Goodbye England

Time: The middle of the night.
Location: My sister's living room, Oxford.
Mode of blogging: My sister's laptop.

Already I'm regretting packing the ukelele. It doesn't stay in tune and just because it's a lot smaller than a guitar doesn't mean it fits easily in my rucksack. I spent years pronouncing 'rucksack' like a German or a northerner, with a 'rook' sound for the first syllable. I think it's because that's how my dad says it and of all the people I regularly to talk to, he is probably the most prolific user of the word 'rucksack'. Some mates pointed out a few years back that I said it 'wrong', and for a while I started pronouncing it poshly, but now I've switched back. In case you're wondering, I'm not going anywhere with this ramble, I'm just bored waiting for a 4am bus to Heathrow Airport and I'm scared that if I go to sleep I'll miss said bus and wake up five minutes before check-in, in the wrong city.

According to the Blogger account login control panel thingy, this will be my 100th post. I imagine that includes all the ones that I start writing but don't finish. Still, I suppose it's a landmark of sorts. Still half an hour before I have to leave for the bus station. I just used the word 'still' to begin two consecutive sentences. I'm also not too sure about my spelling of 'syllable' in the first paragraph. This is as close as you can get to just reading my thoughts as they happen. I'm just typing whatever comes into my head. I've got two creme eggs in my rucksack. I've spent the last three or four weeks attempting to grow a beard, and it hasn't worked. I'm starting to wish I'd got rid of it when I had a shower this morning. I've loaded up my MP3 player with 8GB of music and 10 episodes of Scrubs. I doubt I'm going to watch any Scrubs on my 2-inch screen - it seems like a sad thing to do whilst exploring the world - but I like knowing that I could if I wanted to. Here's my prediction for what will be the soundtrack to my holiday:

Radiohead - Pablo Honey
Sigur Ros - Afaskljhfakjsh Bdfajkfhdlkjsfh (can't spell it, it's Icelandic)
Bright Eyes - Fevers and Mirrors
Bob Dylan - The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
Leonard Cohen - Songs of Love and Hate
Kanye West - Late Registration
Grandaddy - The Sophtware Slump (that's how it's spelt, promise)
Bjork - Homogenic
Ekkeko - The Canal Boat Sessions (yes, my band is a lot shitter than everyone else on the list but I want to see what we sound like in various settings, like on a plane or on a beach)

I think that's enough typing. I'm not sure how much I'll update this for the next few months. Probably not much. Right, nearly time to walk to the bus station. I prefer trains. You know where you are with trains. Buses rely on some knowledge of the local geography, instead of a clear and calm robot voice, supplemented by a clear, decisive LED display, telling you when you're at your stop. I wonder where San Francisco airport is. I hope it's near San Francisco.

Bottle

Tonight, Panorama are doing a program about bottled water. I'm glad, because I have always viewed the phenomenon of buying bottled water in a country with a perfectly good supply of water as being totally ridiculous. I think, purely in terms of logic, it ranks up there with war, advertising and botox as one of mankind's most pointless endeavours. Wow, I spelt 'endeavours' right first time. I'm not going to bother ranting at length about why bottled water is such a silly idea, since I would hope it's pretty obvious, but I will moan about something else.

I'm heading off travelling on Friday, so I'm cancelling my subscription to Tesco Online DVD Rental. When I logged in to cancel, I noticed that there were three options: I could take two weeks of holiday without payment (not much use since I'm away for over three months, but a good idea), I could cancel my account entirely, or I could 'freeze my account'. This sounded tempting - why cancel completely when I could just return my current DVD, keep my account details and list of films that I want to rent, and start paying again when I get back? The answer, it turns out, is that the cost of this privilege is £1 a week. That's about £4.50 a month, AKA more than half what I pay right now for the full service, just so they won't delete my account details. I know, it's called capitalism and they're allowed to charge whatever they want, and I'm not really moaning at that (I don't have the energy). I just think it's a really silly decision - if it had been free, I would definitely have reactivated my account when I got back. Since it's not, I might as well look around for a cheaper DVD rental company when I get back, so Tesco lose out. Then again, I suppose if business were my bag, I'd find it perversely satisfying to have come up with this idea - being paid a fiver a month not to do something. I wonder what the legal definition of blackmail is...

