Cocktails and Records

It is almost 9 years since I first arrived on these shores.  In that time I have adapted relatively easily to life in the UK - my youthful addictions to Ladybird books and Enid Blyton, The Goodies and The Good Life, Number One and the NME prepared me well for all that Britain had to throw at me.

But there are still some things that I truly do not like or understand about this country.

1. The total absence of powerpoints from British bathrooms. I thought that Australia was a health and safety obsessed nanny state when it came to these things, but why British Building Regulations  assume that people will automatically use their hair dryers while in the shower if there is a powerpoint in the bathroom is beyond me.
2. The general propensity to wash up in a bucket in the sink, rather than in the sink itself. Why??!!
3. Voting on Thursdays. If you want to increase voter turn out, then switch election day to Saturday. This frees more people up for both voting and campaigning, and as an added bonus you can stay up all night watching the results without fear of having to go to work with a hangover and two hours sleep the next day.
4. People complaining about the weather. I don’t mind people talking about the weather - it is something that affects us all and is a very convenient tool for small talk afterall.  But it’s not that bad. There are few hurricanes, tsunamis, bushfires, earthquakes or randomly erupting volcanoes; you don’t have to sleep rolled up in towels because it’s so humid you sweat lying still;  it isn’t completely dark for several months of the year; the seasons don’t blend into one constant mush of mildness; you don’t risk skin cancer everytime you leave the house without Factor 36 sunscreen on etc. etc. The weather is not that bad. And it is not a good enough reason alone to immigrate. 
5. The combination of Daily Mail winge culture and British net migration out of the country. It is socially acceptable amongst a large proportion of the population to moan about ‘PC gone mad’ and ‘floods of immigrants destroying traditional culture’ whilst at the same time unironically eyeing up house prices in France and Spain. Drives me mad.

That’s enough for one week. Feel free to defend or just explain. Please.

Girls Aloud
The Promise

This month’s members magazine from the Chartered Institute of Marketing of all places, gives me the astonishing news that you only need to sell a measly 40,000 singles on average to get a number one in the British singles charts.

The website for my favourite pop song of the moment, ‘The Promise’ by Girls Aloud, proudly states that they got their one week at number one with 77,000 sales and that they have shifted 200,000 copies so far. This apparently is an achievement in 2008, even for a classic girl group number like this.

For comparison, Jimmy Osmond’s ‘Long Haired Lover from Liverpool’ sold 998,000. Things aren’t what they used to be…

Youtube won’t let me embed the clip, but here’s the link if you so desire.

Here’s an interesting question for you. What’s the most played album in your collection?

I overheard someone talking about this very subject this morning and although they were probably referring to the present time, it set my mind thinking. So during a bored moment at a conference today, I found myself speculating on what my most played records ever might be.

The following list is based on 25 years of accumulated music buying and listening, and comprises the records that I have probably put on the ghettoblaster / walkman / family hi-fi system / bedroom CD player / turntable / ipod most during that time.

So in no particular order of painful authenticity:

1. Colour by Numbers - Culture Club
2. Grand Prix or Songs from Northern Britain - Teenage Fanclub
3. West Side Story - Original film soundtrack
4. Whitney - Whitney Houston
5. Rumours - Fleetwood Mac
6. Liberty Bell and the Black Diamond Express - The Go-Betweens
7. My Favourite Things - John Coltrane
8. America’s Greatest Hits - America
   
9. Extricate - The Fall
10. True Blue - Madonna

And I still play all of these records quite a lot to this day. Yes, really.

BTLP warned that this site - www.ladybirdprints.com - had a touch of the Proustian rush about it, but how could I have forgotten how fabulous the illustrations were too? And how much the four year old me liked the look of that toy shop…

So here are some of my favourite images of 70s Peter, Jane and the ever-faithful Pat the dog from 1a: Play with us.

Work’s a nuisance at the best of times, but it has been more irritating than usual recently. This is because it is starting to make me feel old. You see, I have been working with some younger colleagues on a writing project for our organisation. And to put it bluntly, although they can formulate sentences, their grammar and punctuation are woeful. I find myself tutting over their work and wondering how they got through the education system with their impoverished use of commas. Most dangerously, the phrase ‘I would never have got away with not knowing this in my day’ has crept into my mind. I’m not nearly old enough to be thinking this way.

Or perhaps I am.

Because it was with a slight pang that I read in the Guardian obituaries on the weekend that Douglas Keen has passed away. Mr Keen was the Editorial Director of Ladybird books and the man who commissioned educationalist William Murray to put together the Ladybird Key Words Reading Scheme, otherwise known as the Peter and Jane books. 

I learnt to read with Peter and Jane in the 70s. Mum and Dad dutifully bought the entire series and went through them with me every evening. I remember enjoying them and innocently allowing the aspirational middle class Englishness that the series has been criticised for wash over me. Having said that, I only discovered recently that I actually grew up with a revised 70s version - in the original 60s series Peter and Jane quaffed sweets and Jane clutched a doll, but in the 70s they enjoyed apples and Jane was the proud owner of a pair of rollerskates.

So here’s to you Douglas Keen for helping me learn to read. Even if the thought of Peter and Jane, like certain young people’s command of the comma, does make me feel unnecessarily old.

Baaska & Scavelli
Get off the Ground (short version)

Last Sunday I went to a club for the first time in around seven years. I’d stopped going to clubs because well, I’m too old, too tired, too boring and too much of a music snob to cope these days. But this was ace - it was a club for old people. It was Another Sunday Afternoon at Dingwalls, a session revisiting the ‘legendary’ days of the same club in the early 90s.

