In honour of the Hoff’s finest hour

Sometimes

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel faces down frost;
green thrives; the crops don’t fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best intentions do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen to you.

Sheenagh Pugh

In your strength I can crush an army;
      with my God I can scale any wall.

Psalm 18:29

Les flics, c’est chic.

If you’re anything like me, then if I were to say to you the phrase “French cop show”, the first thing to come into your mind would probably be something like this or, possibly, this. Which is fair enough, bless us, we’re English, we don’t know any better. Except that I’ve stumbled on something wonderful which has rather changed that for me.

It’s a show called Spiral (Engrenages in the original French), it’s on BBC4 on Sunday nights at 10pm British time and it’s great. I found it a few weeks ago just after an episode of Waking the Dead (which, if you’re not from these shores, is our equivalent of Cold Case) had finished on BBC1, and found that, in a little piece of scheduling genius, hidden away on BBC4*, someone had made it so having just got myself in the mood for dark, pensive, detective thriller action with one our of it, I could switch over and get another hour of it in French – which, as we know, makes anything darker, more pensive and generally cooler.

(*By the way, for my non-British readership: the BBC have four main TV channels. BBC1 is the major entertainment channel with the big dramas, soaps, American imports, documentaries and such on. BBC2 is maybe slightly less safe, less ratings-hungry scheduling – a lot of shows start off there and if they do well they get transferred to BBC1. Lots of leftfield comedy, less mainstream documentaries, thoughtful one-off dramas. BBC3 is the yoof channel with music, comedy, imports like Family Guy and such like, and BBC4 is pretty intellectual, a bit like NPR on the telly, and nobody watches it (including me usually), even though much of it’s brilliant – hence it’s where you would find a French cop show in this subtitle-phobic country of ours. We have lots of commercial channels too, but we can deal with them another time. My favourite is one called Dave. Seriously. But back to the story.)

So it’s set in the Criminal Investigation Department of the Paris police, and they’re uncovering an increasingly complex web of drug dealing, gun running and general nastiness in the vast Parisian suburbs. Our heroine is Laure, a detective cut from the traditional hardboiled, troubled cloth except that she’s a lady. She’s played with what I think they call “understated brilliance” – which is to say she can say an awful lot with a very small change of facial expression, which is great for telly – by someone I’ve never heard of but hope to hear of again, called Caroline Proust. She’s helped by various other policy judicially people, none of whom is a weak link in the acting chain, really. There are also a couple of deliciously corrupt, über-French lawyers, as well as layer on layer of greasy underworld types, the absolute star of whom is the electrifyingly horrible Aziz, played by Reta Kateb (also new to me), a swaggering mess of copycat gangsta style and mentalist brute violence, like a slimmed-down cross between Forrest Whittaker’s Idi Amin and Snoop Dogg, only with worse teeth. He’s probably worth your licence fee alone.

Anyway, as always with my TV recommendations, this is no use to you if you live in (a) the future or (b) not the UK. Sorry! The whole series is on iPlayer on the BBC website, but only for another week or two as I think next week’s is the last episode. So quick! Give yourself an hour of Gallic intrigue every day for the next week and a half and you should manage it if you start… well, now. Off you go then. =o)

IOC, FOTC

This morning on the radio I’ve heard the Spanish representative on the International Olympic Committee saying that his father, also a former IOC member, “knows the ropes [of the Committee] inside out”. That’s all.

That, of course, and this:

Uncharted territory

Hello again. When I come on here and shower you with links, I sometimes feel a bit like a wayward cat who runs off for weeks at a time and then comes home carrying three-quarters of a dead pigeon by way of a gift in the hopes that it’ll make up for his absence. Still, when they’re as good as some of today’s you can’t really blame me for giving it a try.

First off, I was going about my everyday business of Translating Stuff this morning – none of it terribly exciting although I did get to use the phrase “plastics in extruded form for use in manufacture”, as a result of which I’ve been singing Mary Poppins songs all day – when Fran sent me a text saying she’d just seen an advert for a gig by a band called Soft Toy Emergency, and wasn’t that a great name for a band. Well I thought it was – so great in fact that like any sensible person with work to do and access to the Internet I googled them, and found that a man in the Daily Telegraph had described them as “day-glo pop with electro-punk attitude, somewhere between Aqua and a heart-attack”, which all sounded ripping fun (except, I’ll grant you, the heart attack), so I looked further and found their new single on YouTube and it goes like this, and I LUVZ IT:

So much so that I was all for going to see them at this gig tonight, but then Fran did a bit of googling of her own and found out that it was at our city’s further education college’s welcome week event thing and therefore we’d be about the only people there over 18. Which would have been a bit odd, so we haven’t.

