Mark J Daniels - The Ultimate Ultracrepidarian

Saying goodbye…

2010-06-06T14:25:00.002+01:00

If you’ve followed this blog over the years then I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you. It’s coming to an end.

But I’ve also got good news… it’s being revived over here, at Wordpress!

Google’s Blogger service has always been a faithful friend to me and my moanings, but – as they say – a change is as good as a rest and, unfortunately, although Google do well in many areas Blogger just seems to have been left behind and forgotten about. As such, it’s not really progressed with the blogging revolution and so I’ve been hunting around for a while now for something new to use that better suits my requirements.

Having played with Tumblr for a bit, I’ve decided that Wordpress is the way forward for me right now. So, from today, all new blogs will appear under the new address: http://www.markjdaniels.com/

This old address, http://blog.markjdaniels.com/, will remain for the time being so all old posts are still very accessible. But if you followed me here, then head over to the new blog right now and sign up for notifications of new blogs – that way you won’t miss out on anything!

Thank you for reading, and au revoir…

Guaranteeing Insurance for the Young

2010-06-05T17:43:00.001+01:00

“I wonder if it’s time for the insurance companies to come up with some compromise that will help parents and children get out on the road without bankrupting them before they’ve even started their lives; a ‘guarantee’ system, perhaps?”

Having just been involved in a car crash myself, and being in the messy middle of changing from one insurer to another as it happens, I can appreciate some of the dilemmas that insurance companies have to go through when one of their customers cocks it up a bit.

But I can’t help feel sorry for young drivers, and the news today that over 40% of parents ‘front’ their children’s insurance in order to help them get on the road doesn’t really come as a surprise.

After all, according to a BBC report today, for an average 17-year-old the cost of insuring a bog-standard Vauxhall Corsa would be somewhere in the region of £4’000. That’s quite ridiculous, even allowing for the fact that young drivers pose a risk on the road.

A basic, brand new Corsa costs barely £9’000, meaning that insurance premium is half the car’s value before you get started. And that’s just for one year…

There are literally dozens of second-hand Corsas for sale and such insurance premiums often mean that youngsters are paying more to cover themselves on the road than they paid for the vehicle in the first place.

It’s no wonder, then, that many young drivers are turning to Daddy for help in the hopes that they might circumvent the prices. The difference in premiums is quite staggering – but then, it is for all of us. On a recent search for changing the insurance on my own car the prices quoted to me, at the tender age of 38, ranged from £219 to £1’047.50.

Then there are some who might decide that they’ll take the risk and drive without insurance because, as long as they don’t kill anybody, it might be cheaper to just pay the third party to keep quiet and buy a new bumper. Highly illegal, but much cheaper than taking out insurance without sticking a parent’s name as the main driver.

‘Fronting’ might be deemed insurance fraud, but surely people can understand why it’s done, given the price difference between that and insuring the car yourself. When I was seventeen I had a two-year-old Austin Rover Metro and insurance groups ran from one through to nine (today it’s one to fifty); my insurance cost me £600 for the year, and it was only that expensive because I’d driven in to the back of my Mum’s Fiesta XR2 when she stopped for a lollypop lady to let kids cross the road.

But at least, at that price, I could afford to insure the car myself – just – and I was completely legal.

I wonder, then, if it’s time for the insurance companies to come up with some compromise that will help parents and children get out on the road without bankrupting them before they’ve even started their lives.

I remember getting my parents to act as a guarantor on my first ever car loan because I didn’t have enough credit history to take one out myself. Perhaps there could be a system whereby parents ‘guarantee’ their child’s motor insurance.

It would mean the kids get their premiums lower, but still at a price that reflects their inexperience and risk, while their parents’ premiums increases by a percentage to cover their guarantee. It would be a win-win situation for both customers and insurance companies, because it would mean tying both father and son, mother and daughter in to one insurance company in order for it to work and would take out the apparently heinous crime of ‘fronting’ in an effort to circumvent the currently ludicrous prices young people have to pay.

And it’s worth remembering that, while I appreciate young people do pose a risk on the road, a man of seventy will always get ridiculously cheap insurance because of his age and experience.

Yet how often do we read stories of a modern day Mr Magoo driving the wrong way up a dual-carriageway, leaving carnage in his wake?

And yes, I am aware of the irony of writing about insurance for the young when I had a crash with an ambulance last week… MJD

Xperia-nce the best!

2010-05-30T12:05:00.001+01:00

“…why the developer thought it would be a good idea for me to stick my shiny new phone between my wife's legs is beyond me...”

The first thing you notice about Sony Ericsson's Xperia X10, right after its sleek and sexy glossy body, bright screen, 8 megapixel camera and beautiful Timescape interface, is how much it uses the battery.

So let's get the bad news out of the way first: Sony Ericsson boast that this phone can achieve up to 425 hours from the battery in standby mode. This is, quite frankly, a blatant lie.

I timed mine, switching it on in the morning from a full charge and leaving it alone all day. After thirteen hours and three minutes, the battery was dead.

Both Sony Ericsson and Vodafone, my mobile provider, told me that I could extend the battery life by switching off such features as GPS and Wi-Fi, but as the GPS was already off and my phone wasn't in range of a wireless network, such advice seemed redundant. Not to mention that if I didn't want to have such facilities as GPS and Wi-Fi, I wouldn't have bothered buying the phone in the first place.

Switching them off, then, seems kind of pointless.

Still, the iPhone fares no better when it comes to battery life, and as the X10 is aiming squarely at the same market place we can assume there are no victors on either side in the battery argument.

So what is the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10? In short, it's Sony Ericsson's first foray in to the Android market place. Android being Google's smartphone operating system to challenge the iPhone, and it does this very well indeed.

Certainly, Apple's 'Jesus Phone' has got a big chunk of this particular market place at the moment, but Google's clever move has been to release Android as an operating platform to any manufacturer or developer who wants to play with it, and let them put it on to any device they wish. Apple, on the other hand, keep their OS strictly to themselves and rigorously check every app written for the device before releasing it to their market.

As a result there are many more manufacturers putting Android on to their top-of-the-line mobile phones and, in the US, Android phones have started to outsell the iPhone this year.

The other big advantage of Android is that it can run more than one application simultaneously, whereas the current crop of iPhones can't. This means you can have instant messaging and e-mail applications open whilst listening to your favourite music and browsing the web.

Like Apple's phone, there is a Market place where applications - or 'apps' - can be downloaded, and apps for just about everything you'd ever desire can be put on your phone. The Android market is still not as populated as Apple's, but it's growing by the day and a plethora of free and pay-for apps ranging from games to office applications and everything mundane in between can generally be found. There's even one that turns my new Sony Ericsson in to a vibrator, though why the developer thought it would be a good idea for me to stick my shiny new phone between my wife's legs is beyond me...

The other advantage of Android is that each developer can 'skin' their own interface, essentially making the phone look bespoke to their brand, whilst still taking advantage of Google's slick mobile operating system.

Sony Ericsson have done this extremely well, focusing heavily on the social networking market space and squarely marketing this phone at Twitter and Facebook addicts. Their Timescape interface brings feeds from your social networking accounts in to one simple, scrolling page that allows you to see all updates from your contacts with the flick of a finger on the screen. If one grabs your attention, simply touch that particular image and it will bring up the relevant account with all details.

Timescape also allows you to link all your social networking feeds with your contacts list. This takes a little time to do, but it's worth doing. Each time you scroll through your contacts you'll see their latest Facebook or Twitter updates without having to open your browser.

Mediascape is Sony Ericsson's music player, photo and video library all rolled in to one. It makes selecting your music, pictures and videos easy and allows you to display slideshows to your friends of your latest holiday snaps. It even connects to Facebook and Picasa and allows you to show off photographs you've got stored online, too.

The 8 megapixel camera is good, with a variety of digital camera options including face recognition, smile detection and image stabiliser all helping provide good quality images - excellent for a phone but even with eight megapixels the images still lack some depth. The 16x digital zoom is poor, with even the mildest zoom applied leaving the images pixelated, and the unprotected lens on the back of the camera is easy to smudge with your finger when taking the phone from your pocket.

The phone comes with a photolight but, as this device is being shipped with version 1.6 of Android, it doesn't act as a flash. Sony and Vodafone have both advised me that when they release the upgrade to version 2.0+ of Android this flaw will be rectified. I wait with baited breath...

Being a Google device it communicates with all of Google's online services seamlessly so if, like me, you're already a Googlephile, setting the phone up is a doddle. I simply switched it on for the first time, gave it my Gmail login details, and within two minutes my contact list was populated with all my e-mail addresses and telephone numbers stored online.

This phone does rely heavily on being connected to the Internet and so you must make sure you've got an unlimited data contract with your mobile provider. Failure to do so will result in some spectacularly expensive bills! Its insistence on constantly updating you with e-mail and social media feeds will also remind you of how much junk your life receives throughout the day. After a couple of days use it left me wishing for the 1980s, my collection of LP records and having to knock on the door of my mates' houses in order to find out what they were up to.

As I approach my forties, however, I do find myself having a particular aversion to touchscreen keyboards. I like to feel something click under my finger tips and the X10's onscreen keyboard has been a constant thorn in my side as I fumble my way from one letter to another. The predictive text input onscreen, however, is excellent and often spots my errors and suggests corrections. After two months of use I have started to get used to it and can now type a text or e-mail with relative ease, although if I'm not concentrating I can end up writing utter rubbish.

One huge plus that I do love on the X10, however, is Google Maps. Coupled with Google's recently launched Navigation service, the device now acts as a full Satellite Navigation solution in the car, with better results than even the industry-leading Tom Tom has managed to achieve.

Despite some of the flaws, however, I love the X10 overall. The interface is shiny, bright and easy to read and it means that when I'm out-and-about I'm in constant contact with my friends and my business without having to lug my heavy Compaq laptop about, whilst simultaneously providing me with entertainment and a good camera for those opportune family-snap moments.

If you can get used to the constant raping of the battery - I recommend buying several USB-based charging leads to dot about the home and office - and can forgive some of the weaknesses the camera shouldn't have, this makes an excellent everyday phone and a clear alternative to the Apple iPhone.

If you’re going to crash…

2010-05-27T14:33:00.001+01:00

“Had my hair cut, gone grey, crashed in to an ambulance, been breathalysed, ensured that an ambulance driver has been suspended from his job, and left myself without a car in the process…”

When you wake up in the morning you always make decisions that affect how the rest of your day pans out.

Take me, for example. This morning, I woke up and decided I needed a hair cut. As I’m in training for the London to Cambridge Cycle Ride, I considered cycling to Newmarket and back again but then decided that the barber can often take a long time so driving would be quicker.

On the way in to town I heard a funny noise from the back of the car and thought it might need checking out, but then promptly forgot about that as I watched the barber blow dry all the colour from my hair. I swear I wasn’t that grey before I went in…

Getting back to the car, I decided that I would drive up to Sam’s to get a burger but, as I drove out of the Market Square car park, I heard that funny noise again so decided to drive to Ian Button’s in Fordham to get the noise checked out, and turned right instead.

On the way to Fordham I saw an ambulance behind me, blue lights flashing, so – at the next roundabout – I pulled across to the side so that he could come around me. For some reason, I assumed the ambulance driver would be going straight on so, when I saw in the wing mirror that he’d cleared me, I pulled out and accelerated again. Only the ambulance driver was turning left on the roundabout across the front of my car…

It’s amazing how many emergency vehicles turn up when you write your car off on the side of an ambulance…

Still, all the attending paramedics and police officers declared that I am a fit and healthy young man (their words, not mine) but this is how my day has gone so far:

Had my hair cut, gone grey, crashed in to an ambulance, been breathalysed, ensured that an ambulance driver has been suspended from his job, and left myself without a car in the process.

How many other people can say they’ve achieved so much in such a short space of time?

If I’d made the decision to get fit and cycle in to town, or get fat and go up to Sam for a burger, I’d still have a car. But I didn’t. And I don’t.

Click here to see more pictures

Going for a ride…

2010-05-26T09:29:00.001+01:00

Once I've got all my cycling gear on I end up looking like a human Fab ice lolly. Only nobody's ever keen on licking me...

On the morning of Monday 26th July I shall most likely wake up in bed, still caked in sweat and my muscles quivering with fatigue.

This won't be a delayed reaction to England's obvious success in the forthcoming World Cup tournament, nor - unfortunately - will it be because I finally managed to spend a night of unbridled passion between the sheets with Jennifer Aniston.

Instead, I'll be trying to recover from taking part in the London to Cambridge cycle ride the day before.

What started approximately twelve months ago between my friend, Keith, and myself was a simple need to work off a bit of beer belly. Back then, attempting to complete a circulatory four-mile route felt like it would kill us. And took about an hour to achieve.

Gradually, we were able to build up both our pace and our stamina but, as winter approached, we needed an incentive to keep us cycling through the icy conditions. Somewhat foolishly, we decided it would be a good idea to take part in a cycling event and so, on Sunday 25th July, Keith Lomas and I, along with friends from the pub, will be taking part in the 57 mile event.

Now, ordinarily I hate begging letters, but understandably we'll be raising money for good causes: my youngest son is affected by Asperger's Syndrome and this local charity, Asperger's East Anglia, works with families and individuals whose lives have been altered by this condition. Keith's chosen cause is the Irregular Cornea Foundation, an organisation founded to help raise global awareness of irregular cornea conditions and Keith's company, UltraVision CLPL, works closely with them. The organisers of the event are Breakthrough Breast Cancer, and therefore we'd like to help make a contribution to them too.

I'm not writing this to ask for donations, but should you feel you'd like to help us raise money for these good causes and support us in making sure all the hard work of staying on the bikes throughout last winter's freezing temperatures was worthwhile, even the smallest contribution will be gratefully received and so I've included a link to our Charity Giving page at the end of this blog.

It's also worth noting, for comedic purposes, that (unless some generous benefactor feels like donating me a brand new bike) I'm going to be taking part in this event on my aged Raleigh mountain bike that I think is older than my children's ages combined! And I haven't changed a puncture since the age of fifteen.

I'm a little worried that the lack of punctures over the past twenty three years might catch up on me all in one go...

With just shy of two months to go until the day itself, and with the World Cup hopefully going to be keeping me busy in the pub in between, I suspect July 25th will be here before I know it but you'll be able to keep up with how we're getting on via my Twitter feed or on my publican blog.

To ensure my poor old bones don't end up in too much of a bad way and that I don't get saddle sore, my wife has very generously been out and bought me a pair of cycling shorts that, quite frankly, make me feel like I'm wearing a nappy, a pair of fingerless gloves to stop my hands chafing on the handlebars, and a helmet that, honestly, makes me look like a berk.

Add to that the hi-viz t-shirt that I need to wear to make sure the traffic can see me wobbling about on the road and I end up looking like a human Fab Ice Lolly. Only nobody ever seems too keen on the idea of licking me after I've been for a ride...

We're hoping to complete the distance in under six hours and then get back to the pub for a few celebratory pints. I suspect, however, that by the time I've collapsed on Cambridge's Midsummer Common all I'll be wanting is the kiss of life.

So, if anybody's got Jennifer's number, please tell her where I'll be....

Please do help support us on our ride by visiting http://www.charitygiving.co.uk/markkeithandothers - details of the ride and the charities we are raising money for can be found there.

Who The Hell Is Gene Hunt?

2010-05-24T11:03:00.001+01:00

Warning: contains spoilers of Ashes to Ashes and Lost…

So the two greatest questions in television history (well, almost) have finally been answered:

“Who the hell is Gene Hunt?” and “Will they get off that damned island?” They rank, sort of, with that timeless classic: “Who shot J.R.?”

The answers are simple:

Gene Hunt, it turns out, is God and, after a brief tussle with Satan, decides it’s time to let Will, Chris, Shaz and his sort-of love interest Alex Drake saunter off this mortal coil by opening the door to a pub.

Essentially, they’ve all been in that between-worlds limbo and Gene Hunt was in their collective imagination.

Series 3 of Ashes has struggled to maintain my interest but, while I would have much preferred to see God/Gene Hunt have a quickie with Alex Drake and send her off to the pub with a smile on her face rather than tears rolling down her cheeks, Life On Mars and Ashes to Ashes have kept my attention reasonably well over the past five years. Lost, on the other hand, waned early on for me.

After Series 2, which basically appeared to repeat everything that had happened in Series 1, I got bored and didn’t bother watching again, preferring instead to watch the final episode and see if I could catch up with the characters’ lives without too much difficulty. I watch Coronation Street in a similar vain: not at all for years and then switch it on at Christmas time to see that Gail Platt (or whichever surname it is she goes by now) is still a snivelling, whining waste of time whose voice is akin to scratching a fork down a blackboard.

But such hype has been made over how the series would end, just what the island is, and what will happen to its inhabitants that broadcasters around the world came up with the idea of a ‘simulcast’, showing the final episode simultaneously to prevent spoilers, internet piracy and, apparently, sleep.

Because here in the UK, to keep up with America, the final episode was screened at 5am. On a Monday morning. Meaning die hard Lost fans had to get up really, really early before work.

And all to discover that, basically, they were all already dead and the island was a either a figment of everybody’s collective imagination, or just Jack’s, depending on which way you want to look at it.

In the end, though, I’m genuinely disappointed that Gene Hunt didn’t scream on to the beach in his Audi Quattro, snarling “right, you ‘orrible lot, there’s the pub. They even have a saloon bar…”

Wake up, Pam, Bobby’s in the shower…

With two powerful television series coming to an end, I couldn’t help but be disappointed with the lack of imagination that seemed to blight the writers as they prepared to finish their respective shows. That said, how else could you bring to a close two separate story lines centred around characters who have either been shot in the head or crashed in an aircraft disaster?

The character of Gene Hunt has been left open for another series in which he seems to be contemplating driving a Mercedes 190D, this time looking after a floppy-haired victim who is already complaining about not having his iPhone. Yawn. Probably best to leave the format alone now. At least for the next twenty years.

Lost, on the other hand, has definitely come to the end of its run. But I think I’d have liked to see them rescued from the island, transported back to Australia and then, on their return home flight, crashing once again…

Fate always gets you in the end. Even television shows.

The Dark Art Of Motor Insurance…

2010-05-20T14:08:00.003+01:00

Yesterday, I received a letter from MoreThan insurance, telling me that the insurance on my Chrysler Grand Voyager is up for renewal and I could get insurance for as little as £206.

To me, this seemed like voodoo magic, mainly because I’m not insured with MoreThan and I only bought the car in February. So how did they know it was up for renewal, and how did they know exactly what car I owned?

But even more voodoo magic was to come – my renewal from Churchill shows a figure of almost £400 to renew the policy, so MoreThan’s hyperbole junk mail seemed a good price. It was almost too good to be true. Indeed, it was too good to be true, because I’ve just gone on to their online system, following the details in the piece of junk mail they sent me, and their quote worked out to be £606!

I’ve often thought that there’s a dark art to motor insurance, and it comprises that old calculating method of looking at the details on the paper, waving a finger in the air and then making up whatever bollocks figure they think they can get away with.

Which is why, after searching through four different ‘comparison’ websites (yes, I’m singing Go Compare! in my head as I write…) using exactly the same details, the price difference is quite staggering.

For a twelve year old Chrysler, with full no claims discount and only limited mileage, with no need to insure it for business purposes as it is simply used as a jalopy and a family bus, the cheapest quote I got was £219.

The most expensive was £1’047.50. From Asda. Who are always proud of telling you what great value they offer.

It just goes to show that it pays to shop around. As does being creative with your occupation, it seems. Being a Publican, and therefore having the cars kept in a car park, does tend to hurt your premiums a bit. I’m pleased (ish) with the £360 quote I’ve got from the Post Office, ultimately, which includes full UK + Home breakdown service, European travel and all the other legal paraphernalia that goes with modern day insurance, but if I’d declared myself as a writer rather than a publican, the quote would have been closer to £300.

MoreThan’s policy would have come down from £606 to £490.

The Dark Art of Motor Insurance is, it seems, an odd one. No longer do we stick with the same insurers year in year out; it just isn’t worth it. There’s no longer such a thing as customer loyalty, and that’s a shame.

Because I really can’t be arsed to spend hours each year shopping around for a slightly better price.

Adam Boulton v Alastair Campbell…

2010-05-11T00:00:00.001+01:00

When it comes to politics, journalists are usually calm, level-headed and, whilst not necessarily unbiased, they’re usually the ones who try to rile the politicians.

Not so in Sky News’s Adam Boulton’s case, who seems to get wound up quite easily by Alastair Campbell.

If you missed their entertaining sparing matches during the current election debacle, check out these videos…

Election Night, early hours of Friday morning…

Monday 10th May 5:44pm …

I managed to catch both of these exchanges live and they’ve provided much entertainment to my election viewing, but the following video was found via Twitter:

As commented against that last video, it’s possibly time Adam Boulton took a bit of a break…!

Google Navigation – simply beta than the rest

2010-04-22T16:56:00.001+01:00

I’ve often thought that if somebody produced a satellite navigation system using Google Maps to navigate from then it would be simply the best navigation system on the planet. Now somebody’s done just that: Google.

Yesterday, I became the first person in the whole of the United Kingdom to use Google’s new satellite navigation service, Google Navigation.

Well, okay, maybe I’m stretching the realms of truth there and I probably wasn’t the first, but let’s allow my fragile ego a moment of limelight. Here’s what actually happened: five minutes before we were due to head for London where Ali and I were guests at The Publican Awards 2010, I noticed a headline that caught my attention in Google News: Google unveils sat nav for Android phones.

This, it seems, was the moment I’d been waiting for. I’ve been using satellite navigation systems since they first became available, from in-car systems to handheld units to the Tom Tom that currently resides on the dashboard of my jalopy. I even once used a laptop with Microsoft AutoRoute, connected via a Garmin handheld GPS receiver, and a girl sat in the back of the car with all of this equipment around her to navigate me from Calais to Amsterdam.

And when, on April 1st, I became the first person [sic – see above] in the whole of the United Kingdom to own a brand new Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, one of the things I was looking forward to was being able to use Maps as a navigation device when Google finally got round to releasing the service in the UK.

Interesting, I thought as I glanced down The Telegraph’s article. I’ll look at that when I get chance. And then I bundled the wife and kids in to the Chrysler and tried entering the post code for the BBC Television Centre in Wood Lane in to my trusty Tom Tom. Except that, amazingly, the Tom Tom refused to accept that the post code existed, and the nearest it could find was Westway, rather than Wood Lane.

Eventually, I manually entered Wood Lane, London in to the Tom Tom and at least had some chance that when I got to Wood Lane I wouldn’t be able to miss the Beeb’s big building. (Not that I was going to anything glamorous on the telly, it’s just that’s where my sister-in-law works as an editor and she was having the kids overnight.)

But, while Ali was collecting my dress suit from the tailor, I tried typing the post code in to Maps on my new Android phone. BBC Televison Centre came straight up. With a new arrow that hadn’t been there before which, when I pressed it, started up the Navigation service. So I figured I’d give it a go and jerry-rigged a method of holding it to the dashboard for the journey.

Tom Tom say that they aren’t worried by Google’s new Navigation system, but they should be. First, it’s free to Android phone users with the 1.6 version of the operating system or above. Second, it is much, much quicker at calculating complicated routes than my Tom Tom is, and even quicker at recalculating the route should I deviate from it in any way. Third, the spoken directions are much more precise than Tom Tom’s, including ‘reading’ to you exactly what the sign you’re supposed to be following will say as you approach the junction.

I’ve always thought that if somebody produced a satellite navigation system that used Google Maps to navigate from it would be the best navigation system in the world. Somebody has now done it, and there are no prizes for guessing that the people behind it are Google themselves.

The onscreen display is clear, and typically Google: uncluttered and easy to understand. The top of the screen displays what action you are going to take next, while the bottom of the screen shows how long to the end of your journey and the name of the road you are currently on. If you want, you can call up different layers that will even allow you to use Google’s satellite imagery to navigate from rather than the map, but I found that this cluttered the screen a bit and made navigating complicated junctions tricky.

Much easier to just leave it in map mode, although you can pull up Street View images to help you understand where you are. You can also quickly and easily call up a detailed schedule of your journey, details on traffic delays and much more. It surely can’t be long before Google add a layer that includes speed cameras – at that point it would be a hugely powerful tool.

There are a couple of downsides, though. First, it does require the phone to have a data connection open for downloading maps and calculating routes. If you haven’t got an unlimited data package on your contract then this could prove costly, and even then if you travel abroad a lot roaming charges for international data connections could lead to bankruptcy.

And while the spoken details are so good you don’t actually have to look at the screen at all, other than to admire your phone and the clarity of the display upon it, the voice is less than audible. It sounds like Stephen Hawking on transgender drugs and if, like mine, over sixty miles per hour your car makes more noise than the Large Hadron Collider on overtime, then you won’t be able to hear it no matter how loud you push the volume button.

But this is a beta product and was only launched to the general public yesterday. Like all Google’s products it can only get better.

In fact, the only truly negative experience I had is that Sony Ericsson, at the time of writing, don’t actually produce an official in-car mounting kit with charger for the X10 model, and therefore the battery on my phone ran out one mile away from BBC’s Television Centre.

Sort it out, Sony…

Schumacher thinks new rules will make F1 more exciting. For him.

2010-04-01T00:39:00.001+01:00

“If it looks like it’s getting boring,” one team-member who didn’t want to be named said, “then the FIA will just turn on the taps and flood turn four in order to bring out a safety car and close the pack back up again.”

Michael Schumacher has said that he is in favour of the new rules to be brought in this weekend by Formula One’s governing body, the FIA.

Following an exciting Australian Grand Prix, the FIA noticed that the excitement was sparked by an unusual grid line up and the onset of rain just before the race started.

With Malaysia usually hot and dry, fears amongst those who make the most money out of the sport are running high that this weekend’s grand prix could be as dishwater dull as the opening race of the season in Bahrain almost three weeks ago.

