Endgame

Well, dear reader(s), this is it. This is my last blog. After a year documenting the minutes and minutiae of my life (putting the chronic in chronicles), I am hanging up my metaphorical pen and signing off as a blogger. The time has come to dedicate all my creative energy to my increasingly hectic day job as the nation's favourite freelance copywriter - and there’s something pleasingly circular about finishing up before Christmas, having started this blog back in early January. There may not be so much as a hint of Lindt or a soupçon of Suchard over the next fortnight, but there will be excessive amounts of cheese-eating and general vegetation, and quite frankly, I can’t be arsed thinking of clever puns and wordplays to entertain you over the festivities. Although did you know that Gary Numan is 13 days older than Gary Oldman? That’s my Fact of 2013, that is. I mean, like, dude, and stuff, you know.

Writing a blog has been fun, but because my working weeks are so jam-packed nowadays, it’s increasingly eating into my spare time. These precious moments could otherwise be spent planning my wedding, learning German, building up my Twitter following or maintaining my frankly obsessive knowledge of modern and classic cars. So that’s what I’m going to do from now on. In a year’s time, I’ll be a married bilingual twat who can spot a Dacia at a hundred paces. If I’m completely honest, it’s also becoming difficult to write new posts without revealing too much about myself – I’m fundamentally a private person, so blogging at all is slightly counter-intuitive. If I’m blogging for much longer, I’ll end up recounting the story about the drug dealer’s girlfriend…

As a final parting gift to a grateful and tearful world, I have decided not to delete my blog, but rather to leave it online. It will thus form a permanent shrine to my sheer talent with a keyboard (move over, Rick Wakeman), and also in case anyone stumbles upon it who might want to give me a lucrative job blogging for a newspaper or magazine. That way, future generations can marvel at my use of the Oxford comma, the deft deployment of parenthesis, and the occasional indulgent inclusion of past participles. Also, any Johnny-come-latelys can read my considered ramblings about the failings of the NHS (‘Wait and bleed’), the threat of militant feminism (‘Here comes the monster’), abused apostrophes (‘Mr Writer’), and why some Lanarkshire towns have to have self-repairing infrastructure (‘Welcome to the jungle’). By the way, if you spotted that all these blog titles are also the names of rock and metal songs, well done – you would have my eternal respect if I knew who you were.

In the immortal words of Dave Mustaine, one thousand times goodbye. And if you actually are the commissioning editor of Shortlist or GQ, gissajob. Go on…

The separation of church and skate

It occurred to me last night, in a brief moment of relative tranquillity, that I haven’t written a blog for ages. Admittedly, my devoted followers (hi again, Stuart) haven’t had to wait as long for my latest post as the many fans of my fiancé’s work – after six posts in one month, her blog been a graveyard of ambition since early September. I’d love to say that our increasing bloglessness is due to our whirlwind social life and endless bouts of sex. So I will say that. It’s up to you whether or not you believe me…

Anyway, my neglected Blogspot profile can also be attributed to a lack of time. The weeks are running away with me at the moment – November has gone by so quickly I haven’t had time to cultivate a moustache (i.e. it grew so slowly that I gave up after a fortnight and shaved it off), and suddenly December is looming large like an obese knitwear manufacturer. My day job as an award-winning copywriter™ is the most hectic it’s been all year, our social lives really have been populous of late, and the other minutiae of daily life has collectively gobbled up most of the free time I previously had to rage about things that don't fully push my buttons and leave me partly depressed.

The scary thing about this accelerated passage of time is how quickly far-off events are now approaching. In four weeks’ time, I’ll be emptying the contents of Santa’s sack all over the living room floor. In four months, I’ll be married. And ten months from now, I could be living in a disintegrating country, depending on the results of next autumn’s independence referendum. For anyone who’s been living under a rock since 2011, Scotland is considering packing its bags and walking out on its three siblings, boldly making its own way in the world after 307 years of grumbling co-existence. Quite how the separation of these conjoined nations would work in practice is currently unclear, despite this week’s publication of a 670-page independence manifesto that claims to have all the answers, while actually posing far more questions than it resolves. Regardless of the endless waffling and posturing by both pro- and anti-independence camps, it’s come as an unwelcome shock to realise quite how close this potentially seismic vote actually is.

Although I’ve just used the word seismic, in reality, I doubt it’s going to be much of a surprise. Despite my famed inability to predict anything correctly (especially the EuroMillions numbers, or who will be voted off MasterChef this week), I am slightly tempted to break my self-imposed lifetime gambling ban and place a tenner on a decisive No vote. I only know one person intending to vote Yes next September, as opposed to 30 implacable No voters. And I’m not talking here about 30 Union Jack-waving pro-monarchy Westminster apologists, or 30 Subaru-driving shotgun owners, or 30 Guardian-reading tofu-munching left-wing ALF pinko freaks who knit their own muesli and smoke things that make them happy and anxious at the same time. I’m talking about a representative cross-section of society – entrepreneurs, suburban housewives, office workers and pensioners alike. As bettable events go, the Scottish independence referendum is the most one-sided two-horse race I’ve seen since One-Legged Jack O'Hopper tried to win an arse-kicking content against a quadriped from Chernobyl with double-jointed knees and the ability to levitate. So, that’ll be a decisive Yes vote next September, then.

Anyway, at the rate time is passing, I should know by tomorrow morning whether I can look forward to billing G75 Media’s clients in pounds, Euros or groats, and whether my car will be searched by border guards at Gretna for contraband vegetables and people who say “yah”. It really makes you think. Or it would do if I actually had any time to think. Now please excuse me - I have 7,456,000,000 things to do before teatime. Which is an hour ago.

Heartwork

I have recently become a parent, in a manner of speaking. What I’ve actually done, in tandem with my fiancé, is adopt a cat. Now normally I wouldn’t dedicate a blog to waffling on about my personal life, because quite frankly, it would make you all feel jealous and inadequate. However, this story bears repeating, because I think everyone should experience the jolt that your life receives when an animal becomes part of the family.

I should stress at the outset that I’m hardly a shrinking violet when it comes to being responsible. However, our one-year old adoptee has just recovered from major surgery that prevented her from enjoying her youth properly. As a result, things like climbing and running around after toy mice appear to be new and exciting beyond measure. She is, in effect, a one year old semi-longhaired kitten, who wakes us up at 5am by licking our faces, and treats any limb unwarily extruding from a sofa or bed as a monster that needs to be bitten. Even in the middle of the fucking night.

It’s remarkable how many things in our lives have changed as a result of introducing a four-legged friend into the family. The windows stay shut to avoid the outraged yelping noise that invariably results when a cat unexpectedly descends twelve feet onto grass. Used butter knives go sharp-end-down into a mug, lest a little tongue be sliced in two while enjoying a tasty snack, rather than leaving said knife on the worktops in the hope that wind erosion will clean it. Hairs turn up in the most unexpected of places, and I have never spent so much time anxiously looking at curtains as I have done in the last month. Then there’s our new entry procedure when arriving home, which involves inching the front door open before squeezing through sideways and shouting “back back back”, in an attempt to prevent escapology acts. It’s quite a challenge with four shopping bags in your hands, but the neighbours must find it hilarious, and the cat probably quite enjoys it too.

Life has just got a whole lot harder, and I’m only able to type this now because I spent the last hour creating monsters out of straws, tinfoil and various other mundane household objects that apparently adopt magical qualities when viewed through a cat’s unblinking eyes. I’m tired and a bit scratched, our formerly pristine home has disappeared under a fine layer of brightly-coloured toys, and the cat has six times as many beds to choose from as we do. But despite all these sacrifices on the altar of Bastet (Google it), I reckon everyone in the land should adopt a cat, or a dog, or a rabbit, if they can offer it a decent home. I haven’t laughed as much in years, playing monsters is brilliant fun when you’re not half-asleep, and there is something quite wonderful about everyone settling down for a kip at the end of a long evening.

If you already have a pet, you'll know what I mean. And if you don’t, you really should.

More life in a tramp’s vest

As a well-travelled chap, I have recently returned from visits to London and Middlesbrough. Not locations that are commonly bandied about in the same sentence, unless they’re abridged by the words “is much better than”. However, I do believe the planners and architects of Glasgow, my beloved home city, could learn a thing or two from both places. Yes, even Middlesbrough.

London is a very big place, so it stands to reason that its landmarks are far more landmark-y than might be expected in Glasgow. From the 63rd floor of the Shard, you can admire buildings as diverse as Westminster, the Tower of London, the Gherkin and the Walkie Talkie. (Incidentally, did you know that the French for walkie-talkie is talkie-walkie? Made me laugh for ages, that did, and I don’t even know why.) Anyway, I am not suggesting that Glasgow should become home to phallic skyscrapers or 11th-century prisons. What I am suggesting is that Glasgow should borrow some of the architectural ideas seen elsewhere in this country, because there are critical errors needing to be corrected in our city’s fabric.

Consider Harley Street. Forget about the presence of the London Leech Therapy Clinic, or psychologists who charge £395 per hour to nod sagely while listening to your first-world woes, and instead look up beyond those buffed brass door plaques. These elegant four-storey terraces sport substantial front doors, simple rooflines and railings a few feet from each elevated ground floor window. It’s a brilliant streetscape that would work equally well in contemporary materials, and I am absolutely convinced that if buildings of this calibre were created in Glasgow, they would walk out of the sales suite. It worked for the Georgians, and they didn’t even have Cat5E cabling or rainfall showers.

