Stickleback

Charlton 1 Sheffield Utd 0

2012-01-21T19:02:00.000Z

Let's just look at this for a moment. Huddersfield are still playing as I type this, and have just taken the lead, so they could move up to second, but they'd still be 7 points behind and still have played one more match than Charlton. We've seen several teams have a crack at challenging Charlton, and any of those top 5 could have had their moment this season, but Charlton have just been so consistent that they've established this impressive lead without anyone outside SE7 noticing.

"Charlton" and "consistent": not two words you have expected to find together for a good few years. As the season goes on, it becomes more obvious how important the role of the defence is. The two fullbacks must be the best in the division, and could easily hold their own in the Championship. In the middle, Morrison and Taylor are rock-like. Only Man City have now conceded fewer goals this season. We've seen Charlton in full flood at times this season when you believe they can beat anybody, and we've also seen edgy performances, when goals are scarce but one is all they need. The strength in defence means the team can ride out the dodgy periods, like Bradley Wright-Phillips' recent barren patch. The first few months of the season was built on his goals. I feel desperate for him to get scoring again, but look! it doesn't matter to results or position in the table if he doesn't. Or look at today, when our goalkeeper had a bit of a mad day, but the defence took care of him.

Sheffield Utd were the best team to come to the Valley this season, and they came on a good run of results. You could see the quality in the team from the start: intelligent running and passing, a good understanding between the players.

But they didn't really look sharp in attack, and after Johnnie Jackson's goal - a sweetly hit free kick from about 25 yards into the top left corner - they were less impressive in the first half.

The second half saw them throwing everything at Charlton, and it was a gripping, sometimes hard to watch match. Charlton's midfield didn't seem to be working quite as well as usual, and Utd must have had a huge majority of possession. But that defence soaked it up, and all but 2,694 of a huge crowd for this division (20,000 +) were ecstatic with the result. Like last week's 1-0 win at Sheffield Wednesday, it properly proves Charlton are where they are because they deserve to be.

I can't end this post on such a positive note. So must mention that today's referee, Mr Deadman, had a shocker. But what the heck! Even that can't spoil the fun.

Why not read the Charlton website review?

Charlton 2 Brentford 0

2012-01-03T11:06:00.000Z

This game was delayed for 15 minutes after a power failure in the upper north stand. Details are in the first link below and Al Gordon's blog gives some comments on his experience. For me, in my usual seat in the old geezer section, it was good to have a drummer and some chanting for a change. But I think the breaking-up of the covered end choir contributed to an odd atmosphere around the ground, particularly in the first half.

Apparently, in his post-match press conference Brentford's manager, Uwe Rosler, said he thought his team played better and deserved to win. If that's really true, if the team deserved to win but still managed to lose 2-0, that's shocking. That's worse that admitting they weren't quite good enough, which I think was a truer summary.

In the first half Brentford really did look better than Charlton. They had a much better understanding among themselves. It reminded me of how Charlton played earlier this season when the team was unchanged for match after match, and the telepathy grew. There hasn't quite been that understanding in recent games, and the performances have been a bit disjointed as a result.

So when Michael Morrison scored one of the streakiest goals you'll ever see on the half hour, it was arguably against the run of play. But on the other hand, despite having 5 corners to Charlton's 0 in the half, Brentford had never looked like scoring. A team that doesn't score will never win, Uwe. (This is one of the basic rules of the game.)

Charlton were much better in the second half, and a very-much-welcomed-back Johnnie Jackson was unlucky not to score. But it took until the last minute for the clinching goal to come: a well-executed effort by Danny Green, which he could easily have messed up.

So not a vintage performance, but the new year is underway with Charlton 5 points clear at the top. Next week there's the welcome diversion of a trip to Fulham in the Cup, a game where, in a sense, they can't lose. Of course, in another sense, the everyday sense, they probably will. But here's my dream: we win, preferably with an own-goal or two by Danny Murphy, and draw Arsenal at home in the next round, and the best player I've ever seen live - Thierry Henry - comes back to the Valley one last time.

Other views
Details of the power failure
Club's website review
Al Gordon's blog
Kevin Nolan

Charlton 1 Oldham 1

2011-12-17T18:44:00.000Z

Sometimes I think it's not so bad being in the third division. But then games like this happen: a negative team comes to town with the sole objective of getting a point - and fans who celebrate as if they've won something when that happens - and a third division referee, whose capricious decisions ruined any flow the game ever looked like having. The only good thing I can say is that at least it didn't rain much. And we're still 5 points clear.

The monthly curse

2011-12-09T10:17:00.001Z

No, not that one. Chris Powell has been named League 1 manager of the month for November. Thoroughly deserved, of course, but football lore has it that this is bad luck and the good results will stop.

Actually, it is likely to be true that a team's results get worse after the award, but it's nothing to do with a curse. The award recognises that the team's results have been exceptionally good. By definition, nothing exceptional can go on for ever, so the next month is statistically likely to be more normal. Charlton might even lose a game. It's the law of averages.

But this is Chris Powell we're talking about. He's not bound by anything as puny as the law of averages. Even the laws of physics bend to his will. When he used to "jump" from the tunnel after winning games, that wasn't him jumping, it was the earth taking a step back in awe of his magnificence. With him, the exceptional is normal. Wednesday have a very loseable game tomorrow (at Oldham), though sadly Huddersfield don't, and I expect to travel back from Walsall with an 8-point wide gap of a grin.

Charlton 2 Vincibles 0

2011-11-29T09:24:00.001Z

All the Sky hype before the game had apparently been about "high-flying" Huddersfield. Flying so high they were five points behind the leaders in league one, whoever they were, and in third place. But this was always going to be a crucial game. Sure enough, Huddersfield turned out to be the best team that's come to the Valley this season. The key to their hitherto-unbeatenness is their midfield: it really was superb, controlling the game for long periods. You can see how they can shut down most opposition.

Their player who usually gets all the attention is Jordan Rhodes. He's scored 13 in the league this season, so he's almost asgoodasbetterthanShaun, and I was looking forward to seeing him. I still am. He was largely invisible, and not in a good way. The sense is growng that we have, at last, a defence we can trust. And we needed it: Huddersfield got 10 corners to Charlton's nil, but the number of times they genuinely looked like scoring was tiny.

Charlton's first goal was a precise header to the top corner by Kermorgant that left the Terriers' keeper completely flat footed, and the second, by Hogan Ephraim, was the result of some quick thinking and fumbly goal-keeping. As usual, the opposition had started stronger, but that doesn't worry me any more. It's good that Charlton take the measure of them before taking control.

In the second half Huddersfield were mostly on top, and I got the sense that some of the Charlton players were feeling the pressure of the situation. But without any real scares they saw the game through, and the buzz around the ground at the end of the game was more jubilant than I can remember for a long time. Maybe the boxing day defeat of Chelsea all that time ago?

Chris Powell had tried to play down the importance of this game. Wisely, he wanted to take pressure off the players, and he's right that it's just game 19 with 27 more to play. But it felt momentous, as if Charlton had absolutely claimed their right to be on top of the league. Now they really are the team to beat. (And my pre-season bet on Charlton to be champions at 11.5 is looking good. The latest price is around 2.6.)

Selected other views
Guardian report (Don't usually see them here. It's a good report with interesting reader feedback. The Independent's report is all about Huddersfield's broken record, so I'm not linking to that. If the Telegraph has a report, it's too well hidden for me.)
Cafc.co.uk match report
Huddersfield website report
Wyn Grant (magisterial, as always)

Donate a coat

2011-11-23T08:24:00.001Z

Here's one of the stupidest statistics you'll ever read:

Recent research shows that more than 1.2 million people over 60 in the UK agree that having a warm coat is a good thing during winter.

Let's think how they got that figure.There's around 12 million people over 60 in the UK. So either they asked 1.2 million people the same stupid question before they got bored with getting the same stupid answer, or they asked a sample, and scaled up the response. That would mean that 1 in 10 over sixties agreed with the value of a warm coat. And the rest didn't?

Anyway, the unreferenced and meaningless research is connected to ITV's "Donate a coat" campaign. The idea is that people with too many coats donate one of them, so that the Salvation Army can give it to someone who needs it. Sounds fair enough but hang on a minute ...

So far, they've collected around 2,500 coats. Presumably there's a target of, say, 50,000. That means they're estimating there are 50,000 people in the UK - a relatively rich and relatively cold country - who can't afford a warm coat. That's a national disgrace. If they really believe it, shouldn't they be doing something to change it? "But they're not allowed to be political." But they're being political: making a statement that 50,000 people are living below the most basic standard, but that's OK. Here, have a coat in exchange for a little dignity. You're old and/or poor: how do you expect to actually buy a coat of your own?

As an illlustration of how charity can be demeaning and reactionary, it could hardly be bettered.

Grey days and browning leaves

2011-11-22T09:45:00.001Z

If not winter, it seems autumn is properly here. Not the nice autumn, where chilly sunshine illuminates the last red leaves, but nasty autumn, where permanent drizzle makes everything grey. Every day is a staying-in day, and so it's time to start getting a bit studious again.

Luckily, there's a booksale to help with that. I've written before about the Blackheath Amnesty booksale, held in June. I didn't know they also have one in autumn, but they do, and it was on Saturday, and here are the books I picked up.

First, two pretty volumes of Verlaine published by Editions de Cluny in 1947/48. I'm sure I've got some Verlaine already but couldn't resist these, and look at the generous, elegant and timeless typesetting:

Then two writers whose names end in -o. (That's really the only link I can find.)

Ionesco seems to have gone out of fashion these days. This is a 1960 edition, with many of the browning pages still uncut. The original reader didn't get past the first two plays. I've never (I think) read any Ionesco, but I've just read the opening of La Cantatrice Chauve, which has made me laugh out loud. Here's my translation.

Scene 1
English middle-class interior, with English armchairs. English evening. Mr Smith, Englishman, in his English armchair and his English slippers, smokes an English pipe and reads an English newspaper by the English fire. He has English spectacles, a small grey English moustache. By his side, in another English armchair, Mrs Smith, Englishwoman, is darning some English socks. A long English silence. The English clock strikes seventeen English times.
MRS SMITH: Oh! It's nine o'clock. We have eaten soup, fish, potatoes and English salad. The children have drunk English water. We have eaten well tonight. That's because we live in the outskirts of London and our name is Smith.

Perhaps I'm just easily pleased.

You would think you can guess quite easily when the Ariosto was published: it's such a 70s design. But the print was 1994, which surprises me.

Next, just because I feel I ought to have read more Pushkin:

And finally, because any help is welcome:

"New"? It was published in 1969 (when Ez was still alive), spent its life in a Greenwich library, and judging by its condition, didn't get out much. Unsurprising, given the terrible, terrible cover design.

So plenty of improving literature to read during these dark damp months. Only time will tell if I actually do.

The handwritten Bible

2011-11-12T08:53:00.001Z

I'm not sure what to make of this latest flowering of celebrity culture. It's a project to complete a hand-written Bible. The obvious question is why, and allegedly it's to reconnect the British public with the Bible. And of course these days that means there has to be a celeb element. As the Guardian puts it, there is a "celebrity verses" section, with remaining verses written out by the public. And that may be the real purpose: to give celebs the chance to project a nice image of themselves, while the proles get landed with the lists of dietary laws and all the smiting and begetting.

David Cameron has chosen some of Paul's less contentious advice:

Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. Those things, which ye have both learned, and received, and heard, and seen in me, do: and the God of peace shall be with you.

Even I can't find anything to complain about in that. Apart from the mention of God, of course. Prince Charles has gone for Genesis Chapter 1 verses 1 and 2. The Guardian links this to his environmental concerns. Balls. It's our future king's way of saying "By hook or by crook, I'm first in this book."

So, readers, Christian or otherwise, which verses of the Bible would you choose to contribute?

FIFA gets something right

2011-11-07T10:12:00.000Z

More poppy madness, I'm afraid, and some people might like to look away now. I've just read a tweet that says "The world has gone mad" because FIFA won't let the England football teams have a poppy design on their shirts for their game against Spain on Saturday. (Guardian story here.)

Here's the first provocation, which I feel I should whisper. The world's gone mad when people think footballers should wear a poppy design on their shirt. To amplify on my earlier view, it seems that remembrance these days is all about putting your feelings on display, with the implication that you can't be sincere unless you're wearing a poppy 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for about 3 weeks. It's like a few years ago, when everyone was encouraged to wear a pink ribbon to show their opposition to breast cancer. As if anyone is in favour of it... England's footballers can express their views perfectly well without wearing a poppy symbol on their shirts. They could be silent on the morning of 11 November. They could go to a remembrance service next Sunday. They could donate their match fee to the appeal. And there will in any case be a minute's silence before the game.

And here's the even more shocking view: I think FIFA is right. Their rules say that a national team can't change its kit without approval, and that in particular the kit shouldn't carry any "political, religious or commercial messages". It's debatable whether the poppy symbol is a political message. Lots of people would say it is, in that it implicitly condones militarism. I'm not sure. But I think it's right to be careful about these things, and it's better that FIFA should ban anything that looks remotely like a political symbol, rather than get into a discussion of what is and what isn't. I really don't want Sepp Blatter making that kind of decision (or any decision at all, in an ideal world).

Funnily enough, it seems the organisers of the poppy appeal agree with me. A British Legion spokesman says: "We appreciate that showing support is not always possible under some regulations and we would never seek to impose ourselves in these situations."

So, in one morning I've found myself agreeing with FIFA and the British Legion, and disagreeing with (apparently) the vast majority of football supporters. I need to go and lie down.

Charlton 5 Preston 2

2011-11-05T20:17:00.000Z

Looking at the Charlton team at the end of the match, you wouldn't have thought they'd just won 5-2 and gone five points clear at the top of the table, the first team in the league to reach 40 points. They looked vaguely disappointed, presumably at giving away the two late goals. Possibly they were also fearing Chris Powell's post-match comments.

What does that tell you about the spirit in the team this season? They aren't satisfied with anything but the best, and are driving each other onwards. It's easy to believe this is stemming from Powell, who's built the team around his vision, with players who can sign up to it. Like the defeat at Stevenage, you feel he'll use those two goals to draw even better performances out of the team.

Once again, the game was over by half-time after an immaculate performance. It's all about patience and sudden bursts of creative play, and Preston were nowhere near good enough to withstand it. In the second half they played with a bit more freedom - the result of having nothing more to lose - but it was Charlton's switching off that gave them the chances to score.

The fans didn't care about Preston's two goals, to be honest. We'll be happy if we get a three goal advantage in every game.

It'll be interesting to see how the Football League Show manages to fit the seven goals into the usual 20 seconds. Sooner or later they're going to have to use a split screen so they can show two goals at the same time.

Other views (the pun du jour is "fireworks")
Charlton web site review
Charlton Casual

Charlton 4 Carlisle 0

2011-10-23T08:49:00.001+01:00

Is it wrong to feel disappointed after a 4-0 victory? Going into halftime with a 3-0 lead and the opposition reduced to 10 men, I'm sure everyone expected a demolition job in the second half. Even more so after the fourth goal on 48 minutes. But that was it. Fair enough, Charlton have a game on Tuesday coming up, and all they needed to do was hold the lead.

Charlton's first goal was a thing of beauty: a simple but superbly executed sequence of passes onto Yann Kermorgant's head for the first of his two. The second goal came when BWP exploited a defensive error to score from a narrow angle past the stranded goalkeeper: the goal of a born goalscorer. Kermorgant's second came after a goalmouth melee; usually Charlton don't get these. The half ended with Robson sent off for two (individually fairly harmless) yellow cards.

The second half started with an embarrassing goal for Carlisle, as the keeper let Danny Hollands' shot slip through his hands. From then, though, Carlisle impressed everyone with their commitment to keep playing, although they rarely looked like scoring. Final proof it wasn't their day was when their penalty was saved. Their fans stayed singing throughout. At halftime we'd been feeling pity for them: 500 had made the long journey to see this. But by the end, you couldn't help admiring them. Honestly, Charlton boo-boys, look and learn.

If you want to read more about the match, here are some people who, as always, put it better than me. (Warning: you may encounter more puns on the word "four" than are permitted by the Geneva convention)

Cafc.com report ("a four-midable response")
Dr Kish ("all is four-given")
Blackheath Addick
Charlton Casual
BBC report
Paul Green in the News Shopper

Why I won't be wearing a poppy

2011-10-22T12:33:00.000+01:00

Any day now, remembrance poppies will go on sale. The poppy season now lasts three weeks. Probably from Monday we'll see no-one on live television without one pinned on. (I imagine the studios have bulk supplies so that anyone who turns up without one can be made acceptable.) The odd rebel who insists on not wearing a poppy will be open to scorn in the tabloids, attacked for ingratitude and lack of patriotism. It can't be long before technology is developed that will enable people in recorded programmes and films to have a poppy cgi'd onto them during the season. So we don't have to see anyone disrespecting our dead. We'll see Humphry Bogart as Philip Marlowe going down those means streets with trilby, trenchcoat and poppy.

I hate the moral and emotional compulsion that builds up around this. Poppy-wearing becomes something you do because it's the thing to do. I don't like being told what to do. Especially, I hate being told what emotions I should have and express. At first, I think "this is too early - can't we at least wait until November?". By November I'm thinking I'll just wear a poppy on the day itself. But by the time that comes, I am full of resentment, and I find myself arguing that, actually, the soldiers fought for my freedom not to do what everyone else is doing. I'll respect the eleven o'clock silence, but I won't wear a poppy.

In theory I would like to wear a poppy, and by buying it, to contribute to the welfare of ex-soldiers. Even though I think recent wars have largely been criminal and foolish, the soldiers who suffered weren't responsible for that, and the government support they receive is shockingly inadequate. That's where the real ingratitude is. On remembrance day we should be protesting about that, not bathing in a feel-good groupthink, too easily hijacked by those who want to keep Britain's spending on defence at its present obscene level (£46 billion pounds a year - these tiny islands have the world's fourth highest defence budget).

I like the idea that one day in the year all of us can show our gratitude and support for the soldiers and our anger at the politicians who sent them abroad to die, and ignored them when they came home wounded. One day a year, we all do something different. That would mean something. Remembrance, as it is now, doesn't.

Charlton 1 Tranmere 1

2011-10-08T18:27:00.000+01:00

It seems to be the pattern that visiting teams set out to make a quick impact, hustling for every ball and disrupting Charlton's pattern of passing football. If Charlton were a website, you'd call it a denial of service attack. That's exactly what Tranmere did, and Charlton never settled in the first half. It wasn't surprising that Tranmere took the lead after 30 minutes or so. A speculative shot from McGurk took a sizable deflection off Chris Solly to beat Ben Hamer. I'm sorry, Chris, but I'd call it an own-goal as I think he was trying to block it but got the angle wrong.