Another nice thing is that do you remember a while ago I told you about my friend Gabriel’s blog Verbatim Poetry? Well it’s still going strong and I’ve got two new favourites – this one and this one. Not sure the second one counts, really. Twitter lends itself to poetry a bit too well, I think, cos having only 140 characters to play with forces people to be disciplined. That’s partly why, despite the sound of gauntlets clanging to the ground, I probably won’t ever get round to tweeting myself – I like poetry but I don’t feel like I quite have the type of brain for writing it. The relationship between my brain and writing is a bit like one of those organic veg boxes that arrive on your doorstep from local farms, in that you don’t know what you’re going to get until you open it, and you just hope you’ve got a recipe you can use most of it in. If I had to worry about having all the right words in the box and cooking them in the right order I’d probably never write anything.

Gabriel’s also got another project on the go. He’s writing a novel, and blogging about it as he goes. If you want to know what it’s about and how it’s going, pop over to www.tonguesofmen.com and have a look. It’s an unusual choice of subject but he comes at it with a very thoughtful eye.

*        *        *

Ummmm… so I turned thirty last week. That’s weirder than I was imagining it would be. I don’t know what I was expecting – it’s not as though I thought I’d wake up suddenly all grown-up on the day, with a mortgage tucked under my pillow, wearing a suit and talking about lawnmowers – but it feels… Well, it feels a bit like a new haircut, or like when you buy a new shirt you know you like but which isn’t quite what you’re used to.

Thing is, for a very long time thirty was something that happened to other people. Then it changed and became something I threatened myself with. There’s a line – in The Tongues of Men, actually – about a character “who had feared turning thirty for so much of the last four years that now that he had reached it he was convinced that he must be at least thirty-three”. That pretty much describes me for most of the last year. Thirty was the bailiff at the door, the date your debts came due, the point at which you’d somehow be judged for all the expectations you hadn’t yet met…

And then suddenly, simply by virtue of my going to bed one night and getting up the next morning, it stopped being a threat and became a fact. And facts are almost always less scary than threats, I find. Especially since one of the nicest things about it is that I think, at thirty, you no longer have to obey anyone’s rules. Like, obviously I want to try and obey God’s rules, since they were invented for my own good, and I’m up for being part of what he’s up to in the world, so that’s all good. But I’m beginning to think there’s only three questions worth asking:

• Are you seeking to love God?
• Are you seeking to love people?
• Are you taking responsibility for what (and, indeed, whom) you’ve been given?

But the questions about what order you do the big things in life and whether you go into management and how much you know about lawnmowers – it turns out there’s no-one really asking them. Not God, not anyone I hang around with and not even me if I decide I can’t be faffed with them anymore. To many of you this won’t feel like much of a revelation but to a certain type of person – of whom I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one, or even the only one reading this page – it’s so great a mental change of tack that it does feel like when you get the new haircut/shirt/whatever and can’t quite comprehend the fact that the different and somewhat better looking chap (or lady, as the case may be) in the mirror is still you.

Anyway. Work Boy Work! isn’t supposed to be a navel-gazing blog so I think I’ll stop now. It’s just, y’know. It’s novel for me. I’ve never been thirty before. I’m starting to think it might suit me.

Clickety click, linkety link

Owight lovelies? I want to apologise for my silence but if I do I’ll just sound like the person described in this comic (to whom I am already perilously close), so you can have an explanation instead. And with photos, too, you lucky things. What it is is, is I have been on me ‘ollidies (or, for my TX readership, on vacation). I went with some friends from Geneva and some other mutual friends to a village called Samoens, in the French mountains, about an hour and a half outside Geneva. According to its website it’s “to falling in love with“, so you can see it can’t be bad.

We stayed in a big house

with a hammock

A RAINBOW coloured hammock with a WHOLE COW for a mat underneath. Clearly very effective, as you see.

and did all sorts of exciting things. One day we got all harnessed and fingerlessly gloved up like raggamuffins

Magda, a raggamuffin

and amused ourselves by nearly plummeting to our many and varied dooms on zip wires for a couple of hours.

Terror.

Ruddy brilliant.

Another day we got all dressed up like strong men in a Victorian circus and went white-water rafting.

Francoise, Adam, me and Gareth, all very strong.

Another day we went walking up near some huge big steep mountains, but we didn’t have to dress up funny for that one.

Breathtaking. Mags and Gareth are very very small in the bottom left. Normally they are normal size for people, so you can see how big the mountain was.

Then on a couple of evenings, back at the house, a keyboard was found, and Monkey Boy here was prevailed upon to sing some Divine Comedy and wheel out my increasingly unreliable Mika impression, a feat which makes me look like this:

Monkey Boy

and Gareth helped.

