Decline & Fall: Diaries 2005–2010 by Chris Mullin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The second volume of Chris Mullin’s diaries that I have read and, as an inside account of the British Parliament at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it’s both reassuring to see that many representatives in The House are not in it purely for self gain, having loftier aims that benefit us all, and disappointing to discover that Honourable Members, just like the any group anywhere, can be back-stabbing and self-serving. Mullin clearly falls into the former but his ringside seat for the end of the Blair era, the expenses debacle, the arrival of Gordon Brown and the self-destruction of New Labour is fascinating. I don’t know if the diaries are well edited, or well written in the first place, but you are drawn in by the stories the diaries reveal and gripped as the details of parliamentary life are unveiled. His belief in a parliamentary democracy and MPs who work on behalf of their constituents is clear and often put him at odds with senior party colleagues. The fact that he does not follow the party line all the time is what makes his account all the more memorable. The book’s easy to follow as Mullin does not fall into the trap of reducing most people to nicknames or initials and, therefore, can be read without constant reference to a ‘cast of characters’. This volume ends as Gordon Brown leaves number 10 and Mullin retires from The House (he did not contest the 2010 election) but before that point some of the most interesting events of recent times are recorded with a charm and wit that’s compelling.

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In the spirit of keeping things in one place. I just answered my first question on Quora, a question and answer website that’s hooked into your social network – via Facebook and Twitter. I imagine it’ll become overwhelming pretty quickly as it needs much more engagement than Twitter so, should all the people I follow on Twitter start posting questions, I’m going to end up swamped with questions. Still, so far, so interesting.

The question: Will 2011 be the year that internet radio will pass traditional radio? [link]. And my response:

I can’t see internet radio will pass traditional radio for quite some time.

There are too many broadcast radio (AM, FM, HD, DAB) receivers out there for this to happen quickly, and – even today – the number of FM receivers continues to grow as they are added to mobile phones, MP3 players etc.

Right now, broadcast radio remains more portable (mobile data is inconsistent) and FM receivers can generally handle a poor signal quality in ways that data connections don’t seem to be able to do (at least, without resorting to continual re-buffering).

Then there are habits to break. Others here have touched on the car radio but broadcast receivers are also clock radios, shower radios, kitchen radios etc. I imagine substantial number of these form part of a routine and there’re not easy, nor cheap, to replace quickly. And why would you if it’s still working well for you?

(There are some interesting figures for streaming & mobile listening produced in the UK by the Absolute Network and analysed at James Cridland’s blog.)

You can add something to the answer by joining quora and going here.

A just posted a review on Goodreads and Amazon of Chris Mullin’s account of life inside the Labour government.

A View from the Foothills by Chris Mullin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An an insiders view of life as a Labour MP and, at times, as a junior Minsiter (transport and environment/Africa) this is a compelling read. The diary format is easy to dip in to – and that had been my intention – but I found I was hooked and could spend many hours reading; it’s not a slimline book! The inner working of government are fascinating: Mullin has a particular dislike for the poorly written speeches he was expected to deliver; the excesses of Ministerial cars and the fact that, as a Junior Minister, it seems impossible to actually get anything done. It’s interesting to see that a relatively few number of MPs – mainly those nearest the Prime Minister – can actually do very much at all; the rest expected to tow the party line. Mullin was not that close to The Man but he certainly has a different view than most of us. Of most interest historically, of course, are the discussions that lead to the UK’s support of the Iraqi war but, if you’re interested in how much of government works, this is possibly better positioned than some of the bigger names.

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It’s not unknown for me to state the obvious, so here goes. This was/is that last working day before Christmas. And for many, including me, it was the last working day of the year. It has also dawned on me that it’s the last working day of the decade. I guess, therefore, that I’ll play the looking backwards game. You know, the one where we all try to find something interesting to say about the last year, or in this case, decade. So, what have I learnt about working in the twenty-first century? Firstly, it isn’t different to my working life at the end of the last decade/century but I’ll skip that marvellous observation and present the top five things I’ve seen change – or not – in my last ten working years.