Which brings me onto the rather less evocative setting of Middlesbrough. I have a real soft spot for this place, even though it’s a bit rough and industrial, because I appreciate the fact that Middlesbrough’s town planners didn’t try to run before they could walk. The skyline is low-rise, because there was no need to economise on land by building upwards. The grid-pattern streetscape actually works better than it does in Glasgow, because (if you ignore the dockside districts), there is far less wasteland or brownfield than you might expect. There is greater harmony in the choice of building materials, and it feels like the place is actually finished, regardless of whether or not you like the end product.

Now contrast this with Glasgow, where entire swathes of the east end lie empty and overgrown, often because land has been zoned exclusively for housing associations with no interest in actually building anything. Travel along Gallowgate, Carntyne Road, Duke Street or even London Road, and there are regular expanses of scrubland where tenements or factories once stood – gaping holes in Glasgow’s welcoming smile. It’s an absolute sin, and it’s an issue throughout the city – Balmore Road in the north, Pollokshaws Road in the south, and even Beith Street in the west end, which borders Byres Road, for God’s sake. We have more land than we know what to do with, so why are we sanctioning housebuilding on the edge of the city, in places like Whitlawburn and Newton? Where’s the sense in building 18-storey residential towers at Glasgow Harbour when the land immediately west of it is undeveloped? Why aren’t builders being incentivised to construct quality dwellings on these desolate spots, when there’s a housing shortage and particularly high demand for new homes?

If I won the Euro Millions lottery, I would set up a property company and start planning elegant terraces of high-ceilinged tenements for as many of these gap sites as I could. Combine traditional aesthetics with modern specifications, engineer in good soundproofing and secure off-street parking, and residents would flock into areas that are currently little more than urban wastelands. It’s a guaranteed money-spinner and it would fill in all the missing pieces of Glasgow’s urban jigsaw, making this the city it should be rather than the (incomplete) city it currently is. Now all I need to do to realise this Utopian vision is actually win the Euro Millions. Can anyone lend me £2 for a ticket? I promise I’ll pay you back in full within 48 hours of striking the jackpot…

Blamethrower

You might have read in the papers recently that a young Welshman called Gareth was offered a fairly high-profile new job a few weeks ago. He wasn’t sure whether to take it, since it involved relocating abroad, but the monthly salary of £1.11 million was enough to swing his decision. His old employers were paid an £86 million lump sum by his new ones, and everyone ended up happy. Actually, that’s not true. The only really happy people were Gareth, his representatives, and the owners of the two respective businesses, one of whom now has loads of money to re-invest, while the other is planning a marketing campaign in the Far East to cash in on Gareth’s new-found celebrity.

Gareth, you see, is pretty good at his job – in fact, he’s acclaimed far and wide for his talents. So much so that his £256,000 a week salary is earned for roughly a 25-hour week, including around three hours of high-profile work in the community. He also gets lots of additional revenue for his image rights, which is a bonus in every sense when you’re not exactly a looker, and Gareth also has some new friends with whom he can party during his extensive amounts of free time. Indeed, there’s more free time than even Gareth expected, because much of the time, his talents are deemed surplus to requirements, and he’s told to stay at home while other people do his job.

If you re-read those opening paragraphs and think of Gareth as a consultant, or a solicitor, or a motivational speaker, or pretty much any career imaginable, it seems utterly obscene that someone can be paid so well for effectively a part-time job, particularly when the country he’s moved to is Spain, with 56 per cent youth unemployment and a rapidly contracting economy. However, as the more astute of you will already know, young Gareth earns his crust by kicking a plastic sphere into an onion bag strung between three pieces of fibreglass, and he is therefore apparently worth every penny.

Fucking disgusting, isn’t it? The problems and poverty that exist in the world today, and Spurs get £86 million for selling a midfielder to Real Madrid. But that’s the hyper-inflated bubble of football. While you and I balance our cheque books each month and battle to live within our means, the football elite get to enjoy a real-life Brewster’s Millions – every weekly salary of £100,000 or £150,000 needing to be spent on something. The problem is, though, when you’ve already bought an eight-bedroom mansion in Alderley Edge and filled its quadruple garage with Ferraris and Bentleys, what else do you do with your cash?

Well, drugs are out for a start. RDTs and Diego Maradona have put paid to that. Prostitutes are risky, especially now the whole super-injunction thing has been cruelly exposed by Twitter. You could buy more houses in Alderley Edge, but since all your team-mates and players from several other clubs are competing to do the same, that’s not really viable. Foreign holidays are a limited commodity when you only have every second summer off (and even then you often end up doing overtime in China or America), and there aren’t many yachts that can fit up the Manchester ship canal. Your wife would probably love to go on high-end shopping sprees, but even a Victoria Beckham dress is priced in the upper hundreds rather than the thousands, so that’s not going to empty your bank account. Maybe artworks hold the answer, but since most footballers couldn’t tell a Canaletto from a Cornetto, that’s probably not going to happen.

All of which makes me wonder why more footballers don’t use their astronomical wages to do some good in a world that’s clearly desperate for their assistance and cash. A notable few do their best – and quite often the players you’d least expect. Uber-merker Rio Ferdinand funds various charitable initiatives in his childhood suburb of Peckham, while Cardiff’s nutter-with-a-putter Craig Bellamy has a truly heart-warming footballing foundation set up in Sierra Leone for children who wear rags and live in mud huts.

Sadly, these are the glorious exceptions to the inglorious rule. For the most part, the money in football is raised from Sky subscribers, given to football clubs, lavished on player wages and then…what? What do they do with it? Where does it go? How many billions are sloshing around in offshore tax havens, unspent and pretty much unwanted? And, most depressingly of all, how much further does this bubble inflate before it bursts, leaving people like Gareth earning less than ten times as much in one week as the average British worker earns in a year?

State of the world address

I’m not going to go on a hate-filled rant about cheese today, or spend six paragraphs discussing why Rise Against are better than Enter Shikari. Instead, I’m going to make some serious points about something that could change our lives if we’d only let it – working from home.

Every major population centre in the UK experiences gridlock and mayhem on its roads for several hours each weekday, as increasingly ignorant motorists vent their frustration on everyone around them. The trains are crowded, slow and unreliable, while the Glasgow subway is a rattly old shitbox and London’s glossier alternative is simply too crowded to function properly at rush hour. Meanwhile, buses are grubby and erratic stab labs - the last time I was on a bus, the windows got bricked. Clearly, commuting isn’t working in this country. So why do so many of us do it?

Putting aside road accidents or the wrong kind of air around train tracks, most congestion builds up during the ever-lengthening “rush hour” periods because too many commuters are trying to get to (or out of) one place at the same time. Remove the need for everyone to channel their way into overcrowded employment zones, and the sea of people will melt into a more manageable river of humanity. The simplest, most obvious way to achieve this (other than everyone working different hours, which would be a logistical nightmare) is to allow employees to work from home.

When you think about it, home working is potentially a cure for many of the nation’s ills. It offers us the chance to save vast amounts of time, reduce the horrific burden on public transport, lower the numbers of road traffic accidents while cutting pollution and congestion, save everybody pots of money, and create happier staff who will take less stress days (which is now the biggest cause of workplace absenteeism, lest we forget). The time and money saved by not commuting can be redirected to people’s loved ones, so families would benefit and children could become happier than they are in their current latchkey states. Meanwhile, employers would benefit from greater staff productivity, workplace satisfaction and employee retention rates, not to mention smaller offices that in turn save money on overheads.

Obviously, home-working can’t be applied to all jobs – someone has to drive the Mr Kipling cakes to Morrisons, and doctors certainly shouldn’t video-conference an oncology consultation - but most companies will have a percentage of staff who could be based at home either part-time or full-time. Do graphic designers need to be in large city centre offices? Couldn’t call-centre workers operate from home if their employers paid the phone bill? Why are middle managers forced to attend meetings when teleconferencing is now a practical alternative? I spent ten years driving across Scotland to sit at a desk and email documents to people in the next room – now I do it from home and save a fortune on petrol.

This, then, is a direct appeal to any managers or directors who are reading this blog. Why not try letting your employees work from home? Set them work-related targets each Monday, keep in regular contact using the panoply of modern communication methods available nowadays, and if the targets have all been met by Friday teatime, it’s working in every sense of the word. Alternatively, if they end up watching Loose Women and the targets are missed, bring them back to the fold, discipline them, or sack them – they’re probably on Twitter all day in the office anyway. Do the whole country a favour, and start alleviating the rush hour misery that your outdated employment policies are inflicting on society. You know it makes sense.

Right, that’s enough seriousness. Next time I’ll explain why cheese slices are better than heroin.

Bring it back to the streets

I have an addiction. It’s one of those shameful secrets that quietly festers away, like the embarrassing itch that comes from drunken sex behind a skip. It started off as a harmless bit of fun, but it’s become far more demanding than that. I’m increasingly making excuses to be alone, to indulge my habit, but if I’m honest, I can’t get enough these days. Enough, as a concept, doesn’t really cut it. Loads more, however – well, that can keep me going for hours, while my fiancé sleeps on obliviously in the next room.

