Flower power

Disaster. I've gone down with a cold...surely a sign that summer has arrived. Hopefully gallons of Lemsip, TLC and a good deal of moaning and groaning from me will put things right again. Although it's midday and I'm still in bed, I don't intend it to stop me going out for a civilised evening at the ballet tonight.

So to the daily photo...and it's been a tough choice. Yesterday I cycled to work which provides a wealth of photo opportunities over the 17 mile route. An obvious choice would be the Olympic site, but in truth the best views are out of reach at the moment; another obvious choice would be the street art which is a particular favourite of mine; or even the canal boats...there are so many along the ten miles of canals that I ride along and they are all delightful. But instead, I've chosen this one of the wild flowers...that may just have had a little help from human hands getting here...certainly I've never seen so many poppies along the canal side as this year. It amazes me that even in deepest, darkest central London there are these oasis of paradise...barely a noise, fabulous colours, fresh air, lovely surroundings...just beautiful and really, really uplifting.

Building BRICS

I arrived in the office this morning after a long cycle...eighteen miles is a good way to wake up before you start work. The trouble is that by 11, I'm generally ready to go back to sleep again. Anyway, I arrived and my bladder spread its contents all over the floor by my desk. Quite embarrassing really Mr Film Man was just introducing me to someone. Someone just happened to be a cyclist as well, so immediately realised what my problem was...my valve wasn't sealing properly so capillary action meant that the liquid was just spilling out everywhere. Anyway, I guess a quick trip to the cycle shop to get a new valve should solve my problem and once more my Camelback (TM) will be water tight ready to refresh me for my next cycle. Enough about rucksacks and water bladders. It had been a slow cycle as I was trying to take a picture for tomorrow...I have plenty and it will just be tricky deciding which one to choose.

Today, however, I give you this to summarise my day yesterday.



Ha ha...no I'm not emigrating to Turkey. I've been there once. Twice if you count the day trip to Turkish Cyprus with Grandma in Cyprus. Lovely place. Fascinating place. I'd love to go back, but not to live. I was in the building beyond...the IPA. This is Belgravia Square...one of the poshest in London and full of embassies and wealthy people. It makes you realise there's a whole different world out there when you see nothing less than a top of the range Mercedes parked there and mostly it's Rolls Royces and Bentleys. I had my first London job, so not a bad start. My first day was a Friday and on my desk was a memo to every employee explaining that rumours that the company was about to be sold were without foundation. When I arrived on Monday, there was another memo welcoming everyone to their new employers. The company had been bought.

Back at the IPA, I was learning about how companies are doing business in the BRIC countries...that is Brazil, Russia, India, China. Mexico got an honourable mention. These are the countries whose economies will dominate our children's futures. I learnt many things. Inspite of the headlines about drug lords, Mexico is a great place to do business...especially as it's all done over lunch. India is not one country but many, with food, customs, business etiquette changing every few hundred kilometres; it's difficult to start doing business there so make sure you're in there for the long haul. They are adding 15 million phone subscribers every month. Can that really be the case? China is easy to start doing business in, but difficult to sustain a business there. Staff turnover is 200% per annum. And the bureaucracy is almost unbelievable. Anyway it was fascinating for me...I learnt a lot.

Down on the underground....

Well it was a bit of a struggle yesterday to find a picture to take...and I guess that's why I'm doing this. If at the end of the month I look back and see that it's been very dull, I'll have to change things. That's quite an incentive!

Yesterday I came in on the tube. If you commute on the tube, it's hard to know just how awful it is....crush, crush; sweaty, sweaty; odour, odour; hot, hot; knock, knock; airless, airless; squash, squash; ache, ache; rattle, rattle; unbalance, unbalance; stop, stop; start, start; stutter, stutter; smell, smell....and so on.

I prefer the motorbike or the cycle...but when it's pouring with rain, needs must....

An examination

Here we have a picture of a hare. Just in case you can't see it from the picture, this is one big motherf*kka. He can look me in the eyes when I'm standing on my tippy toes. He' the biggest one here, but there are about a dozen others dotted around the garden. Never let it be said that there is a lack of hare in the Nota Bene household. It's a good job there are a fair few hares for us to enjoy, because we're not getting out much at the moment. The garden is our great outdoors.

