The Running Bomb

Fiddling while Rome burns...

2011-08-09T10:52:00.000+01:00

This picture captured the terrifying moment a woman escaped a burning building in Croydon last night. The police are trying to break her fall. This is London at the moment.

The sight of people piling into a shop and looting it makes me very sad indeed. One can't help thinking of the owner's reaction when they come back to their business. It is not right.

However, following the sudden plague of violence - originally stemming from a demonstration turning nasty at a shooting by police in Tottenham but seemingly having long since forgotten about that incident - I've been slightly disturbed by the reactions of onlookers, media and society generally.

Twitter has been jammed with people saying this sort of thing:

"Any other country would take control. Martial Law. The Army needs to come in the Police have lost control of our streets."

I find this incredibly depressing. We watch the Arab Spring uprisings and hope and pray that the people of those countries can make their voices heard and when we see armed forces being used as violent instruments of terror and tools of complete subjugation we, quiet rightly, are outraged. This is not how we should treat people we think. And yet, those very same people are baying for young armed men trained in warfare to "teach a lesson" to the criminal looters and "regain control" of the streets. I don't often agree with Theresa May, but her response to these calls has been admirable. She was on the news this morning reiterating that in this country we police in consent and by cooperation with the public. And thank goodness for that; I personally don't want to live in a society where the police and the army are used in such a manner. And it would be especially dangerous in the wake of the police's corruption and moral ambiguity we were all correctly condemning in the wake of the phone hacking scandals.

I also worry about our country's class divisions, uncomfortably lit up by this strange and frightening epidemic. Lots of middle class people (like me) calling these young men chavs, thugs, despicable and the like isn't going to solve the problem. I don't condone their criminality in any way, but that doesn't stop it happening. It is happening right now. It has happened. The question is why it has happened, and how can we stop it happening again? The truth of the matter is that we live in a society that is utterly and seemingly irreparably riven. We are fortunate to have a huge and reasonably affluent middle class in this country, but, almost because of this, we're very good at ignoring the social problems and plights of those stuck at the bottom of our class structure. They are there and they are real. At best, we take the micky out of them and satirise them, but mostly we try to ignore them and tut at them when they dare to appear on our radar. But there they are. It's not just wealth, but a poverty aspiration, self-worth, and a feeling of genuine detachment from the rest of society that means that people start to behave in this way. At the risk of being incredibly patronising, imagine this scenario: a child is ignored by his parents; it wants to feel loved and cared for but is ignored completely (except for the occasions on which it is derided and mocked) until it does something naughty and then it is vilified and condemned. Who do we blame? The child? Or do we need to take a long look at our parenting skills? Naughty is naughty, but there's always something, some reason or motivation behind the naughtiness, as any teacher or parent will tell you.

I'm not saying that this sense of dissatisfaction is explicitly what goes through a young man's head as he climbs through a smashed shop window looking for bottles to throw at the police and a watch to nick But I do believe it's a factor and that we should think about our role in that too. We are society: there's no in or out. Like it or not, those people on the telly burning stuff and you and I are all part of the same thing.

And as such, I think the most powerful thing that can happen is for society to engage with this problem. I'm inspired by the people in London going out to clear up the streets; I'm inspired by people reacting in love, compassion and without judgement. I hope that we and our government looks at this carefully and reflects on how our community can let things like this happen, how we can allow individuals to be so detached from society and so contemptuous of law and order and so devoid of respect for their fellow citizens. Because problems don't go away just because we ignore them.

Somewhere...

2011-07-25T12:19:00.000+01:00

Blaming the English

2011-04-22T17:55:00.002+01:00

The mighty Conwy Castle. I know many think it pretty geeky/sad/tragic to visit historical sights while on holiday. But I defy anybody to go to Conwy and not be inspired by it.

It is awesome. Unbreakable. Invincible. Terrifying. I reckon you could still hold out against some nasty bad guys in there for a pretty much indefinite amount of time. Easy peasy.

And, of course, that was the exactly the point. I've already blogged about the turbulent history of Wales and the subsequent struggles of the Welsh/English psyche. I've been told that I probably went on a bit too much about it all, so I won't go through it all again. Read it if you're interested in the endlessly complex and messy history of the birth of what we now call the United Kingdom.

If you're not bothered, you're still welcome here.

However, I really don't want you to be like the man I overheard in the gift shop. He made me very, very angry.

This is what went down. I was perusing the excellent and well thought out exhibition that explained the campaigns of Edward I in Wales in the 13th Century and the subsequent rebellions that ultimately ended up with some of the most impressive castles in the whole of Europe being built. Edward built the castle and walls of Conwy in just five years, a feat that I'm not sure we could repeat even today. Of course, he got other people to build it for him, but impressive nevertheless. The speed of construction and the general mightiness of the structure was obviously intentional. With this castle, Edward was sending a message out that could never be ignored or misunderstood by the locals: I am in charge now and you now need to behave, please.

All of this was put very clearly in a display created by Cadw (the Welsh version of English Heritage) that was clearly aimed at children. Anyway, I was minding my own business when a thick-set, be-tattooed and lobster skinned man of a similar age to me very audibly took exception to what he was seeing.

"Oh yes, that's right. Blame the English time!" he protested in a loud Lancastrian accent as his blue-biro effect tattoos rippled in reaction to the perceived injustices before him. "All over the world, everyone wants to blame the English."

I was stunned. I turned to say something but I was only able to splutter in indignation as he stormed off into the North Welsh sunset muttering to himself.

Do we need to blame someone for building a pretty impressive castle 700 years ago? And if we do need a scapegoat, it's going to have to be the English isn't it? I'm pretty sure Edward I is going to have to be classified as English. Or perhaps we could argue that he had a good French pedigree, but I don't think that would go down well with Mr England vs The World. So we won't mention that.

And as for everyone, all over the world no less, 'blaming the English'. That's a very strange way to perceive the world isn't it, to think that everyone is blaming you and your kin for everything? Maybe Mr Tattooed And Indignant needs to understand that maybe there are people in the world that don't really give a shit about England. Not in a bad way, simply in the way that I'm sure he doesn't give a shit about, say, Greenland.

It was, all in all, a very depressing experience. The dude hadn't even bothered to read all of the exhibition and seemed to delighting in, wallowing in the mud of his complete and utter ignorance of the history of his own country.

You know when you hear something awful being said to you or someone close to you and it isn't until later that you manage to think of the utterly devastating, world-ending, brilliantly destructive reply that you needed right there and then? This was one of those situations and this is why I'm boring you with it; I am blogging exactly why that ill-informed but highly-opinioned chump was so unimaginably and irritatingly wrong.

Touché.

Little Country

2011-03-07T23:17:00.000Z

On 1 May 1707, the united Kingdom of Great Britain was created by the political union of the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland.

(Wikipedia entry on the United Kingdom)

Can you spot what's missing here?

On a recent and inspirational stay with many dear friends in an off grid converted cow shed in Mid Wales, a conversation struck up about whether Wales was a country or not.

(I say conversation, but out of necessity a conversation requires two or more people to offer trade thoughts and information. If you know me, when I talk about Wales there is rarely opportunity for anyone else to get involved. Perhaps soliloquy is a more appropriate noun.)

I started the 'discussion' by stating that I didn't think Wales had ever existed as a country in its own right. My friends disagreed and said that of course it is a country, you idiot. The subject of Wales and its identity as a distinct country has played on mind ever since, and seems relevant in light of the Welsh people voting overwhelmingly for more powers being granted to the Senedd.

And, of course, Wales is a country. And yes, I am an idiot.

But I think my point was that, according to what most people understand a country to be, Wales is a country. But it's more complicated than that. When we think about British history and the United Kingdom, we think of four countries - England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Easy. But, I don't see four countries; I see two countries and two ideas or concepts.

Northern Ireland is a very difficult subject and one which I know little about, so I shall not offend anyone by attempting to write about it here. But, needless to say, it is not an ordinary country. It was created in the aftermath of Irish independence and has long been riven by those that want it to be the United Kingdom, those that want it to be the Republic of Ireland and those that couldn't really care less so long as everyone stops killing each other over it. So let's put the whole thing to one side, walk slowly and sheepishly away and pretend I never mentioned it.

So the Act of Union put into effect in 1707 created the United Kingdom. The hitherto separate Kingdoms of England and Scotland got together, gave each other a big hug and decided to hang out forever more. Best friends forever. After centuries of bitter squabbling and bloodshed - accurately and irrefutably described in Braveheart and other similar historical documents - the Auld Enemies were joining up and soon would conquer most of the known universe.

To this day, the monarch of England is also the monarch of the Scots (not Scotland mind...never King or Queen of Scotland, only of Scots; one can't reign over the moors and mountains of Scotland itself, only over the folk that live in it. I like that). Queen Elizabeth II is the Queen of England and the Scots.

But where is Wales in this? Where is the lovely little country I grew up in and harp on about so? Well, by the time the love in of 1707 occurred, Wales had been 'absorbed' into the Kingdom of England and had existed as such for a good 500 years or so. The word 'absorbed' is almost the official term for the event, but in reality the geographical area we now call Wales was annexed by Edward I - otherwise known as Longshanks (he was a big lad apparently) or the Hammer of the Scots (I again refer you to the supreme historical document that is Braveheart. I think Edward was played by Edward Woodward observing closely the standard the-English-make-the-best-psychotic-villains Hollywood protocol). Previous to Edward's Welsh Wars of the 13th century, 'Wales' was a vaguely insulting term for the collection of principalities and micro-states in the extreme west of the British mainland. The word derives from the Anglo Saxon words Wēalas and Waelisc meaning 'foreign land' and 'foreigner'. It was insulting because these Celtic speakers of Brythonic languages that are now still alive in the form of modern Welsh, Cornish and Breton were definitely here before the opportunist Scandinavian migrants turned up in the uncertain and rudderless aftermath of Roman rule. A bit cheeky to then refer to the incumbent residents as foreigners, I'm sure you'll agree. Take over the land, but at least do it politely.

The spread of Anglo Saxon culture pushed the Brythonic speaking people further and further west and north until all that remained were a collection of tiny countries in what we now call Wales, Cornwall (spot that naughty Anglo Saxon foreigner word again) and those that migrated to Brittany as a result of the pressure from the east. These tiny Kingdoms argued among themselves constantly and were never truly unified. Occasionally, a very shrewd and, if we're honest, lucky ruler would manage to find himself ruling over a lot of them at once (notably Llewellyn Fawr (or the Great) who ruled over the Kingdom of Gwynedd and managed to incorporate the Kingdoms of Powys and do deals with various sycophant rulers of Deheubarth), but no one ever managed to rule over them all. Llewellyn Fawr only got away with it because he'd done a deal with King John of England to send lots of cash and do as he said. The trouble is that these brief arrangements of near-union of the Welsh peoples could never last because all the sons of a dead King inherited the land equally and immediately set about killing each other, carving up the kingdoms and generally undoing all the work done by their fathers.

At no point leading up to the Welsh Wars is there a single entity called Wales. The next best effort after Llewellyn Fawr was his son Llewellyn the Last who repeated the trick of conquering, subduing and doing deals with his Welsh neighbours to control a big chunk of what Wales is now. However, with a name like that he should have seen what was coming next. To cut a long story short, King Edward of England got fed up with not being in charge of absolutely everything and decided to act in the best tradition of his Norman forefathers and attack and kill and dominate everything that he could get his long hands on. So, he invaded Wales and began what was at the time one of the bloodiest and largest military campaigns Europe had ever seen. The Welsh, infighting and quarrelsome and divided as ever (much of Edward's Norman English army was provided by the Welsh who didn't like Llewellyn's bullying), stood no chance and Llewlelyn the Last ended up with his body in a Welsh abbey and his head on a spike in the Tower of London where you could have a good look at it for the next fifteen years.

Ironically, it was in a way Edward's spectacular conquest of the Celtic states to the west of his Kingdom that created what we call Wales today. The 'country' we now call Wales was born out of the utter destruction and near-annihilation of dozens of independent self-governing states all now coming under the rule of England and its monarch. Wales as a country is probably the result of the aggression of a Norman English monarch.

So a political and historical view of a nation of Wales is a difficult thing to understand. Nevertheless, people say that it is the culture of Wales - the Welsh language, traditions, regional identities and so on - that set it apart as a distinct country. This is true where I grew up in Carmarthenshire and also Ceredigion, Gwynedd and in many other areas of Wales. But these cultural distinctions are harder to define in the border areas and in pockets such as Pembrokeshire and the Gower peninsula where Scandanavian and English influences are more engrained and perhaps even the main feature of the area's cultural identity. Logic says that the further west you go, the further you travel from England and into the extremities of Wales, the more 'Welsh' the culture will be. But, way out west, Pembrokeshire is very much an area of Wales influenced by English culture, far more so than Carmarthenshire to the east of the county. The county's superb natural seaports meant that it was so long inhabited by Vikings and later the Norman English that indigenous Welsh cultural characteristics began to disappear. Old Welsh churches in the west don't have steeples - that's an English style. Pembrokeshire churches have steeples. The place names are more Scandanavian than Welsh: Bosherston, Skrinkle, Tenby, Caldey, Skomer to name a few. As for Monmouthshire, well that hardly feels like Wales at all; aside from the occasional Red Dragon fluttering from a castle built by Normans to warn the Welsh what would happen if they started acting up again, it's hard to know where Gloucestershire ends and Wales begins.

My point is that it is hard to define the country of Wales as we know it now. When we blithely list the four countries in the UK we barely know what we're talking about. Historically, it has been a mess of micro-states grouped together by what they are not as much as what they are. And trying to use culture is equally problematic. Is it the language? In many parts of Wales that is what is considered to be the defining feature of Welsh culture, but the Valleys is possibly one of the most fiercely 'Welsh' and proud areas and the Welsh language isn't much more than a background hum in those areas.

I think that the reason I'm thinking about this is at the moment is because of the recent referendum and also because I have often heard nationalists tub thumping about a free and independent Wales while citing inaccurate and sometimes plain wrong 'facts' about what Wales has been. I would consider myself as a person that would like to see Wales govern itself and operate more outside of the union of England and Scotland. However, I think that it should do so with a stark understanding of its own history and culture; there should be a sense of newness rather than reversion. Mainly because in reality there isn't an old and idealised Wales to revert to. If Wales is to be its own country, it must be a new and shiny thing; it's got to be a new place because there never has been an old place. And when one is in the middle of the Welsh wilderness, walking through the ancient granite bones of the country and feeling the weight of millions of years of geology and wildness, that's an exciting idea.