And Scribble the dog helped him help, which was very thoughtful.

All in all it were grand. Good food, good wine, good friends and, everywhere you looked, views to make this Fenlander’s eyes pop out on stalks.

So that’s the long and the short of why it’s been a bit quiet around here lately.

Ey, though, I’ve got a lovely couple of links for you. First off (and tip o’ the hat to Stew W. for this), Little Boots, whose recession-bustingly fun first single about going out on the cheap – brilliant – was one of the things that have made me feel pretty happy about pop music in recent months, has this thing on her YouTube channel where every week or so she records a cool little stripped down cover version of some hit or other. Have a nose around; there’s some gems. I especially like this version of Day and Night by Kid Cudi, and this version of Boyfriend by Alpha Beat which somehow manages to be very clearly just two kids having fun at their parents’ house and yet also very listenable and good.

In a rather more hi-tech take on the same idea, here’s my fellow Tennant wannabe Gary Go doing a haunting version of With Every Heartbeat by Robyn:

Finally, as our great island once again transitions seamlessly from lush, verdant spring to pale, windswept autumn without bothering with anything so common as an actual summer in the middle, here’s a combination of two of the most English things you could ever wish to hear: high Anglican chant and the weather forecast.

Oh, one last thing – slightly unfair of me to throw this out just as I’m about to finish and go to bed, but I think I may have had an actual prayer answered today. No, really. Now, I can’t go into great detail about this story as it involves other people’s living arrangements but Fran and I were having a (rather rare) good ol’ pray about a situation which was looking like it was going to go a bit rubbish. And then about an hour later a person (who’d been avoiding their phone calls for a couple of weeks) rang their house and said something that basically transformed the whole situation for the good. Sorry for the vagueness; other people’s accommodation, as I say, y’know. Now, for a Christian I can be quite sceptical about coincidences like this; I know all about confirmation bias and I naturally tend towards pessimism… but… well, it’s rather making me think. It’s making me think I want to do some more praying, at least. I mean. I’m not the sort that likes to get his hopes up (probably to a fault, I’ll admit) but what if this God and Jesus being at work in the world stuff is actually all true?

We are miracles wrapped up in chemicals

While we’re waiting for the Proper Post, here’s 4 or so more minutes of poppy pleasure. It’s pretty shamelessly mainstream pop, so it won’t be to all your tastes, but I like it a lot for several reasons:

• the chap clearly wants to be David Tennant; so do I; I feel a certain solidarity with him in the attempt (although, having darker and less vanishing hair, he has a much greater chance of achieving it than I do);
• he’s actually bothered to think about the tune in the verse rather than just using it as padding before he can get onto the chorus (Sugababes take note);
• I know it’s cheesy and certainly Not Very British, but I think he’s tapped into something with this “Say I Am Wonderful” malarkey. Look how many people write on his boards. We’re aching to be told this stuff. What if that’s actually because it’s true?

Compare and contrast

Hi all. I’m part way through writing a Proper Post about balloons and love and the return of Christ and pork pies and stuff, but meanwhile, here’s a little exercise for you.

Below are two of my favourite pop videos of the last couple of years. They’re both for songs by acts that (I reckon) deserve more fame than they’ve yet had, they both tell stories, they both feature beautiful, wordless performances from two of the UK’s most, um, facial-expression-ly talented actors (the first, who you’ll recognise, is Sir Ian McKellen, and the second, whom you might not if you’re not familiar with British television, is the brilliant Northern Irish actor James Nesbitt). They’re both quite slow songs. Oh, and they’re both a bit sad. I won’t say “depressing” – that’s for you to decide. I think that’s about it. But they’re also quite different. My questions for you are, if you like either or both of them, which do you prefer and why? I might tell you what I think later, you lucky chaps and chapesses.

N.B.: second one can be a bit slow loading. If I were you I’d press pause and go and make a cup of tea and let it load up before you watch it, yeah?

A very clever man what you have never heard of

Hello.

Today I’m going to tell you about this man:

He is called Vannevar Bush and he is Quite Interesting. I found about him this morning when I was looking up whether you’re still allowed to say “hypertext links” in English (don’t fret, you are). His coolness derives, apart from the fact that his brain is nearly the width of his shoulders and his desk is a near-perfect mirror, from his having invented Wikipedia in 1945. No, really, he did.

