Those who are about to die salute you!

Well, it's five o'clock and time to go home. Instead of going to Helen's party tomorrow, I'm off to help set up the Much Wenlock Olympian Games fencing. There are loads of events this weekend, and it's one of Britain's cutest villages, so get yourselves down there. Good pubs, a good book shop, lots of sports (some more serious than others) and beautiful countryside. The fencing is on Sunday at William Brookes School if you want to cheer me on. I'm in charge of the entries, so I already know my name won't be on that trophy…

No representation without taxation

There are people in the House of Lords who don't pay tax. That's to say, they have a lifelong seat, with speaking and voting rights in the legislature without ever having to be elected, collecting attendance money and affecting the laws of this country, while hiding their money abroad. They don't contribute to the roads, health service, justice system, defence of the realm, environmental improvement or the education system, but reap all the rewards of living here and being listened to on whatever subject is on their minds.

There are also lots of tax exiles who live abroad but hand over large amounts of money to political parties to get their own way, such as Sean Connery, the Scottish Nationalist (Barbados Branch) amongst many others.

Lord Campbell-Savours moved an amendment to the Political Parties and Elections Bill outlawing this corrupt distortion of democracy. The government and the Tories are planning to allow this revolting practice to continue when the bill comes back to the Commons.

Lobby your MP: mail them, fax them, make a personal call. The rest of us pay taxes and get very little say in affairs - let's level the playing field. Contact your representative via They Work For You.

Work work work

I'm again spending the afternoon hiding boxes from management. They want us to do a lot of work, but appear to think that it's all virtual - there's a strict limit on the number of boxes colleagues are allowed to move, it seems. So there's an underground economy of space-selling.

Meanwhile, the university's full of students taking resits or handing in rewritten essays. I wouldn't mind, but they don't even look sorry! I've got to mark all this stuff… Unlike school (I remember a particularly impressive 4% in a maths exam - that's like, er, not many right if my calculations are right), I didn't fail stuff at university, by some amazing freak. Neal did - perhaps I wasn't having enough fun. Anyone else?

Doomed!

God what a depressing afternoon - 2.5 hours in a union meeting hearing of the most awful stuff being done to us by a management which seems to have taken Wall Street as its Bible. Plus I've been volunteered for a few more jobs… How's the cricket going?

Damn… more books

I've just received the very elegant Yearbook of the Association for Welsh Writing in English, Almanac, packed with excellent scholarly articles. This led to the OUP sale page, where I just slapped down £60 for The Oxford Companion to Chaucer, Modernism and Democracy, The Grounds of English Literature (about medieval lit) and The Oxford English Literary History: The Victorians. Mmmm… academic. Now I'm off to Amazon to order Hodd, Adam Thorpe's Robin Hood novel. Must stop this madness.

Mid-July Friday conundrum

What have you submitted to from politeness or for a quiet life?

Being a humble chap, I've often done the decent thing to avoid offence, but one occasion sticks in the mind (and gullet). I hate fish, gooseberries and raspberries. They all make me gag. When I was a young postgraduate, I was invited, with a young lady, to dinner at my favourite professor's home. Every course (I can't remember the starter), was something I absolutely hated. Not just disliked, but utterly hated. There was no way I was going to offend these lovely people, so I got on with it, and even said yes whenever seconds were offered. Meanwhile, said young lady giggled continuously, nudged me, and made unsubtle hints all the way through. I can't even think of that meal without shuddering - which makes me feel very guilty because apart from the food (which was beautifully cooked if you like that sort of thing), it was one of the high points of my social life so far…

So come on, what have you done to smooth the path?

Meanwhile, here's Cynical Ben. I must point out that I'm not teasing him with this photo: I just like the effect of the light.

If you go down to the woods today (redux)

Morning all. How was your day of from my incessant, vacuous ranting? Thanks to Emma for keeping me updated with cricket scores. England + Wales/Australia sounded like fun, and Ireland hammered Kenya!

We went to Cannock Chase for a good long ramble. No dogging involved at all. It's a weird place. Some of it is horrible commercial timber plantation, some bits are quite bleak, while other areas are idyllic. We saw green woodpeckers, buzzards, kestrels, rabbits, lots of bilberries and two types of deer (roe and fallow). Needless to say, they all evaded my camera very impressively - here are a couple of snatched shots of shy deer. The Map Twats didn't get away quite so easily - the full set's here

Obviously, being in the woods and on the heath didn't preclude me from buying books: Oxfam in Stafford is very impressive. I picked up an oldish translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Nancy Mitford's lightweight Voltaire In Love, Michael Frayn's witty A Landing on the Sun and two very throwaway books for summer reading: The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies and Michael Dobbs' House of Cards.

Proper Caesar's Pet

I hate setting new devices up, and now regret being mean and not buying an iPhone because Macs just work.

Anyway, have a good day tomorrow: I won't be online - I'm taking a day off. They're hanging me the right way up. Cynical Ben, Radford Sallow, Neal and I are going bilberrying on Cannock Chase. Woo - and indeed - hoo! Someone text me exciting cricket scores and Tour de France news?

Gissa job. Go on, gissa job.

Sweet - my new phone's here, and my Dublin sister has jacked in her unfulfilling job, a week after my brother quit his for a new life as (cough) a lawyer, once he's done his conversion course. Add my newly unemployed New Zealand lawyer sister to the list and half my siblings are now scrounging dole scum, in the words of The League of Gentlemen. I, of course, am loving this. Having suffered the slings and arrows of these career-minded chaps and chapesses while I did an English degree, an MA in Welsh writing and then a PhD (Masculinity in four 1930s political Welsh novels), now I'm the one with a career(ish)! The worm's turned, the world's turned upside down etc. etc. etc. The family are going to hear about this for a long time to come.

Having laboured over Mark's collection of journals for hours (Sewanee Review 1966-1977 anyone), I've been rewarded with some fine books: The Trial of Lady Chatterley, Doctorow's Ragtime and Ballard's The Day of Creation. Good job I'm not being thrown out of my office.

In my absence the cricket has turned from the habitual England mediocrity into a brave stand by Collingwood and Pietersen. At least Pietersen went in his standard way - trying to be too clever. My least favourite player.

(Post title is from The Boys from the Blackstuff)

Mark ye but this

Mark has:

a three-legged cat

14,500 books

7 broken TVs

no ceilings

no number-plates

3 broken computers

one (semi-) working eye

no spectacles

and is a dear, dear friend and colleague. His research interests are porn, Charles Manson and other freaky stuff. And now he's completely knackered his back - can only shuffle, can't lift things etc - so I'm off to help him move office. He is, of course, in possession of the largest library in the university. See his library and cat here (and mine here)

Another stultifying politics post

Thanks to Kate, who sent me a petition about lobbying for the government to ignore. I don't know if you're aware that business groups, British and overseas, have an open sesame to government: anything they want, they get. They have meetings with ministers whenever they want, they lobby ministers and MPs to get laws weakened, and they second their staff to work in government (so that, for instance, the weapons procurement department of the Ministry of Defence is partly staffed by employees of companies selling weapons to … er … the MoD). The Business department seems to think that its job is to shill for the aviation industry rather than to govern in the interests of citizens. In return, failed ministers get nice fat directorships of companies dealing with the politician's former ministry. You and I will never be listened to with the same grovelling regard.

However, we might be able to reduce the influence these people have if there's a clear record of who's been lobbying. So here's a petition to sign.

I've just signed a petition to tell the government it's time to put a stop to lobbyists working in secret.

[http://38degrees.org.uk/page/s/lobbytransp]

Whether it's tobacco advertising, arms deals, GM food, or airport expansion, companies pay people to try to influence government. Currently we've no right to know what these lobbyists are up to.

A compulsory, public register would put a stop to that, and help clean up politics. The government has said it will make its mind up on this in the next few weeks: please sign now to help make sure they make the right decision.

[http://38degrees.org.uk/page/s/lobbytransp]

Environment saved

I was keeping this for Radio 4's Genius program, but the need is too urgent to wait for a new series.

I think that most of the drivers I know don't care about the damage they're doing to the environment and to the lungs of pedestrians because they're insulated from the immediate effects. Likewise, the exhaust fumes disperse and we don't really notice it any more.

