Author: kevinrevell

Blogging that is in imminent danger of disappearing into its own middle aged, middle class, middle England hole...

Falling on a bruise

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Sadly, another day in which I feel old before my time. As my dear children will often remind me, I am old, at least by their standards, but this morning at around 0800, on the Newmarket Road leading into Norwich, I had my first ‘senior’ moment. For it was there and then, dear reader, that I suffered a fall.

Suffering a fall is the sort of thing that I’d associated previously with shopping trolleys on wheels, thermal bootees, and for some reason, Thora Hird. And I do have the excuse that I was travelling at least at some pace, but even so, a fall it certainly was.

Being a bloke, I do feel it necessary to drag out both the extreme pain and the ignomy of the experience in some detail. I was running to work along my normal route, not really going either fast or slow, and listening to Danny Baker tearing up the podcast charts, when I, well, just lost my footing. On what appeared to be (and I did check) a perfectly reasonable piece of pavement. At this point I stumbled, and cracked my knee very hard onto the pavement. Which hurt. Then I bounced along the pavement, before I bashed down simultaneously on my left shoulder and elbow. Which really hurt. Then, one more bounce, before I came to rest with my head perilously close to the gutter, having broken my fall with both palms. Which really really hurt.

For those of you familar with this part of the world, you’ll realise that at that time, on that road, there’s lots of traffic, moving pretty slowly. And I must have sailed past about 5 cars travelling in the opposite direction before I finally stopped moving. At which point a succession of very slow moving cars will have seen a bloke in shorts, lying down on the pavement next to them, bleeding. For my part, I think I lay there for a couple of minutes, not through any other reasons than thinking that I’d broken my arm, and not having the first idea of what to do. And, as it happens, whether I’d still make it for my 0830 meeting.

And, nothing would please me more to report to you that the traffic stopped, and I finally came to, wrapped up in a tartan blanket from the back of a car, while perfect strangers administered basic first aid, sweet tea, and kind words of comfort.

But, this being fact, no such thing happened. Every single car drove straight by, although a couple of cars did steer slightly to the right as they did. I suspect that this was to protect their tyres rather than my body though. As it happens, a couple of guys walking into the city ran over, checked me out and lifted me up. Having thanked them, and deciding that nothing was broken, I continued both my run, and, indeed, my general disillussionment with my fellow man.

Chewing gum for the ears

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This is a blog which starts off with me in the shower, so readers of a nervous disposition may wish to look away now.

Jr Emu #1 bought me a radio for my Christmas present; one that I can listen to when I’m out of the shower in the mornings. Given that I take a morning shower in the basement of the office after running into work, however, this creates an issue. My radio stations of choice for the morning are Radio 4 (light political grillings – just the thing to kick off the morning meetings) or Radio 5 (relatively inane banter that might inform the odd conversation during the day on football). And unfortunately, even though the great British Broadcasting institution reaches all around the world, it is unable to penetrate the lower ground floor in the NR4 postcode area.

Unless, it seems, it is masquerading as BBC Radio Norfolk, which has signal like you wouldn’t believe. I don’t quite understand this, as I thought that all BBC channels would be transmitted from the same masts at the same strength, but the truth is there to be heard in glorious mono, every morning at 8am.

So, to get to the point, I am compelled to listen to Radio Norfolk in the morning. Now, me and Radio Norfolk actually go back quite a long way.

In my youth, I worked at Radio Norfolk for what was probably all of about 4 weeks. I had a very brief stint as an assistant to an assistant, and very briefly reached the position of bona fide assistant when the teatime show presenter went on holiday, thus allowing his assistant to stop being an assistant, and thereby needing his own assistant.

The best fun on local radio was devising phone-in competitions, and at Radio Norfolk we had the added challenge of having no audience with any enthusiasm for phoning in. Or possibly no audience with any enthusiasm. Or possibly no audience.

