Category: Confused

I probably am this a lot

Advent #7

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Confused
Current image: The dark blue sphere that is an Alexa Dot smart speaker. It's approx 3 inches in diameter, with a flattened base to stop it rolling over. There is a light blue strip of light around the base which indicates it is active.

We’ve got an Alexa in our kitchen.

It’s mainly for music, I often put it on when I’m doing the dishes (either that or listen to The Archers).

If I ask for ‘some music’ (which I concede is pretty vague) Alexa doesn’t always realise who’s speaking – so if the opening notes are a deafening bass guitar, or somebody screaming in Norwegian (rather than, say, The Seekers or Leo Sayer) I know it thinks it’s Mrs C rather than me.

Sometimes I like to give it a challenge – ‘songs by Ronnie Hazelhurst’ didn’t phase it, albeit it was more big band swing than sitcom themes. And similarly, it trotted out the theme to Cheers without even breaking a sweat.

So this week, when I asked Alexa to play some Carols, I didn’t expect to get Cilla Black belting out You’re My World – swiftly followed by Smokie’s A Few Dollars More – swiftly followed by me giving up and putting on The Archers instead (to be fair I was keen to know how Eddie Grundy’s turkey plucking machine was working out).

Last night I thought I’d try again, with the more specific brief of ‘Carols sung by a Choir’ – and lo and behold it played Carol of the Bells. This was followed by Joy to the World at which point I thought we’d cracked it… until this was followed by John Lennon, doing neither a carol nor singing in a choir…

Current image: The dark blue sphere that is an Alexa Dot smart speaker. It's approx 3 inches in diameter, with a flattened base to stop it rolling over. There is a light blue strip of light around the base which indicates it is active.

So maybe machinekind isn’t quite ready to replace the human race just yet. Which cheerful thought I’ll leave you with this Sunday morning, whether you’re at home listening to The Archers (in which Joy is worrying about the Christmas Eve tractor run) or at Church marking the second Sunday of Advent (and singing hymn 417, The Boys are Back in Town)…

Advent #18

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Confused
The current image has no alternative text. The file name is: river.jpg

One song which doesn’t get much airplay, oddly, is River by Joni Mitchell.

I don’t know if it was intended as a Christmas song (it was released in June 1971, rather than December) but frankly if you’re going to mention Christmas trees and reindeer in a song you have to accept that sooner or later (almost certainly sooner) we’re going to claim it as ‘Christmassy’.

The first time I ever heard it was in an episode of Ally McBeal (if you want to carbon date which series, it was between ‘death of Billy’ and ‘OMG Bon Jovi’) and was sung by boyfriend de jour, Robert Downey junior – and I assumed it had been written specially for the episode.

Anybody with a long memory (and no doubt a despairing look) may recall earlier examples of my musical ignorance, never having heard of John Lennon until his death for example. Similarly I’d never heard of Joni Mitchell – so in that context I guess it’s not surprising that I didn’t realise a song I’d never heard before was written by a singer I’d never heard of either!

Fast forward a few years, and of course Joni Mitchell has become inextricably linked with Christmas (whether she likes it or not) by dint of another song appearing in ‘that Emma Thompson scene’ in Love Actually. THAT was the first time I’d heard Joni Mitchell’s name… although given how they talked about her, I assumed she was dead.

I wasn’t disillusioned of THAT until a news story another few years later reporting that she was gravely ill – and while obviously it’s stretching it to call that ‘good news’ it did at least demonstrate she was still alive, so…

In conclusion, I guess – I really don’t know music at all.

(But I know what I like!)

The Easter Mystery

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Confused, Moaning, Pets

To misquote Noddy Holder, It’s Eas-ter!!!!!!!

There are of course two Easters, just as there are two Christmasses – that is to say, there’s the actual religious festival and then there’s the commercial event. And I think, whether wholeheartedly or begrudgingly, we just have to accept that.

It’s inevitable really, given that of all the many religious festivals only those two prompt Bank Holidays and all that go with them. No doubt there’s mutterings in some corners that even this simple fact is yet another example of how fundamentally discriminatory and just plain awful the British are… but in fact no, that’s just how our particular society has evolved. (Personally I’ve no objection whatsoever if anybody wants to get us an extra few days off work for Eid or Diwali – I often think that if Rishi Sunak promised three extra bank holidays (and to fix all the potholes) even he could still get re-elected.)

