The alternative Royal Wedding playlist



Image: Salvatore Vuono


1. I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That) – Meatloaf
2. D.I.V.O.R.C.E – Tammy Wynette
3. My Favourite Mistake – Sheryl Crow
4. Emotionless – Good Charlotte
5. Grounds For Divorce – Elbow
6. Haitian Divorce – Steely Dan
7. Before You Accuse Me – Bo Diddley
8. But Not For Me – Various (Elton John, Sinatra, Elvis Costello, etc)
9. Some People Are Crazy – John Martyn
10. White Wedding – Billy Idol
11. Slave - Prince
12. Love Will Tear Us Apart – Joy Division
13. There My Dear – Marvin Gaye
14. They’ll Need A Crane – They Might Be Giants
15. Slip Slidin’ Away – Paul Simon
16. What’s Love Got To Do With It? – Tina Turner
17. Jezebel – 10,000 Maniacs
18. Don’t Get Around Much Anymore – BB King
19. Farther On Up The Road – Eric Clapton
20. Pretty much anything by Phil Collins

#goodnews

Twitter can be credited with so many great things since Jack Dorsey came up with his novel 'micro-blogging' concept five years ago, but one Tweet in particular brought a welcome smile to my face this weekend. 

Actually, it was these two Tweets: "So. I'm fine. If I could eat I'd be perfect. But I can't. Not for ages. There was a disaster with a jacket potato last night," shortly followed by "Should have said 'attempted jacket potato'. Who, coincidentally, I once saw supporting Ten Years After at the Marquee".

These were the inaugural statements to herald the arrival to Twitter of Danny Baker, one of the finest, most inventive, idiosyncratic and - damn! - funniest broadcasters of his generation. Life in the Baker treehouse got decidedly grim towards the end of last year when he announced via Facebook, on November 1, that he'd been diagnosed with cancer.


True to style, his statement chimed with defiant self-effacement: "Hello cats and kittens," it began. "As you know I am queasy about introducing vulgar real life onto the vaudeville stage so let's keep this crisp. After a pretty mouldy diagnosis about a month back I finally begin chemotherapy on Monday with further radiotherapy from January." Baker continued: "Once the quacks have soundly thrashed this thing I shall return like a rare gas and as if out of a trap. In the meantime I am watching Tommy Steele box sets (and has there ever been a more lying title to a film than TS's It's All Happening?) and urge you all to keep yakking up a storm and laugh extra loud at the incumbents," before stoically ending with: "So. Manly handshake. Walk right on. In the words of King George, 'What what and there it is...'". 

At the time this emerged I was embroiled in dramas of my own which, looking back, seem petty by comparison. In itself, Baker's announcement wasn't so shocking, either: after all, almost 11 million people around the world are diagnosed with cancer every year. Even more cheerily, one in three of us will develop some form of the disease in their lifetime.

Just about everyone will know or know of someone who has it, beaten it or, sadly, given in to it. My father has it (though thankfully, it's under control); my former next-door neighbour survived it; and I learned a short time ago that a very good friend of a very good friend succumbed to it at the age of 51. Boom. Gone. An effusive life cut short by something you would have thought, by now, medical science would have sorted out.

Cancer is, we're told, "not necessarily" a death sentence. Early detection is the key to surviving it, depending on which of the 200 varieties you've got. I can't begin to imagine what goes through anyone's mind when they've been told they have The Big C. For my dad, who is now 81, being confronted with prostate cancer must have been baffling, bewildering, distressing and any one of a number of emotions. All of a sudden, something was attacking him from within and, unlike most other things he'd been confronted with in life, there was very little he could do about it. Well he could: agree to the treatment and let medical prowess do its work. Except that the medical treatment to beat the cancer led to all sorts of side effects, physical defects and energy-sapping fatigue - entire days when you don't feel right but can't put your finger on why (which may also have been worsened or accentuated by the first signs of mental decline).

I know this post has just taken a somewhat downbeat mood, but I come back to my original thesis: Danny Baker's appearance on Twitter on Saturday, and the rat-a-tat-tat of his subsequent musings reflecting one of British broadcasting's sharpest wits, reassured me that life does go on.

Back in November, when Baker announced his affliction, I was bitching and moaning about painters' bills, about the apparent challenges of changing jobs, of selling houses and moving countries, and everything else that seemed to anchor an ever-present black cloud of grumpiness above my bonce. What I failed to do then, but seeing this minor event on Twitter reminds me to do now, is put it all into the correct perspective. Shit not only happens, but there are people in this world who are dealing with copious amounts of it. And coping with it relatively well.

The placebo effect of a royal wedding

Living, as I am, in a country with a less than embracing attitude to royalty, some of France's republican tendencies may have rubbed off on me.

