PLATTITUDE

Wake-up call on climate

2009-09-22T08:54:00.000+01:00

On 21 September 2009, at more than 2600 events in 135 countries across the globe, people used their mobile phones to join together to issue a wake-up call to world leaders on climate change. The breadth and creativity of events was breathtaking (a world away from the old-style 'Whaddawewant?' chanting) and the message broke through to leaders and international media.

Wot, no spliff?

2009-09-03T18:33:00.001+01:00

Whatever is the world coming to? Telegraph blogs editor Damian Thompson, who lives in Notting Hill, had a predictable moan about this year's Carnival: it's too big, in the wrong place, blacks and whites don't mingle (not with him maybe).

And then he shows how with it and street the new Notting Hill Tories are trying to be by complaining that 'I was struck by the shortage of spliff being smoked today. My theory: the stuff is now so ubiquitous that Carnival-goers no longer get excited about scoring and then being able to smoke it outdoors without being arrested. Call me a fuddy-duddy, but the clean air smelled wrong, like a Catholic church from which incense has been banned by a trendy priest.'

That's him in the picture, by the way. The idiot grin is a dead giveaway.

The Black Album

2009-09-02T21:39:00.002+01:00

The headline in the London freesheet on my way to Hanif Kureishi’s new play The Black Album read ‘Racists Kidnap Muslim Leader’. Noor Ramjanally, from Loughton, Essex, was reportedly abducted from his home at knifepoint by two men, bundled into the boot of a car and driven to Epping Forest. There he feared he was about to be murdered when one of the men said ‘Let’s do it here.’ Instead, he was warned, ‘We don’t want [your] Islamic group in Loughton. If you don’t stop, we’ll come back.’

Ramjanally has been the target of a hate campaign, including the firebombing of his house, since starting a regular Friday afternoon prayer meeting in a Loughton community hall in March. It’s the sort of overt, spilling-over-into-violence bigotry that frequently goes along with far-right electoral success. The BNP has four councillors in the area, whose leader Pat Richardson denied his party’s involvement in the attacks on Ramjanally with the comment that ‘firebombing is not a British method. A brick through the window is a British method, but firebombing is not a way of showing displeasure.’

It is indeed a brick rather than a firebomb that goes through the window of a Pakistani butcher’s home in The Black Album. But the effect of such attacks, and the lower-level, everyday racism encountered especially – and, since 9/11, increasingly – by Muslims of Asian origin in Britain is no less incendiary.

It is this anti-‘Paki’ sentiment that provides the backdrop to Kureishi’s play, which is based on his second novel, written in 1995 and set in 1989, when the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie called on Muslims to murder the author and his book The Satanic Verses was being burnt in Bradford and other cities. The Black Album relates the rise of a militant, political Islam, told through the prism of Shahid, a young student, newly arrived in London, who had been so scarred by his experience of racism at school in Sevenoaks that he had wanted to deny his own identity and be a racist himself.

Shahid, like his creator Kureishi, feels himself disconnected from both the society in which he resides and the one from which he came. Like Kureishi, his love of literature takes him into a world of the imagination that distances him from others in his family and ethnic community. Even so, he has an immediate bond with his new Muslim friends in London, Chad, Hat and Riaz – ‘the first people he had met who were like him; he didn’t have to explain anything’. The novel follows their radicalisation in the face of the toxic cocktail of racism and the seemingly empty hedonism they encounter in a London whose youth are revelling in the drug-fuelled euphoria of rave culture following the ‘second summer of love’. The play takes us forward a further decade, to the suicide bombers of 2005, finishing with a literal bang as one of the characters dons a rucksack and blows up himself, the set and everyone on it.

I was left wanting more from Kureishi, who remains one of a very small number of writers of Asian Muslim origin who has made the crossover into the British literary milieu. The Black Album as a play felt too trite and obvious (the opportunistic Labour council leader was little more than a silly parody of George Galloway). Caught between the racists and the Islamists, I can’t help feeling that the likes of Kureishi have been cast adrift. The kind of cultural fusion that his work represents seems to find itself on ever more uncertain ground, speaking to an almost entirely white liberal audience – not so much a bridge bringing together different traditions as a no man’s land being bombed from both sides.

