The world's favourite airline

Well, they are as far as I'm concerned. I got bumped to First Class from London to Singapore, and since I've never been in BA's First Class on a long haul flight, I will only ever fly BA again. When it's a twelve hour flight coming up, you can't imagine what a spring it puts in your step when you're about to board and you get called over for an upgrade. What a great start to the week.

In case you're wondering what life the other side of the curtain is like, here's a quick guide...

Good. The seat was pretty comfortable and you get a much bigger table to work on. I really liked the leg support: it made for a comfortable working position. They give you a very nice sleep suit. I'd always assumed that the First Class toilets would be luxuriously large so that celebrities could have sex with the cabin crew in them, but they're not that much bigger so it's a bit uncomfortable to change. You get a duvet if you prefer it to a blanket: very cozy. The wash kit is much, much nicer than in the back of the plane and the sleep mask was better too. Really nice food and especially good full English breakfast.

Bad. The new BA Business Class has proper power sockets in addition to airline adapters, so I didn't bother bringing my airline adapter with me. But in First Class, the seats only have the airline adapters and my MacBook Pro gave up the ghost after 2 hours 20 minutes. It didn't really matter because I was knackered anyway so I slept for a fair bit.

The middle-aged (ie, like me) couple in the middle seats were obviously famous in some way, judging from the way they were greeted and seated, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out who they were so that I could impress my friends. He looked a bit like David Gest, she looked a bit like Delia Smith. Any ideas? Perhaps a simple future enhancement to the in-flight entertainment could point out the celebs to other passengers: I've even worked out how to do it, by getting people to add their Facebook page when they go through the online check-in (after all, it already asks you for your mobile phone number and so on).

P.S. I watched Beowulf with dinner: lobster salad, monkfish and dark age slaughter. Excellent.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Good news

It's generally very depressing reading the newspaper, which I why I don't do it terribly often. I used to read two newspapers every day, then one, then one now and then plus a glance at the Financial Times in the office, then none except at weekends. Now I just buy The Telegraph pretty much other Saturday. Physically, most of it goes straight in the bin because I throw away property, travel, weekend (except for the crossword), magazine, motoring etc etc. I read the money section now and then. I read the first part of the sport section about football. But mostly I just read the main section.

Now and then you do stumble across some good news, though. I was trying to think of the last time I read some really good news, and I had to cast my mind back a few months to the time when I read that Mr. Robbie Williams, the world's most famous karaoke singer, had gone on strike. Not only are we to be denied his dreary warblings for some time, but apparently he may also be sued for countless gazillions. He probably won't even notice: his record company (EMI, the same people who once paid $50 million to Mariah Carey to NOT make any more records) gave him EIGHTY MILLION QUID to make four records so he must have some of it left. Sometimes the good news veers into the surreal: Mr. William's manager is quoted as saying that EMI is acting like a "plantation owner", implying that Mr. Williams is being treated as a slave. What planet are these nauseating people living on?

Anyway, I was thinking that as bands stop behaving like farmers and instead adjust to the new realities of the "intellectual property" business (despite their products not being property in any real sense of the word and not being intellectual in any way at all) the inevitable adjustment will be that the cost of recorded music will fall to zero and the cost of live music will soar, as the market prices the economically scarce resource appropriately.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Normal Service

Last week, I wasn't well for a couple of days, I was laid up in bed with some sort of flu. When I was feeling a bit better -- not sick, but still very tired -- I decided to keep my meetings and set off into London. How reassuring it was to find myself on the 7.40 cattle-truck to Waterloo and hear this announcement from the guard: "We apologise for the overcrowding on this service, which is due to an excess number of passengers." As the staid looking chap in a suit and tie opposite me remarked, "no shit".