Leroy's Moral Maze...

2011-01-19T11:21:00.002Z

I've been watching the progress of the action taken by Martyn Hall and Steve Preddy against Peter and Hazelmary Bull with interest. I think that it's an important and intriguing case and the argument surrounding the conflict of religious versus civil liberties is a crucial one. It is a topic that divides people in the Christian world and one that I often struggle with.

If you can't be bothered to read the previous link, or if you're not that interested, I shall sum up the situation briefly. As usual, I refuse to be held accountable for my lack of research, understanding or accuracy; I'm just saying what I think rather than saying that what is written here is some kind of truth. It is conjecture. My whole life is conjecture!

The basic story is that Mr & Mrs Bull own and run a guest house in Penzance, Cornwall called the Chymorvah Hotel. Mr Hall and Mr Preddy are a same-sex couple living in a civil partnership, an arrangement that is seen in law as having the same rights and responsibilities as civil marriage. (See the Civil Partnership Act 2004 for all the details or just go to good ol' Wikipedia for a potted version). Mr Hall and Mr Preddy fancied a break in Penzance - they seem like a well travelled and outward looking couple - and they booked a room at the Chymorvah Hotel. According to them, they checked if they could bring their dog, which caused no problem apparently, but when they asked for a double room they were refused by Mr and Mrs Bull who cited their Christian faith as being incompatible with allowing an 'unmarried' couple to share a room in their hotel. Mr Hall and Mr Preddy were obviously quite upset by this and sought to take legal action, action which they yesterday won at Bristol County Court with Judge Rutherford finding that they were directly discriminated against, something that is against the law in the UK.

Simple enough, you may think. But actually, the story doesn't end here. Judge Rutherford acknowledged the sincerity of the Bulls' beliefs and that in actual fact many Christians (and people not of the Christian faith, come to that) share them:

"I am quite satisfied as to the genuineness of the defendants' beliefs and it is, I have no doubt, one which others also hold...It is a very clear example of how social attitudes have changed over the years for it is not so very long ago that these beliefs of the defendants would have been those accepted as normal by society at large. Now it is the other way around."

Judge Rutherford left the door open for the Bulls to appeal based on the fact that religious freedom is also a legal right in this country. I find the Judge's dilemma very interesting indeed, and I think that this is a crucial argument that the church and secular world in the UK need to engage with. The question in itself is intrinsically problematic: Should discrimination against a religion's freedom to discriminate be allowed? Phew.

Let's look at the back story here. It is a commonly held belief that Christians don't like gay people. Usually, one of the first questions people ask me when they discover that I am a Christian is "Do you hate gay people?". I've seen the change in expression on a gay guy's face when he found out I went to church. How did this preconception come about? To answer that, we need to read the famous verse in Leviticus 18 (verse 22 to be precise):

"Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable."

Unlike a lot of the Bible, it's quite hard to read around that and find an alternate meaning that isn't quite as controversial to the sensibilities of a 21st century middle class Westerner. I'd say that was pretty explicit. The sexual actions of gay people are detestable; that's what it says. The way it is written even puts those exact words into the mouth of God Himself. Blimey.

(Fortunately, we don't have to deal with such a moral maze with the commandment in the previous verse that says "Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Molek, for you must not profane the name of your God." I think we can all agree that sacrificing anything to Molek is a bad thing, and I will defend to the death the rights of hoteliers to prevent people from sacrificing children to Molek in their establishments; it's just not cricket.)

I struggle with this stuff. The truth is that I don't agree with it and probably never will. I don't agree with vilifying and condemning people because of their choices. I don't see how we can pick and choose what we get in a huff about and what we choose to ignore. I also get confused about the amount of apparent contradiction in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament. You only have to read on a couple of pages in Leviticus to find yourself reading "Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbour as yourself. I am the LORD.", which seems to be in altogether a different spirit from Leviticus 18.

In fact, the more I read Leviticus, the more confused I get; which commandments here are definitive and which do we take with a pinch of salt as we view them through the smug-tinted glasses we view everything from our vantage point in the 21st century?

For example, Leviticus 19:26: "Do not eat any meat with the blood still in it". Whoops. So anyone that likes a stake medium rare or rare has broken that one.

OK, what about Leviticus 19:27: "Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard". If you wear a short back and sides, you've broken that one (a style Mr Bull seems to sport, along with most men in England) and it seems that a goatee is out of the question.

The next verse says that you can't have tattoos, which is surprising if you look at the fashion amongst trendy church types at the moment; it is almost de rigueur for a trendy youth pastor to be inked up somehow, along with some blonde highlights and some age inappropriate clothing. Check this out:

I'd love to chat with that dude about the book of Leviticus. I'm guessing that he didn't read it all. I doubt (but I can't be certain) that he is a mainstream Christian, but it kind of sums the problem of Leviticus up for me.

In fact, come to think of it, I might go and get a cool tattoo of Leviticus 19:28 as a symbol of my wrestle with faith. That would be an interesting conversation point at church.

But, to be fair to Leviticus, lots of the directives make sense.

“Do not degrade your daughter by making her a prostitute, or the land will turn to prostitution and be filled with wickedness". Fair enough.

"Do not defraud or rob your neighbor". Jolly good.

"Stand up in the presence of the aged, show respect for the elderly and revere your God". Hear hear.

"Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material." Eh?! Dammit! My clothes are all filled with sin! NO!

My point is that it is very hard to know when to stop and start following commandments in Leviticus; some of them make perfect sense and are in fact what a large proportion of our laws and human rights are modelled on. Don't kill people. Don't steal. Don't slander. Don't be an arse.

But how come we get to pick and choose? How come we can shave our sideburns without fear of persecution but we can't allow a gay couple to stay in the same room in a guest house? Who decides that it's probably OK for a Christian to get a cool tattoo as long as it's about how gay people are bad?

It's an unfathomably difficult subject; according to the Bible, all of these commandments were issued by God Himself - the last verse of Leviticus 19 says "Keep all my decrees and all my laws and follow them. I am the LORD." - and yet, thousands of years having passed, for some of them we seem to be able to exercise discretion based on changed standards and progress in society since the times of Moses.

But not all of them. Many Christians believe that gay marriage is wrong, but society as a whole believes it to be acceptable - it is protected by law in our country and the Civil Partnership Act of 2004 was supported by all the democratically elected parties in the Commons. In the New Testament, in Romans chapter 13, it says "Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God". I think that throws yet another massive and confusing spanner in the already confounding works. Should the Bulls even be challenging the court's decision on this? If they do, are they going against the beliefs they are fighting for the right to have?

Man alive! My head hurts.

I am nowhere near learned or theologically savvy enough to unpick this stuff and offer an even halfway satisfying answer to any of it. I think what I want to say is that it is really confusing, and there is nothing more annoying to me than a Christian standing resolutely in a camp as though they are sure that they are right, that the whole, mighty weight of the Bible's righteous teaching is behind their stance. How can one do that? How can one cite Leviticus as a reason to turn away a gay couple from a hotel, yet have a hair cut and eat a rare steak in the same chapter of the book that says we should follow all of the commandments in the same way?

Of course I sympathise with Mr & Mrs Bull and the dilemmas they face as Christians in a secular world, but I also sympathise with the rights of Mr Hall and Mr Preddy to live their lives as they see fit and to be respected as equals by others. At the end of the day, I consider myself to be a Christian, a follower of the teachings of Jesus. The Sermon on the Mount (See Matthew 5 to 7 if you're interested) is the cornerstone of my faith and is how I try to live my life. A lot of what Jesus says here is in my eyes incompatible with some of the stuff that I hear Christians saying about a lot of controversial issues (homosexuality, Islam, crime and punishment, etc.) and doesn't fit with the secular stereotype of the intolerant and judgemental Terry Jones type Christian.

Intolerance is a no-no. Judgement isn't allowed. Revenge and point scoring is not good. Showing off your piety and holiness as if it makes you better than others, well that's not on.

But forgiveness, charity, generosity of spirit and - above all else - love are good and what God is all about. I'm paraphrasing the Sermon with incredible ineptitude, but I hope you get the drift. All I can hope to do, as an ignorant and fallible follower of Jesus, is hold on to His words as they're reported in Matthew and hope the rest of the stuff that I don't understand will fall together and make sense at some point. All of which sounds wishy-washy and unsatisfying, but I think that it's important that as Christians we admit this fallibility and discuss it with each other and with non-Christians. Not to do so will result in extremism, intolerance and a blinkered vision that history has proven over and over again to be very, very dangerous.

I don't mean to dilute what we believe in, but I do think that we have to admit we don't always know exactly what it is we believe. We know we follow Jesus and we believe Him to be the son of God, but after that almost everything is down to debate and discussion and is not up to us here on Earth to decide on definitively. It's hard to look at the fragmented and split church as it stands today and even harder to read its history and then argue that we all as Christians know exactly what we're on about and what God wants us to do. The beauty of Christianity is that there is room to argue and to disagree with each other. In the meantime, we have all to look after our own shop and try to be good. Whatever that means.

And, finally, I would suggest if you're the kind of person who doesn't like people getting up to stuff in your house you probably shouldn't be running a hotel; if you're a vegan you probably wouldn't be advised to work in a butchers.

As Christians, we need to know that “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven".

Which, beyond giving some stuff to Oxfam from time to time, I'm clearly not going to do.

Discuss.

Fat, Old Men

2010-12-04T14:46:00.002Z

Ah, yes. Barry John in his pomp. Widely considered the best fly-half ever to have played the game. Well, by Welsh people at least. A magical number 10 maestro in the style that is guaranteed to get any Welsh rugby fan misty eyed and waxing lyrical. A genius of vision and timing, a master of controlling a game and bringing his team mates into play at the exact right moment. And, unthinkably in sport's current era of professionalism and money spinning, a part-timer and an amateur playing for the love of it in his spare time.

I love sport. I've never been that good at it; I lack the necessary fine motor skills to be the mercurial number 10 in rugby union or football I dream of being. Combine that with a quite spectacular case of pigeon toedness and you understand that I had to reconcile myself to a lifetime of passionate appreciation of the skills of others in sport. Having said that, I did manage to carve out a very brief and mediocre niche in my school rugby team as a utility forward. My favoured position was wing forward - too slow and clumsy to be a back, too weak to be a lock - but I think I played every position in the front eight over the three or four years I played. I discovered that I could use a half decent bit of acceleration and a surplus of body weight to good advantage if I used my head and tried to play ahead of the game. It was reasonably successful and got me into the school team for a couple of years.

(I even actually managed to play for Wales, to wear the famous red shirt. Admittedly, it was for the Air Cadets and it would be safe to say that Air Cadets are really not very good at rugby; they seem to draw their ranks from boys that would rather be playing with Airfix kits and constructing balsa wood flying machines. I enjoyed a tournament as a medium sized fish in a very small pond indeed; I think it must have been my sporting apex.)

I also explored a slightly darker side of my personality that I think is worth knowing about in the life long quest to improve one's nature and become a better person: there was no sweeter sound to me than a scrum half's breath being forced out of his chest as I drove my shoulder into his torso and dumped him on his backside. Getting up off the ground, leaning excessively on the vanquished foe to further rub salt into his wounds and fan the flames of fear and intimidation. You would feel invincible, indomitable and trot off to tidy up with whatever the fancy dans in the backs had managed to muck up. It's not a particularly constructive or good character trait, but I think that as a bloke one needs to be aware of it; many of us have a need to dominate, to be more powerful, to be the victor at the expense of others. After I left school, I quite fancied playing a bit more rugby for a local team (Clwb Rygbi Nantgaredig) and signed up to join. I think I trained for about a month for what must have been about the 10th XV side, whereupon I realised that I had nowhere near the ferocity or fearlessness that is required to cut it in the carnage of low level Welsh club rugby. Let alone the skill or application. So I gave up rugby and focused on the far less frightening and more forgiving code of Association Football. The physical costs of the two sports are incomparable; I'd rather have a twisted knee from a late challenge than an eye gouged out by terrifying, ginger farmer with hands the size of snow shovels. I soon found that goalkeeping played to my skills as an over physical bully hell-bent on scaring the living daylights out of players that are more skilful and talented than I could even dream of being but who made the fatal error of being smaller than me. OK, I've destroyed my knee playing football (jumping to catch a cross on a not-quite bowling green flat pitch in Nailsea), but I'm pretty certain if I'd stuck at rugby I'd have been picking my teeth off the ground, having my eyelids stitched back together and relocating many a jauntily angled finger with much more regularity than I have.

But now I'm fatter (thanks in no small part to the needy knee) and older and have had to scale back all my delusions of sporting grandeur. I now enjoy watching the games and playing the vital sporting role of fanatical fan and armchair raconteur. Sports like football bring so much pleasure to so many people in such a simple and innocent way. Since the dawn of time, human beings have like nothing more than watching other human beings race, wrestle or knock heads for entertainment. Which is why Sepp Blatter and FIFA really, really make me annoyed.

Why is it that self-serving, fat, old men that wear expensive but crushingly dull suits are in charge of almost everything that is good in the world? Why should something as simple and joyful as sport be enveloped in a world of back-handers, bungs and bribery? Sport should be innocent, carefree and, above all, entertaining. These people are like Dementors that suck the soul out of the entertainment of the common Man and grow ever fatter, ever more self-important with every slurp and lap up of our innocent joy. Money doesn't care about us. Power couldn't give a shit about our passions or traditions. If you're a Liverpool FC fan like me, or just a fan of sport that has followed the whole sordid, sorry affair of our transition from family run tradition to globally branded commodity, you'll know what I'm clumsily trying to describe here. Don't get me wrong: I don't think England has a God-given right to host the World Cup - as a follower of Welsh international football I find the arrogance of English fans and media quite irritating and am very happy to see Russia, one of the biggest and most football mad countries on earth never to have hosted the competition - but I do find FIFA's smugness and greed one of the most nauseating phenomena on the planet. Why the hell is Blatter and all of his executives treated like statesmen and dignitaries? Who the hell do they think they are? Why the hell do we play along with it and play along with inflating their egos?

So, hurrah! to Panorama. Hurrah! to Roger Burden. Smash FIFA; go for the jugular and bring all their leeching executives crashing down on their engorged and bloated backsides. I'd be very happy to see the real fans, the real grass-roots of the sport turn on their detached, conceited and corrupt leaders and force them to find gainful employment in some other realm.

Widdly widdly woo!