So the way to shame people into driving less or driving cleaner cars is to increase the immediate effect of the pollution. I have the answer. Add harmless black dye to the exhaust so that each vehicle pumps out a foul black cloud proportionate to the pollution produced, so that everybody can see whose cars are poisoning them, and gains a visual index of the degree to which our air is polluted. Link it to another pump which exudes a revolting but harmless gas into the vehicle's cabin - I suggest the eggy deliciousness of human flatulence - in proportion to the engine output (for SUVs, I'd prefer to link the exhaust pipe to the air conditioning, but apparently that counts as murder).

Before long, the selfish bastards in urban SUVs will be rushing to buy Prius's as their clothes stink of bottom and passing pedestrians lob bricks at the filth factory speeding past. It won't cost drivers any more, it doesn't penalise people who have to drive for work, it simply emphasises the costs of how we run our society.

Ashes Fever

The first Ashes match has just started - follow it live here on the Guardian's wonderful 'over by over' coverage. If the play gets boring (unlikely), contributions from viewers are always fun. Also tomorrow, Ireland play Kenya in the first one-day international, which used to be the high-speed version until Twenty20 was invented.

(In case some of my readers are confused, I'm talking cricket. Googlies, Chinamen, silly mid-off and all that).

Shome mishtake shurely (which only makes sense if you read Private Eye)

I e-mailed this round to my Irish friends and family, though I'm not normally one for crude humour. Still, I think it's worth noting (thanks to Ewarwoowar, who saw it before me). Journalism at its finest!

Bow your heads

Morning. Natural Blues's grandfather has died: pop over there and sympathise in the way only caring atheists can. Shockingly, the news came via her sister's Facebook update - isn't that horrifying?

Yet more foolish book purchases

After an afternoon in the art gallery tearoom swapping gossip, I've returned to buy books. I've balanced today's purchases: the fourth volume of the Moomins comic strip reprints, and Declan Kiberd's new book on Joyce, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living.

I've also organised a new phone contract - much more expensive this year - and resisted my natural urge to get an iPhone (I'm a long-term Mac user). Self-denial!

Crueller Brother

An anonymous source sends me this snatched footage of Cruel Brother's latest performance. Go mad in the comments section, groupies.

Pies in our time

Mentioning my upcoming birthday (not for another week yet) is paying off handsomely. Not only have Owen and Bethan presented me with excellent books and stuff, Christine has come to my office bearing fine pie and quality real ales. So that's lunch sorted out anyway.

Stick that in your kettle

One of my distant superiors was involved in the design and defence of 'kettling', the police tactic of imprisoning legal protestors for long periods, allowing them out only if these innocent people surrender their details and images to cops for a database that's been declared illegal.

Well yah boo sucks to you, Professor: your methods have been described as 'inadequate' and outdated by the official report into the G20 events.

Some highlights:

Commanders appeared not to properly understand basic human rights laws or the legal requirements surrounding the use of kettling, the report said. However, O'Connor said this was the case for only some senior officers, and refused to identify those at fault.

It says police are currently failing in their human rights obligations, and describes public order policing guidance issued by the Association of Chief Police Officers – adopted by all forces across England and Wales – as "insufficient".

The national policy should be overhauled, it says, to "demonstrate explicit consideration of the facilitation of peaceful protest".

contrary to claims by senior Met officers ahead of the demonstrations, there was "no specific intelligence which suggested any planned intention to engage in co-ordinated and organised public disorder".

Despite that, senior commanders gave "no consideration" to the idea that the protests might be peaceful and planned how to deal "robustly" with unlawful activity.

Just to be clear: there are some individual officers behaving insensitively and criminally, but this report, and my point, is that there's a structural and institutional problem with policing when it comes to protest: the police force is far to the right of the population and shows no sign of recognising citizens' rights to peaceful protest.

Smile you bastards, or you're sacked

Sometimes the most oppressive aspects of life are the most stupid - Keihin Electric Express Railway Company are assessing their employees to make sure they're smiling properly and frequently, using some software

Railway workers of Japan: rise up, scowl, and overthrow the tyranny of enforced false joy! Our masters pay us to facilitate their profits. They have enough power without demanding that we pretend to enjoy it - it's an attempt to take over your souls.

Here in the UK, grumpy shop assistants are a cultural strength, from Open All Hours to Fawlty Towers to Black Books, never mind the distinct brand of misery dispensed by transport officials. Why should people on the minimum wage be forced to smile through the inanity and stupidity of the great British public? I respect the strength of mind of any employee who refuses to engage in this fraudulent attempt to persuade us that suffering terrible conditions on low pay is somehow the fulfilment of all their fantasies. Furthermore, the grumpy employee reminds us that there's a human in that uniform, not a robot on whom we can unload all our frustrations. They can treat us as badly with full legal immunity - they can't build enjoying it into our contracts.

So next time you're treated dismissively, rudely or surlily by a man or woman in a neon nylon suit, remind yourself that this is an act of class warfare and applaud their brave stand against the tyranny of simulated joy. Unhappiness is your right and mine.

You Gotta Roll With It (and some butter)

I'm no Oasis fan. I was for a while - working in a terrible pub (legal reasons prevent me from regaling you with the appalling things done to the 'food'), music played in one corner on a constant loop. Of the 90 minutes, the only two decent songs were Supersonic and Cigarettes and Alcohol (this was 1994), and I would time my passes around the tables to catch these thrilling, sneering, passionate songs.

It was, of course, all downhill after that, but I still have a soft spot for Noel Gallagher, on the strength of two comments he made:

'Michael Owen - he looks like a trainee CID officer' (Owen is a soccer player and CID is the plain-clothes detective police branch).

'Liam is a man with a fork in a world of soup'. I love this phrase and intend to use it all the time. Perhaps not when I'm marking.

Sheepy goodness

It's raining heavily so I'm a happy rodent.

Last night Neal and I had another in our now regular series of quality meals on Monday - they've come about because it's convenient for Neal to stay at mine and the boy can cook. Anybody looking for a house-husband? Last night consisted of fine vegetables supporting slow-cooked tender lamb chops marinaded and crusted with minted Greek yogurt. Then Neal got disgracefully drunk on very little beer, though he behaved rather better than Radford Sallow did a few weeks ago…

We watched Torchwood which was much better than its previous incarnations, then watched Panorama's exposé of the police's vendetta against environmentalists: the senior cops came across as shifty, badly-informed and occasionally dishonest. Watch it here if you're in the UK.

All These Worlds Are Yours…

I'm quite a fan of Doves, and really enjoyed their live set at Delamere Forest. They finished with this track, which they originally wrote as Sub Sub, their rave origin. I can't find a version online with the video from 2001 A Space Odyssey: someone help me out? There was just something euphoric but menacing about crunching guitars, driving beats and the repeated quotation on screen - All These Worlds Are Yours, because the second half of the sentence is 'except Europa'.

The Book Vole

Even going to a wedding allowed me to acquire more books: my mother gave me a 1930s edition of Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence, and my brother and his wife Bethan presented my with Mark Thomas's exposé of Coca-Cola Belching Out The Devil, some fine Moleskine notebooks, and a Warhol-esque Margaret Thatcher postcard.

Then I get to work and find deliveries of more fine books: Nick Turse's The Complex: How The Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Reeve's Fever Crumb, le Carré's A Most Wanted Man and finally Diana Wynne Jones's The Game. I must do some work this week, so will try to ignore them…

Popular Culture rears its ugly head

Ewarwoowar, who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of popular culture, is on about children's TV today - nostalgics should head over there. I didn't watch much, but must admit to enjoying Press Gang on many levels.

That's by the by: what I meant to mention was that Ewarwoowar directs our attention to Garfield Minus Garfield. I always hated Garfield - one-joke nonsense. Someone has a lazy, greedy cat. Garfield Minus Garfield, however, is wonderful. Without the recurrently lame punchline, there's a minimalist, Zen-like and even poignant quality to his owner's life which is entirely lacking in the original. Is this one of the rare cases (perhaps Cheers/Frasier) where the 'remix' or pastiche transcends the original? I definitely think this qualifies as art.

Give Cynical Ben a big virtual hug

Being at a wedding on Saturday, listening to my sister holding back the tears (of joy, presumably) as she said her vows, reminded me of being least worst best man at Cynical Ben's wedding almost a year ago. So overcome was he, that I had to give him a big hug before he could get the actual words out. He's not so cynical after all, even after I played Phil Barclay's 'Short Fat Ben' at the disco later…

He's also on magnificent blog form at the moment, both over at his place and in the comments section of mine. Jo deserves some kind of accolade for their 11 months of marriage…

Update: As Dan points out in the comments, it is indeed 23 months since Ben and Jo married - how time flies, and how senile I am. It was my brother who married last year. He managed to make his vows very confidently.

