podcasts

it may be that i like a rant about the bbc but that doesn't mean to say i don't listen to a fair bit of it. radio 3's spoken word output is rarely less than fabulous and radio 4, despite often feeling like a middle class family has stopped their range rover long enough to beat you to death with their golden labrador, is well worth the effort despite all the wallpapered mindlessness of it. even if the sound of your demise will doubtless be played to the tune of the archers.

(should i mention the tv? i could but i shan't, not unless i wanted to conflate a sentence using the words smug, preening and flamethrower)

but should one be able to reach the escape velocity to turn away from the bbc behemoth there's much to be found in the world of podcast. i don't usually post about podcasts, mainly because i post enough on here already (and i'll be stopping soon so make the most of it), but also because those lovely guardian people have just gone and done a handy starter which i mention not least because i used to have some online banter with the don logan bunch.

is it a relentlessly anglophone list? why, of course it is (you did see the link was to the guardian?). does it appear that their choices maybe reflect some of the global population more than the rest. maybe...!! but, get into the world of internet radio and the only limits you need to set are those you set on yourself. listening to stories from people who don't look or sound like you is a great way of hearing the world.

i strongly suggest indulging....

exit thatcher

how can I not write something about thatcher? even as I tried to avoid the blanket news today I caught a snippet from one of the 'demonstrations', filled it would seem by people who most likely weren't even born when the thatch was in power. but one of them got her time in front of the camera declaring 'that woman made my life a misery'. and in that was all that needed to be said.

a long time ago now but a time when it seemed to be about 'them' and 'us' as opposed to 'me'. I never, other than one brief paranoid moment, when it appeared the special branch were upon us, thought that thatcher had it in for me personally. that came later, a noxious by product of thatcherism, the all consuming individualism. there is, she declared, no such thing as society. and then set about making sure it was true. and, much like orwell's big brother, far from having it imposed upon us, the country lapped it up and demanded more.

I remember when word cam that she had finally left downing st. I was working in the states at the time and my flatmate phoned me. have you heard, he said, thatcher's resigned. I put down the phone. I had, it must be said, expected to be euphoric, as it was I was stunned. I need a moment I said to one of the others on shift. I went away and sat down for half an hour. thatcher was gone. it seemed like the end of an era. except really it wasn't, only the start of the process that would lead to thatcher's unofficially anointed successor, tony blair.

how do I feel about it now. strangely, with much on common with russell brand of all people. love her or loathe her there, surely, can be little debate that thatcher's domain changed the face of the country. and try as I might I can't quite unremember those days of strikes, blackouts, rubbish in the streets and general hopelessness that preceded her even as I want to remember something else, something that was about community. as the man in the article says - this demonstrates, I suppose, that if you opposed Thatcher's ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies.

she was such a dire person what with the support of the regimes, the total lack of support for other women, the cronyism and everything that went with it but I couldn't help but feel sorry for the wreck of a woman in her later years. I've seen way too much in the way of Alzheimer's, vascular dementia and the like to take any pleasure in seeing someone with it. poor thatch, escorted by the police to water flowers, banged up in the ritz with no-one to visit her. be careful what you wish for, sometimes you get it. unfortunately, with people like thatcher, so does everyone else.

lancing the boil

days now from the lance armstrong 'revelations' it appears that, as a result of the oprah interview, his popularity may have gone down. oh dear. what a shame. but, despite the spectre of ensuing legal cases, where companies that benefited for years from all the lance exposure, capitalise on the whole shenanigans rearing its ugly head again, getting more publicity and clawing their money back. cycling dirty? you don't say!

the oprah thing was about as predictable as it was likely to be and never that likely to go down well with a non-american audience. lance's continuing references to his 'flaws, the cloying nods back to family, oprah's long pauses and just that nagging ever present hello magazine style air of 'he's a (rich) celebrity' were all something that is mostly absent from that sort of interview here (see how it's done here).

or maybe not. in it. phil 'voice of cycling' and long time lance defender liggett wonders where all the drugs have come from. maybe he missed all those years commenting on the most dope soaked races ever run. honestly, phil, did you really believe people could cycle up those mountains at that speed and not even break sweat?

but here's a thought experiment for the likes of phil. hypothetically of course. once upon a time there's a guy called thom wiesel. thom's a cycling fan, such a fan he bails out usa cycling back in the nineties when they're having a bit of difficulty. thom's such a cycling fan he's even getting into sponsoring his own team. around this time he's also starting to invest in a new biotech start up. pop quiz cycling fans - can you guess what this company is going to produce?

yes that's right it's amgen and it's epo. now once the money starts rolling in the team that weisel is involved in sponsoring has a change of name. and sponsor. that's right. it's us postal! is it too speculative to be joining those dots yet? course there's a body that sorts out all that stuff, right? that. at that time was headed up by one hein verbruggen. now there have been a variety of accusations made about hein verbruggen but so far very few that suggest a conflict of interest with thom weisel handling some of his financial affairs.

now it could be that all of this is no more than internet smoke and mirrors. phil liggett's well respected and well loved around the world and maybe he just couldn't see what was going on for being too close. and now we're in an era of clean cycling. where things have changed. really? who's watching the tour of california this year? the amgen tour of california. the same amgen that puts profit before patients?

it seems in the wacky world of cycling that there's a blind spot when it comes to sponsors and money and a collective amnesia about the effect of business on racing. why it appears that even some of the most outspoken critics of drugs in cycling may have a teeny bit of a double standard when it comes to the blush of a dollar at the amgen event

you'd be forgiven for reading many of the articles and comment by fans re armstrong that the real issue is not epo/drugs and their association with cycling but the fact that armstrong really just isn't a very nice person. for comparison try - miguel indurain (lovely guy)/lance armstrong (dick). or alternately watch all those conveniently six month banned zabriskie, vandevelde, leipheimer types lining up contrite and fighting for the future of the sport' at the AMGEN tour of california. no irony whatsoever.

