Random Purchase

I really should stop racking up my credit card so quickly. But at least it meant that I had an other Amazon voucher to spend. The last couple have gone towards things for the house - cables and the like. I thought that this one, at least, could go on some CD purchases. So, what to buy? I couldn't think of any Jazz albums that immediately appealed and a couple of box sets I fancied were too expensive for my tight finances - even with the £10 off. So, I ended up using one of Amazon's really useful features. I typed "Best Of" into the search box and left my choice to the whims of the search engine algorithm.

Some people can be quite snooty about compilation albums. Certainly, if it's an artist I particularly like I prefer to hear the original albums as they were produced. However, there are many acts which, whilst I find them pleasant enough, I have never had the inclination to trawl through their back catalogue. This is where the compilation comes into its own and the Amazon search is a really good tool for sniffing them out. It remembers my somewhat eclectic tastes in music and prompts for things I might be interested in. Many are of no interest at all - or I already own them. However, every so often something will catch the eye and make me wonder why I have never bothered with them before.

The first thing to catch my eye was The Ultimate Bee Gees - the Amazon search was clever enough to work out that Ultimate was a "Best Of" album. It was under a fiver which is great value for a 40 track double CD. The Bee Gees fit the bill quite nicely as one of those groups who I quite like but have never bought anything by. My wife has a couple of their vinyl albums: Saturday Night Fever and Spirits Having Flown. These are from their peak period but what surprised me with Ultimate is actually how much of their stuff I know. At least 80% of the tracks are very familiar - even if I know them by other artists such as Islands In The Stream which I recognise as a Dolly Parton track. The first disk of Ultimate covers the bulk of their late 70's heyday and the big hits from the 1980's. You really do forget that they were Disco with a capital "D" - all Four-on-the-floor rhythms and close harmony falsetto singing that is so high it would make Castrati wince. The second disk is more orientated around the brothers' song writing ability and covers more of their 1960's material as well as live versions of songs they wrote for Barbara Streisand and Dionne Warwick. I'm wondering why I didn't buy any of this years ago: it certainly seems like money (or at least voucher) well spent.


The second disk to come up was The Very Best Of Free & Bad Company. This is, essentially, a compilation of Paul Rogers 1970's output. I like Paul Rogers - he has a fantastic blues-rock voice and isn't scared off by a decent tune. I do have quite a bit of the Free material on vinyl but I've never bothered much with Bad Company - again for no particularly good reason. The album consists of eight Bad Company tracks and seven from Free. I can't complain about the choice as the Bad Company tracks are all good and the Free ones include all the big hits like All Right Now and Wishing Well. There are other Free tracks which I think could have been included but as a compilation goes this is really first rate.


The third choice I picked out was more on price - I searched for anything under £3 as I had used most of the voucher. What did pop up was the Best Of The Nice (15 Psychedelic Hits). The Nice were one of the first bands to be described as Prog Rock and featured the talents of Keith Emerson - later to form one third of Emerson, Lake and Palmer (ELP for short) whose music varied wildly between the sonically exhilarating and utter pretentious twaddle - often within the same tracks. I only knew of one recording by The Nice: a cover version of Leonard Bernstein's America. Having listened to The Best Of The Nice that is actually the only track of theirs I do know. The rest is quite interesting, starting off in a similar style to early Syd Barrett Pink Floyd and gradually moving on to something more closely resembling ELP. It's weird and wonderful stuff with elements of psychedelic rock mixed in with nods to classical and free Jazz. They even finish off with a cover of Dave Brubeck's Blue Rondo à la Turk - which is no bad thing in my book.


So that's by CD collection expanded yet again and my musical horizons widened somewhat. And the cost to me, after the voucher was deducted, was a princely £1.77.

Road Safety

One of the problems of moving back into town is that there is much more traffic. Having spent pretty much all of their lives in the countryside, I have discovered that all my children have the road sense of hedgehogs. I think they are improving - having an HGV whiz past one's nose probably does that. However, I don't think the message of crossing the road safely is being drilled into them at school. Certainly our eldest boy, at 9 and a half, should know better even if he hasn't quite had the practice.

