27th August:

The root cause of social problems like youth crime and obesity is one
simple thing: education.

Or, to be more precise, a lack thereof.

I know people who have barely had two pennies to rub together in the past, but they did not have a compulsion to go out and steal cars and blame society for their actions, nor feel the need to eat at Burger King five times a week and then pull a surprised face when their GP told them they had chronic heart disease. I am guessing this is because they were brought up and educated in an environment where their parents had a strong moral compass, and they believed that hard work and diligence would see them alright. The importance of this parental influence cannot be underestimated.

Television is currently full of programmes like ‘Supernanny’, which seem to involve an endless and gormless stream of fat and foul-mouthed parents queuing up to explain, usually with a perplexed look and a cigarette hanging out of one side of their mouths, to the resident child behavioural expert just what a fucking little shit young Justin has been recently. I am embellishing a little, of course, but it doesn’t take a leap of genius to see where young Justin got it all from...

Our baby daughter recently embarked upon the new adventure in alimentation we call ‘solids’. Which coincidentally enough led to the new adventure in retching we now call ‘nappy changing’. Being responsible and caring parents, we have started making purees of organic meat, fruit and vegetables which our offspring takes great delight in partly eating and partly redecorating with. It’s all part of the learning process, I tell myself. Food is, after all, partly social as well as being a necessity. Our local Health Visitor recently commented that we should probably be moving up a gear and offering our daughter solid food 3 times a day instead of the current 2. When asked for suitable breakfast suggestions, she helpfully offered us ‘cheese on toast’. Our daughter is 7 months old. And the government wonders why everyone is fat…

All too often, poverty is used as an excuse for criminality. It’s an argument that I have little time for. People with very little money might covet things owned by people with more, but there’s still a massive moral jump between coveting something and smashing someone in the face with a beer bottle so you can help yourself to it.

Nobody has an automatic right to wealth or happiness in this world. You have to work hard to achieve both. We should educate our children accordingly and stamp-down on the idea that the secret to success lies with short-cuts and quick fixes.

They just land you in jail or make you fat.

26th August:

Age focuses the mind, and I have found myself becoming increasingly choosy over the last 10 years. Choosy about how my time is spent, who I associate myself with and what companies I am happy to support as a customer. Choosy, also about how my living is earned. I may also have become less tolerant over this decade, but we’ll gloss over that and move on…

As a plucky young man in my mid-twenties, I joined a company and threw myself into learning all about the products and all the reasons why they were better than the products made by the competitors. Unfortunately, it didn’t take me long to learn that the founder of the company was an arrogant and nasty son of a bitch whose life revolved around making money for himself and telling his employees that they were all idiots. How I cringe now when I look back at all those times I was interviewed by magazines and, being the loyal and dutiful company man, said how great it all was.

In order to be satisfied in a job, you generally have to care about what you are doing and why. As soon as either or both of these factors is missing, the seeds of dissatisfaction will undoubtedly start to creep into your daily routine. You end up wearing it like a perfume – people can smell it on you. I’m not sure what the fashionable Human Resources term is for what happened to me, but after several months of increasingly vocal belligerence, I was summoned and given suitable incentive to leave. Which I gladly did.

Having discussed the thorny moral and philosophical issue of what TV is all about in the last couple of posts, the spotlight now turns to private companies. Realistically, almost all of us are in business to make money in order to pay the bills. Which is fine. Profit is not immoral, but neither should it be sought at any cost. Nor excessively. The older I get, the more I feel the need to seek out companies and people whose values resonate with my own. I therefore don’t want to work for, or buy anything from, companies who exploit children, abuse human rights or suppress the Palestinian people. Amongst other things.

If you were being cynical, you would say that corporate responsibility only amounts to companies spending money on good causes in order to either generate positive PR for the brand or off-set some damage that is being done elsewhere. And yes, it is probably true that many companies rushed off to draft a corporate responsibility policy in the early 1990s because it was the fashionable thing to do. However, the companies who take responsible trading to heart, do so from an understanding that their profit-making activities have an impact on, for example, the environment or people in poorer countries. And why should either of those things be exploited?

Ethical profit is not some kind of charitable or altruistic goal. It is a genuine belief that there does not have to be a winner and a loser in the commercial environment – we can all gain by looking after each other better.

25th August:

Serendipity, indeed.

Yesterday's post pondered the role of television in society as a medium to inform and entertain. At the Edinburgh International Television Festival last night, notable TV presenter and journalist Jeremy Paxman delivered the annual James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture. In his speech Paxman also pondered the role that television should play, and made some pretty damming comments about the quality of output that the major broadcasters transmit these days. He also raised concerns about the sheer amount of content available, noting "the more television there is, the less any of it matters".

Paxman's comments don't perhaps address the issue of how to make quality programming profitable but it is heartening to feel that people on the inside are just as worried about the erosion of quality as some of us on the other side of the screen.

24th August:

Rejoice one and all, for there will be no 'Celebrity Big Brother' in 2008. However, it would appear that there may be a series again in 2009, so we can't get the champagne and bunting out just yet.