Internet Access Is Ubiquitous In The Workplace

I ended the last decade having just left an organisation where you had to have special permission to have online access. Ironically, I was part of the team building their web content. And, although my world view is biased because of the industry I work in, I think access if fairly ubiquitous. Of course that’s lead to the rise of personal blogging, Facebook, instant messaging and shopping in your working day. I do see a trend the opposite way: corporate filters and blockers are in place in more and more organisations to restrict access. Sorry chaps, it’s a losing battle. You should trust your employees more.

Digital Connectivity Hasn’t Cut Travel

I’ve spend a decade in industries supposedly working in ‘new’ media with organisations you would hope would embrace virtual conferencing to reduce the carbon footprint of their employees. It simply wasn’t the case because the need to actually sit face-to-face with prospects – for them to shake your hand and know if they can trust a word that you’re saying – remains. It’s only the economic climate that’s cut travel budgets but I don’t believe it has cut the need. In fact, digital connectivity may have facilitated more travel because you can be connected everywhere so why not send somebody off to cement the deal?

Business Travel Still Sucks

Business travel has an air of glamour. Lunch in Amsterdam, dinner in Milan sounds fun. How wonderful it could be. Generally, it isn’t. Unless you’re the boss, you’re on cheap tickets at the last minute with early starts and late finishes. Fly in, taxi to an office, meeting, taxi to airport and home by midnight to do it all again tomorrow. It’s generally bad for your sleep patterns, bad for a social life and it’s really, really bad for your waistline. In the last ten years the relative reduction in the cost of flying has meant business meetings abroad are really more affordable than they were. But, as long as you know it sucks, then it’s still a great deal of fun. I’ve been lucky enough to travel to a lot of places over the last ten years that I probably wouldn’t have gone to if my boss hadn’t sent me. And I would not have changed that opportunity for anything. I’ve eaten cuisines of the world and seen – albeit often from a taxi window – many amazing places. It may be unpleasant but it’s unpleasantness worth enduring.

Constant Connections Means No Off Time

This is one that I think most employees find themselves powerless to fight. Now that the last ten years have connected us, we’re always connected and so we’re always at work. Wasn’t the digital future meant to give us all more leisure time? But now, we’re answering emails when we get home and on the train heading into the office in the morning. We can answer calls from the boss while waiting in the doctor’s surgery and speak to an overseas office while sat in the pub (I don’t recommend that). Digital connections and a mobile infrastructure mean we have an expectation of immediacy and I, for one, remain to be convinced that it’s a good thing.

Companies Haven’t Embraced Remote Working Opportunities

I’ve established that the last ten years has connected us and thus allowed us to work all the time from anywhere. But I think employers as a whole – large and small – are failing to embrace remote working. There are many jobs – and I know it’s a long way from being all jobs – that are not so time sensitive that the 9-to-5 has to apply. There are few jobs that need to be done in the same office in those hours. But organisations – or maybe it’s the boss – fail to embrace the flexibility this could offer them. With many of the companies I have worked with (rather than for) I hear tales of how working from home is frowned upon and the thought of working from a holiday villa for a week is a no go zone. Now, I believe workplace culture is important because employees need to belong and interact with colleagues. But, we don’t need to be there all the time and we can work from 7-3 or 12-8 and be just as productive. We can work from our houses, a friend’s house, the local coffee shop and, in some cases, at 35,000 feet above the planet and still reply to your email. Remember, it’s results that count.

And so, that’s my random five observations. I could have noted how tools like Twitter are changing the way we interact with customer or how they’re replacing industry-centric publications by connecting you directly to people. I could have noted how smart phones mean office workers aren’t carrying laptops quite so much but you still see far too many laptop bags on those overcrowded commuting trains (why haven’t we solved that dilemma?).

If I am lucky enough to remain employed for the next ten years, I wonder what changes will appear? I suspect that the idea of remote working will be embraced by more and more offices where there are huge overheads in central office space that could be removed if people spend part of their time working remotely. I know it doesn’t apply to everybody but I suspect increasing broadband penetration and cloud computing means it’s becoming more and more feasible. I’m looking forward to the next decade. In technology terms, I really believe it will be the decade of the cloud.

