My word verification hell

I have wrestled long and hard with my conscience before posting this. I feel like an old guy in a grubby rain coat who has spent the last 50 years keeping a dirty secret to himself: "Psst I get off on surgical casts."

Thankfully this is not my confession but it's almost as embarrassing. OK here goes. I regularly fail word verification.

I'm not sure if I'm alone in this but the letters are often so funny and jumbled they are hard to read. Somebody is clearly having a laugh. What's most alarming is there's a spiel that says you have to go through the ordeal of word verification to prove you are human, and by implication, not a robot.

(Pause to remove a small aerial from the back of head).

This is unnerving because robots are generally not sympathetic sorts of fellows. Ash in Ridley Scott's 1979 movie Alien was a robot and he lacked the quality of empathy that humans can occasionally display. Ash was also played by Ian Holm who was later to be cast in the role of another sinister character with hairy feet to boot (or rather no boot),  - Bilbo Baggins.

Ash is eventually deactivated. He's also decapitated. But his decapitated head is reactivated to provide the crew the truth about the bloodless one. Ash tells the crew the company installed him on board the spaceship to ensure the creature was brought to them, and the crew's lives were expendable, all of which sounds about par for the course for your average US company, even if it's not spelled out in the manual on the day you meet the nice man from HR.

After informing the crew all they know about the creature, that has already wrecked John Hurt's lunch, Ash tells the crew, "You have my sympathies," regarding their chances of survival.

The crew don't appear to believe Ash's head is any more sincere than the rest of him was. Ripley pulls the plug on Ash and Parker burns his head.

And nobody lives happily ever after. The excursion into Alien took me some way away from word verification, but you get the drift.

Normally I don't have much to do with word verification. I'll avoid your blog like a mild bout of the black death if you have word verification on the comments. It's not personal.

But in the wonderful world of marketing I find myself coming across word verification on numerous occasions. None of them are pleasant as the wall would be able to testify if walls could testify.

I really can't see the point of this torture. The official line from Blogger on word verification is: "What this does is to prevent automated systems from adding comments to your blog, since it takes a human being to read the word and pass this step.

"If you've ever received a comment that looked like an advertisement or a random link to an unrelated site, then you've encountered comment spam. A lot of this is done automatically by software which can't pass the word verification, so enabling this option is a good way to prevent many such unwanted comments."

Grudgingly I concede there's a point to it but I'll take the unwanted comments. They must be lonely if nobody else does.

I'm also scratching my head about why the letters need to be so bizarre looking and illegible. Surely there's a better way. I'm sure it was easier to make out the writings on the side of a pyramid.

A few days ago I discovered there is something of an alternative in that a voice can instead tell you what the characters are.

The trouble is the voice is tinny and sinister and guaranteed to completely put you off your stride. It sounds a bit like Ash telling me: "You have my sympathies."

Tracks and Lines

CHAPTER 3 - LINES

I compare my thirties to a railway station. One with yawning great exists and entrances on both ends. I'm old enough to have lines coming in but lines are also going out, leading to who knows where. It's an apt comparison for me because trains have never been far from my life.




The home where I grew up was an old railway worker's cottage, and although it had modern windows and a conservatory sometimes I would feel the soul of the roughly hewn home, seeping through the trappings of modernity.

At night the express trains would come rattling past and the walls would shudder and it felt as if the terraced house wanted to follow the train down the line. I imagined I'd wake up the next morning to find the cottage had been shunted away down the valley but the view was the same, the trees forming an austere line and the high ridge of the dark moors beyond.



I often wondered if the emptiness of it all was the reason why I sought the city. Walkers came to the high moors in their yellow raincoats in the summer to get away from the Smoke as London was known back then but the hard empty moonscape left me feeling exposed and wanting to surround myself in bustle and disorder.

Perhaps I wanted to get away before the iron in those hills entered my soul. My father was a Yorkshireman and I often thought the thinner oxygen of those altitudes had reduced his blood. I'm not sure why he had a family because his kids always seemed an embarrassment or an inconvenience and you'd catch him looking at you obliquely some days as if he has spied a strange shaped table that didn't belong in the house.



"Well he's bringing his fancy big city ways to Ilkington. Eel be out by Christmas. You mark my words," he'd say of a succession of new vicars that the hapless Church of England sent north to convert the heathens.

And sure enough my father and his cronies from the Old Boot would ensure the "soft arsed southerner" had packed his bags shortly after Harvest festival, talking glibly about the delights of Dorset which was a code for a place without big raw boned northern bullies, where little old ladies shook your hand outside the church on a warm spring morning.



When my father spoke of the big city he was speaking of Manchester or Leeds. Of London he seemed to have no perception and the idea of people moving to the capital was akin to forging an existence on one of the less hospitable satellites of Saturn.



My mother existed. I never really knew if she had a personality before she met my father but she certainly didn't have one afterwards. She was there to serve his every whim but at least she could bake fine cakes.



So the railways held a special significance for me. As a child I would sit in the chilly trees and watch the trains below me heading in a blue and yellow blur to Huddersfield and Nottingham and eventually south to London.

My original perception of the capital came from a metal biscuit tin and an engraving of the Great Fire of London. There was a huge cathedral, gaunt and skeletal being consumed by the flames, and the distinctive pinnacles of the Tower, so bijou and innocuous looking for a citadel steeped so much blood. And the people teemed over London Bridge and the houses leaned into each other. It was busy, deadly, exhilarating.



While other kids sniffed solvents, hung out at only disco in town and chased after the only girl in town, Maureen Davies with her curiously wrinkled stockings, I methodically plotted my escape. I hung out in my chilly room for hours at a time reading Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, putting myself in the nicely polished shoes of the old rascal as he walked the festering streets of London.



"I went all the first part of the time freely about the streets, though not so freely as to run myself into apparent danger, except when they dug the great pit in the churchyard of our parish of Aldgate. A terrible pit it was and I could not resist my curiosity to go and see it."



Later on I read about Jack the Ripper and the horror of Whitechapel. More densely packed streets and families living eight to a tiny room with a clinical killer in their midst.

While these grisly tales would have put many a stout northern soul off visiting the capital, they spurred me on with the curiosity of a war correspondent intent on visiting the in vogue battle spot of the day which was Beirut when I was a teenager.