and talking about that institutionalised doping. what about them rabobanks? not quite such a news story without 'nasty' lance and complicated by most of it no doubt being in dutch or flemish, the effort of translating which precludes most english speaking cyclists from outrage. could it just possibly be that there's not just a problem with the riders, the institutions but with the fans themselves?

there's a rumour kicking about today that lance's 'people' have been in touch with no fuss to see if he can ride the tour de ben nevis. most likely bollocks but cue predictable outpourings of outrage from some members of the mountain bike community. it's amazing when there's so much poverty knocking about, the economy's down the toilet, wars are sparking up everywhere, just what it takes to raise the ire of a certain type of cyclist.

me, if you asked me to cycle like those professionals do you could pour drugs into me with a hose. come to think of it most days when i'm wheezing up some hill you could pour drugs into me with a hose! would it be worth it tho? having seen the lance machine ever so briefly up close i wouldn't swap a minute to walk in those shoes. but that's a lesson you can see not being learnt (more in road than mountain biking i'd speculate) every weekend at every race. too many people, well, men, taking it waaaay too seriously.

at the end of his interview lance gets asked the moral of his story (you what!!!). he doesn't know. well, lance, i'll give you a clue. winning at any cost has a price and now's the time to be paying. as to those outraged cycling fans. really? time to take some responsibility for having the blinkers on all those years. lance never made you put those on. you did that all by yourself.

*i should point out that where possible i've included links for any internet speculations re the above. as for the big pharma and epo cases kathleen sharp's blood medicine, while not the best book in the world, is as good a place to start as any. seeing what this crew have got up to and the amount of money involved puts having your cycling spectating memories ruined by some guy on a bike properly into perspective.

the armstrong thing

if i have a guilty magazine pleasure then it's rouleur. from the moment it hits the mat i'm looking forward to settling down and opening it. the coffee will go on, i'll wait for a quiet moment and then out it will come. it's not so much what's in it but the instant hit of the smell of fresh print. then there's the mix of top quality images, articles so niche they're niche in themselves and a refreshing lack of ads. of course there are things i don't like. there can be no illusion that this is anything but a boy's club even if, and they've been better at this recently, the odd woman does crop up now and again. not so very long ago they had a brilliant article on women's racing, an article that reflected the very set of values that you'd expect rouleur readers to be into. indeed were it not for t's change of circumstance swiss lounge would've have been punting some sponsor money to a woman's team this year.

but cycling for rouleur will be a man's sport. you can hear this in their podcasts. this being rouleur, obviously they don't just talk about cycling. here, they hold forth about cartier-bresson, the social nature of velodrome racing and photography in general. not the stuff you get in your regular bike magazine! but, it being rouleur, the lance armstorng issue creeps in. and it's here that johhny green (whose column in rouleur is probably my least favourite - something that may well change with this podcast) steps up. going on from cartier-bresson the discussion comes around to the nature of memory. johnny green was, he says, at luz ardiden and no amount of revisionism can make him remember it differently. but armstrong they say. i don't care. says green. you can here the intake of breath.

armstrong is the bogey man of cycling at the moment, a cypher for all that 'went wrong'. except that in order for it to have 'gone wrong' one would have to ignore pretty much the whole history of professional cycling where 'preparation' has been in use since the first decade of the 20th century, manufacturer and sponsor manipulation (it's the kindest word) have been, if not the causative factor, then intrinsic to the races we so favour today. i got asked last night what i thought of it all. i love watching the bike racing i said, but i take it no more seriously than american wrestling. for me, as barthes far more eloquently put, it's a metaphor, not a race.

but what then of the doping? and what then of armstrong? armstrong i don't much care. i saw armstrong the other year (apparently, in some circles, this makes me an 'enabler'!) and i realised that i could never know what it was like to be him, to make the choices he's made. it was like being in a pressure cooker and i didn't like it. but the doping is a whole other thing. aside from the great mystery that it's cycling that is the 'dirty sport' (did no-one watch the olympics this year!) there are only two questions i would ask as a result of the whole shameful debacle.

firstly, where's all the money coming from? top cyclists earn but not that much, and their domestiques are just getting by. in which case all that needs be done is look for the money. but of course to do that would expose sponsors, for example, and they'd be off out of professional cycling like snow off a dyke. and then no more sport. a governing body of such a thing - where would that leave them?

and then there's the drugs. if, i used to ask, there are so many drugs in sport, where are they coming from? and, as if the cycling thing wasn't depressing enough the true horror that is big pharma seems apparent here. so they might be facing 780 million dollars in settlements. against what profits? and then you might think about these expensive drugs that have marginal effects that somehow keep cropping up in the media. do you honestly think that's a coincidence?

it may be yet that armstrong and possibly even others, have to pay back their prize money. but what about the people who made the drugs and by their practices allowed them to be used for these purposes. what about corrupt salesmen and medical professionals? will they ever be held to account? of course not. not in a society greased with money where all that's needed to market the latest snake oil is to hold up a picture of someone with cancer and put a headline of 'scandal' rather than look at the evidence.

maybe it's just easier to point the finger at armstrong. that we way we can 'believe' in the sport again rather than look at what lies behind it and the realisation that what we think doesn't actually matter at all.

proposal

it's that time of year when i'm thinking about writing proposals for various things arty-like. now despite the fact that it is widely considered that there is no bullshit i cannot talk i never much like doing this despite the fact i've done some tongue-combingly cloying examples for other people. in those circumstances it's just a bit of fun and i can always deconstruct (you see what i did there) the bullshitese in advance of the fact.