They used to joke that you shouldn’t mention The War (at least not in the same breath as the English World Cup victory of 1966). Maybe they still joke about it, I am not sure.

Then again, perhaps it wasn’t a joke. Maybe people were serious about that and, in polite company, you shouldn’t mention The War. I thought it was a joke because Basil Fawlty first taught me that mentioning The War was not good: although spilling soup is not good and he didn’t seem overly concerned about pouring hot tomato down the front of your trousers. So, I may be wise not to cite Basil Fawlty as a mentor (and wiser to steer clear of such conversation topics).

Still, it’s fair to say that The War has been replaced in recent months with Heathrow Airport. It may seem odd that a stretch of land to the west of London can be compared to one of the most terrible events of the 20th Century and I am obviously not comparing the great evil which attempted to take Western Europe to a mass of concrete and jet noises in any way as being being on a similar scale but take it from me you don’t want to be talking about either.

You see, right now, people will work themselves into a purple-faced rant about how terrible Heathrow is in a way that makes me wary of mentioning it. You should not make the mistake of saying the words ‘flying to Oslo’ and ‘terminal three’ in front of anybody who has been out to, what was, the Great Western Aerodrome for you will be subjected to an outpouring of such rage that you will wish you’d said something all together different (I wanted to use a comparison there to something truly awful but decided against it lest people think I was serious about the previous paragraph).

Heathrow has become the chattering class’ villain du jour (and you know it’s serious when you invoke a du jour). Nobody likes it. Ken Livingstone doesn’t like it. Kitty Ussher (City minister, did you know we had one?) isn’t keen and former Chancellor Lord Lamont labelled the airport a “national disgrace”. Really, Heathrow is not winning a popularity contest right now.

The problem? Well, that depends on who you ask. To some the airport looks shabby and not a giant gleaming temple to London’s greatness that some think it should be. To others it the baggage (or lack of) that seems to cause consternation. While others think the queues are to blame. All of which is nonsense. Regular readers (well, the regular reader) will know I travel regularly on business and I often go from Heathrow. And I have been laughing in the face of these naysayers for months. My mantra was ‘read the rules and ye will have a speedy voyage’.

On recent trips I have been astounded by people who were passing through. The large signage reads ‘only one cabin bag allowed’ yet there is a lady with three and she’s getting frustrated that she’s having to go the back and check the others in. Then it says ‘No bottle over 100ml’ and yet, lo, here’s some chap with a bottle of aftershave containing enough liquid to give us wave power for twenty years. Put your metal objects in your hand bag before you go through screening? Well, it must be written in invisible ink given the number of times the alarms go off. We’d actually given these people passports.

I am a Heathrow fan and these people, as my mother would say, were just showing themselves up. Give yourself time, pack properly and all will be well. At least, that’s what I had argued until Monday when I headed for Oslo from LHR T3 where I was greeted by an enormous security queue and a, probably very pleasant, young man. You know the sort, his power simply oozed from his fluorescent yellow jacket.

I present to you, gentle reader, the man whose job it was to ensure the right people got through the queue at the right time. So, only people whose plane was leaving within the next two hours could join the line of passengers waiting to be scanned. The rest of us had to wait patiently until our time was called. A sound and reliable plan (and the lack of seating for the waiting crowds was not his fault).

“Not time yet sir. Only planes leaving before half past,” he would say.

“Please come back two hours before your flight. We’re only letting people through then” he added in a reassuring ‘you won’t miss your flight’ way.

All in all, a very sound and sensible approach to the growing crowds and the lack of resources to screen everybody quickly. No earlier than two hours. Please don’t cheat the queue. Get yourselves a Pret while you wait. Except for one little problem. The man charged with filtering stressed passengers and tasked with keeping the calm and encouraging the nervous flyers to wait until they still had two hours to get to the plane didn’t have a watch. Not only that he didn’t have a clock. He had no clue about the time. You can imagine the rest.

I am writing this episode of .org on one side of the screen while watching an episode of Queer As Folk (US version) on the other side of the screen. I’m playing it from my computer’s built-in DVD. I am doing this as I am sat in a hotel room in Oslo. See, the relentless march of technology allows me to mutli-task in ways I would never have imagined a few years ago.