I wanted a danger that was more palpable than Mrs. Bowern's poodle being decapitated by an Austin Maxi. I wanted life, however risky and unpredictable it might be.



The railways for me were the way out. When the weekends arrived I would spend money I earned from humping around sacks of flour on a train ticket. Within an hour I'd be in Leeds with its blackened urban spires and tower blocks. I'd hang around for most of the day doing urban things, delighting in the anonymity afforded to me by the city.



I was drawn to the stations of these great cities, arched like vast hothouses, the domain of errant pigeons, their wings sooted up from layers of old grime deposited decades ago by the last of the steam trains.



When I was 15, I made it to Liverpool Lime Street, the venerable station opened in 1836 that's overlooked by the chateau-like former North Western Hotel designed by Alfred Waterhouse. It was converted into student accommodation by the time I managed to see it, and few of the hung over specimens saw wandering around seemed to have any interest in the architecture of their temporary home.

I walked the streets around the station but became more lost every time I turned down another blind alley and the streets became more threatening. Under the rotting concrete edifice of the Catholic cathedral dubbed "Paddy's Wigwam" children with pock marked faces followed me down the street, intent on helping me part with my train fare home.

Their mothers looked on sullenly from door slabs under washing lines of yellow clothes where weeds grew in the poorly strained air. There would be no mercy or respite from my tormentors until I got up the hill where the Anglican cathedral soared to the foggy skies red and austere, its head high above the urban wasteland that was the closest Britain could get to Beirut, although Liverpool’s social mix and tensions made it more akin to Belfast, just a short ferry ride away across the muddy waters of the Irish Sea.



Liverpool shocked me but it failed to divert me from my urban dreams. So it was no surprise when I found myself on another train a year later, clutching a note for an interview and a one way ticket, as the King's Cross station loomed out of the mess of wires and graffiti.

King's Cross with its low rent homes, its con men, spivs and prostitutes, was every bit more dangerous than Liverpool. King’s Cross as a welcome to London resembled an upright finger.



It was just an interview but I wasn't going home. Fortunately the job was so dire, I was offered it. I could imagine my father from afar, wearing his puzzled and put out face on for a few moments before he picked up his cap from the nail in the kitchen and made his way down the Old Boot to discuss his son's disappearance with his friends before diving into the real meat of the cricket scores.



The thoughts of the past flitted in and out like the sun that flooded in and was shut out by the tunnels down the line. Railway dreams like the lines moved in diverse directions, uncertain and suburban, jolting and stopping but always taking me somewhere. I wondered as the identikit homes of Southgate came into view, how London could ever have seemed so exciting from afar. I wondered about familiarity and the way it reduces wonder to an everyday commodity.



I remembered tonight's game of squash was with Paul Moriaty and my interest was piqued briefly because he seemed so different from the usual crowd at the squash club, the Clives and the Derricks with their body shops and insurance brokers and their faux matiness, their gray slip on shoes and their fondness for Tottenham Hotpsur.

Not for the first time I wondered what drew Moriaty to the obscure squash club in the park.


Four miles away where the Hackney skyline did its best to obscure the late afternoon sunshine Laura left the fourth floor apartment and walked into the Red Dog cafe.

The crowd looked up and greeted her with the understated approval reserved for hip chicks. She knew there were guys there who wanted to remark on her boots but didn't have the courage, given her reputation for a swift put down.

She knew the rip in her red tights was small enough to be cutting edge but not too obtrusive. Her eyes were darkened with mascara and her lipstick as vibrant as her tights. Just one thing was gnawing away at her air of composure and quiet attitude and it was a large one and the same one as always.


When Robbie had first cameto visit he had been a burning man, burning up and consumed with her mother but it hadn't lasted and she had seen it again and again. It seem far too familiar - the raised hopes, the dashed dreams; the rise and fall, the departure of passion from the platform of necessity and the scars on her mother's arms.

God knows she had tried to inject realism. The burning men always became singed carcasses. There was soon no fuel left to burn. Couldn't she find a simmering man who boiled away below the surface and never quite went out? Couldn't she find a man called Colin whose mother knit all of his Cardigans for him?


She had winced when Robbie went through the spiel amid that curious foot tapping motion of his. Perhaps Robbie could have done it without mentioning his wife. Told her he was gay; anything but what he ended up saying. Laura had just sat there in the recliner puckering up her "nice one" face, wearing her attitude, even while she felt a sickening sliding sensation.


But now Laura started to wonder if she should be at the Red Dog at all. The last of the afternoon sun projected the railings through the grubby windows of the Red Dog; lines on the tables, power lines across the litter strewn street, a line across her arm - sharp like the incision of a knife. Laura wondered if she should call her mother but she ordered a herbal tea instead.

Of Wills and Canaries

If the sobering truth is to be told I have written the first chapter of a novel on a number of occasions. I tend to find it's the rest that's the problem. How do I flesh out my characters? How do I fill out the middle. I have an good idea about A and Z; it's just the letters in between that pose a problem.

I really am more determined this time. But already I can see a problem with letters D-M which make up rather a large chunk of the alphabet.

At least I feel in an iconoclastic mood. Tomorrow is March 1 (or at least it was when I started this post) and we'll wake up to find employees of Google rifling through our undergarments. Make the most of the next few hours.

LIKE A CANARY IN A COAL MINE

I did not see Paul Moriaty again for two months and when I did it was in unexpected and fleeting circumstances.

One Tuesday I walked into my office and was told I was going to Hackney. My supervisor seemed to be suppressing a giggle at the news which was uncharacteristic for her. I work at a law firm. People don't giggle generally or show any outward signs of humor.

I often wondered how I ended up as a paralegal. I blame the day when, clueless about my future I went to a Job Center. The twitchy, acne ridden guy behind the desk who probably wasn't much older than me, went through the usual range of unimaginative options involving being some kind of clerk or other. I sat in silence because my mother had instructed me to visit the Job Center and I had no idea why I was there. After a couple of minutes the silence became embarrassing and the acne ridden one started clearing his throat. I felt myself becoming nervous that he would start squeezing the pustules on his nose and wanted to get out and breathe some non stale, government subsidized, Job Center air.