Which left us pretty much to our own devices, and this meant getting our friends to phone up in a style that I like to think was ripped off wholesale by shock-jocks a few years later. So, for example, we would announce the ‘talented pets competition’. “Phone us with your talented pets, and we’ll let the county know”, we’d call out. “If you can’t get through right away, keep trying, as the phones are really hot here at Radio Norfolk”, we’d cry, looking out into the control room, where the work experience girl was looking intently at a phone that was steadfastly refusing to ring. At which point, we’d call in our special weapon, which for the sake of this blog, we’ll call Mike Todd, on account of that being his name.

Mike would appear on the phone (we had to dial him, which always left the work experience girl a bit more miserable), and he’d pretend to be a caller with an interesting pet. Initially this was a yodelling dog, which was basically his flatmate making howling noises while MIke played the piano. Then it was a tap dancing tortoise, introduced by a nervous schoolboy, who’d discovered this talent while a) his Dad was out, and b) he’d let the tortoise stand on the hotplate. And so on. We did get a few genuine callers, which left us a bit flustered, but we soldiered on. I don’t think anybody from Radio Norfolk noticed anything was unusual – largely you were alright, even on primetime, as long as you didn’t use up any of the ‘needletime’ budget.

This may have changed now, but certainly in those days, the royalties you had to play on records, calculated by ‘needletime’, could make or break the budget of the show. So you did one of three things. 1. Talk about absolutely anything for as long as possible. 2. Play music from unsigned bands. 3. Play music from ‘pre-paid’ albums (Now that’s what I call… etc). Fortunately, we managed to fill hours and hours with 1 & 2 and seldom resorted to 3.

But the best bit about Radio Norfolk was the institutional parochialism that filled the place in a pleasant, practical fashion. The best example of this was the traffic report. Growing up near London, I was familiar with Capital Radio’s ‘Eye in the Sky’, swooping down on the North Circular and giving up to the minute reports at all hours of the day. Things in Norfolk were slightly different. Firstly, the only road that anyone was bothered about was the A11. It got people into Norfolk, and it got people out. Secondly, the budget didn’t really run to helicopter surveillance. So, very practically, one of the editorial staff would phone up her Dad every morning. Her Dad lived on the side of the A11, just outside Wymondham. So, after the normal father/daughter greetings were complete, he’d put the phone down, go to the front door, look to the right and to the left, then report back accordingly.

So, although I would never listen to Radio Norfolk if I had any real choice, if I do have to then it’s always a bit nostalgically. Certainly I listen to the webcam driven traffic reports with some disappointment, as I’d just really like to know that the A11 is clear at Wymondham. And I listened with abject horror on Friday, when the phone in was ‘what do you look for in a chicken’. Just asking for trouble, quite frankly.

And imagine my surprise when I came across this on the BBC Norwich City website tonight.

You need to look at the last item under ‘local news’.

And if you can’t read this, it says “Farmer reunited with lost fowl”. I suppose when you see real life imitating stereotypes, we may as well enjoy it.

Menus with pictures…a good thing!

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Things to avoid on holiday in Barcelona:

1. If your wife is scared of heights, and yet willing to confront her fears on a wobbly cable car several hundred feet above Barcelona harbour, really think carefully about the ‘bargain’ return ticket.

2. If travelling to Montjuic, the steep hills overlooking the city to the east, be sure to read the guidebooks in advance. They will tell you where to get an escalator to the top of the hills, and avoid you having to climb 1 in 4 slopes on your hands and knees.

3. If ordering from a Tapas menu, don’t feel that you have to be adventurous. For example, if you see ‘Sepia’ on the menu, and work out that it’s Cuttlefish, then don’t assume that because Cuttlefish have ‘fish’ in their name, that they look or taste anything like a fish. However, do make sure that when what appears to be a grilled alien lifeform is delivered to your table, make appreciative noises and get stuck in. However, you may find that the ink sac that gives Cuttlefish its Sepia reference is quite easy to burst. Watch out if this happens, as the ink can go quite a long way in a crowded restaurant.