We're going through the same as many thousands of parents around the country. GCSEs. They are stressful...and go on for ever. When I were a lad, we knocked off our 'O' levels in a couple of weeks. That was in the days when anything less than 99% was failure, not like the 8% to get a grade A now. Anyway I think end to end it's about eight weeks, with a half term in the middle.

The Boy seems to hop skip and jump through them, whilst The Cat grinds along with more and more worry lines engraving themselves on her forehead. But underneath, it's just as stressful for the pair of them...as it is for teens across the country. For The Cat's Mother and me, we worry that they worry, we stress that they are stressed, we feel helpless as we can do no more than tell them to buckle down and do more revision and prepare for the next exam.

For the last few weekends our social life have been near lifeless...it doesn't seem fair to be whirling away at the local dance hall whilst the offspring are cooped up in their rooms sweating away. Brighton has been abandoned...our absence doesn't encourage focus or productivity.

I can't wait for the exams to finish so I can go and get legless.

First Friday Photos

Yes, I know it's Sunday, but Friday was busy, so I suppose this is Sunday Show. Whatever. I've been snapping.


This poor pheasant didn't make it through the month


The Cat's Mother took this picture of me at Alice in Wonderland


ai weiwei at Somerset House...we met the prodigal godfather for lunch


Pretty rose


The muffin and friends climbing some sculpture


Deckchairs...guess where


Same place


Still on the beach


My brother and his partner came to visit


I loved the atmosphere at Secret Cinema


Another death...fortunately only at secret cinema

....Saturday morning

Breakfast out side is a rare and wonderful thing.

So here we are on Saturday with toast and jam and marmalade and Marmite, tea and juice in the back garden. The plants are looking great at the moment and the lawn is just perfect...although a few more weeks without any rain and I don't doubt it will be brown. Don't mention the broken concrete ballustrade...unless you know someone who can fix it.

We're very lucky to have so many birds come and visit us...the cuckoo is a regular musical accompaniment, we have jays, a woodpecker, wood pigeon, blackbirds, crows, a friendly little robin and sparrows (how rare they seem these days)...there's also some birds we don't recognise...the dark brown one with a little crown for example.

At the moment we're a tiny bit pre-occupied withe the absurdity of the Olympic tickets situation. Not so much the allocation system, but rather the mind set of many people who've applied. I was at a party where someone had applied for £12,000 worth of tickets and was fervently praying that they didn't get them all because they couldn't afford them...and everywhere I read similar tales. The end result appears to be that everyone will get tickets for the Olympics, but not the ones they want...because everyone has just applied for enormous quantities in any old sport. It's an absurd reflection on the state of people's thinking that this is how it is. The system seems fair enough, but greed, insecurity and panic have made people act in a ridiculous way. We don't know yet what we've got...other than I'm pretty confident that it will include the mountain biking...and we did only apply for events we really wanted to see. Looking forward to that ticket exchange getting up and running.

Friday night...

TGIF is something you'll often hear me say. At least once a week. I find four day weeks to be troublesome...there's always some piece of bad news. So imagine how it's been since April. And this was one of those perishing four day weeks. Thank heavens it ended on a high note.

Last night, we went off to see 'One Man Two Guvnors' at the National Theatre. It stars James Corden...and there's a man whose star has fallen. A very short time ago he could do no wrong. And then he could do no right. The Boy and I first came across him in History Boys and had been wowed, so it was a shame to see him fall from grace. He is an undoubted talent of the first order. The play itself is set in Brighton, and coincidentally references Debden which is just down the road from here, as well as the famous Floral clock just at the top of our Square. It is rip-roaringly funny. Mr Corden is brilliant...but then so too are the rest of the cast...it is British humour at its best. I would highly recommend you get to see it...except you can't because it's all sold out. However, don't despair because The National has begun an initiative which sees some of their performances being shown in the cinema for one night...we've seen some great things. And you get your chance to see One Man Two Guvnors on September 15th. Don't miss it. Really don't miss it.

