30th November:

Human nature is such that it is usually easier to be critical about things and dwell on their faults and shortcomings rather than highlighting the positives. Anyone browsing through previous posts on these pages might feel that your congenial host is especially guilty of crimes against optimism, which is kind of ironic because said author generally considers himself to be a ‘glass half-full’ kind of fellow.

Author and Permission Marketing guru Seth Godin made an interesting point about business, but really about life, on his blog recently – “if you read enough stories, it’s easy to believe that [companies like] Starbucks and Apple….somehow manage to effortlessly create remarkable products and happy customers”. Of course there are, in truth, no perfect companies, no perfect products nor any ideal places to work. Companies like Apple found it tough going for years and still continue to struggle in some ways even today.

The process of engaging in critical intellectual analysis of anything, from popular television to the price of milk, helps us to identify and isolate flaws, which we can then work to minimise or eradicate. And those flaws are always there, buried somewhere. Even Nicole Kidman gets spots.

The feeling that you can’t change the world is often enough to persuade you not to bother trying.

But everything can always be made better.

29th November:

That’s the problem with all those naysayers. They’re always saying nay. According to them, terrestrial telly is doomed. Recent reports on viewing habits suggest that more and more of us are switching off the traditional box in the corner of the living room (or hanging slimly on the wall if you’re a bit flash that way) and are going upstairs to sate our entertainment and current affair needs via the medium of the Interweb. This is, as all right-thinking people will already clearly have spotted, a complete red herring. Watching some fat bespectacled kid pretending to be Luke Skywalker on YouTube is hardly akin to 30 minutes of Panorama on a Monday night. Whilst it is possible to find the occasional profound nugget of sweetcorn amongst the sea of silage that is public-generated web content, most of it is either contrived, pointlessly bizarre or openly pornographic. Which is fair enough, as long as we’re clear about it.

Social commentators (who know much more about this sort of thing that I do) have suggested that the web will subtly change over the next few years. Whilst it will continue to offer every kind of content imaginable, it will do some in a much more tailored fashion, giving us less overall but more of what we actually want. Sounds quite appealing, doesn’t it? Fewer videos of fat trainee jedis and more of those buggeringly addictive click-drag games.

The recent furore over Michael Grade’s high-profile defection from the Beeb to ITV does optimistically suggest that we British do still care about our telly. Yes, ok, we are still producing crap like Big Brother years after most other European countries had the sense to see it was going nowhere and kill it off after 2 series (the people did indeed vote and the verdict was “meh, let’s go down to the square, have a coffee and watch the world go by instead”) but quality programming still has the ability to capture the public’s imagination and embed itself into the national consciousness. Stuff like ‘Prime Suspect’ and ‘Cracker’ still gets talked about years after it was shown and this can only be a good thing. In some ways, Grade’s move to ITV is a positive step because their programming output has been in need of a boot up the arse for a few years now, and he’s probably the man to do it.

The message to all involved in broadcasting is, I think, a clear and simple one: the delivery mechanism may change as technology evolves, but good telly is good telly and enough people will watch and support it to ensure its viability. Now, where was that video of the kittens singing 'Bohemian Rhapsody'?

28th November:

You may love them or you may hate them, but you have to hand it to the French. Although they have a massive public sector and civil service, and the State seems to loom large in most aspects of daily life, the French still have a very highly evolved sense of personal freedom. And they guard it jealously. They don’t really mind their high-profile public figures having an assorted collection of mistresses and offspring lodged in Parisian penthouse apartments at the public’s expense as long as it doesn’t affect that official’s ability to do their job and serve the public. At the first whiff of a plan to increase the amount of personal data held by government bodies as part of the existing national identity card scheme, however, they are rioting and burning their livestock on the Champs Elysees.

We Brits, however, seem happy to stand around in a lemming-like trance while the government quietly but rigorously strip us of our personal rights and freedoms replacing them with legislation that treats us like idiots and spells out (in very small words of two syllables or less) exactly what we’re allowed to get up to during the rare moments when we’re not being caught on CCTV or having our supermarket purchasing habits being dissected by some supercomputer deep in the bowels of Tesco Towers.