2010-12-01T21:10:00.003Z

Is this the most avant garde, experimental and downright dangerous thing ever to have happened on a popular music recording?

Yes. Without a doubt, it is.

The whammy bar glissando introduction is almost half arsed, like Mr Van Halen can't really be bothered, but launches into the most mind-blowing assault on tonality and common sense, good old fashioned guitar playing ever recorded. People have played faster and louder on many other records, this quite tame to many of Van Halen's other recorded guitar solos, but there is something about the fact that this is on a record by the King of Pop himself that trumps all other examples of widdly woo virtuosity.

Musicologists could - and almost certainly already have - write entire theses on this solo. Obviously, it is technically very difficult to play. However, most bedroom guitar nerds don't worry about that sort of thing. Check this note perfect rendition for example:

Not a problem. Note perfect, even down to the knock on the body of the guitar, although the forced harmonics don't quite have the same ferocity as the original. You have to admire this man's - and it is almost certainly a man, isn't it? - dedication to learning things really carefully, to the detriment of his sleep patterns, personal hygiene and social skills. I have known many bedroom based guitar geniuses, some of whom rank among the most accomplished musicians I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. All totally blow me away when it comes to technical knowledge of how Western music works, from classical tradition to death metal. However, get them in a band and it all goes wrong, probably for the disregard show to the fundamental life skills listed above; live music is a team sport and not really the preserve of the genuine geek.

(As an aside, I didn't realise that knock at the start was a guitar; knocking on the body of a guitar is something lots of players do to check they're on and live in a less obtrusive manner than playing a note or chord. If Van Halen did that on purpose, that's an outrageous approach to a recording session and therefore true genius. If it was accidental and the producer (the great Quincy Jones) just thought he'd leave it in, well that's just as maverick and just as innovative; these big money recordings are high stake affairs and little touches like this are gold dust.)

What interests me more than the geeky widdlery and note frequency is the unfettered abandon of the performance, the cavalier approach to musical theory and convention. I don't have the necessary education to explain it, but some of Mr Van Halen's note choices and musical phrases are challenging to say the least. This is no solo by numbers that one would normally expect from a session player on a pop record. No sir. This is a tirade, an outpouring of raw, visceral virtuosity and expression that can only come from a player that a) has done a lot of practising, b) is unbelievably self-assured, possibly almost psychotically so and c) is almost certainly drunk.

I really enjoy and admire technical excellence. I have huge respect for players that have dedicated their lives to playing just so. But more than anything, I love players that have done that work, have painstakingly built up a vast chandelier of skills, muscle memory and cerebral knowledge, and then choose to smash the whole lot up in an instinctive, emotional and gutteral mess.

And, to really cement the claim for the most avant garde exhibition of musicianship in the history of pop music, he did the session for free. As Eddie Van Halen himself said to Rolling Stone magazine in 1984: "I did it as a favour ... I was a complete fool, according to the rest of the band, our manager and everyone else. I was not used. I knew what I was doing - I don't do something unless I want to do it."

; )

2010-09-24T20:46:00.003+01:00

Today, I explained the awesome power of the semicolon to my ten year old students; I felt the time was right.

If I achieve nothing else as a teacher, I hope that I've played some small part in triggering the resurgence of that most undervalued and misunderstood of punctuation marks. So elegant; so versatile; so addictive; so intimidating.

And I mean intimidating; if I write a letter of complaint I never fail to include a couple of semicolons. My reasoning is that, as it seems that most people can't quite remember what they are for, when they see one in your writing they immediately assume you are well educated, intelligent and not to be trifled with. This is, of course, rubbish. Any tit can use one without too much effort at all; I don't know much more about grammar than what is required to teach ten year old children. However, I have found the little semicolon to be devastatingly effective; it is the quick flurry of jabs before you deliver the knock-out right hook.

So far, my trusty semicolon has delivered a full and frank apology from a major car hire company and a no-questions-asked payout from an insurance company in cash, to name but two and not mentioning the scores of quailing and intimidated people at the sharp end of some pointed grammar.

So, get involved! Join independent but related clauses! Create lists!

Just think of the semicolon as a more cuddly and less severe full stop. You could just join two sentences that you want to group together. For example:

Just think of the semicolon as a more cuddly and less severe full stop; you could just join two sentences that you want to group together.

Isn't that nice? So graceful and sleek. I love 'em.

The top tip I give my students is this: think of a sentence that consists of two clauses joined with the word 'because'. For example:

I feel sick because I have eaten too many chips.

That sentence is made out of two smaller potential sentences, "I feel sick" and "I have eaten too many chips". Either could exist on its own. If you take out the 'because' that is holding them together and swap it with a semicolon it looks like this:

I feel sick; I have eaten too many chips.

So much more distinguished. The 'because' trick, as we call it, is pretty much foolproof and rarely goes wrong.* Your writing immediately looks more sophisticated and you look more learned; people take you more seriously and are more likely to do as you say.

I get the kids at school to go home and ask their parents how to use a semicolon; the answers that come back are always very entertaining, and the salt-of-the-earth kids in my class love being able to out punctuate the older generation. Anyone of my generation (I'm 35 and a product of the creative writing, anti-grammar fads of 70s and 80s education) is unlikely to feel confident about using one. In fact, many language experts worry that it may soon disappear altogether. We could soon live in a world where the only echo of the semicolon's glorious and debonair history is the cheeky wink symbol I've used as the title to this post. That would be a shame and a real loss. Witness how mastering the semicolon's simple rules is quite a thrill to young kids; they suddenly feel like they are in control and even masters of their often baffling and frustrating mother tongue. I love to see bad lads that are so often reluctant to get into writing suddenly get a bad case of semicolon fever: "The ball hit the net; the shot was unstoppable".

The Americans love a bit of the semicolon (although they too are worried about its future) and we could learn a thing or two from them by getting them back out of the punctuation box, blowing off the dust and employing them to devastating effect. Just be careful: one can easily overdo it (as I have intentionally done here by way of illustration) and look like the worst kind of sanctimonious grammar bully. Less is more: it's all about considered and effective timing.

Use semicolons; they make you sexy.

*Please note that there is absolutely no way that you can use a comma in place of the semicolon in that example sentence. Commas can never join sentences. If a full stop could work there, a comma never will. That would be a comma splice, one of the few offences along with treason and drawing spectacles on the Queen's face on stamps that is still punishable by death. At least that's what I tell children.

Is it wrong to love another man?

2010-09-19T23:25:00.004+01:00

This video replaces the original one that I posted, removed from YouTube for some reason or other. It's the same performance, but you need to go to about 1:25 to find it. Or you could just watch the whole thing.

I love Pino. If you're a regular here, you should know this by now. Here are some of the main reasons I love him so:

He is a bass player;
He is a bloody good bass player;
He is playing a Fender Jaguar bass here, which is, let me tell you, very cool;
He's quite unassuming and nice;
The variety of music he plays is - in all honesty - truly staggering. If you've got spotify, you may like to have a goosey gander at this. If not, then you'll have to take my word for it;
He looks a bit like Jasper Carrott;
He's Welsh.

Enough said.

This track is from a live performance with French "smooth jazz" pianist Philippe Saisse and session drummer par excellence Simon Phillips. PSP is a trio they formed to express themselves a bit and write material to showcase some of their strengths as players. OK, it's a bit cheesy. OK, it's a bit nerdy. But, do you know what? I don't give even the slightest bit of one. And nor should you; this is brilliant music and brilliant musicianship, even if it is probably the direct inverse of cool. Pino's playing is stupendous; the way he uses his right hand - one finger on each string with thumb on the E - is ridiculously hard to do without sounding like a sponge being hit with a slightly gone-off cucumber, but he manages to get attack and power all the same. Amazing.

He doesn't over play. He doesn't show off. He's a proper bass player, not one of those "LOOK AT ME!" players. He sits in the pocket, keeping everyone in order, doing his job. But, every now and then, he sticks in a fill or flourish that is truly breathtaking. I shall resist and not list them all with a ludicrously geeky description of each like the last time I eulogised Mr Palladino. Just watch and find them for yourself.

(Though, if you ask me, I will tell you. That is a warning you ignore at your peril.)

The other two dudes are pretty good too. Well done them for providing a context for the king of all bassists to perform. I salute them.

One, two, three, eleven.

2010-09-12T00:26:00.004+01:00

You may or may not be familiar with the works of The Swiss. If you are, then the video above will - hopefully - bring a nostalgic smile to your deranged features. The tippy-toed dance of Don't Meditate In Such a Way was the band's hallmark. They would labour for hours over some of the most intense, uncompromising and mildly irritating music that could be created, unleash it on an unsuspecting public and, coup de grace delivered, would stand back and gauge the punters' reaction.

"I like the funny dance you do in that funny song", was far and away the most common comment on our work.

Ho hum.

We (for it was a band comprising Stewart Ford, Nigel Savage, Gareth Hamer and me) didn't mind though. The band was envisaged as an antidote to the shoe gazing, self-important and largely humourless music scene we'd all had more than our fair share of. We were serious about our music but had problems taking ourselves seriously. You've got to enjoy yourself haven't you?

The Swiss, alas, are no more. Or are they? You can never tell with The Swiss; often no gigs happen for years at a stretch, and then, for reasons that are unknowable, suddenly a couple will come along at once. However, Stew Ford, the main song writing force of the band is so utterly and unstoppably prolific that it is not long before more of his musical world leaks out into the open. He has recently released a record of his own songs entitled Silence Is Golden. It is a brilliantly intricate work that is very different from the apocalyptic sound of The Swiss; guitars are bell-like rather than guttural, rhythms dance rather than stampede. You can recognise the Stewness though: guitar and bass parts woven together that, if untwined, would make no sense on their own, time signatures that are so devilishly complicated it's best not to think about them too hard.

Though think about them I must. Stew is playing some of the songs off Silence Is Golden, and despite his immense, multi-instrumental talents, needs people to play the bits he hasn't got enough hands for. So he asked some old Swissmen and Robin Mitchell - a trusted friend of the band and massively talented musician in his own right - to help him out. This means that I've been doing a lot of counting to eleven recently...

Tightrope.mp3 by Stewart Ford

...and trying to replicate the mid-range growl of a Ford bassline. Not easy, I can tell you. But refreshing to play music that challenges and makes me think.

The gig is at St. Paul's church, Coronation Road in Bedminster on Saturday 18th September. I think it starts at 6.30pm. Do come and help me count to eleven.

And, following the ancient Swiss custom when departing, I leave you with this:

Jake Hess and Turkey

2010-08-14T10:39:00.000+01:00

A recent tweet and blog by journalist Johann Hari (follow him on Twitter: @johannhari101) alerted me of the plight of the journalist Jake Hess in Turkey. He has been arrested and imprisoned for reporting on the situation of the Kurds at the hands of Turkey and Iran. Having just been to Turkey and enjoyed it very much -- it truly is an astoundingly beautiful and evocative place -- the story resonated with me. It seems crazy that we still have this situation in the 21st century, a situation where government interest and political gumpf take precedence over human needs and rights and the freedom to tell the truth about what is happening. Although Turkey felt a modern and vibrant place to be, there are some draconian laws surrounding freedom of speech and some startlingly lax approaches to protecting the rights of their fellow human beings. You cannot criticise Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey; you can't use YouTube because it is censored by the authorities. This seems very much at odds to me with the image that Turkey wants to present to the world.

At the prompting of Mr Hari via Twitter, I decided to write the Turkish government a letter. Please do the same if you feel stirred in the same way that I did. I have copied my effort below. The address to write to is contact@turkishembassy.org.

Dear Sir/Madam,

Having recently returned from a holiday in your fabulously beautiful country, having experienced the warmth, generosity and hospitality of the Turkish people at first hand and loved every moment of it, I was shocked to read of the situation in which the respected American journalist Jake Hess finds himself in. I cannot believe that a modern and respected country like yours would imprison a journalist merely for reporting about the situations of real people in real places. Objectivity in journalism is not the same as supporting or sympathising with terrorism. A journalist's job is to report on the situations that real people encounter and telling others about them. Mr Hess is a freelance journalist and telling the stories of people in various situations and finding out more about them is what he does for a living. Whether you like it or not, the world is aware of the plight of the Kurds and we all, as fellow human beings, have the right to learn more about it and offer support or criticism to them or to governments as we see fit. It is for this reason that the work of journalists like Jake Hess is vital. It may not always suit your country's wishes, but that's the way it goes sometimes; human interest should always trump political and ideological interest.

On my trip, I attended the Istanbul Modern art gallery. I was inspired at the radical creativity and passion for life and art that I saw there. If I'm honest, it took me by surprise to see the freedom and vigour with which the artists of your country expressed themselves, both women and men. It challenged the preconceptions and stereotypes that live within me and in all human beings. I cannot emphasise enough how sad I feel to have this feeling of inspiration and enlightenment crushed by the disappointment and frustration of the situation involving your government and Mr Hess. Surely, you want to show the world that you are an open, progressive country that supports the ideas of truth and justice?

The idea that a respected and esteemed American journalist is involved with terrorism is a ludicrous one -- I believe he is being held at the Diyarbakir Anti-Terrorism Branch -- and your government should, if it has any semblance of the self-respect and integrity that I witnessed in many of its citizens in my recent trip, release Mr Hess immediately.

Yours faithfully,

Liam Owen.

Dear Internet using person,

2010-05-23T22:41:00.000+01:00

May I begin with a warning? This post is the result of an uncharacteristic bout of insomnia, doubtless brought about from an orgy of sleep last night that was definitely brought about by a day spent vomiting after eating a dodgy burger the night before that. Strange how seemingly insignificant decisions come back to haunt you, isn't it? As a result of all of this sleep dysfunction, I've been thinking. Something that I am not particularly used to doing when I am normally sleeping. And I've been thinking about serious things. Not the usual wow-isn't-this-almost-quite-interesting, don't-you-hate-it-when, I-think-this-you-should-think-it-too, internet waffle that my fellow bloggers and I love to wallow in, but actual genuine key issues in my life. So if this all seems sanctimonious, self-indulgent and extraneous to your life, I can only apologise. Feel free to turn over whenever you lose interest. However, in the interests of getting this out of my head and hopefully being able to sleep at some point tonight (it's 2am), I am going to treat this post as a purely selfish cathartic exercise. There's nothing like getting naked in front of the entire potential readership of the World Wide Web for getting things into the open.