It would be foolish to expect an entire society to be of one mind, most of the time we can’t even agree on who should win Strictly; so it’s not unreasonable that for those who, to misquote Shakespeare, have Easter thrust upon them, there should be a secular element to give it some identity. Not that I’m suggesting the manufacturers of Easter Cards, and chocolate eggs, and the not-to-be-confused-with-Playboy bunny ears, are doing it out of a sense of civic duty. I’m guessing, to be blunt, they’re mainly in it for the money.

This was made very obvious to me today when I ventured into our local Morrisons to find that the Easter aisle has already been cleared out. No doubt come Monday it’ll be full of buckets and spades and other Summertime paraphernalia (which will be there until about mid-July when they’ll be replaced by new School uniforms and Halloween stuff). For the merchandisers, even before Easter has actually arrived it’s time to dump all that and move onto the next thing.

I’ll be honest, I don’t really mind that. I do, though, have a bit of a problem with the insidious playing down of Easter itself. Actually no, I think insidious is unfair – that suggests strategy, which suggests conspiracy. When, for example, Iceland bizarrely removed the cross from their hot CROSS buns, I don’t believe it was a calculated move to eradicate Easter. Much more likely it’s another example of this infuriating modern trend of trying to pre-empt somebody taking offence, and in the process offending many more people.

I’ve done no research but I’m prepared to go out on a limb and say nobody, nobody, has ever objected to having basic Christian iconography pushed on them via the medium of baked goods. I’d go so far as to say if anybody has objected to it, well, the problem probably isn’t with the bun.

Even the word itself, Easter, seems to be an embarrassment in some quarters, as though there’s a worry that poor innocent consumers might unwittingly come over all C-of-E simply by reading it. Just taking a quick straw poll of the five-and-a-half chocolate eggs currently in our house, the word Easter is only prominent on the two that my wife felt strangely compelled to buy for our dogs – the eggs intended for human consumption mention Easter only once and only in the small print.

All of which seems very odd to me. Of course we are a multi-faith culture now, which is a tremendously encouraging thing to aspire to (even if, as has been pointed out, ultimately only one of them can be right (possibly not even that many)) but at the same time you can’t unwrite the country as it has evolved and you can’t rewrite history. Nobody would visit Vatican City and complain that there are too many Catholics, or open a gift shop there but play down anything that was “a bit too Pope-y”.

So maybe the UK shouldn’t worry so much. Leave the cross on the hot cross bun, leave Easter on the eggs. Anything else, we leave that to your own beliefs.

To not misquote Dave Allen: Goodnight, and may your God go with you.

Happy Easter.

Advent #10

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Confused, Family

We have ourselves a Christmas mystery.

It’s not the one where I can vividly remember being drilled in how to enunciate the lyrics to White Christmas, hitting a definite ‘T’ sound in the line “and may all your ChrisT-masses be White” – the mystery being I cannot work out who or when, or why for that matter as I don’t recall ever singing White Christmas, certainly not in public. (I remember putting it on the jukebox in the Old Market one February evening, clearing the bar in the process, but that’s probably more a cry for help than a mystery.)

But anyway, this isn’t anything to do with that. This mystery is a Christmas Card that arrives each year, addressed to my inlaws, but which the postman delivers here because he knows they’re no longer with us and (therefore) aren’t living in the house at the other end of the village. It comes signed – but the names mean nothing to us.

It’s a peculiar puzzler because clearly it comes from somebody who knew my inlaws well enough to send them a card every year (and this despite the fact that they certainly haven’t received one back since 2017) but not well enough to know they’ve both passed away.

And so the mystery remains. The postmark is never legible enough for us to determine where it’s from, I suppose if we really HAD to find out who sent it we could try a post on Facebook, or maybe in the Portsmouth local papers (they were both from there originally)… But I have to admit, regardless of the unsolved mystery, I like that my inlaws are still getting a card each year. It’s a nice reminder of them, at ChrisT-mas.