Place: Dingwalls, Camden
Time: Sunday afternoon, 1pm - 6.30pm
Music: Jazz Dance and Latin
DJs: Patrick Forge and Gilles Peterson
Audience: 30 and 40-something music obsessives
Experience: a couple of pints; a chat with fellow friendly clubbers; a dance to some classic tunes; home by 7pm.

Perfect.

So to celebrate the way clubbing should be for bores like me, here is the formerly rare-as-hens-teeth jazz dance classic ‘Get off the Ground’ - the short, vocal mix though as opposed to the 9 minute long wig-out.

‘Get off the Ground’, Baaska & Scavelli, 1978. Reissued Freestyle Records, 2006.

I don’t particularly like ITV’s celebrity reality show I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!. This is for a number of reasons, none of which have anything to do with me being hugely adverse to ‘reality’ formats - I’d be the first to admit that I’ve had my moments of serious addiction to Big Brother, Celebrity Big Brother, Wife Swap, Faking It, The X Factor, Pop Idol et. al. (and thankfully, I’ve been able  to successfully recover from all of them).

I’m a Celebrity has always irked me though.

Allow me to come over all po-faced for a moment, but Australia and Australian wildlife really doesn’t deserve to be associated with useless B grade celebrities.

The centrepiece of I’m a Celebrity is the bush tucker trials where viewers vote to submit the celebrity kicking-bag of the moment to torture via native animals. So we have celebrities wading through swarming angry insects, eating live wriggly worms and being covered in curious creeping beetles. Of course, we’re meant to laugh at the hapless celebrity, but I’m guessing that the animals don’t particularly like it either.

Obviously I didn’t grow up in a rainforest (or an ITV jungle filmset in Queensland for that matter), but I did spend my formative years in a typical Australian country town. At school, on TV and in first-aid classes we learnt about our country’s insects and animals, including some of the nastier ones. We discovered how they sustain an fascinating and distinctive eco-system, how they’ve provided a food source for Aboriginal people for thousands of years and exactly what to do when a box jelly fish decides to attack you.

There is a peculiar populist British media view of Australia as a land of non-stop sunshine, where blonde-haired, BBQ loving, lager drinkers constantly risk being eaten by sharks and crocodiles as they go swimming during their lunchbreaks. And with its portrayal of Australia’s wildlife as something to gleefully torture celebrities with, I’m a Celebrity isn’t really doing much to help the cause.

Yes, Australia does have lots of creepy crawlies, but apart from a few notable exceptions, they do mostly keep to themselves and are a vital part of what makes the country unique. They deserve better than being eaten by Robert Kilroy-Silk.

The Chills
Heavenly Pop Hit

What better way to cheer us up these lengthy winter evenings than a classic piece of indie pop from New Zealand’s finest exponents of ‘the Dunedin Sound’, The Chills.

I don’t think ’Heavenly Pop Hit’ was ever actually a hit, but its pretty damn heavenly - the sound of those ‘dum dum da da da-das’ never fails to make me feel happy. Enjoy.

‘Heavenly Pop Hit’, The Chills, Slash Records, 1990

We went to see Robert Peston, the BBC’s Business Editor, speak at the London School of Economics on Monday night.

Lets look at the good things first. Robert Peston is an excellent speaker who clearly, precisely and humorously detailed exactly why he thinks we are in the current economic predicament that we are.

Unfortunately, what he had to say was pretty depressing. To sum up his analysis of the causes of the world financial crisis in 3 over-simplified points:

1. Greed - we all wanted too much and borrowed too much. 125% unsecured mortgages indeed.
2. Ignorance - nobody, from bankers and hedgefund managers to politicians and journalists, ever really understood what the hell was going on. This is the ‘Grandma Test’, Robert Peston says, where if you can’t explain what a collateralised debt obligation is to your Grandma and how many you’ve got, then don’t do it.
3. Naivity - our illustrious leaders stuck their heads in the sand for too long, never believing that it could all go pear-shaped. i.e. they really, really did believe that Alan Greenspan was right, the City was great and that there would be no more boom and bust cycles.

Like how you learn the textbook causes of World War I and II at school, Robert Peston had no problems outlining step-by-step how we got into this recession. Yes, it’s all clear now. So why wasn’t it at the time? Economics always works best in hindsight, doesn’t it?

It is Mickey Mouse’s 80th birthday today.

Now I was never a huge fan of Mickey. He’s always been just a bit too much of a goody-two-shoes for my taste. Donald Duck was always my favourite in the ‘Disney family’. If there was anyone who could be relied on to completely screw up everything and respond in the most extreme and stupidly funny way possible it was Donald. Mickey is just too reliable, predictable and dull. Watching a Mickey Mouse cartoon is kind of like what it would be like watching a cartoon about me. i.e. boring.

Still I have a soft spot for Mickey, mainly because for me he symbolises a mystical mid-century America that I’ve long been entranced with. I grew up watching repeats of Disney cartoons from the 40s and 50s and fell in love with that land of neat template houses, wirelesses playing Rosemary Clooney, big beautifully polished cars, cheeky talking squirrels and domestic bliss. Everything was neat, orderly and nice in Disney cartoons.

Some might say this was just unrealistic and dull, but I loved this mythical world of mid-period Disney. That’s my Mickey Mouse and my Disney. I find most Disney cartoons since 1970’s The Aristocats insipid and sickly (except for Toy Story). Nothing compares to childhood illusions, eh?