Vannevar “The Mannevar”* Bush, you see, was an American scientist who wrote an essay called As We May Think, in which he theorised that wouldn’t it be cool if, through telephone lines and cameras and electromechanical controls, you could have a great big desk somewhere – let’s called it a Memex, just for kicks - which could look at the information stored on any piece of microfilm in any library in the world. And, he thought, wouldn’t it be great if on all of these bits of microfilm there could be references embedded in the text, somehow, that could cross-reference other bits of microfilm in other libraries in the world that might be relevant, so that you could just flit from one interesting document to another, without having to go all the way out to the boring bits like contents or indexes or a great big catalogues or such. He wrote:

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client’s interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. … The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.

Anyway, obviously it never got beyond the idea, but that essay was what set other weirdy sciency clever types such as Ted Nelson to start thinking about hypertext (hence me finding this stuff out in the first place), and it was their ideas that led Tim Berners-Lee to invent the modern world.

So there you go. An immensely important man that until this morning I had never heard of, and probably neither had you. Unless you are Nayf or Bekki, cos they’ve heard of everyone.

Back to work for me, then. You may, tonight, if you’re very lucky, get a post about a wonderful, weird, balloon-heavy wedding I went to the other week. Meantime, have lovely afternoons.

(*He was never called this.)

He’s a prize and she’s a catch

shouldn’t really be writing at all, should be cleaning the toilet, BUT just a quickie to say:

I’m off to a wedding this weekend. Actually I’m not just off to a wedding, I’m off to have rather a big weekend. Fran and I are off to tick off (in a good way) all the remaining parents we respectively haven’t met yet AND go to a wedding AND see how we do on a 12-hour round trip in a car.

Actually, don’t tell anyone, cos I have a grumpy-old-man image to keep up, but I’m secretly rather excited: not only do I get to have a bit of a break from work and preparing for our church’s amazing kids’ holiday club (which is ace but by ‘eck is there a lot of running around and feeling disorganized involved), I get, like, a whole four days of Fran and Fran-banter. Not to be too smug and couply, but there it is, I consider myself a lucky man, is all. Well. I say “lucky”. I rather suspect it’s actually that the Big Chap has various different ways of throwing grace at us like a bucket of cold water on a hot sticky day and Fran-banter happens to be one of the ones he uses on me, and very glad I am too.

Anyway, before this gets both overly theological and overly soppy, which would be a rubbish combination and you’d all stop reading, on with the Point, which is that this wedding I’m going to on Saturday, it’s one that excites me a lot, cos it’s my good friend Nic, who I’ve known since we bullied each other in the playground when we were seven. She’s brilliant, and funny, and lovely, and has many good CDs (and some Kylie), and she’s met a man who is brilliant, and funny, and lovely, and has many good CDs (and some unironic heavy metal). And they’re a thoroughly successful combination. They’re one of those couples that without making any massive effort just sort of make you feel… at home, and relaxed, and, yeah, that sort of thing. Anyhow, sparing their blushes, Nic and Stew, you rock. God bless yer, now and every day. Now I’ll shut up and play a weird but sweet love song by Pavement in your honour, won’t that be fun?

A story about a bear, ooh, no, sorry, a lion, well, a fireman really

Oh. My. Days. As they say around these parts. SO much going on that’s worth telling you about and SO little time to tell you about it in. I really, really, really want to tell you about:

• Fran’s 140-character gauntlet and why I may choose not to pick it up
• Why I bought a cravate and why it was so worth it
• A beautiful, bizarre, balloon-filled wedding
• A big ****-you to the powers of darkness

But tonight is sadly not the night, though it is the night in which I get back to you at last and say: hi, ’sup? Sorry I haven’t been around for a long time. All a bit busy, but with brilliant stuff, much of it musical, weddingy or Godly and some of it all three. Can’t chat for long now, either – off to read a bit of Neverwhere and then to bed to enjoy the strange dreams it will no doubt give me.

What I will give you, however, is something I promised you a long, long time ago, and that is a story about a bear. Only it turns out it’s not about a bear, it’s about a lion. Well it’s sort of about a bear, only not. Well it’s not about a lion either, really. Anyway, though. I found it when I was looking for something boring and work-related (“scaffold awnings”, an old e-mail to Bekki now tells me), and rather fell in love with it. It’s by Evgeny Zamyatin, whom you haven’t heard of and neither would I have except that he’s Russian so he got mentioned a bit on my course at uni. Apparently he pretty much invented political dytopian science fiction* with his weirdy-beardy but really rather good novel We, which was a precursor to stuff like Brave New World and 1984, if you like that kind of thing, which I do. This, though, is completely different, but I think it’s kind of beautiful, in a slightly sad way.

(*As is often the case when I string long words together, I may well be talking rubbish at this point.)

Anyway, here it is. It’s called

The Lion

I hope you enjoy it.