For future reference, this is what a Cuttlefish looks like:

and here’s someone who obviously ate at the same restaurant as us:

4. Remember the golden rules around your fellow humans in European/ Mediterranean cities:

4.1 Whilst the image of loveliness that typifies our notion of people living in Milan, Rome, Barcelona, Madrid etc, is of beautiful olive skin, flawless bone structure, elegant dress sense and shiny hair, the grim reality is that a large percentage of the population look like Wayne and Waynetta Slob dressed entirely from Millets c1976, and with skin applied with an artex trowel

4.2 In any given crowd, on the metro or in restaurants, the majority of people wearing black clothes will be local. ‘Colourful’ clothing tends to be brought to you by Americans and Northern Europeans, most noticeably the British. As if you needed any more signs as to who they were.

5. Meanwhile, back in the restaurant, try not to improvise your order. So if you see a delightful fruit salad being delivered to a table nearby, and then think you see it on the menu for a mere 1 euro, don’t be surprised if you get into a bizarre discussion where the waiter lists all the fruit he has available, you keep answering ‘Si’, and he starts getting slightly cross. In case you’d not guessed, one euro buys you one piece of fruit. Still the conversation will stay with me for some time to come:

‘Plaintain?’

‘Si’

‘Mandarin’

‘Si’

‘Naranja’

‘Si’…and so on

Anyway, had a lovely time. Not as glad to be back as I’d like…

What’s the matter here?

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Here’s the story of my worries of the week.

Saturday – watched a performance from Norwich City vs Southampton that was best described as turgid. Not helped by sitting next to the Southampton fans, who alternated their singing between ‘Top of the league, – You’re having a laugh’, ‘Small town near Ipswich, you’re just a small town near Ipswich’ and, as the home supporters started leaving at 2-0 down, ‘Home to your sister, you’re going home to your sister’. My main worries were around the value of forking out £56 to take two of the boys to a game of such embarrassing disappointment, and the huge wage bill that Norwich City pay to players who, largely, didn’t seem to be able to do their job properly.

Sunday – worried about Jr Emu #2 having a crap 14th birthday as he’d been throwing up all night and looked pretty miserable all day. Then I worried about the results of a long run, where I’d struggled to hit the time I wanted, and had a slight twinge in my right calf caused by my pesky compression sock, which then developed into not being able to put any weight on it (my leg, not the sock) for the rest of the day. So I worried about getting old, not being able to run marathons again, and generally being crap at what I wanted to do.

Monday – worried about work. Came home and worried that I wasn’t being a terribly good parent.

Tuesday – worried about dreadful customer service from Apple, a company I’d previously thought very highly of, and who now are pretty low on my list of favourite businesses. Pretty weird that Apple don’t even have a complaints process, and even weirder that they find it acceptable to charge £73 to fix an iPod that was still under warranty.

Wednesday – worried about work in the morning and afternoon. In the evening, worried about whether the new band was going to be tight enough to be gig-worthy, whether the songs were strong enough, whether the lyrics made sense, and whether I was getting a bit too old for this rock and roll lark.

Thursday – ran into work, listening to a podcast of ‘The Interview’ from BBC World Service. This was an interview with Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda. We all know about the appalling genocide in Rwanda, and Kagame is the man who has been tasked with rebuilding the country following that dreadful history. You can hear the podcast at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004t5p8, and I thoroughly recommend that you do.

Whatever you might think about Kagame, his thoughts on class division and the work in having to rebuild communities where a devastated family might have to live next door to the perpetrators of the genocide and be encouraged to co-exist, are, frankly, mind-blowing.

So, largely, I decided that my worries were pretty small beer in the scheme of things. In fact, should I ever descend in this blog to the sort of whinging that doesn’t stand up to real world reality, please do remind me that I don’t even know I’m born.

I’m like a John Deere tractor…

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Here are two things that happened to me on a run this morning.