After the break, Charlton played with a lot more composure, helped, no doubt, by Tranmere's decision to hold on to what they had. In their keeper's case, what he often had was the ball and although he got a talking-to, he didn't get booked.

Charlton's equaliser came from a penalty, and the decision was followed by some ludicrous gamesmanship by Tranmere, including the keeper, who actually picked the ball up off the spot after Johnny Jackson had placed it. The referee, D Drysdale, really lost control of things at this point and it must have taken three minutes before Jackson took the kick. Thanks to @hannahbk for this video:

Tranmere are a huge team. In particular Showunmi up front looks about two metres tall, but he's not the aerial threat you might think. Like a lot of big men, he can't jump that well, which was fortunate.

On the other attack, I thought BWP had a slightly below-par game. His touch and movement weren't quite on song, and he missed a good chance in the second half which he'd normally be guaranteed to get. His understanding with Kermorgant doesn't look complete yet but they haven't played together much, so I'm not too worried about that.

So Charlton still haven't worked out how to weather a determined denial of service attack. But they remain top of the league and unbeaten, and the clocks are soon going back. It's still much better than anyone could have predicted.

Two big questions remain at the end of this game. How did Tranmere's keeper get through 90 minutes without a yellow card? Have you ever seen a worse free kick? (You know the one I mean.)

Other views
Charlton website
News Shopper (Paul Green)
briefly put: Charlotte Allen on Twitter (contains strong language)

Sheffield Utd 0 Charlton 2

2011-10-02T11:28:00.000+01:00

I don't normally blog about games I haven't attended, but yesterday's wonderful result shouldn't go unnoticed. And I think this picture typifies the way things are in the team at the moment. This was after the game, when Chris Powell spontaneously got the team together to reflect and celebrate on the victory. You get the feeling that these players would walk through fire for him.

Thanks to @leaburn on twitter for getting the picture, and for cleverly positioning the flash so it's close to Chris Powell's heart!

Another reason for this post is to plug a new blog, set up and written by the kids at the International School in Monaco. John Jones, on Drinking During the Game, says "although not strictly for Charlton, it does have a rather large CAFC bias!" As the kids are presumably all millionaires' children we should certainly welcome their support! Have a look: http://football.ismonacoblog.org/

Other views
Charton Casual
Charlton match report
Liam Happe (News Shopper)

Siobhan

2011-09-26T08:29:00.001+01:00

I met Siobhan when we were studying on day release for our qualification in housing. It was pretty much love at first sight on my part. She had that curiously Irish colouring of pale skin and dark hair, with slate grey eyes, a cute turned-up nose and a mischievous smile. Over the three years of the course I grew to know her very well, and we'd often bunk off for the afternoon, finding a Hackney pub where, in those less enlightened days, they had to close the curtains and pretend they were shut. When she had a few drinks, she spoke with a Brummie accent, which is always amusing, and when she’d had a lot she lapsed into the Dundalk accent of her childhood.

Our careers followed each other around for a bit. For a time we both worked for Islington, and then we were both at Lewisham when they were developing their Neighbourhood Offices. It was obvious she was going to be very successful. She was brilliantly clever, quite driven and very hard-working. But once she had stopped working - often well into the evening - she definitely switched off and became a fun monster. She was terrific company and the best person to be with, either in the pub or at the theatre.

We slept together a few times but it was obvious there was no future in that. Obvious to everyone but me, that is. Every time we met I'd fall in love with her again, hoping that finally she would see sense and stay with me. I know now, and probably knew then that it would have been better for me to keep her as a very good, exciting, entertaining friend, but I could never do that.

After I left the housing business, more than 15 years ago, we gradually lost touch, but I followed her career. Sure enough, she did well and this year she was the Head of Housing in a London borough. I'm sure this was no less than she deserved. From time to time I thought of contacting her, but I feared a repetition of the heartbreak.

One evening last week she came back to mind, and the next day I did a google search on her name and the name of the council she worked for. The first few results were normal: she was still there, and I found she was Head of Housing (East). I skipped over a few results for someone of the same name who had died – her name’s not that unusual – then found this announcement in a committee agenda.

[Siobhan ____], Head of Housing East, passed away suddenly on Sunday 24th July 2011. [Siobhan] joined _____ in 2006. She initially worked as the District Housing Manager for _______, and later became Head of Housing Services for the east of the Borough. [Siobhan] was committed to providing the best possible housing service for residents and worked hard to improve the management of our stock. She passionately believed in resident engagement and had a great relationship with the tenants’ representatives in her area. Her passing is a terrible loss to _____.

I did the sums. She must have been 49. That can’t be right. The Siobhan I knew was bursting with life. Death couldn’t touch her. But then I looked back at the results I’d skipped over. A newspaper in Dundalk had reported her death. Not much more detail, but some things I didn’t know. She’d been living in Blackheath, and had a daughter. Suddenly there was a huge gap, a loss. I had missed so much of her life, always assuming I could pick up the pieces later. I found a death notice that had been published in a local paper, with a photo of Siobhan that must have been taken around the time I knew her.

Nearly a week later I’m still in shock. Part of the reason I’m writing this self-indulgence is to try to come to terms with this. I know that with time I’ll stop thinking about her, feel less sadness, feel less guilt for losing her friendship through cowardice. If you’re reading this, and there’s a Siobhan you’ve lost touch with, pick up the phone, give them a call. You may not get another chance.

(Siobhan isn’t her real name, of course. One thing this experience is shown me is that people – even fairly private people like Siobhan, who wasn’t on Facebook or Twitter – have a kind of afterlife on the internet. I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. Her Linkedin profile is still there: why would anyone ever think to delete it? I don’t want anyone to stumble over this blog entry the way I stumbled over that committee agenda.)

Charlton 3 Chesterfield 1

2011-09-25T08:09:00.000+01:00

See, I thought this was a great game, but the Football League Show disagrees, seeing it as just another 20 seconds of action. Bizarrely, they showed Chesterfield's unsuccessful penalty appeal (no way) but didn't show Charlton's (which looked clear-cut to me live - I haven't seen it again). I really don't know why I even bother recording it any more.

After a bright opening spell by the visitors, Charlton battered them through the first half, and only a few brilliant saves by keeper Fleming kept them in the game. The first goal looked a bit scrappy live, but on television you could see that Hayes put a crucial and quite subtle deflection on BWP's shot. (Oh, yes, that's why I record FLS).

The second goal - a smartly taken set-piece that a better team than Chesterfield should have taken care of - and a hilarious close range miss from Clarke ("are you Torres in disguise?" the Covered End sang - it wasn't a compliment) meant that Charlton took a two goal lead into halftime. And that should have been enough, but

After the break Charlton's play slowed down quite noticeably. Again, Chesterfield started brightly but this time didn't fade. Charlton sat back a bit, and as Chris Powell has said

for a 15-20 minute period in the second half I didn't like what I was watching too much.

Chesterfield didn't look too threatening from open play, though, and needed a penalty (which looked nailed-on) to score. Charlton raised their game after that. Just think what would have happened a year ago after such a setback - negativity, defeatism - and saw out the game fairly comfortably. Very comfortably, after BWP's injury time goal.

So this year's "Football for a fiver" (unlike last year's) was a total success. A pleasantly mild, sometimes sunny afternoon, an incident-packed match, and three points. Three points clear at the top of the league. It's great to be an Addick at the moment.

Other views
Charlton website match report
News Shopper report
Deepest Darkest
Blackheath Addick
Drinking During the Game

Slavery and Servitude

2011-09-11T18:26:00.001+01:00

Slavery and Servitude ought to be one of Jane Austen's grittier novels. It isn't, but it is a work of fiction. The BBC is reporting that 24 people have been rescued from forced labour in a Travellers' camp in Bedfordshire. This is a story I want to keep an eye on, because it presses a number of buttons: some of the "slaves" were east European migrants, and the alleged enslavers were Travellers. A dilemma for the tabloids!

But the BBC claims the arrests were made under the Slavery and Servitude Act 2010. I'd never heard of that Act (Acts of Parliament don't usually have such evocative names) so I looked it up. It doesn't exist. Less dramatically, the relevant piece of legislation is the Coroners and Justices Act 2009, section 71. It came into force in April 2010.

Well so what, you say, does it make any difference? It bothers me that if the BBC can't get something as basic as this right, how many of the other details of the story can we believe to be accurate? It's particularly important where the story is one where the media might be expected to have a biased view already. As I say, I'll keep an eye on this. And, to be fair, The Guardian also refers to the non-existent Act, so I suppose the mistake arose with the Police or with the news agency that spread the story.

*Ooh, and there's another button pressed: the Act refers to the European Human Rights Convention, which, as every tabloid journalist knows, allows Travellers to do whatever they bloody well like.

Charlton 2 Exeter 0

2011-09-11T09:21:00.000+01:00

Another really enjoyable afternoon at the Valley, not always because of the quality of the football.

The key incident happened after 18 minutes. Nardiello thought he'd scored for Exeter, and so did I, but the officials thought the ball hadn't crossed the line. While I was feeling grateful that we don't have goalline technology, Nardiello was taking it out on the east stand linesman. According to one source (@LouisMend on twitter), he said "Lino you p*ick, that was a goal you f*cking cheating c*nt'!" Kevin Nolan's report has the even more asterisked "You’re a ******* waste of space. And while we’re at it, you’re also a ****** **** of ********, not to mention a complete ******." Which is normally enough to get you sent off, after all. The halftime twitter verdict on the "goal" was mixed: even people who were sitting near to each other differed in their opinions. My telebox wisely refused to record the Football League Show, but I understand the goal probably should have been given.

Anyway, the sending off forced Exeter to switch to a defensive style. This wasn't actually a big change in tactics. And it worked quite well until Bradley Wright-Phillips finished a neat passing move after 43 minutes.

In the second half Exeter made all their substitutions in the first ten minutes and you have to give them credit for having a decent go. But they didn't make many real chances. Meanwhile Charlton were only at their best in flashes, but finally got the second goal.

The result, and the fact that MKDons (spit!) lost, puts Charlton 2nd in the table. What might have been less noticed is Charlton's disciplinary record. According to this site, before yesterday's game Charlton shared bottom place in the yellow card table, with just six so far (compared to Sheff Utd's 19, for example. Oops, make that 23.). With no bookings again yesterday, that's where they stay. Another sign that Chris Powell is building a team in his image.

Charlton 1 Sheffield Wednesday 1

2011-09-06T08:13:00.001+01:00

Deadman and Slaughter were two of the match officials last night. If I were a tabloid sub I could made something out of that. Wednesday should have been deadmen by halftime. That's probably true (metaphorically, obviously*). A great start with a 3rd minute goal by Bradly Wright-Phillips saw a dominant first half performance, but with only one really clear chance. It wasn't the best football Charlton have played this season, but it should have been enough to sweep away a sadly limited looking Sheffield team.

Slaughter at the Valley didn't happen. It was one of those games where suddenly the whole team seems to lose its way. Passes fail, frustration builds up, and the pattern of play disappears. Players fall back onto what they're comfortable with, the apparently safe option of a long ball aimed at BWP. Better than Shaun he may be, but not much taller; he's never going to win these balls against any regular 3rd division centreback. So possession is lost.

Even that wouldn't have mattered though, if Charlton hadn't helped Weds out. Their open play looked unlikely to bring then a goal, but once again slack defending of a corner was Charlton's downfall. Goals from corners should be very rare, but it seems as if Charlton have already conceded several this season. I hate to place individual blame but it struck me that Ben Hamer generally had a poor game in goal, suggesting he hasn't yet established an understanding with his defenders, and that has to be Chris Powell's priority in training.

*Clearly, I'm not cut out to be a tabloid sub. Can you imagine a Sun front page ever featuring the phrase "metaphorically, obviously" after a blast of hyperbole?

Maple House

2011-08-22T13:53:00.000+01:00

I saw reports on Friday that there was a fire in Idonia Street. Deptford. According to the BBC, it was a fire in a residential tower block. There aren't any tower blocks in Idonia Street, though. I know this, because I used to live there. That's why I recognised the unusual, unforgettable name.

So this morning, for a quick ride, I decided to go and see. Here it is:

It's not a tower block, it's Maple House, a four-storey block, and the flat that's burnt out is number 21. I know this because I used to live there. Happily, it seems no-one was injured. Here's the fire brigade report.

I still wonder why the BBC described it as a tower block. Nothing in the fire brigade report says this. Maybe they think all flats in Deptford are in tower blocks.That's a nice stereotype after all. But wrong.

Charlton 2 Scunthorpe 2

2011-08-21T19:09:00.005+01:00

The last couple of years I haven't really been paying much attention to football. I would turn up to the Valley on a roughly fortnightly basis, watch the game, go home, write a blogpost, have a drink, forget, forget, forget. It was nice. I didn't have to put up with Match of the Day or the Football League Show. I almost forgot who Steve Claridge was.

As a result, I didn't know that Scunthorpe had just been relegated from the Second Division. How can that be? Not the relegation, but how did they ever reach those heights? Their results so far this season seemed mediocre, while Charlton had been imperious. So how could anything go wrong? I predicted a 4-0 win on www.charltonpredictor.com.

Turns out Scunny were much better than I'd expected. It was one of those times when I wished I could be the famous "neutral observer" - it was a cracking match, with both teams playing a nice passing game, and chances happening at both ends. The result was fair, even if you could (of course) point to a few mistakes by the referee: he got completely conned at one point by a Scunthorpe dive, and added 5 minutes of injury time to a game where there was only one time the physio was on the pitch. It didn't make a difference: the final goal was scored in legitimate added time, and the game was so open and evenly balanced it could have gone either way.

The most shameful incident was when Charlton got a corner with five minutes to go, and, at 2-1 up, decided to play it short, presumably intending to hold the ball there for the rest of the match. They managed it for about 20 seconds. For that alone, they deserved to forfeit a goal.

So, an odd feeling after the game. Disappointment that Charlton couldn't hold onto the lead, but no sense of injustice.

I've started watching Match of the Day and the Football League Show again, and I've remembered who Steve Claridge is. He's the man who was sacked as Millwall manager without leading them into a single competitive game. He must be worth listening to.

Carnivorism 2.0

2011-08-15T10:26:00.002+01:00

I'm not a vegetarian, though I have been in the past. In the end, I don't think there's a convincing moral argument that eating animals is wrong (though I'll spare you the details of my reasoning). On the other hand there are overwhelming arguments on health, economic and environmental grounds that people in our society ought to eat a lot less meat (again, I'll leave out the details - any number of websites will carry the debate about this).So if, say, 20% of people became vegetarians, it would be a Good Thing. Even if you can't bring yourself to give up meat, you ought to be glad if other people do.

These days, vegetarianism can mean two things. The original meaning is simply not eating meat. But now people possibly expect a vegetarian to be a strident crusader for not eating meat. Vegetarianism 2.0 is a campaign as well as a dietary option.

What I think has been less noticed - though possibly not by vegetarians - is that carnivorism has its preachy wing too. As always, my frame of reference is Come Dine With Me, where the carnivores typically don't only not know what to cook for vegetarian guests, but panic at the prospect of a vegetarian meal. Some go further, and suggest that people are wrong, morally wrong, for not eating meat. Well, if there's no moral argument in favour of vegetarianism, there's certainly no valid moral argument against it. (Except this: if you drink milk, you should be prepared to eat veal.) And it's perfectly possible to have a healthy diet that doesn't contain meat, as hundreds of millions of Indians will confirm.

When I was a vegetarian, I faced this kind of defensive hostility all the time. I didn't understand it then, and still don't. I think there's going to be an outbreak of carnivorism 2.0 tonight, when a team of vegetarians appear on Only Connect. I'll be following this on twitter and I'll be looking out for the funny comments about how weak and pale and generally wimpish they seem to be. I might make a drinking game of it. I'll be pissed before the missing vowels round.

A Woman Killed with Kindness

2011-08-13T13:06:00.000+01:00

Tuesday's blogpost about the "riots" in Lewisham and Catford is by far the most read ever on this blog. It made me wish I still carried adversts. Hail and farewell, new readers! This post is more like the normal routine: a half-arsed review of a play what I have seen.

A Woman Killed with Kindness is a 1603 play by Thomas Heywood. You can read it here, if you like. I did, earlier this week. I wasn't impressed. The language is caught between Shakespeare and the metaphysical poets. It doesn't have the rich verbal texture of Shakespeare or the underlying thoughtfulness of the metaphysicals. The plot and subplot are barely connected, but scenes alternate.

The production, at the Lyttleton, is directed by Katie Mitchell. I'd seen one of her plays before, a production of The Trojan Women. It seemed to me at the time that the production embodied a theory of drama, rather than a view of the play itself. From reviews of other plays it seemed that she had a strange realist view, where the characters quite obviously are talking to each other, not to the audience. She combined this, however, with formalist elements, such as closely choreographed movement, and use of unrealistic music.

I'd read that the production was just over two hours long, with no interval. Theatres don't like not having an interval - it reduces bar takings - so if a director is going non-stop, is it because she fears the audience will leave at half-time?

So, I was prepared for the worst.I even thought of not going, but staying at home, protecting my little corner of Catford from any remaining looters. But I recognised that as paranoia, so took the very slow bus to Waterloo.

And I'm glad I did. I still don't think the play's all that. But that makes it an ideal vehicle for a tendentious production. Mitchell's production is distinctly feminist, picking up on the irony of the play's title and extending it, so that you have, in a sense, two women killed by kindness. It's not entirely convincing, because the two central women aren't given good enough texts. It means that one of the best passages I noted in reading the play, a speech by Frankford, is savagely cut:

A general silence hath surpris'd the house,
And this is the last door. Astonishment,
Fear, and amazement, beat upon my heart,
Even as a madman beats upon a drum.
Oh, keep my eyes, you Heavens, before I enter,
From any sight that may transfix my soul;
Or, if there be so black a spectacle,
Oh, strike mine eyes stark blind; or if not so,
Lend me such patience to digest my grief,
That I may keep this white and virgin hand
From any violent outrage, or red murder! —
And with that prayer I enter.

Most of this goes. It's OK to do this, of course, but I wonder if it oversimplifies things.

The staging is striking, and a neat solution to the play's structure. Effectively two sets in one, you have a doll's house view of the public areas of the two locations: the shabby old-money home of the Mountfords, and the new (1920's style) house of the Frankfords. And there was a really stunning final piece of staging. It's as usual a bit worrying, though, when the sets are what you most remember.

There were some of Katie Mitchell's apparent predilections: several times the arrangement of furniture seems to be reinforcing the fourth wall, but less annoyingly here than in The Trojan Women. And her use of choreography to indicate passage of time was generally efficient and effective.

