Pieces of a Man Think it. Do it. Be it. Embellish.

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Oh la la! Miss April is the seductive Madame Maître from the Pyrenées. She even has a boudoir;

Maison de Maître offers 7 bedrooms and will absolutely captivate you with her gardens (7,000m²) which are planted with many unusual trees and shrubs and shield the swimming pool and three horse boxes, all of which compliment the lovely building. More...

Labels: 2007

And back in beautiful Blighty, here's a building I stroll past twice a day going to and from Stockport station. Either wind or age or the activities of the bodybuilders within made a big chunk of it just fall away into the street. Now I tend to skip rather than stroll...

Labels: 2007

It's been a hectic couple of weeks trying to get an assignment done for yesterday's deadline, and I never closed the loop on the house in Rotherham.

Of course, it was too good to be true. It was smaller than it appeared on the photo; I'd like to think it was something underhanded about estate agents and wide-angle lenses, but it was probably just as much the grand architectural features skewing the sense of perspective. It was also damp, not just normal damp from a few months of neglect, but wet up to the ceiling, probably due to a failure in the gully between the two roofs. Most of all, though, it was just a bit of a weird layout, lots of small rooms all over, a bit of a rabbit warren. On the plus side, the cemetery was lovely.

The day was productive, though, as we revisited Sheffield and move that thinking on a bit. I guess I tend to only see the nicer parts of Sheffield; wandering round the town centre at lunchtime, walking up to Collegiate Campus, coming in on the train along Abbeydale Road. Driving in from the north is a different kettle of fish and really brings how many shitty parts of the town there are.

The key insight, though, was provided by Jo; it's probably not that Sheffield has more shitty parts than Manchester, it's just that you can see them so much better. And it's true! Even in the £250,000 plus areas of town you can still see the cramped terraces and pre-fabs a few miles away.

So my current thinking is that Sheffield is off the agenda for the moment and we're just going to focus on now until next year when Oscar will change school, Jo will have finished refurbishing this place and I will have done the Masters. It feels like the right decision, too.

Then, who knows? I notice I'm starting to feel like a big change of some kind as the big four-oh approaches...?

Labels: 2007

Here's an amusing piece in The Guardian on the failings of England and Steve McClaren: Why seven-year-old Joe could outmanage McClaren;

Within eight games of taking over McClaren has morphed into Sven-Goran Eriksson. Everything about the Ginger Reaper suggests the deadly one - the corporate suit, fixed smile, constipated body language, joylessness, fear and the sheer bloody stupidity of what he says and does. Take this for example: "I don't read the papers, I don't gamble, I don't even know what day it is." Is that what finally convinced the FA he was the man for the job? Or this: "The goal was the deciding factor." Best of all, the following post-Israel classic: "At this level you need to score goals."

Personally, I hope England get beat by Andorra tonight. Watching them is just so painfully bloody boring; at least the post-mortem would be interesting.

Labels: 2007

It is a serious matter - as umpire Darrell Hair found out - to accuse a team, purely on the basis of supposition, of cheating to win a cricket match. It is an even more serious matter to accuse a team, or a player, of taking bribes to lose a match. But to accuse a player or a team of being involved in the death of their coach raises the stakes by several orders of magnitude. Hyperbole may be the bane of sports journalism, but the unsubtle innuendo linking Pakistani cricketers to Bob Woolmer's ghastly murder goes beyond sensationalism. The rush to judgment here is fuelled by that other bane of sports journalism, national stereotyping. More...

Labels: 2007

Carolus Linnaeus was the guy who invented the system of Latin names for plants and animals.

Presumably it was much earlier in his career when he came up with the following description of racial type that I discovered today on the BBC website commemorating the abolition of slavery;

• European: eyes blue; gentle, acute, inventive. Covered with close vestments. Governed by laws.

• Asiatic: eyes dark; severe, haughty, covetous. Covered with loose garments. Governed by opinions.

• Black: phlegmatic, relaxed. African. Crafty, indolent, negligent. Anoints himself with grease. Governed by caprice.
  
  The System of Nature, Linnaeus, 1735

Labels: 2007

Strip away the endless moaning about the state of the world and Slow Leadership serves up a tasty morsel every few weeks; e.g. this article on sensemaking and storytelling...

I had a friend who worked in air accident investigation. He told me the only truly reliable witnesses to air accidents were small children. They told what they saw. Adults told stories based on what they thought they ought to see, then embellished them to make the stories more vivid and interesting. More...

Labels: 2007

Today we're off to the People's Republic of South Yorkshire in order to check out the strange and unusual Rotherham house.

During a bout of essay procrastination last weekend I did some more detective work on the web that not only helped make sense of its price but also made it more intriguing than ever.

Turns out - from checking out the aerial view of the place - that it's actually the lodge at the gates of the historic Moorgate Victorian Cemetery in Rotherham, which explains the low price (£209,995).

In addition to the location, which I guess would be a bit much for your average punter, they also had problems with vandalism in the 1990s, which only serves to reinforce the reaction that every Sheffield person has given me this week to the idea of living in Rotherham; "Don't do it!"