You could almost say I am stunned. But I am not. I am just bored in a hotel room.

Having said that, it would be great if all that technology stomping around the world managed to get a coffee machine or kettle in this hotel room. As it is I had to take the lift and fetch a cup of over strong coffee from the reception area. Really, Scandinavia is supposed to be so much more advanced. All this wood, heated bathroom flooring and sweet herring is all well and good but I want a good old fashioned cup of Costa Coffee and there isn’t one to be had.

Sorry, back to that relentless technology marching. I am seeing sleek back and silver gadgets marching in perfect unison through Red Square; USB cables tightly rolled and ready to attack at the first sight of an invasion. General Mac and Air Marshall Windows quietly surveying their battalions with stern pride and swelling chests full of medals. But this is modern tech. It would fail. It would let you down. The connector would be the wrong size or the driver would be missing. The intruders would conquer and a few bits of bare wire and broken hard drives would litter the streets.

See, I am well aware that technology is not fool-proof. How many times have you sent that email to somebody who should not have been on the cc list? How many times have you wasted half the paper in the printer because you forgot to check how that document would print? How many times did your Sat Nav take you the wrong way down a one-way street? How many times have you called somebody on your mobile that you didn’t mean to call? How many times have to had to reboot your train?

Yes, honestly, my train was rebooted this morning. I was heading to the airport and sat in my train seat waiting to leave the station. I had a nice cup of morning coffee in my hands (I was still in England, it’s civilised like that). I was thinking ‘which terminal?’ and wondering if those people on the platform were going to be charged excess baggage for the small van-load of cases they were taking. Then the train driver announced a small problem they were working on. A few minutes passed. We were late. The driver came on the tannoy again: now the power would be turned off and back on again. We weren’t to panic as we were plunged into darkness and the doors locked themselves. So we sat there in darkness with all the power gone. And then somebody switched us on again and – as with all turn it off and on agains – we were good to go. So we did. Go, that is.

Seriously, they turned my train off and then on again to fix it.

And it was at that moment I knew that technology had gotten the better of us. Machines now rule and we are relegated to the bit parts (every pun intended).

I am configuring my new ATMT Network Hard Drive (and, according to the box it’s a Samba Server & FTP Server too). I plugged it in and it was seen straight away on my network. Lovely job.

I am using it as a network drive to store music, photos, documents etc. and share it to all the PCs on my network without ever having to have any one particular machine switched on. Great for sharing my iTunes library with my work laptop when I bring it home and stuff like that.

So, there it is, on the network and I start copying files to it. They all appear and all my machines can see them. Very nice.

But I didn’t think of the file structure on the new server. For example, would it be easy to map parts of the system as different network drives? Of course it wasn’t. I have to set the different shares up in advance through the browser-based GUI on the drive. Which is why I am now copying all my music from one partition to another and will have to let it run for the next few hours.

Aggghh. Now I wish I’d read the manual.

I haven’t written much here for a while. I don’t really know why but I haven’t gone away – perhaps I am just spending all my time moving my Windows Media library across to iTunes. Yes, I gave up and switched to an iPod Nano. And, after all those trials and tribulations with other music players, I am very happy. I even bought the Nike+ kit so that I can track how far I have run at the gym. Seriously, I’ve tried many of the music players and they just don’t have the ease of use and integration that the iTunes has. It’s the seamless interaction that makes it all work so well.

Still, that’s not why I picked up the keyboard today. Earlier I watched the European Formula One Grand Prix; and boy what a race that was. But I don’t really want to talk about the race itself (I am sure you can read all about it here) but I did want to talk about one of the best pieces of advertising that I have seen a long while.

Even if you are not a petrolhead follower of Formula One – and especially if you are British – you can’t have failed to have read some piece about the Championship scrap between Lewis Hamilton and his McLaren team-mate Fernando Alonso.

The latest advertisement from Mercedes (which is of course the team they both drive for) plays on this rivalry beautifully. Anything you can do, I can do better:

I just think the whole thing is really well pitched and they seem to have had some fun making it.