Let's look at some reviews. Lyn Gardner, in the Guardian, doesn't seem to have a lot to say, frankly. Charles Spencer, in the Telegraph, isn't as dim as usual (translation: he has pretty much the same opinion as me), but seems to have missed the chance to have an interval drink. (I didn't find the lack of an interval a problem, by the way: a break would have ruined the play.) Paul Taylor, in the Independent, is the most enthusiastic reviewer, but doesn't quite explain why. I think it's fair to summarise their response, like mine, as being aware that Mitchell is trying to do something very interesting, but not completely succeeding.

Lewisham and Catford riots

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

Yesterday evening vague reports of disturbance in Lewisham were coming through, so I decided to go and look for myself and cycled through Catford to Lewisham and back.

At first, it seemed quite normal. Traffic was flowing pretty freely, but in Rushey Green a bus had been parked across the road and traffic was being diverted away from Lewisham High Street. The Argos store had a broken window, and the optician next to it was smashed wide open.

In Lewisham there was a police line across the High Street at the corner with Courthill Road. It seemed as if they were kettling the area, but I couldn't see what was happening inside.

Back at Catford there was a strange, unpleasant atmosphere. There were a lot of people walking around, partly, I suppose, because there were no buses running, partly because there were a lot of sightseers, like me, but I also felt that some were there opportunistically to grab what they could. There was no sense of a riot, no sense of a large mob rampaging. Rather there were groups of four or five, mostly in hoodies, which isn't unusual, but some wearing masks, which is. They had the stance and posture of kids in a mall, wondering which shop to go to next - which is probably exactly what they were thinking. I'd guess there were at most 100 people looking like this. There didn't seem to be many police around. A lot of small shops which would normally be open till 10 or 11 were closed and grilled at 7pm.

This morning I repeated the ride. Lewisham centre was now open and there didn't seem to be any major structural damage: no buildings burnt down. Macdonalds had smashed windows, and a few places were boarded up, but I couldn't tell if that had been a precaution rather than a consequence. A few pawnbrokers seemed to have had their grilles attacked.

In Catford, still the major damage appeared to be Argos and the optician's. At the business centre on Bromley Road it looked as if Curry's, PC World and Comet hadn't been touched. I learned off twitter that JD Sport on Catford Island had been seriously looted, and found a youtube video of that taking place, as well as the trouble at Argos.

Compared with Croydon, or even Ealing, Lewisham and Catford got away fairly lightly. My guess is that the police action in sealing off Lewisham centre was effective both in stopping any serious incidents there and in stopping it spreading down the A21. It also looked as if businesses had been given adequate information and taken precautions. If that's true, then well done the Police.

Charlton 3 Bournemouth 0

2011-08-06T19:56:00.001+01:00

The levels of optimism before this game were high enough, but after a comprehensive win in fine style, it's going to be hard to be realistic. Bournemouth were by no means a bad team: they played an attractive passing game, and I've a feeling they'll do well this season. But Charlton were a team transformed.

Considering the team was rebuilt almost from scratch over summer, the understanding between the players was impressive. Chris Powell is continuing the work he began last season in getting the team to play nicely, passing between defense and midfield, holding the ball, waiting for the chance to break. It was controlled and patient, but there was also a bit more bite in defence. We didn't see last season's tendency to give up on 50-50 balls.

As the game went on there was even an element of adventurousness. This was best rewarded in Scott Wagstaff's goal, a stunning volley from outside the penalty area, but other players seemed willing to try an unlikely shot.

We'll probably not see a better goal this season, but if the team continues to play like this, happy days are certainly here again.

How do you like your steak?

2011-08-02T09:57:00.003+01:00

One thing my years of watching Come Dine With Me has taught me is that there is a whole semiotics wrapped up in the question of how one likes a steak.

It's clear from the shows that men feel a kind of pressure to say they want their steak almost raw. They say stupid things like "Wipe its arse and put it on the plate". Raw meat: rrrrahhh! I think if a man were to ask for his steak well-done, he'd be pitied so openly by the other guests, he'd have to at least apologise. And would probably cry in the back of the taxi going home, to an accompaniment of Dave Lamb's finest sarcasm.

Women are allowed to ask for a well-done steak. But not if they portray themselves as hard-headed no-nonsense businesswomen (and there seem to be a lot of them on CDWM) - the kind of women who proudly say other women don't like them. For them it's essential they have the steak "blue", or rare at most. More "traditional" women can assert their femininity by asking that it's cooked until it looks as little like fresh meat as possible. They don't win any prestige for their choice, of course.

I'm suggesting that the choice of how a lot of people like their steak has little to do with how it tastes, and I know that people will dispute that. But I like the tang of blood, they'll say occasionally. More likely they'll refer to the juices. I'm not sure that's much different. Eating blood has a semi-magical significance you don't need to be Claude Lévi-Strauss (or, come to that, Roland Gift) to understand.

Frankly, I don't know. My difficulty is that if someone were to ask me How do you like your steak? I wouldn't know what to say. Not that I'm a vegetarian, but I have very rarely eaten steak. When I was growing up, people used to have special steak-knives. I think they were diamond-tipped, because the assumption was that any steak a poor person could afford would be tough. I seem to remember that eating a steak was hard work; not worth the effort.

Later, in my "vegetarian hell" years, four of us were cycling in France. We'd camped about 20 miles outside Paris and the only restaurant we could find agreed to stay open later than usual for us, but all they could offer was steak-frites. Hunger got the better of us, and we all enjoyed the meal, and I'm sure it was very good, but it didn't excite me. There's something about a slab of meat that's just too much for me. Again, it's not the taste that puts me off, but the symbolism: it's carnivorism at its most naked. I've just added the picture to this entry. It's not making my mouth water; it looks more like a challenge than a treat.

But tell me, readers: do you like a juicy steak? What am I missing out on?

Rebekah Brooks - clever or not?

2011-07-15T13:32:00.000+01:00

In her first statement on the phone-hacking - actually an email to staff - Rebekah Brooks said:

I hope that you all realise it is inconceivable that I knew or worse, sanctioned these appalling allegations.

Various commentators jumped on this, saying that of course she didn't sanction the allegations. The allegations (made by others) are that she sanctioned the alleged actions. There's a difference. What she said is nonsense, but it isn't a denial of that.

And in her resignation letter today, there's another odd turn of phrase:

Therefore I have given Rupert and James Murdoch my resignation. While it has been a subject of discussion, this time my resignation has been accepted.

This has been interpreted (eg by the Guardian, here) as implying that she had previously offered to resign. It doesn't say so though. It would have been easy to be clear, if that was the case. Instead she uses a civil-service impersonal formulation. Her resignation has indeed "been a subject of discussion", but nothing here confirms that it's been a subject of discussion between her and Rupert Murdoch.

Is this deliberate or careless? One of the striking features of News International's response to the allegations has been their unwillingness to face direct questions. No press conference, no media interviews - only occasional written statements. Perhaps they are concerned that Brooks might repeat the error she made in admitting to the commons committee that the NotW had paid police officers.

So they restrict themselves to short written documents, which are presumably legally and managerially checked. Which must mean that any meaningless or vague sentence is deliberately meaningless or vague.

I don't know exactly where this leaves us. It's not surprising that NI should avoid saying anything clear that might be prejudicial but I'm not sure the media are quite grasping that they're playing a cunning game, with aims that aren't yet clear.

Hardcore in Rochester

2011-07-04T16:32:00.000+01:00

Sorry to disappoint, but when I say hardcore, I mean hardcore quizzing. Saying this now, however, won't stop spambots from following me on twitter, and won't - oh so unfortunately - retrospectively take away any hits this blog gets.

So I have to say clearly right now that if you've come to this blog looking for details of how to find hardcore in Rochester, you've come to the wrong place. Maybe you should just go to Rochester. I'm fairly sure you can buy all the hardcore you need there, should be be wishing to undertake some building work: a hardstanding, for example.

I went to Rochester on Saturday to take part in a quiz organised by the British Quiz Association. This is the first time I've done this. The BQA does what it says on its tin: it organises quizzes and keeps score of who's best. Rather grandly, it calls its monthly quizzes "Grands Prix". Each one is held in a different part of the country and people travel enormous distances to get to them, pay a £25 entry fee, and often stay overnight before or after. It can be quite an expensive day out.

But Rochester's not that far, so it seemed like a good one to try. The quiz was held in a United Reform Church building and when I arrived to sign in at 11 there were already plenty of people there. The final total of participants was 69.

Some of the faces were slightly familiar: a lot of these people have been on television. There were three Eggheads, for a start: Kevin, Pat and Barry; and several others have been on Mastermind or Only Connect. It was no surprise that contestants were overwhelmingly white middle-aged men, but it was striking how many were, to put it bluntly, fat. I'm not thin, but I began to feel as if I was.

For your £25 (£10 for debutants) you get an individual quiz in the morning, lunch (unsurprisingly including unlimited sausages), a team quiz in the afternoon, and tea (unlimited doughnuts).

The individual quiz is the serious business. Forty written questions on each of six subject categories (so that's 240 questions in all). You have 90 minutes in exam conditions ("you may turn over your paper .... now!")* to get as many as you can. Maximum possible score is 186 because 60 of the questions are "tie-breakers", which are only worth 0.1 points each, because they're much harder. (Yeah, I know. I don't understand that bit either.) Oh no, actually the max is 155 because you drop your lowest scoring category to get your total. (Don't worry. It's not important.)

It was a hot day on Saturday, and a crowded room. People who've recently done their GCSEs probably wouldn't think this was any kind of fun at all.

After the 90 minutes is up, you pass your paper to a neighbour and the answers are given. I was marking the paper of someone who seemed to have done pretty well. I later found out he's in the top ten, and has been in a Mastermind final. You get the paper back, check the score (if you can be bothered) and put a summary of your scores into a basket, so that the organisers can add the scores up while you have your sausage-based lunch. My score was 82.2. I'd no idea how that compared with others, but the paper I'd marked had a score just over a hundred.

In the afternoon you're allocated a place in a team of four. The teams are chosen to balance good and bad players. So it's a welcome insult when you find you're in the same team as Kevin Ashman. For me, then, the afternoon largely consisted of watching him fill in the answer sheets. I was certainly beginning to feel stupid now. We won the first half of the team quiz, but post-doughnut we didn't. There's another bizarre marking system applied, but I'm sure it worked out properly.

The day closes with the announcement of the winners. They get a round of applause and a book. There was an opportunity of going on to a pub for the evening. Tempting - there's real ale and a curry - but there's also an informal quiz. I'm quizzed out, and get the train home.

Next day, the full scores are published. Turns out my 82.2 puts me 37th out of 69, which I'm happy with. It gives me 296 ranking points. I've no idea how these are calculated. But if I go to more "grands prix" I can accumulate points and - I think - if I get enough I can attain the rank of Sage, rather than Novice (and beyond that one can aspire to be a Candidate Master, Master or ultimately a Grand Master).

Will I go again? Probably. I liked the indiviudal quiz and I'm obviously at a reasonable standard. The team quiz got a bit boring, and I'd rather be in a team without a dominating player, even if it means we lose. But the next grand prix is on the first day of the football season, when Charlton are at home, so that's out of the question.

But, disregarding all the flimflammery of points and rankings, it largely was fun, so next time it's somewhere I can get to easily - why not?

* This is a Johann Hari-style quote, and may bear little relation to what was actually said.

More lovely Penguins

2011-06-25T14:57:00.000+01:00

I found these in Kirkdale Bookshop. The first is another Elizabeth Bowen, a 1946 printing.

What I particularly like about this generation of Penguins is the happy dancing penguin on the front. Probably someone has done a survey of the different penguin depictions and how they relate to the national mood. In 1946 perhaps there was a mood of optimism. But austerity too. The pages are printed closely, with narrow margins, to save paper. Which wasn't apparently an issue in 1940, when my next book comes from.

I've no idea what the book is about. I'll probably never read it. It seems to be naval stories, and I suppose it has a patriotic intent. Look at the back cover for a summary, though, and this is what you get:

which is just too beautiful for words. It's the reason I bought the book.

Shalimar's a strange nom de plume. There's an old song, a favourite of tight-trousered pre-war tenors, that goes "Pale hands I loved, beside the Shalimar", and I guess that gave the name to Shalimar hand creme. If you've ever waited for a train at Hove, you might have seen the old Dubarry factory, with its tiles that proclaim Shalimar Complexion Creams For Loveliness That Lasts. Here's a blog about it. I'm glad the building's survived. It's pretty, but still not quite a match for the Shalimar Gardens in Kashmir.

Blackheath booksale 2011

2011-06-18T14:57:00.000+01:00

Is it a year since the last Amnesty booksale? It seems barely 12 months. This year didn't seem quite as good; very little grabbed my attention, although I arrived precisely at 9am, joining the queue of about 30 people. People queuing for books! That's nice to see.

In the event all I bought were three Penguins from the 60s, largely because I like the design. Here's the first:

I've really only heard of William Plomer as the librettist of Britten's Gloriana, an opera that flopped largely because of its crap libretto, I believe. But it's a very nice illustration by Robin Jacques, which was clearly already old-fashioned when the book was published (in 1961).

Next is a book by one of those novelists who's always described as unfairly neglected.

Again, a charming illustration (by Paul Hogarth) on the cover of this 1962 edition, which is almost timeless. Only the rather heavy-handed hatching looks dated now. I haven't read any Bowen before and I'm really looking forward to this.

Finally, Jack Trevor Story, a writer who was absurdly prolific in his day, but the brevity of that Wikipedia entry shows how transient his fame has been.

This was published in 1963, and what a sudden transformation there's been. In many ways this is the most dated cover of the three precisely because it was so modern in its time. Designed by Martin Bassett, it clearly comes from the dawn of Beatledom, seen above all in the man's sharp suit (Italian, no doubt) and shoes. But it's a bit cautious: the woman's pose makes you think for a moment she's flashing her thighs,but she's actually wearing quite a sensible skirt. The back-cover matter has an unconvincing bluster to it:

You're bound to laugh at the clipped and bawdy dialogue of this social merry-go-round. But you'll also wince at the cutting edge of this brilliant writing.

Penguin could see it was on the edge of something different, but didn't quite know what to make of it.

I'm very pleased with these slim pickings, though. They were very cheap.

If Nurse Jackie were a Saturday morning serial

2011-06-16T11:50:00.001+01:00

Gather round, children. Once upon a time the grown-ups of Britain didn't know what to do. They all had children, and wanted more children, but so many children in the house meant that the grown-ups couldn't spend special time together. (No-one used to talk about special time in those days, far less discuss it in front of their children.)

And so the grown-ups built cinemas on every high street, just so that on Saturday mornings, they could send their children there to watch some films made especially for them. (In those days, children, most films were made for grown-ups. Can you imagine that? Films for grown-ups!) And while the children were out, the parents could spend some special time together.

When I was your age, children, I used to go to Saturday morning pictures regularly. It was fun. There were cartoons, a sing-song, and a thrilling serial. What I remember most about the thrilling serials is that each week our hero was apparently killed, trapped in an unescapable situation. And then next week you would find out how he had in fact escaped.

What annoyed me even then was the flimsiness of the escape narrative. Say our hero is trapped down a mineshaft. Blank, sheer walls all around him. Up at ground level the villain has found a heavy safe that just about fits the shaft. In the last scene, he heaves it down the shaft and we see a cloud of dust plume out as it plummets. Surely our hero is crushed to a pulp (as a 10 year old, I'd have liked to see that, even in black and white).

Come back next week and we rewind time a little. Back in the mineshaft our hero finds a door which he had somehow failed to see earlier. A quick shoulder charge and it's open and he (and his dog, or some orphans, or a screaming girl) are out of the shaft just as the safe falls. I felt cheated. Almost wanted the hero, his dog, the orphans, and above all the screaming silly girl, dead.

The memory of this eases my pain at the news that Sky Atlantic have bought the third series of Nurse Jackie, which means I won't see it. In fact, I've come to consider this a good thing. For those who haven't seen it, the eponymous Jackie is a senior nurse in a New York hospital. She has a difficult home life, and an addiction to prescription drugs. In series 2, we saw how this got her deeper and deeper into trouble. She lied to her husband and to her only friend and right at the end of the series these lies unravelled. The husband and friend both found out what she had been doing. What will become of Jackie? Will the falling safe smash her to a pulp (in full colour)?

Of course it won't. At the end of series 1, the drug addiction seemed to have single-handedly crushed her and she lay in an apparent coma on the floor of a hospital toilet. At the start of series 2, this was - essentially - forgotten. Jackie just picked herself up and carried on. It was worse than the sudden discovery of a door in the mineshaft. It was the equivalent of acting as if the safe had never been dropped. There never was a safe. I felt cheated.

Of course the safe is never going to hit Jackie. Somehow, the script will find a way for her to continue more or less as before. She has to continue to be a senior nurse with a drug habit and a difficult home life, because that's what people like seeing: that's why there is a third series. I'm sure that if I saw the start of the new series I'd feel cheated again. And this will get worse the more series there are. The end of each series will see Jackie closer and closer to the edge, so that each following series will need increasingly contorted explanations and evasions to return her to the starting point. The only difference really is that Jackie's cliff-hangers take a lot longer than a week to build.

I guess it's economics. It costs a lot to stage a programme like Nurse Jackie and the production company probably doesn't start making profit until the third or fourth series. If a programme survives that long, it becomes increasingly unlikely it's going to change significantly: its very success ossifies it.

So I've added a second rule to my guide to watching American TV: only ever watch the first two series of any long-running show.That way, there's a chance you'll remember it with fondness and not grow to hate it.

Thank you, then, Sky.

Open Street Map

2011-06-02T21:09:00.000+01:00

I don't think the Open Street Map is very well known. It ought to be. It's a collaborative attempt to map the world on a shared, free basis. And I think the results are better than most. Here's a part of the world where I went cycling today. First, here's how Google maps sees it.

While here's the basic view from OSM:

There's simply more information - those red-dotted lines, for example, are footpaths, which Google doesn't show. (I also think it looks better - nicer fonts etc - but that's a personal preference.)

But the real strength of OSM is that users can select the information they want to include. Someone has used the OSM data to produce an OpenCycleMap. Here's its version:

You can see how the roads are rendered differently - cyclists don't need to know that the road is the A225 - some information is left out, but some is included. You can't see it much on this extract, but it shows cycleroutes and - really important for cyclists - it shows contours.

The OSM project is a kind of wikipedia, and like wikipedia is only as good as the people who edit it. The perverse advantage OSM has is that you need a certain level of expertise to edit it, and to create specialised maps from the data. On the other hand, that means that certain parts of the world are poorly covered.

But, if you've got GPS equipment and want to fill in some of the gaps, it's probably not that difficult. Why not try it?