"Well," he said finally.

"Well," I replied and overheard a sharply dressed young woman in the next booth talking about being a paralegal.

"Paralegal," I ventured.

"Yes. Good choice," he replied and pushed some forms in my direction. I won't say that settled my career path but as I meandered aimlessly through education it was always in the back of my mind. I filled them in and the rest, as they say, is history.

But that wasn't the end of my career angst. Later in life I started to think more about history. I would ask myself were Alexander the Great alive today would be be a paralegal? What about Julius Caesar? I doubted it very much, although I still have a strange recurring vision of Alexander stuck in a four mile line of traffic on the M-25, trying to barge other vehicles out of his way as if they were chariots, his angry thumb jammed on the mobile phone button to the Cones Hotline.

My boss was called Mrs. Jones. If she had a first name I couldn't imagine anyone ever addressing her by it. She was always rather controlled, sucked in and a bit withered. She was nothing like Mrs. Jones in Rising Damp who perversely I had a soft spot for, her voice aside. The day I went to Hackney Mrs. Jones was bordering on the jovial.

"I need you to take some details from a Mrs. Collins," she informed me. "She's rather old and a little eccentric, but you'll get the measure of her. Its...well... it's probate. Read the file on your desk first."

The thought of Hackney failed to galvanize me. I had been thinking of Hawaii a lot of late and Hackney seemed like a poor, palm tree bereft substitute, with the similarities running out somewhere after the H. Still I boarded a small commuter train and found myself shuttling through stations with names like Hackney Downs and Hackney Wick looking over a world of huddled terraces and gaunt concrete monstrosities that rose over greens of a most sickly hue. Hackney made no sense to me. There are places where you can live surrounded by crime, squalor and bad schools that are far cheaper to live in, without the feeling that the city has swallowed you up and discarded you.

Clapton meant little to me. My only knowledge of the place was from people who said it was borderline trendy. They were almost always confusing it with Clapham.

I took a cab and walked down a terraced house off Pembury Road. While I had always been dismissive of Hackney I was finding something stimulating in the urban grittiness on the street scene; the faint smell of cat piss, the shuffling hobo and the kind of pubs that looked like you could drink there all day until you slumped off your bar stool onto the floor and a jolly landlord would prop you up half an hour later and exhort you to buy a round for the whole bar. After two years of working at a law firm, there was something mildly attractive about disorder.

Mrs. Collins' home generally fell easily into the theme and marched behind. The three story terraced house was grand and rambling from across the street but when you came closer you saw the fissures in the stucco, the paint jumping ship off the railings, the bike rusting away at a subterranean level and Mrs Collins herself who was doing a good impression of being 110 even though she was probably not a day older than 80.

"I'm sorry about your loss, Mrs. Collins," I said, lowering my voice as per the firm training manual.

"It's quite a loss sir."

"You were close, I know. Let me see ... you were together 62 years."

Mrs Collins' already scrunched up face contracted further. "Nart that bastard."

"Oh. I see. Well I have some documents..." At this juncture I realized I had been so busy admiring the grubby inner city scape of Hackney I had forgotten to read any of the documents. I had no idea what this probate case was about and resolve to visit the toilet as soon as was polite, to acquaint myself with the paperwork.

"I have tea." It was a threat rather than an invitation.

"That sounds fine Mrs. Collins."

She headed to the kitchen and  heard a chorus of twittering as she brushed on a cage near the kitchen.

"What bird is that Mrs. Collins?"

She shot me a malevolent glance which I thought to be strange at the time given the innocuous nature of the question, before vanishing into a kitchen of stale yellow wallpaper that looked like it had been clinging to the walls since the war. There was an unclean and dull clattering noise that made me glad I was not witnessing the tea making process.

Then over a scalding cup of tea in a cracked mug I started going over the files. "All that time and you never married. Did you ever consider it?"

"Are you joking me?"

The old bird was a lot tougher than the on in the cage that was clearly a canary.

"I don't want to pry but," I said, the but hanging in the air like a big hook and an invitation to pry. "If you disliked him so much why were you together all that time?"

For a few seconds a lost expression passed over Mrs. Collins' face, as if I had asked her a question that never occurred to her before she snapped back. "He was there."

I felt like pointing out dog mess and chip wrappers on the street were there, but it's not normal practice to take them inside and cohabit with them for more than 60 years.

Then out of nowhere Mrs.Collins started to talk about a vicious argument in the most colorful of terms. The "f.. bastard' wanted to plant crocuses; she said they were a disappointment and insisted on daffodils. They had hardly spoken since. Then there was the stoke and he lost the power of speech. But not the power of glare.

The papers before me were interesting. The house was dilapidated but it was worth a lot of money and there was a parcel of land in Wimbledon of all places. I assumed the couple's differences had been sorted out in the will if not life until a line in the document jumped out at me. Her watery eyes met my gaze at the same time as the information entered my consciousness like a the sting of a north easter on a February day.

"So the estate was left Mrs. Collins to the um. Canary."

There wasn't so much to say once I had reached this pertinent line in the document that I should have read a few hours later.

"Well. Mrs Collins. Canary's don't live very long. I don't suppose he has a day job in a coal mine?"

By this time any wetness in her eyes had glazed over and given way to an unsettling flintiness. The feeling came over me that the life span of the canary would not be a long one.

Back on the mean little platform at Hackney Wick I reflected on my surreal morning and longed for the train to come to get me out of the borough and back to reality. As it appeared in the distance I noticed a scene nearby. The man was thick set but not excessively so. His hair was glossy black and his hands were moving jerkily through it. He was squared up to a dishevelled looking woman dirty blond, slightly wild and unkempt and a striking looking teenage girl stood between the two. I heard their voices rise and fall above the rush of the incoming train. The woman almost wailed, the man sounded lost in a deeper baritone and the girl gave off the air of referee in a wrestling match.

My train arrived but I strained my neck to watch this micro conflict on an unimportant inner city platform. The man, as if sensing my attention, turned and I had my second shock in the space of an hour. His features were those of my squash partner.

Starting the great unfinshed novel with a game of squash

Giving up my job after more than 20 years on newspapers, with just the occasional interruption, felt surreal. It still does.