Recognising that unusual grid line-ups and damp race circuits make for the most exciting races, the FIA have decided that this weekend’s qualifying session will be cancelled and the grid will be made up of the order that the drivers finished in at Australia, in reverse* order.

“I think this is an excellent idea,” enthused Schumacher, who benefits from starting ahead of his rivals when the lights go out on Sunday, albeit still in the middle of the pack. The German’s tenth place finish last weekend means that he will begin the Malaysian Grand Prix in fifteenth. “I don’t mind that,” the former seven-times World Champ said with a grin this morning. “Fifteenth is still ahead of most of my rivals, and the cars in front will be easy to pass.”

Schumacher wasn’t bothered about Jaime Alguersuari being just one spot ahead of him on the grid. The Spanish Torro Rosso driver was the source of much frustration for Michael during the Australian race as he held him up for lap after lap, seemingly unfazed by the most successful driver in history being stuck behind him with no apparent fight left in him to even attempt to overtake.

He went on to point out that this change in ruling favoured him over all the other drivers. “It means that I will be able to pass those in front of me reasonably easily, including Alguersuari off the start line, without putting too much strain on my neck which, if I continue not to win races, will end up being just the excuse I need to pull out of the sport without any shame.”

Even having Vettel ahead of him on the grid was of no concern to the great German. “For sure, he’ll break down before we are even maybe fifty percent of the way through the race.”

As well as mixing up the grid to put the winner of last week’s race at the back of the pack, a controversial decision which Bernie Ecclestone knows is guaranteed to cause a ‘first corner incident’ and therefore improve his television viewing revenues - “we all know that if there isn’t a potentially fatal accident at the first corner everybody switches off and goes to the pub instead,” the seventy nine year old billionaire from Bungay was once heard saying over a Cinzano and lemonade last year – organisers of this year’s Malaysian event have also decided to spice up the racing by adding sprinklers to strategic points on the track; even if, as forecasts suggest, it’s already raining!

Some think that this might be a cynical ploy by McLaren to try and show Lewis Hamilton that he needs to be as gentle on his tyres as team-mate Button is, but it seems that there is some truth to the rumour. Manny Fogel, who disappeared following the collapse of Texas Homecare at the end of the last century, is apparently in Malaysia to set up a new household-product chain and was eventually coaxed to admit that his business was profitable again after agreeing to supply eighteen oscillating Hozelock garden sprinklers and several thousand meters of anti-kink hosepipe to the FIA.

“I don’t mind if the track is wet,” grinned Schumacher, “just as long as that Spanish muppet Alonso isn’t spinning in front of me when I try to get by him.”

If the new rules prove to be popular this weekend then the FIA may consider making them a permanent fixture at all future race tracks. “We’re even looking at the possibility of running a winter race in the Swiss Alps,” Ecclestone mused just before midday today. “The steep hills and snow and ice would definitely mix up the racing order, especially if the drivers chose the wrong set of tyres to race on.”

This weekend’s starting order is listed below and because qualifying has been cancelled the BBC have chosen to show highlights of last weekend’s IndyCar event from St Petersburg in Florida.

Ironically, that race was postponed from Sunday to Monday last weekend when it rained a little bit and the American drivers decided that the wet track was just too dangerous to drive on.

“I hate it when things get moist,” complained IndyCar pilot Danica Patrick. “It just makes a mess of everything.”

* 2010 Malaysian Grand Prix line up; reverse order results from Australia

Jarno Trulli (Lotus-Cosworth) Pole Position
Kamui Kobayashi (BMW Sauber-Ferrari)
Nico Hulkenberg (Williams-Cosworth)
Sebastien Buemi (STR-Ferrari)
Bruno Senna (HRT-Cosworth)
Vitaly Petrov (Renault)
Adrian Sutil (Force India-Mercedes)
Sebastian Vettel (RBR-Renault)
Lucas di Grassi (Virgin-Cosworth)
Timo Glock (Virgin-Cosworth)
Karun Chandhok (HRT-Cosworth)
Heikki Kovalainen (Lotus-Cosworth)
Pedro de la Rosa (BMW Sauber-Ferrari)
Jaime Alguersuari (STR-Ferrari)
Michael Schumacher (Mercedes GP)
Mark Webber (RBR-Renault)
Rubens Barrichello (Williams-Cosworth)
Vintantonio Liuzzi (Force India-Mercedes)
Lewis Hamilton (McLaren-Mercedes)
Nico Rosberg (Mercedes GP)
Fernando Alonso (Ferrari)
Felipe Massa (Ferrari)
Robert Kubica (Renault)
Jenson Button (McLaren-Mercedes)

(Starting grid correct at time of going to press, April 1st 2010.)

Fucking Hell – it’s a new beer!

2010-03-31T07:51:00.001+01:00

I’ll apologise immediately for that headline – but honestly, it wasn’t meant as a profanity, although I admit I chose to write about this here on my personal blog rather than on my Publican blog for fear of repercussion from the editors there!

Indeed, had I received this news article tomorrow morning, I’d have put it down to being a great big April Fool’s joke, but it seems it might not be.

According to Spiegel Online International, the EU have granted a German firm the rights to name a beer “Fucking Hell”.

“Hell” is apparently a German term for Light Ale, whilst Fucking is the name of a town in Austria that the company wants to name the beer after.

Admittedly, it was at this point that I thought that somebody was taking the, well, er, piss, to be frankly honest. Until I looked it up on Google Maps here: Fucking, Austria. It’s as good as the town of Muff, in Ireland, which really does have it’s own Diving Club…

So, unless the German’s actually do have a sense of humour, and their version of April Fool’s Day is 29th March – and if Google Maps isn’t in on the gag – it seems we soon could be drinking a pint of “Fucking Hell.”

You can read the full story here: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,686305,00.html

Schumacher fails to shine in rain-sodden race

2010-03-28T12:52:00.001+01:00

“The German’s comeback is proving to be a struggle and, while the elements might have worked against him today and he got a touch unlucky in the opening lap, one can’t help but wonder that if Schumacher’s fortunes don’t change soon how long before he discovers that his neck is beginning to hurt again and that he may have to give up on Formula One for good…?”

In sharp contrast to the opening race of the season, today’s Australian grand prix had more than its fair share of thrills and spills as the drivers started on intermediate tyres and then gambled like crazy to choose the right time to come in and change to dry-weather tyres.

If Australia had been the opening race of the 2010 season, and if the race had run exactly as today’s did, the past two weeks would not have been spent with journalists and bloggers (myself included) filling column inches, Twitter posts and web pages with diatribes about how F1 needs to get its act in order.

So the big question is going to be: can the excitement keep up?

Red Bull dominated the front row in qualifying, with Vettel pipping local hero Webber to the Pole Position spot, but when the red lights went out at the start of the race the track was very different from yesterday. Rain had been falling, the circuit was slick with water, and the teams were each predicting more rain at varying points in the race.

The action was dramatic from the start as the drivers got underway gingerly in the damp conditions, Alonso more gingerly than most and quickly slipping down the order to tangle with Button and Michael Schumacher in the first corner, leaving the Ferrari driver facing the wrong way as the pack roared by.

Schumacher’s front wing was damaged in the incident and he had to make his way back to the pits for a replacement, leaving him at the back of the pack with all the work to do too.

The race continued in the same vain, with Button making an early call to switch to dry tyres and then immediately sliding off the track at the first corner. It looked like it was a decision that could ruin his race, but the track – and the tyres – quickly came back to him and the reigning World Champion started pumping in fast times.

With the timing board showing up his impressive progress the other drivers started streaming in for dry tyres – including race leader Vettel, who managed to get out and maintain control of the race before Button had a chance to catch him. Had Button not slid off the circuit, he would undoubtedly have beaten the German to first place.

The champ’s team-mate, however, was having a very different race. Despite undoubtedly being the driver of the race, with overtaking manoeuvres left, right and centre that were unbelievably impressive, a wrong call for a fresh set of tyres and several tangles (including a shunt from a frustrated Mark Webber), meant the 2008 World Champion couldn’t get himself on to the podium and ended up finishing sixth.

Vettel looked like he had the race in the bag until, just before half-way, a brake disc collapsed, chucking his Red Bull off the circuit and his hopes of victory in the bin for the second race in a row.

Button took his second Australian victory in a row, with Renault’s Robert Kubica, and Ferrari’s Felipe Massa making up the remainder of the top three – none of them resorting to changing their tyres and hoping that their driving styles would mean they could keep the cars on the track as the tyres begin to wear – while Fernando Alonso and Mercedes driver Nico Rosberg filled the gap between the podium position finishers and Lewis Hamilton.

Both Virgin cars, Kubica’s team-mate Petrov, Bruno Senna, Sebastien Buemi, Nico Hulkenberg, Kamui Kobayashi and Jarno Trulli failed to finish the race, while Heikki Kovalainen in the remaining Lotus and Karun Chandhok in the Hispania team car managed to bring their new team’s cars home, albeit lapped by much of the rest of the grid.

But the new boys are showing themselves to be totally unafraid of the grid’s highest-paid driver, Michael Schumacher. The seven-time champion may have had a reputation for being a little aggressive on track, but today he showed little of the flair that made him the champion he became.

Instead, Jaime Alguersuari in the Torro Rosso showed that he wasn’t intimidated by the great man and kept him at bay for much of the race, with Schumacher eventually passing him and bringing his Mercedes home in the last points position, a lowly tenth.

The German’s comeback is proving to be a struggle and, while the elements might have worked against him today and he got a touch unlucky in the opening lap, one can’t help but wonder that if Schumacher’s fortunes don’t change soon how long before he discovers that his neck is beginning to hurt again and that he may have to give up on Formula One for good…?

Mark Daniels and the fiery pizza of death

2010-03-23T10:32:00.001Z

Nothing has ever made me get up, run to the bathroom and stick my mouth under the cold tap before.

Yesterday we decided we’d pop out for a spot of lunch, so Ali and I headed to the local Pizza Express. Not because we were in the mood for a pizza, but because we had one of those gift credit cards, so it wasn’t going to cost us anything.

I was actually in the mood for a curry and I’d already set my mind on the Diavolo pizza as it’s nice and spicy, so imagine my delight when I spotted a new pizza on their menu: the Calabrese.

The waiter told me it was very hot, and so I ordered it. I’m used to having to warn people about hot foods – Ali’s hottest version of her chilli once competed with a nuclear reactor core and was so warm that it actually burned a hole in the top of one of our tables – and I’ve always been a bit partial to hot food.

When the pizza arrived I dug in. I have to say it was very tasty, and appeared only mildly spicy. Working my way in towards the centre of the pizza, chatting happily away to Ali about why I really needed to pick up a copy of Tiger Woods PGA Tour ‘10 as soon as possible, I suddenly became aware that my tear ducts had opened involuntarily.

I wasn’t aware of any other symptoms at first until I took a swig of beer and carried on eating, at which point my mouth became hotter than Satan’s under-crackers.

It was as if somebody had just lit a gas main over the top of my tongue, and then the tears began to flow properly.

Now, I’ll admit that I’m getting older and my taste for hot food is probably weakening, but the last time an item of food actually made me cry I was sat on a beach in Penang eating a Malaysian curry.

And nothing has ever made me get up, run to the bathroom and put my head under the cold tap to cool off my tongue. But this did.

Returning from the bathroom I tried my best to hide my tears and sat down, manning myself up to finish the pizza off. The manager discreetly brought me a jug of iced water – bastard had seen me make a break for the bathroom – and checked everything was okay.

“Fine,” I squeaked, as Ali giggled quietly to herself.

So the Pizza Express Calabrese. Lovely pizza, very tasty. But only recommended for people with tongues made of asbestos.

I’m a Web Fox…

2010-03-18T09:16:00.001Z

According to the BBC’s Lab services, I’m classed as a Web Fox:

The following information is taken from the BBC’s website following an online science experiment: you can take part by visiting: https://www.bbc.co.uk/labuk/experiments/webbehaviour/

Mark J Daniels, you are a Web Fox

Fast-moving - Web Foxes like you are great at finding information quickly, just as real-world foxes are always ready to pounce on an opportunity.

Sociable - Foxes are highly social animals, maintaining complex relationships with the other members of their social group. When you browse the web you are also a social creature, often using social networks, or other sites whose content is created by its users, as sources of information.

Adaptable - Web Foxes are highly adaptable multitaskers, able to do several things at the same time – just like real-world foxes who can rapidly change their behaviour to suit their environments.

How we worked out your web animal

Our web animals are just for fun, but the test is based on solid and rigorous science, so your results should tell you something interesting about your web behaviour.

Three aspects of your web behaviour were used to work out your web animal.

Adaptable or specialised?

We aren't always as good at multitasking as we think we are

The internet allows us to do lots of things at the same time. You might be listening to music and updating your blog while receiving news alerts and chatting online with friends. Then an email arrives. Can you switch seamlessly between different tasks? Or are you actually less efficient?

Indeed, a study from Stanford University in California suggests that people who spend their time multitasking might actually be less good at juggling tasks than non-multitaskers.

If you are an ‘adaptable’ web animal, then you scored highly on our tests that measured your ability to multitask. If your web animal is ‘specialised’, then you are probably better suited to taking on one task at a time.

Fast-moving or slow-moving?

Slow and steady sometimes wins the race

The internet helps people find information fast. Practice makes perfect, and its possible to learn techniques for getting to the information you need quickly. But speed isn’t the same as accuracy. The first answer you find isn’t necessarily the right answer.

We measured the time it took you to complete a series of search tasks. If you are a fast-moving web animal, you took less time than average. This maybe because you know exactly what you’re doing, but could also mean you missed important information. If you are a slow-moving web animal, this could be because you're less confident, that you focused on getting the rightanswer rather than the first one.

Social or solitary?

An online social life could influence the way you trust people

The internet has radically multiplied the ways in which we can meet new friends and stay in contact with existing ones. (Internet guru Clay Shirky once said that before the internet came along, the most recent technology that affected the way people sat down and talked to each other was the table.) So how social are you online?

If your web animal is social, you probably told us you spend quite a lot of time on social networking sites and that you tend to trust sites whose content is created by its users. If your web animal is solitary, you probably don’t socialise as much online and are inclined to trust sites whose content is produced in a more traditional, ‘authoritative’ way.

Social behaviour online is a fascinating area of study for our scientists. They would like to understand the relationship between time spent online and the type of information sources users choose to trust.

Formula One is in need of some Hormone Replacement Therapy

2010-03-16T09:55:00.001Z

Here’s hoping the 2010 F1 season doesn’t turn out to be too much of a bore. Without Michael Schumacher winning all the time it just won’t be the same…

I think I’m finally over the shock.

After months of waiting, hype, speculation and anticipation, the Formula One season finally got under way this weekend, with Bahrain hosting the season opener rather than Australia.

There was much to look forward to, not least the fact that the sport I have loved since the tender age of three years old (and I’m now much older than that) was getting under way again. We had new rules – smaller front tyres, no refuelling and so on – and new teams. The inaugural Korean Grand Prix will get underway later this year and, with Mercedes taking over Brawn GP, us Brits found ourselves with that mouth-watering fight we always love: England versus Germany.

Reigning world champ Jenson Button joined the 2008 champion, Lewis Hamilton, at McLaren while Mercedes lined themselves up spectacularly with Nico Rosberg and, wait for it, the return of the master himself: Michael Schumacher.

With Fernando Alonso taking over from Kimi Raikkonen (who appears to have left F1 for a career of crashing cars in the World Rally Championship) at Ferrari, the line up of Hamilton, Button, Alonso and Schumacher means four world champions on the grid.

USF1 Grand Prix failed to make it to the grid at the last minute (wow, didn’t see that one coming), meaning just three new teams turned up in Bahrain to compete. Lotus, Virgin and HRT. Whoever thought of calling a team HRT? All it makes me think of is my wife.

Apparently, though, it stands for Hispania Racing Team and I couldn’t help, out of all the teams, feeling sorry for them. With no chance to test their car before they arrived in Bahrain, all their shakedowns were done on site and it meant that Karun Chandhok, India’s latest F1 prodigy, didn’t get to drive a single lap of Bahrain until he went out to qualify because of hydraulic problems that blighted him through most of the practice sessions.

Ultimately, this meant he qualified last and crashed first as he struggled to get to terms with his new car and a rather bumpy Sakhir circuit. But that doesn’t mean we should write him off yet – given that he had had no running he quickly made up his pace to qualify just a second and a half behind his team mate, the late Ayrton Senna’s nephew, Bruno Senna. In F1 terms, that sort of gap is a life time, but considering Senna – who eventually broke down on lap seventeen and whose uncle had touted him as faster than the great champion himself – had managed to run in the previous practice sessions and get some experience under his belt, he qualified only one place ahead of Chandhok … and almost three seconds off the pace of 22nd place Lucas di Grassi in his Virgin.

The shiny green Lotus of Jarno Trulli and Heikki Kovalainen found themselves in 20th and 21st respectively, sandwiched, as they were, between a pair of Virgins, with Timo Glock qualifying 19th.

The rest of the grid lined up almost as the bookies had predicted, with Vettel fooling everybody at the last minute and putting his Red Bull on Pole Position. In the one-upmanship game, Massa trumped new team-mate Alonso by getting on the front row alongside Vettel, pushing the double-world-champion back in to third.

But there was never any doubt about which of the two Ferraris would be ahead of the other as the first lap came to an end and, after the lights went out and the race got underway, it seems to me that the most spectacular thing to happen was that Mark Webber’s engine spent most of the race looking like it was going to explode, but never actually did.

What followed was pretty much what everybody who isn’t a fan of Formula One always says happens: a procession. Cars going round and round in circles. There were a couple of taps and a suspension failure for Renault’s new boy Vitaly Petrov but other than that the opening race to one of the most eagerly anticipated Grand Prix of recent years was, well, boring.

Michael Schumacher moved up from seventh to sixth and then spent the rest of the race hoping he could remember which was the brake pedal, but the guy has been out of the sport for three years so we really ought to give him chance.

Reigning world champ Button went up from 8th to 7th. And then spent the rest of the race hoping he could remember which was the brake pedal… Team-mate Lewis Hamilton started fourth, finished third … but only thanks to the fact that Sebastian Vettel’s Red Bull developed a mechanical problem and it was all that the German could do to keep himself in the running.

Otherwise, to be fair, he’d have won and the Ferrari’s wouldn’t have finished first and second.

The new rules have actively encouraged the teams to build strategies around preventing tyre wear and conserving petrol. Nobody wanted to push hard, nobody wanted to be aggressive and everybody just drove around in circles until Alonso won.

Bernie Ecclestone has warned against knee-jerk reactions to the opening of the season, but we all know he’s a bit pissed off because he’s told the teams that they are in the business of providing entertainment and not conserving fuel.

A knee-jerk reaction might be too much too soon and we’re all hoping that Australia in a couple of week’s time will be a lot more exciting and prove us wrong, but there’s no doubt about it: Formula One might just be in need of some serious Hormone Replacement Therapy.

If they need any pointers, they should watch the rerun of Sunday’s IndyCar 300 from Sao Paulo. Even though the American series racers don’t like driving in the rain, there was action from first to last corner and the race was eventually won by a man whose parents obviously had a sense of humour: Will Power.

Here’s hoping the 2010 F1 season doesn’t turn out to be too much of a bore. Without Michael Schumacher winning all the time it just won’t be the same…

My claim to fame…

2010-03-11T10:55:00.001Z

Google Streetview has gone live on the majority of the UK’s roads this morning, both urban and rural, so – as all good geeks do – I had a play around with it this morning.

Then I remembered that I had once seen the Google Cam car working its way through our sleepy village so started to have a potter about. And that’s when I discovered this:

It seems that not only do I remember the day the Google car was in the village, but it remembers me, too! At least I can say I was doing my bit for the planet, taking the bottles to the bottle bank in my green wheelie bin, as I was.

Growing up before 1980…

2010-03-10T09:07:00.001Z

I received this on e-mail yesterday and it made me smile… thought I’d share:

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning.... Uphill... Barefoot... BOTH ways… yadda, yadda, yadda

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!
But now that I'm over the ripe old age of thirty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia!

And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don't know how good you've got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have the Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!!

There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter - with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox, and it would take like a week to get there! Stamps were 10 pence!

Child Protective Services didn't care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our ass! Nowhere was safe!

There were no MP3's or Napsters or iTunes! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yourself!

Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio, and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up! There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car.. We'd play our favorite tape and "eject" it when finished, and then the tape would come undone rendering it useless. Cause, hey, that's how we rolled, Baby! Dig?

We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal, that's it!

There weren't any freakin' mobile phones either. If you left the house, you just didn't make a damn call or receive one. You actually had to be out of touch with your "friends". OH MY GOD !!! Think of the horror... not being in touch with someone 24/7!!! And then there's TEXTING. Yeah, right. Please! You kids have no idea how annoying you are.
And we didn't have fancy Caller ID either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your parents, your boss, your bookie, the collection agent... you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn't have any fancy PlayStation or Xbox video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like 'Space Invaders' and 'Asteroids'. Your screen guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!!! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen... Forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!
You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel!!! NO REMOTES!!! Oh, no, what's the world coming to?!?!

There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I'm saying? We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little rat-finks!
And we didn't have microwaves. If we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove! Imagine that!

And our parents told us to stay outside and play... all day long. Oh, no, no electronics to soothe and comfort. And if you came back inside... you were doing chores!

And car seats - oh, please! Mom threw you in the back seat and you hung on. If you were luckily, you got the "safety arm" across the chest at the last moment if she had to stop suddenly, and if your head hit the dashboard, well that was your fault for calling "shot gun" in the first place!

See! That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled rotten! You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980 or any time before!
Regards,

The Over 30 Crowd
(Send this to someone you'd like to make smile)

Sony PS3 meets Toyota Y2K

2010-03-02T09:15:00.001Z

My wind-up watch gets confused by February 29th every year and it’s still working…

Laying in bed this morning I was filled with dread as I heard horror stories on the news about Sony PlayStation 3 units going in to meltdown as a slightly delayed reaction to the Millennium Bug caught up with the modern world.

This caused me a moment of panic, as I love my PlayStation. It was probably the one gadget that I would take with me as I leapt from a burning building, mainly because it has all my high scores on it and a new one would mean I’d have to start all over again…

The problem was simple: for some reason, older PS3 units believed the year 2010 to be a Leap Year and, therefore, at midnight on Sunday simply changed the date to the 29th February 2010.

I didn’t switch my PS3 on yesterday, so I didn’t notice the issue, but despite Sony’s demands that users don’t switch on their consoles until they fix the bug I leapt out of bed and switched on my beloved console to make sure it was still alive.

Sure enough, it said today’s date was March 1st 2010. So I switched the date to March 2nd and all is fine. My high scores are still safe, my machine still connects to the Internet, planes haven’t fallen out of the sky, and Sony don’t have to send me a bug fix via urgent Acme courier delivery service.

It all seems as overblown as the Toyota accelerator pedal recall to me; After all, all drivers have got to do is hit the brakes and the car will stop and all PS3 users have got to do is change the date on their console. My wind-up watch gets confused by February 29th every year and it’s still working…

What That Renault Did This Month…

2010-03-01T16:31:00.001Z

Those of you who have been following the “Renault” blogs will know that in June 2009 I bought a Renault Vel Satis and by July 2009 I was regretting it. The car was littered with faults, all of which should have been resolved under the warranty that was apparently provided by the dealer that sold it to me: Bulldog Premier of Downham Market.

The list of faults were quite endless, ranging from little issues such as the outside temperature display not

Where the Sat Nav always thought it was...

working, through to the utterly ridiculous such as the satellite navigation constantly thinking it was parked in The Wash. Or the door mirrors that repeatedly adjusted themselves to a totally useless position each time you got in the car.

And then there were the more serious faults, such as the slightly annoying gearbox clunk and the starter motor that failed…

It was the starter motor that really was the straw that broke the camel’s back when it came to Bulldog Premier. When I’d purchased the car the salesman had told me it came with a 6-month, 6’000 mile all-inclusive warranty. And then I found out that they weren’t prepared to honour that, either because the salesman had lied to me (one suggestion put forward by the company secretary) and that I didn’t really have a warranty at all, or because they really just didn’t want to spend the money on the car and were doing their damnedest to ensure that they didn’t have to.

The gearbox ‘clunk’, they said, was a natural quirk of Renault’s revolutionary gearbox from 2002 and nothing to worry about. The car didn’t have an outside temperature gauge, they pointed out, which was why it didn’t work on the dashboard. The mirrors adjusted themselves according to the memory setting that I had in place, and therefore I must have set them wrong. And the satellite navigation didn’t work properly, they surmised, because it wasn’t an original copy of the Renault software. Which is odd, because they supplied it to me. And charged me for the disk…

You might remember from the last “Renault” blog that just as I thought I’d had a clear month with no problems, the dashboard lit up with an “Automatic Handbrake Failure” warning. When I took the car to a local Renault dealer, they pointed out that it was the computer that had failed and it would cost the better part of £600 to repair. Just to make a handbrake work again. “Oh,” the engineer added, “and your gearbox is f***ed.”

It turns out that the ‘quirky clunk’ that Bulldog had told me not to worry about was the sound of the automatic gearbox clutch slowly lunching itself. That’ll be at least another £1’000 please…

And so the Renault is no more. It’s gone, replaced with an ageing, high-mileage Chrysler Grand Voyager for the time being. It’s not pretty, but it’s practical, and it was cheap, and if the handbrake goes on that it should cost me nowhere near the amount it was going to on the Renault…

It’s a shame. I liked the Vel Satis, it ticked every synapse that makes me want to buy a car, and it was quick and comfortable. It could have been a pleasure to own, but it wasn’t. I know you can get “Friday afternoon” cars, always littered with problems, but you can also buy them from rubbish car dealers who’ll do their best to make it seem like it’s your fault, when it isn’t.