The Moment To Choose (as Romana might say)…

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Confused, Doctor Who

…or, to bafflingly quote an entirely different cult property, Who is Number One?

I’m in a quandary. It’s something trivial and unimportant, so naturally it’s occupying my thoughts to an absurd degree. It is in fact the Doctor Who Magazine’s 60th anniversary survey, looking to rank Doctor Who’s entire TV output from worst to City of Death.

This isn’t the first time. If there’s one thing Doctor Who fans love more than Doctor Who, it’s LISTS about Doctor Who, and we certainly haven’t gone fifty-nine-and-a-half years without thinking of rating each story. But it’s a slightly different process this time, which is interesting. Rather than tackling all three hundred in one go, a preliminary round has ranked each Doctor’s output. From this ‘first cut’ the top three per Doctor have gone through to (which is where we are now) the final.

So in a sense a lot of the heavy lifting is already done and we’re left with just thirty-seven stories. I can sort of see the logic behind it, it means that in the final countdown every Doctor will be represented, which is nice. On the other hand if, say, you happen to think Tom Baker’s fourth best story is also the eighth best story EVER – tough, it’s already out of the running.

To be honest, therefore, the final ‘1 to 37’ list is already contentious for that very reason. But then, it’s not really about reaching that rare beast, the definitive answer. The main purpose, I suspect, is to give us something to endlessly debate and dispute for the next decade-and-a-half until DWM’s 75th Anniversary Poll rolls around.

As ever my problem, my opening quandary, is how should I choose? Are we looking for the ‘best’ story, or the one that is most people’s ‘favourite’? In other words, how should a story be judged? Is it a mix of the quality of its script, the direction, the performances, the incidental score… or is it just the far-more subjective, “I really like it”?

If a story has a good script, good direction, good acting, is that enough? Does it actually matter whether or not it’s entertaining? I mean, take James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s generally accepted as a literary masterpiece, but I’ve only ever heard it referred to in sentences such as “I’ve finally managed to finish…” or “I’m afraid I’ve been defeated by…” Nobody has EVER said, “loved it, what a page-turner!” (Me, I’ve never even bothered, I’m going to wait for the movie.)

In the earlier rounds I tried my best to be fair – so, good news for The Caves of Androzani which is objectively superb but which I’ve never really warmed to. Now we’re into the final furlong though, and I sort of feel (in a wishy-washy “you’re all winners” kind of way) that we can take as read that these final thirty-seven are all a bit tasty. So the only way I can really separate them, rightly or wrongly is, well, the enjoyment factor.

On that basis, and bearing in mind we can vote for five stories, I’ve whittled it down from thirty-seven to thirteen.

It would be tactless of me to say which stories I don’t enjoy so much, so I won’t specify which twelve-part Dalek epic I’m not voting for, and will similarly keep shtoom on which of the ‘Doctor meets sunflower-painting Dutch artist’ stories doesn’t delight me.

I will say though, which is partly what has prompted this navel gazing, that at the moment Paul McGann’s movie-length outing is looking like it’s very likely going to get my vote. I accept that the story is a bit ropey, that there’s some twaddle about the Doctor being half-human which is there solely to try and help the plot hang together, and that the resolution is baffling to say the least (twenty-seven years on and I’m still not really sure what a temporal orbit is). However, and despite all that, I love it more every time I watch it.

Which rather sums up the whole show in fact: it’s a load of nonsense, but I love it.

The Age of Ignorance

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Confused

I never expected to find myself envying the Koreans*.

I’ve nothing against them per se, he added quickly. I drive one of their cars for a start, and by all accounts their response to the Covid outbreak puts ours to shame. (I fear I’m in danger of becoming a Monty Python routine now: “Yes, but apart from the superbly-produced mid-range cars and the expert pandemic procedures, what have the Koreans** ever done for us?”)

No, but it turns out that this past week, the very week that I turned 52, the Koreans** have all become younger. That is to say, the country has finally adopted the international standard approach to age, which is to count it from the date of birth.

It had never occurred to me, if I’m honest, that there could be any other way of doing it but it turns out, and not for the first time, that I was wrong. The method in various East Asian countries has been to say that you are one at the moment of birth and thereafter, on 1st January each year, you (along with everybody else in the country) are another year older.