This picture I took outside the Theatre...as we left. The reason I chose it is that I took it with my new phone which has a great camera...and I used a technique/process called HDR: it takes three pictures at different exposures, and then combines them to give you brighter, more vivid pictures...I think it works brilliantly.

Putting on the pounds

Day 2 of my June quest, this may not be a classic shot but it says a lot.



The Cat's Mother is an expensive item. And a bad driver. Evidently.

It's time for me to renew my car insurance, so I've been comparing meerkats. I can't remember how much I paid last year, but this year it's £439 and a few pence. Inspite of my impecable driving record being extended by yet another 365 days of accident free motoring, I still have to pay an enormous sum. But on checking my details, I realised that I was down as divorced/separated, so I ticked the box that said I was co-habiting. I expected it to make no difference, but in fact it meant my insurance went up by a pound. So £440 and a few pence. Now I may be wrong, but as I understood it, living with some one was supposed to be a less stressful experience. I certainly remember (or rather don't remember) some pretty wild experiences after my divorce, and I'd say I was a less responsible person. I may even have read that co-habiting is good for men as they live longer, whilst it knocks a little bit off a woman's lifespan. So I should be quids in. I'm not. I'm a whole pound out. Imagine what I could do with that pound. That's a whole packet of crisps and a Mars Bar. I then thought I should add The Cat's Mother to my insurance. And as I'm very bored with hearing, women are better drivers than men. The Cat's Mother has a clean driving licence and an impressive no-claims history. So surely, surely the cost should go down...even if she drives the car just one day a year, that's one day a year when the risk is less? Perhaps they've seen her reversing technique. It's available as a viral on the interweb. Maybe. Anyway, it put the insurance up by another pound. That's another whole pound. Imagine what I could do with two whole pounds. Because I can't.

So there we have it, in my dying days as a forty-something I have learnt that women make you a worse driver and are pretty dangerous on the road themselves. It's something I've always suspected. That should get me a long way.

I'm not even going to say what happened when I tried to see what would happen if I delayed until after my birthday. It's quite a saga.

Flaming June

I seem to have dropped off the Blogger bandwagon a little bit...so apologies if I've not kept up to date with what's going on in your worlds...I'm no less interested than I've always been I can assure you you.

As it's June, and at the end of the month I have a very special birthday, I thought I would take a slightly different approach. Each day I'm going to take one photo and post it up, just to see what happens over the course of the next thirty days. Probably not much. But who knows? If it is incredibly boring by the time we get to 1st July, I'll know I need to change. If it's rivettingly exciting I'll know I've got a few things right.



Fittingly, I'm starting with breakfast. I'm downstairs alone because the kids are on holiday, so everyone gets a lie in except me. I loathe eating breakfast alone, even though when The Boy and Cat are around normally we're all a bit subdued. I pretty much have the same thing everyday...either a couple of scotch pancakes and a cup of tea or a couple of crumpets...one with honey, and one with Marmite. Delicious. I read the paper to see what's been going on....we take The Times - I prefer The Guardian, but The Cat's Mother has had The Times from time immemorial. If I catch the tube, I'll usually buy The Guardian at the station. I look at the news, read the facts and then usually disagree with the interpretation...it fires me up for the rest of the day. So at the moment, we've got the incompetent (English FA) vs the corrupt (FIFA), we've got the global economy going into stall mode again (I still blame the bankers...in fact they have missed their opportunity to rehabilitate the sector as it is the financiers that are keeping the economy down whilst they continue to make ridiculous profits), we've got Libya turning into a war with no end, and an outbreak of e-coli that seems to relish killing women. Perhaps I shouldn't be reading the paper at all....except that it tells me that the James Corden play we're going to see on Friday is ace!

Once I've finished I take The Cat's Mother up a cup of tea...is that kindness or just revenge because she's still in bed? I don't know, but she seems to appreciate it.

