Things I meant to post last week

Early last week, I was roused from my commuter-stupor when I saw a man who I was convinced played Danny Kendal in Grange Hill in the 80s. We got off the same train and I was transfixed by his head-down, purposefully shuffling gait – ambling down platform 14 at London Bridge station just as he used to turn his back on the school building and make for the gates, with the bellow of Mr Bronson ringing in his ears.
I think it's clear from this picture that it is DEFINITELY him – it's there in his thick black hair and diminutive stature. It's my considered opinion that he probably now works as a graphic designer or web developer. This is evinced by 1) leather elbow patches on a vintage-look jacket and 2) beard.

Similarly, when I first moved to London, and used to walk the [middle class bit of the] mean streets of Camberwell, I would, on occasion, see 'Bullet' Baxter. I'm sure that if I bumped into Johnny Depp buying Weetabix in the nearest Sainsbury's Local, it could not come close to eclipsing my excitement at these two fictional eccentrics from my childhood apparently walking their path out of my television 25 years ago, and all the way into my postcode.

It probably wasn't him.

Like many of our peers, my friends and I spent a significant portion of last week engaged in lengthy and involved discussion about whether we would attempt to go to see the newly reformed Stone Roses play next summer. There is no easy segue or close link between Danny Kendal and the Stone Roses, apart from, perhaps, that distinctive, nonchalant walk. A swagger in the case of Brown and co. A few daily portions of fruit and vegetables short of a swagger for Kendal.

Naturally, I have heard all the stories about Ian Brown's unconventionally impressive live vocals. I have heard Ian Brown's unconventionally impressive live vocals, but on that occasion, I had carefully set my expectations several legions below neutral, which enabled me to be pleasantly surprised. I have also read about the financial motivations that may be behind the Roses' new-found zeal for band life.

In spite of all this, there I was, sitting at my desk, excitement creeping all over every part of me, waiting for the news of the reunion press conference to break online, wondering if the Stone Roses would even turn up – just as, in 1995, I'd wondered if they'd even turn up at the Leeds Town & Country Club. They did. Grown men cried. In a good way.

But here's what I think I would really like to be doing when the Stone Roses take to the stage at Heaton Park next June. I would like to be in a friend's garden, staging 'the Headphone Roses', a glorified indie disco, listened to individually on earphones, because obviously we don't want to upset the neighbours, I mean we sorted the problem with the hedge out so amicably it seems like suicide to rock the boat.

It can't be my garden, because I don't have a garden. I have a flat roof outside my kitchen window. This would be fine if we kept the numbers right down, but even so, I don't imagine my downstairs neighbour would be too thrilled as we came crashing through her ceiling within the first four bars of I Am The Resurrection. There would be a 'support act' of course – a carefully compiled turn-of-the-90s indie playlist – followed by the playing in full of that golden first Stone Roses album, and there will be lots of dancing, because there will be room for lots of dancing, what with there not being 49,970 other people invading your personal space.

There would be cold beer at sensible, supermarket prices and upmarket organic red wine and barbecued burgers – we could, of course, undercook them slightly for an exciting hit of festival-food jeopardy. But in reality, of course they'd be reassuringly well done and served with that Waitrose celeriac remoulade that I really like. There would be a toilet that is clean, dry, fragrant, fully functioning and just a matter of feet away, so you would not hear the faint strains of one of your favourite songs drifting through the evening air as you exit a Portaloo and realise it will be over by the time you have legged it all the way back to your mates in the crowd, because the band has come on earlier than billed. YES JARVIS COCKER, I AM TALKING TO YOU.

I would perhaps scatter a carpet of half-eaten noodles and cracked plastic pint glasses all over the lawn for authenticity and 'colour'. But crucially, there would be NO DICKS THERE. And here I should make it clear that I could be talking about the crowd or the band. Only people whose occasional dickishness you are familiar with, and tolerant of – which is to say, your close friends and family – are allowed. There would be licensed taxis home, at a time that is later than your normal bedtime, but not, like, that late. We've all got DIY to do in the morning. No one will have to spend their journey home wedged in the corner of a surely-illegally-overcrowded bus or train carriage hoping that no one vomits on them, missing their stop because they are physically hemmed in by a league of bodies sweating cider.