The Outside Temperature Gauge, for example, did exist. It was just that the wires behind the wing mirror had been cut and taped back together with electrician’s tape by some bodge-it mechanic. I couldn’t possibly say where from…

Vodafone Sure Signal

2010-02-20T10:47:00.001Z

Hoping the “power of the Internet” will finally get me an answer…

While the politicians are out and about talking about how the blogosphere will help them win the next General Election, I’m hoping that my little blog here, in my corner of the Internet, will get the attention of somebody who knows how the Vodafone Sure Signal works, and tell me how to make mine work!

I got it yesterday and was told it simply needed plugging in and leaving alone. All it’s managed to do, however, is repeatedly disrupt my Internet connection. In order to post this blog, I’ve had to unplug it completely to keep the connection alive long enough to get it out to the web!

The forums haven’t really generated any result other than to advise leaving it alone and it’ll “eventually” connect; however, if it keeps killing my Internet connection that’s never going to work!

So here’s my set up:

I’ve got a D-Link DSR-2640R running Firmware Version: 2.11.42.108(RE0.C29)3.9.4.150_v1.06 Hardware Version: B1

I connect through Opal Telecom (TalkTalk Business) and all the while it’s been connected my Vodafone Sure Signal has simply flashed the on-off light steadily. Over night I switched off the firewall and this morning the power light had stopped flashing, but no other connection lights were illuminated and my mobile signal was no better; and the Internet connection kept dropping!

Vodafone’s Sure Signal support sent me a mail with details of how to configure the router but none of it makes sense and, having looked through the router, none of the settings need changing – the device should be able to see “through” without any problems. Other than that, they seem unwilling to provide further assistance.

So, do I have a faulty Sure Signal? Does my router not support the device? (Nobody seems able to tell me.) Or should I give up and just going back to having ropey mobile signal in my building?

I’ll miss the News In Briefs, but The Sun has got to go…

2010-02-17T15:10:00.001Z

This is unlikely to cause Dominic Mohan any sleepless nights, but I think it’s about time I told the newsagent to stop delivering the pub’s copy of The Sun.

I don’t mind the newspaper itself but, like all my customers, I’m just fed up of being bombarded each day with a front page of footballer infidelities.

Indeed, one has to question why each of the men exposed by the newspaper would ever want to cheat on their gorgeous wives, but is it really any of our business? Does anybody really care? And do the likes of Cheryl Cole really deserve to have their lives destroyed on the front pages of the country’s tabloids?

I’m bored of it now, so it’s time to find a different paper to read.

Which is a bit of a shame really, as I’ll miss the News In Briefs section. Surely probably one of the best-written parts of the newspaper…

Out of the mouth of babes…

2010-02-12T09:36:00.001Z

If you’re somebody who follows my tweets or blogs, you’ll be aware that I’ve been having a little, er, car trouble of late.

Last night, over dinner, Ali and I were discussing the options that we have to free-up this little ‘issue’ we’re facing. Malachy, our eldest son, turns ten next month and is, at that age, becoming more and more interested in cars. He can identify most brands and is getting pretty good with models too. And his biggest concern is that, in order to alleviate our existing problem, we’re about to end up with “an old banger.”

“We always have cool cars,” he said. His definition of cool is slightly different to mine, but we’ll go with him on this one. “I like the cars we have. I don’t want an old banger.”

Jacob, who’s just turned seven, sat quietly, musing over the conversation going on around him. Eventually he asked: “why do we have to have an old banger?”

“We don’t,” I said. “But we don’t have the money to just go out and buy a brand new car right now so, if we change, it’s a stop-gap to just get rid of a little problem we’ve got at the moment.”

He seemed to accept this for a moment, and we got on with the business of eating lasagne.

Then Jacob got up and gave me a hug – signs of affection are rare from children with Asperger’s – and said “don’t worry, Daddy, I know how you can get money. Lots of money!”

Ali and I smiled at each other. We guessed where he was going – the kid, after all, is addicted to television adverts.

“All you’ve got to do is get all your gold, put it in a bag, and send it off to moneyforgold.com.” He beamed. “We’ll be rich and we can get a brand new car.”

You had to smile, otherwise you’d cry.

Now, if only we had some gold, eh…?!

Warning, Parking Brake faulty! (This month’s Renault blog.)

2010-02-01T09:53:00.001Z

Waking up this morning, on a cold, crisp February 1st morning, I thought about the Renault and considered that, at last, I had managed to make it through the whole month of January without a single thing going wrong with the car.

At last, I thought, maybe all the niggles are working their way out of the system.

Indeed, the most sinister thing to happen throughout the past month was that I discovered the car suffers from a very severe paranoia complex: SERVICE! the display screamed at me earlier in the month, accompanied by the soothing tones of the onboard computer’s voice over-riding the stereo and announcing: “Warning, fault, return to Renault dealer immediately.”

Prepared to curse loudly and smash an axe through the car’s windscreen in frustration, I investigated further and discovered that the whole cause of panic was that the windscreen washer bottle was empty.

Topping it back up again, the car appeared satiated and we carried on as normal. Nothing else, it seemed, went wrong.

Indeed, the car hasn’t been used much this month so the performance figures are low and it hasn’t really had much opportunity to get itself in to trouble, but – for the first time since purchasing it in June – we had a trouble-free month of ownership.

Until this morning, that was. It’s Jacob’s seventh birthday today and he insisted on being driven to school rather than using the bus, so we obliged.

“Warning!” Announced the soothing voice of the onboard computer as the car was started up. “Automatic parking brake is faulty. Return to Renault dealer immediately…”

Renault Vel Satis 3.5V6 Performance Log

Because of the weather, a quiet month business wise and other your-lips-are-moving-but-all-I’m-hearing-is-blah-blah-blah excuses, the Renault hasn’t been used much during January, which has brought some of its performance figures down further. Good job, really, as this bloody handbrake problem might have surfaced sooner…

Fuel Used: 18.6 gallons (down from 36.9)

Economy: 20.0 miles per gallon (down from 22.9)

Distance: 372.2 miles travelled (down from 846.3)

Average Speed: 25.4 miles per hour (down from 30.0)

Service due in: 12’200 miles

Odometer reading: 66’229 miles

The iPad – is it out of date already?

2010-01-30T12:21:00.001Z

Like Mélissa Theuriau, the iPad looks great but makes no sense to me whatsoever.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the iPad recently. Mainly because every time I watch the Internet, somebody’s talking about it. Or about John Terry bedding the wife of one of his football buddies.

Most of the people talking about the iPad thingy are full of praise for the way in which it’s going to revolutionise the computer industry. I have to say I’m completely unmoved by it.

This isn’t because I dislike Apple – admitting to this sort of heresy in public is likely to have me swinging from the pub sign before the day is out – but I do have to confess I’m not a huge Apple fan. It’s a personal thing, you understand. I don’t like football, either.

I did, however, watch the launch of the new iPad with some interest. Everybody was talking about it, so I didn’t want to miss out. But when Steve Jobs produced a very big iPhone, all I could think of was Dom Joly’s mobile phone sketch on Trigger Happy TV.

The iPad is undoubtedly very pretty, but then Mélissa Theuriau makes watching the French news interesting too, even though I have no idea what she’s saying.

And that’s my problem with the iPad – it looks fantastic, but I have no idea what it’s saying to me.

It does everything the iPhone does, on a much bigger screen, yet it doesn’t fit in my pocket. The iPhone has that wonderful twiddly thing you can do with your fingers that allows you to zoom in and out of pornography easily whilst watching it on the bus on your way home from work. The iPad does the same, just on a bigger screen so the bloke sat behind you can enjoy exactly the same bit of the movie that you are.

You can read e-books on it, which is probably causing Amazon’s Kindle some sleepless nights. And so on and so on. All the arguments for and against the iPad have been heard countless times. No point in repeating them here.

There is no doubt that Apple’s latest baby will have put the willies up one or two manufacturers, but despite the Apples Are Ace crowd screaming that it signals the death of the PC and the printed document, I can’t quite believe it does. In fact, it may already be out of date.

This video, featuring MIT genius Pranav Mistry, takes “smartphone” computing to a whole new level that even Captain James T. Kirk would struggle to get his head around. Best of all, this technology’s apparently already available. And Mistry has made it Open Source…

The video’s fourteen minutes long, but it’s worth finding the time to watch. It might cause the iPad some sleepless nights.

2010 Formula One Car Launch dates

2010-01-27T09:31:00.001Z

“When, oh when?” people ask, “are the Formula One cars launching?”

Well I’ll tell you. Okay, I won’t – autosport.com will.

The first one is tomorrow, with Ferrari officially launching their 2010 contender on the 28th January, swiftly followed by McLaren on Friday. Sauber and Renault are launching theirs on Sunday. Michael Schumacher’s new team – sorry, Mercedes GP – will launch on Monday 1st February, as will Williams and Torro Rosso, while sister team Red Bull won’t launch theirs until February 10th and new-comers Lotus will launch on February 12th.

That just leaves Force India and the remaining three New Boys – Campos, US F1, and Virgin – to announce their launch dates. If they turn up at all. Which I’m sure they will…

“Have you found any cock yet?” And other text message blunders…

2010-01-21T11:49:00.001Z

Years ago, while returning from a long-distance meeting, I sent Ali a text message that said “On way home, be naked, I want a snog.”

When I got home, Ali was tucked up in the corner of the sofa, wearing the thickest woolly jumper she possessed, and hiding behind a magazine. She also looked a little bit worried.

Showing me her phone, the text message she’d received said “On way home, be naked, I want a pooh.”

Understandably, she was unsure of my intentions and had chosen to watch Big Brother instead.

Over the years, similar such text message blunders have occurred when the predictive text language has opted for another word instead and I’ve not scrolled through the options, including once assuming a friend’s wife’s name was Yummy before I’d finished typing in Yvonne.

This morning I sent Ali a text message suggesting she stop by the local garage to pick up some coal as we’re still waiting for the delivery. What she received was “You better go to the garage for some cock.”

Interestingly, I’ve just discovered the same permutation of letters results in anal, too.

Memo to self: always check the text message before you press send.

So, has anybody else had any amusing text blunders? Or is it just me…?

Gran Turismo 5 – the elephant in the gaming room…

2010-01-15T09:28:00.001Z

What is going on with Sony’s flagship racing game, Gran Turismo 5?

Originally the idea that spawned the games console itself, GT5 is – was – the driving game to beat all driving games, needing a much more powerful console to render itself on and therefore being probably the only reason to invent a whole new games console, the PlayStation 3.

Indeed, when the PS3 was launched it originally came with a teaser game, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, just to whet your appetite and get you excited about the prospect of spending fifty quid on an upgrade of your favourite driving game.

But, since it’s launch in 2007, nothing else has come of the game itself.

Sony keep releasing online trailers, teasers and, just before Christmas, a Nissan-based competition game just to keep fans excited about the three-year wait for the game.

But gamers are getting bored and now Sony have released information that the game, which had been delayed again until March 2010, will now be postponed “indefinitely”.

The company are citing production related difficulties behind the ongoing delays, but I’ve got another idea: perhaps they’re just scared by the level of competition out there now and maybe GT5 isn’t going to be as good as all the hype has promised.

I’m beginning to think I should jack the PS3 in, get an XBox and play Forza Motorsport instead…

Spring, it’s the fault of Global Warming.

2010-01-10T17:20:00.001Z

322’731 new potholes in England and Wales caused by the snow and ice.

That, of all the statistics relating to Britain’s Big Freeze – as cited by today’s Independent on Sunday – is probably my favourite of them all. Mainly because it’s tangible: there are two potholes in my driveway that have appeared during this winter and, before long, I’m sure we’ll be able to use them to follow Professor Von Hardwigg to the centre of the Earth.

The others, whilst probably factual, are little more than hyperbole and scaremongering. Like the 40’000 people government experts believe will die because of the freezing temperatures, or the record 463’000’000 cubic metres of gas used on Friday. Of course it’s a record: today, more people live in this country and use the gas supply than ever before.

Or how about the 8’500 schools closed so far due to the weather. Why?

When I was a kid (here comes a rose-tinted moment if ever there was one) the only reason we got snow days was if the diesel in the school bus froze. And Malachy, who’s about to turn ten, tells me that when they are at school on a snowy day, they’re not allowed out to play in it in case they get hurt.

But isn’t that the point of being a kid? Snow angels, snow balls with ice hidden in them, that type of thing. In my day, the best game was to make an ice path right outside the entrance to the building that housed the headmaster’s office.

Without getting caught.

These days they close because the teachers can’t make it in, even if the kids can. But aren’t teachers supposed to report for duty to the nearest school if they aren’t able to make it to their normal base? The problem, as a customer-in-the-know explained to me yesterday, is that the teacher’s CRB check isn’t valid for other schools, only the one they work in – so they might not be safe to work in other schools…

The Big Freeze is due to last a further ten days, and one of my favourite sights since it started snowing in the weeks before Christmas has been watching drivers of 4x4 cars career off the road and then get out of their cars, scratch their heads and wonder why their vehicle wasn’t impervious to the white stuff.

The reason is simple: snow and ice, in a car fitted with ordinary road tyres, makes no difference whether you’ve got one-wheel-drive or four-wheel-drive – if you haven’t got traction You Will Crash. Here, in England, we never seem to understand how to drive in these conditions, yet in snowy climes such as Switzerland all they do is fit skinnier tyres to their Porsches, cover them in snow chains, and then they can still drive up in to the mountains to throw themselves back down on two slim planks of wood.

Walking with my family around the local Fen this morning, another thought occurred to me. Despite the exclamations that this weather is the worst in more than thirty years, potentially the coldest in the past hundred (does that still make it the fault of the motor car?) and with almost two weeks of it left to come, the Climate Change environmentalists appear to have been silenced. (If you ignore Peru for a moment, that is, where the unprecedented flash floods are being blamed on Global Warming.)

But despite the promise that there are at least ten more days of this weather to come, I noticed the snow around us is already melting, and where snow abounded just this morning there are now puddles. Including in my newly acquired potholes.

This means that soon we will be seeing The Big Freeze’s sequel, The Big Thaw and, as we head inexorably towards Spring, we’ll see the country start to warm up again. At that point, somebody is bound to pop up and say that the flooding isn’t caused by the seasons changing and the snow disappearing, but by Climate Change.

I suggest you start sand-bagging now…

Games Consoles Are Taking Over My House

2010-01-08T20:26:00.001Z

“all I find myself craving for is a good game of Jet Set Willy…”

I swore I would never let it happen but, very subtly and without me really noticing, Games Consoles have inexorably crept in to every room within the house.

Now, before I sound like a moaning old minnie, I love computer games. I don’t know why, as I’m not actually very good at them, but for as long as I can remember I’ve always had a games console. My dad got me the Sinclair ZX81 the day it was launched. Then I upgraded it to the Sinclair ZX Spectrum with 48k of memory, which I quickly upgraded to the 128k (much to the annoyance of my Dad) the day it was released, citing – as only a fourteen-year-old can – that the 48k had suddenly become rubbish overnight.

Then, as my teenage years dwindled and adulthood loomed, I bought the Sega Megadrive. And then the MegaCD the day it was released, funding them both by the delightful discovery of a finance account with Lombard Tricity.

In fact, it was computer games consoles that probably saw the demise of my credit rating before I’d even hit the ripe old age of 21, as no sooner had I started paying for the Sega equipment than Sony popped up with the original PlayStation.

And I just had to have one of those the day it came out…

As the years disappeared behind me I thought I’d grown out of the games consoles, until I went shopping one day and somehow came home with a PlayStation 2. I think I’d actually gone out for potatoes.

The PS2 sat gathering dust under our television for many years, as Ali bought me Sony’s portable version, the PSP, almost as soon as it was released. The idea was simple: I spend a lot of time away from the house part of this building, so the PSP was a much easier way to get my gaming fix than finding time to sit down in front of the television.

Then, Christmas 2008, my Dad bought me a PlayStation 3. It is, without doubt, my favourite gadget – not because it’s a brilliant gaming machine, which it is, but also because it’s a fantastic Blu-Ray player and, as the past year has gone on, it’s become a stunning media machine too, complete with the ability to download hi-def films to its hard-drive, or watch iPlayer through the LCD in the lounge, rather than on this tiny laptop screen.

I truly think it is almost Godlike, a status almost everybody else seems to think should be given to the iPhone.

The PlayStation 2 was consigned to a Tesco carrier bag and placed in a corner of the office. Until Malachy discovered it was there a few days ago, and hasn’t stopped harping on about it being put in his and Jacob’s bedroom ever since.

The thing is – quite how this has happened, I don’t know – both boys, and Ali, already have their own Nintendo DS each. And, over Christmas, I promised I’d bring the Nintendo Wii up to the flat from the pub as Sky Sports has put pay to anybody wanting to use it on a regular basis.

I always said I wouldn’t let this house become dominated by games consoles, but I seem to have failed. All of a sudden there’s a PlayStation 3, a Nintendo Wii, three Nintendo DS units, a PlayStation 2 and my Sony PSP up here.

And all I actually find myself craving for is my old 48k ZX Spectrum and a good game of Jet Set Willy. Fortunately, I still have it, in its original box too…

In December The Renault Used…

2010-01-02T12:14:00.001Z

When the Vel Satis broke down last month it wasn’t strictly the car’s fault that it happened, but I quickly found reason to become frustrated with the blessed thing.

Adam and I worked the bar for a wedding reception on Friday 18th, ironically the day before my own wedding anniversary and an untimely reminder that I’d completely forgotten to get anything for it, and we eventually finished lugging all the equipment back to the pub at about two in the early hours of the Saturday morning.

With the weather heavy with the snow and bitterly cold, I’d parked the Renault at a jaunty angle in the car park so I could use its headlights to light up the interior of the shed we were unloading in to, before we took the mountain bikes for a quick spin around the pub car park.

Cold, tired and in need of a beer after the night’s work, I decided to leave the Renault where it had stopped, locked it and wandered in to the pub where, even at that late hour, a couple of friends were waiting to keep Adam and I company.

With the weathe r so full of snow that weekend neither Ali or I ventured out in the car at all and so it didn’t get moved but, come Monday (a day we usually stay shut for lunch time so that we can have a bit of time off), I decided I’d treat Ali to a surprise, two-day-late Anniversary lunch and, under the guise of taking the kids outside to play, walked them up to a friends house where I’d arranged for them to stay while we went out.

Then I walked back, calmly told Ali to put her posh frock on, and headed out to the car to get it all nice and warm and clear the snow off it. Walking towards it I noticed that my keycard didn’t appear to be unlocking the Renault, but that didn’t really come as a surprise: that particular card is notoriously unreliable so I went back and got Ali’s keycard. Which also didn’t unlock the car.

It was at that point that I noticed that the rear left door, which Adam and I had unloaded some of the equipment through, wasn’t properly shut. Which meant that the interior light had been on since Friday night – and that, in turn, meant the battery was flat.

Frustrated with myself for not checking the car before I’d gone in, I unlocked it with the magic key and popped the bonnet, which basically reveals nothing but a whole load of plastic panels, none of which tell you where the battery might be located.

Eventually I found it, then wandered next door to where some builders were working and asked if I could borrow one of their vans to jump start the car. Eager for the chance to down tools and take a tea break, they came round to help but we couldn’t get close enough for the jump leads to stretch because of the humorous angle I’d abandoned the car at before the weekend started.

Ordinarily, this would be no problem because you’d just stick the car in neutral, take off the handbrake and roll it back. But this is the sodding Vel Satis we’re talking about here, which happens to have an electronic handbrake, and the car will always put the brake on automatically when you switch the engine off. Once the battery is flat, you can’t – it would seem – get the brake off again. According to the local garage, they have to come out (at great expense, I’m sure) and use their computers to release the handbrake.

Not prepared to bow to them, we tried daisy-chaining the jump leads, but that didn’t work. So I went and borrowed a trickle charger from a friend and set about charging the battery slowly.

This, of course, meant I couldn’t get Ali in to town so we wandered up to our friend’s house where the children were staying and her Surprise Anniversary Lunch turned out to be a cheese and ham toastie cooked by Yvonne…

Normally, I’d stop there and give you the atrocious running cost figures for the month, but I thought I’d also share this picture of Uncle Paul having to dig the Renault out of the snow when we got stuck getting in to another pub’s car park for my Dad’s birthday, and we did also take a run down to Fulham between Christmas and New Year to see Ali’s sister. I made the mistake of using the car’s inbuilt Satellite Navigation to get us there, which works fine when it’s not having to navigate you anywhere but permanently thinks it’s on the A6 if you try and get it to actually direct you.

Eventually it got us down the A10 to the North Circular Road and roughly in the direction we were supposed to be going. But then it got lost. Then it got confused by a turn I chose to make whilst waiting for it to figure out where we were so it gave me one last direction – towards the Hammersmith Flyover – and then promptly switched itself off, leaving me in a part of London I’m not completely familiar with and no choice but to admit to Ali that she’s been right all along, Satellite Navigation systems are hopeless, and then listen to her crow on about it as she deftly navigated me to her sister’s front door.

Renault Vel Satis 3.5V6 Performance Log

In last month’s report on the car’s behaviour I made the mistake of saying I hoped it behaved over Christmas. As that clearly asked for trouble, this month I’ll just predict that it’s all going to go horribly wrong before the month has even got under way. Meanwhile, here are the stats:

Fuel Used: 36.9 gallons (up from 29.9)

Economy: 22.9 miles per gallon (up from 21.9)

Distance: 846.3 miles travelled (up from 655.6)

Average Speed: 30.0 miles per hour (up from 29.1)

Service due in: 12’572 miles

Odometer reading: 65’856 miles

What happened to you in 2009

2009-12-31T10:25:00.001Z

I hope you haven’t bought tickets for Michael Jackson’s O2 concert was the text I received.

Why? I replied Is he dead?

It was a flippant remark, and one I quickly came to regret.

Looks that way was the reply that beeped in to my phone a second later and, turning on Sky News, sure enough there was confirmation. Michael Jackson was dead. Thankfully, I hadn’t bought tickets…

Now, on the last day of the year, I find myself wondering what has been the thing that has stood out most for 2009. Sure, we could look at celebrity deaths, and if that’s what you’re interested in then the list is depressingly long, as it is every year: Keith Floyd, Farrah Fawcett, Patrick Swayze, Brittany Murphy, Patrick McGoohan, Stephen Gately and Wendy Richard are to name just a few.

If that’s what you mark your year by, why not look at the six pages of those who’ve passed away here: http://www.whosdatedwho.com/celebrities/people/list/celebrity-categories.asp?FD=yod&ID=2009

But what else has stood out for you in 2009? It could be something special that’s happened (at least two of my friends have got engaged over Christmas alone, two more have got married this year, one has had a baby), or it could just be something funny you remember: Jenny Faulkner on GMTV yesterday morning made me chuckle when, remembering her time on Entertainment TV, she pointed out: “I learned that whenever Ben [Co-host Ben Shepherd] had something moist in his hand, it would usually end up in my face.”

Some things will just come back to haunt you for the rest of your life. Just ask Tiger Woods…

For me, it’s difficult to pinpoint what was the exact highlight of the year. I managed to get featured in the business section of The Times and also in Private Eye, as well as getting the pub on the television and radio news broadcasts a couple of times.

The disaster of the year is definitely buying the Renault – a deal that looked too good to be true, it certainly turned out to be! Six and a bit months on and it is still causing me nightmares (look to my next blog over the weekend for details of its insanity during December) but there’ve been good times to, including getting time to spend with the kids over both the Summer and Christmas holidays, something that rarely seems to happen these days.

But when I think back to what has to have been the thing that stood out to me the most in 2009 it still has to be the death of Michael Jackson. Troubled as he was, he was such a shining star during my teenage years and his death wasn’t so much of a surprise, but certainly a shock.

I wasn’t upset – I don’t do the wailing and the teeth gnashing thing, especially when it comes to somebody I didn’t know at all other than via his music, but it was still probably the biggest event of the past twelve months.

And that made me think that the most outstanding thing that’s happened this year is that we’ve made it to the end – the pub is still trading, despite news stories of so many closing on a daily basis, and the family are well.

So here’s to 2010. I said at the start of this year that publicans who were still in business by the end of the year would be in a good position to survive in to the future. I hope that’s true for all you publicans out there who follow this blog; I even hope it’s true for me! There’s a lot to look forward to in the coming months, so I’ll take this opportunity to wish everybody a happy and prosperous one.

Happy New Year!

Why Isn’t There A Christmas Song At Number One?

2009-12-20T14:42:00.001Z

The hype and hyperbole surrounding this week’s Number One record for Christmas can hardly have failed to catch anybody’s attention.

First up for the Christmas Number One slot is Joe McElderry, the latest incarnation of Simon Cowell’s relentless televisual approach to making millions out of getting the public to vote for who they think should win the X-Factor contest.

Up against the apparently clean living Joe is Rage Against The Machine, who probably would have stood no chance ordinarily of making it to number one except a rowdy bunch of disillusioned protagonists have set up a Facebook page and asked people to make sure RATM’s “Killing In The Name Of…” beats Cowell’s manufactured beast to the top of the festive charts.

Predictably, Simon Cowell has taken a bit of umbrage to this approach. As has co-host Cheryl Cole. And, according to yesterday’s Sun newspaper, so has their progeny, Joe.

They think the attempts by the Facebook crew to beat their young hero to number one are an underhand attempt to undermine their grip on the pop market. No more shallow, though, I think than spending weeks suckering the general public into paying to vote who they want to win, virtually guaranteeing the number one spot and a place in the record books.

Personally, I have absolutely no knowledge of either band. I can’t abide watching so-called “Reality TV” and the abhorrent noise that Rage Against The Machine seem to make, not to mention the language they use, puts me off them.

But there’s no denying both are powerful forces and, at last count, RATM appeared to be beating the X-Factor winner in the shoot-out for the festive number one spot.

Which is disappointing. I keep hoping that Shakin’ Stevens will pop out of the woodwork with a remaking of “Merry Christmas, Everyone.”

After all, we’re talking about the Christmas Number One here, not some manufactured artist or a rubbish song that’s only reach infamy through a Social Networking site.

I’ve listened to both songs. Once. I don’t like either of them. They’re not festive. They don’t make me feel jolly or want to dance around the Christmas tree wearing awful woolly jumpers and drinking mulled wine. They don’t put me in the mood for Christmas.