It was a reasonably early start, the temperature was about -3, and I wanted to get 20 miles in, ideally before the family had started missing me. For anyone who has met my family, you’ll realise that this is veering into the realms of self-aggrandisation; no member of my family admitted to missing me, has ever pleaded with me to stay at home rather than go out, and none of them has ever been in the least bit pleased to see me on my return from a run.

Anyway, it was really cold. If I’d not been reading Mark Beaumont’s excellent book about cycling around the world the night before, I would have started feeling a tad sorry for myself. If you get a chance to read this, do. Once you get past the rather graphic descriptions of open saddle sores, it’s an amazing account of self determination in the throes of a real physical test. And the bit I’d read the night before included him sleeping outside in sub-zero temperatures, and getting back on the bike just to keep from freezing, so a frosty run around the French countryside didn’t actually seem so bad.

I was in a vaguely grumpy mood, partly as I found my ipod had lost its charge again. Normally I’m accompanied by Simon Mayo, Sandi Toksveg or Danny Baker on these runs, but no luck this morning, so, I was going to have to do 2.5 hours alone with my thoughts. And again, as my family will testify, that’s a dangerous amount of time. If you spend that amount of time just thinking, you can a) solve the riddles of the world, or b) let your mind wander around in a random collection of vaguely connected and surreal thoughts. I tend to opt for the latter, not least as my normal long runs with my friend G are more constructive, generally trying to ease him from his lofty political position just to the right of Ghengis Khan, to something a little more liberal. Occasionally I get him just this side of Lord Tebbit, but then we get to the end of our run, and he reads another week’s worth of the Daily Mail and by the following Sunday we’re back to square one.

But I digress. There I was, alone with my thoughts, and two things happened.

Running along a frozen track, with fields either side, three deer ran across in front of me. Not for the first time in this situation, I wondered why on earth I ever bothered with this running lark. To see an animal as graceful as that, running across ploughed and frozen fields, and springing along just…well, naturally, was fantastic to see, but a bit of a contrast to the rather ambling shuffle that I was effecting. It did make me think for a while about human form – other than the absolute top athletes, do we ever look at each other (or ourselves, for that matter) in awe at our grace, or naturalness, when moving? Have a look at a really big event like the London Marathon, next time you see it – after (say) the first 100 finishers, who looks like they’re naturally running? Or better still, if you’re a runner, take your next run through a town centre and sneak a glance in the shop windows when you go past. That, ladies and gentlemen, is you, and it’s exactly why kids point and laugh at you.

So, this thought kept me going for a couple more miles, during which, of course, I tried, remarkably unsuccessfully, to adjust my form to that of a graceful and stylish athlete. And then the horror of the Smurfs struck. If you’re a runner, you may recognise this phenomenon. You’re rattling along, alone with your thoughts, and suddenly, you run out of thoughts, and a song comes into your head. And not just any song, often the most irritating song you’ve ever heard, and you just can’t shift it. Sometimes I give up on the ‘trying to shift it’ bit, and start singing it to myself. Which is why, for the last 4 miles of the 2004 London marathon, I ended up singing verse one of The Smurf Song. Constantly. And, I’m pretty sure, audibly. Fortunately for me, the song that came into my head this morning was slightly less painful. It was the first verse of The Judds’ “John Deere Tractor”. I first heard this in the mid-80’s and the sheer C&W-ness of the lyric has been a benchmark for me ever since, describing a country girl’s adventure into the big city leaving her alone, vulnerable, and fed up with not getting anywhere. Has anyone ever crammed so much good ol’ boy emotion into a metaphor?

I’m like a John Deere tractor in a half acre field

trying to plow a furrow where the soil is made of steel

Oh I wish I was home, where the bluegrass is growin’

and the sweet country boys don’t complain

And, as I went trough this verse for the umpteenth time, I looked to my left onto the field. Which was about half an acre. And frozen. And the John Deere tractor on it was definitely struggling with the plough.