The undoubted success of the night will lead to a franchise of similar 'music-listening experience' events, and eventually we will be able to eradicate the whole wretched business of live music altogether, and all the bad smells, discomfort and idiots that come with it. Jean-Paul Sartre said 'Hell is other people.' To that I say, 'Bonjour Jean. Je pense que nous devrions être amis. Voulez-vous venir à la maison de mon ami et écouter les Stone Roses?'

Who's in?

Chain of fools

If you're looking for some beach reading that will give you a break from the intellectual rigours of the latest Katie Price novel, maybe this is for you?

Perhaps at one point they had a budget for picture research, but then they spunked it all away on embossing. Look! We've put shiny bits on it! Like a real book! Oh wait, we need some photos. Quick, let's photocopy that old issue of heat.

Oh Cheryl and Ashley. Can you point to the precise moment your Genuine Real Love started to rot away? For Cheryl, I suspect it was the first time she saw Ashley in that necklace.

The chronic infidelity merely confirmed her worst expectations.

Coming soon: marathon news.

Sorry, this is kind of a downer

A couple of months after my dad died, I was involved in a hideous day-long work brainstorm, where hours of your life are wrenched away from you, while you attempt to answer questions like 'Who is the reader?' (Answer: Someone who drinks white wine, shops at Topshop – but Karen Millen on payday – and is apparently uninterested in buying the failing magazine we were working for.) I was miserable with grief; insane with attempting to subdue it between the hours of 10 and 6 and understand it in all the other hours. On that day, in those hours, being intensively work-farmed with one side of my face wedged against a flipchart and a magic marker in my hand seemed intolerable. 

Somewhere on the other side of town, George Best was dying a bizarrely public death, at a very similar age to my dad. Every time we took a break from work (and there are many breaks in this kind of day, so much so that you wish everyone could exercise a little more bladder control and a little less of the compulsion to eat so that you could all go home three hours earlier) we were released into a refreshments room which had a big screen tuned into a news channel. There you could escape neither the Pavlovian consumption of at least four bland biscuits at a time, nor the rolling reports on each tiny increment of George Best's expiration, a tireless countdown of his elapsing quota of heartbeats.  'It really is very near the end now.' 'Only a couple more hours.' 'This really is it.'

I remember very clearly how unfathomable it was to me, after my own recent experience of someone dying. The sense of spectacle and expectation afforded to George Best seemed incomparable to the way John C Jones, 61, had quietly left the family home one afternoon, after exchanging with his wife the routine but never less than totally heartfelt pleasantries of a harmonious 40-year marriage – and never returned. Just one man, quietly leaving the world, opening a door, stepping through it, closing it silently behind him, while everyone else carried on shopping or working or watching Countdown. He was a man who didn't care for a fuss, struggled with the burden of small talk, and in the face of attention and acclaim would rather repair to the garage and repair something. It was a wholly appropriate exit. I couldn't equate what had happened to him with what was happening to George Best. 

I wonder now if it was just because I was seeing coldly and starkly, from the outside, the enormity of what it means when someone dies. When you're in the thick of The Bereavement Experience, it's hard to fathom the scale of it. Probably because if you could, it would drive you mad. (It actually did drive me fairly mad, but that's another story). It's like when you go to Paris and you stand under the Eiffel Tower and you can't really see how tall it is, but when you're streets and streets away, you think, 'Look at the size of that.' That was a metaphor, by the way. You're so consumed with getting through the day, and then getting through the next day, and wondering why every part of your body feels so incredibly heavy, and when you might feel normal again, and what did that even feel like anyway, it's hard to conceive of the massive, defining thing that has happened to one of the people you love the most.

Or maybe that's not it at all.

Anyway, now, three and a half years later, working on and around various celebrity magazines who are consumed with the failing health of Jade Goody, and the optimum time printing-schedule-wise for the worst to happen, that sense of strangeness and confusion is creeping back in. Neither Jade Goody nor George Best lived a life that was more giving or worthwhile than my dad's. Why are they different? Because they are famous obviously. Because Jade Goody is young. Because George Best made boys kicking cans in alleys believe they could do anything. But I know from my privileged position of first-degree family member, and also from the letters we were sent, and the stories we were told, that my dad lived most days of his quiet life being determinedly kind and instructive, providing and enthusing and, as it turned out, inspiring in his own small way. When I think about that, I always think of George Eliot, and how he had it right at the end of Middlemarch:

'...the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.'