And surely, isn’t that the point of the Christmas Number One?

Maybe next year the X-Factor could get them all to sing holiday songs in the lead up to the season and put us all in the mood. Then again, hopefully not…

What happened to Cliff Richard? He used to rule the Christmas charts. Not Simon Cowell.

Why Children Shouldn’t Be Allowed At Nativity Plays

2009-12-16T01:17:00.001Z

There’s a reason I get all Bah-Humbuggy around this time of year: school nativity plays.

Last week, it was the turn of my six-year-old to perform dutifully – and I say ‘last week’ because it really has taken me a week to recover from it.

Not that the play was terrible, you understand. After all, we’re talking about a bunch of Year 2 kids here, who pretty much mumble their way through whatever script their teacher has to prompt them through, looking all cute in their dressing gown shepherds costumes whilst mothers all around the room coo, and ah and “aw bless” permanently.

The problem was the fact that I had to attend the afternoon session which, it appeared, meant that I was the only bloke in a school assembly hall full of doting mothers who’d all forgotten they were in their (average age) late twenties and had suddenly turned in to grandmothers.

For those who aren’t aware, my six year old suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, which – basically – means he has difficulty socialising and can become a little obsessive about things. Sometimes it also gives him an excuse to get away with just being an awkward sod.

On his Nativity Day, however, he was obsessing about the fact that his dad was going to be in the audience. He wasn’t bothered about performing in front of me, he just wanted to make sure he could see me from wherever he was on the stage.

Having paid my 50p for the performance’s programme at the door – which turned out to be a red sheet of A4 paper with all the performing kids names on it and not, actually, a programme at all – I sought out my seat. I’d been reliably informed that Jacob would be second-row centre on the stage so figured an aisle seat would give me a vantage point from which I could see him and, more importantly, from which he could see me.

The hall was already filling up to its capacity so I grabbed a seat roughly half way down the room, right on the aisle itself, so that I was clearly visible from the stage and then set about messing with my phone while I waited for the show to start. This, of course, meant I missed him as he walked in – and it also meant I hadn’t noticed that the real-life equivalent of Marge Simpson had taken the seat in front of me.

Suddenly, my entire view of the stage was obscured by a bouffant of untidily bunned hair. It also meant that Jacob couldn’t see me. I leant to the right and saw that he was scanning the audience for me so tried to catch his eye and raise my hand. At that point, Marge moved to the right, obliterating my view.

I leaned to the left, tried once again to make eye contact with my son, and then Marge leaned to the left.

The show started, and Jacob and I hadn’t yet communicated with each other. Every now and then I caught a glimpse of him, looking around the room with increasingly panicked eyes. Each time I moved to try and get a clear shot at him, Marge moved to block me. It was as if she was magnetically attached to my swivelling head.

Naturally, my constant movements were beginning to irritate the hell out of the mother behind me. “Oh for God’s sake,” she hissed. “Can’t you just sit still?”

“No!” I hissed back. “I’m trying to make sure my son knows I’m here and the woman with the big hair in front keeps moving.”

Marge heard me – which probably meant the head teacher did too – and promptly turned to glare at me. My loud hint didn’t seem to have worked, however, as once again I tried to move to catch Jacob’s attention and she moved to prevent me.

By now, the play was underway but I had no clue as to what was going on as I had become feverishly occupied with making eye contact with Jacob. I was just on the verge of standing up and calling “cooey!” to him when I managed to dummy right then left quickly enough to fool Marge’s hair. She stayed right, I stayed left and Jacob’s eyes met mine.

They lit up, he stood up, and the next thing I knew he was doing the sailor’s dance he’d been unsure of doing.

I was happy. Now, I could sit back and it didn’t matter if we didn’t see each other any more through the play.

Except that Marge had brought along little Maggie. Only, unlike Maggie in the TV show, this girl didn’t have a dummy. Or the wherewithal to keep her tiny trap shut. Instead, she decided she was bored and therefore began to scream and cry. Marge, desperate to make sure she didn’t miss a moment of whichever cherub was hers on the stage, ignored her screaming child.

And ignored it.

You couldn’t hear what the six year olds up front were saying or singing because of this baby, but it kept on being allowed to wail and nobody said a word about it. It was just accepted; other children in the audience actually took up the call of their comrade.

At one point it actually paused for breath, but you still couldn’t hear the stage because in that moment of pause all you could hear were other mothers going “aw, bless, doesn’t he look cute.” “Look at her, isn’t she adorable.”

And then little Maggie started wailing again.

At some point I think I daydreamed of shooting both mother and child, but instead I made a mental note to suggest to the head teacher that children who aren’t performing shouldn’t be allowed along to the plays.

Eventually, after forty five minutes, Jacob’s school nativity finished and they all marched off the stage.

I still have no idea what it was about, and the programme’s utterly useless as it doesn’t actually tell me anything. But, as the children marched up the aisle and back to their classroom, Jacob stepped out of line and gave me a hug. “Thank you for coming to my play, Daddy,” he said seriously, then bumped fists with me and wandered off.

Aw. Bless.

Should Jenson Button Have Won X-Factor?

2009-12-15T00:29:00.001Z

Can you remember who came second in the 2007 BBC Sports Personality of the Year?

What about in 2008?

On both occasions it was a Formula One driver: Lewis Hamilton.

In fairness, can you actually remember who won the title in both of those years? In `07 it was boxer Joe Calzaghe and in `08 it was Chris Hoy.

To be honest, despite the fact that I’m something of a slightly obsessive motorsport fanatic, I didn’t believe that Hamilton deserved the award in 2007, although I was somewhat surprised he didn’t win it given the media furore surrounding his first year in the sport.

But that’s why I didn’t think he should have won it then anyway – it was his first year in the sport. What he achieved that year was certainly, undeniably, meteoric in a sport that sees so many newbies beaten to a pulp by their more experienced, and much richer, team-mates. And he did have that little argument with Alonso, who threw his toys out of the pram because McLaren appeared to be favouring their prodigal son.

2008 was a little closer to call. Winning his first Formula One World Title in only his second year of competing certainly proved he has the talent and the ability to take on the statistics of the mighty Michael Schumacher, but he did find himself up against Chris Hoy, who just happened to have won three impressive gold medals at that summer’s Olympic Games.

This year, though, the smart money was on another F1 driver, Jenson Button, to win the prestigious BBC award. Why? At the start of this year Button, team-mate Barrichello, and the hundreds employed at Brackley’s Honda F1 factory, didn’t have a team to race for. He was effectively out of a job, and the odds were against him finding a competitive seat in another team.

Eventually, Ross Brawn and Nick Fry came through with a financial deal that saw the team able to turn up in Australia for the season opening race. A deal was done with Mercedes for an engine that had to then be shoe-horned into a chassis that was designed for a Honda engine, and the bookies had Button at a hundred to one to win the title.

The odds, as they say, were stacked against him and rebranded team Brawn GP.

Yet, despite financial worries, uncertainty over the shotgun marriage of engine and chassis, driver and team triumphed in the face of adversity. Button himself took a massive pay cut to assist the team and funded much of his own transport. Some might argue that he’s rich and he had no choice if he wanted to stay driving in Formula One, and that’s true, but it also shows the level of commitment he was prepared to put in.

The reward was success, and his first championship after ten years of trying that had been beleaguered by awkward team-mates, truculent team bosses, some dodgy management decisions, and a somewhat unflattering playboy image cultivated by both the driver himself and the tabloid media.

You could forgive Ryan Giggs, then, for looking awkwardly surprised when he was announced as the 2009 BBC Sports Personality of the Year, pushing Button in to second place.

The result left many wondering how it had happened.

There are a couple of possibilities, ignoring the glaringly obvious one that many people simply don’t think Formula One is a sport, and that the car does most of the hard work.

The first is that Ryan Giggs is a footballer – and, as we all know because The Sun tells us so, there is nothing in the world more important than football. This means every teenager with a mobile phone will have been calling in to vote for Giggs because his was the only name they recognised on the list.

The second is that the BBC made the hideously poor decision to broadcast Sunday’s Sports Personality of the Year, which relies on viewers to vote during the course of the show for who they want to win, at exactly the same time as the X-Factor final was being shown on ITV.

Whilst the BBC’s show brought in a fraction more than four million viewers, ITV’s flagship show got almost five times that amount.

With everybody hellbent on making sure Joe McElderry won and thus lining Simon Cowell’s pockets with even more gold, they forgot to switch to the other channel and vote for any of the ten worthy candidates for the Sports Personality award.

I have no idea if a racing driver will be in the running for next year’s Sports Personality award but it strikes me that, if the BBC want people to actually watch the show in 2010, they’re going to have to either block all ITV signals or pick a date that doesn’t conflict with the nation’s obsession with the X-Factor.

Alternatively, employ Cowell to radically overhaul – and judge – the 2010 BBC Sports Personality of the Year.

Oi, Santa Claus…! Where’s my f***ing bike?

2009-12-11T10:38:00.001Z

Watching my children attempt to write their Christmas wish lists to Father Christmas this week I couldn’t help but wonder why kids actually bother these days. Malachy has already announced that he knows it’s us that put the Christmas presents under the tree and therefore his letter to the North Pole was more of a Final Demand, while Jacob decided it was too hard to write a letter and just pushed the paper to one side and went back to watching Spongebob Squarepants.

Well, I still believe in Father Christmas – indeed, he visited the pub yesterday – so I thought I’d give it a go for myself, just in case he’s got the North Pole hooked up to the ‘net finally.

Here goes:

Dear Father Christmas,

I really have been a very good boy this year – in fact, I’ve kept myself out of so much trouble that I’m actually hoping for two oranges in my stocking this year rather than the measly none I got last year. But let’s not linger on that.

It’s been quite a good year, actually. Business has been a bit tight but Ali and I’ve worked pretty hard to keep everything together so I hope you’ll see to it that when you unload your sack down my chimney on Christmas Eve something here can be in it. (And if, as my nine year old son seems to think, you’re not really real, then maybe somebody else reading this can be generous enough to think one or two things here might make good gifts.)

It has also been a while since I’ve written you a letter, but I thought I’d get this one in to you quickly as, according to Gordon Brown, global warming means you might not make it to next year…

Ta muchly,

Mark

Wish list: (mostly found in this month’s Stuff magazine, admittedly)

Aspiral Clock – www.aspiralclocks.com

I quite like unusual time pieces – you should see some of the watches I have, one even tells the time in binary – so this one would fit my collection perfectly. Admittedly, at £350 it’s a touch expensive, but they do say that for that price they guarantee to have it delivered to the North Pole before you get out delivering. And who wouldn’t want a clock that tells time by twisting on the wall while a ball-bearing maintains its position to tell the time? Pure, costly genius.

North Face E-Tip Gloves - http://fwd.five.tv/gadgets/sports/mountain/north-face-e-tip-gloves

At some point in the coming year, I’m going to change my mobile phone and, despite my liking for normal telephones which have buttons on them to press to get it to do things, the chances are that the industry’s hellbent approach to technology means that whatever I do get next will have a touch screen. The problem with touch screens is that when it’s cold, the new technology can’t recognise your touches. So to send a text message or make a call you’ll have to take your gloves off. Annoying when it’s freezing outside. Now, admittedly, I won’t be changing my phone until summer so I don’t actually need these gloves until next winter, but I’ll have forgotten about them by then so I’d like them now. And, at twenty quid, they’re not actually that expensive! Cool.

Sony Ericsson Satio - http://www.sonyericsson.com/cws/products/mobilephones/overview/satio?cc=gb&lc=en

Now, I know my mobile isn’t due for renewal until summer next year, but I’ve already thought long and hard about what to replace my existing W980 phone with. You see, I think the iPhone’s great, but do I really need one? No – because I live and work in a pub and rarely see the outside world. I am also never more than five feet away from a desktop or laptop computer that’s connected directly to the Internet, which is infinitely better than anything the iPhone can chuck at me. But what I do want from a mobile is a good camera – I had a Sony with a great camera on it a couple of phones back and I really miss it. Their new Satio has a mind-boggling 12.1 megapixel camera built in and, whilst a bit chunky, will surely use less space in my pocket than carrying both my current phone and my ageing Pentax Optio S50 digital camera. So I’ve either got to wait ‘til summer, or some generous benefactor can spend £450 on a contract free one for me for Christmas…

PowerMat - http://www.powermateu.com/pm_uk

In this modern world of so many rechargeable devices, I really do get fed up with having to search around for somewhere to plug my mobile or my MP3 player in to charge them up. Or the camera. Or Ali’s personal marital aids. Living in a building built in 1704, there really aren’t enough electric sockets to keep up with all the personal paraphernalia our modern lives desire. But help is at hand – I want a PowerMat. It uses one socket and you literally just put whatever needs charging on to the top of it and it’ll charge it up by the power of osmosis. Or witchcraft. I haven’t actually worked out how it works, but it’s the sort of magic that even my uncle wouldn’t understand.

Pure Sensia - http://www.touchmyradio.com/

All our bedside clocks are broken at the moment. All of them. Even my wonderful Ferrari alarm clock – which wakes me up to the sound of a Ferrari Formula One engine no longer works properly thanks to the troublesome thumbs of my youngest child – and Ali’s appears to not be able to do anything other than play AlphaBeat tracks any more. But the Pure Sensia would wake you to digital radio, music wirelessly streamed from the Internet, and the first thing I could see when I wake up would be my Twitter feed… Ah, geeky bliss.

YuuWaa – www.yuuwaa.com

My file storage is utterly unreliable. I have files stored all over the place. Blogs and pieces written for The Publican magazine are stored on Google Documents somewhere in The Cloud, pictures are stored on an external hard drive, accounts spreadsheets are kept on a USB memory stick that I keep losing and I lost my whole family tree a couple of months when the backup file was the only file I didn’t actually put on a separate drive just before I wiped my laptop to install Windows 7. With YuuWaa, however, I would have none of these troubles as it provides online storage and local storage via the USB stick, and means I can share files seamlessly with the other machines on my network. Or even you, my loving friends and family… Might as well go for the top of the range Plus version. It’s only £29.99

Buzz for the PS3 - http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0017USAPE/?tag=googhydr-21&hvadid=4923246069&ref=pd_sl_3g17qakb64_b

I love my PlayStation 3 – it’s pretty much a media portal these days for everything ever that I want to do. Did you know, with its web browser, you can actually get Internet porn on the telly? Oh, and iPlayer. And now I can download movies to it, too. But I never, ever, let any of the rest of the family play on it. It’s mine mine mine. To be fair, I only wanted the PS3 for Gran Turismo 5, but as that is never going to come out – it would seem – I have to start looking at other uses for it. And that might mean sharing it with the family. The Buzz quiz games seem like a good place to start. There are different types and, with the controllers, means all four of us can play. Until I win, of course, and then Jacob will throw a strop…

I could probably make this list much longer, but it would only get more expensive…! Anyhoo, Santa, I hope you can help out.

Mark.

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Incidentally, you can read my blog on getting the kids to turn the pub’s lights off on The Publican at: http://www.thepublican.com/story.asp?sectioncode=16&storycode=65967

Silverstone Makes A Break Through…

2009-12-07T17:09:00.001Z

Yippee! There can hardly be anyone, with the exception of the crew at Donnington, who isn’t pleased to hear the news that’s been announced today: Silverstone has signed a new seventeen year deal with Bernie Ecclestone to host the British Formula One Grand Prix.

Quite right, too. It shouldn’t have been moved from Silverstone anyway.

To the outsider, Bernie’s reasons for taking the show away from Silverstone were nothing more than spiteful. He expects an old wartime aerodrome with more history in motor racing than most current F1 drivers have got in their DNA to conform to the same standards as, say, Abu Dhabi, which had a billion dollars thrown at it and, whilst a flashy and extrovert way to end the season, resulted in a damp squib of a race.

It isn’t going to transform over night, but he expected it to, and when the BRDC tried to get him to see sense he threw a hissy fit and gave the race to Donnington, who promptly dug up their track and then ran out of money.

Now Silverstone have both the Moto GP and the British Grand Prix in their calendar for next year, and there are smiles all round the boardroom.

Surely Bernie could do nothing now to scupper their plans to prove they are a worthy host for the show?

Well, yes he could, actually. Because the race is provisionally scheduled in its traditional slot, which would mean it would fall on Sunday 11th July 2010. And that’s World Cup Final day.

If England were, by the skin of their teeth, able to make it through to the Final, nobody will want to travel to Silverstone as they’ll all be in the pub praying like crazy the home team can do it for the first time in forty four years.

And then Bernie will say: “see, I told you nobody was interested in Silverstone.”

I hope that provisional date can be changed, and give the circuit a fighting chance in its first year of a new contract…

England out of the World Cup … Who cares?

2009-12-06T13:20:00.001Z

If, like me, you’re not one of those football fans then the news that the England team actually qualified for next year’s tournament, and that we have the easiest opening group ever, will probably have left a sinking feeling in your heart and the next seven months until we fail to win the 2010 World Cup will be stretching ahead of you like a yawning chasm.

I probably know more about the footballer’s wives, and the designer-label lingerie that they like to wear for photoshoots in lads’ magazines such as FHM, than I do about footballers or the game itself.

Honestly, I sometimes feel like I’m the only man on Earth who doesn’t know what the Offside Rule is. Everytime somebody tries to explain it to me, during the next game I watch I cry “Offside, Ref, c’mon, book ‘im, get up you puff!”, only to be told that the Offside Rule means something completely different today. And it’ll be different again the next time I watch the game.

There are even girls that actually know more about the rules of football than I do.

The last time England won the World Cup, footballs were made out of lead and were apt to give players concussion when they tried to head them in to goals, yet already the cacophony of noise has started in the tabloids about how we can do it THIS TIME! The weight of expectation on John Terry’s squad is unbelievable, and we haven’t even got to South Africa yet.

So it was with blessed relief that I read the Independent’s take on a countdown to next year’s World Cup in their Sunday edition today.

The print edition looks much better, as they’ve used images, but the online version of the article reads just as well. In short, they’ve predicted the headlines leading up to next summer’s International tournament and my personal favourite will, apparently, occur on April 17th 2010 (ironically, my birthday):

Wayne Rooney reveals that the crying of his baby son Kai occasionally wakes him up in the night. The Sun asks: "Is this the most evil baby in Britain?"

Perhaps, however, most tellingly the Independent predicts that England will lose on penalties to Argentina during a quarter final game on July 2nd. On July 3rd the England squad will be denied re-entry in to their country and by July 4th the rest of the world cup will play out, but the UK won’t care any more.

Tongue-in-cheek it might be, but it does accurately portray the hysteria that is about to come to this country during the first half of 2010, and the depression that inevitably follows.

It’s a good read; find it here: http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/the-ios-world-cup-countdown-1835043.html

It’s too expensive searching for Little Green Men

2009-12-04T20:01:00.001Z

According to the website defencemanagement.com, the Ministry of Defence has stopped keeping an eye out for alien invaders.

Launched in 1950, the MoD’s Extra Terrestrial division apparently dealt with more than 12’000 cases of alien invaders on British soil, but now the department’s been closed – either because aliens don’t really exist, or because it’s becoming too darned expensive to keep an eye on what our intergalactic neighbours are doing.

Amazingly, the last reported alien sighting in the UK came on 10th September this year, when three people in a car in Lennoxtown were faced with a colourful bright light that lasted for two minutes. Alien encounter, or just the headlights of an oncoming car…? I suspect we’ll never know, because such phenomenon is now deemed an inappropriate defence resource.

That’s okay: we already know that most aliens land in America anyway, because Hollywood tells us so, and that there’s a secret alien base in China.

So, as we’ve got all the alien bits covered, the Government’s UFO department – which apparently cost £50’000 a year to run and, presumably, wasn’t all that busy – is being disbanded so that resources can be used elsewhere.

The dedicated hotline answerphone and e-mail address, both possibly manned twenty four hours a day by Will Smith, were shut down on December 1st, along with the statement that, whilst the MoD has no opinion on the existence or otherwise of extra-terrestrial life, “in over fifty years, no UFO report has revealed any evidence of a potential threat to the United Kingdom.”

They did also add that there was no defence benefit in continuing to spend money on this department of mad folk and that, anyway, the UK “has no specific capability for identifying the nature of such sightings.”

So it cost us fifty grand a year to keep a telephone answering machine running then, eh?

We can all sleep well in our beds tonight knowing that our money is finally being better spent elsewhere. And that little green men might still be watching us from afar…

Quick Blog: Tiger Woods and Top Gear … So what?

2009-12-03T12:28:00.001Z

Tiger Woods

Can I be the only person in the world who really isn’t interested in the fact that Tiger Woods has been mucking about with other women?

I don’t condone the behaviour, you understand, but is it really so important that it has to be splashed all over the front pages of the tabloids? At the weekend, ITV News dedicated more than three minutes to the fact that Tiger Woods had crashed his Cadillac Escalade in to a fire hydrant to escape his angry wife and only thirty seconds to a story about a terrorist bomb in Russia which killed twenty six people.

I understand sponsors such as Gillette, who are already having a torrid time with Thierry Henry’s blatant handball, being slightly concerned with the image it might give their product (and they must be a little worried about what Roger Federer is going to come up with to top the other two) but, to be honest, what goes on behind closed doors really is none of our business.

That said, having looked at the pictures in the paper today I can’t understand why Woods would have done it in the first place. I know I prefer blondes, but I wouldn’t have climbed over Erin Nordegren to get to Jaimee Grubbs, Rachel Uchitel or Kalika Moquin.

Which leads me to think that the other three must be offering something his missus ain’t…

Top Gear

Shock horror, the news has been leaked by some bitter spoilsport – who probably didn’t get paid enough for his part in the show – that James May’s ‘dangerous stunt’ on Top Gear last week was faked.

Well blow me over with a solar-powered fan. It was a bit obvious, wasn’t it?

If you hadn’t guessed that the whole lunacy was just designed to let Hammond fanny about in a Lamborghini, then the bit about them flying in to Norwich Airport’s airspace must have given the game away. Even my nine-year-old son said that if it had been real the police would have shot him out of the sky.

The point is that the show was providing us with entertainment, and everybody in my pub watching it on Sunday night laughed quite heartily at it.

I say keep up the good work, boys. We know it’s staged, but we love it.

In November The Renault Used…

2009-12-02T09:40:00.001Z

It’s amazing to think that I’ve now owned the Vel Satis for six months, almost to the day. It’s just crept over 65’000 miles and, to be honest, it’s a wonder it’s made it that far, but it’s even more of a wonder to have to announce that, in November, almost nothing went wrong with it.

I say almost, because on one occasion I did push the button to make the driver’s window go all the way down and all it did was budge about an inch. After that, I had to keep pressing the button to make it go down in one-inch stages until it was all the way down. I think the traffic warden that was waiting to speak to me would have been happier if I’d just opened the door, but you know how these things go and the next day the window worked absolutely fine.

I have noticed, over the six months of owning the car, that the Vel Satis does seem to suffer from more mood swings than my wife, but at least the last few weeks of ownership have been relatively trouble free.

The biggest problem I now face is dealing with the garage that I purchased the car from. When I bought it, the salesman told me that I had a six month, 6’000 mile warranty on the car. That warranty would expire this month and, as I’ve only achieved around five thousand of those miles in that time, I certainly haven’t exceeded any terms that could have been put in place. Unfortunately, though, upon trying to extract some money out of the garage for the replacement starter motor that broke in October, they pointed out to me that I didn’t have a warranty, and that the salesman lied to me when I purchased the car.

“You wouldn’t believe how many times he’s done this to us,” one young lady at the dealership whined to me in an effort to make me feel placated. So, if he’s done this to you that many times, why the hell is he still employed? And, if you’re happy for him to lie in order to close deals, then you are by proxy admitting to offering me a 6-month/6’000 mile warranty, surely? Or is it that fixing the car is just too darned expensive, I wonder?

Indeed, after several ignored letters to the garage pleading for some form of help with the costs of the car, I’ve had no choice but to start to consider legal action against the garage. So I guess this part of my blog will soon become the “what happened in court” section.

Here’s hoping it at least behaves itself over Christmas…

Renault Vel Satis 3.5V6 Performance Log

It has to be said that, whilst somewhat reliable during November, the car’s overall economy hasn’t been that great. One or two longer journeys to see family members did result in 30mpg being returned, but the actual figure at the end of the month is woefully less than that. As this figure shrinks, I’m beginning to think I should have kept the old Jeep after all. And mentioning earlier that I’ve now had the car for six months has reminded me that the tax expired on Monday…

Fuel Used: 29.9 gallons (up from 23.4)

Economy: 21.9 miles per gallon (down from 22.4)

Distance: 655.6 miles travelled (up from 521.7)

Average Speed: 29.1 miles per hour (up from 28.5)

Service due in: 13’419 miles

Odometer reading: 65’009 miles

Looking back at the previous version of this blog I noted that in September I’d mentioned the car hadn’t had too many problems, only to be faced with anarchy in October. Having just mentioned that November was relatively trouble-free, perhaps I’m asking for a kicking this month…

Why Can’t I Just Make My Phone Go “Ring-Ring”?

2009-11-20T13:33:00.001Z

My first mobile phone was a People’s Phone PP800, and it was brilliant. Its 1996 styling, even by today’s standards, is still quite modern and it exists today, even though it no longer works. My children use it to bash each other about the head with.

Back in 1996, when Vodafone purchased People’s Phone for £77m as they strengthened their grip on the mobile phone market, text messaging wasn’t a thought-about form of communication and, in the event that you had a friend who actually knew your mobile number, all it emitted was a shrill, electronic ringing sound.

Since then, of course, the mobile phone market has bloomed and the PP800 shares about as much DNA with the Sony Ericsson W980 that I use today as a BBC Micro does with the laptop I’m using to write this blog on and, naturally, companies have made a fortune from offering add-on services to meet the needs of every user’s mobile perversions.