When I was at school this was treated quite seriously. Apart from visits from the local policeman to give road safety advice in an amusing manner (he actually did a pretty good ventriloquist act) the one thing that really sticks in my mind were the public information films. These were aimed at a variety of ages, starting with Tufty the Squirrel (voiced by the ever brilliant Bernard Cribbins):



Tufty eventually disappeared from our screens for reasons never quite made public. I suspect that Willy the Weasel grew up to be a joyrider and Tufty fell in with a group of ne'er-do-well grey squirrels, serving time for petty theft. Nevertheless, these little films really got their message across much as the "Charley" adverts did with rather more difficult subject matter:



I took great notice of these films and always took all my advice from my cat. This probably wasn't the best of moves as my cat knew zilch about anything. However, back to the road safety and what would be better than to have an iconic childhood hero to get you across the road in one piece. For me that hero would be Doctor Who and the message was SPLINK. What does that stand for? Well I'm beggared if I can remember and I seem to recall I was nearly squashed a few times trying to work it out. Maybe Jon could explain:



I haven't seen that for years but I'm still none the wiser. Luckily the UK road safety committee were to come up with an iconic film that would stand me, and a good few other children from the 1970s, in good stead - the Green Cross Code man:



That's Dave Prowse - possibly better known as Darth Vader from the Star Wars films, although they used an asthmatic American for his voice - a pity really as I think his natural West Country accent would have been fantastic for the dark lord. The great advantage of the Green Cross Code campaign is that it was simple and effective: Stop, Look, Listen. I still subconsciously do this in my 40s. So why did they change it? There seems to be a tendency to change for change's sake but what they came up with was those most traffic aware of animals - hedgehogs:



They've actually changed this again and have gone back to the Stop, Look Listen message but instead of the friendly advice of the Green Cross Code Man we get this frankly disturbing 40 second horror flick:



Maybe times and children change but it's an important message to get across. I'm not entirely sure that this does.

Matt Busby

I watched the BBC drama United a couple of weeks ago. This was the dramatisation of the events surrounding the Munich air disaster of 1958 and focussing on assistant manager Jimmy Murphy, who tried to rebuild the Manchester United side in the immediate aftermath, and Bobby Charlton who survived the crash but found himself struggling to overcome the shock of the events and the loss of his close friends. I enjoyed the film and, from what I have read of the accounts of Charlton and others it was a fair representation of the facts. David Tennant was very poignant as Murphy and the sense of shock, even knowing how events would unfold, was very real. However, I did find the portrayal of Matt Busby a little off. In fact his son, Sandy, was highly critical of the depiction. In interviews, Matt Busby always came across as a gentle, softly spoken man. Having said that, I don't really know that much about him outside of his managerial career - other than that he originally came from Bellshill: the local sports centre near to were I worked was named after him.

I lent Sir Matt Busby: A Tribute from the local library. This was described as the Official Authorised Biography and I do wonder if it is actually the best portrait of the man. It is clearly aimed at Manchester United fans, which is fair enough, but it only has around 30 pages on his pre-United days which really makes it difficult to see what influenced him to become such a great manager. Whilst it does mention that he enjoyed his time as a player at Liverpool - particularly the family atmosphere at the club - they don't go into any details about how he gained the clubs captaincy or his relationship with the young Bob Paisley with whom he remained great friends. Clearly he was cut out for leadership from the start but his experiences at Liverpool appear to have moulded his ideas of how a football club should operate and, indeed, what sort of entity it should be. Also, the book doesn't really go into any great depth about Matt's religious convictions. He was a deeply religious man and this must have provided a great support to him - particularly after Munich.

The book takes the form of Matt's life story interspersed throughout with anecdotes from friends and colleagues. Whilst this does give some indication on how he was viewed by those around him it doesn't really give any idea about what was going on in his own mind. Inevitably, this story is always going to pivot around 1958 and the events in Munich. This is where I think there is some insight as the crash deeply affected him and left him in much pain: both physically from his injuries and emotionally from the loss of so many of his young team. Inevitably, he would feel guilt that he was somehow responsible and this lead to his determination to rebuild and win the European Cup for those that couldn't be there. It is noticeable that he announced his retirement only months after winning the cup and I suspect he had long planned this.

There are always going to be comparisons with other managers. Matt Busby is often hailed as the greatest of all time. That is difficult to determine. How can you compare him, for example, to Alex Fergusson or Herbert Chapman who have managed in different eras and with different challenges to deal with. The one comparison that is often made is with contemporaries Bill Shankly and Jock Stein. Much is often made of the three men's similarities - they were all from the same part of Scotland and all from mining communities. As managers they were all to become friends and have a great mutual respect of each other. However, their managerial styles did differ. Stein was more the no nonsense Scot - a strong personality whose presence demanded respect and made his players fearless on the pitch. Shankly was the eternal enthusiast - a football nut whose passion for the game inspired those around him. Matt Busby was the paternal manager - he created a family atmosphere in which his young players were encouraged to express themselves and realise their talent.