The need for Angry Birds to eat (well)

Evidently you can't run a successful business if you spend your day writing your blog, so the boss has told me to focus on earning money to pay the mortgage(s). That's a little bit frustrating as I always like to start the day with a quick scribble. Anyway, the boss says, so I must do. Or rather not do. For at least a week. Or two.

I see those bloody Icelanders have been at it again....sending us their ash just a year after the last one. It's the money we want back, not their soot.

Yesterday I ate the devil's food. Spring onions that I stole off The Cat's plate. And no matter what I do all I can taste is....spring onion. I'm in despair. I may yet need to gargle with sulphuric acid.

On the other hand, The Boy has been cooking the food of the Gods. That'll be burgers which he made from a recipe with the grill that George gave me last week, and some tuna as well. I know I've banged on about this grill...but it has got The Boy cooking, and that's a good thing. Anyway he's cooked twice and it's been cracking grub. His university days are sorted. And so are our meals for the foreseeable future....







And if you're wondering about that competition, I'm going to ask George to send a grill to Steve on the basis that his suggestion was the most ridiculous. Obviously, the judging was free and fair (the voting system is the same as the one they use in Syria) and no correspondence will be entered into...

The other thing that's eating well at the moment is our squirrel...actually there's two of them. We've put some feeders out for the birds...we get robins, jays, crows, woodpeckers, blackbirds, wood pigeons and some that we just don't know in the garden, so we thought it would be good to feed them up. The squirrels think otherwise and are stealing all the nuts, so we're going to let them finish the food and then won't replenish them. I expect that'll make them Angry Birds.

Well connected

I used to cycle to the office twice, sometimes even three times a week. A round trip of around 32 miles, but for some reason, the extra two miles added by moving to Loughton made the journey just too exhausting. It may have been the two enormous hills that were added to the route. Or perhaps I didn't have the incentive any more. So at best now, I do it once a week...splitting the journey so that I cycle in one day and cycle back he next - in between I catch the tube.

On my route, which takes me alongside the London canals for most of the way, (I still can't believe you can get to the middle of London without seeing a high rise office block or getting squashed by a big red bus) I go past what was the old Matchbox toy cars factory. Last year they knocked it down, and this year they're putting up a residential development. Developers like to give their creations names which conjure up an image which relates to the locality, or the history of the place. So it's pretty logical to call this Matchbox Wharf. But, who would want to live in a Matchbox reasoned the developers. We'll call it something else. They could have called it Lesney Wharf after the manufacturer, but no, we'll call it Matchmaker Wharf they decided. Matchmaker! Presumably this means this is a place where singletons can buy a flat and then get it together with their next door neighbour. Or if they're already married, perhaps they can shag the housekeeper a la Schwarzenegger. Or perhaps it implies that once upon a time matches were made here. They weren't. So at the whim of some two-bit developer (Telford Homes....do look at their website), the entire historical context of the area has been given the 1984 treatment. A piece of British industrial history just whitewashed for the sake of a piece of marketing splurge. That's a shame. I always thought history was important.

And talking of important just how important do you think you are? On my desk is a book a bout the most powerful people in my industry (I'm not mentioned), and I guess most people have heard of the Times Rich list. And now Rupert Murdoch's lot have started The Social List. Not the list of the people who are movers and shakers in 'social circles', but the most important and influential users of social media. Any one can put their hat in the ring and see where they pop up. I did it and I'm in at 2121. Which is a nice number. But utterly meaningless. I have included my Facebook page, my LinkedIn profile and my business Twitter account. I haven't included (because it won't let me) this blog, nor the associated Twitter feed (because you can register only one Twitter feed). My betting is that if I could, that would make a big difference...it's where I spend most of my social media time. And I'm not an important blogger by any stretch of the imagination. The chances are that The Sunday Times Social Media List will become de facto the measure of social mediaites, and that's worrying because it's fundamentally flawed, and engineered to support the marketing of News International and its marketing agency. I suspect that in full flow, we will find that the most influential are scrawny fifteen year olds who can't hold a proper conversation unless it's about the newest Playstation game, or social media geeks who are entirely out of touch with the real world.