when it's me tho i always feel that awkward nag that is the truth gnawing at me, like a tooth that's just been pulled. but no longer as now there's someone to do it for me. yes indeed - i give you arty bollocks. only a couple of tweaks away from a level of perfection that will gull the vast majority of your arty fart pants.

one should never take these people seriously, even when they're me. as i had it put to me by my new friend k, who was relating how he had caused some disquiet among the employees in the ingmar bergman centre - they were really angry. but i didn't mind. i can never be offended by a man wearing pink converse with a handlebar moustache. such is the nature of deep truth.

dark skies

we like our dark skies but one thing you can pretty much guarantee in the uk is that if there is something interesting happening in the sky, assuming you can dodge the light pollution, it's most likely obscured by clouds.

that wasn't what we were about tonight tho (see clouds above). no, tonight seeing as there's a bit of a hoolie blowing we were off out to record some tree noise. initially i thought it'd be the wind that was the problem but i'd picked a wee valley round the back where we had plenty of cover and not much air movement at ground level. so far so good. what wasn't so good was that where ever we went we could still hear the traffic from the dual carriageway which is a good mile away up the hill.

i guess that level of noise pollution is just one of those things that's so omnipresent we just screen it out. last year when we came back form the western isles (where there's almost no traffic) we were struck by how noisy everything seemed. it only lasted a few days. i'm convinced it can't be good for you!

i did get sonmething that might work in the end but tomorrow i'm off into some proper forest so i can get conifer noise and some trees creaking. what might one call this? it's not silent and it's far from quiet. an away from human racket zone? how pleasant....

objectify this

it should come as no surprise that i quite like a bit of a rant. there is it seems, at least so i am told, no end to the number of soap box issuesabout which i can go off on one given the right stimulus. and the guardian supplied ample fuel to that fire the other day with another one of naomi wolf's lifestyle disguised as polemic missives. in this one not only does she get to talk even more about herself but specifically her vagina and its many doings (or not doings). off she spouts with some pseudo-neuroscience (or as we would have it in the vernacular here - pish) and then ices the shouty cake with the revelation that despite her many insights into (her) vagina she was 'traumatized' for six months by some vagina themed pasta. in which case should you be reading ms wolf you would be well advised never, ever to visit the east coast of scotland.

all of which may bring to mind henry more's words on the workings of the brain prior to the discoveries of thomas willis - this lax pith or marrow in man's head shows no more capacity for thought than a cake of suet or a bowl of curds

fortunately for every naomi wolf there's a whole bunch of actually interesting women who perhaps don't get quite get the attention they deserve. object is just such a squad of these types (they even have some chaps for balance) and is the organisation i refer my younger female colleagues to when they have the need to react against the phallocracy. imagine then the non shouty joy with which i came across objectify this which not only delves into the murky world of female anatomical representation (inc the legendary becker, wilson and gehweiler!) but just goes on about anatomical representation generally, which is just a joy. if you click on the link on the right hand side of the exhibition page on the image of thanos and eros it'll even take you to the flickr group for anatomical street art. surely just the type of thing the internet was designed for.

i do worry about naomi wolf tho. calling her book vagina. all those young minds being corrupted by the v word. in a world where todd akin breathes actual oxygen (even if, as seems likely, he doesn't believe in it) perhaps she'll be burnt as a witch.

pica pica

my association with illustrators has, without exception, been fruitless and lamentable with every single project i've ever been associated with or wanted to complete with one of them in any shape size or form (regardless of whether i'm actually paying them money!) ending in complete failure. i've worked with every brand of anything you could conceivably brand 'creative' but for sheer feckless unreliability illustrators are absolutely top of the tree.

which is a shame as illustration is one of those things, especially if it's accompanied by a bit of text, i love above all else. which is why, aside from loving a magpie in our house, my eye was caught by daren newman at me and my pen. rotring loving he says and my how it shows.

once upon a time i'd have been straight on that email. these days it's just nice to look....

*just in case it's not clear - i have not ever worked or attempted to work with daren newman. i assume from the work on his website that the work he produces is on budget and to deadline. in which case he is a prince amongst his fellows.

down at that olympics

tired of the sight of rain i decide to take t away down to her mum's for some south of england sun. at least that's the theory. t's mum says it was 32 degrees thursday past. as it turns out we brings the overcastness with us but it's still plenty warm for me.

we settle in for the opening ceremony. after deep ambiguity about the whole affair we were well impressed. i wasn't so happy about the whole nhs medley what with all the horrible cliches about nurses but sticking a bit celebrating the nhs in the opening ceremony given what the tories are about at the moment was a grand thing to see. i was a bit disconcerted by black people playing cricket and having a pastoral time in the fields as opposed to any accurate portrayal of britain's colonial past but the windrush finally appeared and the fact that doreen lawrence was helping carry the flag provided a nice counterbalance.

i'd seen the tiger feet clip prior to the event and it hadn't filled me with promise but in the end i was quite up for the musical section right up to the inclusion of dizzee rascal. plus the section for those absent with emili sande was both poignant and apt. by the end we were all (with me as the token non-londoner) happy with the opening as a representation of london. right, that is, up to the appearance of paul macartney. and off with the tv!

surprise of the night was the thomas heatherwick cauldron in part because of my heatherwick fanboyness but also because we'd been to the heatherwick thing at the v&a in the afternoon. not that surprising stylistically but beautifully executed. everybody we spoke to loved it.