Nothing has been done about Sam Wollaston

2011-05-25T17:56:00.000+01:00

I don't get many visitors to this blog, and I don't complain about that: it's too irregular and too unfocussed to build up a following. (More than half the visitors I do get only come here because they think they're going to see something about Charlton, and more than half the time they're disappointed.)

But one of my posts that's always attracted a trickle of views dates back to April 2009. I suppose it turns up when people do a search for Sam Wollaston. Why would people google him? I think it's unlikely that people want to know more about him - he's adequately forthcoming himself about his own life, his career, his girlfriend, etc - but I like to think it's people looking for someone else who shares their disbelief that he keeps his job.

And now, more than two years later, I've got my first comments on the post, and I'm pleased to say they support this hypothesis. In fact the first commenter, Ronniespraggs, makes me look like Wollaston's biggest fan.

As for me, I've almost stopped looking at Wollaston's columns. I know that people will say that's what I always should have done: if you don't like it, don't read it. But for me the real pity of Wollaston's writing is the opportunity cost: the Guardian's TV review could be, and used to be, one of the delights of the paper, one of the first things I'd turn to. Ronnie and Linda's comments have made me look at his latest two columns, and it doesn't seem things have changed. This makes me sad.

The missionary vanishes

2011-05-03T11:12:00.001+01:00

As I've noted before, waking up early gives you the opportunity to listen to American evangelical preaching, and this morning at 5 am Pastor David Jeremiah told the story of Jenny Adams, a Baptist missionary in Trujillo, Peru. Even at that time of day the story sounded strange, so I decided to investigate it further.

Here's what Jeremiah said.

Jenny Adams had been a missionary for 34 years. One day, she gave a lift to a young woman, without knowing that the woman's brother was a cocaine refiner, and she was carrying 3.9 kilogrammes of the drug. The police found this in Adams's vehicle, and so she was charged with possession (and presumably with intent to deal). The Peruvian legal system presumes guilt until innocence is proved (apparently), and so the local newspapers started printing stories about the "cocaine missionary". Adams was in prison for 20 days (so we must assume she was cleared of any charges).

Jeremiah's point is that this was an example of anti-Christian harassment. As a symbol of north American Christianity, Adams and her mission were vilified on this pretext, and no account was paid to her 34 years of unblemished service.

My first thought was that all over the world people are stringently punished for suspected drug offences, whether they are Christian or not. If there was any vindictiveness aimed at Adams or her mission it was more likely to be anti-imperialist that anti-Christian. And she was apparently acquitted. Good, but all over the world there are people in prison for long terms who might have done nothing worse.

So I decided to find out more about Jenny Adams. Jeremiah had mentioned what sounded like direct quotations from Peruvian newspapers, so it shouldn't be too hard to find. He must have read the story somewhere, and as he presumably doesn't read the Peruvian press, it must have turned up in some American media. And if the story is so heinous, at least some American Baptist websites would cover it.

Google searches for "Jenny Adams peru" and "Jenny Adams baptist" hardly help at all. I find one page which identifies Jenny Adams as a missionary in the Iglesia Bautista de Samne, 50 kilometres from Trujillo, so that must be her: the name must be right. But nothing about drugs. Even that snappy headline "cocaine missionary" doesn't give anything.

I'm honestly surprised that there is no trace of the story, and caught between disappointment and delight. I feel like it's possible I've caught Jeremiah out in an act of fiction, to put it nicely, but I'd be happier if I could be sure that the Jenny Adams story is not as he told it. What started out as a fairly weak attempt to show that Christians are persecuted merely for being Christian turns out to be a story that - so far - only exists in the world of David Jeremiah. But if anyone knows better, please let me know.

EDIT: I'm grateful to Anonymous(1) for the link and happy to see that the Jennie Adams story is true. I don't agree with a lot of what missionaries do, but I admire her evident fortitude. I had got the impression that this had happened quite recently, but that's clearly not the case, which would explain why it was hard to find any trace on tinternet. I'm also happy to withdraw any suggestion that Dr Jeremiah had made it up: it's natural that he would have known personally of Jennie Adams's history.

Charlton 3 Rochdale 1

2011-04-26T09:38:00.000+01:00

I started blogging Charlton matches to help me remember them. I've a terrible memory for sport of any kind, even for Charlton games. I think it's a specific Charlton gene, which scientists ought to name "Happy Oblivion 1905". The god-given process of evolution has fast-tracked, over 106 years, the development of protective amnesia. But the second half of this season has given us a series of games no-one would want to remember. So I stopped blogging them.

Yesterday's game wasn't one. I had even predicted a 3-0 win, based on a feeling that Chris Powell's approach is finally taking root. And that seems to be correct. All the team, ravaged as it is by injuries and bans, seemed comfortable and confident with the passing game. I suppose it helped that the season is truly dead now, and the result would change nothing, but the style of play makes me happy that I've renewed my season ticket. For weeks now, I've been wishing the season could end NOW, but now I wish it was just beginning.

If only we knew how to defend corners ...

Homage to Phyllis Pearsall

2011-04-17T21:25:00.000+01:00

What do the conflict in Israel/Palestine, the unrest in Libya, the unrest in Yemen, and the Greek financial crisis have in common? They're just four of the things for which someone has produced a "road map" as a solution.

The first reference I can find in the Guardian to a road map is in 2003, when an article prematurely claimed "the road map is dead". In those days the concept of "road map" was probably an optimistic replacement for the concept of "peace process" - after all, everyone knows that processed peace is less tasty and nutritious than fresh or frozen peace.

In 2005 a Guardian editorial declared that this road map was stalled - a lovely mixed metaphor, which should have warned people off using the phrase.

But this year the damned maps have been turning up all over the place. The world of politics has turned into a branch of Stanfords. In February an "official" said we need a road map of Egypt. In March, "In Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world, the opposition presented President Ali Abdullah Saleh with a road map for a smooth transition of power this year" (that was nice of them). This month, April, the Vickers report apparently sets out "a road map for a better banking system in the UK", while the Greek Prime Minister has announced a "road map to recovery".

So many maps, but no-one knows where they're going. You can understand why demagogues love to say they have a road map. It announces a certainty about things: who can argue with a road map? What it actually reveals - like all clichés - is a lack of imagination or creativity. Phyllis Pearsall - who mapped out the original and best road map, London's A to Z, by tramping the streets for 18 hours a day - should haunt and torment the people who spout the cliché. A road map, a good one, a real one, like hers, is so much more than a list of good or unrealistic or self-seeking intentions.

Incidentally ...

2011-04-09T09:40:00.000+01:00

The fact that I'm typing this proves that if you leave your mobile phone on, the plane won't necessarily come crashing down. I was sure I'd turned it off - apart from anything, the battery was running down and I wanted to conserve it. So it was stuffed into the hand luggage in the locker.

So when the plane landed and I heard the text message tone - a swirly tune with bird tweets - I thought how interesting, someone else has that tone. And tsk, they haven't turned their phone off. Then I heard the same tone a few more times and I still didn't get it, still thought there must be a lot of people with the same phone as me.

It was only when I got on the train that I found my phone had been turned on all the time, and had picked up eight messages in the air: Welcome to Spain; how to use your phone in Spain; Welcome to France; how to use your phone in France; Welcome to Britain; how to use your phone in Britain; service message please delete; service message please delete.

In the modern world this is as close as you can get to a death-defying experience. I've never felt more alive.

Confessions of a rubbish tourist (2)

2011-04-07T11:58:00.000+01:00

Pretentious tourists call themselves travellers. I'm by nature a holidayer, a tripper, and I sometimes think that I'd be happiest holing up for two weeks in a chalet in Leysdown, with a good supply of books and beer.

And, of course, a telly. I love watching foreign television even if, especially if, I don't understand it. I could probably spend all day in my room flicking through the channels. The hotel in Lisbon had these:

4 Portuguese channels, ARD, TV Italia, BBC World News (which had an alarming obsession with the coming royal wedding), Swiss TV5, Eurosport (which was showing a snooker match that seemed to be lasting a week), CNN and CNBC (both news porn for the tired businessman), RTE Internacional, some Russian language station, and RT (Russia Today) dubbed into Spanish.

The best show was RTP1's version of This Morning, called A Praca da Alegria. Each show begins with a musical performance. Here are the bands they had on Monday and Tuesday.

and while they play their slightly folkloric tunes, the studio audience dance fairly gingerly.

After that, they get an expert in to discuss a consumer/lifestyle issue. On Monday, it was a body posture expert discussing how to tell if your suitcase is too heavy. (Hasn't he heard of wheels? Every bloody suitcase in the world has wheels these days. Noise levels at airports are reaching dangerous heights with the clickety clack of them on the terrazzo tiles.)

If I had my way, if I wasn't scared of being judged by the hotel staff, I'd only leave my room for food. Actually, in Portugal not even for that. I hate to say it, but Portuguese food is dull. I like salt cod as much as anyone, but it needs something like a spicy tomato sauce to bring it to life. I think there's no word for 'spicy' in the Portuguese language. There is certainly no entry in my English/Portuguese dictionary for 'spicy'. Someone's crossed it out, possibly in every copy.

A few days in Lisbon

2011-04-06T23:35:00.001+01:00

I'm a rubbish tourist,and this is shown nowhere better than in my travel photos. I don't see the point of photographing the well-known sites, because I know that I can come home and find in minutes a better picture than anything I can take. Here's the Castello Sao Jorge in Lisbon, for example, as seen by me

and as seen by someone on the internet:

Even at these small sizes you can see he or she has a better camera, and more patience to wait for the evening air to thin and the sunlight to warm up.

And it's not just photographing that I'm rubbish about with famous sites. That castle, you'll notice, is on top of a bloody great hill. I've seen loads of castles, thanks, and climbing a bloody great hill isn't my idea of a holiday. Almost everything in Lisbon is on top of a bloody great hill, in fact.

The photographs I'd like to take are the photographs that show how people live: photojournalism, I suppose. But I think it's rude to take photos of people you don't know, and it's definitely patronising to make a technically perfect (I wish) photo of a gap-toothed grimy shoeshiner an emblem of 'local character' like some guidebooks do. (Lisbon looks generally down-at-heel. While I was there, more and worse news of Portugal's economic position was being revealed daily. I don't understand economics much in English, let alone Portuguese, but it seems to amount to a state of being in the shit, with possible IMF intervention, which will surely slash public expenditure. It's alarming to think what state Lisbon will be in after a few years of this.)

So I don't take photographs of people. Here's one:

It's the Praca do Commercio, down by the river, a huge public space that doesn't seem to have any purpose. There's a lot of public space like that in Lisbon, I think. It struck me as an attempt to brag about Portugal's grandeur, but the emptiness seems to reveal that when these spaces were created, that grandeur was already in the past.

Here's a photograph of a railway signal.

Even as a picture of a railway signal it's rubbish. I took it on my way back from Sintra. (Actually, the economics of that trip might illustrate Portugal's problems. A return journey of 40 minutes each way cost around 4euros. I think it's great that rail travel is subsidised to that extent but it can't be sustainable. Sadly.) Sintra is like a posh Brighton, where the rich of Portugal indulged their follies in mad over-the-top constructions. Unlike the actual Brighton, there are several Pavilions. It's a side of Portugal I do like, the fairytale buildings that talk about unbelievable past fortunes on display.

The photo I'd most have liked to take is of the most surprising sight. My hotel overlooked the Praca Munoz Martim, a fairly bleak, hard-surfaced big and empty square. On Sunday afternoon a group of local kids were playing cricket there. Cricket in Portugal! The kids looked south Asian so I guessed they were Goan (surely Goa is the only intersection between the former Portuguese empire and cricket). A more brazen tourist would have photographed them, asked them, but I'll just have to hold the memory and in ten years time, when Portugal beat England in the cricket world cup, I'll say it was me who saw it coming.

So, I couldn't say I fell in love with Lisbon, like I did with Madrid at first sight. But I'd have liked to be there longer.

(Next post: food and television)

Who's funny?

2011-03-20T12:03:00.000Z

Over there ---> you'll see my selection of links to funny people. Sadly, though, while I'm sure they're still funny, some of them are keeping it to themselves. Ariane Sherine is, I believe, locked in a convent writing a novel, while Marina Hyde left us in November, with the promise that she'll return to the Guardian "next year".

So, my appeal is this: who else is funny? Please let me know of anyone writing a regular column that makes you laugh, and if I agree, I'll put a link in the list. Thanks.

Wiggy!

2011-03-18T15:15:00.000Z

Flicked over from the Cheltenham Festival to BBC Parliament, where there was an adjournment debate on access to financial services in southeast London - ie Nationwide's closure programme. I was quite impressed by my MP, Heidi Alexander, but my attention was continually distracted by the Boris Johnson tribute act on the coalition front bench. I tried to capture it but the picture didn't come out too well, but fortunately the internet provides a valuable collection of photographs of the man in question.

This is how he looks now:

, compared to a few years ago:

How on earth do people manage to keep a straight face when he's in the room?

In praise of 'cover versions'

2011-03-08T11:39:00.000Z

I think it's probably an evolutionary trait that as people get older they find more in the world that they disagree with, so that eventually death comes as a welcome release from a world gone unrecognisably mad.

I think I'm a long way off that yet because what's exercising me today is the modern orthodoxy that pop singers aren't really authentic unless they write their own songs. I suppose the thinking is that they can't give the same commitment to someone else's words, someone else's experience. But music - or any art - is all about communicating the experience of one person to another. If singers can't inhabit someone else's words and music, why should we, as listeners, be able to be moved by their experience?

Why, above all, should we expect the best singers to be - by happy coincidence - the best songwriters? And I'm not pining after a golden age of my youth in thinking this, but rather of a golden age before I was born, the days of tin pan alley when professional songwriters wrote a song on spec, or occasionally with a particular singer in mind, and the singers brought it to life.

It's too late to go back now, I know. We're stuck with an imperfect mixture of great singers and rubbish songs (I mean you, Amy - some of your songs are real stinkers) or average singers with superb songs (and my example here is from Brazil: Zeca Baleiro - a great compositor whose songs deserve a much better rendition than he can give).

I'd love to be able to clinch the argument by saying that Frank Sinatra never wrote his own songs, but I bloody hate Frank Sinatra.

Anyway, that's my current annoyance with these times we live in. Fortunately it's trivial (though not too trivial for a blog post - is anything?) and it's not enough to make me want to die, you'll be pleased, I hope, to hear.

Charlton 1 Carlisle 3

2011-03-02T10:48:00.001Z

Ditto, if not more so. Horrible defending and disjointed attacking. I think the problem going forward is that Chris Powell is trying to change the way the team is playing and they're not familiar with it yet. He seems to have banned the long hoick, which is a good thing, but the players aren't yet on top of the short-pass game, so are losing possession as often as they used to. Only now they're doing it at ground level, not head-height or higher. I'm such a mug I believe this will eventually come good.

But at the back, oh lord, what problems. Christian Dailly is finally showing signs of his age (37) despite his impressive fitness. Beside him we had Gary Doherty in the first half, 31 but never quick, and Jon Fortune in the second half (surprisingly, still only 30 but looking well off the pace). Rob Elliot had a poor game too, and with that sort of defence behind it the rest of the team can't be relaxed. Basically, there's never been an adequate replacement for Richard Rufus, and although it would be simplistic to blame Charlton's decline entirely on that, that's what I blame it on. Entirely.

The Baron's Speech

2011-02-28T13:32:00.001Z

A repeat of an old Round the Horne reminded me of Patrick Campbell, an Irish raconteur who used to appear quite often on television in the 1970s. Here's an example of his work.

So many things to cherish: Robert Robinson's famous scrapeover, the astonishing beauty of the young Joan Bakewell, and the embryo of evil that was Noel Edmonds.

But, of course, what's most striking is that BBC tv used to regularly feature a man with a pronounced stammer, with an attitude that said "You just be patient. This man is funny and charming and worth waiting for." It treated his "impediment" as just a way of speaking, no more an impediment than Frank Muir's rhotacism.

Campbell himself put it best:

From my earliest days I have enjoyed an attractive impediment in my speech. I have never permitted the use of the word 'stammer'. I can't say it myself.

When did you last see someone talking with a stammer on television who wasn't the subject of a documentary? Probably never, unless you're as old as me. Stammering has become defined as a disability. If that helps people get treatment (and if they want treatment) I suppose that's good, but it brings all the familiar downsides: the stammerer is pitied, not fully respected. If Campbell were to appear on television now - as a judge on Strictly Come Dancing, say - there'd be a feeling that he had no right to be there, that the BBC was being politically correct in forcing us to listen to him.

Perhaps - and I'm no pessimist - we really are in a crueler world these days.

Forgetting the things we like

2011-02-27T14:57:00.000Z

A few years ago I was sitting on a slow bus to London, and heard a young woman telling her boyfriend about how much she used to enjoy ceilidhs. She got very enthusiastic about it, but then said "But I don't go any more. It's not very cool, is it?" Her useless lump of a boyfriend completely ignored this open goal, and it was left to me to say "Don't worry about whether it's cool or not. If you like ceilidhs, and you obviously do, you ought to go to them. If your useless lump of a boyfriend won't go with you, you should dump him because he's obviously dangerously scared of new experiences, and, if I may say so, shows a distressingly small desire to do things that might make you happy. I'll go with you."

Of course I didn't say that, but I should have. Some of it at least. Why do people stop doing things that make them happy? I'm the last person to answer the question because I spent years not cycling, and now I've rediscovered something else I more or less stopped doing.

For a few years I was a pretty solid vegetarian, but then I started eating fish now and again, and then, fatally, I started going to Spain. There is a vegetarian restaurant in Barcelona, but it's a long way to go when you're in Extremadura, for example, where bits of pig are part of every thing you might be served. So I'm carnivorous again, and the arguments in favour of vegetarianism aren't strong enough for me to change back.

But recently I've discovered the joy of home-cooked vegetable curry again. The recipe is simple. Fry some onions and garlic in oil. Grind up a selection of spices, and fry them off in the oil. Take whatever vegetables you have - carrots, parsnip, potato, peas, cauliflower - and dice them. Fry them lightly in the oil then add a tin of tomatoes, and maybe some yogurt, and simmer till cooked. Sprinkle with garam masala and coriander leaves and serve with simple basmati rice. Quick, easy, and very tasty, so why did I stop cooking and eating it?

People are stupid would be my conclusion, but that's not fair. All the evidence so far points to a less flattering conclusion: I am stupid (and so is the woman on the bus, but at least she and I are not useless lumps like her boyfriend).

So the thought for the day is that we should all from time to time think about the things we used to love doing. Why don't we do them any more? What the hell is stopping us?