Cut and dried (in another sense)

The Guardian reported the other day that circumcision (much more common in the US than in the UK) reduces the risk of contracting AIDS, according to double-blind trials.

Ben Goldacre, who writes a column in the Guardian about the media's reporting of science, amongst other things, takes issue with this report most amusingly:

Dear Editor,

your reporter Alex Renton claims there are double-blind trials to show that circumcision reduces the transmission of HIV. In a double-blind trial, neither the researcher nor the participant know whether they have had the intervention, in this case “circumcision”. However distracted I am by the lack of basic scientific literacy in British news media, I feel certain that if somebody cut the skin at the end of my penis off, I would notice, if not immediately, then at some stage in the years that followed.

Yours

Ben Goldacre
(Bad Science)

Cut and dried

Oh yes, one more point in response to Cynical Ben and others on this thread: my expensive professional haircut did not attract single ladies at the wedding, rendering Ben's theory redundant.

I'm getting quite freaked out now

The Mitchell and Vole mindmeld continues, as this sketch (from 16.08 if it doesn't start in the right place) demonstrates in a creepily accurate fashion (Demented is quite impressed by the similarity too). If anyone can find it on Youtube or similar, I'd love to post it - I've only found the BBC iPlayer version.

Demented - amateur DIY on university property is tricky. Hope you get away with it…

Marrying Mr (W)right

Actually, Dominic ruined what would have been a splendid pun by acquiring a PhD (in some fantastically esoteric field of mathematics) a few weeks ago, so congratulations. I'm still going to us it though. Still, girls, it proves that a PhD is a marital asset, doesn't it? DOESN'T IT?

The wedding was, as all weddings are, perfect. For me, this one was particularly perfect. It started in the pub, and ended with me managing to outsource a sister. I arrived in Stone to find the church locked. Couples were wandering around the station wondering where they'd get changed, so we all repaired to a fine local and took turns changing in the rudimentary loos while working out how we all knew Hilary. Unfortunately for my dear sister, several of them recognised me from her looks, though I'd like to think that they're more refined than mine. She certainly lacks the stubble and supplementary chins.

The nuptial mass was delightful - chatty priest, confused non-Catholics etc., though being on the front row meant that I couldn't hide a novel in my hymn book, as is my wont when pressed to attend such services. Still, Maria, the bridesmaid beside me, had a great line in gentle sarcasm which kept my mind off eternal damnation for a while.

The reception was a vast, sprawling affair held at the family home. I should plug some things at this point. The band were The Deadbeats, a talented and genial bunch who played stuff from every generation, and didn't give up until 6 a.m, or so I hear. To them I am indebted for the sight of seeing my venerable father do his chicken dance to Parklife, a song he's clearly never heard. Full marks for effort though.

Above all, please, please visit the Mudchute Kitchen if you're in London. It's the restaurant attached to Mudchute City Farm in Docklands. It's run by Philippa, one of Hilary's closest friends, who catered the wedding. Ladies and gentlemen, I could have wept, so good was the food. My mother grew the veg (and the flowers), and Philippa pit-roasted a lamb, accompanied by the most wonderful salads, vegetables, cakes and multiple kilos of cheese, washed down by stunning wines - including a twenty year-old Madeira - chosen by the Tate's wine buyer. Ales were barrels from Storm Brewing Co. in Macclesfield - well worth searching for.

The speeches were witty and warm - even my dad, whose favourite words are 'er' and 'mm', delivered from behind a newspaper. I lost the sweepstake for the best man's speech by some considerable distance - I suggested 13 minutes, Colm managed a magnificent 33 and a half, though in his defence, it was alternately witty, heartfelt and tender, and therefore worth every minute.

As to the social ambience - I hung with all my cool young cousins, graced the dancefloor once or twice, and made a dignified retreat around 2 a.m., finding myself a spot behind a sofa. Others camped out, or merely crashed where they fell, including the young gentleman pictured below, who was oblivious to the crashing of revellers breakfasting around him the next morning.

Any flies in my beer? Well, by the time thirty or so people had asked where my 'young lady' was, I was ready to yank their tongues out, chop them off and feed them to the chickens. Extra points for the well-meaning damnation of one older cousin who used the phrase 'well, not everybody can find someone, can they'. How my hands itched for a spade. Instead, I merely pointed out that all families need a slightly weird uncle…

Probably of interest only to family members, here are the photographs - click on 'Marrying Mr (W)right' (see, I told you I'd reuse that pun). If you know any of the people, or merely wish to have your say, click 'comment' and leave your witticisms.

Hail and Farewell

See you on Monday, when I'll have either lost a sister or gained a brother-in-law. It's a big Catholic wedding, followed by a hog and lamb roast presided over by a professional chef my sister's friends with. There'll be leaves around for the vegetarians, presumably. Don't expect too much commentary from me: no wi-fi in the church. Honestly, these people live in the Dark Ages, and not just ideologically and morally!

Grease is the word

It is in Iowa, where they're planning a Michael Jackson statue - in butter. At least it'll be the right colour.

More indie-schmindie to please Cynical Ben

Work's hardly happening today - I'm just yawning a lot and browsing for stuff. The associate dean's been in and looked slightly askance: Neal's nicked a colleague's desk even though he's a student at another institution, and I was playing Stereolab's Super-Electric very loud.

I'm feeling listless. It's hot and none of the books I ordered this week have arrived. Nor has my deluxe vinyl copy of God Help The Girl's album.

Anyone fancy Indietracks? It's a steam-train based twee festival in Derbyshire! Teenage Fanclub! Camera Obscura! The Frank and Walters! Other bands!

Confession Conundrum

None of us are cool. There's no such thing, to paraphrase Barthes again - we just all exist in a constantly shifting lake of codes. However, there are things we all do which don't fit our self-images, or the image we'd like others to have of us. Guilty pleasures, I guess. So now's your chance to 'fess up.

Cynical Ben is banned. He has three trillion opinions, and specialises in being contrary anyway. He expresses contempt for my music, my clothes (especially my woolly hat and my favourite DM shoes: 'amazing what you can get on the NHS' was his latest witticism) and pretty much anything else, even though we know that he'll change his mind in a week. He's also banned because he bought a copy of Space Jam. That's the kind of contrariness in which he specialises. Tease him and he'll get even more aggressive in his defence. That said, he does have magnificent taste in literature and cheese. OK, he's not banned. Just don't take him too seriously, that's all I'm saying.

My confession. Despite my well-documented objections to policing methods, and to soap operas, and my love of high-concept drama, I also love watching The Bill. I know it's often very poor, and little better than any number of cheap soaps, but there's still something compelling about it. They react to current stories very quickly and rarely take the easy dramatic or narrative option. It depends on the writers in any particular week of course, and it's definitely less political than when it started, but it's still more than a rest home for ex-soap actors. I particularly enjoyed the special episodes done jointly with SOKO Leipzig, the German equivalent, though it was embarrassing that all the Germans had flawless English while the UK actors couldn't manage a word of German.

So there we are. I'm not nearly so suave and sophisticated as you might have thought (if you've had a lobotomy recently). Your turn!

Hair today, gone tomorrow…

Morning all. I've had a very pleasant start to the day - a swim with Neal, a walk in the rain (at last) and a decent breakfast at the Romanian-Italian place. I didn't get round to a haircut or ticket-buying, so they're on the list for today.

Did I ever mention that I divide the world into haircuts and hairstyles? Everybody needs a haircut at some point. It's just sensible management. However, hairstyles are the mark of a mind with too little to occupy it. Hairstyles are a desperate attempt to catch up with ephemerality, of a need to comply with the arbitrary whims of a soi-disant élite. I know that, like all matters of appearance, they consist of a complex social code (I've read my Barthes on movie hairstyles), but I just can't help thinking that anyone that bothered about their appearance has too much time on their hands.

I should probably confess to my hair history. I had a pudding bowl cut, thanks to my mother, as did all my siblings regardless of gender or wishes. After that, I grew my jet black hair nearly down to my waist, which at least distracted from my face and went well with the skinny frame, black DMs, black jeans, black shirt and black biker jacket. Yes, I was a student. After a while, however, the black became brown and the locks became sparse. I decided that the Francis Rossi look wasn't for me, and chopped it all off for a short-back-and-sides, which is sensible but just doesn't work when moshing.