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

D & Deceased

I was surprised how sad the news of Gary Gygax's death made me. For those of you who aren't initiates, Gary Gygax was the man who invented Dungeons and Dragons. When I was first introduced to D&D, I had never come across anything like it before. I came from the borderline-autistic wargames school, having spent many happy hours (days, in fact) at University refighting the Yom Kippur war and repelling Soviet tank brigades sweeping through the Fulda Gap. The idea of a game where you could do, essentially, anything... wow.
I always loved the game, even after moving on to Runequest and Stormbringer. Now life has gone full circle: my kids and their friends love D&D and I still love playing it with them. In fact, playing D&D with your kids is even more fun than playing D&D with your friends. Thanks, Gary.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.

[posted with ecto]

Rabbit rabbit rabbit

As is typical on South West Trains, people today were rude, annoying and generally revolting. There's no escaping the boorish British public. Yesterday I caught a 7.30pm train home and I was one of the last people to get a seat: other poor sods had to stand all the way after long day at work. And if, by some chance, the t*sser lawyer in the blue pinstripe who was sprawled across two seats talking loudly into a mobile phone all the way to Guildford is by any chance reading this: no act of charity you might undertake in the future will ever absolve you.

Today, I caught an early train home and was so happy to find some empty seats in a "quiet carriage" (ie, one of the carriages where people are not supposed to talk on mobile phones or listen to loud music). What happens?

Exactly. People rabbiting away on mobile phones right underneath the "no mobile phones" sign. Unfortunately, in 21st century Britain, you dare not ask anyone to shut up in case you get stabbed.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.

[posted with ecto]

Poles apart

I've been in Warsaw. I took this photo as I arrived at my hotel on the outskirts of Warsaw. It's an interesting place: one of the guys I was with said that it was built in the 1950s as some kind of holiday camp for communist party officials, a sort of Hi-De-Hierarchy. It was quite odd inside, in an ornate but worn way. There was wireless Internet everywhere, but the radio in the room looked like a 1960s East German copy, a special version that could report back to the central committee to tell them what you were listening to.

I have to say that I enjoyed my trip -- traveling on new EU-funded roads across EU-funded bridges -- and next time I go I'm going to take a day or two off to look around more. I was very sad to hear, though, that the well-presented, courteous and hard-working Poles that we find throughout our green and pleasant land are now moving on. The pound has fallen from over 8 zlotys down to less than 5, our inflation is high and I imagine the crime and poverty they find in the U.K. is quite distressing to them. Now their jobs will be filled -- insofar as any of them will be filled -- by the surly and ignorant indigenous population. It's not progess.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.

[posted with ecto]

It's a sign of the times

My younger son (11) was playing a game on the computer today. It was a detective game where you have to hunt around and find clues, solve puzzles, that kind of thing. But he was stuck, because he didn't know what a "cassette player" was. Even when I described a cassette to him, he still had no idea what I was talking about. So I went out in the garage and found a box of old tapes to show him.
I can remember getting my first cassette player -- I think for my birthday, but I'm not sure -- when I was 13, in 1972. The big, big song in the charts at that time was All the young dudes by Mott the Hoople. I absolutely loved that song, and I still do. It's had an odd effect on me actually, because when my eldest son turned 13, the song happened to come on the radio in the car and it made me cry! The opening chords evoke (in me) that feeling of being 13, of walking down the street (where my parents still live) on a Swindon council estate, listening to the best music I had ever heard in my life, not having a care in the world, looking forward to meeting my friends. It's a feeling that's never going to come back, so there's no point in wishing for it, yet the knowledge that my son feels that way is, in a way that I could never have imagined when I was 13, even better.
Mott's lead singer, Ian Hunter, was a favourite of mine for many years. I remember buying his first eponymous solo album when I was in the sixth form after hearing the fabulous "Once bitten, twice shy". I recorded the album on to a cassette tape some time later, and played it endlessly. Much later in life, the Ian Hunter Band's live double, Welcome to the Club, was (if I remember correctly) the first album that I put on my first iPod. It hate to say it, but they don't make them like that anymore.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.

[posted with ecto]