Rooney

I like footballers who do things differently. There are so many clones in the Premiership now, players who are flown in from other countries then leave before you get a chance to know anything about them. I like players with a story. My favourite player of all time, for example, is Eric Cantona. I always liked him because of his skill, the way he turned his collar up, his style on and off the field, but he didn't cement his favourite-ever place in my heart until he kung-fu kicked a racist Crystal Palace fan during a game. From that point on, everything he did pushed him above all the faceless modern players. The way he turned up at a press conference after the incident, the world's media desperate for a quote, and said: "When ze seagulls follow ze trawler, it is because zey sink sardines will be srown into ze sea. Sank you". Then he left. When he returned from his ban, it felt like a movie, like a war hero presumed dead had returned and filled everyone with hope. I know it sounds like I'm being melodramatic but I still get worked up over football now and at this point I was only 10. And then he retired at 30, wanting to quit at the top of his game, a decision which made me angry at the time but with hindsight just makes Cantona seem even more perfect. Some other players might have had his skill, but not his effortless cool.



Nowadays, my favourite player is Wayne Rooney, because he is also different. He's a big, fat, stupid, ugly ogre of a player who looks like he shouldn't be any good, but he's incredible, and there's something wonderfully English about that. When the modern blueprint of a world-class player seems to indicate a skinny, diving poser with flowery skills (think Christiano Ronaldo), Rooney is the opposite. He gets his goals by knocking people out of the way, he stays on his feet no matter how many centre-halves you throw at him, and when he tackles you, you stay down. And yet, and this is what elevates him to near-Cantona status in my mind, he can do everything these other, far less inspiring players can do: little tricks, delicate chips...he's even bloody fast, which doesn't look possible, like the way you wouldn't think a bumblebee could fly. In fact, a better example of that would be when he once celebrated a goal with a somersault that he had clearly worked on in training. It was so ungainly that it seemed like the stadium shook when he landed, but it was definitely a somersault, and I laughed out loud when he did it. He may not have the poetic turn of phrase of Cantona, but he also gives some great quotes. After Rooney got sent off against Portugal for appearing to stamp on an opponent's bollocks, he was asked if it had been deliberate. Rooney responded by saying that if it had been deliberate, the player would still be in hospital. I'm not saying he's a nice guy - I'm just saying he's bloody entertaining.

Collection

Ever since I've had my own computer (before this millennium began), I've had problems with my music collection. Putting aside the almost negligible cassettes and vinyls, my current music collection is split between CD's and MP3's. A few years back, pre-broadband, my problem was that if I really wanted an album, I would buy it on CD, while my MP3 collection was made up of odds and sods; this meant that my computer-based music library gave a very distorted picture of my taste, since it was missing all my favourite albums. Granted, I could walk across to my shelf, pick up a CD and play it, but that seemed a bit low-tech.
Fast forward to mid-February 2008 and, after a recent spate of downloading, coupled with a concerted effort in 2007 to rip my CD collection, the vast majority of the music that I own exists in one sprawling folder. I'm missing a lot of genre descriptions and a fair bit of album artwork, but that doesn't worry me unduly. What worries me is this:
I have this utopian vision of firing up Windows Media Player and having complete confidence that everything in its library has the correct title and artist, is correctly sequenced within a full album, and is something I actually intended to have in the library. I want there to be no albums that play in alphabetical order (unless they happen to be that way, but a quick bit of maths says only about 1 in 4000 albums would coincidentally occur like that) and most of all, I want to be able to click 'shuffle' and have complete confidence that every track I hear is meant to be in the library. I actually don't like the idea of the shuffle function, since I'm something of an album purist, but it's like when you're climbing and someone tells you that you could hang a Land Rover from your carabiner; you never would, but it's nice to know you could.
I've been meaning for ages to purge the unwanted tracks from my library, but they pop up from so many sources. Rubbish free songs that come with Windows, albums that I don't like but that happen to have been ripped and burnt using my computer, songs I've downloaded for people without the internet and, most annoyingly of all, hundreds and hundreds of individual sound files that went into recording my band's songs. When I do occasionally relax my morals and put Windows Media Player on shuffle, I get a run of maybe two or three decent songs before I hear a fluffed guitar solo, followed by twenty seconds of hissy would-be silence. A couple more pearlers by Radiohead or Grandaddy, then an entire four-minute drum take. Worst of all, I can be shredding on the air guitar to Bohemian Rhapsody, only to find the next track is one of my own dry, horribly off-key vocal takes from a song with bad lyrics that I've written. No-one wants to hear that, especially me.
And suddenly I realise that in the time it has taken me to write this, I could have pretty much sorted out my library. Then again, if I had a model railway, I'd hate to finish it; the fun is in the design and construction, and I guess the same is true of this. Maybe I'll be happier if I ration the gradual improvement of the library to a few deletions a day, the odd venture onto Wikipedia to look up a stubbornly obscure track listing, at least until I actually do get a model railway, which is the only thing that stops me from being terrified of growing old.