Standard ringtones gave way to polyphone ringtones which, in turn, gave way to phones that allow you to use MP3 music as your call alert of choice. That, unfortunately, gave rise to the Crazy Frog and yesterday a customer’s phone rang in the bar, blaring out Lily Allen’s “F*** You!”

Now, I’m not going to say I haven’t fallen foul of the odd jokey ringtone myself – I have! My phone used to play the theme to Star Wars, sound like a Ferrari Formula One car and, my personal favourite, whenever a text message arrived it was known to speak like Homer Simpson and say “ooh, the mail’s arrived!”

Some of it was because I found it amusing, and some of it was because I worked in an office with thirty other people and the only way to guarantee it was your phone that was ringing was to put a stupid ringtone on it. Unfortunately, that just led to a cacophony of polyphonic noise, most sounding like Kevin “Bloody” Wilson or that damned infernal frog.

Today, I don’t work in an office and find amusing ringtones irritating. I just want my phone to go ‘ring-ring’; retro, I know. Unfortunately, however, the W980 that I use, despite being fitted with the latest Sony Walkman MP3 player and 8gb of space to put whatever noise on it I want, doesn’t have a standard ringtone that sounds like an ordinary phone. Or even a shrill version much like my old PP800.

Instead, it comes pre-loaded with a choice of musical tones, all of which serve to do nothing other than make me miss a call while I try to figure out what that stupid noise is.

Why can’t a manufacturer just put a normal ringtone on the phone for those of us who are turning into cantankerous old gits? I’ve tried visiting the Sony Ericsson ringtone section, but there’s no default sound on there other than their company warble. A site called Jamster wants to charge me £4.50 A WEEK for one tone and on there the closest I can get to a ringing sound is the voice of somebody who’s just inhaled helium saying “Ring Ring!” (I’ll admit it did make me smile.)

All I want is for my phone to ring like a phone should ring. In these days of the Internet and access to just about anything you want, is that too much to ask?

Dumb Blonde Jokes Get Taken To Court

2009-11-19T15:39:00.001Z

Yesterday's Independent newspaper writes on page 3 about Mark Lowe, a high-powered hedge-fund manager who's got himself in to a spot of bother with a colleague for sending jokes around the office about dumb blondes.

It seems that Jordan Wimmer, quite a pretty 29 year old blonde, has got a bit upset because of e-mails that suggest the best way to find out which one loves you more, your wife or your dog, is to put them both in the boot of the car for an hour and see which one's really pleased to see you when you let them back out.

I think that's quite funny. And so does my wife, who also happens to be blonde.

Unfortunately for Mark Lowe, however, Ms Wimmer doesn't. And because of that, she's taken him to court.

Now, I don't agree with sexual harassment in any form. Touching a female work colleague inappropriately, no matter how invincible you feel or how much she might have wiggled her booty at you, is definitely going to land you in a spot of bother. As is making lewd comments directly to that individual, or making an illicit pass in the hopes that your wife won't find out.

And suggesting that, in return for a few sexual favours, the promotional ladder might be a bit of an easier climb is clearly going to land you in court with your pants down and your wallet severely lightened.

But sending out e-mails that state a Ferrari is cheaper to run than a woman is not really reason to take somebody to court for a gargantuan sum of money. And doing so, one can only presume, sort of proves the point of the joke...

Blonde jokes are part and parcel of daily life. People might not always agree with them or find them funny, but they go hand-in-hand with jokes about Essex girls, Y-shaped coffins and the roof-lining of a Ford Capri. Forget the blondes for a second: show me somebody who hasn't laughed at an Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman joke.

Politically correct they might not be, but I'm reasonably certain that the Australians have some pretty mean jokes about the Brits. And "Sheilas", too...

Mark Lowe has built up a £100m fortune through his business. He might be a thoroughly loathsome individual with a predilection for peculiar sexual tastes for all I know, or he could be a jolly decent chap who likes to stand in a pub, quaff bitter and make merry with his friends.

I don’t know him, but it does appear that working for him hasn't done Jordan Wimmer any harm. According to the newspaper, she started out on a basic salary of £50'000 and, by the time she got a bit disgruntled with Lowe's jokes, she was earning in the region of £577'000.

Mark Lowe will probably lose, of course, because that's the way these things work, and these jokes can be described as "objectifying women", something courts frown upon. But one can't help thinking that Ms Wimmer could be likened to another of his jokes, one that describes women as a hazardous material that reacts well to gold and precious metals.

After all, she is suing him for four million pounds...

Formula One 2009: Jenson Button, Brawn GP, ‘nuff said.

2009-11-04T19:59:00.001Z

When it comes to summing up the 2009 Formula One season, I believe the subject line covers it well: Formula One 2009: Jenson Button, Brawn GP. Enough said.

Barely a year ago, Honda announced that they were to pull out of Formula One with immediate effect, leaving the Brackley-based team somewhere up that creek, almost paddleless. Honda agreed to keep the team running whilst it sought a buyer, but if nobody had stumped up the cash by the opening race of 2009 in Australia, then the team would be shut down.

As 2008 became 2009 the future looked bleak for the team that had started out life amongst much fanfare as British American Racing ten years earlier.

But, with barely days to spare before the start of this season, Ross Brawn put together a deal that saw him buy the team from Honda and turn up in time for the season opener in March this year. Everybody was glad to see them, everybody congratulated them on making it, everybody was pleased to see Richard Branson leering right behind the team. Nobody outside of the team thought they would do anything good.

And then they won.

In a two-fingered salute to their former owners, Brawn GP were simply stunning. Button won all but one of the first seven races and even a hard challenge from Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel and the distraction of the diffuser furore failed to put a dent in his confidence. The middle of the season fell away from the Briton slightly as he struggled for form whilst Barrichello, determined not to be seen as the team’s Number Two, and the Red Bull drivers of Vettel and Mark Webber all vied to bring themselves to the front of the title challenge.

But as the season came to its conclusion, it was all about Jenson. He would have loved to have had another win, just to put his late-season detractors in their place, but it wasn’t to be. His drive in Brazil, however, from twelfth to fifth to secure the Driver’s Crown was nothing less than the drive of a World Champion, and although a win eluded him in the final race at Abu Dhabi too, his last gasp effort to try and take second from Webber was simply stunning – probably the most exciting bit of the whole race. A podium position was enough for Jenson, however.

Between them, Button and Barrichello also secured the Constructor’s Championship for Brawn GP in their first season of trying, an accolade that had eluded British American Racing despite their boasts of winning in their first season all the way back in 1999.

It capped what has been a simply stunning season, complete with drama, intrigue and the magical press frenzy that was generated when everybody thought Michael Schumacher might return to the cockpit to replace Felipe Massa, who had to sit out the remainder of the season after being struck on the head by a broken piece of, ironically, a Brawn GP car.

The Schumacher Story never came to fruition, unfortunately, but it didn’t detract from what a great season it’s been, all covered brilliantly, in Britain at least, by the return of F1 coverage to the BBC. Jake Humphreys and his bickering cohorts, Eddie Jordan and David Coulthard, complete with their commentary and pitlane teams, put together a wonderful show, and the Red Button alternative viewings rivalled almost anything that Sky Sports, and certainly ITV, could have put together.

And as the season came to a close, both Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel strutted their stuff behind the wheel, showing their feathers and letting Jenson and Brawn know that, come 2010, they weren’t going to make it easy for them to defend their titles.

It all changes again next year, too. It’ll be the last year for Bridgestone tyres, refuelling is banned, new teams are apparently going to be turning up in Bahrain for the start of the season, and the drivers are all shuffling around. Add to that the news, this morning, that Toyota have announced they are pulling out of Formula One with immediate effect and it leaves one wondering just what next year holds in store for Formula One fans, and all those who now wonder how secure their jobs are in Cologne. One can only imagine Toyota are hoping to have a similar success to Honda by selling out to an independent whose passion for winning races outweighs all business motives.

Meanwhile, there’s only one thing that can be left to say: Brawn GP, Jenson Button, World Champions 2009. How I wish I’d put a pound on you both at the start of the season. Congratulations!

‘Nuff said.

Should Stephen Fry Quit Twitter?

2009-11-01T09:51:00.000Z

The answer to that question, in short, is no.

That’s not because I follow Stephen and don’t want him to leave the service, but simply because one person branding him as ‘boring’ is not really a reason to leave. If Stephen himself is becoming bored by the Twitter phenomena that he, himself, helped to accelerate then that’s a different reason but, sadly, when you put yourself in the public spotlight, there will always be a contingent who will have something negative to say.

This week, Paul Daniels also found himself on the receiving end of some pretty mean comments about his height and, in the end, he decided to take a few days break from the service. Perhaps this tactic would benefit Mr Fry, and would possibly help him while he’s feeling a little low.

Quite frankly, however, it is amazing that this has become the news story that it seems to have become. Certainly, Stephen has been a huge advocate of Twitter and has helped grow its popularity in the micro-blogging arena, but is his possible departure from the service really worth a discussion group on the BBC’s website? Before we know it, it’ll be a topic on an upcoming episode of Question Time…

When I was a kid, I was always taught to ignore bullies and they’d eventually go away. It didn’t always work quite as effectively as my parents had hoped, as kids tend to just become more and more mean when their abuse doesn’t seem to be working, or they store it up for later use, but there is certainly a strong argument for being the ‘bigger’ man and rising above the meanness; and, most of the time, simply walking away from conflict did work.

The rise of the Internet and mobile phone technology, however, has seen “cyber-bullying” become ever-more prevalent, and ignoring abusive text messages can be harder than avoiding the taunts in the classroom.

The reason for Mr Fry’s musings about leaving the service seem to have come from one individual branding his posts on Twitter as “… a bit … boring… (sorry Stephen)”, which to me doesn’t really warrant being branded as “too much aggression and unkindness”, which was Stephen Fry’s initial response.

There are certainly many more users of Twitter out there who post far more boring updates than Stephen Fry does (myself included, probably – I’ve just posted one about how many miles per gallon my Renault did in October, for crying out loud!) but, with 929’686 followers, there are certainly many more people out there who find him interesting than there are who don’t.

Looking at Stephen’s Twitter updates this morning, it looks like he’s making peace with the chap who branded him boring in the first place. So maybe he’ll stay after all, and that sort of makes this blog a little bit redundant.

And more than a little bit boring…

Stephen Fry’s Twitter: http://twitter.com/stephenfry
Paul Daniels’ Twitter: http://twitter.com/thepauldaniels
The bloke who didn’t really bully Stephen: http://twitter.com/brumplum

In October The Renault Used…

2009-11-01T09:21:00.000Z

I can see this new regular feature of my blog quickly becoming known as “What That F***ing Renault Vel Satis Did To Me This Month!”; if only it didn’t make the title line so long, I’d probably do it.

It’s been a pretty traumatic month with the Renault, with it deciding that it’s enduring pain-in-the-arse personality would show up again, this time by breaking down on my mother’s driveway one Friday night when I needed to get back to the pub, having just dropped the children off in the hopes of having a relatively quiet, stress-free weekend.

It got worse when the breakdown guy turned up, announced it was the starter motor and that, at 9pm on a Friday night, there was nothing he could do to help me. He couldn’t even get me home as, it turns out, my breakdown cover via Churchill Insurance doesn’t include home recovery.

The following morning the car was taken to a local garage who confirmed that, indeed, it was the starter motor – and that, for this particular model, no third-party manufacturer part could be sourced. Nor could a refurbished part be found. And it couldn’t simply be fixed, either.

I would have to wait until Monday morning, when I could speak with the garage I purchased it from as, after all, the damned thing is still under warranty. Except that, when I eventually got hold of my garage, it turns out I was lied to, and no warranty was ever provided as part of the car sale.

That will be a whole different blog, at a whole different time, once the discussions between myself and the garage I bought the Renault Vel Satis from have completed. In the meantime, suffice it to say, I ended up getting the garage in Buckingham to repair the car, at a whopping price of £428.81 including VAT. (To be fair £7.92 of that was for a new hazard switch, having discovered – when it broke down – that the one in the dashboard didn’t work.)

Still, it kept the fuel and mileage figures down for this month as it took me a week to get it back. And on Wednesday the electric windows stopped working…

Renault Vel Satis 3.5V6 Performance Log:

It should come as no surprise that the miles per gallon figure for this month is quite low. Aside from the one slightly-extended round trip to Buckingham, the car hasn’t been used much this month and most of the journeys it has done were short hop trips of less than four miles. That’s not really when this engine shines. Still, it’s returning an average of eight miles per gallon more than the old Jeep ever did, so let’s not think it’s too bad, eh?

Fuel Used: 23.4 gallons (down from 37.3)
Economy: 22.4 miles per gallon (down from 22.9)
Distance: 521.7 miles travelled (down from 853)
Average Speed: 28.5 miles per hour (down from 37.9)
Service due in: 14’597 miles
Odometer reading: 64’353 miles

Ironically, in my last blog on this car’s performance I mentioned that there weren’t any notable incidents during September, save for the one occasion when it refused to start when I pushed the button. Turns out that was a portent of doom, didn’t it?

Today, I shall mostly be…

2009-10-23T09:13:00.001+01:00

This week has been one of those where I seem to have run around doing absolutely nothing productive. Most of it has been spent trying to find a cheaper alternative to the starter motor on the car, and shouting at the garage who sold me the car in the first place.

Neither was very productive: the starter motor was ridiculously expensive and the garage that sold me the car ridiculously uncooperative.

No matter, the car is finally back and does, at least, work. But that has meant there are loads of jobs left over from the past few days that really must all be done today. So, today I shall mostly be:

cleaning beer lines
cleaning the cellar
cleaning the glass washer
doing the dray order
preparing the bar
looking at Sky Sports for the pub once again
buying stock for Sunday’s bar at the village hall
trying to finish off a blog for The Publican magazine that I started earlier in the week…

And all of that has to be done before a party of fifty turn up for a buffet at five o’clock this evening.

To make things that little bit more difficult, the children are also home today as half-term has already started, apparently…

Button Wins The Driver’s Championship!

2009-10-18T18:44:00.002+01:00

As Webber gets ignored on the podium, everybody else is looking for Jenson Button – Formula One’s latest champion.
Compare him with Hamilton, for just a second: Hamilton won the championship in Brazil in 2008 by finishing in fifth place, driving car number 22.
Jenson Button has just completed one of the most breathtaking races I’ve ever seen him compete in… and has won this year’s championship in Brazil, finishing in fifth place, driving car number 22…
And let's not forget that days before the season started Brawn GP didn't exist. Now they've won both the Driver's and Constructor's Championships.
Amazing. But I still have a headache.

Sex, Alcohol, and far too much stress…

2009-10-18T16:48:00.001+01:00

I had planned to write a blog this weekend on a story I’d seen in The Sun newspaper on Friday. Titled “Master Lasters”, the story focuses on British men’s performance in bed.

Normally, we get derided for being poor lovers in comparison to our European counterparts, but this story shows that researchers in Holland – investigating that favourite bar topic, Premature Ejaculation – have discovered that British men last longer in bed with their sexual partners than any other nation.

To be fair, it wasn’t this that had caught my attention and neither was it the fact that apparently we last an average of a mere ten minutes that had given me an idea for a blog, but the fact that in the article alcohol gets a mention.

With the British pub trade on its knees and alcohol usually cited by all and sundry in the media as evil beyond the realms of Ming the Merciless, I always like to try and find ‘good news’ stories for alcohol to lift morale a little bit, and here I thought I’d found something I could use.

But then I got distracted. Having diagnosed me with concussion following my attempts to beat myself up with pub’s smoking shelter, my doctor decided I needed to take seven days off work to recover. Being a publican, and with a big bar to do on Saturday night for our local Cricket Club, I had to shrug off the doc’s sick certificate and follow Plan B instead. Plan B basically outlines the fact that, rather than taking time off work, I try to relax as much as possible, avoid stressful situations or exerting myself too much, otherwise the effects of the concussion might last a little longer.

With a big bar to put together and the everyday business of the pub to attend to, Ali and I farmed the children off to my mum’s for the weekend, where she could take the kids to the local fair. The trouble was, getting them there. In the end, I opted to drive them from our home near Newmarket, to my mum’s near Buckingham and so, on Friday afternoon, I piled the kids into the Vel Satis and headed on my journey.

Taking it easy as I drove, I started to plan out my blog in my head, thinking I could write it after the pub shut later that night.

The kids and I chatted and, after an inordinate amount of time stuck in roadworks and traffic, we arrived at my mum’s house. A quick up of tea, a natter, a good bye to the boys, and back in the car to get home before the pub got too busy.

And that was when the starter motor seized.

Stuck at an awkward angle on the back of my mum’s driveway, there seemed absolutely nothing I could do to get the car to start, so I resorted to my breakdown service who promised to be with me within the hour.

Two hours later, and with my headache building, the recovery driver arrived and announced that he couldn’t help. “Nothing we can do here, mate,” he said.

And that was when, at nine o’clock on Friday night and ninety miles from where I should be, the recovery bloke informed me that I didn’t have ‘home recovery’. “I can take you ten miles to a garage, mate,” he said, “but otherwise it’s going to cost you a small fortune for me to take you home.”

A few hours later I found myself tucked up and sleeping in a single bed in my mum’s house for the first time in more than twenty years.

Saturday morning dawned and we made arrangements for a local garage to get the car and have a look at it, while my step-dad brought me home so I could start to set up the bar for that evening.

Normally, it takes me and Adam an hour and a half to get a bar set up, so the plan was simple: get the bar set up and then try and spend Saturday afternoon relaxing before the evening, but with the garage having rung and announced that it’s going to cost £300 to fix the car and the part can’t be got before Tuesday, it didn’t look like any amount of relaxing was going to ease my headache.

Finally, at about 1pm yesterday afternoon, Adam and I got the bar in place. We checked everything was sorted, then connected the lager to the gas mechanism and opened the tap.

And that was when the regulator on the gas pipe disintegrated…

---

It’s now Sunday afternoon and you can see why I had completely forgotten about the original blog I was going to write. It seems trivial now, but The Sun’s article brazenly announced that British men last longer in bed than any other nation, and that men who consume alcohol before sex last even longer.

I can’t remember what I was going to write, what quips I might have thought up about Brewer’s Droop or, indeed, that some might see that as a ‘good news’ story about alcohol for a change, but somehow Adam and I, with the help of a chap called Kevin, did manage to get the regulator fixed and, with half an hour to spare, were ready to get the bar open for the evening.

But my car is still stuck in Buckingham and I’m sitting here at home, hoping to relax in front of the telly, a beer in hand and the Brazilian Grand Prix ahead of me.

But Jenson Button’s grid position isn’t doing my stress levels any good at all…

Tragic Magic Gets Hit Over The Head With A Baseball Bat. Maybe…

2009-10-13T09:17:00.001+01:00

a.k.a. Smoking Shelter Fumble

"As I typed out an answer on my phone, my attacker approached, beating me over the head with a very hard object..."

I’m quite fussy about locking up the pub’s car park at the end of the day. When the pub shuts I go round, check the car park for abandoned vehicles and chase the neighbour’s cat that seems to enjoy using the petanque pitch as a giant kitty litter.

As usual, last night I did all of this then wandered – as I do – round to the front of the building to check the pavement and the tables there. We’d had darts in during the evening and, as is always the way with these things, cigarette butts were scattered everywhere: under the tables, on the benches; some smokers had even managed to get the remains of their tobacco fix in to the ashtrays themselves.

I’m quite conscious of the pub’s image and I don’t want the locals walking past the pub with their dogs first thing in the morning to see the place looking scruffy, so I did a spot of cleaning, put all the errant dogends in to the ashtrays and carried them to our smoking shelter, where they could remain in a neat little pile until this morning when I’d have more time to get the cleaning done properly.

As I put the ashtrays down on one of the tables, out of sight of the street, my phone beeped to say I’d got a text message – it was from a friend who I’d been doing a spot of computer repair work for. Basically, her machine was running slow, had no anti-virus protection, and in general just needed a bit of TLC. She wanted to know if it was ready.

Typing out an answer, I turned back towards the car park and was immediately beaten over the head by a very hard object. Probably, my brain told me immediately, a baseball bat.

With my head down, concentrating on the text message, I hadn’t seen my assailant approaching and the whack on my head had hurt quite a bit. I dropped my phone in panic and tried to remember my Judo classes from when I was a child. About the only thing I could recall was my dad telling me that I needed to get in close, but in the melee I couldn’t see where he was.

I put my hand out, felt the attacker’s firm body and grabbed, pulling us together fast in the hopes that he wouldn’t be able to swing his bat again, but instead he just punched me hard in the face. My glasses fell off and I dropped to the floor, wondering what to do next.

Looking up to see what sort of brute was about to finish me off and pillage my home, I saw my attacker: a ten foot tall solid wooden post that was one of several that support the roof of the smoking shelter. Nobody had hit me; instead, I had walked in to it.

Twice.

Tonight, I shall be leaving the smoking shelter lights on whilst I do my rounds…

In September the Renault used…

2009-10-03T17:46:00.001+01:00

For some reason, I’ve come up with the rather dull idea of keeping a monthly log of my car’s performance and then, rather than keeping it on a scrap of paper somewhere in a desk drawer, posting it on my blog.

I don’t know why. Seemed like a good idea over a pint of Davenport’s Highland Whisky Ale in my pub the other night. Essentially, though, the idea is this: at the end of each month I shall log the economic performance of my 3.5V6 Renault Vel Satis, and put the results on this page. You don’t actually have to read it, if you don’t want to…

I may even be bored of the idea by November…

So, here goes:

Renault Vel Satis 3.5 V6 performance log:

Slightly disappointing performance from the Renault this month. Much better figures have been seen in the past, but much of September was spent doing short-hop journeys, which always means the big engine doesn’t have chance to shine. Oh, and Ali did probably 90% of the driving, and as she thinks the accelerator peddle is actually an on/off switch, it’s no wonder fuel economy was so low in September.

Fuel Used: 37.3 gallons
Economy: 22.9 miles per gallon
Distance: 853 miles travelled
Average Speed: 37.9 miles per hour
Service due in: 14’597 miles

There weren’t any noticeable incidents to speak of this month, other than one occasion when the car refused to start when I pushed the button whilst in a hurry to get the kids to school. It eventually decided to fire up once I got out of the car to shout at it. No, really, it did…

Ferrari and Alonso: the perfect partnership?

2009-09-30T16:28:00.001+01:00

Fernando Alonso isn’t very good at keeping secrets, is he?

First, the story about him moving from Renault to McLaren for the 2007 season hit the headlines before the dust had even settled over the 2005 championship, and for the best part of this year rumours have been circulating that he’s off to Ferrari.

Well rumour no more – the announcement has been made today that Fernando Alonso will replace Kimi Raikkonen at Ferrari for the 2010 season, in a new three year deal.

As a life-long Ferrari follower, I have to say I’m disappointed. I know that Ferrari have courted controversy on more than their fair share of occasions and that, with Michael Schumacher at the wheel of one of their cars, there have been plenty of occasions where it’s been suggested that there is some favouritism towards the Italian squad from the FIA, but still – why would any team want to hire Fernando Alonso these days?

In the past three years, the Spaniard has been at the centre of two of the biggest scandals to ever rock the world of Formula One.

In 2007, Alonso threw his toys out of the pram when he realised that Hamilton was getting the better of him and might even win the title in his first year of trying, and stories of blackmail, sabotage and racist slander followed. It was enough to distract the two McLaren drivers enough from their day jobs long enough to allow Raikkonen to win the Driver’s Championship in his first year at Ferrari, having been ousted from McLaren by Alonso.

And this year it’s come to light that Alonso’s victory at the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix was nothing more than a sham, having been engineered by Flavio Briatore and Pat Symonds.

The 2007 McLaren incident saw the team fined heavily and their results excluded from the Constructor’s Championship, whilst the punishment meted out on Renault for race-fixing could have been far worse had team boss Briatore and Pat Symonds not fallen on their swords in an effort to save the team. Alonso was even allowed to keep his victory, and broadcasters on the BBC were still calling him the 2008 race winner even when it came to light that, had Nelson Piquet Jnr not crashed his car deliberately at Turn 17, he wouldn’t have been.

And all along, Alonso has denied knowing anything about the race-fixing. You could believe him, but after his temper tantrums of 2007, would you?

Ferrari and Alonso may be no strangers to bending the rules to get what they want, and the FIA might turn a blind eye to some of their tactics but, if they do, it’ll just end up leaving a sour taste in the mouths of Formula One fans the world over.

Formula One is a wonderful sport that has perfected the art of shooting itself in the foot time and again. With the joining of Ferrari and Alonso, I hope it isn’t about to do it all over again.

Nice Pub. Nasty Tax. (From thepublican.com)

2009-09-29T14:00:00.001+01:00

My latest Publican.com blog is now available here: http://www.thepublican.com/story.asp?sectioncode=16&storycode=65278&c=2

Today’s subject: a slightly ranty go at Gordon Brown for the proposed “Nice Pub Tax”!

To Sky or Not To Sky, that’s our question…

2009-09-28T12:48:00.001+01:00

The following blog was originally published on The Publican’s website and can be found by visiting: http://www.thepublican.com/story.asp?storycode=65259

Can you imagine a pub full of beer-swilling football fans all staring at a screen through a pair of 1950's 3D goggles?

To Sky or Not To Sky, that's my question.

On the one hand, I'd quite like to be able to offer my customers the ability to watch Sky in the pub, but on the other Sky's pricing model is quite restrictive and could be the expense that tips my finely balanced cashflow scales in the wrong direction.

And I'm just a small village pub; the prices quoted to me are, admittedly, much lower than some I hear bandied about by other, larger, pubs, but they're still a large chunk of my turnover, with no guarantee that I'm going to get enough business through the door to even cover the cost of the service.

With finances getting tighter, pubs continuing to close at a faster rate than Kerry Katona's bank accounts and supermarket deals enticing people to stay at home and drink, Sky are going to have to do something drastic to keep their commercial business in place.

And they think they are, by offering loyal Sky Business customers exclusive access to their new 3DTV service early next year. The idea is simple, at first glance: it's a great way for Sky to showcase their new service before they launch it on the domestic market, and it allows pubs to offer an extra dimension to their viewing customers.