Julian Bellamy, Head of Programmes at Channel 4, commented that giving the series a year off would "benefit the format in the longer term as it will have a bit of breathing space". This is sad news indeed - he feels that the show has a long term future.

Let's be clear about one thing - I am not naive. Channel 4 needs to make profit and all of the Big Brother formats are popular. Unfortunately, however, they are also crap. Tough call.

Quality is an inherently subjective concept, but I'm a little tired of being accused of intellectual snobbery by those who think Big Brother is just a bit of harmless televisual fluff. "You don't have to watch it", I am told. Correct. I do not have to watch it, and I consciously don't. But simply choosing to ignore something doesn't make it OK.

The phrase "dumbing down" appears increasingly in certain sections of the media today. From newspapers opting for the shock headline and the throwaway sound-bite, to school exams and higher education degrees getting easier, the intelligent folk believe that standards are on the slide. And I think the point is hard to argue. People's minds grow from exposure to the unfamiliar. I may not have enjoyed studying Shakespeare at school nor did I enjoy my father making me read a broadsheet newspaper every day when I was in my early teens, but I'm probably a more knowledgeable and well-rounded individual as a result of both. Call it snobbery if you wish, but I have a sneaky desire to make everyone who watches Big Brother sit through an edition of Newsnight straight afterwards as an antidote. I'm guessing that the percentage of the population who already watch both anyway is fairly small.

Television can entertain without being stupid or cruel. Not everything on TV has to be worthy and high-brow, but Big Brother tells us nothing about ourselves other than the fact that we are pack animals with an inherent interest in the lives of other people.

And Desmond Morris aleady did that in 1967.

23rd August:

Home, apparently, is where the heart lies. Last year, however, almost 200,000 British people decided that their heart no longer lay in the UK and so they upped-sticks and left. The reasons given for the desire to go and live somewhere else were predictable enough: the cost of property in the UK, the climate, the state of the health service, high taxation and a general feeling that quality of life was not as good as it could be.

Your congenial host has been fortunate enough to have travelled a bit and has also lived in other countries. There are some familiar things about home that you miss, but compensation comes in the form of discovering new things that you have never tried or experienced before.

Statistics suggest that the average retired ex-pat manages to live abroad for 2 years before returning home again. Perhaps some people make the mistake of treating the rest of their life like one big holiday or maybe they don't make enough of an effort with the language or try hard enough to integrate with the local community. Either way, 2 years seems to be the average time it takes for paradise to go mouldy.

Everyone's view of perfection differs. For me, the recipe requires a few key but good quality ingredients: take the climate of the South of France and mix with a good quantity of Corsican scenery and Mediterranean and North African cuisine. Add a generous helping of Italian and Cypriot hospitality, a liberal measure of American customer service, and then wrap it all up in British humour and broadsheet journalism.

Should be served hot and accompanied with a large helping of high denomination Euro notes.

20th August:

When I was a lad, there was a certain kind of person who was into role-playing games. This character was pretty easy to spot - he regularly wore a long dark coat and hat (even in Summer) and had a pasty complexion and a pony-tail. And often listened to Jethro Tull.

These days, however, it's all change. The Internet age has brought us Second Life, There and a whole host of virtual environments that allow you to ignore the cruel hand that Mother Nature has dealt you. Losing your hair? A few pounds overweight? Disappointed with your job and financial standing in society? No problem! Simply log on, create a suitably slim and good-looking avatar and get on with being yourself, only more so...

It's maybe a generational thing, but I am deeply suspicious of people who feel the need to immerse themselves in these games. Spending many hours a week logged into Second Life suggests to me that there is something serious awry with First Life, the original and still arguably best Massive Multi-player Role Playing Game out there. Literally.

In some senses, these on-line games are useful because they remove the need for people to live vicariously through their children. Which is good for everyone concerned, unless you happen to be a Psychotherapist. Although having said that, do people who feel the need to create and hide behind virtual characters in order to facilitate their social networking need a bit of professional help? Just a thought...

Exponents of MMORPG games talk about social revolution. They point to the fact that many companies (including Mercedes-Benz) now have a presence in Second Life and that it is becoming a genuinely important part of a company's new media marketing strategy. I, predictably, argue that it is more about jumping on a fashionable bandwagon and is only interesting to a company's PR department who are after favourable column inches. Let's see how long they hang around for once the fuss has died down.

About one year ago, I took the plunge and became a member of There. I spent a few hours one weekend creating a good-looking avatar and exploring the various virtual countries that make up the There world. I met lots of American teenagers, most of whom said "ROTFL" a lot. I quickly learned several things:

1. Doing anything other than wandering around aimlessly in There involves spending real money. Fuck that.
2. The majority of people you meet will be newbies who are very quickly realising what a waste of time this really is.
3. Everyone lies about their age, marital status and attractiveness.

At the last count, over 9 million people have signed up to Second Life. However, only 1.8 million of these accounts have actually been used in the last month. The other 7.2 million, I assume, have grown weary of saying "ROTFL" and wandering aimlessly around lying about their age, marital status and attractiveness and have gone outside to talk to some real people instead.

If you really want social networking, try Facebook, Flickr, Bebo or even good old-fashioned MySpace.