Anyone else want to confess to particularly egregious choices?

Work sucks

That's quite enough for one day. I'm off to buy tickets for The Unthanks (formerly Rachel Unthank and the Winterset, a very creepy folk band) and for Marcus Brigstocke, who makes my feeble attempts at sarcasm seem very amateur indeed. His rants are easily available on the web and are well worthy finding, such as this one:

I'm also off to get a hair cut. Not sure which one though, buy shoe polish, choose and air a suit and all the stuff I need to do for my sister's wedding on Saturday. I'm hoping for rain - I suspect she isn't.

Book nerd heaven

You may know that I love LibraryThing: now some lovely people have taken on a Herculean task. They plan to found a webpage for each, individual book, forming an open library. I'd love to join in.

If you believe… they put a man on the moon

Sorry for the REM reference

Today, as the Guardian's special section reminds me, is the fortieth anniversary of the moon landings. How do you feel about it? Ten years ago, I had nothing but awe for such an amazing achievement - and I still feel that way for the most part. However, in between, I've done a lot of reading. I've learned how the space programme was motivated solely by a need to dominate the Soviets, about how it was manned by pretty unrepentant Nazi rocket scientists drawing on the skills developed in the 1940s, about how it cost a massive chunk of the US GNP, and how its scientific benefits have been massively overexaggerated by NASA spinners.

The Soviets took a pragmatic approach: near earth orbits are great for science, there's nothing on the moon. So did the Europeans for that matter - manned space flight is like getting a taxi down to the shops. We might make Mars but that's as far as it goes, so let's put our energy into satellites, telescopes and probes.

And yet - the romance lingers, perhaps even intensified by the failure of our space race. Once the cold war ended, it turned out that the motivation (and money) dissipated. Instead, we're in the post-space age. Will our grandchildren remember that men walked on the moon? Will they have the energy to care, inbetween long treks for water and trying to eke out a subsistence living on a ruined earth? Perhaps the dominant mode will be anger, at the waste of multiple billions on a giant penis when millions of people starved.

Perhaps, though, the dominant mood will be melancholy. J. G. Ballard's Hello America and Myths of the Near Future depict a California and Florida of abandoned space centres, emptied pools, men and women spiritually hollowed out by the loss of technological purpose.

Displacement activity

Things to do today: read some incredibly boring papers on Threshold Concepts. Sort the entries for the Much Wenlock Olympian Games (helped inspire Baron de Coubertin to refound the international version - places still available) and do some proper work. But it's too hot…

Meanwhile, here's a lovely bit of melancholic Australian chamber-pop from one of my favourites: The Paradise Motel.

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Five finger shuffle

I've downloaded the iPod OS 3.0, for very little purpose other than being a Mac obsessive, though shake-to-shuffle is quite cool. So I'm taking a few minutes to change what's on the iPod, and it's a bit strange. I'm happily chopping albums up, dumping old favourites, and generally doing things I would normally consider philistine - like losing the 3rd movement of Elgar's Cello Concerto because it's weaker than the other 3 even though structurally the piece needs them all. Of course, the iPod's normally on shuffle, so I wouldn't notice, but it is interesting to note how listening habits have been changed by technology. I do still listen to complete pieces at home and work though - Monteverdi's Vespers today (the Gardiner recording).

Poetry corner

Cynical Ben is versifying. They're pretty good, especially the one about Neal - it sums him up.

Are any of you old enough to remember when Mark and Lard had the evening Radio 1 slot? Amongst the cornucopia of delights was Poetry Corner: Simon Armitage, John Hegley (now doing Yorkshire Tea adverts) and many other leftfield cleverclogs. It certainly persuaded me that poetry could be cool.

O Cruel Brother, Where Art Thou?

Our conference finished with a bravura performance from Cruel Brother - Richard Thompson, REM and Michael Jackson covers performed brilliantly under the stern critical gaze of their colleagues. Here are a few pictures and more posted here. Gerry's slide guitar was particularly great.

Give us your feckin' money

University fees up to £3,200: grants and loans stay where they are. David Lammy, the minister in charge (ho ho) says 'difficult choices have to be made'. Students will have to make difficult choices about whether to bother with university or not. Difficult choices by almost universally-Oxbridge educated ministers have been avoided: Trident, higher taxes for the rich, more inheritance tax etc. etc. etc: none of these difficult choices have been made.

Rich kids won't notice a few hundred more - everybody else, like Wolverhampton students will struggle, especially as jobs will be scarce.

Another blow to the proletariat from the Labour Party then. Fucking shameful.

Now the day is ended…

Finally, our reward for the day - a speech from the Dean (ahem) and a performance by our house band, Cruel Brother, unfortunately sans Deer Friend, who has decamped to Berlin and then Egypt. Perhaps some beer may be forthcoming too.

US Election finally ends

Congratulations to Al Franken, committed lefty (by US standards anyway) and comedian, who was finally declared the winner of the Minnesota Senatorial race by the Supreme Court, despite the increasingly ridiculous refusal of Norm Coleman to admit he'd lost.

It's important because it takes the Democrats to 60 (including 2 pro-democrat independents), which can stop the Republicans killing legislation through filibustering (talking until time runs out). Now the Dems can get on with founding a first world health service, if the lobbyists don't ruin it.

Stand not upon the order of your going

Damn. Just ordered another book, for £21: Klaus and Knight's 'To Hell with Culture': Anarchism in Twentieth Century British Literature: Anarchism and Twentieth-century British Literature. Stephen Knight was one of my PhD external examiners, and I'm a sucker for 'politics in literature' books. It's been an expensive day though…

Quick break now for coffee then a piece on Cromwell's internal political pressure which I'm particularly looking forward to.

It's Malcolm Wanklyn (buy this book or this one). He's got a very small audience which is desperately disappointing, as he's started with a fantastic review of his experience of deconstruction as it affected historiography, especially seventeenth-century history. The focus is the many Oliver Cromwell's: left hero, left villain, inspiration to Hitler and Mussolini, fundamentalist or freedom fighter, hammer of Scotland and Ireland etc. etc. Malcolm's concentrating on the military career and the various ways in which it can be seen. Malcolm sees OC as taken up by radical politicians (the Fiery Spirits) who saw him as God's General who would win the war and persuade the undecided that Cromwell was the tool of Godliness.

It turns out that Cromwell used these people to achieve power, and tamed their radicalism for his own ends. This draws on an existing debate about whether or not Cromwell was radical or not - he certainly crushed the leftists such as the Levellers and Diggers. He was certainly a tolerationist in the early years - he didn't agree with the Scottish Presbyterians that any minority Protestants and Catholics should be crushed.

Despite his later military successes, Cromwell's early martial victories were a mixture of being in the right place at the right time, down to other peoples' successes, and a good degree of spin as the Fiery Spirits sought their 'god's general' - trying Waller, the Earl of Manchester and the Earl of Essex first.

I should mention what a great speaker Malcolm is: enthusiastic, total command of his subject, rarely needs notes, dynamic delivery.

Final session is on Manorial Rights of Wreck - didn't catch by whom. Apparently, some lord of the manor has turned up a 12th century right to ownership anything out to sea as far as a barrel of Hambrough/Humber (no, me neither) can be seen floating on a clear day by a man on horseback from a clifftop (supposedly 3 miles!) - conflicting with all sorts of other laws. The speaker's a law lecturer who is a diver. He's found loads of excellent stuff, but before he could give it to a museum via the crown, the lord of the manor claimed ownership. The git. Anyway, it's raised a host of quite interesting legal questions.

Quick guide for you scavengers:

stuff above water - Wreck. Belongs to the owner or the lord of the manor if no owner turns up.

Below high water - belongs to the Lord High Admiralty since time immemorial, which legally means 1189. Common law jurisdiction follows the tide as it comes and goes.

A derelict is an abandoned vessel floating or sunk below low water - and belongs to the Admiralty in British waters. The Tubantia was a hot case - a Dutch ship sunk and believed to be carrying gold. Turned out it had a cargo of Edam!

Update - a Hambrough/humber barrel = corruption of Hamburg Barrel - a 45 gallon drum used by the Hanseatic League. Phew.