Inevitably, for a book aimed at United fans and written only months after the great man's death, there is nothing relating to his shortcomings as a manager. The foreword in the book is written by George Best and he is the one player who was both a great finding by Busby and who I believe would have fared better under another manager. I suspect that Alex Fergusson's management style would have suited him more. I don't think this was so much a failing of Matt Busby so much as the world had moved on. George Best was the first of the football superstars whereas Matt Busby was used to dealing with the footballer as working class hero. Whereas Matt would encourage footballers to express themselves on the field - and George Best was a phenomenal talent in the late 60's - I think someone like Alex Ferguson would have tried to ensure that his antics remained on the back rather than the front pages of the papers. However, it was only really after Matt Busby retired that George Best went seriously off the rails - which is probably why I remember him more as an embarrassment rather then as a great footballer.

So I'm still really on the lookout for a good biography of Sir Matt Busby. He remains one of the games truly inspirational characters and an intriguing personality.

Did That Actually Just Happen?

It's been election week and the result is something I am actually finding hard to comprehend. In fact it's been an odd sort of week on the world stage, starting with Bin Laden finally getting his comeuppance. I suppose as some sort of woolly minded liberal I should have been hoping for him to face justice in the form of a fair trial with legal representation rather than being bumped off and dumped in the ocean like some kind of gangland hit. But ultimately I don't care - he was a hateful mass murderer that has caused great harm to the world: not least, to ordinary Muslim people that he may have claimed to support. Somehow, the method of his dispatch seemed quite fitting. I just hope that this is a signal for American foreign policy to allow the Islamic world to sort out their own problems in peace.

Anyway, back to the election. I almost didn't get to vote at all. The cut-off for electoral registration was just two days after we moved house so I had to get the forms in at the very last minute. In fact, I had to go down to the main Post Office in Falkirk to make sure they made the last collection. I received the acknowledgement letter back from the registrar but it didn't actually indicate where the polling station was. As it turned out, it was in the same place that I went to last time I lived in Stenhousemuir. That seemed to be sorted until my erstwhile employers decided to send me down to London for the day. I ended up as the first person to vote, banging on the door at 7am to stick my X on the various voting forms (conveniently colour coded to confound the chromatically disadvantaged) before making great haste towards the railway station.

A few months ago it looked like the Labour Party would be getting back into power. It was a close run thing in 2007 with only the narrowest of margins allowing the SNP to form a minority government. This is an interesting arrangement whereby legislation can only be allowed through by horse-trading with other parties. Thus, we get a few extra police to appease the Conservatives or the Edinburgh tramway to keep the Labour party happy (at least I think it was them - no one seems to want responsibility for that mess now). I think it actually worked quite well and the SNP have shown that they are quite competent in government - at least when they have others with a hand on the reins. I wasn't particularly looking forward to another Labour administration. In the eight years that they controlled the Scottish parliament they achieved little that did not appear to have been rubber stamped from London. It really did lead one to wonder what the point of a devolved parliament was. So I was hoping that the SNP could remain the largest party. What I didn't expect was that they would take full control.

It's interesting to see what has actually happened. Despite the high number of seats lost, the Labour vote has actually held quite steady. The Conservative vote has dropped slightly. I must admit I was quite surprised that Annabel Goldie, who is quite popular by herself, invited David Cameron up to campaign. Still, I suspect their remaining support are pretty much dyed in wool blue. The Lib Dems have pretty much imploded: I think they are now regarded as little more than Quislings. It seems a long time since the popularity that Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy brought them. However, it appears that where any votes have been lost they have all gone to the SNP. The parliament's elaborate voting system was meant to prevent a majority government - but that is now what it has produced.

So, where from here? In the first instance, I can't see that much changing. The horse-trading will, no doubt, subside but it also means that those SNP policies which had been blocked can now be re-introduced: most notably, the referendum on independence. At the moment, I don't think that would get a Yes vote. However, after the shenanigans that have gone on during the AV referendum I can't see any vote having a reasoned debate. With the AV vote, both sides have made some dubious claims, but I think the "No" campaign, in particular, have just been telling bare faced lies. I expect politicians to have differences of opinion but they should express those differences in reasoned debate. However, some of the claims can't even be explained by logical fallacy - they are just lies, plain and simple.