back into town the following day for the men's road cycling. given it was the olympic road race i was surprised at dave brailsford's confidence prior to the race. and from lap 3, for me, the british team were in trouble. you just can't let people of that quality away in the break without either shutting it down or getting your man in there. we stopped briefly at the rapha cafe (stowed to the doors) but decided to get down to the mall just in case. being the olympics there's no public screens unless you pay for them so the assembled crowd were listening in on their phones. and, strangely, to me. i nailed the unlikelihood of a catch as well as the fact there was no way the australians or the germans were going to aid cav to a victory. then disaster as cancellara crashes (esp as far as we could make out he had the whole swiss team there - a lesson for team gb?). and then it was vino. you could almost sense the grimaces of the collected uci types. but, doping or no doping, vino attacks. and a great result for rigoberto uran. cancellara inconsolable at the end. but a great atmosphere and everyone loving it.

sunday we were back out but t's mum's dodgy hip stopped play for her. this time the rain was battering down so we decided to get the coverage back in the rapha cafe which was about a third as full as the previous day. cue a grumpy me re the support for women's cycling and women's sport in general. naturally it was a much better race than the day before with the team gb getting lizzie armitstead into the break and emma pooley taking her turn to control the chasing peloton. in the end there was no way armitstead was going to have more than marianne vos but a great finish (a sound recording of which will follow soon). i was heartened to see that armitstead followed my lead to have a mini-rant about sexism in sport off the back of her result (which the bbc obviously decided to more or less avoid).

more of the same when we got home and caught up with the team gb football. great games and great crowds but the attitudes that have so marked women's football still well in evidence in the arrangement of games and the coverage (this last of course not just restricted to football). and hope powell - black national coach? there's a lesson in there for the men's game!

it wouldn't be the olympics without some sort of controversy and t's mum alerted us to the comments over chinese swimmer ye shiwen. shiwen's just a wee lass and only sixteen so it seems unlikely she's been 'prepared' but such is the level of disillusionment about athletes and doping coupled with a reluctance by certain nations to accept they've been beat by scene else. no surprise then that ruta meilutyte is soon accused of the same. cos they're mad for doping down in that plymouth.

all of this coupled with the stuff about transport, the drip feed about how much this all cost (the taxpayer not the sponsors obviously), the nature of the sponsorship deals, the ugly nationalisms that seep round the edges of the athlets' 'journeys' seeps round the edges of the events.

travelwise the 'chaos' wasn't much worse than it's ever been while we've been in london, in fact in many ways it was better. the empty seat thing, initially blamed on those nasty corporations, now appears to be down to the olympic committees and the media, after which revelation the media fell rather silent. and not a cheep about just how many tickets wills and harry and their hangers-on plus shiny dave must've bought these last few days.

i think in the next few days roman abramovich and the apple boy have got themselves dispensations to park their super yachts (ships to you and i) on the thames so as they don't have to walk to far. you'd think in a city where you can still see the effects of the riots this might at least raise an eyebrow but no, everyone sits and sucks it up. there's even people on the streets telling you what pavement to walk on. this last bugged me the most, not because it affected me but because it might have. maybe it's some sort of 'i can walk where i want scottish thrawn-ness' but i was astonished anyone would put up with that.

all i could think walking about was bread and circuses, bread and circuses.....

all that said tho it was brilliant. london was, as i've always found to to be, at its friendly and open best. they love a flag and the houses were hung with them, faces painted and that oddly english desire to be festooned with union jackery was proper manifest. the town felt truly global, esp after the weekend, and we had to wonder, esp in asia but also france, if there was anyone left back there. the volunteers deserve special mention as they were everywhere, amazingly non-stressed from what we saw and ever helpful. our few days were easily too short and if we'd had our way we wouldn't have come back for the duration.

i put my niggles aside, still those voices as i watch wiggins doing the time trial, look at the size of the crowds on the roadside, listen to the noise. i'll never see that again...

wiggins amok

is surely the best headline associated with bradley wiggins post race outburst yesterday - danish it's true, but pleasing to my eyes.

the last two weeks have been sick time in the swiss household but the happy outcome is that the afternoons have seen me and t crawl out from bed to couch and languish in front of eurosport for the tour. and what a race so far. crashes aside one of the things that has leapt into view is the shattering of the field when the going gets uphill. except that is for sky. now, aside from the fact they've made very plain they've spent who knows how long in tenerife riding up the hill and down the hill in the heat for weeks, it's a performance that's bound to race a few eyebrows particularly in view of say, the whole history of professional cycling!

that said, there's always peter sagan, who's been a revelation (but no surprise) and the inevitable hardness of cadel evans who. it seems, can more or less shed his team in the face of the sky might and still attack. maybe not chris froome tho but, despite wiggins statements to the contrary, had that last wee stretch been longer yesterday it would've been an angliru situation all over again with, possibly, evans the only winner.

than again, maybe that's just me. i've liked cuddles since the tour lion incident but especially since the world championship and he showed that he just won't lie down. wiggins i've just never drawn to, maybe a bit too high maintenance and maybe just too much paul weller identification. plus post vuelta last year there's the notion that froome is, and let's face it a british win is sky's declared aim, maybe a bit too african for them in terms of their tour aspirations (but if the latest gossip is to be believed he'll get a lead role at the vuelta this year)

but i did have some sympathy for wiggins when in the press conference yesterday he gets asked about the sky/us postal 'similarity'. given the dubious quality of previous questioning i think i too would have been less than charitable in my response. but, and most likely moreso than wiggins, working in a profession where it seems it's okay for anyone to make any form of statement, shout any form of abuse, i still don't think i would have called them a shower of fucking wankers no matter how much i would've wanted to.