But I had to do something to counter the increasing feeling that the world was passing me by. I had to counter the growing feeling of being a stranger in my own life. My consignment back to the night shift may have been the last straw, but I have watched enough straws to fill a barn drifting past me.

So, in many ways, I felt blessed to be back making those late night calls to dispatchers who would never tell me anything or to be back standing on a dark and beaten up street corner looking at the yellow ribbon of a shooting scene. It was what I did when I first started. It brought it home to me how irrelevant I had become and how utterly dispensable I was in the grand scheme of things.

There were subtle other signs such as the fact I could scroll through my twitter feed and read about the incident I was rushing back to get into tomorrow's paper, on a TV station website or some fly-by-night blog.

In the past I had viewed the idea of selling out to marketing or public relations as if it was some kind of betrayal but increasingly I found myself twisting in my own irrelevancy. For a while I deluded myself into thinking I could be Woodward and Bernstein rolled into one glorious package but it soon became clear a newspaper is as much as privately owned operation as a firm of accountants and there were always a myriad of political pressures and considerations going on behind the scenes.

Increasingly the idea of working for myself became attractive and when I secured a part-time legal marketing job it was the impetus to take the plunge. In my mind's eye I saw myself chasing the big story on my off days and finally seeing the bigger picture instead of being dragged down by the daily grind. But in reality I'll probably end up taking on too much and half killing myself for half a dozen masters or mistresses.

One unforeseen consequence of giving up the day job was an invitation to join a writer's group.

I worried then that I had overstated what I had achieved on my great unfinished novel when a group email was send out about my half finished book. In fact I wrote two chapters and appear to have lost them both in the murky netherworld of my computer. Still the writer's group is unbending and serious. Members send each other their latest chapters before meetings. In the down time this weekend between setting up the blog site for David L Macaulay Media and Marketing and Veritas Legal Media - sorry Blogger, I have so divorced you for WordPress, with the exception of Brits - I have fretted about starting the great unfinished.

So here's the deal. The great unfinished starts with extracts on Brits and goes from here. Enjoy - or tell me it's a load of bollocks. Whatever.

TITLE - TO BE DETERMINED

I can remember almost to the minute the first time I met Paul Moriaty. And that's unusual for me. Some days I won't just forget what I had for breakfast; I'll forget if I ever had breakfast at all.

I'm not sure why Moriaty was different but from the beginning there was an air that set him apart. It wasn't something he had, more like something that was missing and the aura about him that he had it once.

The time was just before 7 p.m. on June 3, 1995 and the place was Squash Court #3 at the Southgate Sports and Social Club.  I don't profess to remember all of the details without paper props. The squash club had a list of times and places for the scheduled rendezvous otherwise known as squash games and Mildred, the secretary with the iron bound hair clips and severe blue rinse, was a stickler for players keeping their appointments.

I'm not sure how I first became drawn down the arcane halls of the sports club that smelled vaguely of rubber and boiled cabbage, although I had never seen a cabbage anywhere in their vicinity. But London is a city of more than seven million strangers who find themselves in odd suburbs of turn of the century homes and quiet trees, because they want to avoid ghettos like Edmonton. Then they find themselves staring out over chimney pots after dark, vaguely thinking about what happened to their dreams of streets paved with gold. So they eventually make a half hearted attempt to take action. They join squash clubs generally. Or do drugs.

Not earning enough to do drugs I found myself joining the squash club. I had always showed promise with the small racquet at school and had rather liked the thwack of the compact little rubber ball on the walls of the court and the mark it made if you hit it really hard. Mr. Rivas had told me I had good technique and had suggested coaching me after school. In the light of the later pedophilia charges brought, which I hasten to point out had nothing to do with me, I have since wondered whether his observation had anything to do with my progress as a player. But to this day I like to cling onto the notion it was a reflection of my ability as a player.

So one autumn night I found myself ducking in and out of the sharp gusts of winds that blasted leaves at me between the sycamores to the squat little building at the bottom of the park and signing up for the squash league. I wasn't the best player but I wasn't the worst. I had a competitive streak but also a natural modesty about winning. My will to win was cancelled out by my lack of a killer instinct.

While I came to know a lot of the players, Moriaty was just a name on the chart before the night he walked into Court #3. He was not much more than a name on the chart when he left, having beaten me with little discernible relish.

At 7 p.m. sharp the small door swung open and there he was in my court, a man of large if not immense frame who was probably a good decade older than me in his mid '40s.

"Moriaty," he grunted under dark brows and gave my hand a firm shake. In that single word I detected some breeding, the cadence perhaps of the parade ground or a second tier English public school.

But Moriaty showed no further interest in conversation. With an abruptness that would seem rude had he showed any interest in me, he tossed up the ball and served. Like a machine he progressed through a couple of sets. He won a close tie break but showed no outward signs of triumph. On a number of occasions I attempted to draw him in with banalities only to receive no response.

For a man 10 years older than me Moriaty had a strong serve and considerable upper body strength. He could also move effectively around the court even though his left leg had a knee support and there was a white streak like the stubborn hint of a scar from days gone by. There was something curious about this scar. It was like discovering a machine could bleed, I thought as he went through the production process of defeating me.

I didn't dwell on it. I normally find it to be bad squash etiquette to remark on a player's scar during the first game.

We seemed evenly matched but every now and then a disconcerting feeling would come over me that Moriaty was not playing at the top of his ability while I was stretching every sinew to keep up with his game.

I was conscious of the dampness of my hand and the dryness of his when we shook hands at the end of the game.

"Good game,"I said.

"Yes." And for a second a caught I caught a glimpse of his eyes. Curious. Green like emerald pools, a touch of the Irish perhaps. And then the small door snapped shut like a spring and he was gone.

The Eighties in retrospect

The Eighties can seem inconsequential in retrospect. My memories of the decade of bad taste are condensed into a montage of boldly stripy shirts, the Rubik’s cubes and late night trolley fights with our rickety chariots stolen from the Tesco’s parking lot after a night of drinking vodka.


But I only need to set one foot on Inconsequential Street to get lost in sentimentality down Memory Lane. The Eighties spawned The Smiths for goodness sake. But the lyrics that keep going round my head are from Tears for Fears, whose version of Mad World was inevitably better than the more well known cover by Gary Jules.