The Black Album as novel finishes on a life-affirming note, with Shahid and his college lecturer lover Deedee agreeing that they will continue with their ‘adventure’ together ‘until it stops being fun’. The fun has clearly stopped long before the end of the play.

Enough already

2009-09-01T10:58:00.000+01:00

To the Globe Theatre for the revolution. Or two revolutions, to be precise: the American and the French. A New World, Trevor Griffiths’ account of the ‘life and loves’ of Tom Paine (that well-known printing error, as the play reminds us – the ‘e’ was a misspelling), is all the more compelling because the audience is so sparse and the actors seem to be playing to us personally.

There’s no one at all up in the gods and only three of us in our lower gallery bay – half as many as made it to the great radical’s famously ill-attended funeral. Abandoned by his erstwhile admirers for his denunciation of organised religion, the man whose pamphlet Common Sense sold 150,000 copies in its first printing (in a country whose population was less than two million) died and was buried in obscurity. I hope Griffiths’ play, which finishes its run on 9 October, doesn’t suffer the same fate.

I suspect the low attendance when I saw it was due to the mass abandonment of London, if you weren’t going to the Notting Hill Carnival, over the August bank holiday. This is the best time to be in the capital, with school closures and other holidays taking up to a quarter of the traffic off the roads and reducing the population by an unmissed million or more. For a little while, you can breathe and you get a sense of why the latest population projections, published in the week before the bank holiday, are such bad news, despite what some would have us believe.

There are now 61.4 million of us in the UK, two million more than in 2001, with most of that increase crowded into the little corner of our island that includes London. We’re on course to hit 70 million within a generation. You don’t have to be a racist banging on about immigration to think that’s enough.

Stop the lies about our health service

2009-08-21T17:32:00.005+01:00

First, let me declare an interest. Both I and my grandson (who was born prematurely, has been in and out of Great Ormond Street children's hospital and will require continuing treatment for the rest of his life) have received the sort of care from the National Health Service that would have been beyond the means of the majority of people in the US. Like the vast majority of people in the UK, I'm proud of the NHS and I'm sick of those wealthy vested interests that try to run it down.

Now let me urge you to sign up to the message below to the people of America. About 80,000 people have done so already; it will take you a couple of minutesto join them.

UK to US: the truth about the NHS

Barack Obama's movement for change in the US is at risk of collapsing - in large part because of lies about healthcare in the UK!

It's incredible, but Obama's health plan, and with it his entire presidency, could be derailed if big corporations and the radical right manage to convince Americans that the NHS is a nightmare rationed service that refuses to treat patients and abandons the most needy, such as Stephen Hawking, without care.

We need a huge popular outcry to show the truth - how proud and grateful we are in the UK to have a public healthcare system that works, despite its imperfections. Sign on to the message to America and forward this link - if enough of us sign, we'll cause a stir in US media and help change the debate: http://www.avaaz.org/en/reform_health_care_uk

US healthcare is run by large corporations - it's the most expensive in the world, but ranks 37th in quality, and 40 million Americans can't afford any care at all. It's an awful system for people, but corporations make enormous profits, so they're fighting to keep it. Industry lobbyists are ramping up their smear campaigns right now to make sure the Obama plan is dead on arrival when Congress meets in September. Americans are hearing a constant barrage of propaganda that the NHS is a nightmare. Let's say it ain't so.

Myths about the proposed health care reforms http://www.communitycatalyst.org/projects/national_reform/alerts?id=0066

Extreme tactics of the conservative right http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/health/policy/04townhalls.html http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-08-17-voa45.cfm

Paul Krugman on health care
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/opinion/17krugman.html?_r=2&scp=31&sq=health&st=cse

The extent of the health care lobby
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aZdbr0YXz5jI

Health insurers stocks rise as health care plans fade http://www.reuters.com/article/hotStocksNews/idUSTRE57G4BU20090817?sp=true

Cricket: better than sex?

