Glastonbury 2010

Photo by the wonderful Mr. Richard Ramshaw

“Glastonbury is nigh on impossible to explain. It’s not about what is happening where and when.  It’s not about maps and atlases. And it’s not about a plan.

When John Lennon said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans” he was possibly sat on a grassy patch in Somerset. Your Glastonbury moments are truly won and lost in the moments of your schedule left undecided and unassuming.

It’s an overheard conversation. It’s dancing with the person standing next to you. It is the overwhelming feeling of peace that takes you over as the sun dips behind The Tor. And it’s finding somewhere great for tea.

It’s discovering something tucked away in a hidden little side-field that you never knew was there. It’s finding a field full of hammocks and looking at the stars. And it’s the kindness of a thousand strangers…”

If you would like to read the rest of the feature please head over to the lovely Cooler website.

Beach Break 2010

I went to Beach Break Live festival down in Pembrey to report for Cooler a couple of weeks ago.

Sun dipping low in the soft evening sky down in Pembrey

“The sun burned bright in the mottled Welsh sky as we rolled through the bottom of Wales with bare feet and sunglasses at the ready, through the majesty of the looming Brecon Beacons, awash in luminous greens and wayward lambs, Tumble and Upper Tumble, Trimsaran and Kidwelly, where pebbled-dashed houses surround solitary fish and chip shops.

In the distance the glinting afternoon sun picks out Pembrey Country Park. The entrance is stern, framed by grey bricks and metal fencing – the start line to the luscious innards it is there to protect. The festival site is small and neat, collected in a tiny pocket of the park, respectful of its beauty.

A whole world is tucked into two fields, trimmed with watering holes and fairground rides. Gaggles of people sway from place to place, crumpling into piles in front of the main stage, straight from the beach. Pints in hand, jumpers on and ready to fade into the evening….”

If you would like to read the rest of the review then it can be found on the Cooler website.

Natural History Fan Club

In all my years on planet earth I had never managed to get myself to The Natural History Museum. As each year passed this became more and more hard to bear. (Especially with my hometown being the birthplace of Darwin an’ all.) So on Easter weekend this year I left my family boarding an aquatic tour of London and headed on my way.

It really does

It took quite a while to get myself inside that majestic, neatly carved building – the queue snaking around the grounds, allowing me to get a good long look at all the creatures hiding in the pale stone. I was beyond excited and impressed by the throngs of people patiently waiting two-by-two to gain admittance.

The Natural History Museum

It was rammed with a beautiful spectrum of people; kids clutching furry dinosaurs, young guys flicking through museum guides and old couples admiring Dawin’s white marble form, hand in hand.

I started off in the dinosaur gallery, naturally. The queue for which could be found crammed next to the skeleton in the entrance hall – full of of bright eyed dinosaur enthusiasts, such as myself, bubbling with excitement as the prospect of all those bones.

Three times the fun

Next up was the stuffed guys…

Stuffed

Big

The corridors were peppered with people pushing their noses against the glass. The reflections of their faces bouncing off the glass protecting those most fierce of creatures.

Reflections

Teeth

My favourite moment of the day came when I took some time and sat myself down in the room decorated with the empty shells of whales. As I sat at one end of the room looking out across bones hanging peacefully in the space above the teaming crowds I felt at a certain calm descend. It was blissful.

Sea creatures take to the skies

Before I left the majesty of my surroundings I decided to hike up to the very top and take a look around. I found the most amazing sights right in front of my nose. I felt pretty lucky to live somewhere where I can go on adventure to see of all these amazing things for free. We are a lucky, lucky bunch.

The view from up high - you can still see Charlie from up here

The big tree in the distance

And all that remained was a quick trip to the gift shop, which is rammed full of many amazing dinosaur trinkets that I still pine for.

Sidney the Stegosaurus

And that was the end of a very brilliant day.

Politics and the new world order

The houses of powerliament [PHOTO: Sofie Jenkinson

Much is being made of the impact that the television is having on this general election. More specifically the televised debates featuring the leaders of the three main parties. The last of which takes place this evening.

And, to some extent, so it should be. It is changing the face of our political landscape as far as the eye can see, possibly forever. However, I have noticed that what is often lightly skimmed over or noted as a side issue by many major commentators in the traditional media spheres is the impact of the internet as a partner in crime to all of this.

I have had my computer open during each of the live debates and have actually started to do so regularly during BBC Question Time as well.

The television debates are offering the public an opportunity to become informed about the policies of each main party and also get a good look at who they want to be in charge of the country. But essentially it is a passive process. Even for the audience, with all the rules that have been imposed about clapping and whooping (unlike on Question Time).