Spooky, huh? Thanks goodness I’d lost the Smurf song by then, otherwise I really would be tripping…

Slower Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

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Firstly, apologies for absence from the waves of t’interweb. I have no excuse other than being slightly busy, and a bit blind to new thoughts – what a horrible way to start the year! I do have a plan to fill such gaps in 2010 with a short series of memoirs of my life n Rock n Roll, such as it has been. But more of that another time.

Also, half-hearted apologies about the title…but all will make sense soon. If you’re not familiar with the work of Russ Meyer, here’s a synopsis from Wikipedia of ‘Faster Pussycat! Kill, Kill!”

“Three thrill-seeking go-go dancers encounter a young couple in the desert while drag racing. After killing the boyfriend with her bare hands, Varla drugs, binds, gags and kidnaps his girlfriend, Linda. On a desolate highway, the four stop at a gas station, where they see an old man and his muscular, dimwitted son, known as the Vegetable. The gas station attendant tells the women that the old man and his two sons live on a decrepit ranch with a hidden cache of money. Intrigued, Varla hatches a scheme to rob the lecherous old man, who is confined to a wheelchair.”

Go on, rent it. Better still, have a weekend ‘in the style of’. Actually don’t, but it does sound like the sort of thing that we might have aspired to a few years back.

Several years (and a number of children) ago, Mrs Emu and I, together with Mrs Emu’s younger brother, took a convertible hire car from LA to Vegas ‘in the style of’ Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And a very wonderful time we had as well, at least partly re-enacting the book. For some reason, myself and ME’sYB necked a bottle of tequila and Mr & Mrs T’s Marguerita Mix in the back of the car, accompanying ourselves as Mrs E drove across the desert, with impromptu strains of ‘It’s Marguerita Time’. By Status Quo. At which point our journey & Hunter S Thompson’s started diverging, and the weekend became officially lost.

And nowadays, when I think about taking this sort of trip, my immediate thoughts are:

Can I afford the time off work?

Who will look after the kids?

Will I get arrested?

How can I avoid a hangover?

How will I get enough sleep?

Will I still manage to get a run in every morning?

…all of which feels, let’s face it, a bit middle aged. And I wasn’t planning to get to middle aged, ever. And it gets worse…

I’ve bored readers of this blog before with tales of running and training, and I’m finally realising that I’m really getting on a bit. You will of course, be chorusing ‘Oh no you’re not’ at this point, but sadly, it’s true. I’ve been training up for the joys of the London Marathon in April, and training on the same sort of plan that I’ve been using for about 4-5 years. And, apart from the fact that I struggle a bit more to get out of the door these days, I’ve been doing the same sort of sessions. Irritatingly though, my 1km efforts this evening are about 20 seconds a mile slower than the pace that I ran for a whole marathon in 2004.

It being the London Marathon, my overriding fears are that a) I’ll do an ’embarrassing’ time and b) I’ll be overtaken by someone in fancy dress. Actually, this happened a couple of years ago when I was overtaken in the Mall by the runner going for the Guinness Book of Records entry for ‘Fastest Santa’. Given that his costume consisted of normal running gear with a light red cape over the top, I didn’t think that counted. No, metaphorically looking over my shoulder I can start to see a Rhino approaching.

So the grim reality that I am no longer 26, unable to knock out a training session in the morning, an evening of flaming sambukas and cigarettes in the evening, squeeze in a couple of hours of sleep, then do the same the next day, appears to be hitting home. But it’s not going to stop me from trying….

Naming the baby

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Recently on Radio 5, I was intrigued to hear a piece on the decline of Bookmaker profits, on which they had a real live Bookmaker, introduced as the head of Paddy Power betting shops. And his name was…Paddy Power.

I never thought for a moment that there was a real Paddy Power. And what a fantastic name for a bookie. Almost as if Mr & Mrs Power sr had thought, when the little fella emerged – ‘Let’s give him a name that will mark him out as a really memorable man, one who could perhaps run a whole series of branch and online betting shop emporiums…let us call him…Paddy Power’.

And so it was so.