2009-08-20T13:03:00.003+01:00

First day of the last Ashes Test and those ever-imaginative people at Philosophy Football have diversified into cricket. This means that you can now add this t-shirt, inspired by the late cricket fanatic and Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, to your whites - or ritually burn it, as the mood takes you, when England's batting again collapses at the crucial moment.

Cricket has drawn a surprising number of left-wing writers to the crease over the years, from CLR James to Mike Marqusee and ex-New Statesman editor Peter Wilby. But cricketers themselves often lack the same way with words. Former England captain Mike Gatting was once asked if he felt vindicated when a test victory followed a period of press criticism. 'I don't think the press are vindictive,' he replied. 'They can write what they want.'

A trip to the Tower

2009-08-08T11:46:00.002+01:00

My friend is on a mission. At the top of the Oxo Tower on London’s South Bank is a public viewing platform overlooking the Thames. You have to go through the eighth-floor Harvey Nichols restaurant to get to it, and the restaurant has been colonising it with tables and chairs as part of its bar space in recent years. But it’s there as a condition of the original planning consent for the restaurant (which sits on top of possibly the best-positioned social housing ever built) and the public has a right of access.

When we visit, however, the restaurant has attempted to close off the area altogether for a private function. My friend isn’t having it. ‘Am I embarrassing you?’ she asks me in an aside as she harangues the bar-tender and anyone else within shouting distance about public access and threatens to bring 60 students along on a field trip as part of the planning course she teaches.

‘No,’ I lie. Actually I’d prefer a slightly quieter defence of our traditional liberties, but she happens to be in the right and I have no intention of moving from our position looking out towards St Paul’s, ‘private’ function or not. We assert our right to be there for as long as I can stand it (an hour on the plinth is more than enough public attention for one summer) and having made the point move on.

If you value public rights of access you have to use them. I recommend making use of the Oxo Tower public viewing facility next time you’re nearby. Just take the lift to the top floor: the view really is worth it.

Michael Jackson, the Elgin Marbles and the Guardian

2009-07-22T13:36:00.000+01:00

Twitter crashed under the sheer volume of messages, and Google traffic jumped so dramatically that the company thought it was under attack from hackers.

But on the Guardian website, (which remains Britain’s most-visited newspaper website, with 27,194,840 unique visitors in May, according to the latest figures), the news of Michael Jackson’s death made only number three on its ‘Most Viewed’ chart for the seven days ending on Monday 29 June, which includes the weekend when Jackson died.

The most viewed? The USA v Brazil confederations cup final live-as-it-happened commentary, believe it or not. Even more remarkably, an arts diary poll on whether it is time to return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece came in at number two.

The poll, which drew 380,000 viewers and 130,000 voters, yielded an Albania-under-Enver Hoxha style result, with 94.8 per cent in favour of their return and 5.2 per cent against – which suggested something of a fix.

And so it proved. Forty thousand came to the poll via various Facebook campaigns; 6,000 more came from a single email circular. Half of those who voted came from Athens, which normally accounts for 0.4 per cent of Guardian website traffic.

Not that the Guardian minded; it’s all grist to its online advertising mill. By July the cricket was dominating its ‘Most Viewed’ charts. There was room, however, for one Jacko story, a classic of its kind: ‘Paul McCartney "not devastated" over Michael Jackson will.’

One and Other

2009-07-08T07:27:00.002+01:00

Stephen Bayley called it ‘art for the Facebook generation’, which is kind of flattering when you’re old enough to remember waiting lists for telephone lines. But I got my hour on the ‘people’s plinth’ in Trafalgar Square on the opening day of Antony Gormley’s ‘One And Other’ project and I am now officially a work of art in the same portfolio as the ‘Angel of the North’ and ‘Another Place’.