The internet offers a forum of discussion and reaction to what is happening, in real time. It allowed you to become a part of the conversation.

This is something which is picked up on by the more savvy journalists and increasingly by the programmes themselves. I mean, there has been a token mention of twitter on pretty much every discussion so far, don’t get me wrong, but it is the perceived impact of these mediums that I am questioning. Ex-party spin doctors and newspaper editors sit there in neon-lit studios pouring over the details or whatever has just come to pass and looking at the next day’s headlines. But in my opinion they are just not giving enough credit to the reams and reams of conclusions being drawn and informed comment pieces being written just moments after, while they are still on-air.

So, who is part of this conversation?

Certainly most of my contemporaries are involved – the majority of my Twitter pals, for example. But is being a part of all of this skewing my view of how important it is or how much impact it is having?

I honestly believe that Nick Clegg would not have enjoyed such a great boost to his poll ratings had it not been for the kindly reactions  and conclusions of the majority of internet goers. The press love to blow their own trumpets about this, pretending that they still call all of the shots, but as we, in the field of journalism, have been learning the hard way for a number of years, it no longer has the sway it once did.

So while the spin-doctors and the press officers sit back and state that this is all to do with the breakdown of political tribalism and MPs expenses I simply want to hit them around the face with a wet kipper. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out what is going on here – local candidates are listing social media sites on their through-the-letterbox leaflets and scores of blogs and tweets are being forged mere seconds/minutes after an event occurs. It is no use trying to ignore this phenomenon if you are advising these MPs, it is happening and it is making a difference.

It is filling the space inbetween when an event takes place and when the traditional media outlets reflect on it. This space is crammed full of informed and opinionated people, from one end of the spectrum to the other. It is creating a throng of people who are more and more informed and therefore increasingly engaged. These are people who are genuinely concerned about the General Election. And British politics in general. When people are crying out about how disengaged people are from politics they certainly aren’t looking over here.

So could we conclude from this that the Liberal Democrats are actually at an advantage because they have more internet savvy supporters? There certainly seems to be more of a liberal influence in this medium.

The most brilliant part of this new way of experiencing politics is the transparency that we are seeing and the attention to detail. Within moments of the YouGov poll being announced after the last debate I had a handful of tweets and re-tweets at my finger tips giving the information that one of the YouGov directors is actually standing for the Conservative party. This is the kind of up to date and accurate information that is allowing voters to become almost as informed at the party press and is, without a doubt, giving us power through knowledge. We can no longer be taken for a ride, it would seem.

It is connecting us everything we could possibly need. Information about how to vote, where to vote and all that jazz over at About My Vote; how much power you have where you are voting over at Voter Power and even a little advise/peace of mind/nudge in the right direction if you’re not sure at Who Should You Vote For. Not to mention the veritable smorgasbord of links and sights advising all the wannabe tactical voters out there (http://tacticalvote.wordpress.com is a good example).

As was pointed out by one of the people on my Twitter stream after the last debate, Conservative supporters don’t really Tweet as much and when they do have seemingly little sense of humour (the second being a side issue, but still worth noting). The Conservative MP standing in my local constituency, for example, has absolutely no presence on Facebook at all and has only three tweets on his page so far.

Is the internet exposing those parts of the our political system that are behind the times and not reflecting the needs of the society it is supposed to be serving?

In a country where I am constantly hearing that people are ‘no longer engaged with politics’ this certainly seems like a step forward. In fact during the debate last week you would be hard pushed to believe that that is the case at all. Yes the expenses scandal dented people’s trust in MPs, but I’m not sure that many people really trusted them anyway and it certainly seems to me that it has got people asking questions – and being an active participant in this situation is half the battle, isn’t it?

I usually watch these programmes with people – friends, family etc.  And on the occasions that this is not possible I have found the whole experience far less enjoyable – because there is no discussion. However, since I started joining in with real-time online discussions in this way I not only feel more involved but there are moments where I actually think I might be making a difference. The truth is, and the beauty of it in fact, is that everybody in that situation is making a difference in some small way.

I have learnt more about the policies and ins-and-outs of the current political issues this year by being involved in this way. And I am saying that as someone who is fiercely political and always a moderately well-informed voter.

I would go as far as saying that tweeting while watching live political debates has not only given me more information and cleared up any questions I may have but has also made the whole thing much more enjoyable. Which is probably #nickcleggsfault.

Much of this was in fact picked up on by Newsnight the other night as well as by Will Self‘s segment on This Week. But there was still a lack of acceptance by many people commenting on both of these programmes about just how important the internet conversation might turn out to be.

