Don't give in to hate

It has been, by any standards, a horrible period for news. The indiscriminate killing of people enjoying their holiday in Tunisia, the awful slaughter in Syria, which British people are leaving our shores to go and join, and just this morning more people killed in Nigeria. These are just the ones I can think of - no doubt other atrocities, those which don't happen to catch the newsmen's eyes, have happened away from the gaze of the western media and are therefore hidden from us.

With so much suffering going on, so much inhumanity, it's tempting to simply close your eyes to it, to disregard the news completely. I've never done that, but I increasingly understand those who do. To do so, though, is to miss other stuff that can cast some light on what good people are capable of. I thought it may be an opportune time to add my own celebration to the life of a man who thoroughly refused to let hatred win. His achievements took a long time to come to light as a result of his reticence and modesty, and even as he died recently at the deservedly ripe old age of 106, the events I've mentioned above rather subsumed his story.

Sir Nicholas Winton didn't come to any kind of national attention until around 1988, oddly enough on That's Life (there's a reference for the teenagers...). He'd kept quiet about his efforts to get children, hundreds of them, out of what was then Czechoslovakia and into Britain, taking them from under the noses of a Nazi occupier intent on murdering them. This is not a phrase you'll ever see or hear again on these pages, I suspect, but have a look at part of the episode of That's Life which brought him to national attention.

He dismissed his own efforts for the rest of his life, instead claiming others took the real risks. His modesty no doubt included a grain of truth in that the other people involved in his operations deserve to be recognised as he was, but to return to my original point, this was a man who refused to let hatred win, who did something amazing and inspirational rather than think he faced an overwhelming, impossible task. It's a shame there aren't more stories about this type of good deed around, but regrettably, they don't sell as many newspapers, they don't make people tune in to watch the news specially – generally it's guns, killing and misery that'll do that.

Tomorrow, Tuesday 7th, is the anniversary of just such an event of the type that sends the media into a frenzy – the bombings in London which killed 52 people ten years ago. This was, of course, a perfect illustration of what can happen when people become so blinded by hate that they lose their humanity. But even in the aftermath of that kind of atrocity, there are still stories of incredible courage, of bonds formed out of the adversity, of people helping each other without regard for religion, colour, etc.

I think, so far at least, that typifies your average Brit's response to this kind of thing – 7/7 or Tunisia, 9/11, Lee Rigby, Charlie Hebdo, whatever. Usually, in discussions about this, what I hear is pretty measured, understanding and accepting that you can't judge a whole creed on the actions of a very few. So far, the usual response is a determination to carry on as normally as possible, a refusal to let these actions achieve their aims, and an unwillingness to tar everybody with the same broad brush.

How many stories, though, will it take before open and inflammatory anti-Islamic sentiment becomes an accepted response to another atrocity? The recent support for UKIP and, before that, an increase in the BNP vote, suggest the bar is moving downward, toward the point where it'll be acceptable to express anti-Islamic, rather than anti-terrorist, sentiment in print. There are clearly individuals who will regard any Muslim as culpable, just as Islamic extremist terrorists regards any Westerner as fair game – there have already been attacks on completely innocent people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – and it appears that some of those individuals are getting into politics, trying to legitimise this sort of response, or at least its spoken expression.

It'd be a slippery slope indeed if that started to become the norm. We would, for sure, be handing those few nutters exactly what they want. Sir Nicholas Winton's life stands as an example to all of us that hatred can be denied its ends, if we stand up to it. RIP, sir.

Reflection

So a couple of weeks on, then, and the first noises are already being made about 'changing Britain's relationship with Europe', Nigel Farage having to applaud, to his own apparent surprise, from the sidelines in the meantime. With a referendum on that relationship with Europe surely now a matter of time, Cameron is making it pretty clear from the first days of this government what it is that people have voted for.

So what happened? Has the country lurched to the right? Is everybody simply voting with their wallets, as I've maintained has been the case since the Thatcher years, now the economy seems to be improving? And why did the fully expected bashing meted out to the Lib Dems seem to benefit the very party they were being punished for getting into bed with?