But more importantly.....WHO CARES? Why does it matter? Why must we measure everything? And why have we all become so obsessed with our place in this world? It's of no consequence to me whether I'm up top or down bottom (inspite of rumours to the contrary). The lists out there of who is better, richer, more powerful, and so are endless. I would hope that just being happy and content with our lives is more important than whether we are a step above or below our neighbours. Perhaps it is this endless pursuit of success, and ambition to achieve which has got the western world into the pickle that it's in. I went for a job interview about twenty years ago, and I was asked what my ambition was to which I replied 'I want to retire'...and never is that more true than now.

No doubt a more cheerful post tomorrow. Now just let me get on with tweeting this. And Facebooking it. And putting it on LinkedIn.

Even more embarrassment

Now this is embarrassing. And it's doubly embarrassing given that I wrote about being embarrassed only yesterday.

Last week I mentioned that George Foreman personally contacted me about National Grilling Week and wanted me to adopt a healthier way of eating. As a favour to an old friend, I agreed, and in return he has sent me one of his grills. Not only that, he also sent me some food to cook on it...plus some recipes.

Now the thing is, the ever-efficient Sainsbury's delivery service arrived with the food on Saturday morning, but the grill itself wasn't delivered until Tuesday afternoon. And as you all know we are a household of two teenagers. And if you have any experience of teenagers, you'll also know that food doesn't stay in the fridge for more than a few minutes. So the net result is that we have a shiny new grill and no food. Oops. George won't be pleased. At least, the steak was grilled, and the peppers roasted. But I suspect that George wants me to say how wonderful his grill is for cooking steak and peppers.

So I shall make a trip to Sainsbury's tonight to get some more food so that the teenagers can stuff their faces in a healthy way.

The Boy seized the grill when it was delivered, ripping open the packaging so he could see the wondrous gadget inside and spent some long time dancing round the house with it. I have a very strong suspicion that as far as he is concerned, it is his and his alone, so he will be finding all sorts of things to cook on it. So that's no bad thing. But no doubt I'll be left to clean it - George tells me its as easy as easy can be. And at least I won't have to worry when he goes off to university in a couple of year's time...I don't doubt it will go with him.

George is feeling generous enough that he says I can give one of these shiny new grills away in a competition too. I'm quite rubbish at thinking of competitions, so either send me an e-mail (bradstockboys@hotmail.com) or leave a comment below suggesting a great competition idea, then you may just win it. That's the competition. Genius eh?

Oh and if you have a 'pod' (that's an ever-expanding stomach) like I have you can find out at the Q&A with Ian Marber, the Food Doctor tomorrow between 11-12- he’s going to be answering questions relating to diet and health from the George Foreman twitter handle @georgegrillsuk. All you need to do to submit a question is include #getgrilling somewhere in your tweet.

There we go, enough shameless commercialism for another day. I feel embarrassed.

Red in the face

It's started. And in the same way the Phoney War must have dragged on, so it has been in the Nota Bene household. But now hostilities have broken out and it is the end of waiting for the exams to start. Yesterday they had a tough English exam, and a tough French exam. I hope that's helpful in focusing their minds on the coming weeks and getting the results they've worked so hard for. Both seem to be in good spirits and will get every little bit of encouragement from us as we can muster.

Well it was my most embarrassing moment for a while. I've had plenty of embarrassing moments in my life. Some mentionable, some not. Generally I've a pretty thick skin...well you need it in my business. But here I was cruising up to the traffic lights on my bicycle in the middle of the rush hour forgetting until the last moment that my feet were clipped into the pedals. And when I tried to unclip, all I did was make myself topple over. Gracefully I'll admit. But there I was falling in slow motion in front of four very long lines of traffic on to the pavement. It didn't hurt, but I lost my dignity.

Not, of course in the same way that Max Moseley lost his dignity. He says that being awarded £60,000 is not enough to restore his dignity when his sexual predilections were exposed to everyone and anyone including his family. Many would argue, that he lost his dignity when he decided to cavort with prostitutes wearing military uniforms, rather than when his antics were exposed. It was probably right that the European court decided that newspapers don't have to contact someone before they write any salacious details of their private lives to enable them to get an injunction. On the other hand, I'm not sure why we should all be able to read about what legally goes on behind closed doors. It's a dilemma isn't it?