Bayonets out for the lads

Now we're on to a brilliant paper by Laura Ugolini on 'Middle-class men on the English Home Front 1914-1918'. One of my specialities is proletarian masculinity, so I'm particularly interested. She's working on how middle-class men, particularly those who didn't join the armed forces, redefined masculinity, given that fighting and manual labour were the standard definitions of masculinity.

Despite the huge pressure (white feathers delivered to 'cowards' etc.), these men found ways to defend themselves while remaining masculine in some way: looking after their families, investing in war loans and joining war-related civilian bodies - hoping these would be seen as manly, which they weren't. The volunteer groups, veterans' groups and so on were seen as physically weak, reserved for old people and not very serious. I wonder if the upper- and middle-class striekbreakers in the 1926 General Strike were up to the same thing.

Update: she sees new themes emerging in the General Strike period but isn't sure why. There are loads of ways of looking at these things. Some good questions from the floor (as usual, I ask something dull) which always lead her to more fascinating detail.

She's got some great propaganda and recruitment images too.

Live-blogging Staff Research Day

Now I'm listening to Cécile Benoit, doctoral student and French language assistant, discuss diversity, religion and primary education in Irish and British schools - it's very interesting because Ireland still outsources primary education to the Catholic Church (and to a lesser extent the Church in Ireland Anglicans), despite the increasing immigrant population of Dublin and the frequent sex scandals engulfing the church. She hasn't mentioned the decline of the Celtic Tiger and the recent reports, but it's still a very sophisticated account of the deal made (unwillingly) between the State and the Churches. The comparison with Birmingham, which deals with massively diverse intakes very differently, is fascinating. Ireland is only slowly becoming a diverse society, so has a lot to learn. She's just said only 1% of National (primary) schools cater for non-Christian children (one Jewish school and two Islamic ones), and only 7% are for non-Catholics - interesting position given the Constitution's commitment to equal opportunities. There are some multi-denominational schools.

Cécile is French, so I wonder if she'll raise the French model: strict secularism in state institutions (laïcité). It's what I'd introduce.

Update: she does like the French system but feels that laïcite is too distinctively French to be imported wholesale. She also thinks that the State/Church relationship won't change because the State was utterly complicit and in any case can't afford to properly nationalise the schools - shamefully.

Boo! Hiss!

Commiserations to Ben Goldacre, whose Bad Science book was pipped to the Samuel Johnson Prize by Leviathan, a book about whales. I'm sure it's very good, but can't help feeling that a panel containing an editor of the Telegraph was never going to vote for a book which excoriates poor science journalism - that paper is particularly guilty (and that's only one example).

They think it's all over… and it is.

Well, that's over. I managed to get through about 3 of my points and six of my pages in the allotted half hour - it's really hard trying to say what's exciting about something when the audience haven't even heard of the field, let alone the individual. Plus my signer (poor woman) had to cope with Welsh names and references without prior knowledge - she did magnificently, but I had to slow down hugely.

Still, I think it went OK, and one audience member clearly knew about post-1918 Welsh culture and asked some interesting questions. It's always a relief to get a question, especially the first one, because it suggests one hasn't completely wasted one's time.

The next presenter gave a historical overview of deaf artists, and he was followed by a fascinating paper on Diana Wynne Jones's The Game, which I'm now about to order.

I'm skipping the next session - I need a break. I should probably move though - the air conditioning's dripping on my computer.

Found

A l'Oréal Shocking Volume Waterproof Moisturizer thingy. Not exactly lost, more thrown from a car window by its owner because it was empty, in a stunning display of public citizenship.

I'm at a staff research conference this morning, in the Lighthouse cinema. I'm on first, which at least gets the boring stuff out of the way. We're already running late - one of the three organisers has arrived, only 20 minutes late.

I see the day as a trap. Our new management will be taking notes. Anyone conducting research which doesn't attract external funding will be sacked. Anyone think of ways to parlay Welsh literature into EU/corporate funding? I'm presenting on an untranslated 19th century Welsh clergyman and academic today. Try to restrain your excitement…

Jolly by name

Happy Birthday to one of my regular readers and colleagues, Christine! 73 today.

ID cards - we win on points

They're still going ahead, but they'll be entirely voluntary, so it'll be no more onerous than carrying a ProveIt card (for young drinkers), and the rozzers won't be able to demand your papers, as now.

Not that I'd have been affected: I have an Irish passport and would have relied on that if ID cards had been made compulsory for UK citizens. Some of you are from states which require ID - what's your experience of it?

My sense is that the police would have used it as another means of harrassing the people they already target: black people. I feel that the right to go about your business without having to identify yourself unless you're committing a crime is symbolically important: the state has the right to intervene if you've transgressed laws democratically voted on, not on the whim of the local bobby. Cards wouldn't be effective in preventing terrorism (a justification they've quietly dropped) anyway - though they might have been useful for identifying the corpses afterwards.

The grande oeuvre is complete

That's my conference paper finished. It's about O. M. Edwards's Cartrefi Cymru, an 1896 Welsh travel book in which our hero visited the homes of various dour religious and cultural leaders, from whom he thought the Welsh could learn (i.e. pray more, don't listen to the nasty socialists, obey your betters) - but he also used the book to turn himself into a cultural icon of bourgeois Welshness and to get over marital problems and his sense that he wasn't really Welsh any more - he'd lived in Oxford for decades and spent a lot of time with the movers and shakers in London.

OK - it's beautifully written and 'nicer' than my rather cynical synopsis, and I'm hoping that the trans-cultural and psychological themes will grab my audience tomorrow - none of whom know anything about Welsh literature, and very few of whom are literature specialists at all. I'd recommend Edwards to you, but the only translation ('Welsh Homes') was in 1936 and may be a little hard to get hold of.

Michael Jackson: victim of global politics

I've cracked the Jackson case. The simple rule is cui bono, or in English, who gains?

What story was all over the press for two weeks previously, and what story immediately sunk like a stone?

That's right. Iran. QED - the Mullahs murdered the Shah of Pop to distract attention from their electoral shenanigans. Let's see how far we can get this round the web, mateys.

It's Pay Day!

So I can sack work off and start buying books and music!

After praising Sweden to the skies yesterday, apparently it's all gone tits up, to use a terrible phrase from the 90s.

Right. Time for coffee with Neal, who swam alone today because I overslept for the first time since I finished my PhD. Alan's told us all about the Nightingales at Glastonbury - hundreds of people lapping up their arty noise rock. Another triumph!

We are a charitable lot

In the middle of another story, here's an astonishing statistic, if true:

The number of students prevented by their parents from attending sex education classes increased during the Iraq war, when many Muslim families immigrated to Sweden. The Scandinavian country, with 10 million inhabitants, granted full refugee status to 24,799 Iraqis between 2003 and 2007, compared with 260 by Britain.

How astonishingly mean-spirited. The UK invades a country on a false pretext, having previously armed and encouraged its dictator, wreaking havoc and a concomitant civil war, then found room to accept only 260 individuals, despite the immense hardship. Meanwhile a much smaller country with no global pretensions and no responsibility for the war opens its doors to a much greater proportion of refugees.

Förlåt, Sweden!

Here Comes The Rain Again

Proper thunder, wind, everything I've been hoping for. Shame that I came to work only wearing my lightest summer trousers and shirt. Shoes too. You've all been very quiet today. Surely you aren't all on holiday? Or is it because I've been going on about books and news.

This is the news

Obviously I've plenty of work to do, so I'm wondering how other countries deal with news and what they prioritise.

Here's the English version of Deutsche Welle (the equivalent of BBC World): vaguely liberal and highly international. Good European citizens.

France24 is also wide ranging, featuring Madoff, the Honduras coup, Argentina's election, Afghanistan and Jackson. There doesn't seem to be any particular focus on French colonial links.

The BBC's World page is, of course, top quality, though it does feature stories with a UK link slightly more often that the others.

I have a real soft spot for America's NPR (National Public Radio), which always struggles financially but produces great programming on a minuscule budget, a bit like Radios 2, 3 and 4 put together. It's not quite the equivalent of countries' international channels, so is far more domestic, but it's an interesting read. There's a particularly good review of my favourite Renaissance music ensemble, Stile Antico and a concert to listen to online.

Any other international services you lot rate? Back to hiraeth for now though… Here's the news in Welsh, though rather disappointingly, the BBC appears to think that Welsh-speakers are only interested in Wales.