What is this obsession, I hear you cry? Is it midget porn? Cocaine? Kraft Cheesy Pasta? No. It is [takes a deep breath] Google Street View. Hi, my name’s Neil, and I’ve got a problem.

Google Street View rose to public prominence a few years ago because a handful of waddling fatties objected to being shown ramming pasties down their throats five yards from the front door of their nearest Greggs. Infringement of privacy, could be having an affair, you can see my psoriasis, blah blah blah. After the fatties had their faces pixellated, everyone seemed to forget about the whole thing. But it’s still out there. And as a means of seeing the world and learning about places on a street-by-street, house-by-house basis, GSV is quite simply peerless. You can zoom in with excruciating clarity, to discover the weeds discreetly poking out of untended gutters, or the group of youths lurking with nefarious intent in the underpass. You can check out what sort of cars people drive on a particular street, and no piece of graffiti is safe from that 360-degree camera, which can go anywhere the tarmac permits.

I started using GSV through my job as a property journalist – it’s a marvellous way to learn about a street you’ve never been to, when you’re writing about a house that’s for sale there. However, the sheer scale of the Street View project has allowed it to take over more and more of my free time, as I obsessively ‘drive’ the wrong way up one-way streets in towns I might like to live in, or towns where I used to live, or work, or drink cider, or towns where my friends used to live, or ex-girlfriends, or basically anyone and anything. You don’t need a reason when you’ve got a broadband connection.

I urge any children reading this to avoid Google Street View – it’s crack for the eyeballs. I’m a hopeless addict now, and I’ll probably always be battling some craving to see what Old Bellsdyke Road in Larbert looks like now that metal storage container has been removed. (Did I mention that GSV gets updated quite frequently?) It’s too late for me, but you can still save yourselves. Just say no…

All killer, no filler

Let me preface my latest rage against the machine by saying that I have huge admiration for architecture as a profession, and architects as professionals. These extensively qualified and imaginative individuals can do great work. They can transform the aesthetics and desirability of some previously Godforsaken area that looks like it was featured in Children of Men, and is optimistically described in sales literature as being “up and coming” (i.e. the ceasefire’s still holding). Consider Anderston, Laurieston, the New Gorbals and Collegelands on the periphery of central Glasgow as four perfect case studies of architects working towards the greater good.

However, sometimes, architects waffle. And when they waffle, by God, they put all the holes in and smother it with ketchup. No stylistic reference is too obscure (hey, Jude), no crenellation too ornate, and no press release too pretentious. Consider this recent example of verbal diarrhoea, from the current design competition to choose Scotland’s new sporting performance centre:

“Meanwhile in Edinburgh it is Reiach & Hall who are assuming design honours, working in tandem with Heriot Watt University and City of Edinburgh Council to deliver a centre with a unique curving roof which arcs to trace the trajectory of Brazil’s Roberto Carlos’ goal against France in 1997.”

Now for those of you who didn’t see that particular goal in Le Tournoi at the time, it was an absolute screamer. It curved, it swerved, it harnessed astonishing technical prowess, and it made the French keeper Fabien Barthez look like a bit of a pillock. It’s well worth YouTubing. But it was a free kick, in a meaningless football tournament, on the telly, 16 years ago. Is anyone ever going to drive past Reiach & Hall’s building (assuming it gets constructed) and think “hmm, that roofline looks just like the arc of Roberto Carlos’s banana shot in Le Tournoi back in the 1990s”? I doubt it. I wouldn’t, and I reckon it was the second best goal I’ve ever seen. Plus I’ve been a property journalist for the last thousand years, so I’m quite good at spotting obscure architectural references in building designs.

I do appreciate that architects have to put spin (no pun intended) on their work. The firm in question are bidding against two other heavyweight design houses with rival proposals for Dundee and Stirling, so they need something to make their work stand out. But this? Really? Never mind the bollocks, here’s a stylish performance centre. Isn’t that enough?

A kick in the mouth

There are few things more poignant or tragic than the plight of a former rock star. When the lights have gone down for the final time and the last ligger has departed for more lucrative shores, what do ex-musicians do to pay the bills? It’s a thought that’s been preying on my mind lately, because I’ve been listening to a series of CDs from obscure British rock bands who never managed to swim into the profitable waters of commercial success.

It frustrates me that there is more talent, intelligence and creativity in one song by certain rock bands than in most of this (or any other) week’s top 40 combined. Listening to the brainless bleeps and squawks of modern urban/R&B music could not be further removed from the sculpted melodies, intricate time signatures and considered lyrics of bands like AP&S, Pitchshifter or Reuben. These bands didn’t make vapid and disposable music that appeals to stupid drunk people in nightclubs, and as a result, their fanbases were a fraction the size of their dance and R&B contemporaries, whose songs often were (and still are) written by a committee.

Synthesized beats and Autotuned vocals can cover a multitude of tonal sins, but they fail to disguise the paucity of talent or emotion in a song’s lyrics. However, in popular music, the lowest common denominator usually wins – nothing else can explain why talentless people with nothing to say for themselves (you know who I mean) continue to dominate the singles charts. Glorious exceptions like Plan B or Lucy Spraggan remain exactly that – occasional opportunities for Radio One to punctuate their A playlist’s stream of urban waste.

The greatest tragedy about Reuben’s commercial failure and eventual break-up is that they saw it coming. Consider the following lines, from 2005’s ‘Return of the Jedi’ as a foretelling of the future:

“Guitarist and songwriter – that’s what I thought I was
I never had no dreams of being a waiter,
But these here Helmet rip-offs, they don’t buy my lunch,
So I will get a real job in the office.
And I won’t bother to make my music
And I won’t bother to sing my songs.”

In fact, the guitarist and songwriter in question is now an illustrator, which I suppose is at least a creative industry, where imagination can be unleashed and spleens can be vented. Far worse to end up in the accounts department of some faceless mid-sized company, armed with three cheap suits and a company laptop, sitting through interminable meetings while remembering the show when 600 people bounced in perfect synchronicity to what was then your latest (doomed) assault on the singles chart. Far worse when you once described yourself as a musician, and now you introduce yourself to neighbours as working in logistics, with a deckle-edged business card on permanent standby in your shirt pocket. Far worse to think that nobody listens to your music nowadays because it’s not on Grooveshark or iTunes. But rest assured, alumni of Pulkas, Capdown and Midget. As long as I live on, at least one person will continue to party like it’s £19.99 from Tower Records.

The irrationality of rationality

Here’s an interesting observation, based on a discovery of mine earlier today. If you enter ‘Place de la Mairie Aix-en-Provence’ into Bing Maps, it will sit there for the rest of time, calmly asking you to “wait a moment” while it does the square root of fuck all. On the other hand, you can enter the same search string into Google, and within 0.35 seconds, it’s found the address, shown it on a map, and displayed beneath it the first ten of 2,980,000 web results. Now, consider this. If your chip pan caught fire, and you needed to know the best way to put it out, which search engine would you call upon?

I did actually see a chip pan fire once. It was in a mobile display vehicle outside a Sainsbury’s store, as part of a roving Strathclyde Fire & Rescue public awareness programme, and when I say it went up in flames, I mean the flames were two feet out of the pan. I’ve never cooked chips at home since, and I have had a great respect for the staff at Mr V’s in Battlefield from that day to this. They risk their lives so you can eat greasy carbohydrates, and I bet you don’t even tip them when you collect your deep-fried heart attack with extra pickles.

Which brings me onto my Rant for the Day (you knew it was coming, didn’t you?) Why do we tip people? It’s completely irrational that we tip the person who carries plates across a restaurant, rather than the person who actually cooks the food we’ve gone there to enjoy in the first place. We tip taxi drivers, but not bus drivers. We tip the guy who carries your luggage to your hotel room, but not the maid who’s charged with removing all the evidence of last night’s debauchery and bodily fluids. I tip delivery drivers who bring me the aforementioned greasy carbohydrates, but I’d no more tip my doctor for giving me sound medical advice than I would fly to the moon. And if I did fly to the moon, I probably wouldn’t tip the NASA astronauts who ensured I returned to Earth in the same number of pieces as when I set off. Nor would I play among those stars, but to be frank, that’s another story.

In America, where immigrant children earn $2 a day sewing chillies onto goats, tipping is a valuable way to supplement meagre incomes, and it is regarded as something of a necessity. In Britain, it’s pretty much superfluous, not to mention hugely selective. I worked in retail for six years as a student, and never once did I receive a single penny in tips. And before you judge this (perhaps correctly) to be the embittered rant of a never-tipped sub-minimum-wage shelf-stacking gimp, I didn’t need to be tipped – I was paid for what I did. I would only have spent any tips on solvents and alcopops. And yet I feel guilty leaving a restaurant without tipping, even if the waitress has poured hot consommé into my crotch while picking her nose and criticising my other half’s hairstyle. Admittedly, it would be difficult to manage all three of these things at once, but I’ve met a few waitresses who looked ready to give it a try. One, down in London (where else?) was so surly, she remains a running joke in our house seven years after her night of the long faces.

So anyway, Neil’s Tip of the Day is this. Don’t tip anyone. You’re just sustaining a culture of complacency and expectation that has little justification in the modern age, and what’s more, you’re tipping the wrong people. Tip the ambulance driver who collects you when you dial 999, not the barman who pours you a pint of lager, which is his bloody job, after all. You don’t tip search engines for giving you a world of information in 0.35 seconds, although since Google don’t pay corporation tax in the UK, they’re hardly short of cash as it is. Ooh, I can feel another rant coming on...