“All around me are familiar faces, worn out places.”

And it’s true in these last few days of journalism as I contemplate my descent into the morality free world of marketing, that the words of Tears for Fears ring true. There are corridors here with photographs of early 20th century war ships that have changed little in decades. There are people who walk and talk and function but they do it out of habit. They are living by reflex – and the reflex is an only child. He’s waiting by the park.

Perhaps this is not just our threadbare industry but life in general. We walk and talk and say things in a certain way and manner because we have always done so. We are without direction because nobody has given us one.

And if you encounter somebody who tells you they know what direction they are going because God has given them one, cross the road fast.

The video for Mad World isn’t very clever and does no justice to the track. Curt looks unhappily out of a window while Roland dances awkwardly in the garden. The video is poor quality and some kid from New York who has hacked Mad World for a school project in which he stalks a girl, hasachieved almost 2 million hits, far more than Curt and Roland achieved themselves.

Incidentally Americans have sought to wean me off the use of the word garden. But I prefer it to yard and have singularly failed to give it up. I always liked the line “I will walk and talk in gardens all wet with rain” which I thought was Yeats but turns out to be Van Morrison.

There is a place for gardens and a time and a place for the Eighties. In these years of winding down it may be now. The Iron Lady is playing at the movies and while I hated her while I lived through her and mounted the barricades, I feel a tad sentimental about her in retrospect. Perhaps it was that time I was talking to a man in the tea room and I turned to the next table where a frail old woman was talking in tones that caught and scraped on something familiar in my consciousness. It took me a moment to realize it was her – Margaret Thatcher - and while her bearing was weak there was still a steeliness in her glance.

There is much to be said for the Eighties in retrospect, not least the fact that Fade to Grey still sounds freaking awsome.

Whitney - diva, girl next door, junkie

The 1992 movie The Bodyguard starring Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner wasn't a particularly clever or good movie. The plot was predictable and the blockbuster hit a little too mawkish.

But it was a powerful movie in that it showcased two stars at the top of their ascendancy. Houston could do little wrong and Costner was one of the biggest names on silver screen. The film moved effortlessly from Miami beachfront to a Hollywood mansion. It showed the America we saw a lot of in the movies back in Britain, the America that you don't see much of in America.

Still reality bites and it bit today.

Although its politics and barely concealed sexism can be nauseating, I can usually rely on the Daily Mail to capture America stories often better than the U.S. media and so it proved with the tragic death of Houston at the age of 48.

There seems to have been a lot of high profile deaths lately, but this one still hit me in the solar plexus, because Whitney was just a bit older than my generation and she was a mega star in the early 90s, a time when I was comparatively young. I still have memories of the dance floor clearing to the strains of "I Will Always Love You."

I'm told Houston was even bigger in America than in Britain. She had the voice of an angel and the clean cut looks of the girl next door. She had appeal in those cookie cutter subdivisions where Madonna was seen as a deviant.

The trouble was Houston was always something of a marketing creation. When she took up with Bobby Brown, an unreconstructed badass, the people in the cul-de-sacs were shocked and reacted as if she had been kidnapped. Yet, according to a documentary I saw while ago, Houston was a lot more like Brown than polite society would like to believe.

Not that we liked to believe it just as we don't like to believe diet Coke will kill us. When someone looks and sounds as good as Houston does, we find it hard to believe she could be the biggest junkie since Major Tom. At least until she started to look like a junkie.

Still, in the words of REM the fame thing - I don't get it. You'd think having the looks and the voice and the wealth and the rest would be a recipe for happiness but it seldom is. Does anyone really believe Brad and Angelina spend all their days floating round on a happy cloud any more than anyone seriously believed Ashton and Demi were the perfect couple?

There are many manifestations of the hollowness of mega stardom but the most powerful image that sticks in my mind is from Martin Bashir's seminal documentary on Michael Jackson. At the Venetian Hotel in Vegas, Jacko took a break from dangling kids from balconies, to go shopping. He whined like a child about the things he didn't have and went away armed with the most gaudy vases and other artifacts $200,000 can buy from an overpriced retail boutique.

It made me think consumerism is not all it's cracked up to be because Jacko didn't look like a much happier bunny once his vase craving was met. I imagine it would be cool to have a swimming pool in the back garden but probably only because I don't have one.

The whole Whitney Houston thing says much about the nature of the American dream. I'm not sure exactly what but nor am I convinced it's a dream worth aspiring to.

The House of the Aunts and Uncles

Sometimes when I watch the kids I wonder what experiences they will remember as adults and which ones will pass them by. Why is memory so selective? Why do I remember the day I jumped from the Mountain Ash tree into the neighbor’s garden only to be yelled at so vividly and yet a whole year at elementary school passed by in a blur?

But some memories are vivid down to the smells and sounds. They tinkle like the first time we hear church bells on a sunny morning deep in the countryside. So it was with the House of Aunts and Uncles. Somewhere in the Midlands, somewhere in a time warp we’d visit, although I don’t think my parents had much in common with the white haired folks inside; less so my sister and I for whom the House of the Aunts and Uncles was like stepping into Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop.

I remember it as a rambling place of fading red bricks, down a lane under wide boughed trees, sycamores with their winged seeds rotting quietly into the autumnal loam, yellows and greens that were fading to brown, behind foreboding privet hedges the house loomed large, although if I revisited today it would probably seem small and insignificant. The House of Aunts and Uncles was in reality two houses that were interconnected. Dorothy and her brother Stan lived in one and Mabel and Charlie the other.

Dorothy’s place was low and dark and a fire seemed to burn in all weathers. While my memories of the furniture are vague I recall the lines in the brown rug and the wide portraits of Cavaliers and their dogs, down the features of their faces. A dark work by a Dutch master, a Rembrandt, perhaps.

The saving grace and sanctuary from the mundane adult talk in the low, stuffy dark room was the large glass conservatory, a playground of work benches, tumbled porcelain pots and climbing plants and the bright fountains of daisies that rose up to greet us in the back garden, festooned with dew and the veils of cobwebs.