Michael Jackson: the final word

Not from me, from Charlie Brooker, who makes fine points when he isn't showing off:

But the news is not the place to "celebrate" Jackson's music. The Glastonbury stage, the pub, the club, the office stereo, the arts documentary: that's the place. The news should report his death, then piss off out of the way, leaving people to moonwalk and raise a toast in peace.

If I was God, here's what I'd do now. I'd force all the rolling networks to cover nothing but the death of Michael Jackson, 24 hours a day, for the next seven years. Glue up the studio doors and keep everyone inside, endlessly "reporting" it, until they start going mad and developing their own language – not just verbal, but visual. And I'd encourage viewers to place bets on which anchor would be the first to physically end it all live on air.

And while that was happening, I'd create some other stations that covered other stuff. Current affairs type stuff. I think I'd call them "news channels". They might catch on.

Jump into the pool of books

Obviously I have loads to do, so I've been ordering books. Not, thanks to my iron will and steely resolve, all the ones I want from the three weighty newspapers I eviscerated this weekend, but some. All this furrowed-brow treatment of the Jackson story in the formerly serious press (presumably feeling that it's their chance for redemption after ignoring Hendrix and Presley's deaths) has given me a thirst for some theory, so I've gone for some classic Habermas - The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Theory of Communicative Action (only in translation), Philip Reeve's prequel to his wonderful Mortal Engines series, Fever Crumb, Nick Turse's book about the militarisation of corporate life (or the corporatisation of military life), The Complex (nothing new: the Roman Empire became a tax machine to keep the army going, leading to its collapse), and for some light relief mixed with adult morality, Le Carré's A Most Wanted Man.

A miseryguts writes…

Happy Monday you lot! There used to be a tradition called St. Monday in Northern cities, including Stoke. A heavy weekend required a day off - a religious festival. In industries with highly specialised skills such as pottery, enough individuals absent meant that a whole crew couldn't do any work - so men took turns a few times a year. This is how I feel today, except that I'm at work and absolutely nobody else is other than the cleaners, who are always very cheery.

It's hot, sticky and horrible, yet I've already seen one student (advice: don't nick your resit from the internet and characters with speaking parts usually aren't dead in Renaissance literature). I've got to write a conference paper for Wednesday ('O. M. Edwards, Travel Writing and Definitions of Welshness' or something similar and the beer festival is still weighing heavily on my guts.

We all had a good time, without getting hammered. Except for Mr. Radford Sallow, who arrived many hours late and proceeded to catch up in spectacular fashion. Poor old man isn't used to drinking. He took the pledge in 1934…

Many of you seem horrified that I'm indifferent to Michael Jackson's oeuvre. Sorry, I just didn't listen to much pop at that formative age. My parents didn't believe in radios in every room, and they listened to mainstream classical, bits of folk, and a lot of religious music. Dad's concession to Irish culture was a U2 cassette and one by the Dubliners, and Mum played a lot more music than she listens to.

If it's any consolation, I watched Blur's performance at Glastonbury last night. All the presenters were talking about it being a seminal, wondrous, amazing set. I didn't. I thought they were quite good. Maybe I'm just getting grumpy. Wonder how the Nightingales went down? The BBC didn't see fit to broadcast any of their set.

On arrival at university I owned a cassette of Automatic for the People given to me by a schoolmate. A few days later I walked into the fabulous Recordiau Cob Records in Bangor and opened up a financial vein which flowed freely for many years to com. I bought two interesting looking records: Gorky's Zygotic Mynci's Patio and Tindersticks Kathleen/ E-Type Joe, both on 10" vinyl - not bad for a random pick. Henceforth, I'd go in on Thursday and pore over the list of next week's releases, making a list. On Monday, I'd collect several groaning plastic bags, to which the helpful gimps behind the counter would add 'some things we thought you'd like'. Years later, I realised that this meant 'our own records because nobody else will buy them [hello, Ectogram] and anything we've ordered in and realised won't sell'. Add to this the stuff I bought because I trusted the record label and all the secondhand bits, and you get the beginnings of my 30,000 collection, surprisingly little of which I now regret. Except for Cast's album: played once, put away for ever. I had to sell some once - 250 7" singles to Norman's Records simply to survive one summer. very depressingly. The collection is now like a smile with several teeth missing.

Au revoir, until Monday

I'm off home now, so you won't hear from me until Monday. I'll leave you with an amusing image posted over at Pharyngula. If you can't see what's funny, you need remedial classes.

Damn - over an hour later and I'm still at work - reading a paper on Foucault and Professionalism in PR. It's very good, despite its author's addiction to 'indicative'!

Never mind Michael bloody Jackson

Swells is dead! Steven Wells, the wonderful, angry, witty, committed music writer from the days when NME did more than print bands' press releases. He died of the seemingly inevitable cancer: his final column (for the Philadelphia Weekly) treats cancer pretty much the same way as he treated all the bands I liked - with total contempt.

How I loved buying NME on Wednesday morning to see what fresh torture he'd inflicted on the English language to express his true feelings towards Slowdive, the Field Mice or anyone else who wasn't absolutely bloody furious every single day. Charlie Brooker learned everything he knows from Swells, though he as yet hasn't managed to write an anarcho-Trotskyist novel entitled Tits Out Teenage Terror Totty.

Help! Inspiration lacking!

My third sister gets married next week. I hate wedding presents, they're all utterly unimaginative. I don't want to mark one of the greatest days in someone's life by giving them a toaster. What do you suggest? She's cool in a Belle and Sebastian way, and he's just finished a PhD in theoretical geometry mathematics or something like that, and they're in their mid-twenties.

Raise your glasses to the Map Twats

It's Stafford Beer Festival tomorrow - I'll be there from noon until they toss my beer-soaked corpse out with the trash, along with the Map Twats and the Ginger Twins (actually husband and wife). I'm particularly looking forward to a foaming pint of Comrade Bill Bartram's Egalitarian Anti-Imperialist Soviet Stout. Only a hero of the revolution can manage a pint of this 6.9% brew!

Foxy

After making a cameo appearance at the staff pissup (particularly bad free buffet at the Hogshead - insulting considering we spend a good deal of our time and salaries there), I accompanied Emma to Fleet Foxes, last year's critical hit, performing in Wolverhampton as a warm-up for Glastonbury.

Zoot Horn has already compared them to Crosby Stills Nash and Young - I can see why, but I thought of FF as much more similar to a gentler 70s folk band, America, a rather wet but commercially successful lot who were actually only half American. Fleet Foxes are part of this 70s revival going on in indie at the moment - beards compulsory, close harmony singing, mostly songs about love.

The problem with this sort of stuff is that part of the attraction is the musical skill - craft rather than excitement. It runs the risk that band and audience want to hear the album exactly as it is on vinyl, admiring the harmonies and fretwork. However, it wasn't like that last night. These hirsute, portly chaps wandered on and introduced themselves as Blur, and kept up a fairly witty stream of banter for the whole evening, taking potshots at the Killers, and generally having fun. Two thumbs up! Incidentally, they asked from the stage whether the rumours that Jackson was dead were true, but nobody paid much attention. So when people ask where I was when I heard, I'll be able to say that I was listening to some decent music.

All in all, it was very impressive, were it not for Student Grant behind me, talking about himself throughout, punctuated by the occasional whoop as if to prove that he was listening to the band, and attempting to pogo most inappropriately. I decided not to have a word. As the only person in the room not wearing a checked shirt, I already felt rather exposed.

Oddly enough, having seen Fleet Foxes, I met an actual fox on the way home, sitting in a driveway as I walked past. It was only a cub, and seemed completely unbothered by me - it just sat there watching as I came within a few feet of the little fella.

Final thought: watch out for The Nightingales on Glastonbury coverage tomorrow. They're on at 11 on the Peel Stage, as befits Peel's favourite band. Making a special appearance on accordion is Helen Apperley - what a professional debut!

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Yet another Friday Conundrum

You've spent a pleasant evening (or extended period of time) with someone you think might make you happy. Suddenly, his or her response to something you say indicates that s/he has absolutely no comprehension of your outlook, philosophy, ideology or whatever you want to call it.

Do you

a) carry on regardless - who cares, the pheromones are raging;

b) carry on, accepting the hit however many times it happens because there's nobody else around;

c) run away - you can only repress the rage for so long?

d) something else

No laughing matter (unless the jokes improve)

I'm utterly indifferent to the passing of Michael Jackson, beyond the human sympathy for an individual dying young. My initial thought was that he seemed perfectly healthy on Radio 4 the other day, discussing the Iraq war inquiry. Turns out that it's another Michael Jackson who died.