You may, perhaps, be familiar with the situation that my wife and I find ourselves in. A while back, my wife suffered abdominal pains that we dismissed at first. However, those pains didn't go away and eventually we trundled to see the doctor, who looked a bit solemn and said that we ought to go and get an ultrasound scan to see what was happening. Yeah, whatever, we thought as we again trundled down to the BRI, indulging in some window shopping on the way. We sat in the waiting room of the ultrasound place for ages, watching the throngs of teenage girls and pissed-off looking grandparents-to-be file in and out of the mysteriously out of sight room. Eventually, our turn came and my wife disappeared off for her scan. I must admit that at this point, I was actually a bit excited: what if she was pregnant? We hadn't exactly been officially going for a family at this point - we hadn't got the stopwatches, thermometers and line graphs out yet if you know what I mean - but it was on the cards and we had abandoned all the traditional obstacles one places in the path of this possibility becoming a reality. Perhaps this was the cause of the discomfort in my wife's belly? After a few minutes, my wife came out of the scanning room clutching an unmarked envelope containing a letter, the contents of which were a mystery to us. All we'd been told was that we had to take the note to ward 6.

Ward 6 was deep down the labyrinthine warren of BRI corridors. We handed the note to a medically official looking person. The atmosphere changed. Suddenly, the people handling us where serious and efficient. Killing time in a waiting room with everyone else was no longer on the agenda: we were shown to a hospital bed, and despite not knowing what was going on, my wife was invited to occupy it. We were confused: if you're going into hospital you pack your pyjamas and your toothbrush. You don't just turn up in the clothes you're standing in, completely materially and mentally unprepared for the whole ordeal. However, being good British subjects, we obeyed without complaint. My wife sat up on the bed and I sat on one of those plastic covered NHS chairs that positively suck the joy out of life. Soon, a doctor arrived, full of calming reassurance and knowledge. She told us that they thought there could be a problem and could she have a sample of urine to do a test on please. My wife obliged and off it went to be tested. Later, a nurse asked her if she knew she was pregnant. No, we didn't. Eventually, when they were sure, the doctors came and told us that there was a 'mass' in my wife's fallopian tube. This was almost certainly an ectopic pregnancy, where a fertilized egg gets lodged and begins to develop in the wrong part of the body. The only course of action was surgery as there was a good chance that the tube could rupture; a life threatening state of affairs.

"You were never pregnant," the consultant assured us. "This is a mass of cells that could never have developed into being a baby".

This all happened in the space of maybe three hours. Surgery - miraculous keyhole surgery at that - happened the next morning, successfully saving my wife's life and removing the 'mass' and the irreparably damaged fallopian tube it occupied. In that moment, it felt like any other routine potentially life threatening medical situation - appendicitis perhaps. The aftermath, however, has been pretty devastating.

Losing a fallopian tube seriously decreases your chances of getting pregnant naturally. As a result of the scare, suddenly pregnancy became an issue in our relationship. We saw doctors and I had to undergo the exciting experience of issuing a sperm sample to be tested for motility, vigour and general manliness. The results weren't good. In a crushing blow that no man can truly appreciate until he's encountered it, it became apparent that my sperm was laced with an antibody that attacked the sperms as though they were an invading agent, killing lots of them and further reducing the chances of natural conception. The combination of fallopian tube shortages and sperm self-annihilation meant that our chances of getting pregnant without the assistance of science were now slim. Our life was not what we presumed it to be.

When you're getting married, doing a job, buying a house and building a home, why are you doing it? I have lots of friends that are following a 'calling' or path through life that doesn't involve procreation, but I'd have to say that the majority of people I know have starting a family at the back of their mind as they are doing their thing. Unconsciously, my wife and I were following a path that we'd set out for ourselves. We talked about families and joked about the stupid names we could call our kids and how I could take them to football and brainwash them into supporting Liverpool FC, teach them Welsh words, all that young couple nonsense. It did not occur to us for one second that that may not be possible. Looking back, I think we assumed we had a right to it. It was a given. It was certain. In the space of a few hours, that assumption was blown into smithereens, liquidised before our very eyes. It was no longer a given. It was no longer our right.

But I realise now that it never was. We in the Western world have a tendency to regard lots of things as being our right. The right to free speech; the right to choose our leaders; the right to watch TV; the right to own stuff we want. The truth is that this is a delusion. Probably the most fundamental right I have is to exist, but no one can guarantee that I will continue to do so by the time I finish typing this sentence, let alone the post or the end of a fruitful and long life. Nothing in this world can be guaranteed, a bald, bare-faced fact that we're not used to looking in the eye. However, events like the one I described above force you to look that motherfucker right in the eye, and in so doing you have a choice: You can either sink into self pity and build an elaborate cathedral of cosmic unfairness to hide yourself in, or you can get a grip, sort yourself out and face up to the reality of what one is entitled to in life. I believe that there is only one thing that we can take for granted in this world: the love of God. It's the only thing that everyone, every single person that has walked, is walking and will walk the face of this planet is guaranteed whether the like it, see it, feel it or not. Be they good, bad, Christian, Muslim, straight or gay, I believe that to be true. I happen to be a Christian, as does my wife, but the theology of God's love for Man tells me that that is almost irrelevant, because He'd love me just as much if I were an atheist. God even loves Richard Dawkins, which must be difficult given the nasty things he's said about Him. Despite the horrible stories of bigotry, intolerance and judgementalism you may hear about Christians, the idea that God loves every human equally is a cornerstone of our faith. It's in the Bible, especially the bits with Jesus in. Go and read it if you don't believe me. John 3:16 is a good place to start. (By the way, I'm not saying that you have to believe or agree with it, I'm just trying to explain what Christianity is all about as an antidote to the media poison that is liberally placed before us).

In other words, God loves his creation, his children. I have no right to anything other than that love.

For various reasons - ethical and practical - we will not undergo IVF treatment. We decided together that we didn't want to force the issue that much, that we wanted to come to terms with the situation and admit that certain things are out of our control. This is, believe me, not an easy decision to make. In times gone by, the pressure to have families was huge. Look at the lengths Henry VIII went to, for goodness' sake. Nowadays, that pressure is subtler but still there. We have more choice over what to do with our lives, but in the age of social networking and iPads, we're more exposed to what people are doing with theirs. It's really hard to look at something like Facebook and see all your friends, family and colleagues having kids and sharing the experience when you, in all likelihood, cannot. One feels great joy and genuine excitement for them, but seeing yet another murky ultrasound scan (remember that waiting room?) portraying a burgeoning foetus used as an avatar is a bitter pill to swallow. It is painful, hurtful and above all, humbling. I would never, ever stop people from telling us about their triumphs and happiness as new or expectant parents, but it is inevitable and healthy that we grieve our loss and circumstance. And it makes you realise again that having a family is not a given, that nothing is certain.

Recently, we've been talking about adopting a family. Man, that's difficult. Will we qualify? Will we cope? Will we bond with it? Will it feel like second prize? It's a can of worms that we never expected to prize the lid off of. Even thinking about adopting is painful because it makes us realise that there are unwanted, uncared for children in the world. How messed up is that? Especially when we and many other people really want to have children. Hang on a minute...

Perhaps I'm wrong; perhaps we do have a right that should insist on in this world aside from the unquestioning, unwavering love of God. We have a right to be parented, to be guided into the world and shown how to work it as best we can despite it and us being a bit broken and unpredictable. Children should have the right to have parents; children should be able to depend on adults to guide them. As a result, we as adults have a responsibility to provide that right to them. It is our duty, just as God sees it as His duty to love us despite everything we get up to down here. Maybe realising that was the point of this journey; in the hammer blows that have reigned down on us in these super-heated events, maybe that's the little pure bit of metal we're trying to separate from all the cak.

Coming from good Liverpudlian stock, I like to sabotage my own earnestness with banality at every opportunity. In keeping with that tradition, I'll finish by quoting the Rolling Stones on this topic:

No, you can't always get what you want.
You can't always get what you want.
But if you try sometimes,
You just might find,
You get what you need.

Oh yes. Woo.

Time for bed.

Zulu - Men of Harlech

2010-04-27T07:27:00.002+01:00

What could be down there..?

2010-04-13T20:41:00.004+01:00

View Larger Map

See that track? Try and peer through the trees. Is this the way to Narnia? A mysterious glade perhaps, shrouded with myth and legend?

Sort of.

I used to live there when I was a kid, from about 1983 to 1997. Down there is Felin Fforest, a small house by a derelict mill in a forest, as the name explains perfectly if you understand a bit of Welsh. The mill was pretty much a pile of stones, but I found a stone that had 'J. Owen, 1905' engraved on it. Whoever J. Owen was, he had the same initial and surname as my mum.

When I was a little kid, Felin Fforest was the best place in the universe. No end of adventures could be had here.

In the seemingly endless woods, one could build swings and eco-friendly model villages out of twigs and moss, although the sheep will invariably eat the village and it's villagers, creating Sheepzilla mayhem.

The stream beneath the bridge you're standing on is the Pibwr, a tributary of the Cothi river so insignificant that most maps don't bother to show it. This is a stream you can swim in, jump in, race sticks in, wee in, do whatever little boys want to do when they see a river.

Behind the house beyond these trees, the hills are absolutely flawless sledging surfaces in the unfailingly snowy winters and in summer they provide no end of opportunity for wargames and hide and seek.

Felin Fforest was a self-contained utopia for a 10 year old boy and his mates.

However, for a teenager it was not so idyllic. I desperately wanted to be playing and hearing new music, meeting girls, finding out about the world and this was not the place to be doing any of that. All there was were sheep, trees, water, moss. I couldn't wait to get out and seek my fortune in a properly concreted over place. Like everyone I knew, I passed my driving test at the first possible moment and bought a cheap car to escape to the bright lights of Carmarthen - a forty minute drive away - whenever I wished to. The urban, golden paved potential of Swansea was the stuff of dreams, a Shangri-La impossible to hold in one's imagination...

Well, not quite. Looking at it now though, I'm more inclined to side with the 10 year old me than the 16 year old me. Now I live in a city, can see and do whatever I like whenever I like, I'd quite like to go back to Felin Fforest and build a model village and wait 'til the sheep come and unleash a ruminant apocalypse. It beats litter and queuing and dust and black bogeys.

As I'm sure those very same sheep would tell us, the grass is always greener wherever and whenever we are not.

Do feel free to explore using the quite remarkable Google street view thingy. Brechfa is about a mile up the road to the South West. If you fancy a pint or a bit of mountain biking, Abergorlech, three miles in the opposite direction, is the place for you. Alternatively, you could look for Gwernogle and Llanfihangel-Rhos-Y-Corn to the north for some really wild living. (I had a friend up there who's track to the house from the tiny road was about two miles in length). Hwyl!

Square peg? Meet the round hole.

2009-11-08T21:20:00.002Z

Ever tried to eat soup with a fork? Or perhaps eat peas with a knife? Some musical instruments aren't designed to be played in certain ways. My instruments, the electric bass and the double bass, define how they could be played by their size, shape and sound. The bass has a very specific role in most music and doesn't often stray too far from it, especially the double bass, usually because of the ergonomic issues that come rolled into the bass package. However, there sometimes comes along a player that shows scant regard for such issues and choose to play their instrument any darned way they like, flying in the face of received wisdom and tradition. The chap in the video above is a great example of this pioneering attitude. I've previously posted on the mind boggling complexity of Giant Steps as written and performed by John Coltrane. Obviously, Coltrane was thinking of the tenor saxophone when he wrote the tune. At least I'd imagine he was; he may have been writing at the piano or another similar instrument. I am sure, though, that he was not thinking of the pedal steel. Without a doubt, the pedal steel was not an instrument Coltrane was thinking about. Playing Giant Steps on the pedal steel is just silly. But this man is Dave Easley and he decided not to worry about such trivialities and give it a whirl. Go Dave.

And while I'm thinking about instruments being forced, kicking and screaming, into realms for which they are ill-equipped to survive, check out Joe Pass and Neils Henning Orsted Pederson playing Donna Lee by Charlie Parker. It is mental. This represents a truly astonishing piece of virtuoso playing from both musicians, but for me the prize for ridiculously triumphing over ergonomic adversity must go to Neils Henning Orsted Pederson. For him to be playing this melody on the big 'ol bull fiddle can perhaps be compared to winning the Olympic gold medal for horse dressage on an elephant. The only hope I have of emulating NHOP's playing is by nuturing a whispy beard and a 70s distant look of being on the edge of enlightenment. I shall now retire chastened into my box of musical conformity...

Bend me, shake me, anyway you want me...

2009-11-02T21:23:00.022Z

In the hit parade of the most spoken languages on Earth, English comes in at number 2 with a whopping 328 million speakers. Mandarin Chinese is sitting pretty in the number 1 spot with the smug air of Bryan Adams humming 'Everything I Do', or whatever it was called. And, when you have 845 million speakers, more than double that of English, you can afford to be somewhat smug. English, however, is locked in a bitter tussle with Spanish to retain the number 2 spot. It seems that the figures are debatable in the extreme, as I am sure is true of anything that is counted in such high numbers, and depending on who you believe, Spanish could be number 2 rather than the number 3 that it gets on Wikipedia. It depends on who's doing the counting. I tend to take Wikipedia as irrefutable truth - why the hell shouldn't I? - and so, for the sake of my arguments here it is the main source of information. If you think the figures are wrong, that's fine; let's not argue about a few million speakers here and there.

If we define 'speak' as being able to convey ideas, intentions and emotions with a reasonable degree of competence and efficiency, I speak two languages: English and Welsh. English is very much my first language, my mother tongue. Welsh is my secondary language; it is not the language used in my home but I used it frequently as a child and young adult until I moved to England in the late 90s. The point of interest that has burgeoned this post was first raised in the discussion to a blog post written by Carl Morris regarding the comments of Janet Street-Porter on the Welsh language. To paraphrase, Street-Porter claimed that Welsh had 'no words for anything modern', a comment which is, of course, a load of pungent and bigoted nonsense. Anyway, Carl and the commentators cover the ridiculousness of this regrettably very common notion that Welsh is a somehow backward and antiquated language that cannot cope with the modern age and therefore has to awkwardly borrow words from its neighbour. I have many times heard the theory that Welsh simply appropriates English words to fill gaps in its vocabulary. Usually this theory is offered by monoglot English speakers which makes it ironic in the extreme. Surely no language in the history of human communication has borrowed, plundered and annexed vocabulary as English has done to suit its needs. Surely, then, a bilingual Welsh speaker is allowed to dip into English to fill a specific hole in his or her native vocabulary?