If you want to pretend you are someone or something you are not, I'd suggest clicking here and then here.

Get well soon.

16th August:

Society's collective notion of justice is a curious thing.

A nice wee woman from East Kilbride (near Glasgow) who has had a tough life and barely has 2 pennies to rub together wins £34.5 million in the Euro-millions lottery last weekend and everybody goes "awwwww" with approval. And yet there was many a critical tabloid-column-inch devoted years ago to the first winner of the "Who wants to be a millionaire" TV quiz show who, it later turned out, was a cousin of Camilla Parker-Bowles and was already relatively financially comfortable at the time of her win. The suggestion being, one assumes, that she somehow merited her million pound cheque less because she had come from a privileged background.

The irony here is that people with experience of having a little bit of money are often better equipped to deal with having a lot compared to those people who have never really had any. If that makes sense. Money brings choices and sometimes people who have never really had choices in their lives find the experience overwhelming. A recent BBC television programme followed a group of people who had won the lottery and tried to conclude if they were happier than they had been before their big win. The programme made for very uncomfortable viewing - many of the lottery winners were from working class backgrounds and declared that their new financial situation had only served to alienate them from their friends and families. One couple from the East end of Glasgow felt so bewildered by their sudden wealth that they didn't know what to do and ended up buying a fully decorated and furnished show home in the posh West end of the city. They couldn't handle all the choices. Twice a week, the mother of the family took a taxi over to the East end and went to the local Bingo hall with those friends who still spoke to her. She clearly felt like a fish out of water - neither posh enough to be accepted by her new neighbours nor still working-class enough to be considered the same person by her previous neighbours. Depression, isolation and a loss of sense of purpose were, tragically, clear themes that emerged throughout the programme.

Some of the most interesting people that I have met in life are equally at home in a tuxedo or a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. Of course, in order to be comfortable in both, you need to have had experience of both. The trick is probably not to value one more than the other.

As someone older and much more famous than me once said, "enjoy the days when you don't have money in your pocket just as much as the days when you do, and never assume that either will last forever".

14th August:

Out of Office Automated Reply

I'm sorry but I'm currently out of the office, returning on Thursday, 16th August. There will therefore be a delay in dealing with the email that you have just sent me. If this email requires urgent attention, feel free to panic now.

Thank you.

Your congenial host

13th August:

One of the things that separates Islam from most other world religions is the fact that Muslims have an implied duty to work towards making the rest of the world Muslim too. Of course, moderate Muslims are quick to point out that this should never involve violence of any kind, the desire for peace far out-weighing any duty to convert non-Muslims to the faith. However, the fact remains that Islam, on paper anyway, has a clearly articulated political agenda. And this is perhaps why so many people fear it.

A conference and rally in Indonesia last weekend, attended by some 100,000 people, called for the re-establishment of a 'caliphate' (a single unified Muslim state) across the Muslim world. The vast majority of attendees were Indonesian women, and many of the speakers due to appear at the rally cancelled at the last minute over security concerns, but it's still an impressive turn-out. Critics were, predictably, quick to suggest that the Indonesian group which had organised the event was ideologically aligned with jihadist extremists. But how concerned should secular societies in the West be at this mass demonstration, no matter how fringe?

The late 11th Century saw the beginning of The Crusades - the 200 year-long attempt by Christian armies to liberate Jerusalem and the 'Holy Land' from Muslim rule. Given that Islam was founded in the 7th Century, some commentators have suggested that the 21st Century is the pertient historical time for a new counter-Crusade, as Muslims all over the world seek unity, political power and a universal adoption of the laws of God as set out in the Koran in preference to laws designed by man.

The same commentators also point out the Islamic faith's seemingly uneasy relationship in certain countries with democracy, human rights and the equality of the sexes, and the question is therefore an intriguing one: just how can a religion with an ideological political agenda operate comfortably within the realms of a secular and democratic society?

12th August:

A recent survey of UK food suppliers revealed, astonishingly, the feeling that UK supermarkets are 'too powerful'. That's 'astonishing' in the same way that news our oursine animal friends have a propensity to relieve themselves in forested areas probably has certain sections of the population open-mouthed in wonder.

Several hundred years ago, people farmed the land organically and sold the resulting seasonal produce to the rest of us at a local or regional markets. Now i'm not suggesting that supermarkets and/or big agro-business are the root of all evil here, but it is ironic that things seem to be coming full-circle as more and more consumers reject this business model. Local organic box schemes are increasingly popular, regional farmers markets are enjoying a revival and certain TV chefs, most notably Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, are banging the quality drum in an attempt to show us that you really do get what you pay for when it comes to food. Even London's Covent Garden recently launched a night market which runs every Thursday evening until 10pm in order to catch the young professionals who normally only have time to stop by the nearest Tesco Metro on the way home to pick up a bottle of wine something to bung in the microwave (so called 'ping-cuisine'). And this market is not some kind of tree-hugging, feel-good charity effort - it needs to be profitable and is being promoted accordingly.

What now, one wonders, for the large supermarkets? Will they increasingly focus their efforts on non-fresh produce items or will they try to take on the small producers at their own game?