Mabel’s place was another matter. From Dot’s living room a passage would lead to a home stripped bare of all darkness. Bare boards and cold blue wood and stairs almost too steep to climb. But we’d ascend, a sharp sun insufficiently diffused by a tall stained glass window, edges of diamond and ship-shaped navy blue. The scullery would open up, a cold cubicle with a deep stone sink and a bar of roughly hewn Carbolic hanging on a string.

Mabel herself always seemed to be upstairs in a high and airy parlor, a big boned woman with a shock of white hair. I don’t remember much about Charlie, apart from his thick circular spectacles and a vaguely condescending air. But I recall a faltering conversation about how the skies were filled with shrapnel, whirring planes and pieces of men and how the mud and the blood thumped against him as he wove across the battlefield with a rickety stretcher, walking low to avoid the monstrous anger of the guns.

On the first day of the Battle of the Somme on June 1, 1916 more than 58,000 British troops were killed. The generals told them the artillery barrage had torn down the wire but the wire was still in place and men were blown apart even as the barbs pierced their skin. Charlie wove his way through this lunar landscape of shell holes, blood and human limbs, patching up the wounded where it wasn’t too late and lived to tell the tale.

But he didn’t talk about it much. In the House of Aunts and Uncles people spoke about the weather and their ailments. And that was about it.

Years later I went back there with my father in a Ford Transit van. He had failed to get the measure of the thing and kept bouncing off the kerbs. We had to pick up a few pieces of furniture that Dorothy had left in her will but the house was already receding. Dorothy had left it to a couple of carpetbaggers called the Simpsons who had forced her hand on her death bed. I remember them now, awkward and wringing their hands, impatient for us to pick up out battered items and to be gone.

Sure enough the house seemed smaller now and the sycamores no longer the majestic specimens of my childhood. There was no Charlie or Stan, no Dorothy or Mable. The House of the Aunts and Uncles was bare and meaningless. The memories had left with them. We left never to return.

Man pulls dubious rodent out of a hole on Groundhog Day

Well I was going to write a post about Groundhog Day today. Then I  thought of being lazy and reposting last year's post about Groundhog day. Groundhog Day - WTF.

But I figured going back to the same old ground again and again would be; a bit like groundhog day, really.

Not that the 42 people who checked out my 2011 article today - yes I work the night shift and I have zero life beyond going to the Fritos machine - seemed to give an over stuffed rat's that this was an old post.

So the interesting news here is that Punxsutawney Phil apparently popped out of Gobbler's Knob, got all alarmed by his shadow and predicted six more weeks of winter which is rather odd considering it was almost 70 degrees today.

Apparently he has a brother in DC called Potomac Phil who is long dead and stuffed but this didn't stop him also making a prediction of six more weeks of winter. I don't understand this whole thing. I don't understand why guys in a top hat have to pull out the rodent and parade him for a bit off off the cuff meteorology.

So it's six more weeks of winter then. And this parrot isn't dead either.

"No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, idn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage!"

Whatever happened to Chris?

Sometimes I wonder about Chris; but not very often. When I first arrived in rural North Carolina and ended up working on a small town newspaper Chris walked in wearing a leather jacket and a superior frown; a big shot crime reporter in a small town, smoking out of his sardonic mouth round the back of the building, looking me up and down with a disdainful eye, slightly unkempt and on the edge.


Chris was odd and I believed him to be standoffish. He shared the next cubicle to me but we seldom talked. Then occasionally our heads would bob up and down at the same time and we’d exchange a few words. I believe he thought I was standoffish.

Chris, his wife and kids lived a street over to us in a white house, that had the mere whiff of grandeur but seemed to be heading downhill fast. The blinds looked as if they had been in a fight; there were kids toys and trash all over the lawn.

We invited Chris to our daughter’s birthday and he came but he looked ill at ease, staring into the far distance through a haze of blue smoke. We started to wonder if he was a depressive. It occurred to me that what I had assumed was his arrogance was in fact something else.

Chris embraced the crime beat like a pair of well worn boots. He’d hang out in the bad parts of town, looking edgy. He wrote stories that went above and beyond but some days he wouldn’t go there at all. He’d be summoned into the editor’s office and would leave looking more hard bitten than ever. Then there was a rumor and speculation he was interviewing for a big paper in California. Then he stopped coming to work. Mostly.

In the end Chris just quit and disappeared into the dark home with white sidings close to the river. He had a large collection of French literature and he just buried himself in it, I heard. Sometimes he’d be spotted in town and he’d enter superficial conversations. But it was as if his former life belonged to somebody else.

Mostly he disappeared. The world moved on and left him in its slipstream – another Boo Radley in a southern town. The last time I drove by the old house in November I saw his door swing open and there was Chris, still in the small town and looking into the middle distance. I thought about stopping and saying ‘hi’ but I wasn’t sure he’d even recall me anymore and the conversation would be frankly stilted.

Yet there are days when I think there’s a bit of Chris in all of us, days when the strange and trite conversations about road tolls leave us numb, when we find we frankly don’t give a damn about whether Romney is five points up on Gingrich.

There are days when just tuning out on a sunny day and disappearing from sight for the rest of our time on earth seems as attractive as taking the road less travelled.

Woolworth staff win compensation - and not in pick n' mix either

The news that former staff at Woolworths have been awarded a total of 67.8 million (what no pound sign on this infernal computer??) in compensation for losing their jobs in 2008, made me incredibly happy.

Not so much because they deserved 60 day's pay, although they probably did for the trauma of having to work at Woolworths - rather that it gave me a semi-legitimate excuse for a shameless repost.

It seemed my first post in Brits was on the closure of Woolworths, back in 2008. Nobody commented back then so just one comment will give me a 100 percent increase in popularity, although this is probably incorrect because anything times zero is still zero isn't it? OK I sucked at maths. It wasn't just the hatred of Mr. Murphy that led me to drop out. Talking of which I find myself sublimely dropping out now. And taking blissful solace in repost heaven.

THE DEMISE OF WOOLWORTHS

When I was growing up in England in the 1970s we didn't have a visit to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory to aspire to.

The closest thing was the pick 'n' mix section of Woolworths, a vast glittering realm of cheap candies and hardboiled sweets, normally positioned near the door that helped cement its nickname of 'pick 'n' steal.'

