Where did you get that hat?

Posted on June 17, 2011 by blogmywiki

I never got hats. For starters, I look a right tit in any hat, so that rules out me ever wearing one. Women’s hats were equally baffling to me. The word ‘fascinator’ only entered my vocabulary during the recent royal wedding ceremony (thank you Jackie), but even then, I never understood why women might actually want to wear a hat – until today.

It’s Ascot this week, which means… ladies in hats. More specifically, ladies in hats on my train, getting off at Waterloo East. And this morning I saw a young woman on her own, the sole racegoer on a train full of a bunch of schmucks, me included, on their way to work.

It was a revelation.

Her hat was – forgive my hamfisted description – a flat black disc with white polka dots. On top of this was a pink floral arrangement with 1 or 2 mad fronds firing off into the air to one side. Her lipstick exactly matched the colour of the flowers. She was wearing a simple black dress. She looked stunning.

She lowered her head slightly to one side and I realised that the way her hat partially obscured her face was very alluring. And you can’t do that with a fascinator.

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Grace in Small Things (2)

Posted on June 13, 2011 by blogmywiki
  • The view as I turn the corner from Great Peter Street into Lord North Street never fails slightly to take my breath away. You may recognise it from the film An Education.
    Lord North St
  • Watching a young man support his girlfriend as she changed shoes outside a tube station this morning. It looked like she had a job interview or it was her first day of a new job and she looked terrified, and the concern he was clearly showing for her was very sweet.
  • Killing a bit of time sitting on the steps of St John’s Smith Square (not unrelated to point 1 above).
  • Being indoors during a rainstorm. Kind of obvious, but I love it when it pours outside on a warm day.
  • Sharing a rainbow with my five year-old daughter. I asked her what colours she could see. ‘Pink’ she replied. I said there was every colour in a rainbow. She looked and said ‘No. Not black. And there’s no brown in a rainbow.’ I couldn’t answer that.
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A load of balls

Posted on June 1, 2011 by blogmywiki

I’m not sporty – and I always had sympathy with the small child in the Alan Partridge sports headlines on The Day Today and On The Hour who caused turmoil at major sporting events by pointing out that golf, for example, was just a load of men in daft sweaters knocking balls around with sticks. The crowds dispersed in dismay that they could have been so easily duped. I also like Jasper Fforde satirising the national obsession with sport by imagining a world where literature has tribal fans.

The FIFA business got me thinking though. Football seems like a bit of fun – not for me, you understand, but if people want to spend their spare time playing it, I think that’s great. I understand why people would want to do that. Even I can see that you might want to pay a few pounds to watch a local team of talented, committed amateur players play the game against another team. But pay thousands for a season ticket and kits? Nah, I don’t think so.

Sport is entertainment. It relies on a mixture of skill and an element of luck to pull people in – the luck is important. I can understand the thrill of watching a minor league team have an amazing FA Cup run, getting to Wembley. I get that. Although some think even luck is not enough:
XKCD

But corruption, of the whiff of corruption, undermines sport’s entertainment value – or it should do. If there’s more to sport than skill and luck – why bother watching it?

I used to follow F1 – until I got the sense that a certain team used to get a suspicious number of judgements in its favour. It seemed like a fix. Its entertainment value evaporated for me. I suspect cycling lost its appeal for many a few years back after doping scandals. Athletics?

Will the same happen with football? Will people wake up and realise that organised, professional sport has failed. Sport should be a hobby, best left to the amateurs.

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Is ‘Nordic Noir’ really so strange?

Posted on May 22, 2011 by blogmywiki

I’ve just finished reading Jar City by Arnaldur Indriðason – desperate to finish it so I can watch the film back. It’s another bit of ‘Nordic Noir’, so fashionable at the moment: Scandinavian crime fiction in the mould of Wallander or Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole novels.

I thought Jar City would be a bit different though; the excellent BBC Four documentary on Scandinavian detective fiction painted this as being a bit stranger. It’s set in Iceland, for one thing, and the story was underpinned by what sounded like a sinister plot for a private company to collect the DNA of every Icelandic citizen. This sounded like an otherworldly mixture of police procedural and thriller.

But it’s not. It’s a detective novel, like any other. The DNA plot only comes to light at the end and is skated over – which is a pity as Arnaldur Indriðason really could have done something that mixed Wallander with Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown and been better than all of them. The format is staggeringly typical of a large amount of detective fiction: the main character is a middle-aged man with health issues and an unhealthy lifestyle. He is divorced. He has a troubled relationship with his grown-up daughter. He is just the same as Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander. He is Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks. He is Ian Rankin’s DI Rebus. He is not an escapee from The Sugarcubes or Lazy Town.

So much for my preconceptions of Iceland.

I’m going to watch the film though – mainly because one of few odd things about Jar City is that we don’t know if one of the characters is male or female. I want to know how they tackled that on screen.

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Master and servant

Posted on May 1, 2011 by blogmywiki

Charlie Brooker has already written, far more amusingly than I could, about the hell that awaits an iPhone user who dares to try to manage their phone from a new computer.

I’ve found myself in the same kind of nightmare – yet to be fully resolved, but I have an idea how to go about it. All methods seem tedious, time-consuming and nerve-wracking. Will I lose my contacts? Will I lose my paid-for apps?

While researching possible solutions I found a really pissy post on a forum that said that users who were upset by the difficulty of, say, adding a new song to an iPhone from a new computer, or who were worried about losing data, were missing the point. It is your responsibility to back everything up, he opined. The computer and the iThing have a master and servant relationship: the computer is the master, the iPhone or iPad is the slave. Back up your computer and all will be fine.

Except that’s not how it works in the real world. Most people use their iPhones and iPads much more than their laptops or desktop computers. You can download, buy songs, movies and apps direct to your iPhone and iPad. Photos are created on iPhones. The iPad encourages creativity more and more with apps like GarageBand (the iPad version of GarageBand is almost reason enough to buy an iPad, by the way – it is incredible). You can plug your digital camera into your iPad and download, edit and view photos – which you may then back up to your computer.

So really – which is the master and which is the servant?

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