[Miss W, I hope I didn't spoil the ending.]

The two Ronnies

What is the word for people who have the same name but are totally different beings, preferably with as diverse jobs as possible? There must be one, lurking within the etymological family that gives us synonym and its siblings. 

I have reflected before on the many skills of the David Battys – one a midfield terrier and the other a BBC antiques expert. And this weekend I was skim-reading some broadsheet earnestness about the film Steve McQueen has just made. The Turner Prize-winning one, not the dead one.

But a few days ago, as I was reading some round-up of moving and shaking in the magazine industry, I was reminded of my favourite matching pair.

Ronnie Whelan, ex-editor of Hello magazine and…

Ronnie Whelan, mainstay of Liverpool and the Republic of Ireland's midfield during the 80s. Perhaps this goes some way to explain the particular fondness shown to WAGs by celebrity magazines. Anything for the missus, like.

In which I get excited about seeing someone famous, who turns out not to be famous, but looks instead more like a different famous person

I went to Beckenham late this afternoon to meet Miss R. On the train, I sat across the aisle from a man who, in profile, looked exactly like Bernard Cribbins. He had all the physical trappings of an eccentric, ageing actor – flamboyant red trousers, overcoat, Kangol hat and large reading glasses – and indeed some of the physical trappings of Bernard Cribbins, which is to say a bushy white beard. By chance, I had heard that Bernard Cribbins was appearing on The One Show this evening, so I realised he was unlikely to be on his way to Beckenham, but I reasoned that there may have been some argument over his outrageous dressing room demands which meant his appearance had been cancelled, so I remained optimistic. However, when we both disembarked at Beckenham Junction, and I saw him face-on, it turned out he actually looked far more like Mr Shorovsky, the taciturn music teacher from Fame. Equally exciting, plainly not the same.




This reminded me of a time a few weeks ago when I was on another train, and there was a man sitting facing me, but far away down the carriage, who looked exactly like my dad – same glasses, same pattern of baldness, same eyes alternately soulful and severe (I don't mean one eye soulful, one eye severe, I mean his whole expression alternating), the same ears even. Unless I had slept through a fairly significant breakthrough in medical science, there was, of course, no way it could have been my dad. Yet the likeness was extraordinary – the closest resemblance since I'd last seen my dad, over three years ago. As you can imagine, I couldn't stop looking at him. It wasn't sad or spooky, it was just incredibly strange. However, as we pulled into Charing Cross and everyone began shuffling in their seats and remembering to take all their personal belongings with them, part of his face was no longer obscured by the seat in front, and he suddenly looked exactly like Norris from Coronation Street, who looks nothing whatsoever like my dad.

On my way back home later this evening, I saw a man on the platform of Beckenham Junction station who, in profile, looked exactly like a fox.

And this time, I'm telling you, it was uncanny.

Kick off your dad's old shoes

While I was on holiday, I didn't pine for Strictly too much as we found a new reality/celebrity collision quietly expiring on Canadian daytime TV – and why would you want to be strolling the beautiful, bracing beaches of Prince Edward Island when you could be holed up in a holiday chalet watching the son of Dee Snider from Twisted Sister performing a glam-thrash version of Ring Of Fire?

But I am getting ahead of myself. I refer to Rock The Cradle, a televisual concept born of MTV, in which the offspring of various rock and pop legends, it says here, compete in the singing arena, following intense coaching from their famous parents, Belinda Carlisle and some people you've never heard of.

We were initially quite excited by Crosby Loggins…

…until, that is, we saw him perform. Perhaps you can guess the identity of his famous father. Suffice to say that Crosby's anaemic version of the Foo Fighters' Long Road To Ruin had none of the spunk that made Kevin Bacon want to run amok and throw some freaky shapes in a deserted warehouse.