This leaves the problem of just how any Scottish independence referendum would be organised. AV is a pretty simple choice. Independence is a much bigger question. What status would an independent Scotland have? Would it remain in the Commonwealth, EU, NATO etc? Would the pound remain or would we have a separate currency or even join the Euro. Even down to simple matters such as whether the country would run everything or would they still use UK based services like the DVLA and so on. I can't see our current politicians having the moral capability to discuss this sensibly. The pro-Union parties would publish all end of nonsense about what independence would mean whilst the pro-Independence campaigners are going to be tempted to simply stick a giant poster of Margaret Thatcher on every available billboard and schedule Braveheart on TV for the night before the vote.

I suppose that is what the attraction of the SNP is right now. I don't think everyone who voted for them actually wants independence but the party has kept itself at arms length from the disrepute that the other political entities have become embroiled in. I just hope that they treat their overall majority with respect: with great power comes great responsibility.

Who's Back

We are now two episodes into the new series of Doctor Who and I think I'm enjoying it. At least I'm a little less confused than I was last week. I like Steven Moffat's writing. He has a great way of telling a story such that it only makes sense in the final scene - which is very rewarding. At least, this is the case when the story in question has an obvious beginning, middle and end (although in Moffat's case you don't necessarily get them in that order). However, as the show runner for an ongoing series like Doctor Who it is not always obvious when the whole story has been told. I think this was the case with the last series of Who as there were several instances of hanging story threads or even sloppy looking continuity which are now starting to piece together.

One of the great advantages of New Who (and one of the things I've really enjoyed) is that it contains self contained one or two part stories. This is in contrast to many American series in which we are expected to buy in to many "seasons" worth of story line in which we are drip fed at an excruciatingly slow rate. Doctor Who does have its series arcs but the individual stories still make sense on a weekly basis. This is great, both for the casual viewer who can watch an individual episode and for the more committed fan, like me, that still likes to see a solid story well told but can also appreciate the nuances of the bigger picture.

Since Matt Smith took over the title role the series arc storylines have become more prominent. I think a few of the episodes would make no sense to the casual viewer if they had missed earlier shows. This is a little unfortunate but I still think it has an advantage over programmes like Lost or Heroes - and that is that I believe Steven Moffat does have a greater story planned out in his head rather than some other shows where I think the writers are making it up on the hoof. The problem is, I have no idea where Moffat's story is going to complete.

The opening two-parter to what is, incredibly, series 6 of the new Doctor Who is not one for the feint hearted. I do wonder whether having a two-parter as the series opener was a good idea. However, it does seem to make sense overall. The characterisation seems to be better from the last series: Amy now feels a little more vulnerable and Rory more rounded and complex. And, as an opening gambit, the two-part opener has left enough unanswered questions to keep me itching to see the rest of the series. Who is the little girl and is she, as seemed to be indicated, actually a time-lady? Does the Doctor really die (and if not, can the writers dig themselves out of that one with any dignity)? Is Amy pregnant or not? Who exactly is River Song?

The inevitable monster, The Silence, were also a bit of a masterpiece. I'm glad to see that they are moving back to prosthetics for their aliens rather than CGI-ing everything in afterwards. Aside from standing out from the crowd, it makes the real-life actors performances that much better as they have a physical actor to interact with rather than a dot next to a green screen. The concept behind the alien, that they are all around but instantly wipe themselves from memory, is another element of clever Moffat trickery. It's preposterous but, at the same time, just believable enough for a moment of paranoia.

I'm still wondering, however, who the show is aimed at. The 6 o'clock starting time seems a little too early. I've been watching the show later on the PVR with my elder son. I have two small children who I don't think the programme is at all suitable for and I am usually getting them ready for bed at that time anyway. I think this must affect other families as the audience figures have been lower for the overnight ratings but I suspect that the final figures will be much higher. I also think it is heading away from a general audience and moving towards a more Sci-Fi savvy crowd. There is always going to be a certain number of people who will never quite get their heads around the intricacies of time-travel plots, but quantum mechanics? Having said that, one of the most popular of Steven Moffat's stories was Blink which relied heavily on a cursory understanding of indeterminism so I am possibly underestimating the British public's grasp of the more bizarre end of scientific theory and philosophical ideas: things like multiple universes, the fleeting nature of memory and other concepts that are familiar to anyone who has read some serious Sci-Fi but not exactly second nature to the X-Factor crowd.

So things are looking up in the Whoniverse. The only problem I am finding is that I now have to see each episode at least twice. The good thing is: I actually want to.