A great illustration of what I am talking about here came yesterday with the birth of #bigotgate. All day there were people commenting, picking apart, discussing and drawing conclusions on the days events. The mood, even in the Brown camp, was fairly upbeat and whimsical, even in light of the PR nightmare than had just ensued. There were jokes, puns and fake Twitter accounts flying around left, right and centre. Contrast this to the the mood today and you find that something has shifted. Not in every case but while the majority of feedback yesterday was that Gordon had almost done himself a favour and that people were almost appreciative of his honesty about such views, today everybody is talking about the end of the Labour, the end of Brown and how fatal this has been to the campaign. Nothing else had happened during this time so the change has simply got to be down to the plethora of negative newspaper headlines Brown received this morning.

At this point I will conclude with the thoughts of my politically active online friend Mr. Bull:

“I think you may well be right about this two tier thing. And it’s a worry because the things that make the new way so awesome are the very things lacking in the old way. I read the original guardian source of that Daily Mail story about Nick Clegg being a nazi before I heard about the Daily Mail story because Twitter was awash with it. It’s great. Not only are things debunked, they’re shoved in your face whether you give a shit or not so you KNOW when something is bullshit. Amazing, I love it. And nobody writes 200 words around one quote they got from some research report that hasn’t been peer reviewed yet.”

And so, while I may have started on this topic thinking that everything has changed and entirely shifted towards the new mediums I seem to have ended up on the conclusion that there are two tiers of reflection and reaction going on, because essentially there are now two audiences. Those that are on the internet picking up the rolling news as it happens and forming opinions and conclusions at that time and those that are reading the story in newspapers etc the next day and forming their opinions based on information presented them through the filter of how it has been chosen to be represent in that field of the press.

Essentially that means that there is a division forming between those that choose to be active and those that choose to be passive. (Obviously this is a general theory and is not strictly black and white in that someone can be a member of the real-time conversation and still form an opinion based on the representation in the press the next day in the same way that someone can react to the newspaper and breakfast show stories after they have digested them.)

I am certainly glad to be part of a society where I can be involved with such a high standard of political discussion and debate. And although I still love the medium of print and will never, ever stop buying a newspaper I am glad that I can pick it up and read the front page story as an informed reader rather than a sponge for the opinion of the very newspaper that is supposed to be informing me.

The impact of the headline is certainly still there but to what extent has the way in which we take our news and comment knocked the spots off the influence that it once had?

p.s. nice little aggregator here: http://www.socialfuel.co.uk/ and the Guardian reflect on this subject over here.

If you can’t write something then write anything

My lovely friend and most excellent master of the pen, Mr. Matthew Hill has written yet another spectacular blog post.

This time about ways to trick yourself into writing.

My personal favourite being:

Use Microsoft Notepad, not Microsoft Word

This is pretty much the gist of what I was going on about down there. It’s the kind of application where you can just write and write and write and not think about it and not care and make mistkaes and not give a fliip about grammar and sound stupid and get it all out. And sometimes this ends up giving you some absolutely cracking sentences, once you’ve cut around the edges a bit.

And so on this note I am off to write about records and monsters in notepad.

I will leave you with Rex, the most brilliant dinosaur biscuit in the world. And what I do when I can’t even write anything.

Rex

Words will never hurt me?

Me and words are going through a bit of a rocky patch at the moment.

Whether that is wise to admit I just don’t know. I am taking a tentative leaf (tentative in the similarity rather than the advice) from my very good pal Mr. Matthew Hill – in that being transparent is the only way to be. To be true.

So I will be sharing some other mediums with you for a while until the prickle of letters falling onto the page returns. There are so many beautiful, brilliant, mind blowing things around – a lot of which I spend a great deal of time seeking out, exploring and marveling at. So it’s merely an extra step. Until I can create something myself, at least.

You do.

Someone who is much more talented, confusing and gloriously deep, yet troubled than I, said to me recently, on a rainy evening in early November, not to worry so much about getting it right and to just let go and do it. To just write and to see. To realise that sometimes what flows, without all the thought and fret often turns out to be the most amazing.

I believe him to be right. And I am taking the advice, privately in my notebook, until I have let myself fall in love with the act once more.

I have noted that recently the world in which respect, heart swells and vehement chagrin overlap is often all a little too close and not quite as clear as one may have hoped.

It is a battle, not yet won.

Parental Advisory: Part 3 (The Four Tops Gate)

So, there we were last weekend not watching The Wire…again.

