Rising from the ashes like an ashy rising thing

A friend of mine has expressed an interest in starting a blog, mainly to have a rant about annoying stuff - which is how most of us started, I suspect. Anyway, I said I'd help, and then realised I'd forgotten EVERYTHING about blogging.

I've been too lazy to come anywhere near this place for years, and although there's still plenty to get enraged about (which is where I came in, back in 2004) I've preferred to take the 'quietly angry' approach to life, except for Sunday mornings, when I have a tendency to wake Soo up at 6 am to discuss the events that led up to the reunification of Germany and so on.

So...in an attempt to help Claire get started, I'm going to reinflate this vessel, and, who knows, I may just get my mojo back.

Moyles raises £2.4 million for charity but is still a complete arse

Despite his broadcasting 'marathon' having raised huge bundles of cash to give to poor people, a survey has confirmed that dead-eyed, snaggle-toothed tub of blubber Chris Moyles is still loathed by everyone in Britain, even those who have never heard his radio programme.

Moyles's declaration on taking over the Radio One morning slot, that he was 'the Saviour of Radio One', gave many people hope that at some point he would agree to be scourged and then nailed to a suitably reinforced cross. Unhappily, it seems that it is not to be.

It is just possible that Moyles could have attained some measure of respect by not only raising the money but also donating all his vital organs to needy children in Ghana. The remainder of his sorry carcasse could have served as filling for pies to assuage the tearing hunger of orphans in the Sudan.

Typically, Moyles refused to go the extra mile, and remains a hate-figure. He has only himself to blame.

The Americana

Friday July 9th. The Americana Festival, Newark, near Nottingham.

Bad shirt, too much Jack Daniels (no, after the band’s set – we’re professionals, for Christ’s sake.) Played adequately, got paid. Bought a dumb hat.

Yee hah, as they say in Nottingham. Sometimes.

Short Fuse

The Daily Express’s front page headline today is “SWIMMING POOL BLACKED OUT TO APPEASE MUSLIMS”. It's a piece of trivial froth which certainly doesn't deserve to be on the front page.

In a fit of mischief I went onto the “Have Your Say” page and complained about the article being anti-Islamic toss. An Express reader responded thus:

"TERRIRIST SUPPORTER
The pathetic one is you - so blinkered and stupid that you cant see what is happening. The people of this country - the REAL people, not the invading hoard, are SICK of being told to change to accomodate a bunch of benefit scrounging terrorist supporting barbarians.

You sound as if you support these vermin? Maybe you also agree with blowing trains & buses up do you? Perhaps the anti-terror police should be looking carefully at people like you - I do hope they do because I for one dont believe anyone with your attitudes can be trusted and you shoul be removed from our streets."

Bit of a short fuse there, I think. It’s a worry that these people are roaming free with little fires of hatred blazing away inside. I tried to calm things down by replying that my golden rule is never to get into a discussion with people who are too stupid to spell “terrorist”, but was then accused of being bigoted against dyslexics.

At one point someone called me a "facist". I think they meant “fascist”, but who can say? And maybe I am a facist. Some of my best friends have faces, but there are still plenty I don’t like.

Closing the Gap

There’s been a revelation from the National Audit Office (NAO) that rich people live longer than poor people, and that the gap in life expectancy is growing. Apparently that’s a bad thing, and we have to fix it, by improving the health of the poor.

We will do this through the tried and tested method of forming committees, commissioning a report which will cost £12 million, take three years to prepare, and run to seven thousand pages of blindingly obvious proposals, half of which will never be implemented. The other half will be implemented, and will not work.

It’s time for new thinking. Where the health authorities are going wrong is in assuming that poor people living longer is a good thing. It isn’t. For those living on state benefits in run-down council housing estates in Croydon, their ghastly, meaningless existence is wretched enough already without trying to squeeze another couple of pointless years out of it.

Rich people living longer isn’t a good thing either, what with them being not only annoying, but also responsible for all the evil in the world and everything. Anyway, I’m all in favour of equality, so the obvious answer is to reduce the life expectancy of the rich.

And this is where it gets interesting. I propose that, at a given age - and the current poor person’s life expectancy of 76 years seems appropriate – we bus the rich old people to the most impoverished parts of the UK, where the poor will be allowed to hunt them down like dogs.

Or maybe with dogs. The kind of dogs poor people go in for would certainly make a much better job of it than those stupid floppy-eared things rich people use for hunting foxes, although I accept that an opportunity for irony in bucket-loads would be wasted.

Although the rich old people should be easy enough to bring down and slaughter, the modest amount of exercise the poor people would get in running after them would undoubtedly improve their health, which is kind of where the NAO are coming from, I think.

