of the imitators that have come along since. By the time the magazine had to resort to guff about ley lines, it was time to quit.

The same is true of the magazines that promise to give you the A to Z of modern weapons. Issue one to five has loads of really cool gear like aeroplanes and tanks, issues six to ten is about guns and ammo and night sights and can still be cool. Beyond that it's mines and other static defence measures and beyond that, presumably, pointy sticks. And the same with cookery magazines, when the issue has the recipe for 'aubergine surprise', it's time to quit.

Reflections on the royal wedding - parties

There was, in the next street along, an honest to God street party, with tables and bunting and a sound system and everything. It actually sounded quite fun especially when, after it had being going for some time and they were getting ready to wind down for the evening, a somewhat refreshed housewife invited everyone back to hers to continue the festivities.

Our own party was a somewhat smaller but no less restrained affair in the back garden. The correct effect was achieved by stringing Union Flag bunting around the garden shed. The garden shed is perhaps the greatest symbol of Britishness there is, and the same can be said of the Union Flag. Combining them more or less went most of the way to restoring the British Empire to greatness, as a bunting bedecked shed stood proud as the greatest symbol of what it is to be British and alive under a perfect sky. Truly a day to pity republicans.

Reflections on the royal wedding - eccentricities

The population of Great Britain is, what, sixty three million and by my reckoning at least sixty two and a half million of them are eccentric. It was interesting to see the crowds that camped out to secure a good place to view the procession, and easy to mock them. Less easy to mock them after the Princes came out to shake some hands and say hello the night before the wedding, which fell into the 'gob smack' category of impressive. Folk queue all night for rock gig tickets or, god help them, new apple stuff and you don't see Mick Jagger or Steve Jobs rocking up to say hello to the crowd the night before the gig. But I couldn't resist the seditious thought that it would be good if somebody was revealed not to be a fan but rather a pervert who liked to shag crowd barriers and had got his knob stuck.

Reflections on the royal wedding - pageantry

It was just a good job that the event itself was so breathtaking. Nobody does pageantry like the British and the sight of trees in Westminster Abby was quite something, as was the spectacle of seeing the horse guards and household cavalry trotting down the Mall, knowing that just last week these same chaps were cheerfully throttling Taliban scumbags.

Reflections on the royal wedding - media

The media build up to the day itself was, to put it mildly, frothing. On the day itself the event was as inescapable as gravity. It started with the Today programme on Radio four. This is normally a programme that follows a rather tight format, they have some spurious stories about the latest survey showing that red wine cures smallpox or something, a bit of sport and then the main event, which is one of the two remarkably offensive old gits that present the thing having a go at a politician about something. Since they banned badger fights it's about the only blood sport left and tends to leave the listener exhausted and bitter and still to face the day.

Instead of a belligerent bully belittling a windbag minister, we had jolly presenters out talking to the crowds that had already started to line the route. Surely the BBC missed a trick here, because the questions were uniformally of the 'where have you come from?' and 'are you looking forward to seeing the dress?' variety. I would have liked to have heard the same level of rigour and challenge that is aimed at politicians aimed at some loyalist royalist, with interruptions, accusations of factual inaccuracies and downright insults, although I appreciate that hearing a BBC presenter being beaten to death with his own microphone is not to everyone's taste.

Reflections on the royal wedding - the weather

Last Friday's Royal wedding gave the British a perfect storm of legitimacy to speculate about the weather, a Big Occasion on a bank holiday weekend. In terms of micro-climates, there was probably very high temperatures around the server that does the BBC weather Internet site as their weather page got more hits than a butt at an archers' convention, combined with a lot of hot air from folk gassing about the weather every time they met.

On the day, the weather was perfect, cloudy in the morning to keep the crowds cool and then, during the ceremony, the sun actually came out. This was because, it was explained to me, God is an Englishman. This actually makes a great deal of sense explaining as it does why so many previously inexplicably ghastly things happen to foreign people.