I have only just found out - significantly later than most of my compatriots, it would appear - that Friday, April 29, 2011 has been declared a public holiday in the UK to celebrate the wedding of Mr William Wales and Ms Catherine Middleton, respectively a 28-year-old helicopter pilot from Gloucestershire, and a 29-year-old occasional photographer from Berkshire.

It will be a day of national exuberance, patriotic fervour and knees-up street parties of a breed not seen since a certain mono-bollocked Austrian corporal shot himself and Europe rapidly descended into peace and tranquility in the spring of 1945. In preparation, grannies the length and breadth of Britain have been buying commemorative tea towels, coffee mugs and sticks of rock in irrelevant gestures of support for the royal nuptials.

OK. Super. But when Britain's finances remain about as robust as a binge-drinking Essex girl trying to walk down Harlow High Street at closing time, Her Majesty's Government has effectively pulled a sickie on the national economy, as the workforce takes an enforced day off, regardless of their view on royalty.

At risk of sounding like an embittered Spartist, the public holiday smacks of a Victorian placebo: "Let's give the proles a day off to wave flags, watch the telly and eat jelly in the street  - they'll soon feel better about things after that."

Actually, it's the last thing Britain needs: with a long Easter weekend just a week before, having everyone take another day off, especially just to watch two people getting married at the taxpayer's expense, is madness and will cost millions in lost productivity.

Constitutionally, William's wedding to Kate, three weeks from today, will be as important as anyone's betrothal should be. But is it really worthy of the country collectively downing tools for the day?

Sorry, my head is full

"How is education supposed to make me feel smarter?", Homer Simpson once opined, adding: "Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain."

If only I had his problem: thanks to obscure prog rock lyrics from the early 70s, trivia about Glen A. Larson productions from the mid-70s, and even more song lyrics from the New Wave of the late 70s, my head is full.

You can try pushing new stuff in, but the old stuff won't budge. My 43-year-old noggin needs decluttering. That seems to be the only reason why, in taking French lessons currently, precious little seems to stick.

It's been 30 years since I last sat in a French class, learning such useful phrases as: "Nikki le singe est dans l'arbre". As Eddie Izzard brilliantly observed, that is not too helpful when you first arrive in Paris as there are precious few monkeys up trees to point out. In fact so far, I've seen none.

Strangely, some of that O-level tuition did get lodged in the deep recesses of my nut. I can confidently order an ice cream, even ask politely for a beer in French. Probably, all essentials are covered with those two requests alone.

So here I am, for three hours each week, wearing the dunce's hat because I'm failing to remember how to  conjugate a verb we went over three weeks ago...or last week...or ten minutes earlier. It's not that I don't want to try: nothing would give me more pleasure than to be able to converse freely in another toungue. I used to think it was the height of erudition: what could be more impressive than James Bond describing exactly how he - and the lady - wanted his filet mignon prepared in any one of a number of languages?

I have dutifully attempted the lingo wherever I've travelled, but this has amounted to nothing more than bad Berlitz versions of ordering a sandwich in German, or requesting a table by the window in Spanish (and wondering why a toasted shoe has turned up in Berlin, and a wine glass and two Nurofen in Madrid). My Italian is, apparently, even worse, sounding closer to an Olive Garden menu being read out by a Midwestern farm boy than anyone genuinely from the Roman peninsular.

For nine of the last eleven years I have lived in the Netherlands. Where they speak Dutch. Given that the Dutch only have to look at a guidebook on a foreign country before they're fluent in its mother voice, my command of het nederlands taal has been woeful.

I can blame the fact that I spent five days of the week in an English-speaking business environment; I can claim that Dutch TV was crap and I watched, mostly, the BBC; I can argue that this nation of polymaths would simply give up listening to my awful attempts at their language and revert to English (arguing, somewhat patronisingly, that "yours is the more popular language, so we should speak English, rather than you speaking Dutch"). The bottom line is that the Dutch language just doesn't sound as poetic or as romantic as Italian, Spanish or French. Still, I should have learnt it; it wasn't about speaking it for effect - it should have been about learning it to communicate.

Now I find myself living in Paris, I know that I must learn French. Why? Because as Steve Martin famously warned: "If you go to Paris, France, 'Chapeau' means 'hat', and 'oeuf' means 'egg'. It's like those French have a different word for everything!".

Almost a month into my course, I'm wondering whether my brain has been progressively and poorly rewired over the years. I'm even seriously contemplating the possibility that mice have simply found their way in and chewed through the wiring. Whether it's stress, tiredness, laziness, or that you really can't teach an old dog new tricks, these twice-weekly, post-work lessons are making no progress whatsoever. What I can say, I can say. What I might want to say seems unattainable.