Funny how the answers to just about everything are so much more obvious as you get older.

God Bless You All

This may be my last broadcast, although I pray to God for his help and blessing in this, my hour of greatest need.

The squirrels are massing at the border, too numerous to count, and filled with a diabolical vigour. At night I can hear their tiny claws scrabbling at the fence. By day they sit in the treetops, counting my guns. Gun. Counting my gun. Even a squirrel can count to one.

I fear I brought this on myself. Enraged by the squirrels’ lust for the sweet roots of my begonias, I bought an air rifle and spent a few happy afternoons getting my eye in. On day three, I shot my first squirrel, from my sniper’s eyrie – the bathroom window.

Since that morning I have killed at least a dozen, and yet still they come. I will keep transmitting for as long as I can. Do not try to help us – save yourselves. May God bless you all.

The Aye-Aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis)

Let’s face it, most of us have self-image problems, but nothing like those that must afflict the aye-aye. The hapless omnivore is in decline at least partly because it is quite likely to be killed because of the way it looks. A harsh fate, indeed, but there’s no doubt that the aye-aye is one of the strangest creatures on the planet.

Early naturalists had trouble making up their minds just what species it belonged to, and for a while believed it to be a rodent, because of its huge front teeth. In the end they gave up and awarded it a genus of its own, so it’s official - there’s nothing else like the aye-aye.

The aye-aye is scruffily be-furred, with huge, bat-like ears, a bushy tail and eyes like saucers. A piece of evolutionary whimsy has given it an unnaturally long and thin middle finger, up to three times as long as the others. The animal uses this elongated digit to tap the tree bark to locate grubs and insects and then hook them out, having first chewed a hole with those impressive front teeth.

As if the destruction of its habitat wasn’t enough to contend with, the aye-aye falls foul of the same fady which, at least in theory, afford the indri some protection. For the aye-aye, however, it’s all bad news.

To a degree the creature brings it on itself, because apart from anything else it can be a bloody nuisance. Like many other Madagascan animals it has too much self-confidence for its own good. It will stroll nonchalantly into a village and help itself to coconuts, mangoes, lychees or even eggs. No wonder the Malagasy view it with irritation.

But it’s much, much worse than that. In most rural areas on the island the aye-aye is thought to be a harbinger of evil which should be killed on sight. Reactions to the creature can be extreme. The Sakalava people, allegedly, believe that aye-ayes sneak into houses at night and murder the sleeping occupants by using that long, thin middle finger to stop their hearts.

Garbutt reports that in some areas, if an aye-aye enters a village the response is to kill the animal, burn down the village and move on. A harsh fate, one might think, for a creature whose only crime is to look like a large squirrel that’s been shot from a cannon.

For all its uniqueness, Madagascar’s wildlife is facing the many of the same problems as endangered species all over the world. Agricultural techniques which worked without too much damage to the environment when there were fewer people are proving disastrous now that the island’s population is approaching 20 million.

Madagascar (Part Three)

The Indri (Indri indri)

Early settlers were – perhaps understandably – uncomfortable with the prospect of sharing the island with primates the size of gorillas, and upheld new-settler tradition by systematically slaughtering them all. As a result of this attrition, the indri is now the largest lemur on Madagascar.

The creature’s name comes from one of those pleasing misunderstandings which show that naturalists can be just as reassuringly dim as the rest of us. In this case it was Frenchman Pierre Sonnerat who failed to spot that, in the native Malagasy language, ‘indri’ just means ‘there it is’. You’d have thought M. Sonnerat might have overheard the phrase before in other incidents involving shouting and pointing, but perhaps he had other things on his mind.

The correct local name for the indri is babakoto, which translates as ‘ancestor’. Indri have traditionally been protected by taboos, or fady, because of their perceived resemblance to the sacred forebears of the Malagasy.

It’s the indri’s human-like behaviour, including a predilection for early-morning sunbathing – eyes closed, legs crossed, plams of the hands offered to the sunshine – and a complex system of communication calls involving roars and wails with a range of up to two kilometres, that backs up this resemblance.

It may sound as if the indri has a pretty easy time of it compared with some of its compatriots, but of course it’s not as simple as that. There’s not much consistency across the island when it comes to belief systems, and the fady which supposedly protect the indri vary widely from one area to another. In one location it may be taboo to eat an indri, but not to catch one and sell it to someone whose beliefs allow them to put in the pot.

In almost every case Madagascar’s endangered species are victims of agricultural policy. The slash-and-burn techniques, which give temporary viability to poor soil, reduce natural habitat by destroying forests and expose the soil to erosion, damaging hillsides and silting up lakes.