On Monday I blew some of the cobwebs off the site and actually posted something of length that wasn’t a link to another site. I blamed the urge to write on reading The Guardian on my flight to Finland and that might be relevant but I suspect it’s also something to do with the current state of the blogs I read.

At various times on this site I have tried to avoid the term ‘blog’. I don’t really like it. Some people don’t like the word ‘moist’. It makes them feel a bit, well, ikky (is that a word?). The term ‘blog’ does the same for me but I shall have to seek therapy because these days everybody from the afore mentioned Guardian to the BBC via The Telegraph and The Economist seems to have a blog of some description. I am now embracing the word from this point on. Bloggety blog blog (see, cured).

Anyway, at last count (about 5 seconds ago) Bloglines had a feed of 124 subscriptions for my account (not all of them public). Take off the 15 I read for work (well, I subscribe then delete all the items when they get to about 100) and that’s still well over 100 things I am ‘watching’. But only a few of them are things I read. I listed some of them in 2002, although that list is dated with a good number of dead links. But few people are writing any more and those that are penning words are doing at such a rate that I have a scary back catalogue of entries to read: Steve, that includes you. So, either I have too much to read that I’m scared to wade in or I have reams of other people’s links that I don’t want to follow.

Anyway, in need of something better I decided that I should start writing once again. I once said that I only did this for my own amusement (and when I used to look at the logs I would have said that was very true) so I’ve decided to add a few more entries and see how we go but, and I bet I’ve said this before but I can’t be bothered to check, this time it will be different.

When I started this (for my own amusement, remember) I enjoyed the act of sitting down and writing. Truthfully, I am not sure I ever wrote a word that was very interesting to others (although Happy Birthday in Russian seems to keep bringing people to the site – twice) but it’s a record of my life that isn’t captured anywhere else. There’s a reason the ‘on this day’ links are at the end of every entry. I click. I find it interesting to place myself back a few years. Last Monday’s entry had four back years for that day and I was fascinated to see that I made references to Blur, traffic congestion, spam and Big Brother in the preceding years; I guess they are still topics of conversation now. And you don’t really get that sense of personal history from a list of links to other things (which become dead links by the time your nostalgic enough to check them).

After a while, however, a blog becomes like a pair of concrete shoes. It weighs you down and you begin to sink. I don’t blog about specific work or my family (hey, Dave, you’re not the only one) and sometimes I ask what am I doing it for? I wonder if you can get treatment for some kind of non-blogging depression? That’s what happened here. I wanted to post daily. I wanted to build that sense of personal history. But I couldn’t. It was too much so it faded.

And now I’m starting again. Less concerned about tracking life and probably with not much more to say but with a heightened sense of why I am doing it.

I wanted to end with a triumphant ‘read on’ but you can’t do that until I write the next piece. And who knows when that will be?

Children In Need is Britain’s version of Thanksgiving. It comes around every November and it changes the television schedules (not always for the better). And that’s about where the similarities end but they say you start a piece of writing with a punchy statement to hook your audience. So, there you go. Thank me later.

I am fairly sure that the good folks in America have their very own Terry Wogan (the American version may also be a genial Irishman given the number of people from the Emerald Isle who shipped across the water) but I have no idea, and can’t pretend I care, for there really is nobody to rival Sir Terry (he is a Sir, Wikipedia told me so and – therefore – must be true).

Children In Need, of course, was last Friday night. You might have tuned in for Jonathan Ross but you got Kim and Aggie trying to clean a Status Quo dressing room. I imagine you’re over the trauma now. It’s Monday and I am whittering on about it purely because The Guardian – free on Finair flights from London Heathrow – has an item on a week in the life of a Pudsey (well, the bloke in the costume, Leeds version). As one of Wogan’s listeners would no doubt email his show, ‘what is the world coming to when Pudsey is attacked by scallies in Bradford’? Seriously, I’m turning all Daily Mail indignant about it.