The only predictable bit was what happened to the Lib Dems. As I wrote here some time ago, vote Lib Dem, get Tory, was never going to wash with anybody who'd put their cross in that particular box last time round. Paddy Ashdown's infamous claim that he'd eat his hat if their showing was as bad as exit polls suggested and Clegg's tearful, apparently shell-shocked resignation speech seemed to suggest that the retribution they suffered came as a horrible surprise to them, if nobody else.

You might have expected Labour to be the main beneficiaries of the collapse of the Lib Dem vote, but that's not what happened. The votes all seemed to go elsewhere - the gigantic swing to the SNP in Scotland, for example, decimated Labour in an area where the Tories only had one seat at stake anyway. And to anybody not voting Tory, the south of England makes for depressing map making. Head south from London and only my home city of Brighton & Hove breaks the blue monopoly. Those disaffected Lib Dems certainly didn't vote Labour.

For those of us not of a politically blue persuasion, there were still highlights, still things to please. The main one, of course, was the defeat of one Farage, N., in Thanet. There's no arguing with the number of votes UKIP gleaned overall - a worrying and slightly depressing sign that many Brits may well be blaming all our problems on immigration and a possible, if seemingly implausible, answer to that question of where the Lib Dem votes went. But their winning of only one seat, and Farage's failure to take his, are cause for some hope. Farage's predictable u-turn on his resignation, though, demonstrated that he'll still likely feature on the newly blue political landscape, even if it's only as a mouthy observer. George Galloway losing (and by 'losing' I mean being completely thrashed) Bradford West was also to be celebrated. Abominable man.

Where now for Labour? Realising, five years too late, that they should have elected the other Miliband, should prove sobering to the rank and file. David Miliband always had more charisma than his sibling, and his brother's campaign, essentially moribund, reflected that lack. In this era of personality politicians, where image is so much more important than manifesto promises that are no longer worth the paper they're printed on, he simply never inspired people. A genuinely fresh face is needed. I'd rather hoped my own MP, Chukka Umunna, a man seen as a rising star of the Labour movement and, importantly these days, regarded as pro-business and not too left wing, would be the new leader. He pulled out, though, feeling the need in the process to deny that an 'unwelcome press story' was his motivation for doing so. Odd.

Whoever they do choose this time, they have to get it right because they've got a lot of ground to make up - we've now got five years of Tory control with a small, but workable, majority. Five years during which the Labour leader will have to prove him/herself as a plausible alternative to the incumbent PM, probably campaign on a hugely important issue like EU membership, and try to find at least some common ground with a party which wants to break up the Union as it stands, if any credible opposition to the Conservatives is to be offered.

Dogma, pedagogy and helicopters.

It's been that long, I realise, since I wrote anything on these pages that it must have seemed like I'd given it up forever. It becomes an easy habit to break, this, and with every week that passes without a new entry, a harder one to re-establish. The longer it goes without an entry, the better it's got to be when it does finally reappear, right? At least that's how it feels from this end.

So, finally dipping my fingers back into the murky waters of the typing pool, you'll forgive me, I hope, if this one falls rather short of the standard that might be expected after a five-month hiatus, for that is what it's been. (I genuinely hadn't realised it had gone that long).

So, comment on general election to come. Clegg's tears, Miliband's rather startled realisation that his brother should have got the job all along, and Farage's defeat will no doubt feature. See if you can guess, before I write that entry, which one of those three things gave me the most pleasure. In the meantime, a bit of comment on what Danny Baker might call the Iron Horse of this blog, the good old Catholic Church.

I've had the very good fortune these past couple of weekends to head out to Spain for each of them. It may seem a bit la-di-dah jet set to fly out on a Friday, back on a Monday, out again on a Thursday and back once more on the Monday, but that's how it fell. First for a wedding, then for a birthday celebration. I've written on here before about Spanish weddings, I think - their length compared to the British ceremonies I've attended, never having to pay for a drink at the reception, the very Spanish music partnered by dancing late into the night. Then there's just how, well, Catholic the actual ceremony is. This usually includes a sermon, in both senses of the word, and the one delivered by the priest administering the wedding I attended a couple of Saturdays back was an absolute doozy.