Very interesting.

Except that a) the choice of words "loyal Sky pub subscribers" kind of intimates that if I were to be interested in taking the plunge and subscribing to Sky in the pub, 3DTV wouldn't be offered to me; and b) it will almost certainly mean an extra premium on the commercial subscription, a fee that doesn't appear to have been made clear yet.

I have domestic Sky in my home, yet I refuse to pay extra for the HDTV service because, whilst I don't mind paying for the hardware, I don't see the sense in paying an extra subscription for channels I'm already paying to receive. Especially as I'm already quite happy with the picture quality.

The same goes for 3DTV. If we're already paying through the nose for the commercial rights to broadcast the channels, why should we pay more to receive them again?

That's without the other costs incurred - 3DTV may seem like a great idea, if you wish to watch pornography in the privacy of your own home, but the technology only works if you have a new 3DTV television set, which won't be cheap. That's another expense loyal Sky pubs will have to incur, and seems pointless if you're an establishment that uses a projector and screen to show footie in full size, not to mention irritating if you've just shelled out on a new HDTV.

And it's important to remember that, despite all the advancements in 3D technology and the recent flurry of fluffy 3D Disney films this year, you still need to wear glasses to get the full effect, even with your shiny new telly. Can you imagine a pub full of beer swilling football fans all staring at a screen through a set of 1950's specs?

The image is laughable, and just gives the punters an extra missile to throw at your expensive new television in the event of their team not winning.

3DTV might work for some, but if Sky want to help the pub trade and grow their respective businesses they need to stop looking at gimmicks with expensive hidden costs and look at their current pricing structure. Iain Holden, Managing Director of Sky Business, admits they have to look at the way they price and license their service and agrees that the current rateable value calculation is now unfair to some pubs - but they seem to be struggling to come up with an acceptable solution.

Perhaps they ought to look at the market they are aiming for in more detail. Many of us would love to put Sky in, but the cost is either a) too prohibitive or b) the service is an unknown quantity: would it really bring in enough extra punters?

Committing to a service for a minimum of twelve months at full price is too much for a lot of us - if Sky would allow a shorter contract, such as three or even six months to allow us to evaluate the costs and benefits to our business, that would be palatable. Or even a Pay-Per-View system where we could pick and choose sporting events that we know will draw in the customers, priced at something acceptable for one-off events.

Domestic customers get offered all sorts of deals and incentives to get them to sign up, or to stay if they're thinking of leaving; when I called Sky recently for a business quotation the girl at Sky was so inflexible she might as well have been an ironing board.

Throw us an incentive, give us the opportunity to try the service and see if it'll work for our business, make it more affordable for the smaller pubs.

Any of these would help sway me towards putting Sky in my pub. But 3DTV won't, although I am trying to convince the wife it's a good idea for the bedroom...

Why Gold Medals Will Never Work In Formula One

2009-09-28T11:15:00.001+01:00

Right up until the day before this season’s Formula One World Championship got under way, the FIA had implemented a new rule: the driver’s championship wouldn’t be decided by who had the most points, but by who had the most Gold Medals.

Podium positions would be issued with medals rather than trophies, with the rather obvious bronze for third, silver for second and gold for first.

And then all the teams moaned that it was unfair to change the rules without enough notice, and the FIA reverted back to the points system to decide the championship. For this year, at least.

Bernie Ecclestone still wants to bring the medal system in for next season, but I have to say I think it would be a rubbish way of deciding the title. It effectively allows a driver to win one race, crash the next, win the one after that, and then crash again, but if he wins enough races he’ll win the championship even if his main protagonist has remained much more consistent throughout the season.

And that seems to be being proven as we head in to the closing stages of the 2009 Formula One World Championship. In Singapore this weekend, you could have argued that Jenson Button was doing his best to hand the championship to his Brawn GP team mate, Rubens Barrichello. A poor performance in qualifying saw him qualify in twelfth place, while the two Red Bulls and Barrichello were much further ahead of him (not including Rubens’ grid penalty for changing his gearbox).

Indeed, had the Safety Car and Nico Rosberg’s drive-through penalty for speeding in the pit lane not occurred, it’s arguable that Jenson might not have scored any points, or would have at least conceded a big chunk to his main rivals. But with these incidents and Mark Webber’s crash, Button found himself finishing in fifth place, just ahead of Barrichello and just behind Sebastian Vettel, giving himself a strong fifteen point advantage going in to the last three races.

But the title fight is still open – thirty points are up for grabs and Jenson Button’s recent form means it’s still possible for the others to catch Britain’s hope. The title is Jenson’s to lose right now; he’s as good as got it in the bag if he can just keep scoring consistently, but there’s every chance that the fight for the Driver’s Crown could go to the final race of the season, in Abu Dhabi.

Ironically, though, if the FIA had got their way and introduced the medal system for this season, Lewis Hamilton’s victory yesterday would have guaranteed Jenson Button the driver’s title, as reported yesterday on the Autosport website. With Lewis winning in elegant style under the lights, it prevented any of Jenson’s main rivals from scoring enough wins to match, or beat, his current tally of six victories.

Jenson Button might be the Gold Medal Champion, but he’s not the Driver’s Champion yet, but I’m hoping he will be.

And I’m hoping that Bernie and his mates will see sense and realise that points are still the only way to truly decide who is, and who isn’t, the Formula One World Champion.

Frustrations, Writing Pains, and a ticking off from Uncle Paul

2009-09-27T12:13:00.001+01:00

I have to confess I’m quite frustrated with myself at the moment.

When I started this blog, the original intention had been to write a daily diary of things that have been happening in my life. I once read a factual book by the novelist Stephen King, in which he said that if you wanted to be a writer you should write at least 1’000 words a day, even when you’re not working on a paying project.

It keeps your mind sharp, your literary skills together, and means that even if you are writing something rubbish, you’re still writing.

The beauty of blogging is that anybody can write about anything they like, without fear of an editor kicking them in the teeth (although sometimes the reading public can leave equally acerbic comments!) and so I’d planned to just write about something each day.

But it hasn’t happened. Instead, this blog seems to have become a random repository for joke e-mails I receive and poorly thought out ideas.

Well, no more. (At least, no more joke e-mails; I can’t vouch for the poorly thought out ideas.)*

I like to write. I write a regular blog for The Publican magazine’s website, but that’s obviously skewed towards the pub trade, and I post a regular Twitter page, too. I want this blog to reflect my thoughts on life, politics, the fact that it’s like Spring in Autumn or just something funny that’s happened to me. For example, last Wednesday we slept through the alarms, woke up at 8:30a.m. and that meant the kids missed the school bus. So I dashed out to the car with them but when I pushed the Start/Stop button it wouldn’t start. I pushed the button four times, to no avail. Eventually, I got out of the car, slammed the door in temper and the engine fired up.

It was like something out of a Michael J. Fox movie, and would have made an amusing blog – but I didn’t write it.

And since the age of twelve, I’ve always wanted to write a book. I even have a few good ideas and some great titles, but I’ve never done it. Instead, I’m easily distracted and like to play driving games on my PlayStation 3 – much to the chagrin of my Uncle Paul.

But this morning, as the birds sing outside and there’s a feeling of a nice warm summer ahead, I’ve made a promise to myself: I’ll have a look at my novel ideas and see if I can make something of them. And I’ll start writing this personal blog properly, too, with at least one entry a week (not a day!) on any random subject I can think to write coherently about.

Probably starting with why Jenson Button needs a great big slap before today’s race.

----

*I can’t promise not to post some of the e-mail jokes either, to be honest. Some of them are quite funny!

Unintentional Double Entendres …

2009-09-05T12:41:00.001+01:00

There are times when you just wish you’d kept your mouth shut… here are twelve of some of the finest double-entendre errors made by commentators. They gave me a giggle this morning, so they should you too!

1. Ted Walsh - Horse Racing Commentator - 'This is really a lovely horse. I once rode her mother.'

2. Murry Mexted, New Zealand Rugby Commentator - 'Andrew Mehrtens loves it when Daryl Gibson comes inside of him.'

3. Pat Glenn, weightlifting commentator - 'And this is Gregoriava from Bulgaria . I saw her snatch this morning and it was amazing!'

4. Harry Carpenter at the Oxford-Cambridge boat race 1977 - 'Ah, isn't that nice. The wife of the Cambridge President is kissing the Cox of the Oxford crew.'

5. US PGA Commentator - 'One of the reasons Arnie (Arnold Palmer) is playing so well is that, before each tee shot, his wife takes out his balls and kisses them. Oh my god !! What have I just said??'

6. Carenza Lewis about finding food in the Middle Ages on 'Time Team Live' said: 'You'd eat beaver if you could get it.'

7. A female news anchor who, the day after it was supposed to have snowed and didn't, turned to the weatherman and asked, 'So Bob, where's that eight inches you promised me last night?' Not only did HE have to leave the set, but half the crew did too, because they were laughing so hard!

8. Steve Ryder covering the US Masters: 'Ballesteros felt much better today after a 69 yesterday.'

9. Clair Frisby talking about a jumbo hot dog on 'Look North' said: 'There's nothing like a big hot sausage inside you on a cold night like this. '

10 Mike Hallett discussing missed snooker shots on 'Sky Sports': 'Stephen Hendry jumps on Steve Davis's misses every chance he gets.'

11. Michael Buerk on watching Philippa Forrester cuddle up to a male astronomer for warmth during BBC1's UK eclipse coverage remarked: 'They seem cold out there. They're rubbing each other and he's only come in his shorts.'

12.. Ken Brown commentating on golfer Nick Faldo and his caddie Fanny Sunneson lining-up shots at the Scottish Open: 'Some weeks Nick likes to use Fanny; other weeks he prefers to do it by himself.'

Why I Should Never, Ever Buy A Car Again

2009-07-30T15:57:00.001+01:00

I miss my Jeep. For all its faults – and it had many of them, mostly expensive – it was a great, go anywhere, do anything car.

But it did cost an awful lot of money to run. It appeared to be magnetised to any petrol station, and you couldn't actually turn it on without being in the radius of a fuel station for fear that it might empty the tank just trying to get itself started.

And so, last month, I made the decision to trade it in, and replaced it with a Renault Vel Satis.

This seemed, at the time, like a good idea. The Vel Satis met all my needs: it was quirky, and different, which I like, and it was loaded with extras: satellite navigation, dual-zone air conditioning, cruise control, automatic lights, automatic wipers, six-CD stereo system with MP3 input. Everything that could tick a box on my wish list, it had.

Even Jeremy Clarkson said it was the most comfortable car he had ever driven.

And, despite having a 3.5 V6 engine (the same as they use in the Nissan 350Z, and thus making it quite quick too) it uses half, literally half, the fuel that the Jeep used.

This, coupled with a good deal from the garage I found it in, made it seem like a sensible buy. It only had 60'000 miles on the clock, came with a service history and was only going to cost me physically £900 to change. Which meant I didn't have to take out a loan to buy it. I worked out that, at the mileage we do, it would have saved that nine hundred quid back in about six months compared to the petrol the Jeep used.

I even quite liked the way it looked. It's not the prettiest car on the planet, admittedly, but it's quite handsome in a sci-fi sort of way at the front, if perhaps a touch Queen Latifah from the rear.

Safe, too. With its five-star Euro NCAP rating and a bazillion airbags, in the event of the unthinkable the family and I would be cocooned in a great big cushion of softness. It's not so good for pedestrians, mind you, only scoring one-star for their safety – the sharp lines of its front evidently designed to dismember anybody foolish enough to jaywalk in front of it.

All was well, therefore, in Daniels' Carworld, for about five minutes. Then it was actually delivered. And it all went horribly wrong, which probably won't come as a surprise.

The problem appears to be that, because this car is completely governed by computers, it has developed a bit of a personality complex and that, therefore, makes it monumentally useless. Pushing the start/stop button is a bit of a gamble: you never know which Vel Satis is going to wake up.

For a start, it can never work out which gear it wants to be in. Pull up at a set of traffic lights and the automatic box will select fifth. Or first. Or perhaps third. It would be funny, if it wasn't happening to me...

Thankfully, it never selects reverse, although when you do put it in reverse it's supposed to drop the passenger mirror to allow you to see the kerb. What it actually does is point one mirror up and one mirror down, like a cross-eyed wombat, and then refuses to remember where it's supposed to return them to.

Then there's the satellite navigation system, which refuses to believe you are parked anywhere other than the North Sea. Just off the coast of Haarlemmermeer. Every now and then it'll remember you're in England, tell you to turn left, then shout at you for having deviated from your fishing route before returning to the ocean.

All the while this is happening, the external temperature gauge remains convinced you are parked near the North Pole, and constantly reports that you are experiencing -38°C. And because it's so cold outside, it refuses to allow you to switch on the air conditioning. Even when the temperatures are tropical.

As a result, the car has, understandably, been back and forth to the garage a number of times. Last Wednesday, I returned it to the garage with the instruction: “don't give it back to me until it works.”

And they haven't.

In fact, eight days later, they are also now not talking to me on the telephone.

I'm beginning to think I might have just bought the world's most expensive 1997 1.6 L Nissan Primera...

Alcohol Mandatory Code: Spoiling It For The Majority

2009-07-27T11:21:00.001+01:00

The Government are at it again, interfering with our daily lives as if they haven't got anything better to do. This time it's all about selling alcohol responsibly and basically means that to stop you, the sensible drinker, from enjoying yourself on a Saturday night they're trying to make the default size of a pint of beer half a pint instead.

In order to find out what all the fuss is about, last week I attended the "Cambridge" leg of the Home Office's Big Alcohol Tour.

Struggling in to my suit, cursing as I realised that I'd put a few more pounds on than I'd thought since I last wore it, I swore again when I looked up the post code of the event's location and discovered that, although it said Cambridge on my invite, it was actually taking place in Wisbech, some forty odd miles further north of the city. That's a bit like trying to catch a flight to Rome on RyanAir.

It also added an extra half an hour to my journey and meant that I would have to use the B1104 Prickwillow Road, a road so blighted with subsidence and pot holes it makes going for a ride on The Nemesis at Alton Towers positively Sunday Afternoonish. But I managed to make it on time.

The proposed new code does make some sensible suggestions when you look at its overview, and ask any sensible, law-abiding member of the public what they think and they'll probably say that it should be brought in forthwith, and flog anybody who begs to differ. But it's not as simple as that.

During the presentations I heard one of the speakers say that "the Government thinks that people are drinking too much and that this shouldn't be allowed to happen." There is a gossamer-thin line between the democracy we apparently live in and the communist state that's being created and it's being trod on very firmly.

The proposed code aims to ban irresponsible promotions, enforce signage that tells you alcohol isn't part of your five-a-day, and bring in smaller measures. It's been widely publicised that all on-trade outlets will be forced to serve wine in a 125ml measure, but what has been less heavily publicised is that it also calls for half a pint to be made the standard measure for beer.

I appreciate that one of the goals of this new code is that it aims to reduce alcohol-related violence, but if my local builder walks in at the end of a busy day and says "IPA please, Mark", as he often does, and I only pour him a half because he didn't say 'pint', as the proposals appear to suggest, he will punch me on the nose.

Do we really need a whole raft of new legislation in our already overly-bureaucratic industry when Common Sense should prevail? I've already received an e-mail stating this new code could potentially cost the industry £58million in its first year. A hefty figure for a trade already so beleaguered.

What stood out most, however, was how heavily biased this new code is to the on-trade, whilst the off-trade are able to sit quietly to the side, whistling to themselves and hoping that nobody will point out that some of their offers clearly fall under the loosely termed "irresponsible promotion".

Simon How, Senior Public Health Programme Manager of the East of England Public Health & Social Care Directorate (I couldn't help but wonder how large his business card must be), presented a series of results from a survey of 7000 members of the public that showed pie charts all displaying that the vast majority of people in the East of England drink, and that some of them even class themselves as Heavy Drinkers.

But, when I asked him what percentage of that demographic purchased their alcohol from supermarkets rather than pubs, he admitted they hadn't asked that question during the survey. So, in a consultation process based upon curbing the excess sale and abuse of alcohol, it didn't seem logical to ask where the alcohol was being purchased from in the first place?

Clearly not.

Mr How did, however, admit that their survey showed that the vast majority of younger drinkers pre-load - in other words, they purchase alcohol from the off-trade and drink it before heading out in the evening because it is a cheaper way of getting in the mood than sitting in a pub all evening before hitting the clubs.

Even a student in the audience put her hand up, got the microphone, and stated to the panel that, at university, her and her friends 'pre-load' before going out for a night. My own barmaid tells me that's exactly what she and her friends do at the weekends when she is at university.

Yet, when asked, the Home Office panel said that the code did not fully incorporate the off-trade because there was little evidence to support the fact that supermarkets were part of the problem!

Indeed, all their code really asks them to do is put a sign up somewhere in the building stating the health risks of drinking alcohol and they can carry on selling twenty-four cans of Stella for ten pence.

Meanwhile, the on-trade have to put signs up, bottles have to be printed with health notices, measures have to be restricted to half pints, smaller glasses of wine and - potentially - 25ml spirit measures only. And, to top it off, we're not allowed to run promotions to try and attract new business like the supermarkets can.

The code seeks to address the problems caused by a small minority of people, whilst the majority of us will have to pay for it. Sadly, despite the best efforts of the bureaucrats, those rogue licensees that wish to flout the law will continue to do so, and the consumers who wish to drink themselves stupid in the first place will also continue to do so. And they'll just keep on getting their booze cheaply from the off-trade.

Indeed, I didn't feel attending the event was a waste of time because, as the day drew to a close, I was able to get the microphone and tell the panel what I thought: and that is that this whole exercise is an expensive waste of time.

Mad Scientists Apply Within…

2009-07-13T16:46:00.001+01:00

On holiday last week I decided it was time for my eldest son to choose what sort of career path he’s going to follow.

If you ask any self-respecting five-year-old what they want to be when they grow up they’ll usually reply with words like fireman or astronaut. By the time they reach ten they’ve developed an obsession with guns and want to join the Army so they can shoot things.

Malachy is nine and, so far, has expressed all the interest in growing-up as I do of getting in to a cage of hungry lions. And I can’t blame him really, given that we spend every day being told that there’s no point carrying on because the planet is melting and we’re all going to die from Swine Flu, but I decided I’d press him on the subject anyway as it’s about time he really started to understand that his lessons and his times tables are, actually, quite important.

So when I asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up, he immediately replied with “be a Formula One driver.” I knew, straight away, that this was a lie. Malachy has about as much interest in motorsport as I do in sticking my hand down a blocked drain, but I do like Formula One and therefore he figured if he said something he knew I’d like I’d shut up and leave him to play with his Nintendo DS.

But I wasn’t going to be perturbed and pushed him on the subject. So, after some thought, he came back to me one rainy day in Cornwall and said he’d like to be an inventor. “That’s great!” I enthused, immediately thinking ‘engineer’ or ‘mechanic’ or, at least, something he could do that would turn in to a career or a vocation.

We got talking about what topics he needs to concentrate on at school and out of Maths, English, Science and Art – all good founding subjects for somebody who wants to ‘invent’ things – it turns out that English is the only subject he doesn’t actually like.

And to me, that’s okay. When I was his age – and even now at 37 – all I ever wanted to be was a Formula One driver. Unfortunately, my Dad pointed out he couldn’t afford to buy me a go-kart so I decided I’d be a writer instead. English, therefore, is my strong(er) subject, while I’m somewhat rubbish at all the others. I’ll leave those to his mother.

I set off in life wanting to be a journalist in the field of motorsport, and then promptly left school and became an Estate Agent – just as the recession in the early nineties destroyed the housing market. My mum got me a job working for the fraud department of the Benefits Agency and then I joined the world of the Internet, where I remained until 2005 when I bought a pub.

The closest I’ve ever got to writing anything is a blog on the website of one of the trade’s leading magazines.

So I want to encourage Malachy to put his DS down and focus on something he’s interested in. Recounting the conversation with my friend James, he quickly pointed out that he has a bike that is in reasonably good condition, but needs some work to get it roadworthy again. James has very kindly donated this old bike to Malachy for him and I to work on during the summer holiday, which starts next week; the theory is that Malachy will learn the basic mechanics of bicycle gearing, brakes, steering and so on and hopefully develop his passion further.

I would say watch this space for updates but, as I have never – in my life – been able to even repair a puncture on a pushbike, it could all go horribly wrong…

A busy weekend ahead…

2009-06-19T16:24:00.001+01:00

Technorati Tags: #proudofpubs

This was too long for a Twitter message!

It’s now time for me to start the evening shift – a table of 19 booked in for a meal tonight, and that’s just the tip of the ice cream.

Tomorrow is our car wash day, there are two cricket matches in the afternoon (and another one on Sunday) and we’ve got a buffet for at least forty people booked in on Saturday night.

Then it’s Father’s Day, where a crowd of Dads are planning to come to the pub to watch the British Grand Prix. If only I could join them…

After that, it’s my respite for the weekend: Malachy’s Father’s Day present is to take me to see Transformers 2 on Sunday night. But, as he’s only nine, I guess that means I’m driving. And paying.

See you when I surface for some fresh air…

The Beer Tie, Big Brother, and Clarkson for PM!

2009-06-05T09:40:00.002+01:00

As the world appears to implode before our very eyes, you'll have to forgive me this morning for waking up a little bleary eyed and somewhat frustrated with everybody. I don't rant often, but...

Should MPs Decide The Fate of the Pub?

Watching the Government melt before my very eyes on the news last night I couldn't help but think that a similar thing is happening in our trade at the moment with the furore over the beer tie.

Certainly, the tie needs to be reviewed, but anarchy isn't going to help anybody. An independent body with knowledgeable individuals from every sector of the industry, should be discussing the future of the beer tie sensibly.

The last people we need talking about it right now are MPs...

---

Big Brother - Don't Bother!

It wasn't until I was flicking through the pages of the Cambridge News last night, looking for the TV schedules to see if Question Time was on at its normal time or whether it had been moved again in a shameless attempt to garner more viewers, that I realised Big Brother is about to burst back on to our screens in a just-as-shameless attempt to make money from our telephone bills.

These days we're barely able to take a breath between so-called reality TV shows.

When I was ten years old, Saturday nights were all about sitting on the sofa with my Dad, a sonic frequency remote control in hand and only three TV channels (the fourth was about to be launched) to choose from. Knight Rider was usually the programme of choice and my Dad and I would sit and laugh at David Hasselhoff's exposed chest wig and the slight campness of KITT's voice.

Today, a twenty-first century Knight Rider can be found: Val Kilmer's interpretation of the car's voice is still a little effeminate and Justin Bruening is as much about tight tops and sucked-in-stomachs as Hasselhoff was, and the programme appears to have been made using exactly the same budget as it was in 1982. But watching it with my son makes me feel ten years old all over again.

The trouble is, it's on the Sci-Fi channel at 8:00pm on Tuesday nights. Pretty rubbish when my boy's got to get up for school the next morning, but at least these days we've got Sky+ instead of Betamax.

The mainstream channels, however, have decided that what we really want to see on prime-time TV is Amanda Holden, reducing a ten-year-old girl to tears.

Just last week we saw the final of Britain's Got Talent see a dance troupe who'd only ever played a live gig once before getting on the telly beat the viewers' favourite, Susan Boyle, to the £100'000 prize. Poor Susan was as shocked as a bookies' bank manager and ended up having to go and have a lie down at The Priory, resting spot for any starlet who's had a bit too much of the front pages.

Barely seven days later and we're about to be subjected to thirteen weeks of sixteen wannabe "contestants" lazing about as they try to achieve their Andy Warhol moment. A quick snapshot of these people shows that the house will comprise a female Russian boxer; somebody who's clearly modelled himself on Russel Brand; an unbelievably attractive 21 year old model who's been in FHM magazine yet, unfortunately, lauds Simon Cowell as her favourite celebrity; a pierced, tattooed, mohican sporting unemployed sexual predator; and a carpenter who looks a bit like a wolf.

As usual, Endemol have gone all out for onscreen ridicule and antics in a ratings attempt for their tenth season of Big Brother and it leaves me wanting nothing more than a drink. Preferably a large, stiff one.

Once again, my pub will be a Big Brother free zone, happily willing to accommodate those lost souls who have to wander out in the evening to prevent staring at a house full of sleeping zombies for the next 91 days.

- - -

Clarkson for PM?

As the throng of departing MPs grows ever larger, embarrassed in to resignation by their determination to claim for a second toilet brush, the growing gaggle of Z-List celebrities eager to take their place makes me shudder.

If you've been struggling to choose between Animals Count or UKIP in the European Elections, perhaps it's time for the celebrities to form their own party - and who better to lead them than Jeremy Clarkson?

I've heard worse ideas...

Knight Rider: A Quick Review

2009-05-14T11:01:00.003+01:00

I just managed to get some time to myself to sit and watch the remake of Knight Rider.

Excited as I was, I couldn't help feel slightly disappointed that the producers of the new version had managed to stick so rigidly to the kitschness of the old version:

While the special effects are undoubtedly twenty-first century, and the car's power system is now eco-friendly and solar-powered, KITT - voiced by Val Kilmer - still managed to sound ridiculously camp.

David Hasselhoff, cameoing as the original Michael Knight, still managed to act so offensibly bad I might have switched it off if he'd appeared at the start.

And the car chases were unfeasibly improbable: a supercar Mustang, powered by the world's fastest hybrid engine, is completely incapable of outrunning a lumbering Ford SUV on a twisty mountain road?

Despite this, the program still managed to make feel twelve years old. And that was cool.

The Husband Store...

2009-05-14T07:43:00.003+01:00

I received this via e-mail this morning. It made me laugh...

A store that sells new husbands has opened on Oxford Street, where a woman may go to choose a husband. Among the instructions at the entrance is a description of how the store operates:

You may visit this store ONLY ONCE! There are six floors and the value of the products increase as the shopper ascends the flights. The shopper may choose any item from a particular floor, or may choose to go up to the next floor, but you cannot go back down except to exit the building!