It sounds absurd (to us) and it sounds like an absolute nightmare of feast & famine for the Korean** greetings card industry – AND it means that, born on 29th June 1971, I would have officially been two in Korean** terms by the time I was, to our way of thinking, only six months old. So anyway, cultural differences notwithstanding and setting aside the question of whether my labelling it ‘absurd’ a few lines up is a bit offensive, they’ve decided to do away with it, and accordingly this week everybody’s age has been reduced by one or two years.

Sadly the BBC report didn’t give much detail so I don’t know if this has been the culmination of years and years of campaigning, or if it’s a relatively recent idea – and nor were there any vox pops from ‘the man on the street’, so I’ve no idea how it’s gone down with the population at large. I am now old enough that I have to stop and think when asked my age, so I can imagine that it would take some getting used to, to now have to remember a different age.

Probably the most surprising piece of this already-surprising news story is right at the end, where the BBC tells us that Japan abandoned this system in 1950 – and North Korea in the 1980s! I mean, I don’t want to sound all judgy, but I would have thought that if you share a border and half a name with a, well, a desperately secretive hereditary dictatorship ruled by a borderline-megalomaniac, and even THEY think it’s a good idea to start counting age like the rest of the world, then surely you wouldn’t take another FORTY years to do the same?!

All in all, it was another reminder that things I consider obvious, self-evident even, aren’t in fact anything of the sort. It’s not that long ago I discovered that, whereas in the UK we use ‘half past eight’ and ‘half eight’ interchangeably, in almost every other country ‘half eight’ means ‘half past seven’. It begs the question how many Anglo-European romances fell at the first hurdle due to a simple misunderstanding. (“I was there on time, but the English guy never showed up!”)

It’s not only things I never knew either, I also find as I get older that I’m whittling away at the things I thought I knew, discovering I’ve either not got them quite right or (more often) not right at all. So, for example, I also learned this week that despite my cast-iron certainty on the matter, Legionnaires’ disease is nothing whatsoever to do with the French Foreign Legion, and was in fact only identified and named as recently as 1976.

You live and learn, as they say. And I suppose, to put a more positive spin on it, it’s exciting that there’s always something new to discover, whether you’re nine or ninety. Or fifty-two.

Fifty-one? fifty-and-a-half? Erm… 

*             South

**           *

Advent #7

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Confused

We recently invested in an air fryer. I was a bit dubious – not in the same way I was superstitiously opposed to dishwashers for the first twenty years of marriage, but in the sense that I had never even heard of an air fryer until my daughter bought one. It came with claims of being quicker (which it is) and cheaper (which it is) than the traditional oven; and also with claims that it makes very crispy roast potatoes.

The first time I tried, selecting the ‘Air Fry’ function and cooking them for about half an hour, they were certainly cooked but distinctly non-crispy. Undeterred, and paying a little more attention to the control panel on the front of the thing, second time round I selected ‘Roast’ – and lo and behold they were very crispy indeed, meaning that I couldn’t send it back under the Trade Descriptions Act and also that I had an awful lot of roast potatoes to eat.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve never actually thought of roast potatoes as being something you roast (halfway through this sentence and already I’m beginning to think yes, yes it is just me) but rather as something you cook TO GO WITH a roast. I’ve certainly never had roast potatoes except as an accompaniment to a roasted something else. (And now, like those moments when you look at something with fresh eyes, or say the same word so often it begins to sound strange, I find myself wondering what on earth ‘roasted’ even means.)

So anyway, the upshot of all that is that come Christmas Day, although I can’t see us squeezing the duck into the air fryer I CAN see us having a lot of roasted vegetables to go with it.

Merry Crisp-ness.  

Advent #3

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Confused, Family

As we head towards Christmas and the chance to finally do something with the duck that’s been taking up valuable real-estate in our freezer since before the clocks changed, I’m faced with the usual dilemma: when it comes to Christmas dinner, and with only four rings on the hob, which vegetable(s) do we sacrifice?

The philosophers among you (when not busy not listening for trees falling over) may have taken part in the sort of light-hearted debate where you imagine yourself on a balloon ride needing to lighten the load. The point of the debate being, what value we place on different people and roles in society – so, for example, you’d have one person arguing as a lawyer, one a farmer, one an actor, etc. (Incidentally, my uncle once told us he had debated as ‘Balloon Pilot’!)