Alas, it seems the unthinkable happened, and Rock The Cradle was not an unqualified success on its maiden outing, meaning it is unlikely to regenerate into a British version. An opportunity lost, clearly. Who would not welcome the spectacle of Stella McCartney belting out We All Stand Together?

Hey Paul, does Noel Edmonds know you've borrowed that sweater?

The panto's the thing

There is much to be glum about at this time of year, but one light I always look for in the autumn shadows is the revelation of which unlikely celebrities have been hired for panto season. Who has traded a pound of their flesh (which, if casting permits, they can disguise with a menacing hook) for the adulation of near-sighted pensioners and children totally jazzed on carbonated soft drinks and Jelly Babies?  Acts you may not have heard of in 15 or 20 years, who you assumed had perished in an inferno of political correctness and reality television, will rise phoenix-like to give their Baron Hard-Up in Woking or their Buttons in Wolverhampton.

In particular, I am fascinated by the US celebrities who have been lured over here to embrace our long-cherished festivities. In recent years, pantogoers have seen The Fonz as Captain Hook, Patrick Duffy as Baron Hardup, creepy little Mickey Rooney (Hardup again) and Paul Michael Glaser  (another Hook). Fonzie initially motorcycled in to replace Hasselhoff, who got a better offer. It would seem from this that Captain Hook is touted as the Hamlet of panto roles, with Baron Hardup the King Lear. This surely must be one of the ways in which the stars are sold the gig by 'their people'. Like, 'Hey! You're doing theatre! In England! They invented theatre! You'll be getting really raw with your craft.' And 'Panto's, like, a rilly, rilly old custom. Y'know, like Shakespeare!' Either that, or it's the mythologically enormous paypacket that panto purportedly dangles.

Little do our American cousins realise that come mid-January, they'll have contracted tonsilitis five times as it is passed back and forth, in and out of the dressing rooms. And as well as their costume, lovingly stitched from the finest manmade fibres, they'll be wearing a large coldsore every night, which has been fed and watered by the freezing English weather. After they've performed their cover of Rihanna's Umbrella, while dancing with Faye from Steps and a dozen children twirling umbrellas, and helped cook a slapstick wedding breakfast for the finale using a giant box of cereal with Credit Crunch written on it, they'll be spending every lonely night sleeping in a grubby Holiday Inn, making up complimentary sachets of Cadbury's Options with their own hot tears, dreaming of sunshine and good dentistry.

Anyway, my point is, this year the Churchill Theatre in Bromley have hired Hollywood In The 80s' own Steve Guttenburg. I saw a bit of Steve on Dancing With The Stars – the inferior US translation of Strictly Come Dancing. He is the most relentlessly positive person I have ever, ever seen in my life. He makes Tom Daly seem like Leonard Cohen. He really does feel grateful and blessed for every sorry opportunity that has ever come his way, and he has the permanently beaming expression of a child star, yet the slightly artificial hairline of a middle-aged Californian actor. I hope he brings the man from the Police Academy films who makes all the funny noises as the kids would love it, and he could probably use the regular work. Miss R has promised she will come and see this with me, as I long to see whether this Overgrown Pollyanna can keep smiling through his sub-standard accommodation and four weeks being upstaged by two paunchy stagehands wearing a giant cow's outfit,  but I suspect that the prohibitive price of theatre tickets In This Country will prevent us. (Dear Melvyn Bragg, I know not where else to turn, but I am concerned our children can longer afford to go to the theatre etc etc). Still, if the Churchill Theatre could also hire Ted Danson and Tom Selleck to appear with Steve as Three Men Playing Ugly Sisters, there is no ticket price too high.

From Miss Jones to K Knightley

Dear Keira

Hi, how have you been? etc

Let me be upfront from the start and say that I probably won't be going to see your new 'queen of hearts' costume drama. Hope that's OK.

Anyway, to business. I was on the train home tonight, reading the London Paper over someone's shoulder (representing no. 53 on the list of Things I Find Unbearably Annoying When Other People Do Them, But When It's Me  – Well, Then That's Perfectly OK). And there you were, quoted as saying that many women hate you, and what is more, you don't care. It is admirable, of course, to cast off the opinions of others – no one should spend their days being buffeted by other people's narrow-minded scowls and tutting. This is the stuff of Year 3 assembly.