Instead my Mum was forcing me and my Dad to re-watch a performance by Rod Stewart on Strictly Come Dancing. Naturally.

Do you think i'm sexy? WELL DO YA?

The backstory here is that my Mum is mildly obsessed with Rod Stewart to the point where we have a leopard print teapot. He can do no wrong, which includes covering oodles and oodles of “American Swing Classics” etc.

He’s just released his new album, an album full of soul and blues covers I believe. Oh lovely. And so he’s on Strictly Come Dancing flailing about like an old turkey to promote this, I can only presume.

The song that he has chosen to cover is ‘Same Old Song’ by The Four Tops. Which seems harmless enough, eh Rod?

So we’re all sitting there, humming along nicely (it’s a good song, OK?) and thinking that this was a pretty good choice. Meanwhile Penny Lancaster, Rod’s ridiculously attractive and very tall wife does weird, wiggly dancing in front of him, gyrating her lovely lady hips and pointing her giraffey legs at him. It’s all fairly standard so far. But there’s only so much of that kind of thing I can take so at this point I made myself scarce.

Now the next part I wasn’t in the room for, so when I was later asked to referee this argument I did not have the whole story available to me. But I guess it went something like this:

MUM: “Who did this song orignially?”

DAD: “The Four Tops.”

MUM:” Noo, it was The Supremes.”

DAD: “No, I really don’t think so.”

MUM: “Oh, maybe it was.”

ETC.

So I was called back into the room to break it up. By Googling it.

And the song was in actual fact a Four Tops song.

DAD: “See I told you!”

MUM: “That’s what I said!”

DAD:” No it isn’t, you said it was The Supremes!”

MUM: “No, I said The Four Tops.”

DAD: :You’ve never shown an interest in Tamla Motown until HE [points at screen] started doing it. You think everything is The Supremes.”

MUM: “YES I HAVE! No I don’t!”

DAD: “I’m going to bed. [Walks off]“

MUM: [Starts singing along]

DAD: [Comes back down the stairs] “DON’T START SINGING THAT NOW. DON’T PRETEND YOU KNOW IT! It was the music of my childhood, you don’t even KNOW!”

MUM: :Oh, go away!” [Then comes into the room I am in singing "It's the saaaame ollld song..." and doing what I can only describe as the Can-Can in her leopard print dressing gown.]

Northern Soul allnighters are some of my Dad’s favourite “When I were young..” stories, so I think it hit a nerve. But it was a classic moment and one of the most hilarious fake arguments I have ever been dragged into, to solve with the internet.

The positive power of the internet <3

Over the past few weeks I have been keeping track of this online project -> http://www.youtube.com/chartjackersproject

Run by British YouTube sensation Charlieissocoollike as well as others, the aim of the project was to create a single using the power of the internet and get it into the UK Charts.

Today the single was released into the big wide world in aid of Children In Need. And I, for one, think it’s a pretty amazing achievement. Not least the video, which you can see below, that is made up from contributions from all’n'sundry across the world.

Not only is it for a good cause and means that these guys have managed to pull off such a big challenge but it also, as Charlie has so rightly pointed out over and over, a great example of what can be achieved with the internet and by young people.

The single is out this week and costs 79p on itunes, you can get it HERE. I have just bought it, because I am really quite impressed by the whole thing.

Parental Advisory: Part 2 (THE WIRE)

The so, we come onto that rarely touched boxset of The Wire.

This is not the kind of wire I'm talking about and that bird has nothing to do with it. (PHOTO: Studio H (Chris))

It all started last Christmas when my Mum bought The Wire boxset for my Dad, in an attempt for us to stick with the latest TV trends and so that we could watch it before the Guardian found out and stopped us from reading their paper (EEK).

So, this boxset has been sat in our living room for over 10 months now and until recently was still wrapped in its plastic. I have been leading an organised and high developed strategy in order to manoeuvre these discs into the DVD player. This has involved a lot of hint dropping and gentle suggestion that maybe The Wire might be better than watching an episode of Johnathan Ross from five weeks ago that we have on the Sky+. I was forced to develop this strategy due to very strict rules, enforced by my Mother, surrounding who can watch it and where – due to the fact it was a present for my Dad.

And so after weeks of groundwork it came to pass.  We watched the first episode.

And then many, many more weeks passed. And we had to watch it again because my parents couldn’t remember what had happened.

And then many, many further weeks passed and we watched the second episode with full on side commentary and crib notes from yours truly to remind my parents what had happened in the first episode. Take this scenario and replay it a few more times and then you should get the picture.