I’d already ditched my idea of spending the hour as the sniper who shot Nelson by the time the day came around. This was partly because I decided against re-fighting 200-year-old wars when there are more than enough present-day ones to be going on with, and partly because I’d not properly considered the logistics of getting hold of an authentic Napoleonic musket, let alone brandishing it in the heart of 21st-century London. The National Theatre props department ‘doesn’t do guns’ (though it does do a very tempting line in steel cutlasses); and the most promising theatrical outfitters went very cold on the idea when I couldn’t answer their questions on security and police licences.

Other possibilities came and went (lying down for the hour so that no one could see me was one of them). But as soon as I got to the square I realised that what the public wanted from this latest manifestation of public art was a performance not a statue, living or otherwise. So, armed only with a blackboard and a bag of chalk, I did my best to find the lowest artistic common denominator and scribbled a succession of unethereal messages for the Twitter generation watching online (www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/steveplatt, if you have an empty hour to fill).

One of them said ‘I’m better at football’, which prompted a particularly snooty bystander to remark ‘Well that says it all.’ ‘The real art’s in there,’ she added, gesturing to the National Gallery on the north of the square. And maybe it is, but I bet the Fourth Plinth project has got more people talking about art than the Littleton Pilaster Saints, much as I love the gallery’s latest acquisition, ever did.

Taking the plinth

2009-07-06T17:12:00.002+01:00

Life is what happens when you're busy blogging on other matters, to paraphrase John Lennon. And life has been coming at me in a bit of a rush over the past few months, which is why I haven't spent very much of my time in the blogosphere for a while. More of that another time (if I ever manage to find the time). For now, hello again, I'm back: you might have seen me in Trafalgar Square.

Nice work ...

2009-05-14T13:00:00.000+01:00

An erstwhile journalist of my acquaintance, now ensconced in that great gravy train on Thames, once gave me advice about how to prosper in both journalism and politics. ‘Always have your next job lined up and your expense claims up to date,’ he said. I’m sure he’s always conducted himself with the utmost propriety when it comes to MPs’ expenses but I don’t see his name at the bottom end of the league table of low claimers.

I do, however, see the name of one Rt Hon Tony Blair down there as the second-lowest claiming MP in the 2007-08 financial year. He’s sandwiched between the veteran left-winger Dennis Skinner, now in his 40th year as MP for Bolsover, and Philip Hollobone, the Tory representative for Kettering and the cheapest of Westminster’s 646 MPs at Westminster, who claimed barely a third of the £135,600 a year average.

Tony claimed £64,064 expenses for 2007-08, including £5,772 to cover the cost of staying away from his main home (that would be Downing Street, if you remember, so a lot of people would no doubt have been happy to pay for him to stay away a lot longer). Which sounds extremely modest by most MPs standards – until you realise that he quit parliament in June 2007, less than three months into that financial year.

Taking aim at Nelson

2009-05-12T17:30:00.000+01:00

I have put in a bid for a place on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. At the time of writing, there are 11,037 applicants for the 2,400 one-hour slots in Antony Gormley’s living monument to the people of Britain, which runs for 100 days beginning in July – so the odds are rather better than for winning the National Lottery (one in 13,983,816 to win the jackpot, one in 56.7 to win a tenner, since you ask).

Coincidentally, I was interviewing Bob and Roberta Smith the other day for Channel 4’s Big Art Project. Bob was one of the shortlisted artists who lost out to Antony Gormley in the contest for the next artwork to stand on the empty Fourth Plinth. So I was thinking of offering him my hour, if I get it, to display his rejected artwork, Faîtes L’Art, pas La Guerre (Make Art, Not War), an illuminated peace sign, powered by wind and solar energy.

Failing that, and the too obvious option of holding down a pigeon for an hour and crapping on its head, I’m planning on donning a liberty cap and dressing up as the French sharpshooter who took out Nelson in 1805. I’ll need a musket and four musket balls for full dramatic effect. (‘If I don't kill him with these three, I'll blow out my brains with the fourth,’ the French sniper is reputed to have said as he set about his task.) But when I’m done it will be some sort of revenge for my country having been on the wrong side in the wars against revolutionary France – and a reminder that the man whose monument celebrates him as a hero of the Battle of Trafalgar should also be remembered as the Butcher of Naples for his vicious subjugation of the Jacobins there in 1799.

Gays and Muslims

2009-05-08T13:02:00.001+01:00

As a headline-grabbing finding, you couldn’t get a much more dramatic – or, from a left-liberal perspective, troubling – statistic than the Gallup poll revelation in May that not one of the 500 British Muslims surveyed thought that homosexual acts were morally acceptable. Such unanimity is virtually unheard of in opinion polling, where even the whackiest of viewpoints usually finds some sort of minority representation.

It was noteworthy, therefore, that the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPACUK) weekly newsletter was recently promoting a piece by gay Muslim film-maker and activist Parvez Sharma on the UN ‘Durban II’ racism conference, where western delegates walked out en masse in protest against Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israeli, Holocaust-doubting views. Sharma clearly got the nod from MPACUK because he chose to direct his criticism against the walkers-out more than against Ahmadinejad, of whom he said only that he ‘made provocative comments which were in poor taste’. But the fact that a campaigning self-proclaimed gay Muslim could feature in such a forum without an outpouring of wrath against him holds out a little hope that perhaps that Gallup poll finding is not as unequivocal as it appears.

Dirty swine flu

2009-04-28T15:50:00.001+01:00

Swine flu pandemonium 1976 vintage. Just make sure you boil that bacon thoroughly ...

30 April: Just corrected that spelling because, as a good friend and informant points out, 'pandamonium ... would be a large black and white bear who spends all its time complaining, when in fact they spend all their time eating bamboo and sleeping. Never met such lazy, good for nothing bears as Pandas.' Maybe, but at least they never gave us panda flu ...

Belgium isn't boring

2009-04-21T11:07:00.000+01:00

This is dedicated to my sister, whose renditions of Do-Re-Mi, complete with actions, are legendary in the pubs of Stone and well beyond.

Second sex

2009-04-19T10:24:00.000+01:00

‘It isn’t only about sex, you know.’ I’ve heard the refrain so often that it’s almost become convincing. And now there’s even a brave new virtual world of political activism and protest being built in online fantasy worlds such as Second Life to justify spending all those hours in front of a computer screen.

Second Life, if you haven’t come across it yet, is a free 3D virtual world where people who have enough time left over from their first life can reinvent themselves and interact with other people via avatars. Once you’ve set up your avatar, you can do all sorts of things that aren’t only about sex – like selling Red Pepper, attending online protest meetings or picketing SL’s digital Israeli embassy, if you’re so inclined, although it has to be said that most of SL’s avatars seem to have other inclinations.

As a hardcore online junkie, old enough to remember rooting around on something called the Undernet and communicating via Internet Relay Chat, and a recovering SimCity and Civilisation addict, I had successfully steered clear of SL since its foundation in 2003. My willpower cracked, though, when a friend insisted that I accompany her on a sort of Motorcycle Diaries-style trip to check out the revolutionary potential.

Let’s say I got distracted.

It started with an invitation to the BadGirlz Club, progressed via a beach resort and continued into a castle occupied by, inter alia, vampires, zombies and aficionados of the cult of Gor (a kind of medieval BDSM fantasy world in which stepping out of character to have a quick laugh at the absurdity of it all gets you kicked out of the club faster than you can say ‘Yes Master’). Before I knew it, my avatar had acquired a shaved head, some very fetching skull tattoos, a single ‘elf gauntlet’ and the tightest pair of gay of gayboi pants you could ever imagine squeezing your bum into. Oh yes, and erm, a box of nine penises.

What do you do with a box of nine penises, I’m sure you’re asking. The answer is: you wear them. Not all at once, of course, and you do have to use a bit of virtual jiggerypokery to unpack them from the box first – as I only discovered after walking around SL with a box labelled ‘Nine Penises’ attached to my avatar’s pelvis for the next couple of days.

My friend, meanwhile, had decided she was up for a sex-change operation. This was after she had refused an offer to spend 155 Linden dollars (SL’s very own currency) on something called ‘seclix rave pacifier’, which supposedly ‘simulates real life pacifier dipped in MDMA’ and is advertised in SL as ‘drugs without the crash’. She spent the money instead on a special, just-like-real-life penis, which came with handy instruction manual.

‘How to adjust the penis size?’ was one of the Q&As, to which the answer is: ‘Wear the penis. Right click it and select “edit”. Click the button “Stretch”. Now use the white blocks to adjust the size. Note that the penis can be made bigger, but not smaller.’

Neither of us has got very far in fomenting a Second Life revolution just yet. But we have a fine collection of penises, if anyone is interested.

Would 'Gotcha!' have been the best tweet ever?

2009-04-01T11:26:00.004+01:00

Nice 1 April story about the Guardian going over entirely to Twitter ('OMG Hitler invades Poland' etc). I hear the Sun considered the idea but turned it down: WTF do you do with 140 characters?

England People Very Racist?

2009-03-07T08:17:00.003Z

I try to avoid reading reviews of things before I have had the chance to make up my own mind. I’m far too contrarian and end up spending far too much time trying to see things differently to the critics.

It was impossible to avoid the charges of cartoon caricatures, racist stereotypes and malevolent wisecracking levelled at Richard Bean’s England People Very Nice, currently showing at the National Theatre, however. Commentators ranging from shadow children’s secretary Michael Gove to East End playwright Hussain Ismail were lining up to diss it. Gove called it ‘dramatically appalling ... It made Alf Garnett seem sophisticated.’ Hussein called it ‘racist and offensive ... I went to the first night ... All I could see was a sea of people laughing at immigrants.’ Even theatre critic Nicholas de Jongh, no PC stalwart he, accused it of ‘defaming refugees’ and ‘[fanning] the ever ready flames of prejudice.

So I went prepared to don my contrarian hat but with more than a sniff of disquiet about my person as the audience laughed its way through a sequence of comedy routines dealing with successive waves of immigrants – French Huguenots, Irish, Jews, the occasional Afro-Caribbean and Bangladeshis – to Bethnal Green, in London’s East End. Each wave was shown to resent the next; and each ethnic group was the target of the sort of humour that does indeed depend on a high degree of racial and cultural stereotyping.

Was it funny? Most of the audience – and I – certainly thought so. And I don’t think it was only in what Nicholas de Jongh called ‘the slick, cruel, abusive style that Bernard Manning perfected ages ago’. Context is everything, though, and it helps to have some Irish blood coursing through your veins if you find yourself laughing out loud at the Irish’s purported penchant for keeping a pig as part of the family, inter-marrying with your cousins and breeding one-eyed babies as a consequence. ‘Mother always told us not to go with strangers.’ I’m not sure I would have wanted to be laughing at that one if my Irish companion hadn’t been pissing herself already.

I found the treatment of the last great wave of immigrants, Bethnal Green’s Muslim community, more difficult to laugh along with. There seemed to be an undertow that was saying that every other group of refugees has ended up integrating and becoming as indigenous as the English, but that this one was different. The BNP character in the play says to an Afro-Caribbean: ‘It’s not about race any more, it’s about culture.’ The Afro-Caribbean ends up packing his suitcase and heading off ‘home’ to Barbados.

My companion and I argued the toss about the play for at least an hour afterwards. We both agreed that the group to come out worst from it was the white working class, whose primary recurring role throughout this portrayal of 400 years of East End history was that of murderous, racist thugs. That’s an unfair caricature – and it wasn’t very funny.

Dynamite shoes

2009-02-27T21:19:00.002Z

He breathed in air
He breathed out light
Adrian Mitchell was my delight

Roger McGough introduced Radio 4’s Poetry Please commemoration of Adrian Mitchell with this reworking of Adrian’s own tribute to Charlie Parker, whose ‘Lover Man’ opened the programme. Over the next half hour, some of Adrian’s many friends and fellow poets remembered him and read from his work.

Jackie Kay chose Adrian’s ‘Back in the Playground Blues’ about his childhood experience of bullying. Michael Horovitz took us back to that biggest poetry gig of all time, when Adrian spat out ‘Tell me lies about Vietnam’ (actually titled ‘To Whom It May Concern’) at the Albert Hall in 1965. Andrew Marr picked up ‘A Puppy Called Puberty’. And John Hegley gave us ‘Ten Ways to Avoid Lending Your Wheelbarrow’ (‘Number One, patriotic: I didn’t lay down my life in World War II so that you could borrow my wheelbarrow; Number Two, snobbish: Unfortunately Samuel Beckett is using it’).

There was also Jonathan Price (‘Death is smaller than I thought’), Michelle Roberts, Carole Ann Duffy, Brian Patten and John Agard. And most of all there was Adrian’s wife, Celia, reading ‘The Doorbell’, which Adrian had written for CND in 2006. Celia said she had chosen because ‘it is about war and destruction and we met and fell in love because we were both wearing CND badges and we saw each other across the room’:

There, on the doorstep, stood the War.

It filled my front garden,

filled the entire street

and blotted out the sky.

It was human and monstrous,

shapeless, enormous,

with torn and poisoned skin which bled

streams of yellow, red and black ...

The War had many millions of eyes

and all wept tears of molten steel.

Then the War spoke to me

in a voice of bombs and gunfire:
I am your war.
Can I come in?

Roger McGough rounded off with a clip of Adrian and his daughter Sasha singing: ‘Poetry glues your soul together/ Poetry wears dynamite shoes.’ Sasha tells me that she and Celia have agreed to do some of Adrian’s regular gigs this year, including probably the Latitude festival, with Sasha singing and Celia reading his poems. Celia says they’re thinking of a big public commemoration for Adrian, maybe at the Hackney Empire in the autumn.

I’m sure they’ll be unmissable. In the meantime, you can listen to the whole of the Poetry Please commemoration at http://www.topicdrift.com/qt/PoetryPleaseAdrian.mp3

Pictured: Philosophy Football’s t-shirt, with which Adrian was delighted and distributed to various friends and family members, is available from http://www.philosophyfootball.com

Safe skating

2009-02-24T16:56:00.002Z

'Skater-haters should hobble back home to take their medication and watch Countdown.' Seventy-one-year old Geoff Dornan of Southport, who's just been fined £300 plus £1,800 costs for 'dangerous skating' in Southport's main shopping street, sounds like someone who's spent most of his adult life just waiting for the opportunity to live out Monty Python's Hell's Grannies sketch for real.

You've got to hand it to Geoff, who admits to having had 'heated discussions with [his] fellow geriatrics' about his skating activities and reckons that they're just jealous that he's still up to it in his eighth decade. He's certainly a decent skater, as the CCTV footage shown in court demonstrates. And pretty 'safe' too, as I'm sure the skating community would agree. Eighteen hundred quid for arguing your side of the case is steep by any standards.

Jade Goody: enough said

2009-02-17T11:50:00.002Z

Somewhere I have copies of the articles I wrote back in 2002 and again during the 'Shillpa Poppadom' affair in 2007 sticking up for Jade Goody. I was going to dig them out and revisit what I'd written about class prejudice and Britain in the light of Jade's diagnosis with terminal cancer but it all felt a bit self-serving and inappropriate when the poor woman is dying, albeit in the full glare of the media spotlight.

Now Michele Hanson has said it for me and I don't have to worry about going over it all again myself. I have a mental image of a bile-filled Sun front page, however, that won't easily be laid to rest. I hope all those who were behind the Goody hatefest will pause for just a moment to reflect on it now.