But if I may elaborate, you were suggesting that you believed that women disliked you because of your appearance – in particular, your tendency towards skinny. 

Keira, Keira, Keira. Women don't hate you because you're pretty or thin. They hate you because you're an idiot. Not all the time, naturally, but perhaps a little bit when you say things like this. We may occasionally wince when we see the bones of your spine protruding through your dreamy ivory skin, but let me assure you that this does not mean we despise the very essence of your being. 

Women don't hate beautiful, thin women. They hate beautiful, thin women who are shallow, who are inane, who are bitter, who downplay their intelligence, who change their behaviour around men, who generalise about other women, who assume the only reason other women could dislike them is because of the way they look. We also, by the way, hate fat, ugly women who do these things. We are an equal-opportunities tough crowd.

And furthermore, I would say that most women positively love beautiful thin women – there are few women who would not admit to having a crush of some degree of intensity on Angelina Jolie, Julianne Moore, Natalie Portman, Cheryl Cole, or similar. All very thin, and very beautiful. 

Most women, I would venture, genuinely like Cameron Diaz. Not because of how she looks, although there is that, but more because she doesn't appear to take herself too seriously, she works hard and she clearly loves her friends. The fact that her stomach is flatter than Liu Xiang's mum's Olympics party is not sufficient in itself to initiate a witch hunt. Do you see what I mean?

I do understand that newpapers occasionally get these things wrong. So perhaps you were misquoted. If that is the case, you will understand how vexing it is when someone is ill-informedly passing judgments on your behalf. 

Chin up

Miss Jones (woman, non-hater) x

Pink, Paxman and peppermint creams

I was on my way home from returning the Ill-Advised Tartan last night – just managing to limbo under the 28-day-returns threshold – when I saw someone else, an actual celebrity and a Proper, Clever One too, experiencing an episode of wardrobe dementia. There, pacing up and down London Bridge waiting to film something almost certainly involving his Eyebrows Of Scepticism And Also Of Sternness, was Jeremy Paxman, over-coordinating his hot-pink shirt with a hot-pink face. Times are hard for the BBC, of course, but you'd think one of his skeleton filming crew would have had a second to look up from their multi-tasking and politely say, 'Excuse me, Jeremy, do you have another shirt? It's just that yours is kind of the same colour as your face. If it wasn't for your hair, you'd look like a walking suit with shoes.' Something else they might say is, 'Jeremy, can we have a conversation about sun block?' And also, 'Jeremy, I know we are colleagues and everything, but you are looking kind of hot for 58.'

In other news, I was excited to see a Fry's Peppermint Cream on sale in Holland & Barrett today. Excited, of course, for two reasons. Firstly, despite being made exclusively from chocolate and sugar, the Peppermint Cream appears to have officially qualified as a health food. And secondly, I'd come to believe that the Fry's Peppermint Cream had become the JD Salinger of chocolate bars. If it wasn't for Dulwich's original, and most magical, branch of Hope & Greenwood, I would rarely come across one, since its place on the cornershop chocolate smorgasbord seems to have been usurped by depraved varieties of KitKat and laboratory-concocted Frankenstein-style energy bars. I miss the elegance of the Fry's brand (apart from the blandness of the plain old Billy No-Flavour Chocolate Cream). Anyway, disappointment was looming, of course. When I opened it back at my desk, I found the chocolate was covered in that mysterious white bloom common to bars of chocolate given to you by your grandparents. Then I noticed it was past its sell-by date. This, of course, had only made it entirely at home in its lodgings on Camden High Street.

Holiday... celebrate

On darker days, you may find me hunched over the dial on my digital Roberts Radio searching for a parallel broadcasting universe where the people who cover holiday leave for regular presenters actually present those programmes all the time.