So last week we finally found ourselves on the second disc of the first series. Now this was a GREAT achievement, I can tell you. We made it through episode four without incident but then made the decision, possibly foolishly, to watch the next episode straight after. This led to not one but BOTH of my parents falling asleep. And snoring.

The fifth episode, as anyone who has watched The Wire (and can remember that far back), is very important. It is the pinnacle of everything else to come and really needs to be paid attention to.

The overarching problem here is that my Mum doesn’t really understand what’s going on in The Wire at the best of times. Recently she has been partial to throwing in a willynily “YO!” at the end of a sentence, over dinner, to convince us otherwise. But being unconscious does seem to be putting her at a disadvantage. Below is a classic example of  why my Mum gets lost so easily:

Her response to the above was, “Why are they just saying ‘Fuck’?”. MUUUUUUUM, get with the program!

My Dad reassures her each time by saying, “Don’t worry , it’s just like Shakespeare. You only really need to understand half of what they say.”

So at this point I had watched the fifth episode and was keen to move on. But I had to wait for them to catch up with me due to the aforementioned RULES. So I went off into the other room to watch David Attenborough talk about little creatures and left them to it.

That was until this happened:

“Sof….can you come in here please? Who died?”

“Ummm, what do you mean ‘who died?’. No one has died.”

“Then what are we watching?”

“I’m not sure…”

Cue my Dad walking over to the DVD player and exclaiming, “WHOOPS, I put in the wrong season. This is season five.”

SEASON FIVE! Season blinking five. This really could have blown the whole thing out of the water, but luckily, as I have mentioned before, neither of my parents really understand what is going on in any given episode so I think we dodged a bullet there. I just hope that the disc was replaced in the right case, otherwise if we ever get to season five it could all go terribly wrong.

Needless to say we managed to nail down episode six, ‘The Wire’ later that week, which is great news because now we have done groundwork for the rest the blasted thing. But we have become stuck again. I pray that we are able to finish season one before Christmas.

The most hilarious part of all of this is that my Mum actually doesn’t really like it. She doesn’t like the way they talk, the way they dress or really the entire premise of the show. But she is determined that we will watch it and that we will watch it together. She also likes to mention that the opening credits remind her of those of the Sopranos and that hasn’t become old yet, honest.

I’m staring down the barrel of another Friday night in, because none of my friends lives here any more (honest) and I am going to work on my best ‘Why don’t we watch The Wire’ argument for later. If we can break the half way point I really think that we might be able to do it.

Wish me luck.

Parental Advisory: Part 1

Advice for parents, apparently. (PHOTO: trix0r)

“A parent
is a caretaker of the offspring in their own species.”

A lot is made of living with “teenagers”, living with animals, living with partners etc. I have noticed, however, that not many people are sharing their stories about living with their parents. Now, this might be because it is painfully ‘uncool’ to be in this position or maybe it’s just because parents don’t say the “funniest things”, right? WRONG.

You see, there comes a moment is everybody’s life where they need to fly the nest. For a lot of people this usually comes directly after finishing university but with the graduate job market being tougher than ever and opportunities being a bit thin on the ground this may not have been the case for quite as many this year.

I am one of those people. I live at home with my parents in a Victorian terrace house in the centre of a fairly large town. The combination of the better class of wine that is stocked in this kitchen and the suffocating debts I now have from higher education has lead to this situation (mainly the latter).

Last Saturday morning we had just finished brunch and the coffee was brewing. My Dad was tackling the challenging crossword in the Review portion of the Guardian, while my Mum was catching up on world affairs in the main section and I was reading about Alex Miller’s releases of the week in The Guide. As I got up to pour the coffee I laughed and explained to them that the Guardian would love the spread of demographic going on across the table. And that’s pretty much what it’s like – we get cheese from the market (wrapped in brown paper), we have a wormery, we listen to Thought For The Day, we watch Later With Jools… (Mum then buys the CDs and I take them to the gigs), we have pretty much every type of tea available (the most important of which being Yorkshire), they are enrolled in ballroom dancing lessons and we own the entire boxset of The Wire (but are yet to break the first season).

None of this seems particularly noteworthy at present but recently things have started to take a turn for the hilarious. I’m not sure what is it, whether the pressure of living with their grown-up chlid is sending them batty, whether the water in the Shropshire area has become infected  or whether the “effects” of the 70s are finally catching up with them. So much so that it has become too good to keep to myself. They tell me that this is just the start of things to come – the tip of the iceberg if you will. Well, i’m fine with it, as long as they keep making me laugh.

And on that note, here is finely crafted tune about parents. My mum didn’t let me have Adidas bottoms for P.E either, Will Smith.