Which brings me onto the real reason I'm here. In the debate on the capability of Welsh in the modern age, I began to think about the dominance of English generally. OK, English may only be second (or third) in the big count of native speakers, but I'd be prepared to wager a great deal that if we include those that speak some English as a second or foreign language, the young, upstart bastard of a tongue from Northern Europe would easily sit atop the hit parade. It is the lingua franca of a mind numbing amount of arenas. It is the common tongue of the wide variety of peoples in the British Isles as well as the present and former colonies (most notably the USA and Australia) of the British Empire. It is the official language of worldwide air traffic control and the unofficial lingua franca of business, economics, and science. In fact, all notable scientific journals are published in English. (While I'm thinking about it, isn't the term lingua franca deliciously ironic, given the barely contained irritation of French speakers at the perceived dominance of English).

I've seen Spanish speakers communicate with German speakers using English. When I visited India this year, I very rarely had problems communicating with people of all walks of life when using English. In the same country, I was fascinated to see Tamil and Hindi speakers converse in English.

How did English come to find itself in this position? There are a number of commonly given theories:

1. Lazy English monoglots
2. The British Empire
3. The American economy and media

I am going to discount theory 1 immediately because I actually think that the idea of native English speakers generally being too lazy or ignorant to learn to communicate in other languages and therefore forcing others to use the language to speak to them is a myth. Sure, it will be true of a few individuals, but it is also true of many individuals from many countries. The Italians, for example, are particularly famous for their reluctance to learn or use other languages. And if you get to roll beautiful Italian sounds around your mouth every day, why would you bother to speak another language? Italian is not a lingua franca of anything much outside of Italy and hasn't been since it's grandad Latin fell out of favour. So, no; I don't think the lingua franca status of English is resultant of the laziness of those for whom it is the mother tongue.

Theory 2 is far more compelling an explanation for the widespread use of English. Without the British Empire's determinedly entrepreneurial and often violent expansion, would English be a global language? Well probably not, but I don't really like 'What if?' history, because we'll never really know so let's not bother wasting time thinking about it. Anyway, there have been some other pretty formidable empires in the modern era. Take the USSR. It's common language was, of course, Russian. What language would you use to do international business with a member of a former USSR country? That's right. English.

The British Empire undoubtedly brought English to the four corners of the globe and you can see its influence most keenly in India, where English unites cultures and tongues that are otherwise utterly different. However, the British Empire also, at one time, contained the New World, or, as it now more commonly known, the United States of America. Which leads us nicely onto point 3.

The effect of American culture on the rest of the world is significant to say the least. Hollywood has spread its creations across the whole world, to the point that you could probably share a knowledge of the works of Arnold Schwarzenegger with remote Mongolian tribes. However, again I am not sure that this influence is why English is so resolute a global language. While the films of Hollywood are seen around the world, most non-English speakers watch them with soundtracks dubbed into their native language. I once spoke to a Spanish lady that remembered vividly the moment she realised that Sean Connery was not Spanish. As far as I know, she is still coming to terms with Connery's famous Scottish accent. So perhaps the effect of American culture is more our experience than that of speakers of other language.

Of course, all of these three points were and are very important when one thinks about the spread of the English language beyond the borders of England. Indeed, without any one of them, perhaps English would not be a global language. But, for me at least, English would not have been adopted as a ligua franca for anything if it didn't do the job very well. The fact of the matter is that English can cope with a mind-bendingly diverse range of situations. The bastard, mongrel nature of its conception 1500 years ago means that it was born adaptive and agile. It emerged as a lingua franca for the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Danes that were terrorising the slightly less agressive, slightly more curmudgeonly Celts on the island of Britain in the 5th century or thereabouts. Their tongues were similar enough to share information about how to get rid of Celts most efficiently and they quickly melded into a distinct dialect.

(It is notable how little influence the Celtic languages had on early English, something that seems to point to how total and effective the Scandinavian ethnic cleansing of what was to become England was. Like all things Dark Ages Britain, this is hotly debated and disputed but it seems to make sense to me; if the invaders settled and integrated peacefully, surely more words with Brythonic origins would exist in English today).

This new language of English existed happily enough in a North Sea focused culture alongside their Scandinavian parents until 1066 and all that. Ironically, the invaders were themselves Scandinavian, although their language had merged with that of the Franks. They were, of course, the Normans and they also brought with them an unparalleled mastery of the arts of aggressive territorial expansion, with an emphasis on the word aggressive. Their particular brand of French/Norse was immediately installed as the official language of governance and aristocracy, and the totalitarian nature of this new ruling class meant that English in its oldest form could not survive as it was. Within a few hundred years, English was again melding with other languages to form a new distinct language.

For the last 4 or 500 years, the vocabulary of the old bastard language has expanded exponentially. From the Elizabethan era onwards, words have been loaned, borrowed and coined with a relish almost totally unique to English. The OED now estimates there to be more than 600,000 words, with an estimated 25,000 words being added to the language every year. That's not too many less words than the entire vocabulary of French added to the language every year (the best guess I can find was that French had about 35,000 words at its disposal). This, then, is truly a language that can flex, bend and adapt to any circumstance. It can incorporate new words and grammar rules into itself with the ruthless efficiency of the Borg assimilating a culture into the hive. As a result, English is a language that you can bend a long way in lots of directions without it breaking. You can mutilate and distort it and still be understood where other languages would break under the strain. This also makes it an easy language to learn, but an incredibly frustrating and difficutl language to master. Teaching 10 year olds to get a grip on their mother tongue is an infinitely difficult job, believe me. Our spelling system is, quite simply, nuts. You try to explain why trough, through, and plough all share -ough but don't rhyme. Or indeed have any of the sounds you'd expect with those letters involved. Or why we say that there are 5 vowels which are a, e, i, o and u and that all words have vowels in them and then give out sky, by. and try as our weekly spelling test words. English is a conglomeration language that is constantly enforcing grammatical rules and spelling systems from at least five different ancient languages. The only good thing about all of this is that it's hard to be utterly wrong when you speak English; even educated native speakers can argue for hours about definitive uses of English and still not be able to agree. My pathetically puny endevours to speak Croat when travelling through the Balkans were met with absolute bemusement until I realised that I had a word order wrong and an accent stressed incorectly. English would have no problem with this; Croatian imploded into a meaningless string of utterances.

The fact is that I can listen to an English learner absolutely murder my native tongue and break pretty much every rule they thought they knew, and yet still be able to glean their meaning. English is the language equivalent of a green sapling in a storm: it will bend without breaking when more rigid, brittle saplings snap. Surely this is why it is the pre-eminent global language? If it didn't work, the world wouldn't have bothered using it and found something else. We're just lucky that we already know it; what a privilege that is.

Returning to the hit parade of languages, Welsh, my other language comes in at number 266, just behind Ancash Quechua and just ahead of Songe. This means that in linguistic terms, the Welsh are slightly less influential than they are in global football terms, which is pretty bad to be honest. I like the dual state of being able to speak a global language and a language so obscure to the rest of the world it was used as a code to guard sensitive information in the Second World War. A language so prevalent I can chat happily to a beggar in Mumbai in it and another so rare that the Ewoks use snippets of it in Return of the Jedi and no one notices. I enjoy that!

Musical epiphony

2009-10-13T22:28:00.008+01:00

(Note that the track in the video above is called 'Prehensile Dream' and not 'Prehensite Dream' as it says on the caption.)

Last night I got to go to a gig. It was actually a bit like a pilgremage for me.

My favourite musical group in the entire world is a jazz piano trio named The Bad Plus. They come from USA and, despite the fact that they are constantly playing around the world, they tour the UK only occasionally, so getting to see them is a treat for me. It was the third time I have seen them play. I can easily cite the first time that I saw them play as the most formative musical experience of my life thus far, without even a split second’s hesitation or ‘Hmmm…let me think about that’ moment. For someone who is as notoriously muddle-headed, see-both-sides, there’s-a-time-and-a-place-for-everything as I am, that is quite a statement. Before that fateful night, if you’d asked me for my most profoundly moving musical moments, I’d have uhm’d and ah’d and thrown half a dozen ideas out that depended on what kind of mood I was in at the time. Could it have been Metallica at the Milton Keynes Bowl when I nearly died in the mayhem of The Thing That Should Not Be? Or perhaps And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead destroying all of their gear in an orgy of musically induced violence before they’d finished playing the third song of their set? Or maybe hearing Arvo Part’s Cantus In Memorium Benjamin Britten by accident at a concert I didn’t really mean to be at? And that’s before I get onto moments of musical profundity that I had the pleasure to be actually involved in as a player.

So yeah, to be able to pin point my supreme musical awakening so exactly is quite a big deal for me. It was at St. George’s Hall in Bristol. I don’t remember the date – I don’t remember dates – but it was around 2006 and it was cold. I had been invited to see this band called The Bad Plus by my friend who didn’t really know much about them either. This is how the evening happened in my head:

Damn it. It’s too cold to be arseing about queuing up to see a band that I’ve never even heard about. This had better bloody well be worth it.

I like St.Georges Hall. You feel like you’re dead clever when you hang around here. Isn’t this where they have lots of chamber music on Radio 3? Oh no. I hope I’m not going to have to listen to loads of weird, warbly songs in German with a load of posh people that listen to Radio 3. Man. Hang on! I’ve never done that before; it might be good. Hold in there Liam; keep that mind as open as it can go. See what happens.

We’re in. Rubbish seats, man! Brilliant: not only am I going to watch a band that I probably won’t like, but I’m going to be doing it with a restricted view. They’re going to have to be bloody good to pull this one off.

Interesting crowd. Young trendy types that do jazz but look like they’re in the Strokes but the old, beard-stroking, shaky head brigade are in too. Who is this band? I can’t tell what they sound like just by looking at the audience, which isn’t normal. Hmm.

Here they come. Three of them. A bookish piano player who looks like a jazz pianist and fits the bill. I’m happy with that. The bass player is hauling up a battered old double bass. I like the look of that instrument – much more grown up than my electric bass. He looks kind of Scandinavian and has an expression that says ‘I’m about to play this instrument. Listen.’. The drummer: doesn’t he play in Helmet or Life of Anger or something? He looks scary: hardcore American shaved head punk styles. Somehow, this doesn’t seem to tally up.

Clap clap clap. Here we go.

Holy shit! What’s going on? I don’t get it! What the hell are they doing? This isn’t stuffy jazz that I don’t understand and makes me feel insecure! This isn’t dry as bones classical music that I feel like I ought to like more! This is bloody brilliant. When it is quiet, it’s so agonizingly beautiful that I feel like crying. When it’s loud it’s so brash and in your face I burst out laughing. And they’re funny and seem to be actually enjoying themselves whilst playing this serious, profound and bloody difficult music. I’ve never seen this before!

Man. Where can this go next? The last song of the set. The piano guy says that they love the acoustic of the hall, so they’re going to play a track called ‘Silence is the Question’ that will exploit it to the full. A bass introduction: quiet, lyrical, emotional. This isn’t what I associate with the bass and I’ve been playing the instrument my whole life. Gentle drums, almost too quiet to hear. Piano arpeggios. Soft. Sensual. Build up of volume and intensity. Ok. This is quite full on now. Bloody. Hell. Surely they can’t keep this up? What the hell is that drummer doing? How is the piano player staying on top of this? Man alive! WOO HOO! Go for it!

And then I passed out.

Not really.

But the point I am trying to make is that I was in the middle of the most extreme, the most intense, the most powerful musical experience I’d ever had. As, I’m sure, were lots of people. You just don’t get to do that in the West Country that often. So much music in the UK seems to be led by image and fashion that players don’t seem to want or be able to express themselves to such extremes as The Bad Plus were prepared to push themselves to. And I’ve seen some extreme music in my time: a mass brawl break out at a Carcass gig in Cardiff, lost my small change in a Sepultura mosh pit, various people with laptops making confusing and disorientating sounds in Bristol clubs. But these three guys, with traditional acoustic instruments, blew everything that I had ever seen or heard before completely, devastatingly, overwhelmingly to smithereens.

And that was my moment with The Bad Plus. Nowadays, I can just watch them and enjoy them immensely without necessarily being reduced to tears – although it does still happen on occasion. But that moment was the moment for me. Since then, I’ve strived to get more from my music. I don’t mean that I’m more fussy or picky – quite the opposite in fact. I demand more of myself when I listen and when I play. I invest more and hold back less. I try to listen with my heart and soul rather than just with my ears and my preconceptions. I work harder as a player to know what I’m doing and then discard that in favour of playing what I’m feeling and hearing.

And seeing Reid Anderson, the bass player in The Bad Plus, play that beautiful upright has cost me a small financial and emotional fortune by inspiring me to enter into the world of the double bass. Thanks.

After the gig last night, I got to say hello to them as well. They were really nice, in that special way that Americans can be: warm, friendly, interested despite having to chat to lots of people. I, of course, came over all shy, mumbled my appreciation, got my CD signed and ran away in cloud of thoroughly British awkwardness and gratitude.

So, yeah. If you love music and what it does to your soul, check out The Bad Plus. Or, if that’s not your bag, go and find your own Bad Plus moment. Keep your mind open: it could happen when you least expect it.

'The Magic That's Between The Lines/Behind the Scenes' or 'The Bassplayer'

2009-10-01T19:57:00.010+01:00

This is a post about appreciating music.

And to appreciate this post fully, you need to watch the video above. All of it. You need to watch it in a way that is perhaps dying out in our age of You Tube haste and attention deficit disorders; you need to watch with care and sympathy for the subject. Open your mind and put aside your issues of taste or preference - attitudes that seem to me to be routed in self regard and narcissism anyway. It may not be your cup of tea. You may be a jazzer that distrusts anything too loud and simple, or an aficionado of way out electro art ensembles, but I want you to empty your mind, as much as it is ever possible to forget the part of you that is nurtured, of your preconceptions, tastes and learned habits and just listen and appreciate. Trust me: you can do it.

Oh, and to really get the gist, you need to be listening on something other than a laptop with silly little speakers that can't reproduce the floor vibrating, stomach churning, bowel loosening glory of an electric bass. Headphones or proper speakers please.

Ok. Now you've done that, I want you to think about what was striking about it. What was different about this extract?

That's right! 80% of the camera's time is spent looking directly at the bass player. His name is Pino Palladino, and there are many things you might like to know about him:

# he is Welsh Italian and there are quite a few of them you know (ever had a Sidoli's ice cream?);
# he has played on countless records that you will have heard, but is most famous for his lyrical, melodious and groundbreaking fretless bass lines with Paul Young in the 80s;
# he looks a bit like Jasper Carrott.

