Homage to Phyllis Pearsall

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 ...

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)

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

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?

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!

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'

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.