Charlton 1 Exeter 3

2011-02-20T12:00:00.000Z

What a disappointing day! This was the game for which seat prices had been reduced to £5. Consequently the ground was packed, but there wasn't much to entice the new or returning fans back. I suppose saying "the team has played worse than that and won several times this season" doesn't help, but it's true. The level of play was - on the whole - well above some of the games won during Parkinson's time, but there were familiar failings. Above all, a slow central defence. Gary Doherty, in particular, looked too easy to beat: every time he was challenged for a ball you feared the outcome. As there are only older and slower players available to replace him, this is worrying.

And the attack, despite making several opportunities, lacked the moments of inspiration needed to convert them to goals. I'm less worried about this: I would hope Chris Powell has the nous to bring out the spirit of adventure the forwards need. I also hope he noted how much better the team looked with Therry Racon on the field.

Amazing offer

2011-02-14T17:55:00.000Z

I don't carry adverts on this blog. Not out of moral qualms, of course, but simply because no-one wants to give me money to do so. So, think of this not as a nasty advert, trying to sell you something you don't want, but as an avuncular word-in-ear, pointing out something wonderful you might otherwise have missed.

All seats at Charlton's match against Exeter City on Saturday are on sale for just £5 - that's any seat, any age. The Valley's a great place to be at the moment, with a real feeling of something very lovely being born, and this is a very cheap way to be part of that. Exeter will be bringing loads of fans - who are usually very enthusiastic and noisy, so there should be a cracking atmosphere.

If you've ever thought about going (back) to Charlton, here's an easy way to do it. Details here.

Charlton 3 Peterborough 2

2011-02-13T14:35:00.000Z

Such a good feeling at the Valley yesterday. Let's ignore the football for a moment, and concentrate on the return of the feesh.

There's only one thing worse than not having a big screen and that's having a broken one. All season it's sat there like a reminder of better days, physical proof of the financial problems. And if you'd asked me if the club should spend money repairing it, I'd probably have said no - there are a lot more ways the money could be better spent. But the news in midweek that it was back in action brought a smile to my face, and it was really good to see it shining out in new improved definition. Before the game, it showed "This is the Valley", an inspirational and moving collage of clips from Charlton's history.

But the team didn't seem to have watched it until half time. Peterborough were by far the better team in the first half, and easily deserved their lead. Charlton had looked bad in all departments, with only Jose Semedo looking at all solid. For the second time in recent games the referee had to leave the game. It looked quite serious - he was stretchered off - and I can only hope that it's a good sign I can't find any news on what state he's in.

The second half saw Scott Wagstaff replaced by Pawel Abbott, who went on to give his best performance for Charlton. After about 10 minutes I realised that somehow Charlton were playing really well, and then they happily confirmed it with two goals in two minutes. A third seemed to have settled the game, but Charlton haven't changed that much, and Peterborough's second, in injury time, meant it stayed interesting to the final whistle.

So - Chris Powell maintains his 100% record as a manager (one out of one with Leicester, four out of four with Charlton), and really seems to be instilling confidence and effort into the team. There's only one thing better than winning, and that's winning - in some style - after being behind.

Greenland

2011-02-10T23:40:00.000Z

Theatre during the football season? That's unusual, but tickets were on sale for just £15 so it seemed worth a try. Although the indications weren't good: Greenland is a play by four different writers, based around the theme of global warming. The obvious dangers are that it'll be incoherent and/or ranty. But one of the writers is Moira Buffini - who wrote Welcome to Thebes - so that's a good thing. (The others are Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner and Jack Thorne - and I don't know anything about them.)

I found a couple of reviews before I went, but didn't read them closely. Michael Billington's lukewarm review gave 3 stars. I think he rarely goes lower than that. He says the play "stabs the conscience without offering a perceptible point of view". Once again (as with Thebes) he's looking for something that isn't necessarily what theatre should be offering (in his review of Thebes he lamented the "unresolved contradiction between free will and fate"). He also says it might have been helpful to create characters, then embody the debate in them.

You have to be open to a less traditional view of theatre to enjoy this play, I think. The structure is that there are four or five different stories interweaving:

(i) a labour party politician attends the Copenhagen conference
(ii) two women recount their differences over their attitudes
(iii) a young woman gives up her career as a trainee teacher to become an environmental activist
(iv) a young man applies to university; simultaneously his older self studies guillemots in Alaska
(v) a man takes part in a symbolic version of Deal or No Deal

Some stories are better than others. Number (i) is by Buffini, I'd guess; it has a lot of the same texture as Thebes and similarly melds the personal and political. Number (iv) is equally strong: a multilayered and quite moving story. Number (v) lost me fairly badly: I never thought not watching Deal or No Deal would be a source of regret.

The structure doesn't give the characters much room to develop, it's true, but I think they are sufficient for the purpose. It's a play of ideas and spectacle, and this sometimes makes it seem a bit impatient.

Charles Spencer in the Telegraph hated it. I think he has a problem with complexity, because it really isn't "two punishing hours of strident polemic". True, it doesn't give any houseroom to the notion that global warming isn't happening - that would be very much like saying disbelievers in gravity should contribute to the science curriculum - but it does explore the divergences of opinion as to how bad it will be, or what can be done about it. Didn't he notice that - for example - the politician wanted the climate scientist to be more forthright in his predictions? He's an idiot.

It's not by any means perfect, but it was an enjoyable, thought-provoking night at the theatre.

Inner city flight

2011-02-01T10:09:00.004Z

Actually, where I live is quite suburban. Just the other day, only two miles or so from here, I saw the blue flash of a kingfisher diving on the River Beck, and I've seen herons in Deptford. But it's turning a bit inner city right now, and the first clue was an innocuous looking letter from the Nationwide Building Society.

On first read, all I picked up was "we're closing your local branch" and to be honest, that doesn't affect me much. I can't remember the last time I went there. I've got a couple of old accounts, dwindling away in these low-interest days, but that's it.

But hang on, the suggested alternative branches are in Beckenham and Eltham - both at least 3 miles way. Why not Lewisham? Oops, they're closing that as well. They're closing all the branches in inner Southeast London, in fact. I knocked up a google map to illustrate this. The blues are the branches that are closing.

View Nationwide closures in a larger map
As you can see, there's going to be a big gap where there's no Nationwide branch. (Oh how ironic that name is.) So I read the letter again.

Nationwide is a mutual with no shareholders and our profits are re-invested for the benefit of all our members. That's why we have to ensure than any activity we undertake is profitable and effective in generating value for the benefit of all our members.

So, what they're actually saying is that not having shareholders means they have to act exactly as if they did have shareholders. And so branches that have unprofitable "transaction patterns" have to go. Doesn't really work for the benefit of those members, does it?

The phrase "transaction patterns" is tell-tale. I imagine it means there are a lot of low-value transactions, people, possibly elderly and poor, drawing out the week's spending money. I'm sure there isn't much profit in that, but what's happened to the concept of mutuality?

I've stuck with the Nationwide partly because of its mutual status (and from seeing what happened to customer service with Abbey National when it became a bank). Whenever I had the chance I voted against demutualisation. Now it all seems a sham.

And worse. Inner city decline in America in the 20th century was partly caused by the practice of "redlining" - denying financial services to certain neighbourhoods. With a lack of investment, businesses fail, and the neighbourhood as a whole gets poorer. Loan sharks (legal and illegal) move in. In America the neighbourhoods that were typically redlined were those with a high proportion of black and poor residents. Does that remind you of anywhere? Nationwide is essentially pulling out of a poor part of London where there just happens to be a high proportion of people from ethnic minorities.

Naturally, I'll be all but closing my accounts with Nationwide. I'll keep a little money there so that if demutualisation is ever proposed again, I can vote for it.

Meanwhile, this:

"Sorry, we couldn't find a policing area that matched your search."
Oh great.

Other bloggers on Nationwide:
Seven and Seven Eighths
853
The Greenwich Phantom

The Dalai Lama again

2011-01-24T12:47:00.001Z

When I previously posted about the Dalai Lama, I kind of assumed the vacuity of his tweet was an unfortunate one-off. But someone else has retweeted another, similar, fortune-cookie motto, and so I've gone to the source. Here's a selection of some of his wisdom.

With the realization of ones own potential and self-confidence in ones ability, one can build a better world.

Because our own human existence is so dependent on the help of others our need for love lies at the very foundation of our existence.

We need a genuine sense of responsibility and a sincere concern for the welfare of others.

By going beyond your own problems and taking care of others, you gain inner strength, self-confidence, courage, and a greater sense of calm.

There's one of these every day, eagerly (I assume) read by 1.25 million followers, and frequently retweeted.

It feels a bit like kicking a puppy to criticise. Obviously these are worthy sentiments, and even if you can question the truth or even the meaningfulness of some ("If we develop a good heart, then whether the field is science, agriculture or politics, since motivation is important these will all improve") you can't help hoping they're true and that people become better from reading them.

But it's all so unbelievably trite and unproblematic. The worrying thing is that the Dalai Lama's thoughts fit so well into the 140 character limit. Of all the things Twitter does extremely well, it really doesn't work as a guide to big moral questions.

Charlton 2 Plymouth Argyle 0

2011-01-22T19:12:00.003Z

Here's how it works. In five and a bit years' time, Chris Powell's Charlton are back in the Premier League, and strongly in the running for a place in Europe. The stadium capacity has been expanded to 40,000 but there's still a waiting list for season tickets, because the team is playing with ruthless beauty, and more than half the squad are local boys, products of the Academy.

That's when 40,000 people will claim to remember being at the Valley for the first game in the new era.

Maybe ... but in the meantime, what really happened?

The general view was that the first half was a bit flat, and it's true that there were only a few chances at either end, but I thought Charlton were playing better than they usually have at the Valley this season. They had the patience to hold on to the ball, and a bit more than usual competitiveness in the challenge. And they didn't panic when all that possession didn't bring a goal.

The second half saw Plymouth a little more adventurous, and it developed into a quite exciting game. Scott Wagstaff's goal was a gift from Plymouth - an underpowered backpass let him slip the ball neatly past the stranded keeper. From then on Charlton's play grew stronger and more confident, and Nathan Eccleston's last minute goal sealed the points.

The game itself was unimportant in some ways. It was only when I got on the train at Lewisham and saw Plymouth fans that I had realised today was more than just a party. The welcome for Chris Powell was as warm as anyone could expect. I wonder if the Plymouth fans could begin to understand it.

Powell was a dapper figure in his elegant suit, still as fit as ever, it seemed. He looked strangely relaxed as the game went on, standing well back from the edge of his technical area, as if realising that once the players are on the pitch, there isn't much he can do. When he made substitutions, you could see him smiling and encouraging the subs, an arm around their shoulder. Surely that sort of warmth and camaraderie must motivate the players to do well for him.

Of course, we'll see, over the rest of this season and beyond. It was a very promising start, though, and, like most of the 40,000 people who will one day turn out to have been at the match, I came away very happy.

Karishmeh

2011-01-15T10:22:00.001Z

Who says modern life is rubbish? Well, keep your head down, Damon, because here's an example of something great that couldn't have happened even 10 years ago.

Listening to Radio 3 last week, I was struck by the voice of the announcer, who I'd never heard before. The accent was a weird blend of Irish and, I guessed, Indian. The Radio 3 website confirmed that her name was Karishmeh Felfeli - a spelling which I probably wouldn't have guessed. So a quick google finds she has a wikipedia entry, which confirms she was indeed born in India (in Pune) but has lived and worked in Ireland for some time as a musician with a wide range of interests.

Follow the links and you find her Glenn Gould Project, or Sarabande, which is largely self-explanatory but covers a wide range of musical topics, and her show for Dublin radio, Offbeat, with a complete online archive of shows, including one dedicated to a Belfast dog that had been impounded by the local authority for looking a bit dodgy. She has also spun off into a blog about animal welfare. Clearly, a fascinating woman.

There's so much interesting stuff here that I have only begun to explore, and all of this springing from an intriguing accent heard on a rainy afternoon. Modern life is brilliant.

Chris Powell - head and heart

2011-01-14T09:46:00.001Z

Although we're still waiting for the formal announcement, it seems likely that Chris Powell will today become Charlton's new manager. For those who don't know, he was Charlton's left-back in three different spells, playing around 250 games. More important that the stats, though, was his incredible charisma and charm. At every club he played for he became a fans' favourite: he just emanates topblokeness, and people who've been lucky enough to meet him (such as ChicagoAddick) confirm that he is simply wonderful. One thing for sure is that when he is introduced as manager next Saturday, the Valley will be a bewildering cauldron of man-love. Can you imagine - a stadium full of football fans worshipping a black man from Lambeth, whose first team was Palace!

But not everyone's happy with the appointment and I can understand why. He's inexperienced. This is his first managerial appointment, although he's been getting praise as a coach, and no-one really knows what kind of team he'll field. Is he just too nice? How will he deal with troublesome players when the charm doesn't work? Can the club afford to take the risk? The only good reasons the head can give are that he's presumably cheaper than an experienced manager, and that he will at least give a short-term boost to attendances.

I'd had all those thoughts before but yesterday, as the rumours grew firmer, I found myself grinning with excitement. If he does well, if he leads the team to promotion, won't that be a much better feeling than getting there with Phil Parkinson, or some other manager who's slumming it in the third division to resurrect a faltering career?

Football, thank goodness, isn't about always doing the sensible thing. If it was, I'd be supporting a team that wins something occasionally, or Arsenal. Following a club like Charlton is foolish and romantic - it's daring to hope against expectation that some dreams come true. And there aren't many dreams bigger and better than seeing Chris Powell leading Charlton to glory.

Cycling update

2011-01-07T15:07:00.000Z

All the snow in December really cut down the cycling I could do. Even when a quick ride was possible, the temperature was so low that I barely got warmed up before it was time to finish, and then all the stretching needed to stop these old limbs of mine seizing up meant that all I could really do was remind my muscles of what it's like. Meanwhile, of course, the Christmas food'n'booze was transforming itself into fat: useful supplies for the hungry depths of winter if I were a caveman, but a bit of a nuisance in the age of Ocado.

One thing I noticed is that the tyres were a bit spongy, so earlier this week bought myself a proper track pump. I've never had something like this before, but it's brilliant. About five strokes and the tyres are pumped up to 55 psi. Oh, but then the rain! So I've been stressing out watching the sky until today, when the rain stopped and I was able to get out. (It's also quite a bit milder.)

Even my unexercised legs felt the difference in the firmer tyres and by the time I'd warmed up I was able to use one gear higher than I'd previously done. Still only a short ride as the sky was, in James Joyce's dad's words, as uncertain as a baby's bottom. Tomorrow is supposed to be dryer still, so maybe at last I'll get out for a longer ride again.

Sorry that this post is, for regular cyclists, a statement of the bleedin obvious. But, hey, motorists - maybe your tyres need more air too. It would be a really simple way to improve your mpg. And no, you can't borrow my pump.

Charlton 2 Swindon 4

2011-01-04T13:29:00.001Z

You can pretty much re-read my comments on the Brighton game, except that Swindon, though competent, weren't nearly as good to watch as Brighton. But Charlton did their very best to make a mediocre team look good. All the Swindon goals were the product of defensive errors, with even the usually solid as a rock Christian Dailly giving away the second goal.

The scoreline flattered Charlton. According to people who've had the nerve to look at the replay, the first goal could have been ruled out on three separate grounds. Another bad refereeing decision, which I feel obliged to note even though it might have worked in Charlton's favour. Charlton's second goal deserved a better reception than it got: a brilliant acrobatic volley from Pawel Abbott, but too late to change anything.

But, as after the Brighton game, you have to ask what's going wrong, particularly at home games. Why is the team morale so brittle? I didn't comment in detail on the Walsall game - I couldn't bring myself to think about it again, but this is two consecutive home games when there hasn't been any evidence of team spirit, and only patches of individual commitment. That Brighton debacle seemed to provoke a bit of a renaissance, and for a while my gloom in the comments on that game looked overstated, so I won't repeat that. I still don't think that replacing the manager is the answer, but he has to change. At times he can bring out a superb team performance, but he seems to have difficulty finding a plan B. He's still relatively inexperienced, and maybe he needs a partner who can challenge his ideas. For example, someone else noted that whenever Kyel Reid got the ball, Swindon put two defenders on him, effectively taking him out of the game. A lot of teams do this. Same thing happened with Lloyd Sam last season, but Parkinson still doesn't seem to have found a way of exploiting the gaps this must open elsewhere in the defence.

The club now has new owners. We know very little about them, but they must have some money. I hope they don't take the obvious route of getting more players in. I honestly believe the squad, man for man, is up to winning the third division. But at the moment, we're not seeing the best of them.

Luckily, he saw the funny side

2010-12-28T12:46:00.000Z

I don't like Ricky (Jim Royle) Tomlinson. Never really known why, but at last I've a kind of reason. For Christmas a well-meaning relative has given me Tomlinson's book Football My Arse! a collection of football-related anecdotes that declares itself "The Funniest Football Book You'll Ever Read". Hmm.

Footballers' wives are notoriously protective of their husbands when watching them play, and there are many instances of them getting involved in slanging matches with spectators having a go at their man. Judith Hurst was infamous for standing up for her World Cup hero Geoff, and it was rumoured she had whacked a loud-mouthed critic with her handbag. I wonder if she hit him three times for a hat-trick?

A lot of the stories are like this, pointless and dull. Even the once-good, once-fresh stories ("Oh jaysus and begorrah, Mr Best, where did it all go wrong?") lie like corpses on the page. Scattered Jim Royle-isms can't hide the fact this is a cut'n'paste job of cynical opportunism (originally published @ £10 for the Christmas 2005 market).

In his introduction, Tomlinson indignantly has a go at the way football's run:

Fans need to make the point that they are being ripped off.

Quite so. Fortunately, my relative - and I am grateful, honestly! - bought the book from a charity shop. I imagine the shelves were full of copies of it. Actually, the banality of some of the anti-anecdotes is quite addictive. Here's another one to be getting on with:

Former Newcastle manager and club captain Joe Harvey was a fanatical gardener. One night he came home to find a burglar in his house. Joe chased the intruder out of the back door, and as he pursued him across the garden shouted, 'Whatever you do, don't tread on my roses.'
When he gave a player a trial after a strong recommendation from the club scout, Harvey wrote dismissively on his report card: 'Can't trap a medicine ball.'

Did the earth move as much for you as for me?

2010-12-22T11:58:00.000Z

Another example of things you thought you knew not always being true. According to the Guardian today a minor earthquake in Cumbria measured 3.5 on the Richter scale. Except it probably didn't.

The Telegraph got it right. In one of those annoying things scientists do, they've begun classifying earthquakes according to the Moment magnitude scale, which is better because it measures the actual movement of land (I think). Apparently this has been the preferred scale since the 80s.