There are many reasons why I might be feeling called to sharing the above clip. I'll do my best to be brief, but please be warned that this is a subject very close to my heart and I do tend to go on so.

Palladino is, to put it in the strangely crass vernacular of jazz musicians, a motherfucker. That is, he is a really, really good player. If you listened to this track and you were not particularly drawn to or knowledgeable about the role of the electric bass in music, you may not even particularly notice what the man is doing. Indeed, most people, when they listen to modern rock or pop, are only really aware of a bass line as a low frequency rumble in the pit of their stomachs and only become consciously aware of it if it is promoted to being a hook at the fore of the mix (I'm thinking of Bonkers by Dizzee Rascal as an example of this, or The Chain by Fleetwood Mac: a tune has been immortalised by Formula 1 over the years). Bass players actually like this phenomenon; we like the fact that there is an arcane and secretive side to what we do. You can only truly understand the dark art of bass playing if you have spent your life listening to only bass lines; if you don't know the words to even the most famous of pop songs but can beat every syncopation and hum every fill of the bass line.

And so, from a technical playing perspective, here are the highlights of Palladino's playing on this track. May I suggest that, after you have listened to the track as a whole, you have a closer look at these highlights.

0:26 - notice the clarity he gets in this bluesy run. Most players, even good ones, would slur this because it is a moderately quick run of notes, but Palladino gets every note in with a punch and lets it exist in its entirety before he moves to the next one.

0:33 - the first 'fill'. A 'fill' is a freestyling piece of improvisation that players insert within a predefined and written line, usually at the end of a section of a song. This is a fairly straightforward and typical example of a blues rock bass fill, but it is merely laying a good, sensible foundation for what is to come.

0:41 - now Palladino is firmly in 'the groove' and is beginning to push the boundaries of convention. There are very few players that would attempt this kind of phrase at this point in the music. It's a kind of Motown bluesy chromatic run from one chord to another that leads into a more avant guard fill back to the safe ground of the run that we've seen at 0:26.

0:55 - another sign of a highly individual approach to the instrument here as Palladino plays a nice, tight little fill and then hits two harmonic notes simultaneously. Harmonics are notes that are achieved when you play a string or strings and do not fret a note but merely hold your fretting hand on the string and release immediately after the string is struck. The physics of harmonics is quite interesting, if you like that kind of thing, and you can explore them here.

1:02 - another piece of left-field playing here. It's actually quite typical for Palladino to play this kind of higher register, melodic fill. But, trust me, you won't hear many other examples of it in popular music generally.

1:06 - this the one that makes me weak at the knees. It's a really simple phrase, but quite, quite brilliant. A bass player shouldn't really be doing anything here other than sticking to the bass line and holding things together, but Palladino slings in a nonchalant ad lib that is unexpected, melodic and devastatingly brief.

Ok, ok. I'm starting to bore myself now and I'm sure you've got the point: Pino Palladino is a brilliant player. We've only got a minute into the track and I could yet probably write a PhD on his playing underneath the guitar solo that follows shortly after.

What I'm really hoping, though, is that you might realise that - if the director hadn't decided to fix the bass player in our sights for a uniquely long section of the film and if I hadn't decided to point all of it out - you'd probably never have noticed any of this. It would have merely been a pleasant rumble behind the guitar and voice that fits in with the drums and makes you nod your head rhythmically without you really realising that you're doing it. A closer look, however, reveals a beautiful web of subtle detail and nuance that normally goes unnoticed.

So, try exploring the dark, subtle shades of the musical world that holds up what you normally listen to. If you understand what's going on down there, you'll understand more about music. If you understand more of music, you'll understand more of what makes life so worth living.

"I want" doesn't get.

2009-07-28T21:16:00.010+01:00

I think that there are some jobs that if you actively want to do them, you probably shouldn't be allowed to do.

Politician could be one; policing is perhaps another.

I'm not implying that everyone that wants to do these jobs is inherently deranged in some way. I was merely daydreaming idly and it occurred to me that, if you quite like the idea of beating people up and handcuffing them and putting them in prison or something, could it be that being a policeman is a dangerous move for you and for society? Or, if you like the idea of having your finger on the buttons that control society, perhaps you should keep your sticky mitts to yourself. Maybe the best kinds of leaders are reluctant and accidental ones: at least then they are motivated in an appropriate way...

I propose that in order to address this problem, we should have some kind of conscription that dictates we all must do a year or two as policemen and politicians, whether we want to or not. Yeah, there'd be some pretty poor policing and idiotically incompetent politicking going on, but at least it would be well intentioned.

It's just that I was bought up to believe that it's the thought that counts.

Something is rotten in the state of education...

2009-07-18T10:26:00.007+01:00

I would like to excuse, in advance, my ranting in this post. As you may well know, I am a teacher working at primary school level, currently teaching year 6 - the last year of primary school.

I love teaching children, but I especially love teaching this year group: there is a real feeling of adventure and journeying about the last year of primary school. There is one formative experience after another - residential trips, leavers' events, SATs - and you know that the children in your care will remember these experiences for a long time to come. However, the major issue in year 6, and in education generally, is that of assessment and how to measure the attainment and progress of children during their primary phase of education.

I have already blogged on my feelings about SATs tests. As I said then, I am in favour of using testing to gauge the level of a child's development in English and maths. Many people believe that the tests cause too much stress for children and teachers alike and that the results are not dependable due to the 'snapshot' nature of a written test; a child could be having an off day or underperform due to some other external factor. Also, it is argued that because many year 6 children spend most of the year in revision for the tests and learning how to perform to the maximum level for them, the curriculum is irredeemably narrowed and subjects such as geography, history and the like get squeezed out.

Whilst I have some sympathy for this last point, I have no time whatsoever for the first one. I went through my views on avoiding stress at all costs in my last post on SATs, and I'll do my best to avoid repeating myself here. It does seem strange to me that we feel the need to avoid any kind of difficult experience for children. Surely we should be teaching children to cope with stress and pressure in a positive way, not avoiding it. Negative emotion is almost taboo in schools: anger, sadness, anxiety are all to be avoided at all costs. Yet I believe that children should absolutely be encouraged to face up to these emotions and learn to accept and cope with them, even turn them into positive things. At the moment, the need to protect children from these things means that some children may never truly understand what it means to be stressed, to cope with the emotion and then overcome it. How will they function when they enter the grown up world of work, relationships and families without some experience of these emotions? Coping with testing in a controlled environments like school is valuable not only for the data it provides teachers and education authorities, but also for the life lessons that can be learned during the process: keeping a perspective on things, setting realistic targets, dealing with pressure etc.

As for a narrowing of the curriculum, I believe that this is not necessarily the case if the teacher is prepared and allowed to be daring and creative in their teaching. In fact, I think that year 6 offers more opportunities to broaden the curriculum than most other years, especially in the last term of the year when the tests are out of the way. Since the tests we have undertaken many projects that broaden the curriculum massively: entrepreneurial projects using real cash to set up businesses; a survey of the ecosystem of the school grounds and a plan to improve the diversity of plant and animal life; studies of London including a trip to the Natural History Museum and various other sights; a week long residential trip to Dartmoor getting involved with a plethora of outdoor sports; putting on a leavers' show with all the dramatic, musical and technical skills required to do so. I'm not entirely sure how those experiences represent a narrowing of a curriculum after they have spent most of the year honing and polishing the most important skills needed for life: literacy and numeracy.

So, yes, I do think SATs are important and that they should stay. I just think that schools and teachers should work harder and be more creative in how they approach them. However, the next big thing in assessment, the much vaunted replacement to SATs is called Assessing Pupil Progress, or APP as educational jargon would put it.

APP is a way of tracking a child's progress in English, maths and, in the future, science and perhaps ICT. Each child has a bank of charts and tables that follows them through school that the teacher uses to highlight specific targets as they are achieved, declaring when they were met and where the evidence can be found for the event. It kind of makes sense - assessment is continuous and fluid rather than a snapshot - until you think about what such a system really entails. The paperwork is hideous: I have not heard a teacher say anything other than that the work involved in keeping up is truly horrendous and that it significantly extends the hours a teacher invests into assessment at the expense of other areas of their job. It is cumbersome and, I am guessing, pretty inflexible. If a target is on the sheet, I have to show that a child has met it and then give evidence for that fact over multiple occasions. So, for example, if I am working with some naturally talented mathematicians, I cannot simply have a conversation with them to ascertain whether they can use, say, short division adequately and then move on to other areas they are more in need of covering; I will now have to make sure that there are several examples of short division in their books to prove their competence in using it. This is proper bureaucracy: needless paper trails that are utterly rigid and have no reflection on the needs of the real world and bypass any kind of common sense decision from the teacher.

APP seems to me to be a step backwards from SATs: it seems even less creative, even less flexible and teachers' instincts and opinions are even more marginalised in the face of cold, hard and evidenced bureaucratic 'facts'.

The problem is not the tests. The problem is the league tables that are published and put pressure on schools to 'play the game' and get to certain targets. APP won't change that fact - there will still be league tables - it will merely mean that teachers will have to play a different game: a game that will involve huge amounts of needless work to do something that already happens anyway. I think that lots of teachers will go off sick in the face of APP (I'm only half joking here...) and that, as a profession, we will merely get better at 'creating' evidence and cutting corners to keep the authorities - authorities that seem to know little about the every day lives of teachers and pupils in schools - from the door while we go about trying to make school a valuable experience for it's students.

No one has asked me about APP. At no point have my local authority asked our opinion. No politicians seem to have consulted me or anyone I know in education. It's just happening, whether we like it or not. It's not yet statutory, but we'll be starting in September regardless because that's what the authorities want. I'll give it seven years before it's scrapped and we try an entirely new approach. The whole thing feels political somehow, especially since the SATs marking fiasco of last year put the tests in the centre of a politcal battleground.

I just hope that they get the next system right. Maybe we'll just go back to old fashioned tests and try to train talented teachers that know how to do their job again...

Join the dots...

2009-06-17T18:56:00.003+01:00

This video shows an animation of the score to 'Giant Steps' by John Coltrane. This is, at the moment at least, my favourite jazz tune - I tend to change my mind about these things and find speaking in absolutes very hard. I simply cannot do those 'top 5' lists! Firstly, I think that this tune shows Coltrane's very real genius: the 'sheets of sound'; the almost ludicrously flexible harmonic structure; the chords shifting like a milling crowd.

Usually, the bass player instinct that is hard wired in me hones in on the rhythm section - the bass and the drums. The guys playing on this track - the great Paul Chambers on upright and Art Taylor on drums - put in an unbelievable performance. They bubble along like a simmering pot on a stove and never lose sight of the tune's progression. It sounds effortless, easy even. Tommy Flanagan on piano almost joins the rhythm section in this case, and, aside from the solo, marks the passing of the chords with guttural stabs. However, for once, my ears are dragged kicking and screaming from the mysteriously arcane and dingy world of the rhythm section and into the strange and uncomfortably brightly lit world of melody and harmony. Coltrane's playing is staggering. He rides over the changes like a surfer on a wave; effortless and yet pushing it as far as he possibly can. I cannot even begin to understand what's going on with this tune, let alone explain it.

So, yes, this is about the best piece of music I can think of right now. What strikes me about this video is how much simplifying has to occur to transcribe what Coltrane is playing. I'm a poor reader of music, yet even I can appreciate how much of Coltrane's playing has gone missing when it is written down. It is very close, but to write every inflection and nuance of what is going on down on the manuscript would render it unreadable to even the most accomplished of readers. Just goes to show: it doesn't matter how much education or expertise one has on paper, real genius cannot be imitated or transcribed. There is simply too much to write down and not enough symbols to give the reader the true colours; a cheap Polaroid of a masterpiece.

Use your ears, folks, and do it for real!

What now?

2009-06-08T20:09:00.007+01:00

May I start by explaining that I never intended this blog to be a platform for my political views. I still don't think that it is really; I haven't really detailed what I believe, just what I object to. However, recent events have stirred the slumbering political beast that lies within me. So, here goes...

Well. It has happened. Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons have become the first members of the BNP elected to the European Parliament. For the first time ever, the British electorate have chosen to be represented by a party that is founded on principles of racism - albeit thinly veiled in promises of protecting the rights of the 'indigenous Briton' (see my posts below if you're at all interested in what I think about that) against the onslaught of immigration. In a manner that is like a diet version of the inter-war rise of fascism in Germany - 3rd Reich Lite if you will - the recession, a feeling of injustice and disillusionment and a need to turn inwards and away from the influences of the others that are the phantom cause of all our ills, far right politics is now firmly on the menu of Britain's political dinner party. I've considered the views of the BNP, tried to understand them and listen to the people that vote for them, but I've always found them to be incredibly flawed, ill-informed, half explained and understood even less. They always come back to plain old bigotry. I even heard Andrew Brons on Radio 2 claiming that he didn't know why non-white people weren't allowed into the party as he had only been in it for four years and he didn't make the policy. He is an elected representative of the party, and yet even he cannot explain why he thinks what he thinks. Is it just me, or isn't that just a teeny-weeny bit farcical? If Brons, a former school master, can't explain or justify what he believes, what hope do the voters he is supposed to represent have?

I'm not entirely sure if I'm being hysterical in saying that this country will never be the same again. The question I'm pondering is whether this will eventually turn out to be a good thing. Obviously, I don't think that it could ever be a good thing to have fascists representing you and me in any kind of democratic assembly, but perhaps the shock - the stomach turning horror of seeing such people and such negativity and hatred given any kind of power - will provoke something very positive.

When it comes down to pointing the ineffectual giant finger of blame, I feel that my generation and demographic has a lot of explaining to do. I simply cannot believe that people would protest the abuse of expenses by MPs or the recession by voting for a party that judges people's rights by the colour of their skin. How could you move from the left-centre politics of traditional Labour to the far-right stance of the BNP? Surely the problem is not a shift in voting loyalties; I think that the problem is with the apathy and laziness of the kind of people who voted for Labour - namely me. I have always voted at every election. I have always made the effort to get down to the polling station and put the cross next to the name that stood out to me. However, could I honestly say that I have taken the time to look into the political landscape into which I am about to walk? Have I done my research? Do I know, really know, if I'm voting for something in which I believe in?