naturally there's been much blubbing into the journalistic porridge at this 'foul mouthed outburst' as if the use of the demotic amongst uk english speakers is somehow a surprise. and obviously for certain sections of the english speaking community amongst our transatlantic cousins the dropping of the c-bomb at a press conference equates with the end times and the coming of the rapture. me personally, i'm with charlie brooker on the responses of sporting types or for that matter all the indignation generally. it's a bike race, a professional bike race. for money. get over it. oh aye and see that tv. it's got an off button. you could be on your bike....

and, a slight aside on the cycling rant, t did note the number of nurses who, while she was in hospital last week, were prone to the use of familiar language, such as 'dear' or 'love'. i pointed out that this was exactly the sort of thing that the hei was against and obviously, despite the many pressures on the nhs these days, this was one area where we'd be pursuing a robust disciplinary response. t, who found the familiarity deeply comforting, responded in a very anglo-saxon manner. as well she should...!

the forbidden word!!

vaginas. i'm rather partial to them. my mother had one and i'm very happy about that fact. most of my work colleagues are in possession of a vagina, quite some percentage of our work centres around the wonky doings of the vagina and its associated workings - these would be things like uteruses and ovaries and the like. we don't tend to have much discussion of the vagina beyond that except perhaps for the effects on it (and everything else) of pregnancy and childbirth. in these cases, mostly, i am glad i don't have a vagina. that said, not being in possession of a vagina, it's my place to listen in a vagina based discussion. women, being the possessors of the vagina, should have the last say on its doings. i'm reasonably certain most men would feel the same way if the positions were reversed.

or would they? it appears, according to the guardian, that for some people, and specifically a charming sounding fellow called Mike Callton who says It was so offensive, I don't even want to say it in front of women, it is so much of a taboo that other stuff, like free speech and whatnot, should be abandoned in the face of its power.

at first i was willing, and wanting, to believe that maybe it was just the guardian gilding the lily but now lisa brown, the dirty birdy who was driven to utter the word vagina in a public place, has confirmed the story. further she alleges that this same mike callton has a degree in biology. how did that work? maybe it's different where he comes from but when i did mine quite a lot of attention was paid to reproduction. did they just avoid the word vagina? and if so what replaced it? and then what did they do with the likes of cloaca?

it's a funny world we live in these days and i shouldn't really be surprised by any fresh new madness but this took me aback. it's the sort of thing that makes me want to fly to michigan and run up and down the streets shouting vagina, vagina, vagina! even in the guardian there appear to be those who are trying to put forward the position that using the word vagina is obscuring the debate on abortion. i would suggest that in a debate on women's reproductive rights if you can't use the word vagina in public you haven't got the right to be there in the first place.

and while i remember. just for balance - penis

too stupid for facebook

after what seems like months, and is quite probably years, of people telling me i should be on that facebook i've finally decided to dip a toe into the waters of the devilish media. not that i can actually use it. i had to go via other people's pages in order to find out what it was supposed to look like. even more stalkerish than google maps! i kind of thought there might be a search thing (and apparently there should be) but not on my page. i look at it blankly. i google stuff to tell me how to work it. they tell me i have menus that i do not have, basic commands to use that it seems are absent from my account. they should be there but they are not. aim the unusability of it all!

normally i'd be in a computer induced rage by now. and yet i am not. i know all the arguments for why i should 'engage' and even if i'm able to let go of my many reasons for not using it up to this point i'm still left with apple's kindly spellchecker insisting i should capitalise the f. for that reason alone i feel happy to admit that i, alone among my peers, am too thick for facebook. i shall try to bear up under the ignominy....

TV-seriesnygg eller Söderhipster

dear mr jörgen andersson

i was interested to see your unsual job ad the other day (maybe it's my swedish but the wording seems to have changed - i wonder why?) esp as my swedish relatives have been banging on for some time that i should be looking at getting a job over there, coincidentally enough at your very hospital. not only that but a while back we had someone come back from södersjukhuset and, as the only person in my hospital with any capacity for reading swedish, i was most impressed with the documentation and the care the patient had received, something much discussed amongst my colleagues. many questions were asked, what was swedish healthcare like, how do nurses work, all that sort of stuff. well, i said, it's sweden, it's all really professional. and again, even moreso, when my partner's mother was admitted, again i think to your very hospital, not so long ago, the care was second to none.

oddly tho, altho both these people had lots great to say about their care, neither mentioned how hot their nursing staff were. maybe i've made a mistake and they didn't go to your establishment but it was in fact somewhere else - you'll excuse me but i don't know the swedish for 'hospital with the ugly nurses up the road'. perhaps it's a cultural thing. i was aware that you swedes are allowed to refuse service if, how shall i put it, your public servants are a bit too brown but i wasn't aware that they copuld do so if their health care professional had, in their eyes, a kinship with a welder's bench.

would it be impertinent then to ask if the hospital has perhaps an affinity for the sweden democrats?a local hospital for local people? i only ask as these jobs are advertised to cover for the locals, natives if you like, getting away for their summer holidays. and given what appears to an immigrant, unused to the fine nuance of swedish humour, a blatantly sexist ad, the notion of a hospital known as the white pearl gives me pause.

you say, mr jörgen andersson, in what is surely the type of healthcare management bullshit recognised by healthcare workers the world over, you've received no negative feedback over this advert. perhaps you've heard of a new fangled thing called the internet. all over the globe it seems, tabloid newspaper types are falling over themselves to draw attention to your ad, accompanying it with some stock picture of a 'hot nurse' (maybe it's the way i'm googling it but no male nurses in their pants?). again, i know that the sense of humour on the northern latitudes is far more developed than that of your pedestrian european cousins but for the rest of us (and specifically the uk) i can pretty much assure you that if i tried putting out an ad like that i'd be in some serious bother. (what's that you say, today you and your nurse buddies have released an apology? but if you had 'no negative feedback'.... then that would make what you said untrue. surely a mistake in translation.)