The Daily Mail (no link - you know you want to thank me), the Sun (ditto), even the Independent also got it wrong. How come I (and the Guardian and Independent) have never heard of it?

There are two big mistakes in the MMS. First, it was calibrated so that it pretty nearly matches the Richter scale. So the Cumbria quake probably would measure about 3.5 on the Richter scale, if anyone measured it that way. You can understand why they'd calibrate it that way, but it does allow for a certain confusion. Media can continue to refer to the Richter scale, without getting the figure seriously wrong. They get the official statement from Her Majesty's Earthquake Inspectorate (Offshake) read the figure of 3.5 and see something about magnitude, so assume it's the number of Richters.

The bigger mistake is that it hasn't got a memorable name. Even Sirlordsugar's hapless nitwits could come up with something better than "moment magnitude scale". It was devised by scientists called Hanks and Kanamori. Scientists estimate that up to 95% of all earthquakes happen in Japan, so why not just call it the Kanamori scale? Sorry, Prof Hanks, but we don't want confusion with light hollywood comedies to blur the picture.

100 per cent at best. Sometimes. That's all. You hear me?

2010-12-16T10:42:00.000Z

I'm sure I'm not the first person to say that The Apprentice has crossed the line into self-parody, but I can precisely identify the moment when it collapsed under the weight of its own post-ironic knowingness.

Last night Margaret Mountford was brought back for the interviews. Maybe because she's no longer in business she now doesn't have time for meaningless biz-speak. So, when one of the candidates claimed to be a major cog, she pointed out that it doesn't mean anything. The programme would be so much shorter if there were someone around all the time, pinging like a microwave every time someone says something meaningless.

"I'll never give less than 110% (ping!)"

"I'm passionate (ping!) about driving this business (ping!) forward (ping! ping!)."

"Perhaps she looks a little ... corporate (ping!)" (It's odd how "corporate" has become a Bad Thing this year. When you consider that the candidates still all dress like the most unimaginative office drones you've ever seen throwing up at Liverpool St on a Friday night...)

"I've got a field full of ponies (PING PING PING!)"

Perhaps it would have taken Sirlordalan less than 10 weeks to discover that Stuart Baggs was indeed "full of shit".

Anyway, good for Margaret but here's where it all went wrong. In the interview with Jamie, he mentoined his exam grades and she predictably raised that left eyebrow. Fair enough, but even archer than the brow was the music that accompanied it, a syncopated staccato string passage that climaxed with a fast plink of percussion at that point. (You can see this around 20'30" on iplayer). It's the musical equivalent of an elbow in the ribs, some tedious git going "look, look, there goes the eyebrow", the money shot that invites us all to agree Margaret's left eyebrow is the funniest, most watercooler-moment worthy feature of our Wednesday night. Finally, the editing and the music have closed out the prospect that we can form our own opinions. We will think what they want us to.

Ugh. Fortunately watercoolers have no part in my life (hence this blog) but this, my first post on The Apprentice, may well be the last.

Making his debut in this blog ... it's the Dalai Lama!

2010-12-13T10:37:00.000Z

Once again I'm bottom-feeding off the scraps of twitter, but it's a cold foggy day, so why not? Here's what the Dalai Lama has said, which more than a hundred people have re-tweeted:

I don't think human affection and compassion are just religious concerns; they're indispensable factors in our day-to-day lives.

Who on earth does think that human affection and compassion are just religious concerns? This comment is too trite to make Thought for the Day.

Charlton 0 Walsall 1

2010-12-13T09:53:00.000Z

Some things are best forgotten. After intensive therapy, I now believe that I spent Sunday afternoon in my nice warm living room watching a particularly bitchy Come Dine With Me marathon.

Stephen Neary, political correctness and petitions

2010-12-09T11:57:00.000Z

The story
Stephen (or Steven) Neary is a 20 year old autistic young man. Last year he went into respite care for a few days while his father was unwell. His behaviour while in respite led the Council (Hillingdon) to keep him in for assessment. The care workers had logged several "assaults" - which Stephen's father says were harmless attempts to gain attention. Stephen is still detained under a procedure called DOLS (Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards). This is intended to protect someone who may be a danger to himself (not to other people). Because it's not covered by the Mental Health Act (because autism is not a mental illness) there is no right of appeal to a tribunal. The Council is currently proposing to send Stephen to an assessment centre in Wales.

Political correctness
The term 'politically correct' has never meant much, apart from being a general label of dislike. In the blog article on this, "Anna Raccoon" says:

Now the Positive Behaviour Unit is a mighty politically correct place. Tap someone on the shoulder to attract their attention, and they don’t think ‘that is how Stephen has always attracted my attention since he was a child’ – they say – ‘he touched me, that is an assault’ and promptly record it in their daily log…..

And I think it's at that point that the term has finally lost all meaning. There may be all sorts of reasons to criticise the Unit's actions, but if we recall that 'politically correct' was originally about actively protecting and promoting the rights of minorities and the powerless, the behaviour of the Unit as described here is as far as you can get from that.

Petition
Nevertheless, I've signed the petition calling on Hillingdon to let Stephen return to his father, and posted a link on Facebook suggesting my friends there do so too. But I have reservations.

First, I know that councils don't keep people in any form of residential care for fun. It is incredibly expensive for one thing, and by and large council staff aren't ogres. Councils generally can't and don't give their reasons for this sort of decision because they have a duty to keep the client's confidence.

Second, who am I to give an opinion? All I know about this case I've read from a partisan blog. It feels wrong, certainly, but I'm in no sense qualified to say that Stephen would be better off at home.

Maybe I'm still too contaminated by my old job, but here's my more considered view.

There is apparently no tribunal that can review DOLS decisions. That seems wrong and the system should be amended. In the meantime, councils ought to establish their own independent review system, probably containing representatives of health services and voluntary agencies, who can consider each case in full and in private. If there were a petition to ask for that, I'd sign it, but for now, I have to sign the petition that assumes I and anyone who's read about Stephen knows enough about him to say what's right.

So, readers, whether you sign the petition or not is up to you. But please don't say this is "pc gone mad". It really isn't.

As bad as it looks

2010-12-08T11:12:00.000Z

Some minor furore on Twitter yesterday about this tweet from @UKHomeOffice:

Contribute your views to our consultation into how we can best reduce the number of students who come to the UK.

There was a link to the Home Office website, where this consultation is taking place.

There's no doubt that the twitter message is openly xenophobic, not to say racist. It is clearly based on the presumption that foreign students are a bad thing. Numerous twitter replies have pointed out that overseas students make a positive contribution to the UK economy, and that their fees can subsidise those of other students. On a less tangible level they push up the standards in universities, and ought to be a major part in spreading a good image of this country around the world.

The Government, I'm sure, would say that it's not how it looks. Its proposal is targeted at non-degree students, because such students have a record of overstaying their visas. So the easiest way to stop them overstaying is to stop them getting here in the first place (rather than, say, enforcing visas better - but that would require an efficient and effective Home Office, and we haven't had one of those for decades.)

Whatever. The twitter message and the only slightly different message on the Home Office website sends out a nasty message about this country. At the very best it's careless, but as so often carelessness reveals the true intentions, the underlying prejudice. So if you're tempted to say it's not as bad as it looks, I'd say how it looks is how it is. Someone at the Home Office is happy to spread the message that forriners is bad.

Ur Bubles

2010-12-07T11:09:00.000Z

Surprisingly, these people appear to have tiresome crooner Michael Buble and his family coming to dinner. I don't think they'll go a second time if a ready meal is all they get.

And on the subject of spelling here's a flyer that came through my door recently. I'm currently reading Dostoevsky's Бесы, translated by Pevear and Volohkonsky as Demons. When Constance Garnett translated it, she called it The Possessed. Critics have always questioned that decision, but it could have been worse.

The war on motorists

2010-11-24T09:40:00.000Z

As Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Littlejohn would no doubt tell you, speed cameras are part of the war on motorists, a cynical money-making scheme completely unrelated to road safety. So any reports saying the opposite must come from some tree-hugging, sandal-wearing cyclists, yes?

I'm not sure what the RAC Foundation does, but it's just published a report saying in effect that speed cameras save around 800 lives a year, and don't raise a lot of revenue for central or local government. But what do they know? And why should we take the word of an emeritus professor of transport studies?

Fellow loonies the AA have said much the same thing.

With supposed friends ganging up like this, who's going to support the beleaguered motorists? The Daily Mail, of course. I've done the research so you don't have to. It has quite rightly completely ignored these two reports, once again refusing to cloud the pure waters of prejudice with the bile of information.

Charl'n 1 Brizzle Rovers 1

2010-11-23T23:54:00.000Z

I hate it when I do consecutive posts about Charlton. Although I'm grateful for the fact that my Charlton posts attract other addicks to the other posts, this isn't a football blog. It's just that I don't do many other interesting things to blog about. If I had an Old Vic season ticket, this blog would be full of play reviews. Actually, that'd probably alienate more people, especially if the reviews were about Brecht. But during the non-summer months Charlton is a regular feature in my life and so it turns up here with dull regularity.

An odd game tonight. Bristol Rovers were really poor, lacking skill, enterprise or industry. So why did they manage to take the lead? We could blame their brilliant goalkeeper, but goalkeepers' raison d'etre is to be brilliant. Rob Elliot's done the same job for Charlton often enough. The referee? Useless, naturally, but I'd have to say he was even-handed in his uselessness. The usual suspect is Charlton's defence, and they're about as innocent as O J Simpson.

But also tiredness, I think. In the second half Charlton looked lacklustre. They just weren't trying. Some of the ennui that we saw against Barnet was there, but couldn't be blamed on the flat atmosphere. Rovers' goal (and maybe Akpo Sodje's arrival as a substitute) reinvigorated the team. A messy goal gave a result that was fair.

In the third division, and in two cup competitions, there are a lot of games. Even as a fan, I feel tired after three games in ten days. I hope the team has the day off tomorrow. That's what I'll be doing.

Charlton 3 Yeovil 2

2010-11-20T18:29:00.000Z

This, on the other hand, was a thoroughly enjoyable match, in spite of almost everything. Main problem was that Charlton weren't very good, while Yeovil were much better than anyone expected. Another appalling refereeing display could have ruined the match, with numerous dodgy decisions and a generally obstructive approach to any football, but in the end it probably turned the game in Charlton's favour.

Yeovil chose to attack the south end in the first half, and it soon was clear that they intended to press for an early goal. They were lively and fast, and didn't deserve to be behind after 10 minutes, when Johnnie Jackson scored. They weren't behind for long, scoring a horribly easy goal through a stationary Charlton defence. Therry Racon restored the lead with a well-taken shot before half time.

In the second half they again exerted more pressure. One of the ref's dodgy decisions gave Yeovil a free kick just outside the penalty area. It shouldn't have caused any trouble but Gary Doherty managed to score an own-goal.

Yeovil then were clearly in the ascendant until Christian Dailly was sent off. A hotly contested decision. Apparently the ref thought he had raised his elbow. I didn't see it, but it was on the far side of the pitch.

Reduced to 10, Charlton actually started playing with new enthusiasm, and on one of the attacks, Paul Huntington pulled down Akpo Sodje who was clear on goal. It was a clear red card and penalty, which Johnnie Jackson converted, making him the top-scorer. Although Yeovil never gave up, they had by now lost most of their early threat and Charlton saw the game out for a win that was all the more enjoyable for being so unexpected.

The curse of a literal mind (2)

2010-11-18T14:11:00.000Z

Our dear mayor, doing something sensible for once and not giving even more subsidy to riverbus services, has apparently said

There is a limit to the amount of taxpayers money that you can pour into the River Thames.

Only if you use coins, though. Notes and cheques would surely wash away eventually.

Charlton 1 Unlucky Barnet 0

2010-11-16T23:39:00.000Z

Really didn't enjoy this game. With the North Stand closed and a less than 5000 crowd, there was a terrible atmosphere, and the small but noisy bunch of Barnet supporters won the battle of song.

And their team should have won the match. But for some wonderful saves from Rob Elliot, they would have. A super goal from Kyel Reid turned out to be enough, but the second half was painful. This wasn't the same team that triumphed at Peterborough, and that's my comfort: they didn't fit together well, that's all, and Saturday's team against Yeovil will be the team that was the team.

Meanwhile tonight, the headline on BBC Football is "Scotland overpower Faroe Islands". Is that really the extent of Scotland's ambitions these days?

The curse of a literal mind

2010-11-13T11:18:00.000Z

It's probably a very mild form of autism, but I have a very literal mind. This picture, from an Aldi mail-out, causes me almost physical pain. I suppose this is what people with perfect pitch feel when they hear a note played slightly flat, or what everyone feels when they watch the Xfactor.

So when the Guardian says today that "Lionel Blue started life as a bitter, angry, Marxist atheist" I can't help thinking he was a very precocious baby.

And in another story, about a Hindu dairy farm, a photo caption says the farm's cows "retire from milk-making at 15 to concentrate on fertiliser production." I think I know what that means.

Early morning evangelism

2010-11-09T21:46:00.000Z

Every morning from 5 on Premier Christian Radio you can, if you're insomniac like I sometimes am, hear two hours of four of America's finest evangelical protestant preachers. You can learn some amazing things. Just this morning one of the preachers made the clear point that "there is no evidence that humans evolve into angels". He was arguing against "angelmania" - a growing body of belief in USA that angels are everywhere, acting on our behalf. It was good to know that there are some beliefs that are too crazy for him to believe. Of course, he means something special by "evidence" - he means there is no biblical authority for this view. All these guys generally believe that the bible is the word of God, to be understood literally.

Or do they? Another of the preachers, Pastor Chuck, fielded a listener's enquiry. In Ecclesiastes it says the earth will endure forever, whereas somewhere in the New Testament it's clearly stated that God will create a new earth and heaven. Which one is true? Pastor Chuck audibly wriggled, and said that Ecclesiastes must be understood figuratively. Uh-oh. I foresee he might have trouble renewing his fundamentalist library ticket.

One unexpected effect of my early morning listening has been to conclude that Catholicism is prettier than Protestantism. Protestantism relies on two basic tenets: sola scriptura and sola fide. The first means that only scripture gives God's word (so any later prophets are false), and the second means that only faith can bring salvation. The first tenet runs into trouble when you find contradictions like Pastor Chuck's example. I don't deny that one of the statements might be meant to be understood figuratively, but who decides?

But it's the second tenet that's more problematic, and makes protestantism seem ugly. Catholicism, by contrast, stresses the value of good works, and so addresses people's relations with each other. These dawn-chorus preachers only address people's relations with God. So it's wrong to be gay, not because you're corrupting someone else but because you're betraying God's intention for you. Salvation depends just on your faith. Everyone is a sinner, no-one deserves grace, but a sincere faith wipes away the sin. Belief, for these protestants, is quite plainly a means to be saved, which actually comes to sound quite selfish. It's never suggested that belief should change your behaviour towards other people. There is no mention, ever, of charity, for example.

I can't see the point of a religion that doesn't attempt to make people act better towards each other. For all its faults, Catholicism seems much more concerned with this than the kind of Protestantism I hear these early mornings.

Charlton 1 Sheffield Wednesday 0

2010-10-30T20:00:00.000+01:00

A very encouraging performance. Or it would be encouraging if it was a normal team. A team that has some degree of consistency, which builds on its successes. So far this season, Charlton aren't that team. But I certainly feel a lot better than I did this time two weeks ago.

What's working now? Some players seem to be getting steadily better. Prime example is Paul Benson. In his first few games he looked like one of the many forwards who've failed at Charlton. Maybe he wasn't quite fit, or maybe it was lack of confidence, but he's a different player now.

In midfield today we saw Semedo and Racon playing more creatively than they have for a while. In recent games they've tended to merge into the back line, which actually weakens the defence by making it too square, while also making it more likely that the team will use the long ball to try to get the ball forwards. Racon had the best game I've seen him play for ages - really getting involved and often finding the right pass to turn on an attack.

Wednesday were pretty mediocre, really, and any chances they had tended to come from some sloppy defending. Their keeper was Charlton oldboy, Nicky Weaver, who never really won the hearts of the fans. He looks slimmer these days, and was responsible for three or four brilliant saves.

The third division is stupidly tight, and this win put Charlton into a play-off place. Considering how badly they've played at times this season, that's almost incredible.

Bad shopfronts

2010-10-28T10:28:00.000+01:00

Now that I'm out and about a bit, I might try going with the theme of Bad Shopfronts, and to give you an idea of what I mean by that, here's my picture, taken from a bus, of a shop in Camberwell.

I've no idea if it's a good shop or not, and I do like the way they've got a ramp at the entrance, but that signage is just hilarious. Obviously, only primary schools should be allowed to use comic sans anyway, but the construction of the sign says "Amateurish" rather than "Basic". Then the carefully colour-matched "HEALTH FOOD" in chubby letters that suggest a Victorian concept where healthy=fat.

I'm sure there's loads of examples out there, and as usual, I'll be happy to feature any examples my dear readers like to send in.

Return of the shopping list

2010-10-27T18:08:00.000+01:00

I'm sorry I've not featured any shopping lists for a while. Two main reasons: they do seem to be much rarer than they used to be; and my printer/scanner has packed up. I could photograph the lists in situ on the trolleys but that would be even more bizarre behaviour than furtively slipping them into a pocket.

Thankfully, Clive has sent me the list you see here. He comments: "Seemed daft printing out a list and then just buying a few items including hard tomatoes." But let's apply those failing powers of investigation. This list was printed on the back of a letter to someone at the Darby & Joan club so my guess is that this is a kind of checklist for people - volunteeers - who do shopping for Darby or Joan.

The letter includes banking details for a local choir, which I have sold to a friend of mine in West Africa. (He's the nephew of the former minister of defence.)

Snappy title still being focus-grouped

2010-10-19T13:40:00.000+01:00

You'd be surprised how many people have asked me How's the cycling going? Nevertheless, here's an update.

Just so you know the background, I used to be a really committed cyclist. I've cycled from Land's End to John O'Groats, I'll have you know, and from Dieppe to Paris. But for some reason I stopped cycling about 15 or 20 years ago. As time went on, I began to think I'd never have the legs or the nerve to cycle, especially in London, again.

But I honestly think the streets are kinder for cyclists now. There's more traffic, certainly, and there aren't any quiet backstreets any more. What on earth do people find to do that keeps them driving along dozy residential avenues at all times of day? But there are more cycle lanes around, and even if they aren't always directly useful, they are an emblem that gives cyclists confidence and gives drivers a reminder. There's much more use of shared space with pedestrians, and a feeling that cyclists aren't actually a threat.