Take driving, for example. Some insurance companies have been trialling a scheme whereby young drivers (who are statistically at higher risk of accidents than their more mature counterparts) agree not to drive between the hours of midnight and 6am in return for a smaller premium for their insurance. This contract is not based simply on good faith, though. Cars are fitted with black boxes that monitor usage, so if the car is started and driven during the night the policyholder is deemed in breach and receives a bill for his trouble. Without wishing to be deemed a conspiracy theorist (not again, anyway), this is potentially the thin end of the wedge. We are currently moving gradually but inexorably from static speed cameras to cameras that measure average speed over a fixed distance. How much longer can we realistically be from an obligatory GPS black box in the car that continuously monitors speed and triggers a fixed penalty fine and licence points if the driver happens to transgress the speed limit?

We already have certain High Street banks seriously contemplating charging holders of standard current accounts an annual fee for the account unless they deposit a minimum of 1500 pounds in the account every month. Let’s just conjure with and savour that idea again: banks charging you for the privilege of keeping you money. Banks penalising you for not giving them enough of your hard-earned folding.

Jeeves, book us on the next flight to Paris and don’t forget to pack the sacrificial geese!

26th November:

Over time, and with repeated use, certain phrases in the English language are eventually told to pack their bags and are sent off to that smelly land beloved of tabloid journalists that we like to call 'cliche'. One such example, which will be familiar to every British frequent flyer and cinema frequenter and which has become piss-boilingly annoying for various reasons that I won't bore you with here, is the expression 'sit back and relax'.

It has, sadly, become one of the stock phrases that every customer service best-practice guide and handbook deems should be blandly and insincerely trotted ad nauseum when dealing with the great unwashed (aka members of the public). "Sit back, relax, and enjoy the film". "Sit back, relax, and enjoy your flight". Quite apart from the question of whether it is physiologically possible or otherwise to be relaxed whilst sitting forward (without looking like an extra from 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest'), I question who ever came up with this expression in the first place. Is it not an unnatural invention of some kind, like rose wine, silicone implants and Noel Edmonds? The literal and ultimately meaningless result of an attempt to succinctly express a higher concept? A bastardisation born from letting some long-dead idiot who barely scraped a B in their A-level English exam loose on the syllabus of an ancient hospitality degree course? We cannot say for sure. The only certainty is that if I hear the expression being delivered one more time by someone with cow eyes who clearly couldn't give a toss whether I am sitting on my head or am wound-up like a coiled spring on the verge of metal fatigue, you will more than likely see me on the front page of several national newspapers having been charged with something that would make Russian sailors run of out a bar in embarrassment.

Enjoy.

Oh, and have a nice day.

24th November:

Ahh, nostalgia. Not quite as good as it used to be, though.

Nobody seems to do it quite like the Brits. Get a group of thirty-something folk together in a room, apply liberal quantities of wine and stand back. As quick as you can say “was George male, female or just bi-curious?” the conversation will have turned to 1970’s children’s TV shows. The Goodie’s recently reformed for a TV special on BBC2 and Tiswas is apparently to grace our screens once more in a one-off celebration of all that is anarchic, soggy and flan-based. Makes me all aglow, just the thought of it. Many is the young lad whose first case of pyjama tepee will have been experienced on a Saturday morning in front of the telly thanks to Sally James and that inspired marriage of large breasts and denim waistcoat (Playtex 34C left in the dressing room).

Every generation has its golden age and we Brits love nothing more than harking back to our own personal ‘good old days’ whilst selectively ignoring the accompanying inconvenient unpleasantries (Polio, TB, infant mortality rates, women not having the vote, homosexuals being placed in asylums or the 3-day week, anyone?). Our appetite for it seems insatiable, although there is apparently a petition going around to stop Boney M from reforming. “During the 50’s”, my grandmother used to say, “I could leave my front-door unlocked without worrying about burglars”. It seemed churlish to remind her that she lived in a cold, 2-room council house with a family of seven. They’d find nothing to take if they did break in. I might know my neighbours but I have central heating and am statistically more likely to live beyond 70.

Is the best time of life the time you are in or does this nostalgia represent a fruitless quest for something unobtainable? Every year, thousands emmigrate to warmer climes in search of a simpler, less stressful existence. Do these people find their Valhalla? The TV show ‘The Darling Buds of May’ caught the public’s imagination in the early 1990’s because it offered a romantic and heavily stylised vision of life conducted during a gentler time. If nothing else, the show did stimulate some debate in the serious press about the fragmentation of the traditional family unit and people’s increasing mobility resulting in this yearning for a bygone era when you knew your neighbours by their first name and coppers could give gobby adolescents a good cuff round the ear with complete impunity.