It’s this sudden surge of middle-Englandness that has prompted me to pick up the quill once more. For it’s not only hoodies attacking Pudsey that got me all stirred up while reading the paper but the very notion that Dame Shirley Bassey is singing about an night on ecstasy in the current Christmas Marks and Spencer television commercial. I imagine, if I wear a legal type, I should add that Dame Shirls probably didn’t know what Pink’s ‘Get The Party Started’ was all about. And why should she? If truth be known, nor did I until I read it in, guess, today’s Guardian (really, there was nothing else to do on the plane).

Should you ever admit to liking a television commercial? I am not sure that you should but I do like the M&S ad. If you don’t know Marks and Spencer – and their place in British life – then you probably won’t get it and you could skip to the last paragraph. But it’s smart, plays nicely on the current James Bond mania and, let’s face it, must have cost a fortune (which I think is a good thing in tv advertising).

In fact, I love it so much I YouTube’d it (isn’t that what all the kids are doing these days?) Go view it. But then I found a rendition of Goldfinger by the very same Dame Shirley Bassey which is also fantastic (and is, if you believe Saturday night’s Channel Four countdown show, the most popular Bond theme of all time). Then I found Sheena Easton’s For Your Eyes Only. You know that one. Sheena was a nice girl-next-door type who sang about being a Modern Girl but then went glam singing the Bond title sequence and gazing into your eyes as you gazed at her in the cinemas of 1981. Oh, You Tube has Modern Girl too.

So, before I get hooked, I better go.

Ten years ago, Palm, captured the imagination of road warriors everywhere with the first Pilot connected organizer, a mighty 5.7-ounce combination of calendar, contacts, to-do lists and notes. Today, having shipped more than 34 million mobile-computing products, the company continues to improve the lives of people and businesses the world over, staying true to one guiding vision: The future of personal computing is mobile computing [Source: Palm Celebrates 10-year Anniversary of the Pilot]

 

by Simon Lord at Flickr

I meant to write about coffee last week when it was on my mind. There was a day, Monday – I think, where I had some time to kill before meeting PY after work. So I went into Cafe Nero and ordered myself a regular Latte. Nice, warm coffee. Then I wandered around some shops and then went into Costa Coffee and ordered another Latte. This time the taste was totally different. Unfortunately, I don’t have the words to hand to describe quite how different the two drinks were. There was a startling difference between two cups of coffee. The Costa drinks was much less bitter and had a much fuller flavour. I was blown away as I have never noticed such differences between two coffees before. I blame the thick stuff we drink at work for dulling my taste buds. Anyway, the leaflet in Costa says, ‘Others think their beans are fine after a 7-minute blast. Our beans need a full 18 minutes at precisely 230 degrees to bring out every bit of flavour – and we always make sure they get it’. It appears to be true. My regular coffee shop has just changed.

Modern Life Is Rubbish, at least that’s what Blur thought back in 1993. I can tell you some Modern Life things still aren’t what they should be. The Modern Life Expo at London’s Business Design Centre was supposed to be and event ‘Combining entertainment and an exhibition we aim to provide suppliers for everything you need in your life from gay wedding planning, health, fashion, home, travel right through to the law & finance’ [site] but it was such a mixture of things (mainly property overseas and wedding invitations) that it didn’t have any focus. Sadly, there weren’t that many people there when we first arrived and we were directed, immediately, to the coffee place rather than the event.

Events like this are kind of weird anyway. They invite people to take stands so that companies can promote their wares. The people attending want to look round with out constantly being pounced on by salespeople. And the two do not go together well. Still, maybe next year …

I love Anna’s writing. Captain Crisps and FagEndBoy is one of my favourites:

It’s got to take the shine off your manhood, being publically admonished by a snack food wrapper.

Little Red Boat certainly has a way with words, she makes me laugh almost every day.

My favourite newspaper is changing. No, I don’t know what Berliner means either but that’s not a problem. No longer will I be hitting old ladies with a newspaper, or getting tangled in a iPod hub’s cable or stopping a City gent scrolling his Blackberry. Smaller, neater, lovely. Danm, it looks hot and it’s only a newspaper!