it was a strange gambit i have to say, using a 'quote' from a patient in a job advert (i can only assume you utilise a patient story approach and will have evidence to back this up). myself, of all the things i've seen and heard over my years in healthcare, a demand for hot, hipster nurses isn't one of them. call them quirky but most folk seem to want that competency thing happening to them.

so despite coming from that terrible uk, i don't think i'll be up for applying to your hospital anytime soon. it's not that i don't like an onsite gym, avoid a grill at work, especially if it comes with karoake nor am i averse to a 58 kroner tea. it's not about the salary which, let's face it, is a wee bit on the short side. i would avoid any categorisation as one of those skinny jeans wearing singlespeed riding wannabes but i would have to admit that in my day, yes it's possible, i could have been described in the modern parlance as a hipster. my partner t will affirm my looks as smokin hot. yes, she will.

no, i'm lucky enough to work with a bunch of people who, whatever their sartorial shortcomings, are professionals, who work on and on and on in circumstances that, frankly, i couldn't. you, mr jörgen andersson would do well to be a lot more circumspect in your attempts at humour and to treat them with a little more respect

*i should point out that these comments are those of an individual and none of the above should be taken as representative of any organisation or profession associated with healthcare in the uk. one thing sweden has going for it far more than the uk is an actual commitment to freedom of expression no matter how much they may not like it.

also, i'm sure mr jörgen andersson has had enough pelters about this along with his colleagues and i'm not suggesting anything more needs done beyond today's apology. he'll be getting enough grief from his countryfolk for making the place look bad.

further, i want to say again that swedish healthcare, if you've got the right insurance, is in my experience, rather excellent. some swedish people may disagree with this but, in the main, i think they're mistaken.

speaking the language

having spent a large part of the day dodging work and getting myself involved in a debate regarding diane abbot's perceived racism (the long story short version - yes she is, all the way back to the finnish nurses thing which i wrote to her about at the time. i've no wish to reiterate any of this but i can forward you onto where i have been on about it should you wish) rather than writing the poetry which is so desperate to get out of my notebooks i find myself mulling over the linguistic interactions that have coloured and informed my work life, just the sort of thing that wouldn't have happened had ms abbot had her way.

for a good part of last year i was working with a finnish-swedish girl (who trained in newcastle - it was a strange, strange accent). when i was attempting finnish it was, she said, obvious 'to anyone who had ears' that i had some sort of swedish thing going on as i was unable to pronounce any of the finnish words without that hurdy hurdy hurdy cadence going on, a description that both hurt and pleased me at the same time.

i looked after a poor wee french woman for a while and tho it's true my french these days is execrable at least she understood me and i, for the most part, her (i have a colleague who is half french for back up for the difficult bits!). this was grand but my moment of the year was going into another poor wee woman who while she did speak english had, in her illness, reverted back to her native italian. now my italian doesn't extend much beyond - hello, how are you. my name is mr swiss and i need a blood sample - but i had that magic moment when her eyes opened and i knew the language had gone in. the nurses were loving it also. ask me i need a blood sample they say. all of the shift. ho ho, how we laughed...

i'm liking the german these days and really must make more of an effort seeing as how there are actually quite a number of germans round these parts i could actually practice with. i had a beautiful afternoon at the end of autumn where i spent a bit of time with friend chrissie and her her dad just listening. i get the odd word but the grammar and such like to hook it all up just isn't there. this almost inevitably leads to that moment when the german speaker will ask me why it is i know these fragments from the tongue of goethe and schiller and, esp if they're from the east, there's that impossibly weary sigh as i admit i know most of my german form listening to rammstein

this week, in a set of circumstances that would've made diane abbot's blood run cold, i was working with a girl fresh of the plane from romania, never been in the uk, never spoken to a scottish person before. i did try to check google translate to check if i could remember any romanian greetings but for some reason it doesn't work at work. nevertheless my mangled romanian was understood and off we went, me with a new friend for the night. it's amazing just how quickly you can break the ice if you can just say your name and hello in the other person's language, something i've tried and broadly failed to get others to do in hospital for years but has seen me getting stuck into everything from cantonese to farsi.

my favourite last year was after getting my haircut (and the big fiery cotton bud in the ear) by a man whose accent i couldn't place, who turned out to be turkish, turkish hairdressers being the latest immigrants around these parts. i was straight round to waterstones and back again - er, i said, tessukur edirim? my first ever turkish!

speaking languages badly is great fun. true, there can sometimes be misunderstandings but the one thing it's necessity to do is listen. and then having listened shape someone else's words in your mouth. it's an adventure!

as an aside, one of my friends is a fluent russian speaker and fan of putin - we exchange many things russian. my favourite advert this year is this one. burger king in moscow - who knew?

just when you thought

poetryland couldn't get any more up itself along comes this gem.

you'd think there was no bother about the future of the book as an object, that such world weary concerns are beyond the reach of such lofty debate. and lofty it is, lofty like an m&s advert. these are not just poems but 'emblazoned on pennants along the road we have just traversed'. brilliant!

it's absolutely worth following all the wee link dinky things in the article as a variety of suspects, well known and not, cue up to give us their views as if somewhere in poetryland a fat controller figure decided that what was needed was a dose of controversy of the storm in a tea cup type that's so favoured by the keyboard warriors of the internet.