The Thatcher once memorably said “there is no such thing as society” but all the signs seem to be that in 2006 many of us have never felt a greater need for a genuine sense of community and belonging.

23rd November:

David Blaine is currently dangling 50 feet in the air above Times Square, shackled and attached to a spinning gyroscope. Many of you may be asking why. Is this magic? Entertainment? A feat of endurance? Once he frees himself, Blaine will then lead a group of 100 underprivileged children (hand-picked by the Salvation Army) on a shopping spree through the city. Confused?

Blaine is a strange character. This will more than likely not have escaped your notice. The British public seem to have an especially low tolerance for self-publicists and his last attempt to engage the common man on these shores saw him pelted with cheeseburgers. We collectively declared it ‘pointless fannying around’ and let him know in no small measure. However, even our colonial cousins in the land of the weird do seem somewhat perplexed by Blaine’s exploits and don’t quite know what to make of him. Blaine’s previous forte was street magic – running around the major avenues of America’s notable conurbations with a camera crew hanging off his shoulder, making people’s shoes disappear and then vanishing himself, leaving bemusement and gasps in his edgy wake. Who was that masked man?

Now, however, Blaine seems to specialise in grand (grandiose?) headline-grabbing exercises that serve no point other than demonstrating to the world how mercurial and anomalous a character he is. It’s like an advert for a brand that is selling no product nor offering any service – ultimately rather pointless. Of course, maybe there is no point. Maybe Blaine is very rich and secretly having a very large old laugh indeed. Even if we are all looking for a message that simply isn’t there, though, surely there can only be a very finite public appetite for this kind of guff?

Without wishing anything untoward to befall the good Mr. Blaine in his latest endeavour, I’d like to suggest a fitting epitaph:

Here lies David Blaine
Eh?
Meh.

22nd November:

The 21^st Century Consumer’s Lament

I want it.
I want it to arrive on time.
I want it to be sent to an address that suits me.
I want it to be nicely packaged.
I want it to work straight from the box.
I want a free phone number with a real person at the other end in case I have questions.
I want to pay with a credit card without incurring extra charges.
I want a comprehensive guarantee.
I want to be made to feel like a valued customer, not a nuisance.

Is that really so much to ask?

20th November:

First it was home decoration, then it was property development and now it is debt. Debt is the new reality TV rock and roll. Watch in awe as a whole barrel-load of unfortunates up to their ears in hock are wheeled out in front of our stern-faced host. Grimace as their flagrant spending habits are put under the microscope and dissected. Gawp as they are chastised for their lack of book-balancing skills and cheer as they emerge from their cathartic mauling humbled and reformed characters. It’s easy to be flippant about this, but it is astonishing how much debt people can rack up on their credit cards due to some misplaced sense of entitlement. Mind you, I’m slightly old-school and was brought up believing that you shouldn’t buy things you can’t afford.

The entitlement issue is an interesting one, however. I once knew a young lady (we’ll call her Jane for the sake of it) who was in debt to the tune of almost £10,000. Jane was 26 and totally unashamed of her spending habits. In fact, her rationale was breathtaking and audacious. When queried about her excessive acquisition of comestibles, Jane simply replied thus: “I’m in the prime of my life and want to have fun. I will earn more in the future and will pay off the debit when I settle down and don’t want to go out so much. For the moment, however, I want nice clothes and jewellery and meals out, and don’t see why I shouldn’t have them”. As I said, breath-taking and audacious. Not uncommon either, I suspect.

18th November:

I took an EasyJet flight yesterday (yes, I know, I know) to Glasgow. In my defence, I live closer to Stansted than any other airport and it was for personal rather than work reasons so I had to consider the economics. With about 10 minutes of the flight left, our perma-tanned (a most unnatural mahogany) hostess came round with a large, clear plastic bag. She proffered the bag in the direction of the elderly and rather demure-looking gentleman sitting next to me. "Rubbish?"
"Yes indeed", replied my companion over the top of his half-moon spectacles, "but it was cheap so I shouldn't really complain".
Chic Murray himself would have been proud.

I have a friend called Philip (hello Mr. P!). Philip has a dog. Philip's dog has an unnatural tendency to pass wind in the car whenever Philip drives past a park. This is apparently because the dog sees the park, assumes that walkies are imminent and gets rather excited. I can therefore only assume that Philip either studiously plans each route to avoid the sight of lush verdure or drives everywhere with the windows open.