I usually hear my girlfriend, a fervent atheist brought up in a Catholic country, muttering in quiet disagreement during these ceremonies as the priests do their thing. On this occasion, though, she actually felt moved to get up and leave the church mid-way through the thing, ostensibly to assist a mum with one of her two babies, who'd started fussing a bit - who can blame them? - but really to cool her anger at what she was hearing. My Spanish has not come on sufficiently to follow everything said at these occasions, especially when it's punctuated by the typical call-and-response refrain of the church's own peculiar argot.

Her later explanation was that the priest had had a bit of a go at parents who leave it to teachers to educate their kids. Teachers, he'd explained, merely teach. They can't educate - only the Church, through their parents, can do that. So all this stuff the schools fill kids' heads with can't be allowed to take root as incredulity, as questioning, lest they veer from the perfect truth of the Church. As a former teacher, this was basically the perfect storm for her, so out she bailed, for a while at least.

All ended well, though. They got married, there was dancing, and I got completely shit-faced because a) the bar's free, remember, and b) you always forget they don't bother with measures like we do, so you're getting at least a treble every time you order a short. The hotel room was doing the helicopter thing when I crashed into bed at who-knows-what hour of Sunday morning, knowing I had to be back at work Monday afternoon and recovery time was therefore short.

This weekend just passed, however, was completely different. I got completely shit-faced at a birthday party instead, and the spare room of the house I was staying in was doing the helicopter thing as I crashed into bed at who-knows-what hour of Sunday morning, knowing I had to be back at work... you get the idea.

What did I learn from these occasions? Well, it might be a good idea to get wasted before any subsequent wedding ceremony I attend out there. The church may do the helicopter thing while the nuptials are going on, but I've noticed that my confidence in my Spanish is correlative with the amount of alcohol I've consumed. So have a few early doors and I'd at least think I could understand the sermon sufficiently to understand what my missus is muttering about as she stands next to me.

Bleak Friday

We import plenty of American culture into Britain. Most of it is fairly harmless, and plenty of it - some of the films, some of the TV, many of their writers, for example - is positively beneficial. Then there's the stuff that's just pointless, Americanising our versions of things that weren't American in the first place - Halloween being a perfect example. And then there's the stuff that's simply inexplicable as to why we need or want it, because it's negative. Damaging even.

The media today has been full of the evidence for the latest such thing that we've taken, for no good reason I can discern, from the States. Black Friday has suddenly become a huge retail event, with pretty much everybody who's got something to sell falling over themselves to persuade you to buy it. Not that, it seems, we need much persuading. Sales law is simple enough - the item only has to have been on sale at the higher price for 28 consecutive days before the commencement of the sale, and can't remain at the sale price for longer than the higher price period. So what do retailers do? Jack up the price of an item in the quiet period preceding a sale, for 28 days or so. Then, for just a few days, or some such giant event, drop it back down to a supposedly greatly reduced cost that is in fact only slightly lower than it could have been purchased at some weeks before. Then, when the sale is over, revert to the original price. Usually, with a bit of shopping around, a bit of internet research and not minding buying stuff that's end of season or end of line, you can pay substantially less than these so-called bargain prices pretty much all the time.

Yet people blindly swarm to the shops at these events, believing they're getting a bargain. What you end up with is scenes like these, with fighting, desperate scrambles, swarms of shoppers descending on harassed, under-secured retail staff, police in attendance even. What the hell has happened to us? Watching the footage on that BBC web page, looking at any of the countless number of photos of desperate faces, arms outstretched, forcing their way into shops, there is an unavoidable analogy to be drawn with another piece of that American culture I mentioned. The great George Romero chose a shopping centre as the setting for much of his classic zombie flick Dawn of the Dead for a very good reason, and did so long before the consumer excesses of Black Friday had reached the levels they're at now. Just look at the shot below the first paragraph of this excellent piece on exactly what I'm talking about - the man was absolutely on the money.