I'm frustrated by a glass ceiling of sorts: I see children of four learning new languages in a matter of months, their sponge-like brains soaking it up; I'm surrounded by non-native English speakers who are fluent in a variety of tongues, and yet by virtue of the fact I was born to speak what appears to be the closest the planet has to a common language, I feel cursed by ignorance and the inability to add to it fluently.

Technology hasn't helped: we're becoming congenitally lazy thanks to the Internet, and I'm as guilty of that as anyone. Need a fact? Wikipedia will have it. Confronted by another language? Whack it through Google Translate.

Perhaps my only hope is that, now we're in the 21st century, science fiction will become science fact: someone must be out there working on a real version of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy's Babel Fish, or BIG RAT from Gerry Anderson's Joe 90. If they are, it will probably be Google.

Surviving an angry Earth

I've just been watching an incredible tale of survival: a Japanese woman who, as the tsunami struck on Friday, was sucked out of her home by the rushing tide, and clung to a tree for all her worth as the deluge flattened her village. As she felt her grip on the tree loosening, she grabbed on to a floor mat passing by, and held on to it until she was rescued two days later. Her daughter wasn't so fortunate.

By now we've all probably seen the footage of 60-year-old Hiromitsu Shinkawa. Shortly after the earthquake happened, he and his wife went to pick up belongings from their house in Minamisoma. As they did, the tsunami crashed through their town. Shinkawa and his wife were swept out to sea by the wave. He survived by holding on to the roof of what was left of his house. His wife slipped away and hasn't been seen since. Shinkawa was eventually found, clinging to a narrow strip of roof, some 15 kilometres out at sea, by a Japanese navy ship which just happened to be passing. Who knows how long he'd have remained adrift - or alive.

All this brings into sharp perspective any travails we might be experiencing. Nothing can compare to the desperation these people must have felt as they clung on for dear life, the freezing cold water surrounding them. It has been a stark reminder of the utter fragility of life, and our relative insignificance as a species in comparison to the power of Mother Nature - even if we continue to challenge her authority.

Situations Vacant

During a recent viewing of The Bourne Ultimatum I lost count of the number of times somebody in CIA collar-and-tie barked out the phrase: "People, we have a situation here". Each utterance prompted deskbound underlings to look up from the keyboards they'd hitherto been furiously stabbing away at.

Quite why, in the 21st century, people in thrillers are still typing anything baffles me: the computer mouse has been around for 47 years, but apparently the only way to demonstrate Really Important Stuff Being Done Really Urgently On A Computer is by typing stuff frantically.

But I digress: in the last 24 hours, no doubt, "situations"have been declared in the boardrooms and business development meetings of Samsung, Google, Motorola and the unfortunately initialled RIM. For Steve Jobs - no less - has finally announced the iPad 2. It is, as people in this business are inclined to say, a "gamechanger". Much like its predecessor.

At his press conference yesterday, Jobs let the figures do the talking: 15 million iPads sold in the nine months from its launch last April, pulling in a handsome $10 billion in revenue. Not bad for one product category alone. You just have to look across the aisle on your next flight or your next rail journey to see  how much the iPad took off. It does seem like everyone has got one.

At Mobile World Congress recently, Ben Verwaayen, CEO of my new company, noted that during a panel discussion at January's World Economic Forum, he looked down onto the front row of the audience, and eight out of the 10 fellow CEOs he saw were nursing iPads. That might say more about CEO remuneration, but Verwaayen's point was important: this was a product that didn't even exist 12 months previously.

The challenge facing Google Android and all the other tablet manufacturers is breaking Apple's 90% market share in the tablet business, especially now the bar has been set higher still. Featurewise, iPad 2 doesn't offer any real surprises: front and back FaceTime cameras bring it up to par with the Samsung Galaxy device, and the addition of more horsepower to run memory-heavy multi-tasked applications was always on the cards.

The improved performance, in particular, will enable the iPad 2 to run dedicated versions of iMovie and Garageband. This, in itself, is big: the idea of shooting and editing a high(ish) quality resolution movie, or recording an entire album on the iPad is a delicious extension of the so-called 'digital lifestyle' Apple and Microsoft coined in the heady early days of convergence.

As usual, however, the talk is quite rightly about Apple's design: thinner than a magazine and weighing just over a pound, the iPad 2 is a marvel of minimalisation. Having recently taken ownership of an 11-inch MacBook Air, I've struggled to go back to any portable computing device which can't fit into an A4 envelope. The iPad 2's thin design completes this transformation, taking the tablet tantalisingly close to a laptop or netbook in what it can do.