So, a woman goes to the Husband Store to find a husband. On the first floor the sign on the door reads:

Floor 1 - These men Have Jobs

She is intrigued, but continues to the second floor, where the sign reads:

Floor 2 - These men Have Jobs and Love Kids.

'That's nice,' she thinks, 'but I want more.'

So she continues upward. The third floor sign reads:

Floor 3 - These men Have Jobs, Love Kids, and are Extremely Good Looking.

'Wow,' she thinks, but feels compelled to keep going..

She goes to the fourth floor and the sign reads:

Floor 4 - These men Have Jobs, Love Kids, are Drop-dead Good Looking and help With Housework.

'Oh, mercy me!' she exclaims, 'I can hardly stand it!'

Still, she goes to the fifth floor and the sign reads:

Floor 5 - These men Have Jobs, Love Kids, are Drop-dead Gorgeous, help with Housework, and Have a Strong Romantic Streak..

She is so tempted to stay, but she goes to the sixth floor, where the sign reads:

Floor 6 - You are visitor 31,456,012 to this floor. There are no men on this floor. This floor exists solely as proof that women are impossible to please. Thank you for shopping at the Husband Store.

To avoid gender bias charges, the store's owner has opened a New Wives store just across the street.

The first floor has wives that love sex.

The second floor has wives that love sex and have money and like beer.

The third, fourth, fifth and sixth floors have never been visited...

Making Breakfast...

2009-05-11T10:48:00.001+01:00

My wife is a keen photographer (no, not that sort; girls taking their clothes off don't do it for her, unfortunately) and so today she is off to the deepest darkest jungle that is Woburn Abbey to undoubtedly get the Jeep scratched and herself eaten by a lion.

Unfortunately, this means that I've got to fend for myself today. It's already been a struggle trying to work out whether to spend the free time this morning before work doing paperwork, reading a magazine, having a bath, doing the housework or just generally being lazy, but then I had to figure out how to feed myself.

This is something I just don't do. There has always been a food fairy that miraculously puts meals in front of me at certain times of the day, usually just before I start killing customers through frustration. Today, there won't be.

But we have children, so when I decided I ought to have some breakfast this morning I thought it would be easy. With a six-year-old and a nine-year-old in the house, I must be able to find some cereal to start the day with, and indeed I could. But unfortunately it was all gobbledegook to me - there was so much choice it was almost painful.

Quite aside from good old-fashioned children's cereals such as Frosties or that Snap, Crackle and Pop stuff, we seem to have a surfeit of other breakfast offerings, including muesli, Special K, Honey Waffles, Chocco Hoops and something worryingly called Golden Balls, from Asda.

The mere choice gave me a headache, so I decided to make myself a sandwich instead. Except, as we live in a pub, there doesn't appear to be a supply of Tesco Value Thick Slice for me to smear some butter on. Instead, we have posh bread that the customers apparently love but, unfortunately, seemed to require nothing weaker than a chainsaw in order to slice it.

I could have screamed. All I wanted was some breakfast. So I made some tea, grabbed a packet of Pickled Onion Monster Munch, and headed back upstairs.

By the time the wife gets home, the boys and I will look so forlorn she'll be forced to serve up a great big plate of supper and never go away again. Even for six hours.

Bernie Ecclestone Talks Bollocks. Again.

2009-04-24T00:31:00.001+01:00

It shouldn't really come as a surprise, but once again the British Grand Prix is under threat and next year might not exist at all.

Money has a lot to do with this, obviously, as Donington Ventures Leisure Ltd, the company who run Donington Park and who are supposed to be promoting next year's race, have apparently forgotten to pay their landlords some rent.

Wheatcroft & Sons Ltd, who actually own Donington Park and recently agreed to a 150 year lease of the property with Donington Ventures Leisure Ltd (it gets r e a l l y confusing, doesn't it?), say they haven't been paid since September last year.

And that the rent owed is £2.47 million quid.

Understandably, then, they're a little huffy about it and have asked for all the rent to be paid. They've even started proceedings to forfeit the lease.

Which sort of leaves Donington Ventures Leisure Ltd up the creek, paddleless.

It's always been a bit of a tall order to move Formula One to its new home of Donington. A lot of redesign work needs to be undertaken, planning permission obtained, and the very small problem of getting an international airport to shut down for the race weekend has also been a bit of a headache.

At every turn, there's been a hurdle. But there needn't have been.

Because despite money having a bit of a hand in this all going wrong, spite has had an even bigger hand. Bernie Ecclestone, Formula One's TV Supremo, has always had a bit of a problem with the British Racing Driver's Club, who own Silverstone. At their every attempt to improve their annual showing of an F1 race, he's criticised them. At their every attempt to achieve his ever moving goal posts, he's moved the posts further away and belittled them.

For some reason, he's got a bit of a bee in his bonnet about Silverstone and, despite it being simply the best venue to host the British Grand Prix at, he's done everything in his power to move it away from them. Including signing a contract with a circuit that clearly has no hope of putting on half the show the BRDC could.

After today's announcement that the 2010 British Grand Prix could be in doubt, Ecclestone has expressed no surprise at all. But he's also said that if Donington can't host it, there won't be a Grand Prix next year because there isn't a circuit in the UK capable of hosting one.

I have to say, and please forgive me here, Bernie's talking Bollocks.

The BRDC have always said that, should there be a problem with Donington, they would be happy to host the race. Bernie says that they don't have the commitment, but he's wrong. I've been to a couple of British Grand Prix and they have been utterly spectacular.

Bernie says that Silverstone doesn't match the facilities of a modern F1 circuit, such as Sepang in Malaysia, but he's wrong. The modern circuits might have high-tech facilities, smooth flowing tracks, and all the trappings of the twenty-first century but what Silverstone lacks in spaceage paddock design, this wartime airfield-cum-racing-track makes up for in nostalgia and history.

If Bernie Ecclestone thinks this counts for nothing these days, then he should stamp on the Monaco Grand Prix pretty quickly. The only reason it's kept on the calendar is because of its history - in today's Health & Safety conscious world of dangerous motorsport, Monaco is a tragedy waiting to occur.

Silverstone has as much history and character behind it as Monaco and just because it's set in a blustery airfield in the middle of Northamptonshire rather than on the sunny Mediterranean coast does not mean that it has no place on the F1 calendar. And Britain, as a country, plays home to the vast majority of the teams that race in the sport, not to mention it's the epicenter of global motorsport in general.

So wind your neck in, Bernie, and put Formula One right back where it needs to be - at the home of British Motorsport: Silverstone.

Japanese Skirts for the Barstaff Uniforms?

2009-04-17T15:26:00.004+01:00

I was thinking recently that it was about time to review the staff uniforms. The burgundy polo shirts for boys and pink shirts for girls are starting to look a tad dated, so I started looking around for some new ideas - and my mum sent me an e-mail with something I think is perfect!

Now, the images you see below are real, and these skirts are apparently the latest in fashion crazes in Japan at the moment. Who knows, it could be the next craze in the UK, too? Before you look at the pictures, it's important to note that the material in these skirts is not see-through, but instead this is actually the pattern on the skirts to make you think that they are see-through...

At the end of the day, the Japanese probably haven't been known for having the best sense of style ... but then, neither am I...!

Walking The Dog...

2009-04-16T23:59:00.001+01:00

I liked this joke too much to ignore posting it on here...

--

A little girl asks her mum, 'Mum, can I take the dog for a walk around the
block?'

Her mum replies 'No, because she is on heat.'

'What does that mean?' asked the child.

'Go and ask your father. I think he's in the garage.'

The little girl goes out to the garage and says, 'Dad, can I take Lulu for a
walk around the block? I asked Mum, but she said the dog was on the heat,
and to come ask you.'

He took a rag, soaked it in petrol, and scrubbed the dog's backside with it
to disguise the scent, and said 'Ok, you can go now, but keep Lulu on the
leash and only go one time around the block.'

The little girl left and returned a few minutes later with no dog on the
leash..

Surprised, Dad asked, 'Where's Lulu?'

You'll love this!!!!!!!!!)...............

The little girl said, 'She ran out of petrol about halfway round the block,
so another dog is pushing her home.'

Button injured in horrific F1 accident

2009-04-08T15:15:00.004+01:00

It's true, I got this in an e-mail from an associate this morning...

Button has been injured in horrific F1 accident...

Terrorists watch Sky News

2009-04-03T09:13:00.001+01:00

I’ve often wondered why we bother spending such vast sums of money protecting our politicians and visiting dignitaries.

This week, we’ve apparently spent £20m on the protection of world leader’s heading in to London for the G20 Summit Meeting but, to be honest, it’s a great waste of money. Not because we’re going broke or because, in this time of global financial doom, we would be better off spending the money on bailing out more failing businesses, but simply because all anybody’s got to do to get around the security forces is watch one of the myriad twenty-four hour news channels we festoon our satellite services with these days.

Seriously, has nobody figured out that the reason we haven’t managed to capture Osama bin Laden yet is perhaps because, whilst our troops are marching on the mountainous regions of Afghanistan, bin Laden and his boys are watching Sky News? News broadcasters have been seen in the past to give them up-to-the-minute broadcasts of exactly where the troops are firing upon.

“Ah,” bin Laden’s advisers only have to say. “They’re firing on that mountain over there. They’ll be here tomorrow. Let’s move to the caves in that mountain behind us.”

It’s the same with protecting the world leaders in this week’s gathering. We knew that President Obama was landing at Stansted Airport on Tuesday evening, not because the world’s press told us so, but because Ryanair have been advertising it in the newspapers. “Obama chooses Stansted,” their strapline screams above a caricature of the American President and his personal Boeing 747, “and so do we!”

So all the terrorists had to do was follow Michael O’Leary’s advertising campaign and they’d figure out pretty much where the top dog was going to land – and it wasn’t at one of the UK’s bigger airports or, indeed, one of the nearby well-protected US Military Airbases.

And as soon as Airforce One touched down most of the UK’s, not to mention the world’s, leading journalists were there to report on the fact that the aircraft’s door had opened. Along with a vast entourage of almost 500 personnel and a bomb-proof car called Cadillac One, Obama stepped out in to the glare of the world’s flashbulbs, to be met by perhaps the biggest financial problem of them all, Alistair Darling.

I was half expecting a Ryanair aircraft to taxi in to view, just for the free advertising opportunity.

The cameras remained on Barrack Obama as he made his way to a nearby helicopter, codenamed Marine One, which was to fly him on his next stage of the journey.

Amazingly, however, the TV anchorwoman, pointing out that the President’s helicopter was departing, also happened to mention that those helicopters following Marine One were the decoy aircraft, designed to confuse any passing scalliwag.

“Holy Helicopters!” the terrorists could be heard exclaiming, “they’re using decoys!” It would be a wonderful ploy, if our television cameras weren’t already broadcasting the aircraft the President had got on to. But thanks for sharing – just in case there was any confusion, all they’ve got to do now is blow up those following as well, just to make sure.

And, if that were to fail, we’d been told a minute or two earlier that President Obama and his wife were on their way to the American Embassy. So the bad guys knew where he was going next, just in case they missed the choppers.

If that wasn’t the worst of it, however, anybody with a bit of a nefarious plan might just as well wait until today, when the jackpot of world leaders were gathered together in one location – which was widely publicised in advance as being the London ExCel.

The £20m spend on protecting this top dogs from around the globe might, therefore, seem a little excessive, but last week we learned why the security was really there, after a faux story appeared in one of the tabloid presses that, for their safety, the attending dignitaries were going to be allowed to smoke indoors.

Be warned, a smoker scorned…

Monday Bananaman!

2009-03-30T09:07:00.001+01:00

So it’s Monday. We’re all feeling groggy from the weekend. Imagine you’re walking down the street, and then this giant banana exposes itself to you… It’s guaranteed to put a smile on your face at the start of the week!

Off on a much-needed break; back Thursday. Have a good week.

Holiday Blues…

2009-03-27T15:40:00.001Z

On Monday, Ali and I are going on holiday.

Actually, that’s wrong. “Holiday” conjures up images of big airplanes, sandy beaches, sunny skies and, most horrifyingly, Mickey Mouse.

In reality, we’re trudging twenty minutes up the road to a hotel just outside of Norwich which, at this time of year, is usually pretty dreary.

Three nights away in a hotel only a few minutes up the road might better be referred to as a “dirty weekend” (the Monday-Thursday dates notwithstanding) but, to be honest, I doubt there’ll be much of the sticky-stuff going on, either.

In fact, what we plan to do on this much-needed break is sleep. It’ll be the first proper bit of time off we’ve had since June last year, and boy are we tired.

I’d like to think that what will happen is that we’ll get to the hotel and be in bed, fast asleep, by 9pm. We then won’t wake up until Thursday morning, when we’ll have a quick dip in the hotel’s pool before heading home.

But I’ve got two kids, and I’ve worked out what is going to happen here. You see, on a school day, getting Malachy or Jacob out of bed before the bus arrives at 8:40 is something of a mammoth task. It has to start at seven o’clock and usually results in me eventually tipping the bunk beds on to their side when I see the bus approaching. Much screaming, shouting and wailings of “I hate you” and “I’m still tired” then consume the brief five minutes before they’re chucked, unceremoniously and without their hair brushed, on to the bus and Dave drives off.

You would think that all of this tiredness would come from a hectic lifestyle and would therefore be all consuming. They swim, play outside, kick footballs around. Malachy even plays the trumpet. Yet amazingly, at the weekend when there is no school, they are both up and screaming the house down at six a.m., their laughter and shouts pretty much grating my nerves after a heavy Friday night. There’s not a hint of the tiredness they complain about on schooldays.

Come school morning, the bunk-bed-tipping has to commence once more.

And this is what worries me. Twenty minutes up the road means we’re near enough if the pub needs us, but far enough away that it won’t disturb my sleep. I’ll be able to get the full night’s kip that I’m yearning. Away from the pressures of customer service and cellar maintenance, away from the distractions of Twitter and autosport.com, I’ll be able to sit in peace and read Stuff magazine and GQ to my heart’s content, without fear of being disturbed.

But because I’m not at work, because the constant demands of the pub will be on somebody else’s shoulders for a couple of days, I’ll be awake at six a.m. There’s only so much GQ you can read and the room’s TV is guaranteed to only have a choice of Fern Britton or the Sky Poker channel. By seven a.m. on Tuesday morning I’m going to be pulling my teeth out and yearning for the chance to clean the lines.

I better take my laptop with me…

Electric Cars get Noisy

2009-03-23T00:43:00.001Z

Electric cars have long been touted by the media as the saviour of all our climate problems, and by manufacturers as clean, green and very, very efficient – because they want you to buy them!

The Government have even fallen foul enough of this to grant electric cars exemption from road tax and the Congestion Charge, and the perception they’d like to have you is that they produce no polluting emissions whatsoever and that they are built in a wooden shed in the back garden of a hemp-wearing nettle-eater, just to keep the green image alive.

The problem, of course, is that to produce the batteries for these cars the manufacturers have to mine nickel, and then once they have done that they have to ship it three times around the world to a factory which produces so much pollution that vast acres of land around it are decimated. Once that’s done, the battery gets shipped around the world again to a building where it is put in to the car, which is then shipped around the world again to a place where you can buy the thing.

Then you have to charge it up, which means plugging it in to a socket in your house, which is probably receiving its electricity from a coal power station.

And then it runs out of charge before you’ve even driven off your driveway, so you have to charge it back up again.

Of course, manufacturers have had to come up with innovative solutions to get round the fallibilities of the electric motor, most of which require the coupling up of the electric motor to that of a polluting Internal Combustion engine. In order to accelerator hard enough to overtake a snail, or to switch on your air conditioning on a hot day, the electric motor gives way to a petrol engine.

It’s not all bad news, however. Manufacturers have been working on cleaner alternatives for a while. Take the Mercedes BlueTec solution, for example. A small, clean yet incredibly powerful diesel engine with very little emissions appears to mean that you can have an S-Class powered by a measly 1.3 litre engine that runs on nothing more than wee, while other manufacturers are touting hydrogen as the way forward. Very clean and efficient, some are even saying that when it’s parked up the car would be able to use its vast built-in power station to operate your house, but the trouble is that hydrogen is inherently unsafe and ultimately means that we are all going to be driving around in potential mushroom clouds.

But the biggest problem that manufacturers seem to be facing is noise. When a Range Rover V8 bears down on a little old lady crossing the road, the chances are her hearing aids will pick up the sound of the burbling engine and warn her of impending danger. The Tesla Roadster, however, can nip from zero to sixty in a smidge under four seconds and can rocket on to a top speed of 130mph, all without making any more noise than mopping a floor, which means it doesn’t matter how good granny’s hearing aids are, she won’t hear it coming before it kills her.

To get around this problem, electric car manufacturers have decided to fit big speakers that will project the noise of a real engine. The sound will emulate that of a real engine as it speeds up and slows down, giving the driver and passer’s by the perception that it is a real, gas-guzzling behemoth while all the time encouraging trees to grow new leaves.

There are even rumours that drivers will have the option to change the engine noise to emulate whatever car they want. So, owners of a G-Wizz can fool people with the sound of a Ferrari F430 engine, while drivers of a Lightning GT with a strange sense of humour could potentially drive along with the engine noise of a British Leyland Allegro rattling out of their speakers.

All of which got me to thinking, obscurely, about the computer game Sim City. In the game, once you’ve built your city, you can choose to let your denizens live in relative peace and harmony with nothing more to worry about than the fact that you’ve forgotten to build a water supply to their house, or you can switch on Disasters. This, in effect, means the computer will decide – randomly – whether a tornado or an earthquake is going to destroy part of your city, or whether a dinosaur is going to take an afternoon stroll over the power station.

So I find myself wondering if manufacturers of electric cars could build a similar feature in to their playlist. With disasters switched off, owners could simply drive along in relative peace to the dulcet tones of an Aston Martin V8 but, when they’re feeling fruity, they could switch disasters on and the computer could, at any given moment, decide to make it sound like the exhaust had fallen off.

That could give the RAC a few headaches…

It’s all so complicated it makes me glad of my four-litre straight-six.

Cheap beer; cheaper service

2009-03-17T00:29:00.001Z

Conned in to wandering around town this morning rather than mowing the lawn, I found myself feeling rather hungry. Tempted by Wetherspoon’s tremendous breakfast offer, just £2.69 for a Traditional Breakfast, Ali and I made our way in to a nearby establishment and promptly set about choosing what we wanted to eat. And immediately I was disappointed.

If ever there was a shining example in how not to offer customer service, this was it. Several of us stood waiting at the bar, while three bar staff chatted inanely in the corner. One customer, desperate for his ten a.m. triple vodka and lemonade, dared to call “when you’ve got a minute” to them, which seemed to enrage at least one of them further.

From what I could tell, this poor chap had done nothing wrong and was simply waiting to part with his hard earned cash. Instead, the women wanted to talk, but his polite prodding had meant that they had decided to make him wait. However, by making this decision – yet knowing he was next in line to be served – they decided that this meant all of us had to wait too.

Eventually, one of them deigned to serve him, and we got moving again. The trouble was that by the time the barmaid had served him and then moved on to me, it was difficult to tell whether the Old Growler was a special they had on the pump, or the barmaid herself.

Getting cross with me for asking for a breakfast baguette with bacon – which is how it’s put in the menu – she admonished me for not simply saying a bacon baguette. When I asked for a decaf latte I was simply told, “no.” No what? “No you can’t have one.” There was no other explanation. So I asked for a regular coffee. “Well do you want a regular coffee with milk, or a regular latte?”

I was so confused, I no longer knew what I wanted – other than that I wish I’d gone to the pub down the road that was charging £4.95 for a breakfast, but in which I knew I could get what I wanted with out having to feel like I’d done something wrong.

I know full well that if a similar attitude had been proffered to customers in my pub, people would have complained and walked out. Yet here, we all simply stood meekly by and let it happen. In a day and age when pubs are struggling, this is the last image we want the public to be getting of our fine trade.

Tim Martin, chairman of pub chain J.D.Wetherspoon’s, might have garnered support from the pub industry last week by speaking out against the Government’s draconian policies towards alcohol, but his pub company could do with some lessons in customer service.

Perhaps, if minimum pricing becomes law, a standard for minimum service could be introduced too.

Friday 13th Costs Me Money

2009-03-13T23:30:00.000Z

I’m not a superstitious person, but there are times when I wonder if there are truths to the rumours that you shouldn’t walk under ladders, step on cracks or let black cats cross your path.

Most of the time I’d say they were folklore, urban myths and bedtime faerie tails designed to spook small children – I’ve broken enough mirrors and spilled enough salt in my time to think it’s nothing more than fabrication – but Friday 13th is one of those days I just shudder at the thought of. There’s always a problem in any given day, usually surmountable, but the tails surrounding this particular date usually mean that we generate the bad luck by expecting it.

Take today, for example. I woke this morning to the sound of a road sweeper whose massive vacuum cleaner had decided to work in reverse, blowing chunks of hoovered up road debris across the path in front of the pub. I should have taken that as a sign the day was going to get worse, but I didn’t. Instead, I watched BBC’s Click, on which they detailed a website about mind-mapping that I was quite interested in, so I went to the website, fully intending to spend just ten minutes perusing the site and before I knew it there were just ten minutes until the pub needed opening, I hadn’t done the cleaning, and the dray order needed to be placed.

At 11:30 – door opening time – I found myself still vacuuming as customers hammered on the door waiting to be let in. I hadn’t had time for a wash and my hair was portraying a distinct Something About Mary… style.

I had thought that maybe my bad luck for the day was going to subject itself to just bad hair and a touch of tardiness, but then the school rang to say that Malachy was being sick. Fortunately, Barmaid Bryony was on hand to stand the bar while I dashed to the school to retrieve him and I prayed that the day wasn’t going to get any worse.

It probably wouldn’t have, but then Ali decided she wanted me to drill some holes in the kids’ bedroom wall to put new bedside lights on. Drills and me don’t get on too well at the best of times, but when I discovered the drill was still outside, hidden behind the log box where it had probably been since November, I realised it was just going to get worse. The drill worked, amazingly, but the chuck-key wouldn’t undo the clasp so I couldn’t change the drill bit. Cue an impatient me drilling holes in the wall far larger than I needed to mount a simple fitting.

The evening session came around and poor old Bryony turned up for work. The customers love her, she’s pretty and personable and everybody enjoys her company – until a customer asked for a Scotch and Dry Ginger, in return for which they got a Scotch and Ginger Beer. Then, in a flurry to sort her mistake out, she inadvertently knocked a whole glass of wine over a customer – and it wasn’t even his glass of wine!

As if my evening couldn’t get worse, we offer a great deal for customers on a Friday night – Ace it Fridays. The idea is simple: called double-six in some places, the customers are handed two poker dice and if they manage to throw two ace of clubs, they don’t pay for the drinks in that round. Most Fridays the doubles don’t come up.

Tonight, of course, I’ve already given away four free rounds to victorious customers, and the shift isn’t over yet…

Repost: Clubcard Pints!

2009-03-10T19:37:00.001Z

I wrote this blog originally for The Publican website and it was posted on Monday 10th March 2009. The original can be read here: http://www.thepublican.com/story.asp?sectioncode=16&storycode=63043&c=2

------------

For some time now, the march of the supermarket has created a dramatic change in the way we shop and steadily gobbled up all but the hardiest of small retailers.

Following in the business models of giant American retail corporations, who swept through US towns and decimated small businesses in the seventies and eighties, Tesco have employed similar tactics in the UK throughout the nineties.

Today, in the twenty-first century, they’re going after the villages too.

With pubs failing at a ferocious rate, the Mail on Sunday – not necessarily a friend of publicans in recent times – has reported that the supermarket giant has recently put in applications to purchase at least ten pubs that have been forced to close.

Pubs become attractive to companies like Tesco because they don’t require lengthy applications for change of use, as licensing for food and alcohol is usually already in place for such buildings and the article intimates that the sites targeted by the chain are town outlets.

But how long before they start getting into the defunct village pubs too?

With their immense buying power meaning that they are able to force breweries to sell to them extremely cheaply, a fact not lost on publicans who then have to bear the brunt of the difference as the breweries try to make up the losses in selling to supermarkets, and their somewhat cavalier attitude towards volume sales, these supermarkets provide a greater risk to the future of pubs than any competition or legislation we currently face.

Tesco themselves have even admitted in the past that their below-cost price policies could be a factor in teenage binge-drinking. More than a year ago they promised to work with the government to end price promotions on alcohol, but today we still see regular heavy discounting on alcohol in the retail sector while Happy Hours in pubs are frowned upon.

They even argue that, whilst aware their price-policies are associated with binge-drinking, violence and disorder, they can’t lift their prices because of fair-trade laws.

Suggestions such as restrictions on selling to under-21s or higher levels of tax for alcohol sold by the off-trade have also been dismissed as either unfair or unfeasible by both the companies themselves and the government. Yet they would certainly help redress the balance between supermarkets and pubs, which are expected to police and manage the sale of alcohol in a manner that the likes of Tesco don’t appear to be.

Sadly, though, I wonder how long it will be long before you’ll be able to drive through a village and call in at The Tesco Arms where, rather than a nice pint of IPA or an imaginatively named Bishop’s Farewell, you’ll be given the choice of Tesco Value Bitter or their Finest Ale.

--------

Since the original story broke, Tesco have denied that they are specifically targeting pubs: http://www.thepublican.com/story.asp?sectioncode=7&storycode=63069

Brawn Grand Prix

2009-03-06T11:06:00.002Z

So the Honda Formula One team has been saved from a miserable fate by ex-Ferrari supremo Ross Brawn, who’s promptly gone and plastered his name all over the team.

It’s great news for Jenson Button, who otherwise would have had to spend this year posing around Monaco in a Honda Clarity FCX, and for Rubens Barrichello, who is reportedly staying on as the sport’s elder statesman.