I'd understand this if we were living in a society coming apart at the seems, with shortages - people fighting over food or medicine for themselves or their children. But for most of us, that's simply not the case. We've seen this for real in places that seem a long way from our comfortable, wealthy lives in Britain, and it's very difficult to imagine how everyday life must be for people for whom fighting for basics is a reality. But, pretty much exclusively, Black Friday brings us people scrambling for TVs. Coffee machines. Big-brand, top-label clothing. Computers or MP3 players. Hardly stuff you'll die without.

I am not, of course, blaming America for this. This is all us. We've become so blinded by consumerism that we sacrifice our dignity for a '% off' sign. Black Friday? It's about the most aptly name shopping 'event' on the calendar.

Ask no questions

I was fortunate enough to spend the weekend just gone in Madrid, ostensibly for a mate's birthday but basically to eat and drink a lot for a couple of days. It led, this morning, to the odd experience of waking up in another country but going to work in London in the afternoon.

Anyway, one of the many pleasures of Spain is the ability to get a decent coffee just about anywhere. In a country that has so many bars and cafés, you don't want to get a rep for making bad coffee. I've therefore had a decent cup everywhere from an underground station to the airport, and pretty much everybody makes real coffee at home - I've never been offered instant coffee in a Spaniard's house.

I was pretty unpleasantly surprised, then, to find that the only place I could get a coffee at Madrid's Barajas Airport this morning, once I'd gone through security at least, was a branch of Starbuck's. Now Barajas is a long airport. I walked the length of it, twice, but unless I wanted to sit down in a 'proper' restaurant, the only other option was a machine. Hobson's choice, as far as I'm concerned - I don't like Starbucks as a company and I really don't like coffee dispensed from machines.

Starbucks are a company that are not easy to like. They paid Corporation Tax for the first time in four years in the UK in 2013 only after adverse publicity and a drop in sales following the subsequent public backlash.Their branches are absolutely bloody everywhere. By far the worst thing, though, is that I think the coffee's just no bloody good. I simply don't like it and it means the other stuff becomes impossible to forgive.

But, hell. It's got to be better than a machine, right? So, reluctantly, I joined the queue. I do remember liking the cinammon roll thingy they do, so that and a coffee would have to do for a breakfast. Such sweet pastry delights are a rare treat for me these days. One snag, though. As the bloke in front of me ordered his drink, he was asked his name. This was a new, fresh hell that I'd forgotten about with this lot. I absolutely hate this gimmick - I'm there for a coffee, not to make friends with a corporate monolith. Were I a regular at Starbuck's I'd want to give ever-more ridiculous names; Zaphod. Ivanhoe. Jebediah. Moon Unit. Daphne. You get the idea.

Anyway, that was the final straw. I wasn't buying a coffee and going through the idiotic false intimacy of having them call out my name rather than just making sure the right coffee gets to the right person. Other coffee vendors manage this perfectly well without this folly. So I just took the cinnamon thingy, which you can buy without the name crap, and went and bought a coffee for half the price from a machine that wanted nothing more than coinage from me. It was blithely indifferent to my name or anything else as it dispensed what turned out to be a reasonably drinkable cup, for an instant.

And you know what? The bloody cinnamon thingy was dry.

Something good had to come out of Fifty Shades...

Huge congratulations are due to my friend H, who has had her first novel, Inspired by Night, published by Xcite. It's just come out for Kindle and in paperback and I make no apologies for giving it a plug here. I'm not altogether sure if she realises quite how hard it is to do what she's done, and how proud of herself she should be for her achievement.

The title of this entry, of course, refers to Fifty Shades of Grey, a novel which simultaneously seemed to make written porn and piss-poor spelling, grammar and punctuation acceptable in polite society. Don't get me wrong - it's the spelling and whatnot with which I have a problem, not the sexy stuff. It was, though, a major bugbear of mine that, with so many talented writers out there struggling to get their work even looked at, let alone published, all it took for FSoG to get accepted was a constant stream of bonking. Out of nowhere it was as ubiquitous as Captain Corelli's Mandolin had become a few years ago - on your morning commute you could pretty much guarantee that one of the women aboard your bus or train carriage was going to be reading it. This despite the fact that it didn't seem to have undergone the scrutiny of a proofreader's eyes at any stage before being shoved out on an undeserving public. Never mind the English, feel the shagging.