Imitation is the sincerest form of battery

My fiancé has become a blogger. This startling revelation became apparent after I spent a couple of hours setting up her account and teaching her how to navigate the CMS software, since when she has blogged variously about crap song lyrics, hating weddings, the subjectivity of humour and the process of ageing. These are all topics close to my heart as well, and I have discussed some of them at various points during my brief blogging career. Indeed, at first glance, it appears there is competition for my title of the best blogger nobody’s ever heard of, except my fiancé isn’t really eligible for that accolade, because her blogs are far more popular than mine. 

In fairness to me, my last blog about feminism was the most-read entry I’ve ever produced. If you missed it, it’s below this one, and if I do say so myself, it’s rather good. However, its readership figures are still dwarfed by anything my dearly beloved consigns to print, which suggests one of several things. Either (a) she’s a lot more popular than me, (b) people prefer to read the words of a pretty girl over anything written by the owner of a scrotum, or (c) she’s a better writer than I am. Or all three. Or any combination. It’s intriguing, and perhaps a touch dispiriting, to realise that the student is teaching the master a thing or two about how to be a successful blogger. And to think I wrote her university dissertation for her. 

It is quite odd reading something a loved one has written. You can almost follow the thought processes from sentence to sentence, but then something completely random and unexpected will appear, and you’ll think ‘crikey. I wouldn’t have thought of/had the nerve to say/questioned the illegality of/ever fancied that.’ It makes me realise that for the last eight months, my other half has probably been clicking onto my blog with the same mixture of enthusiasm, intrigue and slight trepidation I now feel clicking onto hers, in case some sensitive nugget of information has escaped into the public eye. And we’re hardly famous. How much worse must it be if you live your life in the piercing spotlight of publicity? 

Imagine you’re Brad Pitt. No, go on. Just for a minute. Now imagine that your wife’s breasts are trending on Twitter. Not a nice feeling, is it? But wait, it gets worse. Now imagine that their removal is trending on Twitter. A traumatic and deeply personal medical procedure, undertaken to avoid the risk of a life-threatening illness, has become the subject of countless tweets and comments by people you’ve never met, and never will. Can you even imagine how you’d feel going to bed that night, knowing that your life is being splashed across newspaper columns, and dissected on social media sites by avaricious and anonymous people from LA to Larkhall? 

You might have noticed that I don’t reveal too much about myself in these blogs. That’s because I have no idea who’s reading them, or what they’re looking for, or whether an unguarded disclosure might come back to haunt me one day. As a result, I tend to stick to acknowledged facts or general musings, rather than anything subjective or opinionated - I’m quite happy to keep my innermost thoughts, fears and predilections out of the public eye. I just need to hope that my soon-to-be-betrothed is of a similar mindset. Maybe she’ll write a blog about it, to let me know?

Incidentally, if you want to know more about the musings of this sultry wordsmith, her blog can be found at http://bloginstripedpyjamas.blogspot.co.uk. And no, you can’t have her. I bagsied her first.

Here comes the monster

There is an insidious and pervasive force at large among our green and pleasant land right now. You might not have paid much attention to it, alongside daily worries like the gas bill or that parcel that never turned up, but it’s brewing on the horizon like an electrical storm on a hot summer’s evening. It’s taking shape on social media, in press interviews and among the more righteous members of society. And no, I’m not talking about the start of the football season. It’s the jackbooted march of the pro-censorship brigade - led, I’m sorry to say, by a mutant strain of militant feminists.

Let me say at the outset that feminism per se is an entirely laudable aim. Of all the many isms you can accuse me of, sexism isn’t one of them. I disdain prejudice against women, I flatly refuse to visit strip clubs, I abhor boorish chauvinists and I think institutions with female bosses are (dare I say it) generally better run than their male counterparts. I would hate for my daughter (if I had one) to face a tougher life than my son (if I had one), and you certainly won’t be seeing me at Muirfield. Although that’s partly because I hate golf.

So why am I so upset about the recent efforts to force lads mags to obscure their front covers in supermarkets? I hate lads mags, and I find them unutterably depressing. Once, on a flight back from Paris, I was given a straight choice between reading Loaded or Le Monde – they were the only publications in my seat back pouch. Even though I don’t speak French, I chose the newspaper, preferring to try and translate the essence of each story rather than reading about why Chelsy from Wigan prefers pink to brown.

However, there is something deeply worrying about the campaign against lads mags, and it basically boils down to an assault on freedom of speech. Once upon a time, feminism was about demanding equality, and that’s a fine and noble aim. Nowadays, it’s increasingly about banning anything that displeases feminists. In isolation, you may think forcing Zoo and Nuts to cover their, well, covers, is fair and reasonable. But collectively, it’s the thin end of a wedge, and who knows where that wedge stops?

Let me put it like this. It won’t stop here. The more this campaign against what Viz once referred to as ‘the objectification of wimmin’ rumbles on, the more momentum it gathers, and the more danger it poses. What comes after getting lads mags covered up? Why, getting them banned, of course, which is this particular campaign’s underlying aim. Then what? Soft-porn mags. Then what? Max Power (they regularly publish pictures of scantily-clad girls draped over Citroëns, as if either party benefits from this miserable juxtaposition). Then what? The Pirelli calendar. Then what? Erotic art. Then what? Presumably any publication, media outlet or artistic field that in any way, shape or form says, implies or hints that women are in any way different, inferior or distinguishable from men at any activity, ability or function, let alone anything that dares to objectify, glamorise or comment on their aesthetics. Heat magazine is utterly fucked.

The fact is, men and women are different, and the more sensible members of our society embrace and celebrate this, regardless of their chromosomal composition. Sadly, this is not currently a very fashionable perspective to hold, which is why I expect to lose one or two Twitter followers after posting a link to this blog. C'est la vie. I find society’s slow, blinkered march towards the censorship of entirely legal publications unutterably depressing - which, if you were paying attention earlier, is also how I feel about the magazines themselves. I hate them. But to paraphrase Voltaire, although I disagree with what they have to say, I will defend their right to say it. I’m a writer too, just like the teams of journalists and editors who put those magazines together every month. And a ragtag collective of self-righteous moral crusaders should not be able to dictate what I choose to read and write in my lunch hour, just because it offends their sensibilities.

Do you disagree with me? Good. You have every right to. I can say it and you can disagree with it. We live in a free country, where people can make their own decisions about what’s good or bad, right or wrong, risqué or recidivist, and we still have a free press at the moment. I just hope and pray we never live in a country where those who shout the loudest get to dictate what everyone else can read. Or do. Or think.

Word gets around

I was fascinated to read the other day that somebody (or somebodies) has/have compiled a list of the world’s most highbrow jokes. That is to say, jokes that require a fair amount of brainpower to appreciate them – ones that wouldn’t be appreciated by people who think The Only Way is Essex is a documentary, or anyone aspiring to appear on the Jeremy Kyle show.

In fairness, most of the jokes in the shortlist went straight over my head (including the one about aviation, boom boom), but I thought a few of them bore repeating.

1. Did you hear about the man who got cooled to absolute zero? He’s 0K now.
2. When I heard that oxygen and magnesium hooked up, I was like OMg
3. A Roman walks into a bar, holds up two fingers, and the barman says:  “Five beers, then?”
4. How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? A fish.
5. A photon checks into a hotel and the porter asks him if he has any luggage. The photon replies: “No, I’m travelling light.”

Now I didn’t come up with this blog simply to regurgitate a bunch of jokes I found online (really, I didn’t), but rather because it raises the interesting concept of when a joke is funny and when it isn’t. Conversationally, few things are worse than a joke that falls flat – the slight pause, the knitting together of eyebrows, and then the audience’s lips gradually forming to utter four immortal words that start with “I”, end with “it”, and collectively puncture not just the joke itself but also the wider ambience of the moment. Brave indeed is the man who risks a joke on a first date, since a defective punchline can basically knacker an entire relationship before it’s had a chance to get started.

However, it is fascinating how jokes can elicit polar reactions even among a group of supposed peers. The PFA awards earlier this year was a fine case in point, when American comic Reginald D Hunter made an expletive-laden speech with numerous racist epithets thrown in. Hunter is black, although whether that makes his repeated use of the N-word acceptable is another argument for another day. The more righteous PFA members were appalled as the air gradually turned blue, but the vast majority of the audience were in stitches. On a more personal level, I fondly recall a good friend recounting a tale of watching a comedy programme alongside two devoutly Christian friends, and slowly realising with mounting horror that he was the only person howling with laughter at a particularly offensive/clever/rude/imaginative (delete as appropriate) religious jibe. One man’s meat, and all that.

The obvious solution to such quandaries is to tell only jokes that nobody in their right minds could find offensive. You know the sort: “A horse walks into a bar. Ouch – it was an iron bar”. Unfortunately, these jokes are usually palpably unfunny, which rather defeats the whole point. If you opted instead for: “A horse walks into a bar, the barman asks ‘why the long face’, and the horse replies ‘it’s a birth defect’”, you narrow the pool of people who will respond in the desired way, but those who do will provide you with a far more satisfying reaction.