The Guardian: Berliner preview edition

I am so sad right now. The Catherine Tate show (which follows Extras on BBC2 on Thursday nights) has just come to the end of it’s pitifully short run. It’s by far the best comedy sketch show there has been for a long, long time. I love all the characters but the ‘I d’know’ couple make me laugh before they open their mouths. Foul-mouth Gran, Lauren (Am I bothered? Am I bothered though?) and Derek (How Very Dare You) just make me smile the whole time. What a shame this is ending. Please, BBC bring it back soon.

UPDATE 30 August: Amazon have the Catherine Tate Show Series One DVD on sale now.

When I was younger my Sony Walkman was one of my favourite things. Today, you would probably think of it as a first generation device but I think this was 1982 and it was a WM-4 (or the like). There’s a picture of it on this page. My brother and I were at an age where we wanted to listen to our own music all the time so I suspect my parents thought it would be a good idea to get us one each so we could listen to our music in the car while they had Radio 2 on. And it stopped the arguments.

I was a avid singles collector at the time and the little Walkman unit wasn’t ever going to play vinyl 45s. So, at this point in my life I became a compilation tape wizard. I would spend hours putting tapes of my records together to listen to in the car. There would be the odd album track from one of my parent’s records but most of the tracks were from those singles of mine.

I would spend hours listening, rewinding, forwarding and listening again to my soundtrack to the 80s. If it had been number one in the charts during that period then it would have been on those tapes.

And so to – what I thought was going to be – the point of this little wander down memory lane. During that time in the early 80s I used to carry a small stock of batteries around. If the Walkman stopped working I just replaced the battery (although I did learn over the years not to use the rewind functions a great deal as they drastically reduced battery life). My cheesy 80s pop was always with me.

Fast forward to 2005. This afternoon I was heading to the gym and thought I’d take my new century Walkman-equivalent with me only to find the battery was drained. Except this time I can’t just swap out the batteries – I have to charge it. So I wasn’t able to walk with my music.

And they call it progress.

On a side note, my parent’s loft probably still houses the Walkman – the cassette part gave up years ago but the radio still works and the stereo sound from it is still one of the best I’ve ever heard. Those 80s hits singles are all stored in boxes in the same loft space but the compilation tapes have long since gone. It would be amusing to try and recreate one of them through the wonders of digital music but I shan’t be setting myself that kind of goal.

Spooky side note. When I wrote the words above I had no idea that the entries on this day in 2004 and 2003 were both – in some way – music related. I wonder was it is about today?

If you have been wandering around London in the last few weeks you will have seen the 7 million Londoners, 1 London campaign at bus shelters and poster sites around the Capital. The media space appears to have been provided for free. There have are posters and badges available if you want to order them. I really like the positive statements that it’s making. I really hope that it catches on but I haven’t seen many people or businesses displaying the posters/stickers yet. Go and order yours now.

Yesterday I observed the two minutes of silence to remember those killed in last week’s bombings. After work I walked to Trafalgar Square to take part in the vigil. I arrived just after it had started but heard a lot of the speakers. There were moving speeches, prayers and poems from across the political and religious spectrum. There were leaders from the major churches and religions showing a united front. There were London celebrities with sincere words calling for a united city. Sebastian Coe spoke of the Olympic bid and how we’ll build a fitting tribute to the people who lost their lives last Thursday. There were union leaders and politicians who uttered words of support.

But the biggest applause went to members of the transport companies whose buses and trains were attacked and for the emergency services who attended the sites to rescue victims. For once were were not a celebrity-obsessed nation but were there to support the people who keep London moving and safe.

The vigil seemed to go on forever. Perhaps it was too long but when everybody’s words were sincere how could you stop it? It was a united city saying ‘we will not back down in the face of your bombs. You will not break us’.

Sadly, for the media, it was just another news story. There were camera crews from across the globe at one end of the square and various reporters were applying their make-up or dabbing the sweat from their brows as technicians plugged in things and waved cues. Behind all the the tributes coming from the front of the square were a selection of “Londoners are gathered …” and “back to you in the studio”. Reports were being filed in a number of languages via a fleet of satellite trucks being powered by noisy generators in the corner of Trafalgar Square. Maybe it’s because I was right beside the media as I couldn’t get further into the square but the chatter (and the smiles and laughing of some of the production staff) seemed inappropriate somehow. I hope they got their story.