The one genuine surprise during yesterday's press event was the appearance of Steve Jobs himself. Barely days after Apple investors were nervously circling vulture-like over the company's succession plans while Jobs was undergoing further treatment for cancer, he bounded (relatively speaking) onto the Moscone Center stage in San Francisco declaring "I wasn't going to miss this one."

The enthusiasm and the drive was there for all to see. And therein lies the concern about Apple's future: Apple IS Steve Jobs. The passion with which this übergeek rattled off the iPad 2's statistics and then cheekily declared that its competitors were "flumoxed" about what to do next was a huge statement of vitality - even if it was contrived. Whether he didn't personally want to miss the event, or whether his investor relations team didn't want him to, this was vintage Jobs. And you can see why some people really you have a situation.

Shut that window, mother, it's freezing out

For those of you who didn't get the memo, we are still in the grips of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Despite the cartoon snowballs of optimism rolling down the Davos mountainside from last week's World Economic Forum - at which Very Important People talked up a bright, new, post-recession future - we remain in deep cack.

Governments everywhere have instigated ruthless austerity measures to reign in spending. Everyone has had to tighten their belts. Why, even Wayne Rooney, who earns a pitiful £200,000 per week, has wisely opted to give his Range Rover a vinyl "wrap" makeover, turning his grey motor into a white one rather than trade it in for a new one of the preferred hue.

With these desperate times calling for such desperate measures, it's heartwarming to see the English Premier League splashing out a record £225 million in the January transfer window. I say "window" but by the time Monday's limo rides and helicopter flights began, it had closed to little more than a slight opening for ventilation.

As usual, the bigger clubs played the game of waiting until the dying hours of the month before concluding business with a staggering £120 million of wheeling and dealing, ensuring that the January 2011 window beat the previous record - set in 2008 - by an incredible £50 million. That's an entire Fernando Torres.

Significantly, just four clubs - Manchester City, Aston Villa, Liverpool and Chelsea - represented 80% of the spending during this year's window. This quartet all have something to prove: for City, it's their continuing determination to challenge the old order with financial clout; Villa's controversial poaching of Darren Bent from Sunderland, and the loan of Michael Bradley, gave Gerard Houllier a sporting chance of dragging a moribund side out of lower-half mediocrity.

Though no more about confidence and progress, Liverpool and Chelsea's respective exploits in the window were as much about credibility as they were about bringing in new players. Whether Liverpool were resigned to losing Torres or not, they didn't mess around in coughing up £60 million to bring in Luis Suarez from Ajax and Carroll from a noticeably unreluctant Newcastle.

Torres, for his part, had been hinting at a move since last summer, and with Chelsea making eyes at the Spaniard for some time, the question wasn't about "if", or even "when", but "how much?". Comfortably wrapped in the blue blanket of Chelsea's welcome, Torres diplomatically (and clearly on-message) made his statement to his new club's fans with only a hint of a barb at the Liverpool he was elsewhere more desperate to escape. Kenny Dalglish, being a marginally better English speaker, used the full power of his native tongue to wither a snipe at Torres' departure, but based on the maxim that an unhappy player is not much of an asset to a manager, the parting is for the best of both parties.



All-in-all, the Torres/Carroll transactions actually represent good business for the three clubs involved: Newcastle get £35 million for an at-best £20 million player which means, if Mike Ashley applies his allegedly good business acumen, Alan Pardew might have a very healthy purse to open in the summer. Or maybe not. Liverpool, for their part, get in Carroll and fellow newcomer Luis Suarez a new strike duo to ripen things up and plant a large red flag at the North Pole of intent that they want to be seen as an undisputed and justifiable Top Four team.

Chelsea have demonstrated an almost penurious nature in recent transfer periods. Now they have, potentially, the No.9 they've needed and craved for years, and have spent handsomely to get him. If he can be kept out of the treatment room, a Torres playing alongside Drogba, with Anelka off the front pair, could scare defenders witless.

The £75 million Chelsea has spent in the last week on Torres and Benfica's David Luiz is not, as one commentator lazily contrived, "a return to the bad habits" of the early, profligate Abramovich era (i.e. carelessly spending obscene sums on players no longer worth their boot laces). The club has filled two badly vacant positions, and in Torres invested in a genuinely exciting star player. Yes, £50 million is a preposterous amount of money for a football player. Yes, that money would go a long way if spent on more worthy things elsewhere. But it is what it is. It pains me to say "market forces", but if that's what it costs to prize a star player (and the proprietor is happy to stump up the cash), that's what it costs, irrespective of the relative morality of the cost.

Enticingly, we'll get to see if things, as D:Ream optimistically predicted, will only get better for Liverpool and Chelsea when they meet on Sunday at Stamford Bridge. With Torres fully eligible to face his former club, it promises to be a mouthwatering test of who will get the return on investment sooner.