With Edinburgh fringe season starting on Friday, this is a good time of year to take stock of how we define humour. No doubt most of the comedians who perform will be quite good, a few will be brilliant, some will miss the mark by a mile, and Tim Vine will win an award for the funniest joke of the Festival once again. However, when you find yourself squatting inelegantly on a rickety tea chest, in the basement of a pub down some dodgy wynd off the Canongate, waiting for a complete stranger to brighten your day by being hilarious, remember one thing. If you don’t get the joke, it doesn’t mean it’s not funny.

I fought the law (and the law won)

Many years ago, as a budding adult, I dabbled with law as a subject and briefly considered it as a career. I was initially attracted by the Latin phraseology and case-law precedents, before being repulsed by the absurdly long hours and the underlying principle that everyone says black is black until some half-dead fop in a wig says it’s actually grey, and then everyone starts saying black is grey instead. You might as well write opposing rules on either side of a thousand playing cards, chuck them all in the air, and declare that whatever lands face-side up is now the law of the land.

I gave up on law as a career quite quickly, but the recent receipt of a legal missive has brought its labyrinthine nature back into my mind. To condense a long story into a blog post, I was asked to sign a contract document from a copywriting client, and a couple of excerpts from this document caught my eye as being at best laboriously verbose, and at worst completely baffling. And bear in mind that I’m smarter than the average bear when it comes to translating this sort of stuff – I make a lucrative living out of reducing complex topics into easily-digestible bite-sized chunks of copywriting.

If, for any reason, the Company becomes liable to pay, or shall pay, any such taxes, the Company shall be entitled to deduct from any amounts payable to the Consultant pursuant to this Agreement (including, for the avoidance of doubt any amounts prospectively payable) all amounts so paid or required to be paid by it and, to the extent that any taxes so paid or required to be paid by the Company exceeds the amount payable by the Company to the Consultant pursuant to this Agreement, the Consultant shall forthwith pay to or reimburse the Company with an amount equal to such excess.

Not bad, eh? Eight commas and 103 words, all fighting for breathing space in a single sentence. However, that paragraph is worthy of an award from the Plain English Campaign compared to this example, from the next page of the document:

Each provision of this agreement shall be construed separately and (save as otherwise expressly provided herein) none of the provisions hereof shall limit or govern the extend, application or construction of any other of them and, notwithstanding that any provision of this agreement may prove to be unenforceable, the remaining provisions of this agreement shall continue in full force and effect.

Doesn’t that simply translate as “this agreement is binding unless it isn’t”? If that is the message it’s conveying, why does it occupy a 61-word sentence, when I’ve condensed its essence into seven words? Surely the remaining 54 words aren’t required purely to prevent people finding loopholes they can exploit? Perhaps someone was being paid by the word, or maybe they were trying to confuse idiots (in which case, job done). Regardless of the reasons behind such unnecessary verbosity, documents like this underline why I probably made a good decision dropping law as an academic subject, and concentrating on English instead. It isn’t just Latin phraseology that might as well be a different language when it comes to translating the letters of the law.

Conspiracy of one

Well, dear reader (note the deliberate use of the singular), I’m sorry to report that the theory I espoused in my last blog worked about as well as a wheelchair in an electromagnet factory, and I did not record a new visitor record for last Thursday’s exploratory post. Espousing religion is clearly not the way to make this blog an internationally-read online tome, unless I really crank up the pressure and dedicate an entire blog to chanting the names of various deities.

With that in mind - Jehovah Jehovah Jehovah Allah Jehovah Jehovah Vishnu Jehovah Krishna Oankar Jehovah Waheguru Jehovah Buddha Jehovah Ram Odin Zeus Jehovah Lemmy Jehovah [repeat until you’ve got bored reading this toss and moved onto the Independent website instead]

Audience of one

We are now over halfway through 2013, and that means I have written precisely 19 blogs for this site, not including number 20, which you are currently reading but I have yet to finish at the time of writing because I’m still writing it. Interestingly, even though a reasonable number of people read each new entry, I’ve yet to receive a single comment on this page, although in truth, I consider that to be a blessing. The last thing I really want is Disgusted of Bogside ranting about the multiple use of commas (which I pre-emptively apologised for in my very first blog back in January), or some spammer posting a link to www.randyvicargerbils.com, which I’m then unable to remove from the page, thus condemning my pristine blog to display a spunk stain of spam for evermore. If you want to slag me off, Twitter will do fine @G75Media #shamelessselfpublicist #igotretweetedbythewifeofbonjoviskeyboardplayerlastnight

Honourably excepting a couple of out-and-proud followers (hi, Stuart), I wonder who the people reading this blog might be. Ex-girlfriends? Clients? Talent-spotters (doubtful)? It’s strange to think that these words might be read in six months’ time by someone I’ve never met, in a place I’ve never been, who may form a very elliptical impression of me based on my previous posts about neds and tower blocks. When I started this blog, I saw it as a natty way to unleash pent-up creative frustration, and I didn’t really care who read it. However, because my creativity is now being expended upon my increasingly busy day-job as an award-winning freelance copywriter (at your service, sir, madam), the need to vent my spleen has subsided, and anyway, this blog has hardly gone viral, has it? Fenton in Richmond Park it is not.

In fact, there’s another way of considering the readership statistics for each new blog I post. Maybe the world is so bleak and dull, and some people are so lonely and desperate, they will actually resort to reading my linguistic excreta because it’s better than the alternative. What that alternative might be, I shudder to think, but it must involve either Jeremy Kyle or the Daily Record – two of the most odious creations on this side of the Atlantic.

Even more startling was the statistic that on Christmas Day 2008, four people logged onto the G75 Media copywriting website, and only one of those people was me. What were the other three people doing that day? Were their presents so bad that they were forced to distract themselves by visiting the nascent website of a freshly-hatched copywriter in East Kilbride? Almost as tragically, I actually know that four people visited the site, because my website analytics software identifies (among other things) where people come from, what web browser they’re using and even what screen resolution their monitors are configured to.

When it comes to The Write Intentions, I’m considerably less informed about the who/what/where/when, but I do know that the most popular blog I’ve posted to date was a diatribe I penned in March about Jehovah’s witnesses and timewasting. It’s ironic that more people read my opinions on timewasting than any other blog. Or maybe it was the religious angle that got bums on pews and eyes on the prize? Perhaps I should adopt a more reverential tone in all my future blogs?

Okay. Here goes. [Clears throat] Jehovah, Jehovah, Jehovah. All I said was that blog was good enough for Jehovah.

Now to test the theory. If 750 people read this entry, I’ve cracked it, and a blog column in GQ or Loaded surely awaits. Alternatively, if the disappointing audience figures persist, at least I’ve managed to give those mysterious, anonymous readers another little clue about my personality – I love watching Monty Python films. And in that respect, at least, I know I’m not in an audience of one.

Yesterday went too soon

As none of you will have noticed, I am just back from an overseas holiday. A fine holiday it was, too – tucked away on the cusp of Europe and the Middle East, in a resort so posh that I hired a butler one day to bring me pina coladas and ice creams on demand. It was all jolly hockey sticks, much sunshine was absorbed, and everyone came home happy, although in my case, I came home far too soon. Isn’t that always the way with holidays?

The rapid passage of this decidedly welcome break has raised an historic bone of contention, however – the truly awful state of the nation’s airports. I posit this thesis because Glasgow Airport is proudly emblazoned in “Scotland with Style” banners, and it provides the first impression many people will have of our fait land. Yet in the brief time I was there, I was flanked by one crowd of boisterous neds after another, the urinals were all blocked up with piss, the shops were all shut, and the staff wore expressions so hangdog that I don’t think I could have shaken off their collective torpor if I’d vomited fruit pastilles over them and then spontaneously combusted. Actually, I probably shouldn’t mention combustion in the same paragraph as airports – certain people are quite twitchy about such linguistic juxtapositions. Hi to the web traffic monitoring officials at RAF Menwith Hill, who are probably logging onto this site two paragraphs in, but rest assured, lads, you haven’t missed much.

Contrast Glasgow’s fraught ambience with Antalya airport, on the southern coast of Turkey. Admittedly, I did pull a door handle off its loose hinges, and the tannoy announcer was almost indecipherable over the mumblings of sleepy passengers, but otherwise, Antalya provides an object lesson in how to transport large numbers of people quickly and effectively, without irritating them to the point of apoplexy. Efficient and friendly security staff rapidly screened everyone at the main entrance, before an enthusiastic check-in assistant processed our bags at one of the 12 desks dedicated to our flight, and then after a brief additional security check, we were free to walk around a huge, circular departure lounge with each gate conveniently placed around the edges of the circle, rather than hidden away beyond six miles of blank corridors and travelators (I’m looking at you, Heathrow). There was good food available in the 24-hour restaurants (unlike Luton Airport, which effectively closes down after 8.30pm), the buses dropped people off right outside the terminal (no anti-terrorist barriers here to cause confusion and inconvenience), and our flight took off on time because there are three runways (count ‘em! Three!) to channel planes in and out with minimal queuing.

It was, quite honestly, embarrassing to be British in such a situation. And nor is it only Turkey that shames our air transport hubs. Consider the architectural grandeur of Schiphol in Amsterdam, the metronomic efficiency of Tokyo’s Narita and Haneda airports, or the sheer magnificence of Changi in Singapore, which has been voted the world’s best airport this year after finishing as runner-up in the 2012 World Airport Awards. It really does make you wonder what the tourists flocking to Glasgow next year for the XX Commonwealth Games will make of our country, when they first arrive. If I was them, I’d turn around and go straight back to wherever I came from. When I say there’s no place like home, I don’t necessarily mean it as a compliment, especially in terms of our tired and basic airports. And don't even get me started on "Glasgow" Prestwick...

Mental blocks

Anyone who’s ever visited Glasgow will know that this (mostly) glorious city is liberally festooned with tower blocks. Rising above the rooftops of everything around them, these concrete monoliths have become sadly iconic of the city’s 20^th century malaise. They are despised by traditionalists who still resent them for supplanting old tenements, despised by snobs and people from Edinburgh as junkie-ridden hellholes, and despised by a thousand former tenants for the crimes that occurred within their slab-like walls. These former symbols of a brave new city have become anachronistic amid Glasgow’s Victorian splendour and modern aesthetics – a grey and gloomy testament to Le Corbusier’s failed status as a visionary. And so it is that Glasgow’s eponymous housing agency is tearing down tower blocks as fast as it can, replacing them with high-calibre low-rise tenements that people are clamouring to live in.

As a keen student of architecture, I shed no tears for the mass departure of these Brutalist edifices. Ibrox and Govan used to have nine tower blocks, but by the end of 2013, only one will be left standing, and Govan in particular can only be improved as a consequence. Laurieston loses its last two towers later this summer, the iconic Red Road skyscrapers will be razed by 2017, and so will blocks in a dozen other suburbs throughout Glasgow. Their replacements will be far more suited to modern life, and much prettier to boot. Only one aspect of this renaissance troubles me – the knowledge that, in principle at least, there is nothing wrong with living in a tower block.

I know this because I lived in high-rise buildings for two years, and I loved it. The views were amazing, the rooms were spacious, the lack of a garden wasn’t an issue when you have a balcony, and you soon get used to shuttling your groceries about in a lift. However, the difference between these tower blocks and many others is that my former residences were constructed by housebuilders rather than housing associations, and every property was either owned outright or let to tenants affluent enough to afford the (fittingly high) rents. People in more expensive buildings generally take more care of their surroundings, and so it proved on both occasions. Yes, there were issues and irritations caused by communal living, but by and large, both buildings remained clean and respectable, populated by people who probably weren’t model citizens but certainly didn’t shit on their own doorsteps, literally or metaphorically. Indeed, the biggest problem associated with my first high-rise residence was ongoing vandalism caused by youths from the council tower blocks across the road. I’m sorry, but it’s true. We cared about our building, but they didn’t.

And that, in a nutshell, is where Glasgow’s state-sponsored tower blocks figuratively fell down – they were populated with too many people who just didn’t care. Didn’t care if they overfilled the rubbish chutes, which then jammed, and stank. Didn’t care if their kids played with matches in the stairwells and caused everyone to be evacuated while the fire brigade rushed over. Didn’t care if they left rusting prams in lobbies, or pissed in the lifts, or dropped needles on the grass where children wanted to play, or attacked people from the next scheme just because they were from the next scheme. And as a result of this, issues like the lack of soundproofing became more of a problem, because some people didn’t give a toss whether the elderly widow next door was forced to listen to dance music at 2am. People have the most extraordinary ability to ruin things for each other, either through deliberate actions or culpable apathy, and as a direct consequence, Glasgow regularly reverberates to dull booms as hundreds of homes and millions of memories are erased from its skyline.

It frustrates me, it really does. I’ve seen low-rise housing estates with greater social problems than some of the tower blocks that are being blown down, and I could even name a few council towers that are genuinely sought after among local residents - it’s all about the mentality of the people who live there. That’s why one council estate in my former home town had a ten-year waiting list for a house, while another scheme had plenty of empty properties because few people were willing to put up with the brazen drug dealers, feral dogs and sneering vandals. On an architectural level, the continuing demolition of Glasgow’s high-rise housing stock is a blessing, but these tower blocks don’t really deserve the criticism they receive. Buildings are rarely at fault – it’s their occupants who make or break them.

Killing in the name

The other week, rather to my surprise, I was taken to a secure military building. I was going to use the word “invited” rather than taken, but being invited somewhere suggests a deference to my presence that was definitely lacking from the rigorous (though thankfully not internal) security procedures involved. I can’t tell you where I was, or when, or why, but I can describe the entry process, because it has rather coloured my judgement about something I’d previously been quite blasé about.

I was picked up at a designated location by two men in a suspiciously understated car. They drove me through the countryside to a manned security gate, where credentials were displayed, and we then progressed to a second manned security gate, where I was asked to complete an ID form and hand over my mobile phone. Actually, asked isn’t the right word, either. Compelled is the term I’m looking for. Anyway, back into the car we went, before a further drive to a third security gate, after which I was escorted into a building and asked to provide the same information I’d given at gate number two. At this point, I had to be shepherded in and out of every room in the building by someone with the appropriate security clearance, before checking out twice on the way back to our original meeting point.

Which rather begs the question – how the hell did Jack Bauer ever get anything done?

For anyone who has spent the last decade living under a rock, Jack Bauer is the indestructible anti-hero of landmark TV series 24. Along with around a billion other people worldwide, I was captivated by each 24-hour real-time “day” in Jack’s life, where he would start off chillaxing in his living room and end up 24 hours (and episodes) later as a broken, beat and scarred wreck on a cliff-side, having been shot, poisoned, tortured, kidnapped, sacked, re-instated, canonised, lambasted and probably dumped by some swivel-eyed head case of a girlfriend. Along the way, each roller-coaster series featured everything from Presidential assassinations to Lazarus-like resurrections, yet despite its bombastic nature and almost total lack of humour, 24 was hopelessly addictive, like crack for the eyeballs.

News reaches me that Jack is being resurrected once more for a brand new series of 24, but after my recent experience in that military installation, it’s going to be hard for my disbelief to remain suspended. Quite frankly, it would have been impossible for anyone to reach the building I visited without being shot or captured (or possibly both), so the concept of terrorists spontaneously seizing an army base/a weapons plant/the White House suddenly seems quite absurd, even though such things happened with terrifying regularity in every series of 24.

I therefore issue this warning to the writers of series nine – I’m onto you this time. Make the story line plausible, because if you imply that some unhinged maniac can break into a top-secret military institution and take it over armed only with a pair of pliers, a stapler and some boot polish, you will incur my wrath in this widely-read, internationally-acclaimed blog. And you don’t want that, do you? I might even have to send Jack Bauer round to deal with you. Oh, wait a minute…

Partying is such sweet sorrow

I was at a four year old’s birthday party last weekend. Despite a few moments to treasure along the way, it might not surprise you to learn that this wasn’t my idea of an idyllic Saturday. We had someone in a Peppa Pig costume doing the Gangnam Style dance, and an enthusiastic clown terrorising my fiancé, while the adults cowered around the venue’s periphery, trying not to make eye contact with anyone. The food was chiefly chicken nuggets and potato chips, many footballs got stuck in many ceiling nets, and the soundtrack had an intermittent whine of grizzling toddlers. However, the most intriguing aspect of the whole afternoon (or at least the hour between arriving and hastily departing) was the discovery that, even at such an embryonic stage, these proto-people have developed strong and enduring friendships with each other, with an avowed enthusiasm for declaring someone to be their best friend.

Think about that for a minute. Four year old children, already in possession of BFFs and other Roald Dahl-esque acronyms, effortlessly being themselves in social situations and partying with their mates without a care in the world. As adults, we’d never aspire to such confidence (does he really like me? Is she just using me? Am I the ugly one to her pretty one when we go out on the pull?), but the next generation appears to have no such qualms. And this youthful belief in the robustness of friendship set me off on one of the thoughtful cogitations that regularly lead to a blog post.

When I was in my formative teenage years, I too was convinced that my contemporaneous friends would retain that status for life. I assumed, rather naively, that we’d stay in the same town, grow up and get married together (not to each other, I hasten to add), and attend weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs as an implacable group. Sadly, life intervened as it so often does, and people gradually moved away to far-flung locations like Brazil and London. A particularly close friend departed to a distant northern city to pursue a dream job, and although we kept in regular contact for a few years, geographic distance and the passage of time gradually eroded a formerly rock-solid friendship. By the time my auld acquaintance finally returned to his home turf, I’d also moved away in pursuit of a better life, and we haven’t spoken for over a decade now.

Losing touch with an old friend is a horrible business, especially when the reasons for it are lost in the mists of time. Maybe we grew apart, or perhaps we fell out without my even noticing, but we certainly haven’t been to any bar mitzvahs or civil partnerships together of late. However, should he be reading this, I would cordially invite him to get back in touch, thereby avoiding the fate that befalls so many people when they forget about the friends they thought they’d have forever. Rich indeed is the man whose mates can still remember him as a specky, spotty gimp back in third year, making girls recoil with every stride.

As for the four year old whose cautionary tale started this story, her party went remarkably smoothly, considering the potential for tantrums and upturned trestle tables, and her various friendships survived for another week. I really hope they do last for a lifetime, although I fear the odds are against it. Still, she won at pass-the-parcel and nobody complained even though it was clearly rigged, so she’s off to a good start.

House of cards

As a veteran property journalist, I’ve seen some extraordinary things during the countless visits I’ve made to people’s homes. Moments of breathtaking stupidity, improbable ignorance, toe-curling embarrassment and – worst of all – the situations where the horror of what you’ve just seen is indelibly burned into your memory. I’m not talking about people’s choices of furniture or décor (give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of B&Q vouchers, and eventually one will choose a colour scheme that isn’t beige) but rather the art of viewings – showing prospective purchasers round your home. Sellers have lived in their property, decorated it, extended it, copulated in as many rooms as their partner would allow, and even learned how to walk down the hall at 3am without standing on the Squeaky Floorboard. Yet stick a “For Sale” sign in the front garden, and all that knowledge seemingly evaporates, taking common sense with it.

I could fill a book with examples of bad viewing techniques I’ve encountered over the last ten years, but a few will suffice, such as the £350,000 villa with a wasp infestation, where I was encouraged by the vendor to grind said creatures into the carpet. Few things will trump the rented million-pound townhouse where an SPL footballer was deliberately making everything as squalid as possible to deter anyone from making an offer to his landlord, although at least there was some low cunning on display among the soiled knickers. At the opposite end of the intelligence scale, I fondly recall the owner of a chic flat in Glasgow’s west end enthusiastically describing the 3am ram-raid on the shop downstairs the night before my visit, as if this impromptu street theatre was a selling point. My 22^nd birthday saw me in a filthy spider-infested barn, forced to climb a tottering staircase that splintered under my feet so I could “enjoy” the view of said barn from eight feet above ground level. And perhaps most infamously of all, I was once locked in a haunted French chateau by myself, while the 14 offspring of the senile octogenarian owner stood in a neighbouring outbuilding arguing about how high they could make the upset price. They were trying to prevent speculative visits from the local Mafia, who were determined to buy the chateau as a new headquarters. The price wasn’t the only thing that was upset that day.

Lest we forget, viewings are the bridge between the cliffs of property marketing and a completed sale. You can spend a fortune on refurbishment and decorating, advertising with the best solicitor, getting glossy brochures made up, and landscaping the front garden to give your home that much-needed kerb appeal. But if you watch your dog wipe its backside along the carpet and then inform the horrified viewers you’re leaving the flooring (I swear I’m not making this up), you’ll be talked about 25 years later in blog posts. Even if the lady in question had taken her excrement-smeared carpets with her, I don’t think my family would have gone back for a second viewing. In fact, when you think about that traumatic childhood experience, my subsequent career in property journalism seems quite perverse.

When the doorbell rings and the viewers pour forth, common sense appears to get abandoned on the doorstep. Some people simply walk around their house monosyllabically uttering nuggets like “bathroom” (yes, thanks, I’d never have guessed), a few masochistically describe the roof leaks and neighbour problems they’ve had over the years, while others simply seem terrified of the whole procedure. Maybe we need a reality TV show where an intrepid presenter teaches phobic homeowners how to conduct successful viewings. I’d certainly watch it. In fact, I could present it. Anyone got Channel Five’s number?

The more things change…

I’m sorry if I begin this blog sounding like Victor Meldrew (although I probably begin every blog sounding like Victor Meldrew), but why do companies always have to change things? Having once studied a Chartered Institute of Marketing qualification, I’ve already heard all the clichéd if-you’re-standing-still-you’re-going-backwards arguments, but seriously. If something works, and is popular, and doesn’t generate any complaints, why do companies absolutely insist on making things worse in the name of “progress”?

I regularly use a 3D satellite mapping system for viewing towns and streets. I only started using it when my previous 3D satellite mapping system inexplicably closed down a few Christmases ago. Until recently, my new provider delivered a fascinating birds-eye view of anywhere I wanted to look at, but then for absolutely no discernible reason whatsoever, the hosting site increased the size of the overlaid street names to such a ludicrous degree that roughly half the map is now covered in said street names. Entire terraces have been obscured from view by gigantic letters and white stripes that are meant to demarcate the roadway but don’t, because they aren’t in the right place, and therefore cover up the very buildings you went onto the site to look at in the first place. According to this “improved” display, St Vincent Street in Glasgow has become St Vincent Lane, and you can’t see either of them because the sodding lines and letters are so monstrous. I won’t name the company responsible for this omnishambles, but you can find them on Bing. Because they are.

For another example of what I’m on about, look no further than Twitter. As an avid tweeter (Tweeter? Twitterer? Twat?), I use the Twitter app on my lovely new smartphone all the time. Sadly, a few weeks ago it updated itself automatically, without even asking permission (which my phone is always supposed to) and instantly became far less enjoyable. My profile page now regularly fails to display, with a small grey circle endlessly rotating as it fruitlessly attempts to load a thumbnail photo and six short lines of text, and when it does load, it'll display some total nonsense - today it claims I only have 130 Twitter followers, which is some way short of the mark. On every page of the app, the fonts have transmogrified from a neat sans-serif into horrid spidery lettering that is really rather unpleasant to look at. Can I roll back to a previous version? Of course I can’t. I’m stuck with it. Because some dickhead at Twitter’s app division somehow got it into his or her stupid thick skull that this change represented an improvement.

We see this all the time with products and services. Remember New Coke? Thought not – it was considerably inferior to Old Coke, so Coke swiftly brought Old Coke back as Coke Classic, and eventually replaced the replacement, so the New New Coke was actually Old Coke, henceforth simply known as Coke. A decade ago, Citroen made a rather attractive car called the Xsara, but when the inevitable mid-life facelift came along, they replaced its understated elegance with a horrid new front end that resembled a depressed frog. Particularly in green, which mine unfortunately was. I called it Froggy, and not because it was French – it was just bloody ugly, with a face that could give small children nightmares.

Perhaps I’m out of step with the modern world, but I am a firm fan of consistency. I like knowing that tomorrow will be the same as today, I buy cornflakes because they’re dependably tasty, and I take reassurance in things like the Sports Report music on Five Live every Saturday teatime, which is the same music my grandfather used to listen to before throwing his pools coupon into the bin as fortune eluded him for yet another week. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Luddite – in fact, I love to see new products reaching the market and improving our lives. However, I really resent the constant tinkering with the things we’ve already got, especially when these “improvements” always seem to make the objects in question a little bit worse somehow.

Welcome to the jungle

A little while ago, I was standing out in someone’s back garden as the sun set. It was a lovely, crisp early evening – the kind when sophisticated minds turn to cricket on the village green, or leisurely strolls around the local park. Unfortunately, this was a decidedly insalubrious area, full of people who can be accused of many things but definitely not sophistication. On this particular evening, a group of heavily intoxicated neds staggered up one of those awful 1960s footpaths that run behind people’s garden fences, violently attacking every streetlight they passed until each was plunged into darkness. Mission accomplished, and with the lane now an unprepossessing mugger’s charter, they wove their way into the distance, shouting unrepeatable sectarian abuse at nobody in particular.

So far, so Broken Britain, you might think. However, five minutes later, something extraordinary happened. In the sequence in which they’d been extinguished, each streetlight began to flicker faintly, then more strongly, then came back on with a feeble light and gradually brightened until it had regained its full potency. So remarkable was this Lazarus-like comeback that I and my fellow lamp-watchers cheered loudly when the final one defiantly resumed the job of protecting local residents from feral youths.

We soon realised that this was no accident. We presume – and please post a comment below if you know better - that the lamp posts had been engineered to shut down in the event of being attacked, before coming back on a few minutes later when the danger had passed. Which begs a question: is it really necessary to ned-proof such mundane objects, and if so, what does that say about parts of the country we live in, when manufacturers have to integrate vandal-proof safety mechanisms into their street lighting?

In truth, the town where this incident occurred is the sort of place where self-repairing utilities make a lot of sense. Posting a letter after final collection used to be fraught with risk because people sometimes set fire to post boxes, thereby rendering their contents undeliverable. Having your car broken into or vandalised was commonplace (particularly if it was a certain colour), and muggings and assaults were daily occurences, as were crimes against property and what we generically describe as acts of anti-social behaviour. As a result, much of this town had been engineered to withstand assault, quite apart from those remarkable lampposts. Every shop had protective grills over its windows. The eminently breakable glass in traffic lights was replaced with shatterproof coloured plastic discs. People grew trees and bushes to prevent youths congregating along their boundary walls. Shop workers parked outside the police station rather than their stores, to deter thefts. Security lights and CCTV cameras were everywhere, sometimes encased in mesh boxes to prevent burglars disabling them. It seemed like a constant game of cat-and-mouse between engineers and the underclass, and the battle contiunes to this day.

I wonder sometimes whether this continual advancement of anti-crime techniques ever really achieves anything. The presence of CCTV encourages criminals to cover their faces. People barred from loitering outside one off-licence simply migrate to another. Installing spiked metal fencing along footpaths not only inspires burglars to find another point of entry, but it also looks bloody awful. And as Londoners discovered two summers ago, protective shop window screens may deter a well-aimed bottle, but they’re no match for a protracted assault from looters.

An IT guru once told me that every secure server or encrypted file can be hacked, and every password can be decoded. In much the same way, hardcore troublemakers will overcome great obstacles in their pursuit of making other people’s lives a misery. So are we really making ourselves more secure with all these solutions to (and preventions of) criminality, or are we simply comforting ourselves with the illusion of safety? I fear the latter, and I suspect it will require prevention rather than cures to make people sleep soundly in their beds at night - particularly in areas like the estate with the self-repairing street lamps.