16th November:

Channel 4 News in the UK screened a special report last night on the subject of women's rights in Afghanistan. The fall of the Taliban should have heralded a new dawn for the country's female population, but it would seem that Afghan women are still being denied the most basic social rights. Most destressing was the story of one woman being held in a special female prison outside Kabul. Her crime? She had fled her home after being assaulted and raped by her brother-in-law and was charged with adultery.

It is truly heartbreaking that in the 21st Centuty there are still women (and children, for that matter) suffering and being treated as 2nd-class citizens for the most tenuous of soical, cultural and historical reasons. Please do something about it here.

14th November:

Once more the work/blog conflict raises its ugly head, with work yet again emerging triumphant. It's a 'paying the rent' thing, the more sensible half of the household informs me...

Iraq seems today to have gone off to a place far beyond Fuckdom. Still, we should be glad that these people now live in a democracy where they can exercise their right to dress up like policemen and kidnap 100 innocent civillians if they choose to do so. They wouldn't have got away with such japery in Saddam's day. Oh no. Progress indeed.

I'm no fan of the Conservative Party but I did worryingly find myself noddding along when I heard Anne Widdecombe on Radio 4 eruditely pointing out that Democrat's election-winning (and ultimately Rumsfeld-busting) talk of a "change of approach" in Iraq was all well and good but nobody seemed capable of articulating exactly what the new approach would be. I had to go and have a lie down. I'll be buying the Daily Mail next.

Rumsfeld quoted Churchill in his emotionally-charged resignation speech. "I have benefited greatly from criticism and at no time have I suffered from a lack thereof." There might be a reason for that, Don. When the administration needed a scapegoat, who was the guy with one gaffe too many under his belt? At the end of the day, over 40% of your country voted and voted your arse out the door. They can't all be wrong. Still, never mind - just think of all those Non-Executive Director boardroom positions that you can cuddle up to at night. Forgive us if we don't shed a tear.

The UK mains eletricity system runs on 240 volts. Just because the US system runs on 110 volts doesn't mean that the electorates' brains do too.

10th November:

One firmly from the file labelled "You Couldn't Make It Up":

A fire safety leaflet printed by the Scottish Executive in Urdu has suffered from a small translation hiccup - the leaflet recommended breaking ones fall from a window when fleeing a house fire using a donkey. The word 'cushion' in Urdu is apparently very similar.

The bit that really got me, however, was the final line of the story as reported on the BBC web site - "The leaflet has now been withdrawn and will be reprinted." Really? No shit, Sherlock.

9th November:

It's official: Wednesday's mid-term elections represented a savage kick in the conkers for Bush's Republicans. The press are full of it. America has woken up and spoken. Stand on top of Capitol Hill, look towards the horizon and you will see a bright light. That's the rest of the world grinning. Nice to have you back, guys.

The great Rumsfeld rumination: did he fall? Was he pushed? Does anyone actually care? One down....three left. Cheney next, hopefully.

Less than four days ago Bush was questioned about Rumsfeld's position and proclaimed that the salty old dog probably had a couple of years left in him. Now he has gone, and gone ignominiously. When put on the spot today about the accuracy of his earlier comments, Bush said that he knew Rummy was probably on the way out but didn't want to say anything because he, and i'm quoting here, "didn't want to inject such a major issue during the latter stages of an election campaign".

To paraphrase: I knew but I lied because it suited me. Anyone else feel a dose of Roger-Moore-eyebrow coming on? Talk about a fitting epitaph for a Presidency...

PS - has anyone else noticed that Bush tries to open every press conference with a witty little bon mot directed towards the gentlemen of the press? His party took a hammering yesterday and the best opening gambit he could come up with was "Why the glum faces, guys?". You could have heard a pin drop. I practically chewed off a finger in embarrassment. It was worse than staged, worse than cringworthy. It said "business as usual, I don't care". There, in one small sentence, was everything you really need to know.

8th November:

According to the song, ‘the best things in life are free’. This is clearly nonsense. The best things in life are generally very expensive indeed, and all the better for it. That wonderful sunset view from the balcony may be gratis, but the business class flights and the 10 nights in the hotel have probably seen off a couple of grand without any trouble at all. And quite rightly so.

As the world gets smaller and ‘low cost’ airline companies become increasingly profitable and more miserable, maybe we should stop for a moment and re-examine our perception of the value of things.