However, because I'm interested in the way and the speed at which people generate humour, you're invited to leave your jokes here. I have no comment to make about quality.

I was sent the first at 8 a.m. BST, from Zoot Horn:

Jackson's last words: 'Treat me in the children's ward'.

The second and third came an hour or so later:

Emma:

What do Alex Ferguson and Michael Jackson have in common? Neither will be playing Gig(g)s this August.

And finally from my sister:

Police have drawn up some suspects. They're not sure who to blame it on. Will it be the sunshine?, the moonlight?, the good times? or their number one suspect, ....the boogie

Where have all the nerds gone?

Turns out I'm late to the party. I've been blogging for about 9 months - just when everybody else is giving up, or at least very rarely posting, according to this Guardian article and the New York Times, which noted that only 7.5m of the 133m Technorati tracked were updated within 120 days. Apparently everybody's Tweeting or Facebooking.

Which is odd: both those outlets are more about social contact than content - I'd have thought there'd be room for both, unless Twitter/Facebook fans have nothing to say and the good grace not to say it at length on a blog. Don't worry though - I'm going nowhere. Either I drone on here or send my colleagues mad…

I'm off to Fleet Foxes tonight - will be intriguing to see what they're like live, as I think they're good but too tame on record.

Transient random noise bursts and announcements

A quick bit of sport, even though lurker Jo doesn't like it: the US are in the Confederations Cup final after beating Spain 2-0: their biggest result since 1916.

Another book in the post today: Fiona MacCarthy's biography of Eric Gill, painter, sculptor, typographer and child abuser. Should we take down art (especially the religious art) of known paedophiles? Or does art transcend the weaknesses of its composer? I'm quite a fan of Gill Sans and its close relative, Edward Johnston's Johnston Underground (designed for the London Underground).

Hiking The Appalachian Trail

People have affairs, even those who proclaim their moral superiority, such as Governor Sanford of South Carolina. So really, we should leave him alone to rebuild his life, apologise to the injured parties and so on.

And I would, were it not for his brilliant grasp of euphemism. Having flitted off to Argentina for five days to be with his mistress, he informed his staff, and therefore the public, that he was 'Hiking the Appalachian Trail'. I love it. It may have to replace Private Eye's 'Ugandan Discussions', which derives from a sexual encounter in the 60s between a journalist and a politician at a party, when they explained their absence by claiming to have been discussing the Ugandan situation.

More on dead tree media

Talking of things that make you re-evaluate your world, I guess the same criterion can be applied to books: bad ones reinforce your existing positions or make no difference at all, good ones make you re-orient yourself, or at least re-examine your beliefs, tastes and attitudes.

I'm currently reading Angus Wilson's Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, and re-reading some Gwyneth Jones. Wilson's book definitely fits into the 'bad' category, for all its status as great twentieth-century literature. It's not a bad read at all - amusing characterisation and all that, but it's yet another smug set of upper-middle-class characters adjusting themselves to the post-war Britain: neither they, nor Wilson, have much to say. Jones, on the other hand, not only tackles the big subjects: political failure, the dark stirrings of the collective unconscious, feminism, science, our social dispositions, but she does so in compelling, confusing, serious but also exciting and often amusing ways. Kairos is perhaps her weirdest attempt to upset our conceptions of what society means (particularly in relation to sex and gender), while the Bold As Love series uses the Arthur/Guinevere/Lancelot triangle as the basis to examine the purpose and point of nations and states, amongst other things.

Jones is also gradually posting her earlier books, including Bold As Love, as free (updated) texts on her website - presumably as a response to the gradual death of the book marketing model and as the equivalent of the 'director's cut'.

Everything you know is wrong. Discuss.

Maurice Charlesworth was my philosophy lecturer at Bangor University. He was, to me at least, something of a legend. He came to work dressed in a brown suit with brown shirt, tie, socks, shoes and briefcase. He was perhaps the world's only Tasmanian nationalist, had a dry and cruel sense of humour which he directed particularly towards the Christian section of the student body, and told us that he took a few minutes during his wedding reception to prove the non-existence of God to his new mother-in-law. He also dealt with people signing in as Donald Duck by undertaking graphological analysis of the entire class. His favourite illustration of the degenerate nature of our times was to remind us that whereas he used to employ a psychologist in his philosophy department, he was now the philosopher in the psychology department.

All this is tangential, however. The abiding memory I have of Maurice is his mantra that a class has failed if the participants think they understand what's just happened, and that the world is just as they thought. He always managed to leave me exhilarated, confused and inspired - the mark of a great teacher, I think. Every session left us drunk with intellectual curiosity and wonder.

Maurice's philosophy colleague, Ed Ingram, was equally bizarre and brilliant, though totally contrasting. Ed wore shorts and vomit-inducing Hawaiian shirts. He clearly had an absolutely brilliant time in the 60s or 70s, and had barely recovered. He was a former computer programmer who handled all the science-related philosophy with amazing precision and joy. We'd turn up, have our heads completely messed up by quantum physics and the like, then go for a soothing drink. We'd then meet Ed in the street and he'd ask us things like where he lived, or what day it was. Between them and Tony Brown, my learned, kind and wise English tutor, these people made teaching a potential avenue for me - shame the only quality I share with them is a gift for sarcasm…

I Foresee Calamity Befalling You At The Next Election

Never mind moat cleaning, duck islands, gold monogrammed well covers and servants' wings (that's wings on the house, not some hideous surgery to create flying servants a la Montgomery Burns) Tory MP David Tredinnick spent £510 of our money on astrology DVDs - and he wants to run the country. The utter, utter, wanker. I predict an election defeat. Actually, I don't, I just want him to lose badly.

All aboard the effete train

Cynical Ben and I are on the verge of starting our sort-of culture/book/stuff online club: The Culture, Cheese and Pineapple! Thanks to Ben for sorting it out. We'll get going before long, so sign up for excitement, adventure and really wild things, as Arthur Dent is promised, much to his horror.

Top of the Popes

It's the Vole's birthday in July: my dear sister, mindful of my devout Catholicism (ahem), asks whether I'd like to choose from this catalogue. Most of these would earn you a shallow grave in most parts of Northern Ireland (pronounced locally as Norn Iron), but this one would get you there much quicker, particularly in Celtic colours.

Court Short

What an appalling waste of a day. Rather than swimming, writing and blogging, I dragged myself out by 8 a.m. to get to Brierley Hill, where Dudley County Court is based. It's a converted office block in the midst of a depressing business estate (mostly To Let) - but at least the legal toffs have to travel through the concrete jungle to get there.

Once inside, the victim, her mother, their (Lithuanian) translator and I were left in an airless, featureless room for 6 hours. We got over the language barrier and chatted a bit: our first meeting was rather fraught and social niceties weren't observed. I've been to Lithuania so we talked about Vilnius, and the translator studied in the Philology department at Vilnius University, where I gave a paper, so we discovered mutual acquaintances, but after a while, boredom, the upcoming confrontation, and the artificiality of the situation intruded on our sunny dispositions.

Turns our there was nothing to anticipate. First the defendant's lawyer and his interpreter (don't know which language) went to the cells to point out that he was guilty as sin and should give up now in exchange for a lighter sentence. Then there were apparently several hours of legal argument. Then we were informed that the defendant had sacked his lawyer and the new one would need a few months to acquaint himself with the case.

So my day was wasted, the victim was left without resolution and still clearly terrified of this bloke, a professional translator had been hired for the day, plus a night in a hotel, plus the very expensive legal teams (all paid for by the state) - what a farce. And it's all going to happen again at some point in the future. At least I got to read the paper in peace, get a long way through Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and avoid a deathly staff discussion day, though the architecture and decor were virtually indistinguishable from the university. There's a joke about incarceration and Kafka in there somewhere, but I'll leave it to you.

Still, I saw a little bit more of the West Midlands and can tick it off the list of places to visit. Dudley was closed and Brierley Hill had clearly recently been used for a post-apocalypse film (although Survivors made the postwar city look livelier and cleaner). There's something rather sweet about listening to Bach's Cello Suites while gazing out on post-industrial decay, the grey relieved only by the occasional splash of vomit on the pavement.

How's your day been?