Come out and play

The fairly dismal performances of the home nations in their recent World Cup qualifying campaigns has rightly brought the subject of domestic sporting talent to the forefront. For those of you who don’t follow football, last month went something like this: Scotland got gubbed by Serbia, England were lucky to draw against Montenegro (neighbours of Serbia), Wales lost to Croatia (also neighbours of Serbia) and Northern Ireland lost 2-0 to Israel, who aren’t anywhere near Serbia but aren’t exactly renowned for their footballing achievements either. Arguably, Israel shouldn’t even be in a European qualifying group - they’re allowed into Eurovision partly on the grounds that anyone idiotic enough to want to participate deserves the humiliation of getting no points from Norway. However, geographically, Israel is more Middle Eastern than Eastern Europe. The whole thing seems a bit unfair, especially for Northern Ireland’s away supporters, who will have to make an epic journey to Tel Aviv in October to watch their team lose the forthcoming away fixture.

Several conclusions can be drawn from this sorry affair. Firstly, we clearly aren’t very good at football any more. Secondly, the former Yugoslav states seem to be fantastic at it. Thirdly, Israel should bugger off and allow poor old Norn Eire to be crap closer to home. However, there is also an over-riding question about why our various home nations aren’t capable of producing a decent team of footballers between them. With regard to this latter point, I have a theory – we can blame our sedentary lifestyles, or specifically those of our offspring.

When I were a lad, summer evenings were spent on the green outside my house, with freeform 20-a-side football matches where I never really knew who was on my team and who wasn’t. It didn’t matter. The winning wasn’t all that important – it was the taking part that felt good, even when I got put in goal and my total ineptitude was revealed for the inevitable gaggle of teenage girls to laugh at. At least I was trying, and when I decided to become an armchair football fan instead, my peers continued with their endless jumpers-for-goalposts games. But when was the last time you saw a group of children playing football in the park? Or in someone’s back garden? Or anywhere other than in front of their PS3s?

In a previous blog, I criticised schools for the apparent decline in standards of reading and writing, and the roulette wheel of blame has landed here again. I’m sorry, but who thought non-competitive sports days were a good idea? Surely preventing the weak and feeble from being branded losers is far more dangerous than preventing the strong and athletic from excelling at possibly the only thing they’re naturally talented at? Real life is hard, brutal and completely unfair, and bringing kids up to believe that they're all winners is setting them up for one hell of a shock when they start dating/applying for jobs/bidding on eBay/playing sports for real.

It’s also unsurprising that kids spend their morning breaks huddled over their BlackBerries when all the playing fields have been sold off to housebuilders. And then there's the please-don't-sue-us culture of excusals and exemptions. Back in my day, PE classes consisted of dangling pathetically from monkey bars and being yelled at for not attempting a flying angel over the vaulting horse with enough enthusiasm, whereas nowadays students can insist that their astigmatism excuses them from picking up a beanbag. I freely admit that I hated enforced exercise when I was a callow youth, but it instilled a degree of physical fitness that has endured to this day, allowing me to run for a train without wishing I was playing a train-catching app instead.

It appears that as each generation gets fatter, lazier and more inclined to order a Domino’s than make its own pizza dough, its spawn learns by example and does likewise. It’s a worrying development, which can only end in the scenario portrayed in the film WALL-E, where humans have become immobile spherical gannets. In the meantime, we’re going to get increasingly appalling at sport, including the national game of football, and that means the days of Souness, Dalgleish and Hansen will become as nostalgic and irrelevant as the days of Stock, Aitken and Waterman. We’re shit and we know we are. And I fear we’re going to get progressively worse, as every new generation of Facebook-addicted bedroom-dwelling teenagers tries to out-sloth its sofa-ridden parents downstairs.

This is my Hollywood

I’ve just finished reading the autobiography of David Mitchell. You know who he is – by his own admission, he’s become ubiquitous through constant panel show appearances, not to mention Peep Show, which finished its eighth series in fine style a couple of months ago. However, I bring this particular choice of reading material up because it discussed something I’ve often ruminated on – the nebulous concept of self-belief.

Throughout several years of relative anonymity and impoverishment, David Mitchell always knew he was going to make it. Even when his family began to doubt his chosen vocation, he stuck to his guns, self-confident and determined that a big break was going to come along eventually. And it did. But reading about his (literal and metaphorical) ramblings reminded me that I was once convinced I would also become a successful comedy writer. However, unlike the hiking hero of Back Story, my self-confidence and determination ultimately foundered on the big spiky rocks of reality.

Let me expand upon that statement, in an attempt to defuse any inferred assumption that I’m a younger (and more handsome, if I do say so myself) Mitchell brother-by-another-mother. I spent much of my free time as a teenager satirising Shakespeare plays, writing comedy scripts and tape- recording audio sketches where I played as many as six different characters simultaneously. As the years passed, these metamorphosed from avant-garde ramblings into refined, tightly-scripted programmes and screenplays – lovingly prepared manuscripts laid out across neat, double-spaced documents in a drawer.

And that is where they’re destined to stay for ever more. Not only did my film and television scripts fail to elicit a response from any scheduling controller or production company boss, I couldn’t even secure the time-honoured first-rung-on-the-ladder of agency representation. I wrote to every literary agent in the United Kingdom (sometimes more than once), concisely outlining the ideas I’d already penned, and enclosing an SAE so it wouldn’t even cost them to reply. As an impoverished youngster, this cost me a small fortune, and over a three-year period it achieved precisely nothing. I got a few generic “we’re not looking for clients like you”-type letters in response, and one agent did send my letter back with the words “NO THANKS!!!” scrawled in big red letters across it. Sadly, he forgot to include his name and address, so I can’t thank him in person.

Having subsequently carved out a successful career as a freelance writer, I’ve long since moved on from angsting about not being able to enter the nation’s living rooms on a Thursday evening. The only aspect of this tale that continues to trouble me is the realisation that when I die, comedy and drama programmes and films will die with me, forgotten and unmade. They’ll be consigned to a “never was” pile that nobody will even know exists – a personal cavalcade of Hollywood hits that will simply vanish without trace. And that makes me wonder. How many other people out there shared that indomitable sense of self-belief in their formative years, before finding themselves eternally on the wrong side of the screen? How many brilliant ideas, or characters, or novels, will die silently with their authors, when they could have brought laughter or entertainment into millions of people’s lives? And how much squandered talent is dotted around this green and emerald isle, vainly waiting for the day somebody takes a chance on it?

At least David Mitchell made it. And for that, at least, we should all be grateful.

Mr Writer

As a professional writer, and a semi-professional pedant, I am enraged on a daily basis by the general illiteracy of the world around me. As a professional writer and semi-professional pedant, I am also baffled on an equally frequent basis by the total apathy displayed by the inhabitants of said world to the linguistic idiocy that surrounds them. It’s reached the point where bad grammar or spelling has become almost unremarkable – a wallpaper of ignorance that coats our society – and if you think I’m getting worked up about this, you don’t know the half of it.

It’s perhaps understandable that a local charity volunteer might insert an unwarranted apostrophe into their fundraising “menu’s”, but it’s unforgivable when one of Scotland’s largest car dealerships runs a full-page ad on the back of the Edinburgh Evening News with the word “BARGIN” proudly emblazoned across it in 72-point bold capitals. I can forgive a neighbour getting my name wrong on a hand-written note, but I must acknowledge Volvo once again (not in a good way, this time), who once sent a marketing letter to Mr ? Cumins. Even the BBC has become guilty of proofreading laziness – the recent series of Food & Drink displayed captions for “1 carrott” and “half a bottle of of Italian red wine”, while a live news interview on the Oscar Pistorius trial came from a reporter in “Petoria”. After two minutes, the on-screen Petoria caption magically vanished, possibly in response to an anguished tweet from a freelance proofreader in Glasgow.

Bad spelling has become an affliction that strikes at the heart of our society. In terms of its cause, I could blame league table-obsessed schools and their under-qualified teachers, money-obsessed colleges and universities, apathetic parenting, lazy students, disinterested employers, or the almost total lack of demand for professional proofreading services. In fact, I blame all these factors equally. Since setting myself up as a freelance copywriter six years ago, I have witnessed a shockingly low level of demand for proofreading, despite its inestimable value to any company that wants to look even vaguely professional. Company websites are frequently peppered with unnecessary errors, and even people who work in PR and advertising often struggle to write a single paragraph without some sort of grammatical cock-up. Clearly, “it’ll do” is the accepted mentality, and often from people who should damn well know better. If time-served public relations professionals can’t proofread their own press releases, what hope is there for the rest of society?

I’d like to think basic sentence construction and accurate spelling could be taken as read (get it?), but sadly, these elementary skills seem to be an optional extra these days. I don’t expect other people to proofread everything three times as I always do, but once would be nice. Amid this linguistic malaise, my ability to spot a misplaced apostrophe at ten paces is beginning to seem almost quaint and olde-worlde. It’s a situation that makes me feel profoundly sad (particularly while writing this blog post), but Grammar Pedantry Syndrome knows no boundaries, and my daily struggle against the semi-literati must continue.

Now, does anyone want to recruit a freelance copywriter what can write proper and that, innit?