One major positive of FSoG, though, is that it's helped democratise publishing, alongside, of course, increased access to online self-publishing mechanisms. Anybody can now get a book out, giving some of that talent an outlet, finally, and just maybe it's made some publishers a bit more willing to have a look at the work of unknowns. I really don't know, I just hope that's the case.

It's still quite something, though, to get a book accepted by a publisher and published under their name. My friend has achieved that, and written about her experiences (and other stuff) in her blog Tales from the Sofa, to which a link can be found on the right of this page.

Things that don't happen

I recently returned from just over a fortnight in Galicia, savouring the peace and tranquility of the landscape and the noise and chaos of the August festivals at the same time. I'm very fortunate to be able to enjoy two very different lifestyles - the London one I live most of the time, with the attendant cosmopolitan bustle of nine million people, and the escape that Spain offers.

We spend much of our time in Spain in the little town where my girlfriend grew up, and the beauty of its natural surroundings is not unlike our own Lake District - hills and water feature prominently. The town itself sits on a peninsula that juts into a lake created by damming about sixty years ago, and sitting looking out across this lake in the almost absolute silence of the place, its contrasts with London are marked.

                                                   Photo copyright Tom Driver - tdriver74 on Flickr.

It's not just the landscape that's different, though. Some of the stuff that goes on there, you just don't get back home. Our place out there has, without exception, roller blinds on the windows. These things are designed to completely black out the summer sun when they're rolled down, and are set outside the house - they're tough, weather-proof things that you move from indoors with rolling pulleys. If you don't want your house to turn into an oven while you're out, you roll them down whenever you leave, leaving the house in darkness while the blinds absorb most of the heat.

Returning home one afternoon, we were rolling up the blind to the kitchen when it got rather stuck. Something wrong with the mechanism, we assumed, getting a bit caught up or something. Pulling the cord all the harder will soon get the bugger moving. And so it did - after some reluctance, when it seemed completely stuck, it suddenly gave way and rolled up into its housing above the window outside. Job done, issue forgotten.

Forgotten, that is, until a rancid smell started to become apparent in the kitchen from the next day. We emptied the bin, cleaned the floor and sink, but couldn't find out where this smell was coming from. It took until a couple of days later to establish what was causing it. Our neighbours, relatives of my girlfriend, come to our kitchen window to talk to us, as it faces out over the ground in front of their own house. Saves them walking all the way to the front door. They pointed out that, hanging from the top of the blind outside our window, was the tail of some animal or other. Oh dear.

We clearly had to remove the corpse of whatever it was we'd killed if we wanted rid of the smell. This first meant we had to deal with the incipient nest of hornets which was just beginning to be built outside the very same window. Hornet heaven - warm, spectacular views of the nearby lake and handy for local amenities like dead animals and people to sting. So - reach out the window, spray liberally with insecticide (fly spray, basically), withdraw arm as quickly as possible and slam window shut until dozens of furious hornets have died in twitching fury. First part done.

Second part. Go outside and try to remove corpse. At this point, dear reader, I confess that I 'outsourced' the job by cunningly volunteering to go downstairs to the garage and get the hose, knowing we may have to jet the remains off the blind. My girlfriend's cousin pried the animal off using two twigs like chopsticks. I kid you not.

It was a bloody snake. A snake which, while still snake-shaped for the rear three quarters, was flattened into a messy, maggot-ridden disk, squashed flat on the blind, for the remaining 25% at the head end. We'd obviously rolled it up into the blind's housing, encountering the resistance as the poor animal's head jammed into the roll, only for the blind to then move freely again as the snake was squashed like a pancake and rolled up into the thing. Charming.

The stench was overpowering, so the corpse having been removed, I now heroically stepped up to rinse the remaining gunk off with the hose, while those who'd got closer to it than I had gagged and retched their retreats. I also, of course, had to wash off the bit of hornet real estate that had been sneakily added to the wall just by the window.

This does not, you won't be surprised to hear, happen back home in Streatham.