A Moment Of Shameful Materialism

My new MP3 player turned up the other day. I say my new one, but that implies it's the latest in a series and I've never actually had one until now. I hesitated in getting one because I wanted to make sure I got the right one for me. Forgive me for taking this search far too seriously, but I wanted a player with soul, one that I could keep for years because its design would be timeless.
I spent £105 on this player, and have just this moment spent another £17 on a big memory card to quintuple the player's previously tiny capacity, possibly leading you to the conclusion that I've been a bit of an idiot because I could have got a half-decent iPod for the money I've spent. I have some sympathy with this opinion, because objectively, compared to any iPod, my player is a brick-shaped, brick-sized anachronism with the weight, style and storage capacity of...a brick.
And yet, I don't regret my choice. Yes, the iPod is much, much slimmer, but my player fits in my pocket and that's good enough for me - I don't jog. Yes, the iPod has a much slicker operating system in which you don't have to arse around endlessly to get tracks in the right order, but this choice was all about my personal taste, and the fact that my computer hasn't been infected with that virus called iTunes is a big bonus for someone as set in his ways as I am. Finally, there's the fact that iPods hold a lot more songs than my player, but 10Gb is enough for me right now, and anyway, that leads me onto the positives.
My MP3 player has a built-in storage capacity of 2Gb, which sucks, but it has an SDHC card slot, meaning I've already managed to turn that 2Gb into a respectable 10Gb. I can get all the music I listen to onto 10Gb, and the card sizes are going to get cranked up in the near future, so I'm all set. The other bonus about the card slot is that videos are no longer a problem. With a fixed capacity, you're always going to be looking over your shoulder as your video files eat up your finite disk space, but while you don't want to be swapping cards around to find your favourite album, surely there's an appeal to having a little collection of cheap SD cards in your pocket, filled to the brim with Scrubs or Simpsons? Not on an iPod....
But why am I fannying about with this slightly obscure logic when I could be taking big, meaty bites out of the iPod's credibility? Here are a few scenarios in which the tables are turned and the iPod becomes as much use as a brick:

1. You want to listen to the radio. You can't, and yet I'm hearing it loud and clear on my versatile MP3 player. I offer to record the show for you with my player's 'record MP3 from radio' function and give you the file on SD card to listen to later, but you realise you have no SD card slot.
2. Your favourite album is a rare piece of vinyl. You'd love to listen to it through your iPod on the train but your record player is in the living room, your computer is upstairs and the chances of you having the right leads are pretty small, even if you could be arsed. My player has a line input and comes with the correct lead.
   
3. It's dark. You've dropped your keys under your car. All you have is your iPod. You turn the screen up to max brightness and fumble around on the road but it's no good. I rescue the situation with the infeasibly bright LED torch on my MP3 player.
   
4. You're on a camping trip. Your iPod runs out of juice. No sockets out here, and yet my MP3 player appears to be having no trouble. Ah, that's because it runs for 40 minutes after one minute of winding it up. That's right - winding it up. I have a clockwork MP3 player. That's cool.
5. Still on the camping trip, your phone dies. You're stranded on a mountain and you need to call 999. You throw your iPod down the mountain in a feeble attempt to hit a fellow walker and attract their attention. Meanwhile, I am plugging your phone into my MP3 player with one of the many adapters provided. I flick the switch to 'external charge' and resuscitate your mobile using wind-up power.