In similar vein, my wife and I recently had a provisional discussion on the vegetable issue – and I must say I was rocked to my core when she nominated boiled potatoes, rather than carrots, as the most likely to be discarded.

Vegetables are a bit of a sore point with us anyway, afflicted as I am by Cornish Vegetable Blindness. The turnip/swede debate was one of the early features of our married life; and it subsequently emerged that what I’d always called broccoli was wrong too, and was actually (and even now I have to check) cauliflower. (I’m not sure I could pick cabbage out of a lettuce line-up either, while we’re on the subject.) Not that any of the ludicrously over-populated brassica mob is getting a look in while I’m in charge of the cooking (well, except sprouts). Frankly, never mind throwing them out – that dull and duller pairing, broccoli and cauliflower, aren’t even getting ON the balloon.  

Browser History

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Childhood, Confused

As Feargal Sharkey once said (well, almost) a good book these days is hard to find.

No, on second thoughts let me immediately retract that, it’s not. (Yeah, get a grip Sharkey!). There are plenty of good books out there. My problem isn’t the books. It’s the finding.

I’m not (and this doesn’t just apply to books) a natural shopper. I shop like the SAS. That is to say I get in, get the job done, and get out again as soon as possible; I don’t mean I break in through the window. So, for example, I find it very difficult to go into a bookshop and simply amble around browsing. Like going to a restaurant and being handed a menu the size of a telephone directory, it’s too much choice. Just where do you start?!

Obviously it’s easier if you’re really into a specific author, or a particular series of books. As a kid I’m certain I read a lot of Famous Fives and Secret Sevens (although I can’t remember a thing about any of them now) and also a lot of books about a character called ‘Doctor Who’ which were so popular in my childhood I’m often surprised nobody has thought of adapting them for the small screen.

As an adult, however, much more difficult. I’ve only ever bought two books ‘on impulse’ – The Colour of Magic (which probably lured me in with some sort of ‘the next big thing after Hitch-Hikers Guide’ blurb on the cover); and They Came from SW19, which I bought entirely on the strength of the title.

But, those two exceptions-that-prove-the-rule notwithstanding, and to recap, I’m no good at browsing… which has presented a problem now that I’ve come to the end of what has for a very long time been a very large ‘To Read’ pile. The penultimate entry was Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy which, although it has rather too many chapters where characters with strange names sit around telling us about all the exciting things that are happening just ‘off screen’ nevertheless builds to a really compelling climax. And the very last of the pile is Wiped! It’s a book all about the lost episodes of Doctor Who (turns out somebody made a TV show of it after all, who knew) so in other words a bit of a weepy. Especially when the last surviving copies of The Massacre and The Myth Makers are blown up in the late-nineties.

In talking about books, of course, there’s an expectation to be aware of the underlying themes, on what the story has to say about the human condition, on what (and sometimes in apparent defiance of the title or the blurb) on what the book is actually about; but I don’t think I ever pick up on that stuff. I mean, it’s possible that Wiped! has something to say about nihilism and the ineffable resilience of the human spirit, but if so it’s entirely passed me by.

This probably accounts for my lack of browsing confidence, in other words I feel dreadfully underqualified; and is in turn probably a niggling echo from my A-Level English course. One of the books there was a play called Translations which the entire class unanimously pronounced as by far the dullest and least inspiring of the texts on offer. But our lecturer, who I think it only fair to say was in a better position to judge than we were, considered it one of the very best of the bunch – and it struck me then that perhaps I was naively falling into the laypersons’ trap of judging the text based on the actual words.

Amateur psychology aside though, and whether we’re talking about the stuff between the lines or just the lines themselves, I have found myself running out of things to read. There have been several helpful suggestions from Facebook, and the crisis has for the moment been averted – I’ve borrowed The Thursday Murder Club from Mum and Dad (which, as a hugely-successful debut novel, serves both as an inspiration and an irritation to any would-be author.)

After that… maybe it’s time for a new chapter.

Although don’t read too much into that!

Human Race

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Confused, Little Bit Of Politics

I do hope I do it all right.