Mining for Millionaire's Slices

I know everybody says they don't like to look at themselves in a mirror, but in my case, it really is something I avoid if possible in a very literal sense. I have to look at my face, of course, in the morning, when shaving or combing hair or whatever, but beyond that, the rest of my body may as well not exist in the parallel universe behind those glass planes.

Every now and again, though, you get no choice. A couple of Sundays ago this happened to me, and let me tell you dear reader it was a salutary experience. I was up in Liverpool with my g/f, seeing friends of ours, and doing a bit of shopping. Needing to replace some of my increasingly worn shirts, I found myself in the changing rooms at Debenhams to try on a new one, with basically no way of avoiding seeing myself in the mirrors which entirely covered two of the four walls in the little cell in which I found myself.

My own brain decided to pass comment on what it saw in pretty forthright terms, through my inner monologue. You fat, lazy, pot-bellied, out of condition, ugly, going-to-die-young-of-a-heart-attack bastard, it basically said. Cheers, brain - give it to me straight, why don't you? I was, to say the least, displeased with what I saw. This has led to my first proper, serious attempt to lose weight for a very long time.

Now I've tried the Atkins in the past, for a few days. I've tried the soup diet, again for a few days. They're effective in the short term but, as you're always warned about during rapid weight loss, it goes back on in short order when you stop. The only time I've ever lost weight significantly over a long-ish period was the six months when I was out of work. I had, during that time, no money to buy choccy bars, cakes, muffins, creamy coffees and the like, and basically ate nothing but spaghetti tossed in olive oil, garlic and chilli flakes. Delicious and slimming - I recommend joblessness for weight loss, but for absolutely nothing else.

So it seemed obvious which route to take this time - all the various named diets and regimes I'm going to fail at, because I just get angrily, ravenously, desperately hungry, and end up exhausted and unable to concentrate at work. I then cheat, eating the sugary shit to wake myself up, and inevitably give up. The way forward has therefore been to simply eliminate all that lovely stuff. No more giant cinnamon Danish for breakfast. No more chocolate flapjack with lunch. No more partaking of the home-baked cakes, Krispy Kremes and chocolate that's always (and I mean always) on offer at work. (I really do mean always - I write this on Tuesday, and so far this week there have been two-dozen Krispy Kreme original glazed yesterday, and two giant Toblerones today. There will, no doubt, be something else tomorrow. My workmates are a generous bunch with sweet teeth.)

I has been absolutely killing me to sit there and not eat these things, munching through increasingly enormous salads I've been making in an effort to fill myself up. The first few days I was consumed (no pun intended, it's the only apposite word for it) by thoughts of food, I just couldn't think of anything else. And I was bloody hungry. It's getting a bit easier, to the point where I no longer have to make a salad comprising an entire family bag of mixed leaves, an entire family bag of spinach leaves and an entire family bag of rocket just as the base to put all the other stuff on. I can get by now on really quite normal portions and have, pleasingly, only cheated once, and that was on a Sunday at my parents' house, eating a small bit of my mum's treacle pudding, the first pud she's been able to make as her recovery from a stroke continues. So I'm allowing myself that one.

The booze has all but gone, and apparently bread is a great evil to be scoured from our diets, so that's gone too. I'm missing both, needless to say. Excellent advice has been received from my friend R and my brother, both of whom suggested a similar thing - eat what the planet provides naturally, rather than a load of processed stuff with sugar added to it, and you won't go far wrong.

On that note, a thought occurred during a conversation with my brother about that very thing, just a few days into this endeavour. It may perhaps give you an insight into my current state of mind, now fifteen days in. If all that the planet provides naturally is good for you, why the hell doesn't it provide, say, Millionaire's Slice? I'd work at a Millionaire's Slice mine in a bloody heartbeat.

Mined from the deepest Millionaire's Slice mine on the planet, in unrefined form. Just as nature bloody well should have intended.

Derby days

This past weekend-and-a-bit saw me lose my music festival virginity at the third-ever Maifeld Derby in what was an extremely sunny Mannheim in central(ish)-southern Germany. I'd been to a day at the now defunct Fleadh in Finsbury Park many years ago, but that was just a few hours in a park in the same city in which I lived, so could hardly count.