I could go on. Built-in microphone? Check. Built-in speaker? Check. Ability to play Windows Media files? Check. The iPod should hang its head. I appreciate that not everyone loves gimmicks as much as me, but then I have a Master's degree in physics and you probably don't, so perhaps you should consider the possibility that I'm right. Conclusion: I love my Trevor Baylis Eco Media Player, even if it does have a very silly name.

Kwik Fit, Physics Shit

I'm aware I've been swearing a bit more regularly in recent entries on here, but for the sake of a rhyme, I feel the use of the S-word in the title of this post is justified. Anyway, my point. Read this:

Let Kwik Fit recharge your Air Con while-u-wait for only £44.95. We will replace and recharge lubricant and refrigerant levels in line with your manufacturer’s recommendation. If we cannot improve the coolest vent temperature from your car by more than 10% - then you pay nothing at all.

Let me tell you something about temperature - the scale you are used to is very misleading. If you are of roughly my age, which you quite probably are, then your scale of choice starts at the freezing temperature of water and hits 100 as water boils. The rest of you use a ridiculous system in which various points are defined by weird mixtures of ice, salt, ammonium chloride and the armpit of the scale's inventor (seriously).
In any case, unless you're a pedant with a physics degree, you probably don't prefer the Kelvin scale, at which zero is defined as the coldest anything could ever theoretically be. The nice thing about this scale is that you can say that 20 degrees is twice as hot as 10 degrees, because your zero point actually represents zero thermal energy. Since this is a logical scale for discussing temperature, let's use it to examine Kwik Fit's claim that they can reduce the temperature of a car's air conditioning by 10%.
Let's imagine your car's air conditioning system has been neglected and is pumping out air at 10 degrees centigrade. You take it into Kwik Fit and ask if they can sort this out. Yes, they say, they're pretty sure they can reduce this temperature by 10%. At this point, you pull out a calculator and convert 10 degrees centigrade into the far more sensible 283.15 kelvin, then divide this by 10. You cheerfully point out that you are excited at the prospect of a 10% reduction in the temperature of your car's air con, since the ability to blast air at minus 18.315 degrees centigrade will be something of a novelty. The mechanic tells you to fuck off and get a life, but at least you know you're right.

And now some added bonus features for this post.

• You may have spotted that I used the word 'kelvin' twice in this post (before this sentence, obviously), once with a capital 'K' and once without. This is one of those silly little points that I really want someone to pull me up on so I can go 'aha', and explain that actually you spell units in lower case, even if they are named after a person. Oh, but just so we're clear, if you say "10 degrees Fahrenheit", that's correct because the "degrees" bit is the unit (I think).
  
• A thought: isn't it weird that the Fahrenheit scale was named after a person? My D-grade AS-level German knowledge tells me that the word means "going-ness", which seems a pretty apt description of temperature, the measurement of how much the molecules are bouncing around. It's like if the motion of the planets had been described by Sir Isaac Droppingness.

Eels

After listening to an early mix of a bunch of my recent tracks in my mate's car, I've decided not to bother finishing a solo album for the sake of it. It was just a bit too shit. I've been listening to a lot of good music recently, which is a demoralising experience for a songwriter. I tend to oscillate between two approaches to songwriting. The first is to focus on the song, with the lyrics, melody and chords taking centre-stage. The second is to fiddle about with buttons and pedals and computers until something sounds cool, then shoehorn in some half-arsed lyrics with no discernible melody. The first approach seems to produce far better results, but the second is so much easier, and countless years of deadline-centric education has shown that self-discipline is not a strength of mine.
Luckily, I'm soon heading off on a carbon-spewing-hence-guilt-inducing trip around the world, during which my only songwriting tools will be a notebook, a pencil and a ukelele (at least until I decide it's taking up valuable rucksack volume and it's sacrificed for firewood). The great thing about ukeleles is that they sound shite, so the making-cool-noises approach to songwriting is ruled out from the start. Anyway, here's one of the tracks that made me realise I need to change my methods: