Naive until well into middle age, or how this idiot also fell for the myth

This might sound odd, but looking back I wish to God I had attended mixed sex schools all my life, because in one crucial way, life might have been a little easier, not to say more enjoyable. However, I didn't. My first school, which I attended from the age of four and three-quarters to nine, was the Sacred Heart School in Henley-on-Thames. Then I moved to Berlin and from August until the following Easter, I attended a German primary school, Steubenschule, in Berlin-Charlottenburg. After that is was all-boys schools all the way, first a Jesuit college in Berlin-Tiergarten for three years, then a Roman Catholic boarding school for five years.
All this meant that I didn't grow up with women in those crucial adolescent years. Why does that matter? Well, it matters because it wasn't until late in my life that I realised that girls and women are just the other gender, that if there is something special about them, it is the individual about whom there is something special, she as a person, not she because she is a woman.
Growing up, of course, women had what we guys wanted and at times we thought of nothing else, so it is no wonder that we guys, who for many, many years are, unfortunately, apt to think with our dicks, were so easily persuaded that women were, in some way, something special. And naturally it was something for which women were grateful and which they encouraged.
But those guys who attended mixed schools were a little more savvy to the ways of women than those poor idiots stuck in single-sex schools and often, like me, in boarding schools to boot. Oh, well, as the cliché goes, better late than never.

What with the credit crunch, global warming, dumbing-down and farmers' markets, something to cheer you all

The title says it all, really. A nice sunny day, coming across Joe Pass's version of Autumn Leaves, my camera and North Cornwall looking rather splendid, who could resist an hour or two doing this?
t/c (something has gone wrong)

Stupid, stupid, stupid doodles...

Here is the proof, if proof were needed, that some of us have far too much time on our hands. Oscar and Bafta nominations to the usual address, please. Anything else, have your people call my my people and we'll see whether we can't hammer something else. To come, needs a little work.

And you think blogging is easy? Think again, and think blood, sweat and tears

It has been pointed out to me that non-bloggers who restrict themselves simply to reading what we dedicated bloggers produce are unaware of the sheer bloody effort that goes into producing a blog entry. You might think that it is simply a process of signing in, waffling for several minutes, posting, then signing out again. No, sir! Each entry is a matter of thought, planning, consideration, judgment, more thought, discussion with my team of blog advisors, more planning, revision, more discussion with my advisors, and only then comes the writing and publishing. For example, this entry has been several days in the gestation and production and below is a picture, taken by a friend, of me hard at work, producing today's entry. Take especial note of the muscles I have developed over the years of blogging and of which I am, I admit, immensely proud.

Scottish bar stool for Scots who wear a kilt

The Scots, it seems, who are an immensely practical and canny nation, have long been proud of their traditions. However, for many of those who habitually wore a kilt, sitting on a stool at the bar could often become a little uncomfortable, so one enterprising Scot came up with a bespoke stool for those who go drinking in their kilts. Here is a picture of one of the first to be produced:

Sexy accents — there's at least one for all of us. These are mine

Apropos nothing at all, I was walking out of the office yesterday and walked past one of the temps who is standing on for the specialists' secretary. She was talking on the phone and had a Northern Ireland accent. And that gives me the opportunity, dear readers, to inform you just how sexy I find the Northern Ireland accent. It does things for me. I could listen to a woman with a Northern Ireland accent all day long. And if we were in bed together, I would encourage her to talk, talk, talk. Another, equally as potent accent, is the Lancashire accent. She, too, would be implored by me to talk, talk, talk.
Now I must go and lie down.

Going to the dogs — one down-and-out's view

I took my daughter and her friend to Plymouth last Friday. She wanted to buy Babyliss curling tongs, look at clothes and get presents for her mother's birthday. I made sure they had a mobile phone, then let them loose shop and roam on their own. They are 12 going on 13, and who wants to hang around with Dad? They don't. Left to my own devices, I, too, roamed a little, and once I had spotted the first shop which was closing down and had taken a photo (on my mobile phone, would you believe) I immediately noticed 10, 20 more and got the idea for this. I first uploaded it to YouTube, but I couldn't use the song, Steely Dan's version of East St Louis Toodle-oo by Duke Ellington because it is under copyright. So the YouTube version has Debussy as its soundtrack — you can find it here — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrcGl0OoWZo — but I think this works far better with the Steely Dan track. That version is here:

Elsie takes to the kitchen ...

Today my daughter Elsie is planning to cook my wife's birthday meal, and what she lacks in experience, she certainly makes up for in enthusiasm. Getting the necessary ingredients for the meal has so far taken two shopping trips and just now a third up to the village to get some strong white flour.
On the menu are Potato and Leek Soup with homemade rolls, Pasta with Tomato and Basil, and for pudding Fresh Fruit Salad with Cream or something called Sticky Mud Pie.
Elsie is preparing it all with her best friend Ruth and Ruth came shopping with us yesterday on our second trip. The financial damage so far — and quite how I have yet to discover — is about £40. At first Elsie and Ruth planned to offer two soups and two main courses — Tomato Soup and Roast Chicken were also to be on the menu — but I persuaded her that less is often more and she might be taking on too much.
Here is a short video of the two shopping.

Young, old, under the knife or just a sucker for pills - we all die some time.

By the way, when I went to Google images to dig out a piccy of Tchaikovsky, I came across quite a few of the man, and one (or it might have been on another website) of the man as a lad in his late teens or early 20s. It is always fascinating to compare piccies of people at different ages, seeing a picture of someone you know as an old biddy and realising "Christ, she was a cracker when she was younger".
When I think of myself - and I'me sure this is true of you, too, I see, in my mind's eye, a chap who is at least 15 years younger than I am now. And when I catch sight of myself in a shop window, accidentally that is, not consciously preparing myself for the mirror experience in order to comb my hair or something, I am always disappointed that I look like such and old fuck.
C'est la vie, or more truthfully, c'est la mort. (Is death feminine in French?)

Peter Tchaikovsky, Don Ameche, a first piano concerto and why snobs of all stripes are a waste of space

Why do so many classical music lovers look down on Tchaikovsky? Not everyone, by any means, but an unfortunate and unfortunately large number of musical snobs regard his music as easy, candyfloss, that kind of thing. They regard an admission of liking his music as a kind of innocence, a lack of sophistication, the mark of a man who is not wholly serious about music.
Well, in describing them as 'snobs' I shall indicated what I think of such self-regarding prats. Should the worth of a composer really be judged on how 'tuneful' he is or not? Does apparent cacophony (and here I am thinking of what I'm told orchestral players often refer to as 'squeaky gate music', the allusion being obvious) mark out the 'worthwhile composer' whereas those who come up with music which one can whistle or sing along to are to be written off as second-rate? I should bloody well hope not, but to hear some people speaking of poor Tchaikovsky you would think so. A typical criticism is that his music is 'vulgar and lacking in elevated thought'. Dear soul, lacking in elevated thought - what a crime.
Well, I'm not one of them. Between the ages of nine and 13, I lived in Berlin and in all that time I attended German schools, first Die Steubenschule in Berlin-Charlottenburg down the road from where we live (it was a short tram journey away down the Heerstraße), then, from Easter 1960, I went to Das Canisius Kolleg, a Jesuit secondary school in Berlin-Tiergarten near the Siegessäule and the Brandenburg Gate. The German schoolday runs six days a week from 8/8.30/9am in the morning until 1pm, so I would get home for just before two, have lunch, then sit down to do my homework. And part of that routine was switching on my transistor radio and tuning into AFN and listening to the Don Ameche Pop Concert (as I think it was called), which began with the opening of Tchaikovsky's 1st Piano Concerto in B Flat minor and a very lovely piece of music it is, too.
The trouble, of course, or, at least, the trouble for the musical snobs, is that Tchaikovsky's music is memorable, hummable, tuneful and generally, to use a rather cliched term, accessible. And we really can't have that, can we? Good Lord, no. If we sophisticates are to stand out from the hoi polloi, we must not only be, but must be seen to be more rarefied than your ordinary Joe. I mean, really.
That concerto is a great way to get a child interested in classical music, to lead him or her in gently, so to speak. If you want to turn them off for life, just play them anything by Schönberg. That will do the trick. Of course, the other great introduction is Prokifiev's Peter and The Wolf. And by the by, I caught his Third Symphony on the radio driving down from London the other night and rather liked it.
A word to snobs of every stripe: get to fuck.