I am a practicing Christian. This means that I believe in things that have far greater power than any politician. It also means that whatever political affiliations I have now depend on the issues of the moment rather than a traditional association with a party. My dad, for example, is a traditional Scouse socialist: he has voted Labour since he was 18 and will probably vote for them forever. When I said to him that I had voted Liberal Democrat in one election, he asked me if my "arse hurt from sitting on the fence". It's good to have loyalties and strong principles, but I think politics has changed now. If I'm honest, I don't see much difference between the centre-left of Labour and the centre-right of the Tories, aside from some differences of opinion on Europe and the economy. I could honestly say that if the Tories were elected tomorrow, my life would not be impacted greatly. However, I believe that if I am to align my faith with a political persuasion, it would probably look more socialist than right: a desire to help the poor; to treat the sick with compassion; in the equality of all men and the prevention of selfishness and greed at the expense of others. Looking at the manifesto of the BNP is like looking at the negative image of these values.

My faith also means that if there is one thing that is not an option, it is inactivity. Standing on the sidelines and claiming "I told you so" is simply not allowed. It doesn't change anything. It merely makes one complicit to the problem, almost as blameful as the perpetrators themselves. Shame on those who stayed at home and didn't vote as a protest: how can someone claim that by not voting they are protesting? If you don't like the way MPs behave, vote them out. Or spoil your paper. Staying at home - a mass display of apathy - merely confirms that the powers that be can get on with things on their own because we're not really interested. How can we suddenly pay attention when it suits us? And how strange that we demonstrate our anger at the system by doing absolutely nothing, en masse?

Whatever: the BNP stand for nothing good. It is apathy that has opened the door of power to them, albeit the slightest of an amount. It will be apathy that keeps it open. So it is imperative that we get out of our comfortable armchairs of casual outrage and start registering our feelings about whatever is going on in demonstrable, effective ways. Doing nothing could perhaps no longer be an option. Therefore, maybe those fascists getting into the European Parliament could result in being a positive thing. I really hope that's the case. The alternatives could be very unpleasant indeed.

Hello? Is there anybody there?

2009-06-01T21:48:00.008+01:00

The debate rages. Or at least my side of it does. Following my recent emailed letter to the British National Party, I've heard nothing from them in reply as yet. Which seems a little incongruous and even strange considering their almost feverish determination to mop up the 'disillusioned vote'. A gentle reminding nudge was in order, so I've just emailed the following follow up. I will post any responses that come my way. If they ever materialise that is...

Dear sir or madam,

I recently sent you the query below regarding your policies on immigration. I asked you to define the term 'indigenous Britons' that is very frequently referred to in your party literature to help me understand your philosophies and to cast an informed vote in the forthcoming local and European elections. This leaves me unsure as to whether or not I can describe myself as indigenous to Britain. As I have, as yet, not heard a reply from your office, I am assuming that either there is no satisfactory explanation for referring to anybody as an indigenous Briton - other than the Welsh perhaps - or that you don't particularly want my vote. Or would it help if I sent a photograph?

Every other party I have asked direct questions of regarding their policies has managed to reply or at least pointed me in the right direction to find out more. I am very disappointed that you, as a publicly accountable political organisation, have been unable to do likewise. Surely, as you seem very keen at pointing out the all too evident lack of accountability shown by our leading political parties, you would want to display to a voting member of the public such as me that you care about explaining your policies and philosophies. Or maybe you don't want my vote?

Either way, it would be great to hear from you before June 4th. At the moment, I am deciding to vote only for a party that is able to explain exactly what it stands for. That seems to me to be the only commonly sensible way to use my privileged position as a British voter.

Yours faithfully,
Liam Owen, Bristol.

An open letter to the BNP.

2009-05-27T19:01:00.007+01:00

I have just sent this enquiry to the BNP office in Bristol.

It really is a genuine enquiry; I want to understand what they think. I believe passionately in freedom of speech and thought, but I also believe in integrity and truth. Some of their recent publicity has not really given me much confidence in their ability to show either of these qualities. My suspicions are that they are an organisation of ill-informed, narrow-minded bigots that haven't really thought about what they are saying or what it means, let alone checked the facts of what they are saying in any kind of historical or philosophical context; that they are a group of people that are excusing their racism and prejudices by using pseudo-intellectual mumbo jumbo. They would certainly not be the first group of extremists to do that and they probably won't be the last. However, I am prepared to admit that I could be wrong on this fact and that their policies are based on sound thought and motive. I look forward to their response and will, in the interests of balance and parity, post it here when it arrives. The letter I wrote them is as follows:

Dear sir or madam,

I was wondering if you could help me understand one of the details of your policies. I have read on your party's website that you are not against people of other communities and immigrants but rather are standing up for 'native British people'. I have also read that you are standing up for Britain's "indigenous population" and not stirring up racial hatred.

The phrases 'native British' and 'indigenous population' confuse me somewhat; what exactly do you mean when you use these terms? Where exactly is the line drawn? As far as I am aware, the term Briton and British strictly speaking refers to the pre-Saxon celtic population of these islands. The Saxons were just one of a group of immigrants (Angles, Jutes etc.) that flooded into the British mainland and forcibly took territory from the 'indigenous' population, marginalising them and forcing them to the extreme west and north of the island. Does that mean that the English - as those immigrants later became - are in fact one of the groups of immigrants that would be offered the benefits of your voluntary resettlement policy? Or perhaps the Scots, who were in fact immigrants from the kingdom of Ulster that overran the Pictish peoples of the far north of the British Isles?

By that reckoning, almost everyone on the island is a non-'indigenous' person. Except for the Welsh (and perhaps a few Cornish). And them only because we can't actually prove where they came from. All we know is that they represent all that's left of the 'native British' that would have existed before the country suffered wave after wave of immigration - from the Romans; the Saxons, Angles et al; the Vikings; the Norman French. And even the Welsh originally came from somewhere else, probably central Europe, in the first instance. Or is it simply because all of the immigrants I've mentioned here are white? They were categorically not of the same religion or culture and all bemoaned the influx of immigrants that came after them.

So where are we drawing the lines? Were all the previous immigrations to this island wrong? Are we not merely in a fluid and transient flow of peoples in and out of the islands?

This is a genuine and serious enquiry; I am not writing a hate mail or making fun. These issues are very important ones for me and I am trying to make up my mind with regard to casting my vote on June 4th. I analyse every party's policies carefully, question them and decide which fit best with my personal beliefs and opinions. I would be very much obliged if you could help me understand this aspect of your party's philosophy. I look forward to your reply.

Yours faithfully,
Liam Owen.

A really really small snail on a quite big beach.

2009-05-26T23:55:00.007+01:00

As seen on Southerndown beach near Bridgend in South Wales. He was tiny, but we found him to be fascinating. Upon inspecting the snail, I was struck by how unfathomably complex the patterns on its shell were; struck by how something so small can be alive and need to eat and rest and do whatever snails do all day. He was well and truly hiding up in his shell - I guess waiting for the tide to come and save him from prying, sunburning idiots like me - and wasn't game for coming out.

Total perspective issues then flooded into my mind. I must have as much idea about the universe and how it really works as that snail has about Cheltenham's one way system. That put my egotistical, self indulgent, self interested self in its much more insignificant place. Which reminded me of Douglas Adams's description of the The Total Perspective Vortex in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. It was a device that was used as an extreme punishment for criminals; they were put into the machine which proceeded to show them as they truly were against the terrifying, mind-malfunctioning vastness of space. They duly went mad and were well and truly punished. Except that when Zaphod Beeblebrox - one of the main characters and the very definition of narcissism - was put in, he came out reassured that he was exactly as wonderful as he thought he was.

I think I would struggle in the Total Perspective Vortex. Maybe the best way to cope is go for the snail's approach: I don't think he gives a toss about the one way system in Cheltenham. Or anything other than his dinner, for that matter. Doesn't seem right though - we're not snails and we are wired up to care about more than just dinner, thankfully. Maybe, then, I'll concentrate a bit harder on not believing my own hype and trying instead to just enjoy myself and the world a bit more. There's much to see and do...so many rocks to crawl across.

Wordle; check it.

2009-05-25T18:56:00.004+01:00

Paed a feicio yn Ngymraeg...

2009-05-19T21:42:00.009+01:00

In my search for the image that represents the frustrations and confusions of attempting to (re)learn Welsh used in the post below, I found this other image. If I was riding past this on my bike I wouldn't notice anything. The quizzical fellow in the picture is clutching a dictionary though, which caused me to investigate further. The results were somewhat surprising.

By way of translation (using much assistance from the Oxford Pocket Modern Welsh Dictionary)

Llid = Irritation
y = [of] the
pledren = bladder
dymchwelyd = has returned.

The implications of being a Welsh speaking cyclist appear to be much higher than that of being an English speaking cyclist. I'm going to keep cycling in English; the risks are simply too high not to.

A lament at the death of a bit of me.

2009-05-16T17:08:00.010+01:00

It pains me that I need to use English here rather than the Welsh I grew up with, but it would take me hours to write even the most basic of my thoughts and ideas and then it would be wrong and I would be missing the whole point of language: communicating what I am thinking, feeling, meaning. I used to have Cymraeg hard-wired into my young brain, but now it has receded amongst the clamour and overwhelming dominance of English in my life. It has suddenly occured to me that I am missing the old language, and that it may never come back...

I grew up steeped in Cymru Cymraeg-ness: I spent all of my formative years, from 3 to 23 in the rural heart of West Wales. However, I lived in a monoglot English household. I'd speak immature Welsh with my friends in the playground, hear it all day long in the classroom, but never used it outside of the school situation. I must have been at that age pretty much bilingual, as was my younger brother, but there was a general attitude of 'what's speaking Welsh any use for' at that time in Carmarthenshire amongst the younger generations and in my home. As I got older and began attending secondary school in Carmarthen, even my most 'Welsh' friends rarely used it in social situations, and as we grew older Welsh seemed to drift off the agenda. Local bands on the scene started using Welsh in a more forceful and defiant manner - Gorkys etc. - but by then the use of Welsh in my life had long since ebbed back to the horizons of my daily life. I attended the mainstream secondary school in Carmarthen (Queen Elizabeth Cambria) and the Welsh language school (Ysgol Bro Myrddin) was regarded as our bitter rivals. I was interested in the language and still had a good command of it, but the fiercely tribal and cliquey nature of some of the speakers of the same age as me combined with a puberty fuelled lack of forcefulness and confidence meant that I had little or no opportunity to use it beyond Welsh classes at school. I could chat the time of day away with little old ladies in town, but I couldn't talk about what I wanted to talk about as a fiery fifteen year old embroilled in a scene of death metal and leftfield art and music. This resulted in an ironically Welsh-like inferiority complex and made the language more and more unsatisfactory and irrelevant when communicating my interests and desires. It began to whither away like unused muscle and, when I moved to England in the mid 90s, became pretty much a decrepit passenger hanging out in the back of my language vehicle.

Like lots of people from Wales, when I left the country I became a bore on Welsh and Welshness. My interest in the language was revived and extended to other Celtic tongues and their various adventures and plights. I was older, more calm and self assured and no longer needed to shout all the time. Suddenly I wanted to revive the ailing language in my head. But how do you do that when you live in a country where speaking Welsh is viewed as an exotic idiosyncrasy - a bit like stamp collecting or amateur dramatics - and in a city where it is easier to get lessons in Mandarin and Catalan than it is to study a language spoken a mere 45 minute drive away? I've had to content myself with snatching bits of conversation on my occasional jaunts home, reading my Welsh dictionary and tuning in to Radio Cymru and suffering the onslaught of second-rate cod Country & Western to listen to a Gog talk too fast in strange words and phrases for me to keep up.

My friend Carl Morris recently wrote a highly thought provoking post about his struggles to learn the language of the country in which he lives. This here post is a direct consequence of my reading Carl's thoughts on his journey so far. He moved to Cardiff as a child and has made an admirably determined effort to become fluent in the language as an adult. I take off my hat to him: it is a considerable task to undertake in a unique situation. The trouble with learning Welsh is that everyone speaks English. Every stuttering, awkward conversation you have with a native speaker is played out against the backdrop of both parties knowing that you could have the same discussion with far more satisfying and accurate results if you both switched to English. This is my experience of trying to reacquaint myself with the language; there is an insecurity, almost ashamedness, about my lack of fluency, and, displaying archetypal behaviour of humans that are frustrated and embarrassed, I switch back to the easiest option - English - or don't enter into the struggle in the first instance. I am not really a confident person when it comes to dealing with strangers anyway and lack the devil-may-care, if-you-don't-shoot-you-won't-score cavalierness that Carl so commendably displays in most situations in life. So how does one learn to speak Welsh fluently at all then? To be honest, I haven't got a clem.

I could enroll on an wlpan course and immerse myself for a few weeks. But then what? Surely without regular exercise the Welsh muscles would wither again. Also, the Welsh I spoke as a child was rough Welsh, hearth-Welsh as it is called, and I'm not sure I've the patience for going back to scratch now - the same reason that I'll probably not start learning the piano when I have a perfectly means of making music with playing the bass. Perhaps I could move back to Wales, back to a juicily Cymraeg region where you could use and hear the language every day? I think Mrs Owen might have something to say about that, and I love Bristol dearly anyway and have roots here down as deep as they will go. No, those things won't really do it.

I think really that I have to come to terms with the death of Welsh in me. I was a bilingual child, but as I grew up became a monoglot adult with a some knowledge of an obscure Northern European language. Maybe I need to do a bit of grieving and move on. It might seem odd to you, but as I write this I do feel grief; I feel grief for a language that was part of me that has died; I feel grief for a part of my identity that has gone away never to return, only to be remembered and talked about, never actually present. I need to satisfy myself with chatting to people like Carl who have similar struggles with this beautiful and magnificently mercurial language; I need to delight in having conversations in Cymraeg with Breton shop keepers that have learned Welsh from a book because it is so similar to their native Breton and realise that that is as close as I'll ever get to genuine Welsh conversation as I could probably get without having the escape hatch of English forever accessible in the periphery of the moment. That was with Carl too. Tidy darts Carlos, tidy darts.

RIP y Cymraeg mewn Leroy. RIP.

Pob hwyl te. Da bo chi.

The red devilry continues...

2009-05-16T12:16:00.003+01:00

Well. It looks like the worst is finally going to happen. For years, the only consolation that us Liverpool fans had in the face of the relentless, utterly complete and irresistible dominance of Manchester United was that we were still the most successful British team, still had the most European cups, still had the most league titles. Today, or next week, barring any extremely unlikely upsets, Utd will be crowned English champions and will draw level with Liverpool's record of 18 league titles. It will now only be our five European cups that will give us any source of bragging rites, and Utd are only two behind us and are in the final this year. Dark days, dark days indeed.