in a nutshell, somebody writes a book, leaves out some people, includes others. 'outrage' ensues. obviously by outrage i mean the type of outrage you can have that plath, ginsberg, rexroth and the like, all those poets you've most likely got or read anyway, have been left out of a book you're more than likely not going to buy. or folk like mary oliver and billy collins have been included. and just a sweet nugget of racism and misogynism and the like. all those isms. swiss is tired now - wants to go sleepy time on the keyboard...

i read some fantastic poems this week. i was also out and about in my particular section of the world where the concerns of poetryland, notions of poetry, arts and any related are about as far away from relevant as its possible to be. when i got back i liked the fact i could recognise i had the time, the health and the ability to read all that fantastic poetry.

poetry, the act of reading, the space to paint and all of that are privileges i allow myself when i finish work. i don't have kids who are sick, i don't have elderly relatives whose minds are fusing into themselves, i'm not watching a loved one disintegrate in the face of disease. i am not worried that i'm losing my job, that my home is in danger or any of those things. i'm grateful for all of that and i'm grateful that not having to face any of these circumstances means i can help those that are.

getting upset over a poetry anthology! honestly, a wee bit of perspective...

(none of which is going to stop me posting more choice quotes form the ongoing debate. obviously!)

olympic posters

as i'm just after some quality ranting re the paralympic posters from both t and a bunch of assorted mountain bike types i thought i could do worse than share.

please feel free to vent. for what it's worth i like the howard hodgkin one....

the poetry thing

two things come thumping into my inbox on national poetry day that remind me why i won't be putting anything up for national poetry day. aside from the fact i'm not fussed for the numbing compulsory nature of these 'days', a bit too contrived, a bit too generic. even burn's night, at least in scotland, seems too much of an excuse to wallow in nationalist sentiment and generally get shit faced.

so, one of the things i got was a poetry give away. the publisher doing this has done it before so i was pleased to see them doing it again. free stuff is free stuff after all! what bothered me more was that they were having a big sale of their other material all available at a mere £2.99. now that's a decent price to buy a bunch of books any day of the week but looking at it i wondered what exactly was happening with their margins when they are to all intents and purposes giving their product away. which leads to that old saw, that people like reading poetry far more than they like buying it. or perhaps i'm wrong and just missing how it's possible to get something printed and sold and still cover your costs for that price!

another thing that arrived was some announcement about something or other, couched in that language that can best be described as poetspeak, complimenting the poet on his or her 'admirable risk taking'. now maybe it's just me but i'm struggling to think of any activity that's more risk free than poetry. even reading such reviews it seems carries inherently more risk as your hold on the book might loosen as you drift into slumber and then hit you in the face. or perhaps there's a movement, of which i'm as yet unaware, of extreme poetry writing, that maybe i can find on the extreme channel, that famously obscure collection 'haiku written while doing a double back flip over a gnarly tabletop'. yes, i'd read that. or maybe there's an as yet unappreciated risk that one can become so absorbed in the poetry world that it's actually possible to absorb oneself. who knows? it could be true. i have an notion to do something like the bad sex prize for bad writing about poetry/literature. i think that could fly....?

talking of which today's the day after the welcome news that tomas transtromer has won the nobel prize for literature. now i kind of like transtromer but i wouldn't claim to be super familiar with his work, beyond an annoying desire to write his name as tomas transformer and evoking an image of the old poet turning into some of sort of mechanised killer robot laying waste and destruction in the streets of central stockholm. and maybe it's just me but i kind of like the idea that transtromer has managed to keep working in the face of really quite disabling ill health. it occurs to me - last time a writer with significant physical disability won a prize?

which is the sort of thinking you can only get from some of the critical response to transtromer's win, as if certain writers have entirely forgotten that any judging process is entirely subjective and will always leave at least some people a bit stunned (i still can't read elfriede jelinek but i'm not, and i'm sure she isn't, losing any sleep over it). this infighting and general cattiness (which really, is nothing compared to the recent poetry shenanigans) seems to cleave to a rather negative image of poetry types and oddly at cross purposes with an activity that seems to me to sublimely engaging and really rather pleasant. whether it's reading or writing it i really rather recommend it!

goodness me, a post about poetry. and here's me who wud neva...!!!! i must get myself a soothing cup of tea. and much while i'd like to claim it for me maybe i'll just set it as a poetry challenge for those who like that sort of thing. tomas transformer, alien giant robot, wins nobel. can you do anything with that? too risky?

why

one has to ask on occasion do we do things that only serve to make us irate, in my case this seeming to be almost anything to do with watching or reading the news, in particular the guardian. now just to make it clear this doesn't mean i'm off cruising the pages of the express or the mail, papers which easily succeed in making the likes of the guardian look like the complete works of tolstoy but just because something can look like something else it doesn't mean it is. and the guardian's lazy. complacent journalism certainly isn't.

today's offender was what looked like a fairly innocuous article about archery. now that's as maybe but the subtext of reading that article is that yours truly, once upon a time, was an archer of some repute and, in both athens and beijing, was fascinated by the archery competitions. not so for the guardian, for whom archery is posh darts, apparently favoured mainly by koreans. even schools can't be bothered watching it they tell us. because it's just not good viewing.

well of course not, especially if you don;t know what you're looking at. t, who is long inured to my liking for tv's minority sport, is these days, a big fan of the cycling when she has time to actually watch it. it was not always thus but the curiousity of seeing the person you live with engaged with a bunch of blokes seemingly doing nothing but cycling along a road had her looking for explanation.

maybe i wasn't quite as successful with the archery it's true but t was in no doubt as to the majestic performance of the koreans last time around. watching them shoot was transcendent. total stillness, total focus, if ever there was a zen sport it's this one.