I never met a kid who hadn't swiped at least a couple of candies and even parents turned a blind eye.
In those days you could buy enough candies to fill a small wheelbarrow for 50p.

Like Woolworths itself the chocolates in the pick 'n' mix aisle would melt under the glare of a connoisseur, although there weren't too many of those around until the '80s.

It's, therefore, mind boggling to imagine a bag of "Woolies" pick 'n' mix selling for £14,500 as one did on eBay this weekend - the highest of 115 bids that were received..

The 800 gram bag was sold by Ed Adams, the former manager of the Petts Wood store in Kent, who picked it up before his store closed for the last time.

I can imagine Mr. Adams standing in the store with a large Gothic bunch of keys in his hand, ready to lock up the last store in the country for the last time, switching off the lights strip by strip on a cold winter night.

His tear smudged eye falls on a bag of candy the liquidators had missed on the empty shelves and and he picks it up and rescues it.

But I'm sure it didn't happen like that.

Still the demise of Woolworths, with the last of its 807 British stores closing on Jan. 5, is sad for anyone who grew up with the Great British institution that was actually American.

The psychological loss was described in an article in the International Herald Tribune.

F.W. Woolworth closed down in 2001 in the United States, reinventing itself as Foot Locker Inc., but the British company - long separated from its U.S. parent - remained as what the article described as a "symbol of something, a vestige of a simpler past when the country had few department stores and no giant retailers, when shopping still seemed like a treat."

In other words Woolworths was always a synonym for mediocrity.

The goods were unremarkable and the staff were notoriously "Woolly headed," as my mother would remark.

If Marks & Spencer was a grammar school boy in a blazer whose dad drove a Rover, Woolworths was the scruffy kid from the unfashionable side of town who was ferried to school in a battered Vauxhall Viva and always had a lump of snot hanging off his nose, although he didn't know it and nobody had the heart to tell him.

But people get nostalgic about Woolworths because it was like Britain itself back in the '70s, a country where pasta was an exotic food, a social life was a pair of roller skates in a scruffy church hall and nightlife was the baleful light of a fish and chip shop at the end of the street.

The demise of Woolworths is not just the fault of the recent recession. The store struggled for an identity in the 1990s and hit on a new logo and wooden floors.

When that failed it went for more wooden floors.

Now it's gone it's strange to read on its website: "Coming back soon, better than ever."

There's even tentative suggestion left hanging in the post retail ether, that pick 'n' mix could be sold on line.

I'm all for nostalgia but this is surely wishful thinking. For a start how can kids possible steal candies on the Internet?

Kate Winslet and why we're swimming naked

Today I started finding material to send to a national magazine that is looking for freelance writers. I thought this woudn't be a problem having interviewed folks like Kate Winslet, Meg Ryan, Angelina Jolie etc. in the past - admittedly at press conferences in the Dorchester as opposed to over lunch at the Ivy.

I was somewhat taken back to find so few of these existed onlne. Instead I found myself having to transcribe my Kate interview onto my blog and publishing it here.

Looking over my cuttings (they call them clips in the US) started me wondering what exactly I have been doing for more than a decade. The Winslet interview seemed recent but it was early 2002. Looking back it's hard not to look at jounalism as being like that Italian cruise liner, although a more appropriate metaphor, particularly for a Kate interview, is surely the Titanic because it took longer to go down, the band played on and people rearranged the deck chairs.

But I'm sad to say the last few years have been dominated by layoffs and the sight of skilled colleagues clearing their desks after being let go for earning too much, even though too much was not much. And while it's easy to get into an 'it isn't me' mentality there's also a thing called the law of averages.

But there has been plenty of deck chair arranging, talk of new products and innovative internet gizmos, pay walls and content clouds. And 'Talk to Sam,' a marketing initiative by Sam Zell to listen to employees while he bled the company dry and later sued it. We were cynical at the time but the surpreme irony was that even journalists - that most cynical breed of people - were not as skeptical as they should have been.

But at least as we go glug, glug down to the inevitable whirlpool at the bottom of the swirling cesspit we can glory in the memory of Kate running up and down those flooded corridors. Transcribing this interview with Kate Winslet after all these years made me at first wonder what I had learned in more than a decade.

But it also gave me hope. There were paragraphs that I tightened up. I found myself thinking I would write this article differently today and it would be a lot more readable. I may have spent much of the last decade sinking but I've enjoyed the ride. And I've picked up a few tips as I've gone down.



INTERVIEW WITH KATE WINSLET JAN 9, 2002 - THE EASTERN DAILY PRESS

It is an idyllic day in Southwold, Suffolk. The young Iris Murdoch runs down to the chilly sea hand-in-hand with the love of her life, John Bayley. They throw stones into the water and gawky Bayley dons a scuba mask and wades into the sea in an overcoat.

In another scene she stands in a bright blue beach hut rattling with pebbles and shells, wearing a mischievous smile as wide as the cloudless Suffolk horizon.

The movie Iris is a tale of enduring love between the prolific and promiscuous novelist and the awkward Oxford don Bayley. It is an intellectual love that's at times childish.

For Kate Winslet, the actress cast in the role of Murdoch, life was not imitating art. As she passionately embraced her co-star, Hugh Bonneville, her husband Jamie Threapleton was holed up in  hotel nearby. Four months later they split up.

Does Winslet still believe in enduring love? She falters briefly during a press conference at the Dorchester Hotel.

"I'm not a cynical person and I live for the moment. Yes, of course it can exist. Absolutely," she said not totally convincingly, before heading for the safe ground.  "Iris and John were a true love story. They made each other extremely happy."

While Winslet sidesteps the question of her own romances, she glows when she talks about her daughter Mia. She did not mention Threapleton or new love Sam Mendes, the film director.

Winslet made her name in the blockbuster movie Titanic but surprised the movie world by eschewing further Hollywood blockbusters to accept roles in smaller, more offbeat British-made films.

Richard Eyre's Iris falls into this category but looks set to be one of those rare movies that will prove to be a success on both sides of the Atlantic without receiving the Titanic treatment.

On the face of it, a raw film about a novelist's descent into Alzheimer's disease does not sound like a recipe for box office success. But these are not normal times, and post September 11 cinema goers are looking for something different from the traditional diet of action movies.