The best thing that's happened, speaking locally, is the Waterlink Way. It's a network of paths, tracks and cycle routes that lies alongside the Ravensbourne system. Just 100m from my house I can be on a path that can take me to Beckenham or Deptford in relatively car-free safety. The Ravensbourne system is one of the few London rivers to run on the surface, and it's been extensively remodelled in recent years to give it a more natural appearance.

North of Lewisham Station, redevelopment has been designed so that there are segregated cycle routes. This means that the route from Lewisham to Deptford, passing through Brookmill Park, is one of the nicest parts.

Yet it's not all perfect. My local Tesco's, for example, is the perfect cycling distance away, and if I wanted to pop out and get something in the evening, it would be ideal. But its cycle racks are tucked away in a dark corner, unsupervised. I'm not going to use those. On the other hand, if you're cycling you're more likely to use small local shops, where you can leave the bike outside for the few minutes you're inside. That's a good thing.

Every shopping parade in Lewisham seems to have good cycle racks outside. Petts Wood, though, where I was this morning, is rubbish for this.

Physically, it's still a challenge. Relatively gentle hills can defeat me, and these old muscles of mine are taking a long time to get the strength back. But it will happen.

And winter's coming. So far, autumn's been gentle, and I've been able to cycle a bit almost every day. In the wind and the rain of November, it might not be so great.

Charlton 0 Brighton 3

2010-10-16T17:43:00.003+01:00

The fourth goal doesn't count because I, like many others, had left by then. Three-nil's bad enough, isn't it?

Trying to be positive, Brighton were excellent. They played a neat, patient passing game, with some exquisite crosses. Gus Poyet has clearly got them well-drilled and organised, and they thoroughly deserve to be top of the table. They are a template of what a third division team can be, with presumably even less resources than Charlton. They haven't even got a proper ground at the moment.

It's hard to be positive about Charlton. They weren't as bad in the first half as they were in the second. That's about it. Oh, here's another thing: because they had clearly lost by 4:40 I was able to get a much earlier train home than usual (so I'm currently watching someone else bumbling around and falling over a lot. Norman Wisdom, but I've never found him funny either).

You'd hope Charlton would look at Brighton and learn something. You'd hope so, but not with much conviction. They don't seem capable of learning anything this season, from either wins (where the lesson is, keep doing that) or defeats (which ought to suggest you need to do something different).

(Stanley Unwin has now turned up in the Norman Wisdom film, talking his brand of gibberish. It's like one of Alan Pardew's post-match press conferences. Sounds like language but doesn't quite mean anything.)

Inevitably, there will be calls to sack the manager. I suspect that's financially impossible, so we'll just have to get used to a season of underperformance, and the financial disaster that another season in this division will be. All we have is a choice of flavour of financial disaster. Told you it was hard to be positive.

Unbelievable

2010-10-08T10:06:00.000+01:00

Something I never thought I'd say: BBC3 has some of the best programmes on television. Something I thought I'd never do: last night I watched BBC3 for two solid hours without wanting to exterminate all young people and all tv executives who think they have the attention span of a goldfish who's watched too much Friends.

The first programme was Are You Fitter Than A Pensioner? It's pretty formulaic and describing it makes it sound like the usual patronising tosh. Four young unfit Brits are taken to America where they spend a week in the company of elderly fitness freaks. At the end of the week, they must face the Americans in some sporting competition, and they come back having learned a lot about themselves.

But it works really well. The first shocking thing is how unfit some of the young people are. Last night one of the women, whose real age is 20, was assessed of having a "fitness age" of 75. (Actually the concept of "fitness age" is a bit debatable, but let's pass on that for now - these kids are seriously unfit.) The second shocking thing is how nice they turn out to be. Most frequently they start the show as sullen lumps of resentment, but under the carpet love-bombing of the Americans (who obviously treat them as the grandchildren they'd like to see more often) they blossom into confident, determined individuals. By the end of the week they maybe haven't learned that much about themselves, except how unfit they are in years, but they have learned to take some responsibility for themselves. They also seem to gain knowledge of and respect for older people. Altogether, thoroughly heart-warming.

After that, a visit to the Democratic Republic of Congo, a strong contender for the title of the worst place in the world. Stacey Dooley, the presenter, apparently featured in an earlier BBC3 programme investigating third world clothes production, and the encounter with children in sweatshops turned her into a campaigner for children's rights. In DRC there's a UN-assisted programme to demobilise child soldiers - children who've been kidnapped by militias, and brainwashed and dehumanised into cheap killing machines. I wouldn't go to DRC in any circumstances, but I'm a chicken, and Stacey Dooley, though the fear is obvious at times in her very expressive face, isn't. She went to a camp where the rescued boys are given rehabilitation. Part of this is drawing pictures of what they've seen and done, and acting it out, using tree-branches rather than rifles. She mentioned the difficulty of being among this group of boys, who have all killed, and probably have all raped. There was the obligatory happy story, where we saw one boy taken back to his overjoyed family, but it couldn't dispel the overall impression that DRC is hell on earth.

But again, there's a heartwarming basis to the whole thing. Before she became involved in children's rights, Stacey Dooley was obsessed by fashion. We oldies might have considered her trivial and shallow. Somehow, though, she has found this enormous courage and compassion and put it to good use. She comes across as quite naive, looking younger than her 23 years, but that's her strength: her honest, unspun reaction to the horrors she sees and hears is powerful.

BBC3 is considered a youth channel, and I'm far too old to be watching it, but I don't recall any "grown-up" channel covering this issue. Next week, Stacey is going to Cambodia, to investigate child prostitution. Obviously, I'm a little bit in love with her. But watch it, and I defy you not to love her too.

(Incidentally, the law in DRC - hell on earth, remember - prevents anyone under 18 from becoming a soldier, in militia or the regular army. Frustrated 16-year-old Congolese boys needn't worry though. Come to Britain, where it's just fine to be a soldier at that age.)

Charlton 1 Pseudoclub Fakeplastics 0

2010-09-28T23:16:00.001+01:00

I've been to Milton Keynes. It's not as bad as you think. But the best thing about MK is that it's really easy to get from there to London. A fast train service to Euston and you can rejoin civilisation. There's a decent motorway, and probably cheap coaches. So you'd expect a few more than 150 away fans to make the trip. MK Dons really are the anti-Charlton, a club with no history, no loyalty and apparently no fans. I'm really glad we beat them.

It was a rubbish match, to be honest, rescued by the first Charlton goal for Paul Benson, made by a superb cross from Kyel Reid. The team still locked shell-shocked after Saturday's debacle, but after the goal seemed more settled.

Meanwhile, in the programme, young player Yado Mambo was asked about his car. He said "I've seen a car I like, a Volvo C30, which I'd like to get some day." You can get one for about £16,000. The days of Baby Bentleys are long gone.

Charlton 2 Dagenham & Redbridge 2

2010-09-26T11:45:00.000+01:00

I don't want to go into the question of whether it was a penalty (it wasn't), but it turned the game around and it shouldn't have. D'n'R were absolutely hopeless in the first half, the worst team I've seen in ages. Charlton were playing some lovely football, although it might be symptomatic that the goal came from Llera at a set-piece.

But then that penalty - which was, to be fair, brilliantly taken - and you had to wonder what Parkinson would make of that at half time. The clear message he needed to give was that the team just needed to continue playing the way they were and goals would come. Or he could have used the obvious sense of injustice to stoke up the team. Don't know what he said, but in the second half the team looked defeatist from the start. The movement and interplay was gone. DnR began to play, when they weren't wasting time, and always looked the more likely team to score, especially with Llera having a really bad day in defence. Charlton managed to get a goal with their only real chance right at the end, then dozed off to let DnR get the equaliser that their pathetically small band of travelling fans treated like the greatest victory since General Wolfe at Quebec*.

It raises questions about Parkinson's management. How could he not prevent that total collapse in confidence? The first half showed that the players are good enough; on the whole he's assembled a good squad with negligible resources. But the failure to get them to give a consistent performance is more and more worrying.

*I visited Quebec House in Westerham this summer. The Battle of the Plains of Abraham lasted about as long as a football match, and changed North America for ever. Next time an American says "If it wasn't for us, you'd be speaking German", say "If it wasn't for us, you'd be speaking French. With an atrocious accent."

All those years of education

2010-09-25T21:47:00.000+01:00

I've got a lot of time for the Church of England. It's often attacked for wishywashyness, but isn't that preferable to hateful certainty? But, oh dear, here's what the Archbishop of Canterbury has apparently just said:

I think if I were to say my job was not to be true to myself that might suggest that my job required me to be dishonest and if that were the case then I'd be really worried. I'm not elected on a manifesto to further this agenda or that. I have to be someone who holds the reins for the whole debate. To put it very simply, there's no problem about a gay person who's a bishop. It's about the fact that there are traditionally, historically, standards that the clergy are expected to observe. So there's always a question about the personal life of the clergy.

Obviously, obviously, he's a good man trapped.

Spot the difference

2010-09-21T18:10:00.000+01:00

I don't claim to be particularly clever, but my prediction about the Kill the Pope bomb plot came true. And papers like the Express have clearly admitted they got it wrong. Another possible attack on the Pope has been uncovered as the BBC reports.

But while last time around, we almost immediately knew that the alleged plotters were Algerian, and Muslim (and let's face it, that was all we needed to know), this time there's no word on what Ms Lunney's nationality or religion might be. So far, the Mail and Express don't seem to be covering this story at all. Obviously, they're waiting to get the facts straight before they splash it on the front page. Obviously.

(Today's heavy sarcasm is brought to you by the colour red.)

A prediction

2010-09-18T09:13:00.001+01:00

Flipping through the channels last night, trying to avoid popovision, I saw both the BBC's and the ITV's reporters talking about the arrest of six street cleaners on suspicion of planning a terrorist attack against the Pope. Both of them quite carefully explored the possibility that the six might be innocent* but that the Police had to take the suspicion seriously and investigate fully.

This is somehow different from what usually happens, when the reporters talk about a sense that a major attack has been averted, a huge conspiracy revealed. It's clear what happens then: an unattributable police source leaks or briefs the reporters, so although no-one actually says these people are guilty, police and press are happy to let that impression be given.

Something of this is visible in The Sun today, which quotes a "security source" as saying "Information was given on Thursday night of alleged conversations in which the assassination of the Pope were discussed in detail." That's weak, compared to what we've seen before. (And ungrammatical - but when you combine a security source and a Sun reporter, that's the least you expect.)

I can't help thinking the "sources" are preparing the media for the news that nothing was found. Maybe some of the men will be prosecuted for immigration offences, but, I predict, that'll be it. We'll never find out what the information was, or whether the response was proportionate. Those sources will hint at what might have been, and the media will happily repeat it. What a lovely democracy we live in.

*Of course, they are innocent, you know, legally.

Fighting the deficit with the aid of astrology

2010-09-17T09:34:00.000+01:00

Astonishingly, government has ignored my earlier proposal to raise revenue through personalised NINOs and postcodes. Nevertheless, here's a new idea: get sponsorship for the signs of the Zodiac, and sell the right for companies to rename them.

Imagine how much major companies would pay to get their product names in every paper every day for a single (but huge) annual payment. The obvious buyer would be Ford - they've already got cars called Taurus and Scorpio - and they could rename each of the other signs with the names of one of their other models. For example, Capricorn could be renamed Cortina Mk II (your lucky colour is Andalusian Tan, you are sluggish in the mornings and reluctant to be turned away from your chosen path). And no-one would have to face the tired jokes that inevitably now follow the words "I'm a Virgo". To be able to say "I'm a 6-wheeled Box Transit" instead would be much easier. I feel this is a chance to bring the ancient science of astrology into the 20th century. Admittedly, it's not clear if this country owns the rights to the Zodiac, but that's a legal quibble others can settle.

If the legal difficulties prove impossible, let's just auction off the names of the months. I can see Kelloggs being interested here. February is obviously Rice Krispies month, while September, the harvest month, has to be All Bran. What do you think? Would you like your birthsign to be renamed, and if so, to what?

Charlton 1 Notts County 0

2010-09-12T08:58:00.000+01:00

This was a pretty terrible game, but maybe payback for all those games when Charlton have wasted chances and given away a late goal. Because that's exactly what County did. They had two of the worst misses you'll ever see, and a penalty saved. And the really good thing is that Lee Hughes was to blame. I hadn't picked up his back story before. He was convicted of causing death by dangerous driving and served three years in prison. While I suppose you must allow that people, even ex-convict, murdering footballers, must be allowed to work again after they've completed their sentence, you don't have to like them. And his actions in leaving the scene of the accident seem all too familiar of footballers' arrogance.

More reason to dislike him: right in front of me, early in the second half, he got a slight touch to the face from Racon, I think, and went down (a few seconds later) as if he'd been hit by Mike Tyson. It was a clear attempt to get Racon sent off. In the event, he didn't even get a yellow card. Either he had been hit, in which case Racon should have been off, or Hughes was faking it, in which case he should have been booked. But another in the stream of useless third division refs did neither.

An 85th minute goal from Anyinsah, in his first match for Charlton, and in Charlton's first real chance of the afternoon, nicked the points. County will feel robbed, but as we know all too well, when you get chances you have to take them (acknowledgment due to Motty's Big Book of Football Clichés).

Two wheels good ...

2010-09-08T21:22:00.000+01:00

A couple of weeks ago, I took my first ride on one of the hire bikes in London. (They're often called "Boris Bikes" but can't we anticipate the next mayoral election and call them "Oona Cycles" instead?) It was just a short ride, from Waterloo to Pimlico, on a heavy bike, but in that half hour I rediscovered the joy of cycling. Which is simply this: every so often, you get to freewheel down a hill with the wind blowing through your scalp. And there's that sense of freedom, much more than you get in a car: the ability to venture down any sidestreet and discover something you've never seen before.

It was obvious I was going to get a bike of my own before too long, and today was that day. Just around the corner from me, there's a long-established bike shop astonishingly still thriving, it seems, as a family business, with a website you could consider as charming or amateurish according to your taste.

But you just know it's the kind of place you can go to and say Tell me what kind of bike should I buy? and they'll sort it out.

I knew I wanted a folding bike. Actually, that had been a hard decision. Folding bikes are always compromises. But when I last had a bike, it got to be quite a nuisance, dragging it though the house to the backyard. And obviously the key advantage of a foldie is that you can easily take it on a train or put it in the car. When I last had a bike, I didn't seem to mind cycling through miles of suburb to reach country lanes. I don't think I want to do that now. I also wanted a rack: this bike has to get me to shops and back, cutting out unnecessary car trips.

I had looked at the charming/amateurish website and seen that Dahon seemed a decent brand. This morning, I got a letter confirming that my mortgage endowment, which will mature next month, will give me a tasty cashback, so I felt rich and went to the shop.

The brilliant assistant listened to my requirements, and then said that a Ridgeback Envoy was essentially a Dahon machine assembled by Ridgeback, and was £40 cheaper. And although I guess Dahon is a cooler name than Ridgeback (which I associate with dodgy mountain bikes and hybrids) I couldn't see any reason to go for the more expensive option.

Final good omen: while I was in the shop my neighbour Steve, with whom I forged a bond when he was painting my kitchen and I discovered he's an addick, came in; turns out he's working there three days a week.

I had expected to have to order a bike, but they had it in stock. I had expected to have to wait a day for it to be assembled and checked out, but they did it while I waited. Within an hour, I left the shop £500 lighter but with a bike, lights, helmet and lock - all I need to get started.

I was shaking with excitement when I got home! (I had wheeled the bike back, so trembly was I.) I had to calm myself down by eating (well, it was lunchtime). At 3pm I went for my first ride on a bike of my own for maybe, at least, 15 years.

Catford is a flat area, which is fortunate. The few small hills I climbed were a real challenge to my unaccustomed muscles. So I did little more than cycle down to the local Sainsbury's and back. Yes, it was fun, but harder than I'd expected. I'd never have got so sweaty 15 or was it more years ago. But I know it'll get easier.

It's a mad time of year to buy a bike. Just after I got in, the sky darkened and it poured down for an hour. But it's a good time of life to buy a bike. I don't need to cycle at all, so I can choose my times. In half an hour on a train I can be in the North Downs, or better still beyond them, in the cyclist-friendlier Weald.

Everything's great, then? Not quite. In my time in the bike shop I fell in love again with bicycle parts. This is a strange perversion, but it hits lots of people. Once you've got a bike, there's always modifications you can make, something you can change. Slippier tyres, a sexier saddle. I can see myself being drawn into that, and by next spring, if I haven't bought a lighter, whippier bike, I'll be quite surprised.

But yeah, right now, everything's great.

Charlton 1 Oldham 1

2010-08-21T19:21:00.000+01:00

I suppose everybody has things they'd change about football, to make it a better experience. One thing I'd change is I'd let free kicks for offside be direct. Offside kicks are always going to be in your own half of the pitch so if you're able to score from one you definitely deserve it. It would just stop refs having to run around with their hand in the air for a bit. I believe in being nice to referees, you see. Even the clowns in the third division.

Here's another thing I'd change. When highlights are shown on television, you should be given some idea of how much time has elapsed, how much is remaining. You really can't understand what's going on otherwise. If a team is resolutely defensive and wasting all the time they can, is it because there's only five minutes for them to hang on, or is because they're Oldham? (I know that's not fair - Oldham today were much more adventurous than last year's team, and it wouldn't have been surprising if they'd won.) But this struck me today because on the way to the match my phone decided it was exhausted. I don't have a watch, and the big screen's no longer working. So I didn't always know how much time was passing. Today's game, then, if not classic, was at least timeless.

The game wasn't great, but it wasn't bad. In the second half it became very open. Charlton were less organised than usual in defence, with Semedo and Dailly both suspended, but Miguel Llera put in a good performance. I'd have been happier if Solly had been playing.

One thing I wouldn't change, I think, is how offsides are decided. These days, it's almost entirely the lino's decision. He not only decides if the player is in an offside position, but also whether he's interfering with play. So this means he won't raise his flag until the offside player has done something that might take advantage of the position. So many of the crowd around me don't understand this, and have a go at the lino for being "slow". I think they still expect the lino to flag the offside position and the ref to decide if the player's actively involved. And that doesn't happen anymore.

The new season has brought a few new faces to the seats around me. The very old guy who used to sit next to me has gone somewhere else, and there's now a fairly young family group there. In front of me there's an amusingly angry man (who doesn't understand how offside decisions are made, for example). I hope I'll continue to find him amusing as the season progresses.

Having no phone meant I couldn't follow or make any tweets. Two years ago, that sentence wouldn't have made much sense. Now, twitter is a central part of my #cafc life. And I missed it more than the scoreboard!

Danton's Death

2010-08-15T13:30:00.002+01:00

It took only six minutes for me to know I wouldn't like this play. And four of those minutes came at the end.