Let’s be candid, your £10 air ticket will more than likely get you from A to B. However, A is probably not a particularly convenient departure point for you and will necessitate a 4.30am start to the day, followed by a 2 hour drive. Your departure terminal at A will be a large, noisy, unheated corrugated shed. You will have to pay 3 times the price of your ticket to check in your hold baggage. You will have to sit at the departure gate surrounded by men drinking pints of beer at a time when the rest of the country are still contemplating their corn flakes. The pre-boarding call at the gate will immediately result in a mass stampede towards the door that Pavlov would have been proud of. Your airplane will be uncomfortable, garishly decorated and your flight will be punctuated with annoying PA announcements every 10 minutes made by bored teenagers wearing too much make-up instructing you to buy scratch cards, raffle tickets, train tickets, maps and crap overpriced snacks. Honestly, it’s like something from the pages of 1984. Upon arrival at B (another cold, corrugated shed in a provincial town that is a 50 minute coach journey from where you actually want to get to), you will queue for 40 minutes to have your passport inspected by the lone immigration official and then queue for another 45 minutes for your hold baggage to arrive. By this point, you are likely to be tired, hungry and somewhat irritable.

It’s been a long time since air travel has been anything like glamorous, but this...? It’s apallingly depressing. Veal are treated more humanely. And don't even think about what happens when anything goes wrong. All you're going to get is a shrug and that "what kind of service did you think you'd get for a tenner?" look, to which there really is no response. Yes, Sir, you get what you pay for and for £10 we're treating you like a dick. And it really is your fault. So why do we let them away with it? Cause it’s cheap, innit?

One of my colleagues used to work with a small engineering company and he sold a lot of products in Germany. The Germans were always prepared to pay a premium for his products because nobody else made them better. The design was better, the performance was better and they lasted longer before needing replaced. The small premium was therefore justifiable. In the UK, however, the only way to succeed seemed to be by undercutting the competition. Make it cheaper.

Although cheaper generally means ‘more accessible’, it certainly does not always mean better. We can now buy a 30 quid DVD player in almost any major supermarket. Yes, they are crap but they work. However, what exactly is the point of a 30 quid DVD player other than irreversibly eroding the public's perception of the value of DVD players? ASDA has again been voted “Cheapest Supermarket in Britain” for seemingly the 35^th year in a row, but so what? Is it any good? I see no mention of quality, service or fairness here.

Some people’s economic circumstances dictate that they are more price-conscious than others. That’s unfortunately a fact of life. The public's desire for the cheapest deal in every situation is not a healthy thing, though. Products and services don't have to be the cheapest, they need only be cheap enough to be competitive (i.e. viable for both consumer and supplier). How about raising the ceiling rather than continually lowering the floor?

The best things in life are expensive and there to be aspired to. Which makes them all the sweeter when you finally get to experience them.

7th November:

A couple of years ago I attended a business function and got talking to a Israeli gentlemen. Over the course of the evening, the conversation drifted unintentionally towards the Israeli Palestinian conflict. However, no sooner had we touched on the subject than the conversation was cut short. My views were branded naïve and simplistic. “You can’t possibly understand the complexity of the situation and the 2000 years of history that have led us here”, I was told. Rather than offend, we moved on to other topics, but I later reflected that I should perhaps not have let my interlocutor off the hook quite so easily.

I’ve heard similar arguments before. In the absence of all the information and a full understanding of the heritage, history and baggage of both sides, any views one holds are merely going to represent gross oversimplifications of the situation.

However, is it not exactly this baggage and history that represents a large part of the problem? Surely the views of both sides become increasingly entrenched over time and perhaps a simple, ‘clean-slate’ analysis of the circumstances as they are at the time is exactly what such a conflict requires. Bring in a mediator with no prior involvement and no political axe to grind (not an American in this case, then) and have both parties commit to abiding by his or her recommendations.

Simple? Undoubtedly. Simplistic? Not necessarily.

For the record, I'm with these guys.

6th November:

In the tragic-comedic farce that is the world of the parent-to-be (see earlier posts), sooner or later the talk turns to the subject of nomenclature.

This, as you would expect, is a veritable minefield. Saddling your beloved first-born with an inappropriate moniker can have huge potential consequences, both in terms of the child’s self-esteem and personality and the likelihood of you having to re-mortgage the house in order to pay those eye-wateringly large bills for cognitive therapy sessions.

Examples of worst-practice stretch from the sublime (stand up Anne Teak, Theresa Green et al) to the ridiculous and just plain lazy. Nigella, anyone?

Names also come and go with fashion. We’ve sadly seen a sharp decline in the number of Ethel, Norman and Beryls in the UK, whereas in certain biscotti-friendly British suburbs you can’t seem to move for Olivers and Emmas. The Bethany, the Britney and the Kevin also seem to be increasingly common phenomena, albeit within an entirely different socio-economic sphere. I did once meet a Torquil and it was, frankly, a confusing experience for us both.

So what is a good parent-to-be to do? I recommend suppressing your natural instinct to stick two fingers up to the Man by calling your child ‘Sunflower’ or ‘Blossom’ (especially if it is a boy) and going for something plain and simple, with a maximum of 2 syllables. Trust me, your bank manager will thank you for it later.

5th November:

Gunpowder, treason and plot, apparently.

Watching Eddie Izzard on the telly last night reminded me of just how marvellously expressive the English language is. It contains richly textured words like ‘unctuous’, ‘nubbin’ and ‘pustule’. Having the occasion to use all of these words within the same sentence, however, would suggest that specialist medical intervention would be the order of the day.

Apparently our country remains in the grip of an epidemic of expatriation, with thousands of disgruntled Britons casting off the shackles of their daily inner-city soggy commute and going off to live somewhere generally much nicer instead, before having their new lives tragically cut short due to melanoma. Still, quality not quantity, eh?

On the face of it, a new life in, say, France looks appealing. The same population as the UK but double the land-mass means that many parts of France still retain that genuinely rural feel that people seem to hanker for. That is until the wind changes and you get a blast of the goose farm and foie-gras factory in the next village.

This influx of Britishers is not all bad for our French cousins non plus. Many of these ex-pats are desperate to immerse themselves in the full-on French experience and this has resulted in several villages and towns reviving long-dead traditions, festivals and fetes. Village meetings have never been better-attended. Jam-making classes are sold-out. Abandoned farm houses are being renovated. The indigenous natives are taking a long, hard look at themselves in the mirror and asking what it means to be French. No bad thing.

There is a sinister breed lurking amongst the newcomers, however, and the village of Eyemet near Bergerac has just seen the opening of its first “English Supermarket”, complete with Union flag in the window (I am of Scottish persuasion so don’t even start me on this one). Years ago I went on a driving holiday to Majorca was appalled at the number of bars, restaurants and shops bearing teutonically-tinged signage. Not even just food shops, for that matter. There were also clothes shops, tobacconists and jewellers in which the daily greeting was less 'buenos dias' and more 'guten tag'.

It’s great to go and live abroad because you want to change your life. It’s even better to go to a country that you have some kind of historical or emotional link with (invasions don’t count). Either way, learning the language and throwing yourself into the local community with gusto are essentials. Going to live in a country just because you think it’s a good business opportunity and there is money to be made from the ex-pat community? You’re just a parasite, frankly.

3rd November:

I spent most of yesterday working in London, hence the lack of post. Generally, anyone taking the tube between the hours of 9 and 11am will be familiar with the process of wading ankle-deep through a sea of discarded Metro newspapers. Whilst the idea of a free daily paper paid for exclusively through advertising is intuitively attractive to the paying punter, it does raise interesting questions about the dumbing down of the news and the distillation of important current affairs into snappy soundbites and 60-second 200 word articles.

Two further free newspapers have been launched in London since the summer. I had the ‘London Lite’ paper thrust in my face on no less than 8 (yes, I counted!) separate occasions on a journey from Ealing to King’s X. The question is therefore fixed: putting to one side the impact on the environment of manufacturing and disposing of all this additional newsprint, not to mention the increased requirement for crack teams of Albanian waste relocation consultants to ensure that our tube carriages are maintained in their traditional spotless and hygienic condition, what purpose do these newspapers actually serve?

1st November:

It may just be me (always a dangerous opening gambit) but do record companies now automatically include a clause in their artist contracts requiring a “Best Of” compilation after the third studio album, followed at a later date by a “Greatest Hits” singles package, a “Very Best Of” album and the end-of-career death-knell “Ultimate Collection”?

I suppose I can understand the lucrative appeal of annually flogging the dead (literally) horses that are Elvis, Hendrix, The Beatles et al, but the Sugababes?? Do me a favour….