Iris is a profound and moving film in which Winslet sparkles as the vivacious young Murdoch, a woman with a lust for life, not to mention a series of men and women while she is with Bayley, even though he is the man she gives her mind to.

But it is Dame Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent as the older Murdoch and Bayley who steal the show by taking the relationship to a new bittersweet level. They are tipped for Oscar nominations.

The autumn and winter of Murdoch's life rather than the spring days of bicycle rides and skinny-dipping in Oxford's rivers make the most compelling viewing. From being a distinguished scholar and a woman of books, one of England's most accomplished writers, Murdoch was transformed by Alzheimer's into a rambling wreck incapable of reading the word "dog."

For those of us who remember the media reports about Murdoch suffering from "writer's block," watching Iris feels somewhat too close to reality for comfort.

Eyre uses the juxtaposition of Winslet and Dench to devastating effect, nowhere more so than in the scenes filmed at Southwold.

While the novelist as a young woman frolics on the sand before Bayley's friend Janet Stone (Penelope Wilton), Dench stares moodily out to the sea that spawned her most famous novel and places smooth rocks on slivers of notepaper. When Janet asks her to sign a copy of her latest novel, she throws it angrily to the ground. Janet is also seriously ill with cancer, her face set in a mask of pain.

But later that night, outside the candle-lit beach hut there is a moving scene in which Murdoch responds to an old tune and holds Janet tight in a last dance to the music of time for both women.

In an era of escapism and magic depicted by The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, it is sobering to see a film that does not flinch at the grim realities of mortality and old age, a film that addresses the degradation and sheer horror of Alzheimer's head-on.

There is an abyss between Winslet's wild, young character and the sad old woman played by Dench, which is the simple but effective key to the movie's poignancy.

Winslet is well attuned to growing older. She's made a living in acting since she was 13 and is fast becoming a British movie institution. She was nominated for an Oscar for Titanic at the age of 22. When she shot Holy Smoke two years later, she said she felt as though she was in her mid 30s. "God, I don't know how to be young anymore," she said.

Now in her mid-20s she has the attitude of a woman in her 30s. She says she is bemused by her current status as a mega star and prefers to talk about Murdoch.

"I knew about Iris Murdoch but I didn't know about her work," she said. "I had to be very selective about the research I did because the film was not about the novels but about the material from John Bayley's books. I simply read his books over and over again and spent some time with John Bayley. I did not feel the need to go out and read all her novels.

"It confirmed things I knew and felt about her. She loved people, she loved things and had an incredible zest for life."

Despite the close interweaving of the young Murdoch and the older writer in the film, Winslet did not discuss her portrayal of the role with Dench beforehand.

"When I first saw the film I remember thinking 'Thank God we pulled it off.' We did feel similar, even though from the outside we're nothing alike- I'm about five inches taller than Judi and there are a lot of obvious differences. I was relieved that we did feel like the same woman."

Winslet found few problems dealing with the two very distinct plots going on in the film that splits Murdoch's life in two. "They really were two separate stories. I was giving the sense of the young Iris as an absolute stick of dynamite, which is what she was," she said.

She recalled how Eyre told her it had been wonderful to work with Dench and Broadbent but he was glad to move on and shoot the scenes of the younger Murdoch because "it's so much happier."

"Richard has experience of losing somebody to Alzheimer's and it was nice of him to get involved in some of the spingtime stuff," she said.

Water was very important to Murdoch. The novelist and her husband were keen swimmers. One of the last entries made in her journal in 1996 read: "We swam in the Thames, in our usual place for this time of year."

The film opens with a scene in which Winslet swims naked underwater. "I love it. I do love water and I always have done," she said. "If you ask my father who was first to go in the sea, it was me tearing down the beach," the Titanic star said.

Nudity is an issue the actress shrugged off with a laugh. "If anyone is used to taking their clothes off it is me," she said. "You never get used to nudity and I certainly don't look forward to it. This was something that was key in John and Iris's relationship. When they were young they did a of skinny dipping, so to me it was another extension of their relationship."

But she admitted to having a moment of "Oh, no, here we go again," when she saw herself naked in the movie.

Winslet's weight has been a constant source of media interest. After Titanic her weight rose above 11 stone and she was dubbed "Titanic Kate," in the tabloids. She described the coverage as "hurtful" but seemed impervious to pressure to do the thing the movie industry expects of leading ladies - to lose weight. Then, just as she started to become a role model for women resisting the pressure to diet, she lost weight.

Now she is back to her pre-Titanic weight but sighs when the issue is invariably raised at press conferences. "Awful boring weight questions again," she tells the reporter who was bold enough to ask.

"Getting my figure back after pregnancy wasn't easy but I got it back again. I didn't panic and think I'd lost my figure for ever," she said.

Media interest in Winslet's  weight and personal life remains unabated, becoming more intense after she started dating Mendes.

"When I feel invaded I carry on as normal, particularly now that I have Mia," she said. "The press have never forced me to be barricaded into my own home and I never will be. Because of what's been going on I'm probably followed around more now when I take Mia for a simple walk than I have been for some time, but that doesn't mean I won't go on that walk."

The arrival of  Winslet's first daughter also curtailed her movie-making.

"In the first year of her life I didn't want to be away a lot. I have ended up doing two films but only worked about 11 weeks. I feel relatively triumphant about that because she has come along when I've been doing these roles. Actresses are very lucky."

Winslet's post Titanic roles appear to demonstrate a desire to do different. She turned down blockbusters to film the modestly budgeted Hideous Kinky in Morocco and Holy Smoke in India.

"I don't have a specific agenda as  such, she told me. " I haven't turned down the blockbusters because I don't want to do the films. It is simply that after Titanic I have done the things I felt most passionate about and the most challenged by."

Hideous Kinky was her only specific choice. "I wanted to do something that was British and small," she said. "I was mindful of the fact I am a young British actress and it's quite important to set an example."

Many critics are saying Iris brings the best of British to the screen, bu it Kate Winslet, Judi Dench, Jim Broadbent or the writer of whose life this film is a poignant celebration of.

Bayley saw his late wife in the depiction of Iris Murdoch in the film and it made him cry. He won't be the only one.