The latest reasons for superinjunctions being a useful legal tool is that they prevent blackmail. Evidently, that's all these floosies are doing...trying to extort money from famous married men. So I'm not sure where that leaves us in this privacy muddle. I guess, and I'm no expert, that it means that 'kiss and tell' stories will go on to feed the readership of the News of the World providing the newspaper doesn't contact the celebrity in question first. I'm sure they'll make doubly sure they get their facts checked and double checked. But I doubt they'll do it by tapping people's mobile phones.

So expect plenty of celebrity embarrassment. It must be embarrassing for Dominique Strauss-Kahn whose antics - alleged and true - are now being exposed in every newspaper across the world. Who knows what the truth is? The conspiracy theories have gained ground pretty fast, even in our household. So we will have to wait a while for his trial to find out the truth.

Fortunately The Boy and The Cat's trial by exam will be over by July.

Through the looking glass

Once upon a time not so long ago I used to go to plenty of gigs...too many in fact I think because in the last year of so, there's been hardly any. The Boy and I had really loved live music, his first gig being Turin Brakes at Somerset House...a memorable start for him. But I'd got into the habit of just going for the sake of it, so there were a few erm, err, not so fun ones. Poor Auntie Gwen was witness to some of the worst..the rump of Deacon Blue was one, the event most memorable for meeting my ex-fiance and her boyfriend who I had surprising met before. Just once. At The Boy's Mother's funeral. Another was Echo and the Bunnymen who sadly were a band best remembered rather than experienced. Many were envious when we got tickets for Kings of Leon last year, but really they shouldn't have been as I think it takes the crown for worst gig ever. So it was a little bit with trepidation that The Cat's Mother and I went off to see Everything Everything in Shepherds Bush on Thursday. It was my choice as they were the one band that seemed to be played incessantly when we went off to Iceland last year. And there's no doubt they played very well indeed...better than the critics had suggested. It's just that we didn't see them....we were crushed at the back surrounded by giants less than half our age. They played a short set befitting anyone who has only released one album, and very good they were too...I just wish we'd actually seen them. Did I say we didn't see them?

Meanwhile on Friday night we were sitting outside having dinner with 254 other people on a pontoon in the lake of someones very fabulous house and I felt something crawling up and around my leg. For a while at least I convinced myself it was just the fabric of my trousers being blown by the wind, but eventually I had to face facts and accept that there was indeed a beast on my calf. I reached down in the hope of somehow knocking it off and felt it was quite a large beast, and rather than brushing it away I started being rather more vigorous. In fact I looked like an idiot as my efforts got more extravagant and at the same time I started giggling hysterically. Eventually the beast fell from the bottom of my trouser leg...it was a large moth so wouldn't have harmed me; if only I had known. In the background the proper entertainment was almost as entertaining...on stage three queens, a king, a duchess, one half of a pair of twins, a hatter who was as mad as a March hare and a white rabbit. Not to mention a young girl called Alice...in fact there were five Alices. We were doing a round trip of 200 miles to Dine with Alice - an event which is hard to describe but did indeed involve dining with Alice whilst surrounded by the characters from Wonderland. Each course was served at a table in the gardens of Elsing Hall. There were 256 tables - we know because for he first course we were taken by turbaned waiters to a table where we ate the first course...Mock Turtle Soup...alone before being taken to a new table for the second course...and so on. Eventually The Cat's Mother and I met up again whilst the characters continued to squabble in glorious tones around us. Over desert, where the moth made its unwelcome appearance we were serenaded by some wonderful Victorian music hall entertainment. My description of it does it no justice...it was a magical evening put on by Artichoke...the same folks who did the Sultans Elephant a few years back. if you ever get the chance, grab it with both hands!



It seems extravagant to do a 200 mile round trip to have dinner, but it was a great gig.