This week I've been not working in someone else's office, but at home, busy writing The Miss Jones Memoirs (Deluxe Edition) – A Life In Lambswool. While staring into the middle distance, and sharpening and resharpening my pencils, I've been listening to Liza Tarbuck and Mark Radcliffe cover for SteveWrightInTheAfternoon on Radio 2. As some of you know, I would marry Mark Radcliffe, were he to ask, so you can imagine how happy I was to have him in my spare room chatting away of an afternoon, as if he were there in person knocking me up some shelves. I'm not familiar with SteveWrightInTheAfternoon's 'act' these days, but I'm reluctant to believe it has evolved sufficiently since the late 80s to better Mark Radcliffe enthusing about Leonard Cohen and Liza Tarbuck being more entertaining than almost any other female presenter on the radio without her raising a sweat/a sneer/her hemline/other.  Similarly, it is a happy, happy day when Adam and Joe present the 6 Music Breakfast Show, as they sometimes do when Shaun Keavney is away. Unfortunately my holidays coincide with Keavney's uncannily often – enough to make me wonder if I am actually married to him without somehow realising. And I return to work, and to early-a.m. radio, only to hear Keavney's taunting thank you to A&J for their stand-in services.

But naturally there is never pleasure without profound and grinding pain. And in this broadcasting Butlin's, Ruth Langford and Eamonn Holmes present This Morning. Forever. Less your shangri-la, more shangri-aaaarrgggghhhhhhhhh...

Happy hour again

Many years ago, I upgraded my most beloved cassettes to CD format. And recently, with the premiership long since taken care of, I've turned to the lower divisions of my tape collection, now that their CD cousins are ubiquitous enough on eBay to sell for less than the price of a KitKat. So today I enjoyed a belated reunion with this:

The years have been kind to it since I was presented with my first CD player, and faithfully promised the tape-bound NTWICQG  it wouldn't be long till we met again in a new technological dimension. That was a lie, of course, it was almost 20 years, but I'm confident we can put our years of separation behind us. I wonder when I will feel overcome with sufficient nostalgic fondness to upgrade Keep Your Distance by Curiosity Killed The Cat or Turn Back The Clock by Johnny Hates Jazz.

On my way home from work, I am 93% sure that I saw Sebastian 'Lord' Coe walking down Berwick Street in Soho. This is not a place I would ever expect to see Sebastian Coe in his camel-coloured overcoat. Places I would expect to see Sebastian Coe include: a garden party, Austin Reed, Kloisters, Putney. Sebastian Coe's middle name is Newbold. I found this unaccountably hilarious as a child when I first discovered the fact many many years ago in my brother's Guinness Book Of Records. I disliked him, even then. Coe, that is. Not my brother. He's nice.

Simon has sensationally been fired from The Apprentice, despite being marked out as an early favourite. By the end, his mistake was blindingly clear. In his black-cab exit interview he said he gave 100% to the mission. The first thing they teach you at the Business Academy For People Who Pledge To Sell Until The Surface They Are Selling On Literally Bleeds is that you have to give 110%. Idiot.

'Get me Peter Elliott…'

Can anyone, anyone at all, man, woman or child, explain to me what on earth Denise Van Outen was doing carrying the Olympic torch? 

Obviously we are not the world's most illustrious sporting nation, but surely there was some figure of vaguely athletic competence who could spare half an hour? Is Kris Akabusi ex-directory these days?

Let us imagine what was going through the organisers' minds. 

'Well, Matthew Pinsent has a bit of a head cold. He just feels a bit, oh, you know, run down. So we need someone else.' 

'Can we get James Cracknell?'

'Swimming down the Ganges.'

'Ian Wright?'

'Tonsilitis.'

'Mick Hill?

'He's at a wedding in Cumbria.'  

'John Fashanu?'

'Doing a matinee of Oh What A Night in Bromley.'

'Well, in that case…'

I have just watched a documentary about the torch relay, showing how the flame was lit with great solemnity using the rays of the sun in Olympia. How better to continue this dignified ceremony than with one of the flame-bearers winking at the camera, chirping, 'My wrist's getting tired. Oof, that's not what I normally say!'

Give me strength.

Cereal maths

Shreddies and Special K mixed together in the same bowl don't work as well as you might think.

They are less than the sum of their parts.

Today, I saw where Alan Bennett lives. It made me a bit worried about him. His windows really look like they need doing and it's too chilly for a man of his age to be cavalier about draughts.