Honda were a team that should have been challenging for top positions this year, after a dire two years during which they put all their eggs in one basket: the 2009 championship. And then they pulled the plug at the end of 2008. So, while the team undoubtedly has a good chassis and a great set of facilities behind it, the unrest of the past few months and the uncertainty as to whether they would even make it to Melbourne in three weeks time will certainly have set them back a bit.

Brawn’s next challenge is to generate an income for the team – and that means finding sponsorship. Surely, he must be heading straight to Braun for a lovely partnership?

Ross Brawn’s only other coup could be to coax Michael Schumacher away from Ferrari, and maybe even bring him out of retirement for a season or two and get him driving to show Jenson just how it’s done.

Jennifer Aniston’s Hirsute Look

2009-03-05T14:05:00.001Z

Since the day she became famous for her character Rachel Green in the US sitcom Friends, Jennifer Aniston has been equally famous for her hair. She’s also been in the number one slot of my Top 5 Female Celebs I Just Would… list.

Others have come and gone, but Aniston and her famous shag have remained at the top for the best part of fifteen years, despite her turning 40 last month.

In fact, my wife has already been told that if Aniston were to walk in to my pub, divorce papers would be served on Ali straight away. I don’t think she’s overly impressed with that arrangement, but there you go.

One thing Jennifer seems to share with my wife, however, is a ridiculous trait for spending lots of money – especially on her hair. The star’s famous hairdo has been the speculation of many magazines since her rise to fame, but this week it’s come under even more intense scrutiny after it was revealed that she spent £40’000 on her latest 'do.

Apparently, in order to achieve the natural look she sported at this week’s UK premier of Marley & Me, Miss Aniston’s latest film along with Owen Wilson, she insisted that her hairdresser was flown in specifically to arrange it. The stylist’s travel costs, hotel costs and over-inflamed bill have all been covered by… somebody. It’s unclear whether Aniston has paid the exorbitant charge, or whether it has been picked up by the studio.

Either way, it’s mighty expensive. And, as I struggle to comprehend Ali spending £40 on a haircut, spending a thousand times that just to make sure it looks natural seems somewhat… wrong.

Even divorcing my wife wouldn’t cost that much. And that’s saying something!

Another new look…

2009-03-03T10:43:00.001Z

Yes, I’ll confess I’ve spent the night on my own, suffering insomnia and therefore dabbling with the look and feel of my blog. Again.

This time, the idea was to try and make it look something like my Twitter feed. I probably failed and it didn’t cure my insomnia, but at least this time the theme is more unique to me than pilfered from some site somewhere on the etherweb!

Have you seen Kirsty Allsop's ring?

2009-02-25T13:21:00.003Z

Kirsty Allsop - the bubbly yet somewhat everso slightly annoying presenter of Channel 4's Location Location Location - has apparently misplaced her ring.

Given to her by partner Ben Andersen to mark the birth of their first child in 2006, the red ring (surrounded by diamonds, no less) is the closest thing she'll probably ever get to an engagement ring, according to the star. Which probably means that Mr Andersen has some commitment issues towards the star, who has a penchant for knocking down walls and whingeing endlessly to co-star Phil Spencer about the inability of their 'customers' to make a decision on a house.

The Honourable Miss Allsop apparently lost the ring yesterday when she popped in to Marks & Spencers in Hackney for a sandwich, and she is concerned that the item might have fallen from her pocket as she stepped out of the taxi. I'm not sure which bothers me more: the fact that her precious ring wasn't actually on her finger, or that her diet comprises M&S sandwiches.

Either way, Kirsty is devastated and is offering a substantial reward for the return of her ring. I wish her luck; I know how precious my wife gets about her jewellery.

We might be able to help, however. In 2007 Kirsty teamed up with the Conservatives to launch a review in to house-buying and proudly announced that she would walk naked through College Green, Westminster, if people liked Home Information Packs.

Albeit with some concerns, HIPs have now been accepted as part-and-parcel of the house-buying process, which means that if Kirsty stands by her words and gets her kit off, everyone will be able to locate her ring for her.

I wonder what reward she'll give for that...

One-Armed Presenter Doesn't Scare Me

2009-02-23T15:33:00.003Z

So Jade Goody is allowed to die on the front pages of our newspapers in order to increase public awareness about cervical cancer. Thirteen-year-old Alfie Patton and his fifteen-year-old girlfriend, Chantelle Steadman, are front-page news used to raise awareness about the issues of teenage sex.

But the furore about CBeebies presenter Cerrie Burnell smacks of double-standards. The one-armed presenter is at the centre of uproar today after parents have complained that her disability might scare their children.

When we are allowed to let celebrities and youngsters sell their stories to the press in order to make money behind the excuse of highlighting social and medical issues, complaining about the use of disabled people to host children’s television programmes seems somewhat hypocritical.

Children are extraordinarily resilient creatures. They take people’s differences in their stride and are rarely upset by the physical appearances of others. It is only as they grow older and begin to understand the discriminations of the adults around them that issues with disability, race and political issues begin to form part of their personal make-up.

Today’s Daily Mail quotes one blogger as saying “Is it just me, or does anyone else think the new woman presenter on CBeebies may scare the kids because of her disability? I didn’t want to let my children watch the filler bits on The Bedtime Hour last night because I know it would have played on my eldest daughter’s mind and possibly caused sleep problems. And yes, this is a serious post.”

Well, Blogger X, it clearly isn’t you given the number of other complaints about 29-year-old Miss Burnell, but I would have to ask just how you know it would have played on your daughter’s mind unless you pointed it out to her.

As the father of two children, aged six and nine, I’m aware that neither child seems to have even really noticed this apparent issue and they often don’t pick up on the disabilities of others unless they are pointed out to them. Instead, they simply accept them as everyday occurrences.

The BBC are famed for being overly PC when it comes to their employment policies and Miss Burnell might well have been offered the job because of her disability rather than her presentability, but to remove her from this show because parents are worried that their children shouldn’t be subjected to the horrors of the real world simply because they themselves are offended by it seems somewhat discriminatory.

Jenson Button's Hopes Rest on a Virgin

2009-02-22T14:08:00.003Z

Apart from the opportunity to be able to poke fun at the name, with such obvious jokes as having a virgin race team on the track and similar such nonsense, the idea that Richard Branson’s Virgin group might be considering purchasing the almost-defunct Honda F1 team is quite exciting.

Understandable marketing benefits aside, right up until Honda decided to pull the plug it was widely mooted that this year’s racer could potentially have been a race winner, and certainly a car capable of putting the wind up Ferrari and McLaren, which makes it a very viable platform for Sir Richard to put his strong branding to. Pulling the plug so suddenly seems not only folly for Honda, with regards to the business of Formula One, but somewhat unfair on all the people who have struggled over the past few years to put such a recalcitrant car through its paces in competition – not least of all Button himself, who saw so much promise in Honda and therefore buggered up his own contractual stakes with Williams in order to stay with them, only to then go on and race with the back-markers.

Such, however, is the nature of the economic climate and the motor sector that Honda have decided to put their money behind their staff and the manufacturing of their mainstay vehicles – not to mention the development of hybrid and hydrogen technologies – rather than risk it on the chance that their Formula One team might not win a race again this year.

As well as having been a fan of Button and the Honda team for some time, I’ve also long been an admirer of Branson and the work of his Virgin group. As a brand they are phenomenally successful, and everything his company does just seems to work; it’s been thought through long before we get to experience it, and inevitably – contract wrangling with Sky aside over the Virgin TV saga last year – they get it right. And the latest TV advert for the airline is superb.

Indeed, the airline itself is excellent. I’ve flown with Virgin Atlantic on several occasions and have never had cause for complaint. Returning from my honeymoon at the start of 1999 as a Malaysia Air customer, a problem occurred with our booking and the Malaysia staff refused to do anything about it. Fortunately, the flight was a code-share with Virgin Atlantic, and a Virgin stewardess from First Class assisted us, even though she had no need to do so – we were neither Virgin customers, nor First Class.

Such level of service, and she was pretty too!

Branson himself seems to have the Midas touch. He knows when to get in, and he knows when to get out. Which means that it’s no surprise that he’s contemplating a buy-in to Formula One at the moment. The opportunity to buy Honda right now makes financial sense – the car manufacturer doesn’t want much for it in the grand scheme of things, they have a proven team and some of the best facilities in the sport. Located in Brackley, Northamptonshire, they’re close to Silverstone circuit (another unfortunate F1 story recently, it must be said) and they have – apparently – a strong car, designed and built ready to compete with the new 2009 regulations. There are even rumours that a good engine deal has been negotiated.

All they need is somebody with the financial wherewithal to pay for it.

Branson, shrewd as he is, is keeping his cards close to his chest but that doesn’t mean there’s no truth to the rumours: the web address virginf1.com was registered on 5^th December 2008. That could, of course, be nothing more than somebody playing silly buggers and fanning the flames of rumour, but in interviews the Virgin boss has refused to either acknowledge or deny that he is in negotiations with Honda over the purchase of their Formula One team.

What he has said, however, is that if he were to come in to Formula One he would have to be assured of certain changes. He identifies the sport’s faults as being too expensive and too environmentally unfriendly for his tastes – fine words from a man the bulk of whose fortune has been made from flying thousands of people around the world every day in rather large aeroplanes.

Talking to BBC Radio 5 Live, the billionaire said that Formula One would have to become far more cost-effective before he would seriously consider a bid for the team, and that the sport would have to champion clean and environmentally friendly cars.

This seems something of a dichotomy, given that Formula One is one of the most decadent businesses on the planet. Transporting ten teams (if Honda survives) to seventeen different circuits around the globe, in order to then spend three days racing twenty highly-powered cars around in circles (not to mention all the lower formula supporting acts too) hardly registers on the green scale.

Yet Branson’s airline currently fields 38 aircraft, thirteen of which are Boeing 747 “Jumbo Jets”, with a further twenty-one aircraft on order, 15 of which are Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner and six Airbus A380 airliners – the superliner.

Hardly green credentials when looking at the raw data, no matter what the arguments about carbon offsets might be.

Perhaps if Branson parked up one of his Jumbos for a year the carbon offset would be enough to support the running of a Formula One team.

And that way we might be able to watch Jenson Button riding his Virgin hard to victory at some point this season...

In the news this week: Alfie & Jade

2009-02-19T18:01:00.006Z

As far as I can remember, when I was twelve years old I don't think I was biologically capable, let alone mentally, of having sex and, therefore, fathering a child.

Indeed, at the tender age of 15 when I finally fumbled my way in to what we thought then meant becoming men, the mass of limbs and tongues and failed (or botched) attempts to complete the act meant that the world was safe, for the time being, from being faced with another little Daniels.

Twenty-two years on from the first encounter the fumbling still continues, but I am at least the proud father of two Spawns of Satan - and even now, as I head rapidly in to middle-age, the prospect of fatherhood terrifies me. Each time my eldest (now almost nine) approaches me with a maths question, I look at him in quiet terror and point him in the direction of his mother.

So I find it terrifying to think that Alfie Patton, a boy who's still trying to figure out what financially means, managed to consummate the act and bring another little life in to this world. One can only assume he was petrified by his mate, as Chantelle Steadman (herself just 15) towers over him somewhat. Here is a little boy who has got a lot of growing up to do, and he must do it fast. By the time he is old enough to leave school, his daughter will just be starting.

That's a statistic that must worry a few people, but clearly not the parents of other boys who have come forward to declare that Chantelle liked to put it about a bit, and therefore baby Maisie must be theirs, not Alfie's.

While tabloid presses wave massive cheques about, every man and his dog is likely to step forward and claim paternity for this little girl.

One hundred thousand pounds is a lot of money, but once it's in your bank and has been spent, somebody still has to bring that little girl up. Maisie needs parents who will love her for who and what she is, not for the pawn she might become in fee negotiations with the tabloid media.

----

It must have been terrifying for Jade Goody when her doctor finally gave her the news that they couldn't beat the cancer coursing through her body.

Jade, made famous by the reality TV show Big Brother in 2002, is now a household name with a reputation for not being the brightest button on the jacket. She became a comedy character, announcing that she thought East Angular was in another country, and that Cambridge was actually part of London. She kept viewers amused by running around the house with her top off, and referring to her private bits as her "kebab."

In 2007 she hit the headlines again, this time for the apparent racist bullying of fellow contestant Shilpa Shetty in Celebrity Big Brother, and she was mortified at the thought of how much hurt she must have inflicted on a nation.

Throughout it all, Miss Goody has managed to keep a good sense of humour and make a small fortune by putting her name to several products, including her own line of perfume.

With a Burberry tattoo apparently on her left buttock, however, one must presume that Jade is either a shining example of crass taste, or simply somebody with a great sense of humour. Either way, she is a lovely person who clearly - like all cancer sufferers - did not deserve to be given the diagnosis last year that she has cervical cancer.

Having been given the all-clear on two previous occasions, the announcement recently that this time it isn't treatable is truly saddening.

But do we really need to see Jade going through her death throes on the front pages of our morning newspapers and back-end satellite channels? At this time when she wants to marry her sweetheart and see out her days as happily and peacefully as she can, it seems somewhat undignified that it's all been broadcast to the paying public.

Several organisations have recently said that Jade's plight has brought in to the public domain that women really do die from cervical cancer, and therefore it is right that it should be made as public as possible in order to raise awareness.

I don't disagree with that statement and, despite being one of the many to have fun at Jade's expense in the past, I feel truly sorry for her and her family. But I feel even more sorry for those cancer sufferers who are having to deal with the inevitable without the aid of newspaper cheques to secure the futures of their family.

Nigeria Is Where The Money Is!

2009-02-11T09:19:00.003Z

For years now I, like so many people with an e-mail address, have been inundated with requests for money to invest from Nigerian based companies.

Widows, private bankers, estate managers - they've all written to me to tell me that $10'000'000 is sitting in an account just waiting to be signed over to me, thanks to some generous benefactor. In order to claim my money, all I had to do was send them a cheque for $25'000, and then give them all my banking details.

I can't help but smile, then, at the irony of seeing a bank advertising on television at the moment, promoting the success of its portfolio and implying that they are the safest people to invest your money with at the moment. The Guaranty Trust Bank seem to be advertising more than any UK based banking or financial organisation at the moment, and very glossy their adverts and websites look too.

Perhaps I was wrong about those earlier e-mails, citing them as scams and cons and frauds. With the collapse of Iceland and most of the world's banking consortium, Nigeria - it seems - is the safest place to put your money right now!

BBC Tic Tacs at ITV's footie gaff

2009-02-08T16:20:00.004Z

The howls of complaint and derision aimed at ITV this week have been amusing me no end. From every direction, from viewer to pundit and even on to the BBC themselves, the level of disgust aimed at Britain’s premier commercial channel has been relentless.

Had Sir Trevor McDonald, OBE, referred to the Prime Minister in a derogatory fashion? No, that was the job of a BBC presenter. Perhaps Coleen Nolan had made a racial slur? No, that was the faux pas of another BBC employee.

Maybe, then, Jenny Powell had been spotted getting out of a taxi sans culotte. No, that’s usually the job of a drunken pop star. Or Paris Hilton.

What could possibly have got everybody in all of a dither about ITV then?

It was, in fact, all because of the Liverpool v Everton FA Cup fourth-round replay, shown on ITV on Wednesday night. It wasn’t because the game was a dreary bore that headed in to Extra Time because of a nil-nil score but because, in the 118^th minute (and therefore with just two minutes to go), ITV chose to cut to an advert break.

When they returned, the match was over. Dan Gosling had scored the winning goal for Everton, but the fans didn’t get to see it. In fact, the real winner was Tic Tac, the first advert shown as the channel cut to a commercial break – and they were only the winner not because of the fact that everybody was straining forward in their seats, waiting to see whether the game would go to penalties or not, but because the BBC, crowing at their rival’s error, showed the whole thing. Meaning Tic Tacs got a promotion on a non-promotional channel.

Footie fans cried in woe at ITV’s gaff, yet smug Formula One fans like me could do nothing but grin with relief. For ten years we’ve been subjected to ITV’s erroneous advertising, with them often cutting to a break at the height of the race and once, even, cutting to a break in the closing stages of a race that meant we didn’t actually get to see who crossed the line first. An embarrassed Jim Rosenthal had to welcome us back after the break and let us watch the final three laps once again.

ITV, and their advertising breaks, are welcome to the football. Thankfully, when Formula One returns on March 27^th-29^th this year, live coverage will be shown, advert free, on the BBC.

Jeremy Clarkson's one-eyed blunder

2009-02-07T01:28:00.000Z

When I woke up this morning, Jeremy Clarkson was in a spot of hot water for calling Gordon Brown a one-eyed Scottish idiot. Personally, given the state of the country, I think Mr Clarkson was being a tad polite but, in this modern day of over-zealous political correctness, by the time I had to open the pub at 5pm this evening Jeremy Clarkson had been hauled over the coals by the media and you would think he’d actually been apprehended for raping the Prime Minister’s au pair.

The problem is that these days we spend far too much time focusing on what the celebrities are doing or saying, and hanging them out to dry for making their apparently reprehensible points of view public.

Just this week we had Carol Thatcher’s comments about golliwogs. Clarkson himself was in trouble a couple of months ago for insinuating that lorry drivers spend their time driving around the country killing prostitutes. (Or “sex workers”, if we stick to the BBC’s terminology.) Then we had Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross ringing up Andrew Sachs to declare that Brand had had sex with his granddaughter who, if we’re perfectly honest, isn’t the most innocent little creature on the planet anyway.

But who cares what these people are saying? Clarkson is always offensive and, like many of his fans, I tend to find it funny. Usually, he’s just using his acerbic wit to say what we’re all thinking but aren’t brave enough to voice anyway.

Rather than ostracising our celebrities who, if we carry on doing this to them, will just lie low for a while until they get invited to kick start their careers on Celebrity Big Jungle, we should be going after the people who are causing the problems in the country at the moment.

We should be going after the bankers who’ve caused most of our economic diarrhoea. We should be going after the car drivers who turn in to Mr Bean at the first sign of sleet. Or those who insist on driving around in the middle lane of the M1 all day with their front fog lights on, when there isn’t any fog around; and who, to make matters worse, will switch those same lights off the moment fog does descend. We should be going after the bureaucrats who create the legislation that is bringing this country to its knees.

Or we should go after people like the woman in Cambridge who, yesterday, thought that the fact that some errant school children who had found it funny to push her snowman over were so offensive that she actually dialled 999 and insisted that the police took a break from rescuing snow-trapped drivers and went and arrested the culprits.

Put in context like that, Jeremy Clarkson’s comments aren’t really that important.

Children are the cause of Global Warming - fact!

2009-02-03T14:19:00.003Z

As Britain continues to embrace its coldest start to a year in almost three decades, environmentalists have stayed very quiet on the subject of climate change struggling, as they are, to come up with sound, viable arguments for why we need energy efficient light-bulbs when temperatures in early January plummeted to -12°c.

And as the country continues to find it impossible to travel now that a layer of snow has covered the garden table, the strongest argument to come out of the ‘mentalists is one that goes: “aha, but we told thee, Global Warming will actually bring about cold and wet temperatures... or something like that.” Which is basically an argument that ignores the fact that it’s a) February and b) usually bloody cold at this time of the year.

At one point it used to be so cold at this time of year that between the 15th and 19th centuries there were often Frost Fairs held on the River Thames when it froze, so the fact that London was swathed in snow yesterday is nothing actually out of the ordinary for this time of year and goes someway to show that our climate is still fluctuating in the same way it always has.

In fact, the biggest thing we, as Britons, seem to suffer from when the snow falls is an inability to react rationally. Instead, while other countries that are regularly inundated with snow go about their normal daily business, everybody in England seems to turn in to Mr Blobby. And then goes about trying to drive a car...

It’s no wonder, then, that most Global Warming enthusiasts stay quiet at this time of year. Most, that is, except Jonathon Porritt.

Mr Porritt, a political activist on all things environmental and an adviser to the Government on climate change, this weekend denounced families with more than two children as environmentally irresponsible. Sounding a bit like King Herod, Porritt’s concerns surround the fact that the more children we have, the more people there will be on the planet, and the bigger the carbon footprint will be – therefore heightening the risk of catastrophic Climate Change.

Agreeably, children can be an unbearable burden, but not necessarily on the planet. They are expensive and time consuming little beings that require a lot of care and attention to bring them in to the world and get them ready for adulthood – but to listen to Porritt you would think that their ‘unbearable burden’ on the planet could mean the end of all homo sapiens.

Environmentalists have long touted their concern that Global Warming is causing more and more species to become extinct, but in a world where there are literally hundreds of thousands of species yet to be discovered it is difficult to put a finger on which species are dying out because of mankind’s impact on the atmosphere or the natural culling of life that has gone on for hundreds of thousands of years.

Porritt says that he is “unapologetic about asking people to connect up their own responsibility for their environmental footprint and how they decide to procreate,” which is basically his way of saying that we should give up sex to save the world and, in a suggestion that’s not unlike China’s one-child policy, he has recommended that a limit of two-children per household should be implemented to prevent further damage to the environment.

Thankfully, I’m the oldest of six, which means it’s only going to be my four younger siblings who’ll have to face termination, as no suggestion has been made as to what should happen to those families who already have more than two kids. The answer will probably lie in a complicated algorithm of taxation.

And that just goes to prove that Climate Change, if it really does exist, is simply a naturally occurring phenomenon that has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years, whilst Global Warming is nothing more than a Government Taxation Policy.

Lily Allen shows no Fear of her bum

2009-02-03T00:14:00.003Z

Lily Allen is happy to be back at the top of the charts, and so she should be. Her new single, The Fear, is a welcome return to the airwaves and shows a new and exciting side to the singer’s career.

I’ve always been quite a fan of Miss Allen’s music and the new single is no disappointment. And her new album, It’s Not Me It’s You, is due for release next week and I’m waiting with almost baited breath.

Lily’s last album, Alright Still, almost wore my old MP3 player out as its circuitry played and played the tracks until my wife could stand no more; I expect the new album will get similar treatment. Which won’t really be much of a surprise, as Radio 2 seems to have already given The Fear so much airplay I suspect that most people are already fed up of hearing it.

The singer has never been classed as much of a sex symbol, often appearing in hoodies and with cigarettes hanging from her lips, but I’ve always thought she’s got quite a cute side to her. And she showed an even cuter side to herself by celebrating the success of her new single with a quick baring of her bottom.

If her new album is anywhere near as good to listen to as her bottom appears to be to look at, it should be quite good.

Jabba The Hutt Enjoyed Princess Leia's Kebab

2009-01-28T09:01:00.003Z

Apparently, scientists have discovered that Britain’s favourite post-pub-n-club snack can be extremely bad for you.

I’ve often thought that I ought to be a scientist, as I quite often seem to already know the conclusion to many of their own studies, and I don’t get paid the big bucks for doing it. After all, most of their findings are nothing more than common sense.

Of course, most kebab eaters probably weren’t aware that the average doner contains 98% of an adult’s recommended daily salt intake, or that it contains 148% of their daily saturated fat allowance. This isn’t because they aren’t well informed, it’s because they simply don’t care – after all, most kebab eaters are dribbling their favourite snack down their Paul Smith shirts at two o’clock in the morning, steaming drunk after a night on Stella Artois and two-for-one vodka offers from their favourite nightclub.

Naturally, if somebody’s daily diet were made up of a copious supply of doner kebabs, then their doctors might have the right to be slightly concerned about their health. But a few years ago a similar study showed that if you ate a McDonalds’ Big Mac every day then you were going to die. Driving your car very fast every time you go out may lead to a fatal accident and drinking to excess on a daily basis will eventually lead to death too.

Steamy sex with the wrong person could be fatal as well, either through the contraction of some exceptionally exotic disease or because your wife might not be amused and will therefore choose to remove your testicles with some rusty cheese wire.

The rule with kebabs, as with everything else that might not be good for you, is to enjoy in moderation. Or, as the dieticians are fond of saying, as part of a healthy diet plan.

My wife and I once made the mistake of eating a kebab sober, and we haven’t eaten one since. This is because eating a kebab sober means that you take it home, unwrap it from its grease paper and put it on to a plate, where you proceed to consume it via the more upmarket method of using a knife and fork. It was at this point, cutting in to the after-pub delicacy, that Alison discovered a dead beetle sat atop her meat...

Scientists should, therefore, return to their highly-paid jobs of proving that the credit crunch is the sole cause of climate change, and leave doner kebab consumers to mash meat, cucumber, beetles and chilli sauce all wrapped in pita-bread in to their faces every Friday night. At a time when they’re being told they have no money, their mortgages are at risk and they’ll probably be out of work by lunch time tomorrow, it’s a small enjoyment whose worst trait is to make them as attractive to the opposite sex as Jabba the Hutt was to Princess Leia.

And that probably didn’t stop her sleeping with him, either.

Supermarket Scam

2009-01-23T08:55:00.001Z

This is serious. Please BEWARE!

Over the last month I became a victim of a clever 'Eastern European' scam while out shopping. Simply dropping into Waitrose for a bit of shopping has turned out to be quite traumatic. Don't be naive enough to think it couldn't happen to you or your friends.

Here's how the scam works: Two seriously good-looking voluptuous 20-21 year-old girls come over to your car as you are packing your shopping into the boot. They both start cleaning your windscreen. Their large firm young breasts almost falling out of their skimpy T-shirts. It's impossible not to look especially with all the cold weather we have been having.

When you thank them and offer them a tip, they'll say 'No' and instead ask you for a lift to another store which, in my case, was Tesco on Fordham Road. You agree and they both get in the backseat. On the way, they start undressing, and both get completely naked. Then, when you pull over to remonstrate, one of them climbs over into the front seat and starts crawling all over your lap, kissing you, touching you intimately, and thrusting herself against you, while the other one steals your wallet!

I had my wallet stolen November 4th, 9th, 10th, twice on the 15th, 17th, 20th, 24th, and 29th. Also December 1st, 4th, twice on the 6th, three times last Saturday and very likely again this coming weekend.

So Be Warned!

Mark - www.markjdaniels.com

P.S. Lidl have wallets on sale for £1.99 each