The first two minutes set the tone. A bare stage, suddenly inhabited by a gang of French revolutionaries, who happily brought their own furniture with them, who then began debating the course the revolution should take. In Ken Loach's film Land and Freedom, there's a bit where the action stops, and all the characters discuss the merits of collective farming vs private ownership. It led some wags to coin the phrase Homage to Catatonia. The first two minutes was like that and I knew I wouldn't enjoy it. Danton made some political points, and his mates started cheering and waving their fists like extras in a bad play. Oh. That's not a good sign, is it?

What's wrong with this play? It's so wordy, for a start. It's of its time, I suppose, but you can't put on a production of a play like this without acknowledging the wordiness of the text. Some brecthianism would have been a relief. For example, we need to feel the strangeness of the didacticism, to have that isolated from the (possibly moving) personal romance. I understand Howard Brenton signficantly cut the length of the play in preparing his "version". I hate to think what he cut out. Either it was even more of the political and moral discussion (god help us), or maybe it was some action that would have embodied the debates. In what was left, there was very little dramatisation of the debate. We rely on what the characters tell us, not what they do.

There's a personal story too. This is about the contrast between the sensuous, venal Danton, and the buttoned-up, severe Robespierre. This is embodied a little in the characterisations, but again we mainly know about their respective characters because they and others tell us about them. Elliott Levey's portrayal of Robespierre has gained some praise for its psychological insight, but actually I found it tricksy, based in the legs, not the head.

And the last four minutes. Danton, not to spoil this any more than a basic knowledge of history or a basic reading of the name of the play would reveal, dies. He's guillotined. The illusion of the guillotine is very impressive. How did they do that? How? But if your abiding memory of a play is a special effect, what does that tell you? What?

What do the critics say? According to the National Theatre's website, they've been effusive.

Once again, I turn to Charles Spencer, in the Telegraph. He gave it four stars, and his review is worth reading for the background it gives to the play's writing. But here's the final paragraph of his review:

Young and radical though he was, Buchner had clearly realised that the road to hell is often paved with idealistic intentions.

I'm spotting a theme here. Spencer likes to end his reviews with a vacuous cliché.

Michael Billington suggests that Brenton's version has cut out a lot of the human. He summarises the production as "perfectly respectable" (three stars), but he's not really enthusiastic. The comments on his review gradually get worse.

In the Independent, Paul Taylor gives 4 stars, and calls it "absorbing", while Kate Bassett, in the Independent on Sunday, rightly describes it as "unengaging".

So, it's true, most critics liked it. What's wrong with them? These are people who see loads of plays, and know what it's like to be engaged and moved by an unfolding drama. This was nothing like that. The performance lasted just under two hours, with no interval. If there had been an interval, I'd have left during it, and I never do that.

It's the only really bad production I've seen at the National - even debatable ones like Women Beware Women had more basic life and interest in them than this - so I suppose everyone's allowed to get it wrong now and again. I do feel let down by the critics, though,

Back in Andover

2010-08-09T09:30:00.000+01:00

Another list from Andrew, who comments:

It appears to be into groups - by store area? -- but why have the apricots escaped?

The curious entry is 'Phone library'. Curious because it appears on a shopping list and also because the Andover library is 30 meters from Waitrose so why could the shopper not pop in. If the library was closed then why note down having to phone the library (the book needs renewing) but then leave the list behind? Another library perhaps - but why mention it on the shopping list.

Local knowledge can sometimes only add to the mystery.

Incidentally, I've found another blog that collects and displays shopping lists. I think it must be run by Gillian McKeith, the well-known non-doctor, since it speculates in a quite vulgar way on the effects of the shopping on the buyer's eliminatory output. I left a message of welcome, but she hasn't replied, so I'm not linking to the pinched-face charlatan.

Charlton 1 Bournemouth 0

2010-08-08T10:07:00.001+01:00

First game of the season brought a satisfactory win on a warm but quite rainy afternoon against a limited-looking Bournemouth and Boscombe Athletic*.

There have been so many squad changes over the summer, it was hard to recognise the team, and the squad, as shown in the programme, is now the smallest I've ever seen at Charlton. The handbook part of the programme enables you to calculate that the total cost of the squad, at the time of printing, was £35,000, plus Therry Racon, whose price I would give if I could find the euro on this keyboard. The rest is free transfers plus an impressive line-up of youth products.

You could go, oh woe! what's become of us?, but in many ways I prefer this. Some of the big expensive names we've had in recent years have been big expensive chancers, with egos and, in one case**, a backside, to match. (I should also say that some signings have been made since the programme was printed.)

And although it was a scrappy game, I did at least think the players all seemed to know each other and get on. This would be important in defence, particularly in the second half after Semedo had got a straight red. I didn't see what happened, and haven't yet seen it on telly, but the ref did enough to convince me he was probably wrong. He usually was.

One of the youth products, Chris Solly, was probably man of the match. One thing that stood out was his ability to outjump taller players - reminiscent of Chris Perry, I thought. On the first half performance, I'd have thought Kyel Reid would be the star, but with more concentration on defence in the second half, he wasn't so prominent. His contribution to the goal, though, suggested that if he gets really settled he'll be tearing third division defences apart***.

The crowd was a very healthy 16,000 ish, although that no doubt included some holidaying season ticket holders, and the feeling remained positive throughout. Maybe expectations are lower this season. Maybe, let's hope so, there'll be more patience. I ended the day feeling good about the coming season.

* You shouldn't be allowed to call your team AFC anything unless you're in the Premier League. Or Spanish.
** Discretion forbids me from naming the fat-arsed fool. I'm sure you know who I mean.
*** Yes, I know I said this about Lloyd Sam last year.

Welcome to Thebes (2)

2010-08-06T10:59:00.000+01:00

I went to see Welcome to Thebes for the second time last night. I enjoyed it even more, but in an interestingly different way. All through the first half I found I had tears in my eyes as I fought back the knowledge of what was going to happen in the second half. And of course there were things I saw that I had not quite seen the first time around like, ironically, and as if to prove I'm an idiot, the importance of blindness as a motif.

Before this visit I'd read a few reviews. They generally aren't very good (ie well argued and written) even when they're very good (ie favourable).

The worst I saw was Charles Spencer in the Telegraph. Here's the worst paragraph:

There are some wearying “comic” touches, in which an armed militia threaten the audience with automatic weapons to persuade us to turn off our mobile phones, and a manifest determination to give most of the male characters a good kick in the groin, the hallmark of so many feminist writers. Ignoring the evidence of say, Medea and Winnie Mandela, Buffini gives the impression that she believes both ancient Greece and modern Africa would be heaven on earth if only the pesky chaps hadn’t ruined it all.

The simplistic level of that understanding says more about his insecurities than the play, which isn't at all straightforward in its sexual politics. Or its political politics either.

No, actually, this is the worst paragraph, the last one:

One leaves the theatre reflecting that ancient myths still have much to tell us about our own troubled times.

To which the only reply is "Yes - and?"

Michael Billington, in the Guardian, regrets that "much as I love the scope and ambition of Buffini's play, there runs through it an unresolved contradiction between free will and fate." This thought pervades his review. It's reminiscent of Graham Taylor's football punditry: he has one idea and everything else will demonstrate the relevance, the keystone importance, of this idea. There's a lot more going on than this, and besides, what's wrong with unresolved contradictions?

OK, both men had space limits, but both fail to convey the real complexity of the play.

But the question I'm asking myself is, should a play reveal itself completely in one viewing? It's a more difficult question than I thought, and I'll probably come back to it in the literature blog, which is looking a bit neglected lately. Of course my answer is likely to be that you shouldn't need to see a play more than once, but you should want to.

Suzannah Dunn

2010-08-04T11:42:00.001+01:00

Can one careless word put you off a book? Looks like it.

One of the books I got at the Blackheath Book Fair was Suzannah Dunn's latest, The Confession of Katherine Howard. And today I started reading it.

I met Suzannah Dunn at the launch of Louise Doughty's first novel; they had been students together on the creative writing course at UEA. She was pretty, modest, quite shy, but chatty, and - inevitably, for she is a creative writer - I fell a bit in love with her. I've never met her since, which is fortunate because I suppose I'd have to say what I thought about her books, and the honest response would be that I pretty much hated them, although I kept on buying them. She writes beautifully, but all the early books seemed overloaded by an unresolved hostility towards mothers. Of course, I've no idea if that stemmed from anything in her life, or if it was just a theme she found too-fascinating, but every book seemed to revert to an examination of the way a mother restricted and dominated a daughter.

Also, in a more technical sense, although the writing, the sentences, were finely crafted, there was a short-breathedness about the writing on a bigger scale - too many double line-breaks, which annoyingly broke the flow of the narrative.

So, I was hoping that those two tendencies might have disappeared by now. Suzannah is writing historical fiction these days, and the change of subject may have changed the techniques. But, on the second page of the new book we get this:

Life was never so much for the young as on the day that was soon to dawn and we in the queen's retinue were so much younger than everyone else at the palace, which the king and his company had acknowledged, leaving us to our dancing.

By around eleven o'clock we were reeling. Only a handful of us remained with the queen, having retreated to at her invitation to her gorgeous private chamber, where we reclined on cushions around her vast, gold-canopied chair.

Can you see my problem? It's not that first line, with its awkward run of monosyllables. I can take that as a kind of emblem of naivety in the narrator. It's that word "reeling", and the ambiguity of it: does it mean that they were still dancing (reels) or staggering tiredly? The context shows it means the latter, so it looks as if this might be a joke (at 8 we were dancing; by 11 we were reeling) but I don't think it is. I think it's just careless, and a competent editor should have sorted it out.

I'm probably being too picky, I know, and I should overlook this and read on, but I'm proper discouraged.

Welcome to Thebes

2010-07-27T01:24:00.002+01:00

The National Theatre exists for plays like this. A new play with a large cast, with no starring parts a celeb could slip into, doesn't have a chance of being produced anywhere else. And that's before you even think about the subject matter: a "developing" country has been devastated by civil wars, and the dominant world power has come to offer support in rebuilding, but on its own terms. It's virtually impossible to see the dominant world power as anything other than America, and the developing country actually isn't Iraq - comparisons with Sierra Leone or Liberia are more accurate. But in the play the countries are called Thebes and Athens, and the names and myths are those of Greek mythology - to take just two examples, the new leader of Thebes is called Eurydice, and one of the loose-cannon soldiers is called Megaera. This brings with it various staples of Greek drama: hubris, hamartia, peripetia, etc. It's not coach-party stuff, and there were plenty of empty seats.

But this makes it unbelievably rich in levels of meaning, especially when you add the personal conflicts between various characters, and a thread of reflection on sexual roles. And there are racial issues at play too. The Thebans are mostly black, the Athenians mostly white (although their ~~president~~ "first citizen", Theseus, is black).

It's probably too much for one play to handle, but it's bloody close to succeeding. It has good jokes, which might surprise you. The one that got the biggest laugh was the most obvious, though: Oedipus (father and brother of two of characters) is described as a real motherfucker.

Actually, there was so much in it, I don't think I'm equipped to talk about it much more. I think I'll see it again.

Until then, let's just note that the cast was the blackest I've seen in an NT production. It wasn't colour-blind casting by any means, but subtle in the way it played on expectations. Presumably as a result the audience was noticeably blacker than usual, and I felt there was some sense among the black audience of delight at seeing so many black faces on the stage. Biggest applause went to Madeline Appiah, as Megaera, for a brilliantly fierce performance, but performances all round were excellent.

Don't even ask me to try to spell prawn cocktail

2010-07-25T11:26:00.000+01:00

The best of a set of four from Clive.

VIV!

2010-07-24T20:32:00.000+01:00

Two questionable assumptions, and one certainty:

1. When people write out shopping lists, the aim is to be helpful to themselves.

2. Paper-rationing ended sometime in the 1950s.

3. I don't want these people to invite me to dinner.

Where's mad Mel when you need her?

2010-07-21T08:32:00.000+01:00

This story reported in the Guardian touches a few hot topics, doesn't it?

Sabbar Kashur, 30, was sentenced to 18 months in prison on Monday after the court ruled that he was guilty of rape by deception. According to the complaint filed by the woman with the Jerusalem district court, the two met in downtown Jerusalem in September 2008 where Kashur, an Arab from East Jerusalem, introduced himself as a Jewish bachelor seeking a serious relationship. The two then had consensual sex in a nearby building before Kashur left.

When she later found out that he was not Jewish but an Arab, she filed a criminal complaint for rape and indecent assault.

Normally, of course, I'd say that a woman's character and history aren't relevant when you're looking at a rape allegation. But she doesn't seem very nice, does she? Let's ignore the possibility that she's simply a racist bigot, whose racism is endorsed by a racist judicary, and look at whether Kashur deceived her by promising to be looking for a serious relationship. It looks as if they had sex on their first meeting, and that's fine, but it's not necessarily the basis for a serious relationship. Imagine if she had accused him of rape by deception because "he said he loved me". Can't see that prosecution succeeding, can you? Or if he had been married, and lied about it. Or if he'd claimed to be richer than he is? These are things that happen all the time, and deplorable as they may be, don't amount to rape. Women know that men will tell lies in exchange for sex.

It seems as if Kashur's crime was to lie about his race. If the woman had known he was an Arab, she'd have found it impossible to have a serious relationship with him, or even to have casual sex with him. As I say, she doesn't sound very nice.

But I won't know what I really think about this case until I've seen Melanie Phillips' opinion. She's my infallible compass in the moral maze. Whatever she says, the opposite must be true.

Moob ybab

2010-07-10T20:25:00.000+01:00

You know how, when there's a major power cut affecting a big city, people always expect a mini baby-boom nine months later, after couples take advantage of the extra darkness to do the-thing-that-must-be-done-in-the-dark.

For about six weeks now, the nights in southeast England have been hot and sticky. Sleeping has been difficult. Sleeping-with hardly bears thinking about. One sweaty body in a bed is quite enough, thanks.

Does this mean there'll be a reverse baby boom nine months from now? Or are people so addicted to their filthy animal passions they'll do it whatever the discomfort?

Confusing times

2010-07-08T10:47:00.000+01:00

Once again, the coalition government has shamed Labour on a civil liberties issue. This time, the Supreme Court has found that the Borders Agency can't send gay asylum seekers back to a hostile country, with just a copy of George Michael's Guide to Acting Straight. It seems like an inevitable finding, if we accept that it is a basic human right to be openly gay. I think we pretty much accept that, don't we?

Even Theresa May, whose record on gay rights caused concern about her appointment as Home Secretary, has welcomed the finding in a completely positive way.

I haven't dared to see what the Daily Mail makes of this. The Express has predictably splashed a scare of millions of gay darkies coming over here, drinking our brightly coloured cocktails, and the appalling folks at Migration Watch have said this is proof that the UK should set its own policies on asylum. By which they can only mean that capital punishment for sexual orientation is not as bad as capital punishment for political reasons.

Human rights codes have to be international, because national governments can't be trusted. They can pass laws that make all kinds of discrimination lawful, and only an international body, like the Council of Europe, can intervene.

Does the ruling mean there will be more successful asylum applications? Probably, but not to the extent the Express seems to believe. But that's a consequence of doing the right thing - acknowledging that persecution on grounds of sexuality is not really any different from persecution for any other reason.

And in the meantime, we need to pursue respect for human rights in those countries where homosexuality is a criminal offence or where homophobic crimes are tacitly allowed by the authorities. I think today Britain is in a better position to do that.

Now I just feel stupid

2010-07-03T09:31:00.000+01:00

The alumnus magazine of my university arrived this week. It has a crossword, which you'd expect to be hard, but here's the introduction:

Final grid entries corresponding to the asterisked clues can be paired to form anagrams of a series of names, with one missing. To achieve this solvers must change one unchecked letter in each pair of the corresponding answers, forming new words. Corrected single letter misprints in the definitions of 15 clues in order, followed by the unjumbled 3 down spell out the thematic position.

Still with us? There's more.

Half of the clued answers are to be entered in reverse and all thematic names consist of two words (one hyphenated). The missing name can be formed from the final letters in the shaded squares and this must be written below the grid. Chambers (2008) is recommended, but only gives 10 down in conjunction with its direction.

Closing date is September. I might have understood the instructions by then.

Meanwhile, there's been proof I'm still a swot at heart. I use the swimming pool of my old school, which means I regularly go past the sports hall. Recently it's often been set up for exams, just as it used to be when I was doing O and A levels, with rows of desks carefully spaced out to deter cheating and allow invigilation. And do you know, I find it less intimidating like that

Wilts in the heat

2010-06-30T21:34:00.000+01:00

Oh, readers, the lengths I go to for this blog. There are two versions of this story. Choose which one you believe.

I had heard there was a new branch of Waitrose opening in Melksham. I had never heard of Melksham in my life. Despite because of having the kitchen fitter in, I decided it was worth the risk of trusting him it would be better to get out of his way and leaving him to get on with it. Melksham is in Wiltshire, the far end, near Trowbridge. I knew didn't know that. After I had booked into the King's Arms which is where I always stay when I go to Melksham I was when I got tired of driving, and which happened to have a room free at reasonable cost, I read in a copy of a free local newspaper that a new branch of Waitrose had opened, and what's more that there was a £5 coupon, I made sure I knew where the new Waitrose was before I had a meal of Bangladeshi specialities at the Refa Tandoori Balti House (which clearly has a culinary identity crisis) and a modest orange juice and lemonade load of beer in the bar.

Next morning there was a huge number of shopping lists to choose from; my journey was not wasted. The store being so new, there were no shopping lists (although someone had decorated the store opening hours sign with a cock'n'balls) and here's the best of them one I picked up in Beckenham tonight.

It's plain, but I like it. Very down to earth, but that decorated line across the bottom of the list betrays an artistic yearning, dontcha think? Very much like Melksham itself.

One final uncoloured statement: Melksham has a railway station. Four trains a day (two in each direction) stop there. Southeastern are envious; they can only dream of these levels of service.

Blackheath Bookfair

2010-06-26T12:29:00.003+01:00

I went to the Amnesty International bookfair in Blackheath today, here. Click on streetview if you dare. I know Blackheath's posh, but this is just ridiculous and beautiful. If only I'd been born into immense wealth!

The atmosphere was surprisingly unbookish, more like a jumble sale. I believe elbows were frequently employed. I got there at 9:30 but it was too late. Lucy Mangan had already decimated the shelves, and was walking around with two huge bags of books (it was thanks to a tweet from her that I remembered to go).

But I got some books that I might read some day.

José Saramago The Notebook
La Bruyere Les Caracteres
Roger Pearson Mallarmé
Marina Warner Indigo
Tony Tanner Prefaces to Shakespeare
Suzannah Dunn The Confession of Katherine Howard

All in good condition, and all for £21!