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.