in athens you could go along to the archery for nothing. beautiful venue, totally atmospheric. maybe lords isn't quite that but sports fields are where you do your archery in britain for the most part so as venues go, it's a good one. empty stands? archery isn't a jumping up and down sport! of course given the pricing for london you could buy yourself a set of cheap kit and join an archery club for the price of their tickets. i would recommend the latter.

archery is a beautiful sport that, once it's got a hold of you, is difficult to let go. it also, if you're going to do it at national level and beyond, requires massive commitment for very little outward gain. if the guardian and their ilk really want to be writing about olympic sport they should maybe start asking people who actually participate in them what it's all about.

me, i gave it all up years ago. i did have a brief return a while back but the club structure did nothing for me. i used to shoot every day, get coaching input every day so the notion of social shooting was completely alien to me. back then i could put three arrows in a milk bottle top at 20m seven times out of ten. that was good for juniors but nowhere near where i needed to be. back at the archery club they were about hitting the target, any notion of grouping was beyond them. whatever i did there it was never going to get me back to competition level.

but, that was me. everyone else there seemed to love it. and it was great to be back among the targets and nets, to listen to the quiet of shooting, to try and blank the mind so there is only draw and release.

watch the archery. be puzzled over what it's about. don't read lazy british journalism but get down to a club and give it a go. don't worry about hitting the centre of the target (tho please hit the target!). take three arrows, try and get all three within the space of the palm of your hand. achieve this. now do it again. and again. becoming a bit obsessive about that? now you understand....

sound recording

so i have to make a sound recording, something i approach with dread. it used to be i used audacity but now i've got garageband which is widely reputed to be idiot proof. the proof then is in the pudding and, of course, garageband is far from this idiot proof.

problems, as with audacity, start as soon as i put the mic in. of course i can't hear it. it's a posh all singing all dancing mic but in either system it'll only work in mono. not only that but the levels i can achieve are such that i need to peer to see if there's any up and down at all. i check with one of those online tutorial things. do the stuff. doesn't work, because it never works. and there's that curious thing that when i listen to these guys their voices all sound something like normal. mine's, despite the levels being set so low as to be practically unable to see them, makes me sound like i'm recording in a bell, with all the low tones taken out.

i remember in the old days, although tape was expensive, you plugged the mic in, set some basic recording levels, pressed record and you were off. it was finicky but something like enjoyable. this digital recording malarkey tho seems just an exercise in stress esp when everyone and their cat tell me just how 'easy' it is. i wonder if it;s something i'm missing or if there's some quality in the technology that's just passing me by. recording sound used to be time consuming but satisfying. now it's just time consuming!

the collaboration charabanc

it's a jolly wee life just now sitting in my workspace, finishing off a couple of paintings, listening away to whatever internet radio takes my fancy but there;s always that temptation to look away, click on the internetathimgumajiggy and lose a bit of time. worse, it can lead to the guardian, the tabloid broadsheet of those middle classes of whom i am so very much one.

first off this catches my eye. so far, so dandy you might say, i am after all the one who likes all the collaboration and what not. so why then do i find this article so profoundly depressing? i'm all about the science, history of it and all of that. i like marc quinn, i was all happy when blood head made an appearance in kick-ass. and yet when i see a title like 'we share our chemistry with the stars' i can't help but think that it's all a bit leadenly simplistic.

sure the whole art/science thing is in vogue just now. i guess it's a chance for the science types to step a bit outside themselves for a wee while but it seems a whole lot more to do with the arts types to feel just a wee bit (even more) self important. lavinia greenlaw may feel she's 'ridiculously analytical' but, and respect to her point of view, really, she's not.

maybe i'm just a wee bit jealous and hey, who wouldn't be, to get a chance to do all this cool stuff but at the same time, there just seems to be a lack of rigour. and, dare i say it, elegance? i remember it from my time as a science boy, that kind of unfolding, deep satisfaction at recreating an elegant experiment, or interpretation of a set of data, the instinctual (i'm rubbish at maths) pleasure the vision of a well laid out set of equations, exactly the same feeling as i get when i look at a painting or read a poem.

i think someone says it in the comments section - artists are not scientists and scientists are not artists - it's a statement that doesn't stand up (tho it's nowhere near the ridiculousness of say, irigaray's gendered equation nonsense!) but surely, these days, there are enough people who do both? certainly the two fields didn't used to be exclusive. or maybe i'm just being just a tad precious and up on my soapbox!

in which case back to the guardian! old words being retired? what's this? for a start i can't quite see how they make the leap to 'retiring' succedaneum even if it is for this particular use rather than the caput succedaneum with which i'm far more familiar (can you hear the soapbox being dragged back out?). aerodrome? i refuse to believe that the word aerodrome isn't appearing often enough for collins to include it and even if it isn't they should keep it because it's such a perfect word. back when i was really young and first going up in gliders we did so from an aerodrome. such a place is not an 'airport' by any means but a place of grass, of sunlight and buttercups, of struts and hangers, magical in a way that the non spaces of a terminal can never be. but worst of all - charabanc? that must be the lexicographical equivalent of a human rights crime. charabanc is one of my favourite words and a language without it is all the poorer.

which leads neatly to a finally and the sort of story that's a nap for guardian readers. the cafe that borges used to go to taken over by nike. i very much suspect that the average guardian reader views borges a bit like one of their five a day vegetables - they know they should but when it comes right down to it they just don't, even if they like to slip borgesian in as an adjective every now and again. all of which is kind of like shooting fish in a barrel - fun but not fair! i've never been to buenos aires but if i was to you can be sure i'd want to be doing some sort of borgesian (see what i did there!) tour. and while yes, things change and all that, there seems sufficient evidence on the strength of the article to suggest the developers knew exactly what they were about. shame.

oh well, that's a nice half hour passed. back to work....