The wheels on the bus…

It's turned out to be an annoyingly tedious day - my workload allocation is becoming nightmarishly complicated and changes by the hour. And now I find that the court appearance I have tomorrow has been changed from Wolverhampton (walking distance from home) to Brierley Hill - over an hour by two buses. What joy. So you won't be hearing from me tomorrow. Unless it's in the newspapers.

Missed me? Didya didya didya?

Hurrah. Two meetings down. The first one (research) was useful. The second one was UCU (Universities and Colleges Union) Negotiating Committee in which we don superhero capes to defend our members against the depredations and stupidities of management. At least, the others do, and I listen in shock.

This time, I've emerged with another job - deputy secretary. Damn. What's being going on in the world during my absence? All I can concentrate on at the moment is my incredible back pain.

Something else to annoy Ewarwoowar

Quick break between meetings. Further to my comments on police behaviour, here's a much better writer looking at the big picture: George Monbiot. It's turning into quite a big story.

(Sorry, Ewar, I'm only teasing you!)

Morning all!

You won't be hearing from me much today - meetings, across two campuses - will take up my time. Should be fun though: one's on research strategies and the other one is the union Negotiating Committee. Beer, sandwiches and subversion. Pretty much my ideal lifestyle.

Talking of which, Neal and I had a perfect summer evening last night. We made an effete salad (mint, olives, mozzarella, chorizo, rocket, pine nuts etc.), bought fine local beers (Staffordshire Brewing Company and Wood's of Shropshire) and sat in the evening sun doing pretty much nothing. Then this morning, we ate the finest croissants outside Paris (from Snape's of Woore) before setting off to work. I'm still in immense pain from fencing though. It's a young man's game, I tell you.

Which oddly enough, seems to be the case for Speaker of the Commons. Well, young by their standards. Bercow's made a surprising move from the extreme right to liberal centre, to the displeasure of his own party, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a backlash from the Tories and their friends in medialand. For all the hype though, I distrust these people who go into politics supposedly to represent their electorate, then become dazzled by the machinery or the pomp of the institution. There's no way that politics can return to the ethic of service if its practitioners are fixated on ceremony, precedent, wigs and heritage - it becomes a game for the ruling elite rather than a tool to effect social change.

Labour are saying that Bercow's improved through marrying a Labour supporter. I cannot imagine forming a relationship with somebody with an opposing ideology. What's wrong with her? How can one love a Tory, let alone a Tory MP? There can't be any respect between two people, of whom one is right and the other so mentally and emotionally misguided that they support greed, selfishness and spite? OK, he's got better taste than she has, but how can this fundamental divide be bridged? He must be amazing in bed…

Any sign of white smoke?

Every other blogger in the world is endorsing a candidate for speaker, so I thought I should too. Surprisingly, it finds me in agreement not only with the Daily Wail, but with Britain's most evil, ill-informed, stupid, reactionary journalist, Melanie Phillips. (Don't follow that link - it leads you into a weird world in which everybody you know is a degenerate, evil, terrorist-loving, immoral, hate-filled scumbag, in her eyes. She doesn't know anything about science either, which doesn't stop her writing about it at length to the detriment of public health and understanding).

Yes, we both support Ann Widdecombe, Phillips' favourite Tory MP and Mail colleague. Not, however, for the same reasons. Phillips wants a vicious, evil troll in the Speaker's chair because she agrees with her views (AW doesn't accept climate change, instituted the manacling of prisoners who were giving birth, but does oppose hunting). I want her to become Speaker because they aren't allowed to utter a batsqueak about their own views and preferences. They put on a wig and do a lot of ceremonial nonsense. So by electing Widdecombe Speaker (ironically), MPs could achieve blissful silence from that ranting, intolerant corner. The world would be a better place.

Alternatively, there are two Sir Alan's standing (Lord and Haslehurst).

Uneasy Lies The Wig

Today we learn the answer to the question that's been on all our lips: which superannuated pompous idiot wants to stop representing their constituents and instead slip on wigs, gaiters, stockings etc. and spend their declining years weakly insisting on 'order' amongst 'Right Honourable Gentlemen'?

The live (though barely) blog will help sustain enthusiasm for an election with all the transparency and user-friendliness as those we've recently seen in North Korea, Iran and Zimbabwe. Result around 10 p.m.!

The Mailbox Always Beeps Twice

I mailed some of you personally this morning (that's how many readers I have): you won't have received it because outgoing e-mail is down and likely to be so for several hours. Brilliant.

I've just returned from swimming - 30% slower today thanks to the pain and stiffness incurred during yesterday's fencing marathon, but the swim helped. As did the toasted bacon and egg sandwich at Jay's afterwards.

The Map Twats apparently had a good time in North Wales - drinking whiskey all night round a camp fire waiting for the solstice. Apart from James, an early lightweight casualty.

Testing… Testing… 1, 1 2, 1, 1 2

Let's see if this works - then I can torture you all with my 'taste' in music. A gentle one to start with: Deer Friend and Zoot doing 'Waltzing's For Dreamers'

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I used podbean.com - slightly fiddly but got it working in the end.

Wisdom from the master

I went shopping recently, and reported to you that it was a dispiriting experience. I was right, and my instincts have been justified by an impeccable source. Who said this?

I look forward to an eco-friendly future where everyone wears drab and similar clothes until they wear out, just like I do. Obviously I don't do it out of environmental conscience, but laziness and the fear that, if I try to demonstrate taste, I'll be exposed as a twat.

But however puny my motives, I am basically right not to buy expensive yet flimsy new togs all the time.

That's right. My alter ego in his latest column, amongst many other pearls of wisdom.

This old dog DID learn a new trick

I'm back, obviously, and in severe pain. Last night I had a fine meal and a few drinks with Shrewsbury's counterculture. This morning, I thought I'd help set up the Shropshire Closed competition, come a respectable 5th in the foil and go home.

It didn't quite work out like that. Arriving at the venue, I was bullied by the young, thin kids into signing up for the epee and sabre too, presumably because they wanted an old man to push around and make them look better in the Master of Arms competition (awarded to the most consistent performance across all three disciplines).

Well, today the worm turned. Despite never, ever entering a sabre competition before, I won. Accidentally, badly, pragmatically, but I still won, despite knackering my back and lungs fighting the first 6 without stopping. The final was against my friend Jim, tall, rangy and good-natured. Next up, without a break, came the epee. This should be a bit better than sabre - I did an epee competition last year and won (another fluke), but it was tough this time: equal third, and Jim won.

Finally came the foil. This is really my weapon, but I'm the Stoke City of fencing. I fight ugly, cautiously, annoyingly: messing up the better fencer's game is the only way I can win. I fluke my way through the seeding poule without losing any, then hit a couple of difficult fights on the way to the final - powerful young men who injured me pretty badly. I think my hunch has been cut in two.

By the time the final came round, against Jim again, I was happy to be standing. I won, but every point was greeted by my coaches with a scowl, a grimace, a headshake, hands over the eyes - I started to get the idea that my style wasn't winning friends or admirers. It didn't help that Jim's twice my height and very tricky: I only have one move that works on him, so I used it, over and over and over, to his huge frustration. He's a much better fencer than me, but he's always been vulnerable to a triple feint delivered in a fleche (basically, flying towards him without leaving the point out, so he can't work out where the hit's going to land and has to wave his blade everywhere, until I smack him in the middle of the chest). Still - his dad's beaten me in the final every year for as long as I can remember, and Jim won the Master at Arms because he came second in sabre, first in epee and second in foil.

So the moral of the story is: ugly points are still valid points. I know you footy fans admire silky skills, flowing moves and nifty tricks. Fine. But we can't all aspire to such great heights. It was only a small competition, but the occasional success does marvels for one's self-esteem. Obviously, I'll have to slink into the club on Wednesday and endure the scorn of my coaches, but it's a small price to pay. The immediate legacy is more bruises, cuts and strains than I've ever received in my fencing career, inability to bend over and bruised feet. I may hire an invalid scooter tomorrow. Never again…

Ello Ello Ello, what's goin' on 'ere then?

Don't ask policemen for the time. Certainly don't politely ask them why they aren't wearing their identification numbers, as legally required. That gets you a beating, then four days in a cell, without charge. Even better, the police themselves film it, presumably to show down at the masonic lodge or the policeman's ball.

No wonder that some good folks have founded Fit Watch (Forward Intelligence Team) to keep an eye on these loveable bobbies.