A bad week for public art

2009-02-11T17:54:00.003Z

It’s been a bad week for public art. First, the worst of the five entries – Mark Wallinger’s far too literal statue of a bloody big horse – wins the competition for the Ebbsfleet Landmark. And today, Manchester City Council announces it’s going to pull down Thomas Heatherwick’s spectacular B of the Bang sculpture over ‘technical problems’ – i.e. fears that it might fall down anyway.

A shame because both outcomes will only confirm the philistines in their view that monumental public art is just a big waste of time, particularly in a recession.

Money for new wellies

2009-02-10T10:33:00.006Z

My friend Amy has been emailing everyone she knows on Facebook to ask for money to buy some wellies. You'll understand why when your read her letter. I'm sending her some (money not wellies), and if you want to do likewise you can find her here. 50p for every pair of shoes in your possession (double for men)?

That is right, I am emailing you to ask for money.

I am returning to Cambodia next week to shoot some footage, which will hopefully lead to me raising loads of money for people with nothing.

There are an estimated 25,000 orphans with HIV in Cambodia and only two orphanages to care for them, one homes 70 kids and one, where I worked, homes 30. 100 orphans being looked after out of 25,000- that is rubbish.

One of the first places I am visiting is Steung Meanchey, the rubbish tip on the outskirts of Phnom Penh (see clip on my profile page), where many of the children who live and work there are orphans, 70% are HIV+, some have no clothes and most have no shoes.

Foot injuries from needles and glass are very common. I have managed to get some local chemists and doctors to donate medical supplies and I plan to go to the tip armed with my surgical gloves and patch up their feet, then ... I am going to put all those bare feet in Wellington Boots to protect them. And I am asking you to give me money for those Wellington Boots.

'This is the closest thing to hell on earth I have ever seen,' said an aid worker I spoke to, 'I don't know how people can let a place like this exist.'

Maybe it's because people don't know? Well now you do.

If everyone I am friends with on Facebook gave me £5-£10, I would be able to put shoes on the feet of every bare-foot-orphan at the tip. No joke, it doesn't cost much over there and there are about 400 orphans in need of shoes.

When I think about all our spare shoes together, bloody hundreds, what a waste, I wish I could take them over, but I can't carry them all so give me your money instead please. Help your friend Amy put shoes on orphans feet. Go on it will make you feel good.

Feel the love, it is almost Valentines Day and flowers die anyway.

Amy xxx

Paul Ross: the perfect picture

2009-02-09T09:05:00.000Z

'If you only buy one 20 inch canvas print of Paul Ross this year, this is the one to get.'

'I recently purchased this poster, and while it's lifelike, well made and had a certain, portly charm to it, I have since found out that it's actually *cheaper* to hire Paul Ross to come over and stand against a wall, whenever you feel the need to look at him.'

Those people at Amazon didn't know what they were starting when they opened up their website to customer reviews. Paul Ross has a particularly high satisfaction rating.

The Thames trotted

2009-02-08T08:40:00.000Z

It’s downhill all the way from the Prince of Wales pub in Iffley to the bandstand on the green at Henley. Got to be, hasn’t it, or the Thames couldn’t flow so fiercely over the weirs on its way between the two.

One thing that running teaches you is that there’s no such thing as flat. Even a millpond must have its hills hidden somewhere. And there’s no such thing as downhill all the way either, outside a Tory government.

The Thames path (or national trail, to give it its due) saves its hills on this stretch of the river until you’ve already passed the 30-mile mark, when it takes you up the valley sides between Goring and Whitchurch. It rises to all of, oh, 62 metres, which wouldn’t even get you halfway up the London Eye but feels like you’re taking the staircase to the top of Canary Wharf (twice) when you’ve already been running for about six hours to get there.

Starting a 50-mile run from a pub, with a roaring open fire and a selection of fine ales, and finishing at a bandstand, with snow on the roof and ice on the floor, seems arse about tit when you think about it. But, my, did it feel good to get there. Ten and a half hours, just under, and I didn’t go over on the snow and ice once.