I’m not aware there are any statues of Joyce Grenfell* so hopefully I’m not putting her in danger by using the above quotation.** She was speaking over forty years ago, but that anxiety about saying the wrong thing, of worrying that you might offend, is still with us.

It’s understandable – but it makes it difficult to talk about things like race, where language can be so inflammatory. If, as we seem to be saying, nearly forty years on from the Brixton Riots and more than twenty years after the MacPherson report, there’s still an institutional issue with policing; if progress in equality, in representation and diversity has been more lip service than actual legwork; then no doubt it’s a conversation that’s well overdue. But still, one that won’t be easy.

Luckily of course we’ve been saved from having it! We’ve moved away from talking about flawed institutions and unconscious discrimination, to discussing instead which monuments and street names and classic TV shows we should be ditching. This shift in the national debate is largely the fault of the late Edward Colston, although it’s fair to say that’s not the worst thing that can be said about him.

The reports and the video footage of the removal of Colston’s statue from Bristol City Centre suggests there was no disagreement, no conflict between the people present; and to that extent, even though they must have known they risked criticism for it, the police’s decision not to get involved was probably the right one. A rare example, if you like, that demonstrates the fine distinction between ‘mob rule’ and ‘the will of the people’. To be honest, I don’t think one less statue of a slave trader is likely to trouble anybody – indeed, in the 21st Century I would assume the Colston statue to be equally offensive whether you’re ‘white’ or ‘POC’***.

But… that was last Sunday, by mid-week people were gunning for Baden-Powell. Known primarily as the founder of the Scout Movement, I’m hardly courting controversy by saying he’s not in the same league as yer man Colston (who I’d never even heard of seven days ago, but who I’ve now mentioned four times in as many paragraphs) and the seemingly endless ‘Jeremy Vine Show’ debates over whose statues should be toppling next marked a definite shift from specific, understandable ‘targets’ to a much more scattergun approach.

Suddenly organisations like the BBC are doing that awful thing of saying, “We must do something/Here is something/Therefore we must do that” without taking a breath and thinking it through. No, of course in the scheme of things one episode more or less of Fawlty Towers on the iPlayer doesn’t matter a bit; but by the same token, removing it is unlikely to make much of a difference.

I mean I’m no expert, but I suspect that systemic, institutionalised, subconscious, discrimination is NOT going to be ferreted out and put a stop to, simply by changing the name of a college or cutting off David Walliams’ royalties. And it’s a sorry state of affairs, frankly, when what should have been the start of a proper grown-up conversation has instead moved into the arena of headlines, hyperbole and hysteria.

In a sense, you’d have thought that by now, my generation and certainly my daughter’s generation, would have sorted out this racism business; and yet it turns out that this isn’t the case. Maybe it runs much deeper than simple, blatant maltreatment. I mean, I don’t think I’m racist but in my day-to-day life it’s not something that’s ever tested. Besides which, if we’re talking unconscious bias, how would I even know…?

At least if nothing else, we’re all more aware of it now; and with that awareness comes (hopefully) some degree of thought to our words and actions. Even if we run the risk of causing offence by trying not to. In which vein, if I’ve accidentally offended anybody in the preceding 650+ words, apologies.

Like most of us, I’m just trying to do it all right.

*             Although just down the road from us in Plymouth, there is a statue of her maternal Aunt, Nancy Astor, pioneering female MP but also anti-semite and Nazi sympathiser. So whether you’re a left-wing feminist or a far-right mysogynist you’re going to have conflicted views on whether that should be torn down or not.

**           Joyce Grenfell’s First Flight is not even seven minutes long, and well worth checking out. Obviously it comes with the inevitable “attitudes and language in use at the time” caveat, but if you’re not even slightly moved by the end of it there’s probably something wrong with you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-RZ8xHAKwI

***        People are forever determined to judge the past by the standards of today. Yet I strongly suspect that the currently-approved ‘POC’ is a label that will quickly date, and itself be considered offensive. Because unless I’m missing something it is literally a catch-all phrase for anybody who isn’t white, and I would suggest that splitting down the population into just two groups of ‘white’ and ‘not white’ isn’t inclusive, it’s divisive and insulting.