But surprisingly, I don't really mind. It is an unavoidable truth that United have been far, far superior to Liverpool for the last twenty years and, barring the occasional red-mist and adrenaline fuelled derby victory over them, not even the most rabid and prejudiced fan can argue with that. Ferguson is a manager of rare genius that seems to effortlessly keep spinning the plates of modern football management: tactical brilliance; managing a group of ridiculously overpaid cry baby brats; mind games that reduce opponents - including Benitez - almost to tears; rally-cries that stir even the most hard-hearted of onlookers; a healthy dose of gamesmanship, or 'cheating' as it used to be called. To make things much worse, Ferguson to me seems to be a manager in the mould of the legendary Liverpool boot room tradition, with the most obvious comparison being with the great Bill Shankley: both Scottish; both of proud socialist stock; both a bit mad.

So, I can't help feeling that this is the end of an era for Liverpool somehow. The inertia has run out; we no longer have our history to give us succour us through the leaner times. And I think that is a good thing. The hunger has to come back now. We all knew Liverpool were playing catch up in financial terms, now that fact will be cemented and solid and we will have to move heaven and earth to get back to the top and humble United once more.

At least we're on a par with them this year. There can't be many teams that have only lost twice in a season and not won the title. Which only goes to show how good United really are, how great the challenge is to overhaul them. Arsenal briefly challenged them, Chelsea even more fleetingly got one up over them. Can we do it? And can we start another era of domincance?

Hey, maybe we can do it this season. Come on Arsenal! Come on Hull! I'd love it if we beat them. Love it!

El Bajo

2009-05-15T23:45:00.004+01:00

I've just put down my bass after having played it for a good four hours, losing all track of time. This is not in itself unusual: I started playing the bass when I was six years old and have been, to a greater or lesser extent, utterly obsessed with the instrument ever since. My dad, a very fine guitarist with a forte for bottleneck slide playing, bought me a Hondo Deluxe bass from a music shop in Swansea that was going bust. £60 was the price, if I remember rightly. I originally chose bass as my instrument of choice simply because I calculated that playing the guitar when you have an accomplished father for a teacher would be the source of much familial despair and gnashing of teeth. I figured that learning bass meant that I would soon move into my own territory, away from my dad's realms, and be able to improve at my leisure. Pretty astute for a six year old, I'm sure you'll agree. Or maybe it's a false memory and I just liked the colour of it in the shop. Either way, I've always loved bassy things - the rumble that you feel in your guts whether it's the double basses and tubas in an orchestra or the bass drum in some dance music.

The bass Dad got me was to be a combined Christmas and birthday present. I remember with a sharply defined vividness the Christmas morning I came down the stairs - already utterly unable to contain my boyish excitement at the globally delicious anticipation of Christmas mornings - to see my first bass, snug in its case with a token bit of wrapping paper sellotaped to the front. I've basically been playing that bass ever since, until it was superseded as my main instrument by a Fender Jazz five-string that creates strange feelings to be felt by a man regarding and inanimate object. I still have the Christmas morning bass, but it lives in a state of semi-retirement and only gets played in a spur-of-the-moment, nostalgic kind of way. It's essentially a crap instrument, but I regard it as a slightly ugly friend with whom you have come a long way down the pot-holed cart track of life with: you love him, but probably wouldn't want to be seen with him in public by your cool friends.

Anyways...as I said: I've just been playing for four hours. I played like I played when I was a kid and trying to master an enigmatic and much misunderstood instrument. I put on some CDs and listened - really listened - to what the players were doing. Then I played with them and tried to get so close to their lines, so perfectly locked into what they were playing, that I lost a sense of myself and actually felt like I was part of the original music. I believe that an athlete might say that I was 'in the zone'. I love it - it's a trance like state that is by no means vacant or hallucinogenic; it's a state of being totally focussed, utterly intent and right on it.

The album that really got me was Aja by Steely Dan. I've been a bit obsessed with this record recently, so I had most of it etched on my ear drums already. It's a glorious, masterpiece of a recording; every time I hear it new things come to light - percussion, beautiful brass, stunning singing, some of the best drumming ever committed to tape and, of course, some wonderful bass playing from Chuck Rainey. The songs are witty and exciting - pure, surreal Americana.

I don't get to play like that very often nowadays. Work, DIY (see post previous postings!) and general social life seem to get in the way. When I do play, it's usually during the throws of hurried preparation for a gig, church event or something similar. Today I remembered the pure, innocent joy of playing because I wanted to; playing for myself without thought for practicalities and limitations. I really enjoyed it. I must do it more often.

SATs tests...the work of the devil or a power of good?

2009-05-14T18:50:00.018+01:00

We - that is my year 6 class and I - are currently in the midst of the key stage 2 SATs tests. For those of you who don't know, or who are of the generation, like me, that doesn't actually remember ever being tested on anything in primary school, SATs are the tests all 11 year old kids sit at the end of their primary schooling. The idea is that we can assess how well they have progressed during their time in school thus far and use the data to judge an individual school's success or shortcomings. The school's results are published and used to sort an area's schools into a league table to gauge them.

These tests have long been the source of much tension and controversy between teachers, politicians, academics, parents and, of course, children. It appears to me that the majority of people think that these tests are an incredibly bad idea: they stress children out; they stress teachers out; 11 years old is too young to be dealing with such pressure; they cause schools to 'teach to test' and therefore limit a creative and holistic curriculum; they create unfair competition between schools; the results do not fairly reflect the whole picture of a school; the results are not always accurate, as witnessed in last year's marking debacle.

I have a guilty secret though. I am firmly in the minority of primary school teachers that wholeheartedly supports the tests. Let me make it absolutely clear right now though that I absolutely do not approve of league tables for schools based solely on attainment. A school should be judged on how far a child progresses from when they enter school to when they leave school, not on whether it can produce a percentage of children that achieve some arbitrary level of 'normalness' that is used simultaneously and indiscriminately whether you live in High Wycombe or Moss Side. The teacher jargon for measuring an individual child's progress is 'value added'. I believe that this is what counts; a child should leave school having made the most progress they can from where they began. This is what education is all about for me: improving yourself; broadening yourself; moving forwards.

However, I do not accept the 'it stresses children and teachers out' argument. I do my utmost to remove the stress of the tests from the children despite the fact that the catchment area of our school means that we have to work damned hard all year to achieve results in line with what is deemed the national average. We practice, we discuss, we devise strategies for achieving the best we possibly can. By the time the tests come around, the children are anxious to do well but they are so well versed and familiar with testing that it doesn’t seem that much of an ordeal. They set themselves targets, with my help, and they try to reach them. And I have never yet encountered a child that has not left primary school with a higher level of literacy and numeracy as a direct result of having sat those tests.

The trouble is that many primary school teachers are of my generation. If I'm honest, we were not taught particularly well during the 70s and the 80s. How many people that are over 25 or so can explain what a subordinate clause is, or how to use a semi-colon correctly, or use maths in a fluid and flexible way that suits your own way of thinking and the situation? I had to relearn all of that when I was training - before that I'd used scraps of knowledge gleaned from the occasional visionary teacher and pure gut-instinct. It must be said that many teachers also don't really know how much about this stuff and feel very threatened when they are compelled to teach it. Surely, then, it is a good idea to put concrete things like tests in place to ensure that teachers sort their subject knowledge out and make sure that they teach children to the best of their ability rather than bumbling along safely tucked up in their own comfort zone? The tests create a mechanism of accountability that teachers cannot avoid by hiding behind wooly, half-baked and faddish theories. They have to teach children basic crucial skills that can be measured and that will help them for the rest of their lives. The pressure is not, or should not be, on the children; the pressure is, and should be, on the teachers to do a good job. That pressure is on almost everyone else in all types of jobs in all types of industries because they are paid to deliver certain things. We are paid to educate children, and it is fair to expect us to do that as well as we possibly can. I am certain that there is no greater feeling of achievement or satisfaction than that which is found from helping a child achieve or even surpass their expectations. That alone is worth a bit of pressure.

And since when has it been wrong for anyone to experience pressure? We're all under some degree of pressure pretty much all of the time. Is it not good to teach children to absorb this, cope with it, turn it to their advantage? I find that most children actually enjoy these challenges; they like to measure how far they have come; they like to know what to do next to progress.

The danger is, of course, that some teachers turn the pressure that is on them to do a good job onto the children in their care. Cheating in these tests is incredibly common. Every year I hear many stories of teachers feeding answers, changing scripts, just generally not doing things by the book. Who gains from that? I think that it shows utter contempt and disrespect for the children and, for that matter, for the role of a teacher in society. If we are working in a system of testing, then lets at least make it raise standards of learning and teaching rather than it being just a game that is to be won at all costs. And, believe me, the motivation for teachers cheating in these tests is not to make the children feel better about their results, it is simply to paint themselves in a better light and to avoid recrimination and pressure from the authorities because they haven't been doing their job properly. I've never cheated in a SATs test, and if I was ever asked to, I would refuse without hesitation.

So, next year the headteacher unions are threatening to boycott the SATs tests. This is because they are fed up of being judged failures or successes against those arbitrary percentages that are deemed average. They want to be judged on what their children have actually achieved, and fair play to them. The science SATs, which were easily the most unpopular of the tests mainly because they are pedantic and poorly thought out, have already been scrapped. The government appears to be taking the system apart slowly to avoid any sudden embarrassing u-turns. What worries me, though, is what we'll do to avoid lazy, dumbed-down and faddish teaching instead; are we seriously saying that we'd prefer to raise up another semi-illiterate and innumerate generation that doesn't have the skills they need to learn and live their lives? Just because teachers don't want to be stressed out? I think we all need to get our acts together and learn how to teach children what they need to know and not be ashamed of doing a good job.

But then again, maybe I'm wrong.

Blistered and proud.

2009-05-11T20:41:00.006+01:00

1 hour, 17 minutes and 17 whole seconds of punishment on one toe. Battle scars worn with pride and honour.

Do I get extra points for running longer than everyone else? The winner did it in about 28 minutes; that's about a third of the total time I was running. That's just lazy.

My finishing position was 5886th. I like that. It's not often you get to be 5886th at anything.

Love running?

2009-05-10T20:44:00.005+01:00

I've done it. I've done something that I have never done before, never even contemplated doing before. I ran 10 kilometers in the Bristol 10k race.

I was running as part of the Love Running team taking part in the event. There were 300 of us, all from our church, and we raised £50,000 and counting for three charities: One25, St Peter's Hospice and World Vision Zimbabwe.

Unbelievably, amazingly, fantastically I actually ran the whole circuit without stopping even once - except to scamper about on the Portway to retrieve the pieces of my asthma pump that I had tucked into one of my very stylish sweat bands. It was dislodged during some over zealous high-fiving with my friend Matt Smith as he came the other way and scattered in every direction on impact with the tarmac. Roger Bannister never had to deal with that kind of challenge. The resultant scampering only added to the distance though, so it doesn't count as a stoppage in my books. In fact I do believe it means I ran about 10,005 m rather than the advertised 10k. So you definitely got great value for your money.

I didn't quite hit my target of £500, so the amusing costume is staying in the wardrobe until next year (did I just say that?!). I did, however, don a rather fetching headband which, although it made me look like a tool, was actually quite useful. Sweat was kept at bay - an important consideration when you have a hairline such as mine.

I pounded the roads as best I could. I wasn't fast by any stretch of even the most limited of imaginations, but I kept going and even managed a cool sprint finish when the crowds got thicker in the centre of town. The atmosphere of the whole event was a real surprise to me, never having associated myself with such things before. Seeing the other Love Running shirts and hearing people cheering you on was a real inspiration and made any thoughts of stopping unacceptable.

I never thought I'd say this, but I enjoyed the running. The buzz after the pain of the endeavor is addictive. I'm never going to be quick, but I think I'll keep my hand in once I've recovered the use of my ankle. In the meantime, feast your eyes on these. Pay special attention to number 94: a masterclass in athleticism and fashion smarts on the race course.

Do It Yourself

2009-05-08T22:36:00.005+01:00

DIY. I'm sorry but I don't like it. I hate the feeling that you could, at any moment, drill through something vital to the fabric and integrity of your house. I despise the challenge of balancing sky-high expectations with rock-bottom abilities. If I could, I would never DIY anything ever again for the rest of my life.

And yet, apparantly, as a man I ought to love DIY: crave it, yearn for it to prove my masculinity and manhood in the most indesputable of ways. Maybe I need to face the fact that I am a big girl and would rather be listening to a nice record or reading a book. Or even tending the garden; at least I can't destroy anything of importance out there.

So, yes, I have put a curtain rail up. Squiffily perhaps, but it is nevertheless up. And the curtain hang on it as intended. However, a dark cloud of forboding is beginning to gather on the horizon...

Incredibly, there are now a mere matter of hours until Beth and I have to run in the Bristol 10k race. I've never done anything like this - I've barely run anywhere since my school days - and I'm beginning to feel somewhat nervous. I keep telling myself that it is for charity and has nothing to do with my physical prowess or target settings, and yet I can't quite silence a small but insistent voice in my mind telling me that I will look a fool and probably collapse with London marathon style wobbly legs a matter of yards from the start line to the general disgust and derision of a throng of fit, lean and toned specimens of manlihood. What it is to be a man; what it is to live with the voices; what it is to feel like your not quite 'up to scratch'. Never mind. I'm going to experiment with putting the timing device you have to attach to your shoes on an unsuspecting and infinitely lither person and claiming their glory.

Or, as I should have done with the DIY debacles of today, pay someone else to run the bloody race for me.

2009-05-07T22:51:00.004+01:00

I'm thinking...it'll come.

Blogging hell

2009-05-06T20:49:00.002+01:00

Well. Blog. Go on then. Blog, you self obsessed little nerd.

That is the voice that twitters into my innermost conscience. I've ignored it thus far, citing a prejudice that bloggers are all merely nurturing a narcissistic tendency and sharing their inconsequences with inconsequentials. But, I've just decided that all prejudices, even ones that are obviously correct, are wrong and should be challenged. So, here we go. Sometimes I may talk all clever like; sometimes I may discuss matters of a decidedly low brow leaning. Music will be a main concern, but, as in my everyday conversations with real people as a pose to you false e-people, I do tend to veer off down cul-de-sacs: ancient and medieval history and how it tells us the answer to everything; Welsh language and culture; football being the other answer to everything; religion being not just for thick bigots; stuff that just happens to have happened.

I'm off to muse. See you later.