Cards face up, first of all. Anybody who knows me will know that I simply don't understand the idea of travelling any kind of distance simply to listen to music, because I'm not into it in the way most people seem to be. I'm not moved by it (or at least, not often) and certainly wouldn't give up the home comforts of bed, shower etc to enable this to happen. That people do this, in their hundreds of thousands at any one time, and seem to actively enjoy casting aside many of the advances we've made in industrialisation  to improve our lives - sanitation, for example - for a few days in a tent, I find particularly baffling. Personally, camping is the sort of thing I'd do only if society had broken down in, say, a zombie apocalypse, and the cities were no longer safe. Even then, I'd try to find an empty house somewhere rural before I'd resort to canvas.

Anyway, I digress. I was in fact doubly fortunate. Not only did I not have to camp, but this Derby at which I broke my festival duck is organised by people I know, so I was lucky enough to be granted access to the private bits usually set aside for the bands, the workers etc. So, sporting a gold wristband no less, I joined a few thousand other people to enjoy what for them was probably a familiar experience, but for me was completely new.

Observations from this newbie, then. Much of this will be second nature to many of you, but to me the idea of listening to music for anything up to 15 hours, however easily the beer flowed, was unfathomable. It'd surely be crushingly boring to somebody not into music, right? Well, I'll be honest, there were moments during some of the sets from bands whose music I didn't like that I did get a bit bored. These were, though, fleeting - there was always somebody else playing something entirely different on another stage. There was always beer and food available. And in most cases, even bands I'd never heard of (most of them, if I'm honest, but that's a reflection of my ignorance, not the standard of the bill) proved very enjoyable.

It helped greatly that, two hours out of the three days excepted, it was warm and sunny. It helped that I drank a lot of beer, and a lot of whisky'n Cokes, but I did enjoy the live music more than I expected to, even if I'd never heard most of the songs before. I was introduced to, among other things, the delights of Austrian electro-pop-rock funsters Bilderbuch (complete with a lead singer who looked like the love child of Jürgen Klinsmann and the lying blonde kid with the 'clunge' obsession from The Inbetweeners), whose set climaxed with an ode to all the sex things they wanted to do to a yellow sports car.

Then there was Temples, a British band who sounded like a throwback to the prog-rock era, with songs lasting five or six minutes past the last vocals; long, repeating sections that harked back to The Doors, a proper throwback sound which was superb live. There were others - Keston Cobblers Club, another British lot who all seemed to be multi-instrumentalists, and played an old English folk sound on a host of instruments, some of which I'd never seen before. Or Moscow Metro, an Irish rock band who had to cope with a guitar failing to work mid-song and did so without half as much swearing as you'd have heard from me, if I'd been in their place.

One thing that hanging around 'backstage' showed me was how much enthusiasm the bands themselves had for other bands. Their own work done, they'd be talking about who they were going to see with all the excitement of the paying punters. The band which was, I was told by one of the musicians, 'every musician's favourite band', The National, closed the whole thing with a two-hour set. I'm afraid, here, my ignorance got the better of me once again. While all around me, people with extraordinary musical talent of their own were excitedly heading off early to get a good spot for The Nationals' set, I ultimately thought them inferior to many of the bands standing there in the audience listening to them. I was clearly in a very small minority, though, because the main stage was packed for their slot, and they were received with huge enthusiasm.

And so my festival virginity was lost. Back to Frankfurt from Mannheim, and thence home. (If, by the way, you ever get the chance to use Frankfurt Airport, don't. It's crap.) I realise that, to the purist, a hotel room, a private-area-access wristband and a lack of knee-deep mud means I haven't done it properly at all, but I'm counting it.

By the way, the above descriptions of how some of the bands sounded must be regarded with caution, filtered as they are through my entirely ignorant and uninformed ears. That's just how I heard them, but isn't that the fundamental experience of everybody at these things? We must all hear them through the quality control mechanisms of our own tastes, even if that taste is formed from very little experience.

(My sincere thanks to L, P, T and all those others who know who they are, who were so generous in inviting me and my missus and looking after us so well when they had better things to do with their time.)