So that did rather get me to thinking about really good names that were given at birth, with a real insight to their future roles. Here are a few examples:

Vlad the Impaler (well known Impaler)

Johnny Guitar Watson (Guitarist, obviously)

Clarence Gatemouth Brown (Harmonica player)

Fatty Arbuckle (also see Fats Domino and Guitar Slim)

Freddie Parrot Face Davis (err)

Ivan the Terrible (Could have pursued a number of careers, including Karaoke singer, waiter at Little Chef..)

And my particular favourite….

Princess Michael of Kent

In the unlikely event that you wish to add to this list, please do let me know

My name is Kelly

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Well, a very happy NY to you, and what better opportunity to share with you my fave picture from 2008:

And here’s an accompanying competition…I think there are two main (male) reactions to this picture, so why not think of all your male friends, and divide them up accordingly:

A. This photograph typifies everything that is wrong about western society in the 21st century, by cheapening women and their purpose in life with a literally indelible stamp. 50 years on from the progress made by post-war radical feminism, it just seems like we’re no further forward in any real emancipation in sexual politics.

B. How come I never seem to meet girls like Kelly ?

A v happy 2010 to y’all.

Taxi for Emu!

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Probably shouldn’t be doing this on Christmas eve; there’s presents to wrap, drink to be drunk and still a couple of children to tell off, but I would very much like to share my favourite local news article from the last few weeks.

Topical, full of seasonal cheer, and a fine metaphor for the year ahead.

Enjoy!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/norfolk/8428206.stm

R+D my R’s

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I’ve been lucky enough to be working with technology in one form or another for all of my working life. I ‘got into it’, as we used to say when we were young, purely by accident, and have grown ever fonder of the twists and turns it has taken ever since, providing us with new smarter ways of communicating, keeping transparent, staying alive, and much much more. So I am what you might call a fan of technological advance.

And central to the theme of technological advance is Research & Development. Or at least it used to be. In what my children are increasingly calling the olden days, there would be a separate R&D function in almost every business that was delivering new stuff. This stuff could be anything from service products to cars to software. It was expected that any company worth its salt would be finding out what the market wanted or even how to manufacture that market. (History is, of course, littered with attempts to manufacture the market that went horribly wrong. The one that always sends a shudder down my spine is the campaign based on Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) at the end of the 90’s. If you’ve erased this from your memory (and I so wish I could), this consisted of O2 promising that the internet was going to be arriving on WAP-enabled handsets, so everyone could happily browse away in the (relatively infant) web. The problem was, they couldn’t. Not only was the network not up to the job, but neither was the internet. Or the handsets, really. Which just left a half baked idea and a lot of front. And what might work for Simon Cowell didn’t work for O2.)

Anyway, R&D was pretty core to the smart companies that dominated the post war years. Any book on company management will tell you that R&D is the key to the constant re-development of companies like Sony, Apple, Toshiba etc. And the companies that didn’t have effective R&D are the ones that started feeling a bit cumbersome. I think that’s what happened to IBM, and I also think (and part of me secretly hopes) that it’s what may well happen to Microsoft. If your business is constantly trying to push the same market, there’s a chance you’re going to run out of customers.

So, I was at a meeting with a pretty big IT company recently, and asked them how much they were spending a year on R&D. The rep quoted an absolutely massive number, which I couldn’t quite believe. Pushing a bit harder, we agreed that this number must include acquisition costs. At which point it struck me that that’s where we’ve got to in the development of R&D. We see this all the time in IT, with the big companies buying up the small ones to create a portfolio of product, sometimes at odds with their initial direction as a business. And I think that’s a real shame as it becomes all about wedging something small into a bigger whole, and that’s not really about R or D. And of course, in extremis, the big company buys up the smaller one before they can become a competitor, sometimes killing the developed technology in the process.

So I think that’s a shame. When I looked at this fantastic idea from the RCA grad show:

http://www.iconeye.com/index.php?id=3864:rca-student-radically-improves-the-uk-plug&option=com_content&view=article

then I can’t help feeling that what’s being developed by the bigger businesses in the name of R&D these days is pretty second rate.