In 1994 vandals rampaged through the cemetery leaving a trail of destruction. Crosses on graves and headstones were pushed over and urns and vases damaged. Although a package of measures to install CCTV cameras in known crime hotspots was approved by the council Moorgate Cemetery has still not been designated for any security measures.

Similarly the future of the two Gothic sandstone lodges at the entrance to the cemetery was in the balance in 1990 after vandalism and there were calls for their demolition. Fortunately the council decided they were of architectural merit and restoration work was carried out on them. One of the lodges was subsequently sold and the other one is still owned by the Council. It is now recommended that the lodges should be given listed status.

So, realistically it will remain but an idle day dream since it would probably be a bugger to sell and, more importantly, we don't want our kiddies squished under crumbling headstones (there was a spate of that a few years back in similar places).

Shame, really. The idea of living next to a beautiful old cemetery definitely attracts me. There are quiet neighbours - as Dad pointed out - and what better place to live to keep yourself reminded of the fleeting nature of life and the need to make every day count.

A stroll home through there at tea time would certainly put the day's staff problems, managerial bullshit and university polliticking into sharp relief.

Labels: 2007

The waiting room was once a significant place in public life. Newspaper editorials would lament the smouldering fires, obsolete reading matter and bumpy seats in railway-station waiting rooms and doctors' surgeries. "The furniture and decoration are usually in the very abyss of dullness," complained the Times in 1925. But the reason people complained about waiting rooms is that they had to use them: they were places where all social classes, from vagrants to professionals, shared a temporary berth. More...

Labels: 2007

My ears pricked up when I heard on the news that there was a shooting last night in the students' union at my old alma mater - Loughborough - where I used to run discos. When I checked out the union website - surprise surprise - the act playing last night was a rap outfit from Miami called Pretty Ricky. How completely predictable.

But it takes me back to Lieutenant Stitchie...

Back in my student days there, I was the founder of the Reggae Society - an easy way to get a student union grant towards subsidised gigging - and we arranged a minibus to take our posse up to the Marcus Garvey West Indian Centre in Nottingham to see this Jamaican MC - the aforementioned Mr Stitchie - who was big at the time.

It was obvious as soon as we got there that the atmosphere was really tense, mainly due to the friction between the local Nottingham lads and the London security outfit. I remember they were called 'The Rats' and dressed in military-style gear with nasty-looking dogs like pit bulls to match their nasty-looking attitudes.

So anyway, not long into the act it kicked off big style in the venue between the Nottingham and London crews and there followed the most terrifying couple of minutes of my life (apart from the Kobe earthquake). About a thousand people in this dark, packed venue rushed as one for the single exit down two flights of stairs. There were lighting rigs falling on people, guys fighting, bottles flying, women screaming. Insane.

My most vivid memory was that of being swept down the stairs in this sea of humanity thinking, "If you fall, you die". Oh what a night! Still, most nights at Loughborough consisted of scowling at the drunken, vomiting geeks and jocks, so it made a change.

I also noticed this morning on the current 'Ents' website that the format for the Saturday comedy night that we started in about 1989 is still the same. Unbelievable.

Maybe my legacy a hundred years from now won't be a monument in my home town or a street named after me, but the Saturday night at Loughborough University, still going strong! Oh well, it's something.

Labels: 2007

Darcus Howe speaking in the OSM World Cup Special on the decline of West Indian cricket and society;

What transformed West Indies into a great side in the Seventies was the confidence that came out of independence and the rejection of the old imperial dominance, and the Black Power movement that was gathering momentum in the United States.

There was a very strong nationalist spirit and, because we were exiles, those of us in England, particularly in Brixton where I lived, felt it most strongly. To see Viv Richards walking out to bat at The Oval, which was just down the road, without a helmet (no matter how fast the bowler was) and wearing his Rasta armbands of gold, green and red, was inspirational. This was a time when black militancy was building - you had the Brixton riots in 1981 - and that fed off the swagger and the success of the West Indies side.

The collapse of our team since then mirrors the breakdown of Caribbean society. The pride we felt in the post-independence years has disappeared. No young person today wants to play cricket; they would rather have a gun. There is an avalanche of violence waiting to hit this part of the world that will be worse than anything experienced since slavery. How can cricket hope to flourish?

I recently asked my teenage godson, who lives in Trinidad, if he played cricket. He said no. I asked if he knew where the Queen's Park Oval was. He said no. I asked if he knew who Brian Lara was. He told me that he was the guy who owns a street; there is a Brian Lara Parade in Port of Spain. Cricket gives him no sense of racial identity in the way it would have done 20 years ago. 50 Cent does. Last month, I walked up to the place in Port of Spain where I played as a boy. In those days, there was a hum of 'Howzat' running through the streets. Now it's a dump, a place where people leave their dead dogs. All this hurts not just because I love West Indies cricket, but because I love the sport as a whole. The global game can't afford to lose the effervescence our players once brought.

Labels: 2007