Poles apart on Eurovision

So, Eurovision then. This is not going to be an entry about the winner - it's just a bloke in a dress*, Kenny Everett played the queen whilst sporting a beard as far back as the '80s, for crying out loud, can we all just move on? - rather, it's about the fundamental motives that lie behind where the votes are cast.

One thing that's come out about the voting patterns since the competition finished is that the juries set up to try to mitigate the worst excesses of the political voting, of which more later, differed wildly (in more than one country) in their opinions from the telephone-voting public. In some countries, those differences were dichotomically opposed, which gives the impression that the two entities are casting their votes based on entirely different criteria. Britain was one such country. We're one of the rare voting masses in Eurovision whose vote is not always predictable. There's an established voting form for most of the eligible countries which goes something like this:

1. Maintain good neighbourly and political relations with your important trading or ancestral partners.
2. Political point scoring about some contemporary issue, as the Russians found out to their cost this time round.
3. Does it have a rising, anthemic quality, and at least one key change? (As a musical ignoramus, I don't know what this is, but I'm assured by my more knowledgable friends that it's of vital importance).
4. Alright alright, in the event you can't think of anything else, I suppose you could vote on whether the song's actually any good or not.

Now I'd always thought the British vote was slightly different from others in that, Ireland apart, we're not surrounded by neighbours we feel duty-bound to oblige with points. Quite the opposite, in fact. This time's voting pattern in Britain seems to confirm that view. But in the great differences between jury votes and public votes, one song really stands out (you'll see what I did there in a minute…) - the Poles'.

If you'll excuse another list, here's how I personally regard the nature of most of the songs in this competition, year after year;

1. The aforementioned rising, anthemic, key-change carrying stuff.
2. Euro-pop.
3. Quaint, folksy, doesn't-really-fit-any-category type stuff that may be better than 1 and 2 above but isn't going to win.
4. For Christ's sake don't vote for us, we're too skint to host this next year, so we've entered this shit. (I'm looking at you, France).

Poland, however, eschewed these conventions and went for boobs. Never mind the song, check these puppies out. I thought, when I saw this, that they'd misjudged their audience. Eurovision is, of course, a huge event in the gay calendar, and therefore watched by large numbers of gay men, and is also evidently much more popular with women than men anyway. I didn't think the large-breasted sirens provocatively doing their laundry and churning milk would strike the right note. However, their busty ploy might well have worked for them, but for those meddling juries. Now there are a lot of Poles in Britain, I accept that, but not enough to make them runaway winners of the British public vote, as they evidently were. Same applied in Norway. And the Ukrainian public were clearly sufficiently diverted from their present political troubles to pick up their phones and vote for Poland in their droves. How many votes did Poland get from Britain? Nil. From Norway? A measly two. Ukraine? A healthy seven, but not the 12 the public had thought it due.

The Germans had no such qualms, firmly placing the Poles at the top of the, er, pole. Their jury must think like their public. Our own jury, and others, clearly missed the point of the Eurovision Song Contest completely, casting their votes based on the songs, of all things. Weird. (This means, incidentally, since they placed Poland last, that they regarded that French atrocity as a better song than the Poles' heart-felt paean to love and loss, We Are Slavic ('shake what your momma gave you'), a decision which is frankly baffling.)

So, a final list. It seems the British public voted based on the following criteria:

1. Tits!
2. Dunno. That girl's got a beard, though. That's definitely worth a few points.
3. Had a nice holiday in Malta once, I did. Points for them.

I think you'll agree those are considerations which are much more in keeping with the whole tone of Eurovision. We obviously get it in a way that quite eludes the experts. We should think about the composition of our jury a bit more carefully next time.



*On a more serious note for a moment, it's quite easy to take for granted the vote for the Austrian from Britain, living as we do in a liberal, open-minded society. What is gratifying is the fact that this vote was so widely reflected across Europe - it's been seen by various media commentators as a vote for diversity and against homophobia. But even that raises its own questions of our jury - were they expressing their support (understandably if so) for the right to express your identity and sexuality as you see fit, or did they genuinely think that was the best song of the 26?