With its natural habitat in decline, Madagascar’s wildlife is increasingly forced into unwelcome contact with humans. As in most other parts of the world, this is almost entirely disastrous for the animals.

Imagine the scene. A Malagasy peasant – possibly the same one who shot the jumping rat earlier, possibly not – is trudging home after a long day, tired, hungry and starting to become a little unnerved by the forest’s lengthening shadows. There might be evil spirits in these parts, or so his granddad used to say.

And then he sees it, clinging to a tree in front of him, picked out by the beam of his torch. It’s a creature so weird and unnatural that he lets out a scream of terror. Then he feels silly. He looks again. The animal is regarding him with malice and a hint of mischief from enormous eves. Then, as he stands transfixed, the creature raises a long middle finger and flips him the bird.

Coming next - the Aye-Aye

Madagascar (Part Two)

Thanks to gentle nudging from a man in Iowa, here's the fossa...

The Fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox)


Despite looking like a cross between a dog and a puma, fossa are actually members of the viverrid family – a group which includes the mongoose. They’re efficient predators, and aren’t at all fussy about their diet. Fossa will happily dine on insects, reptiles and rodents, and are agile enough to take to the trees to go after lemurs.

Near villages, fossa will also prey on chickens and other domestic animals, and as a result are hunted as vermin. In Malagasy folklore it is often claimed that fossa will attack cattle or even humans, but this seems unlikely. They do, however, have a reputation for unpredictability – there are stories of fossa wandering fearlessly into field camps, ransacking unoccupied tents, chewing boots and eating the soap.

It seems likely, however, that the real reason the animals are unpopular with the Malagasy is that fossa have great sex and people are just jealous. Firstly, the unrepentantly shameless females will sometimes mate with up to eight males a day, and both males and females are pretty enthusiastic.

Naturalist Nick Garbutt writes: “Copulation is noisy, with both sexes purring, snorting and shrieking, and, if uninterrupted by other males, can last several hours.” More often than not they do it in the branches of a tree, which is really just showing off. Fossa cubs stay with their mothers for around twelve months, meaning that females mate only every other year, which explains their joyous promiscuity when they finally get the chance.

Madagascar has a long history of interference from the outside world – the Arabs established trading posts as far back as the 7th century, the first European contact came in the 1500s in the shape of the Portuguese, and the island didn’t gain full independence from France until 1960.

Despite this, Madagascar’s indigenous culture has proved fairly robust and over half the Malagasy still practice traditional religious customs – the rest of the population are mainly Christian, with Moslems making up around ten per cent of the total.

Traditional religion in Madagascar emphasises links between the living and the dead. During the ceremony of ‘turning the dead’ - famadihana in the local language – the bodies of deceased relatives are taken out of their tombs, dressed up in nice new shrouds and carried around over the heads of the crowd for a while with much singing and dancing before they’re put back. Of the Christian clergy, the dour and repressed Protestants condemn the practice, while the Catholics, being fond of a good party, will often join in.

The Malagasy believe that their ancestors are deeply concerned with the activities of their decendants. They also, apparently, believe that their ancestors were covered in thick black fur with round, tufted prominent ears, yellow-green eyes and a bemused expression.

Next - the Indri

Madagascar (Part One)

I'd pretty much forgotten about this - I wrote it a while back as a college assignment. (My tutor didn't think much of my sense of humour and gave me a C. Miserable bitch.) It runs to a little over 2500 words, so I'll post bits over the next week or so. I have yet to sell it in anywhere...


The island of Madagascar lies in the Indian Ocean off the coast of East Africa. On a map it looks, in the words of writer and naturalist Gerald Durrell, “like a badly presented omelette.” About the size of France, it’s the fourth largest island in the world – Greenland, New Guinea and Borneo are the top three – and is home to over 200,000 species, 80 per cent of them unique to Madagascar, and many of them in danger of extinction.

Whether we like to admit it or not, there are some species whose endangered status comes as no surprise. These are the creatures which somehow managed to find a quiet, secluded spot to hide while natural selection went blundering past. Through a combination of a fortunate location and a lack of competition from animals which are just, well, better at being animals, they have managed to survive, and in some cases even to prosper until fairly recently in evolutionary terms.

Until around 160 million years ago, Madagascar was attached to the African mainland – part of the super-continent Gondwanaland, which also contained Africa, South America, Australia, Antarctica and India. As the continent broke up, Madagascar began to move away from Africa. The first lemur-like primates surfaced on the mainland about 60 million years ago and crossed to Madagascar soon after.

By the time monkeys appeared as the bright, confident, competitive new kids on the block, a mere 17–23 million years ago, the island was far enough east to be isolated and its wildlife safe from their attentions.

Madagascar’s diverse and teeming fauna flourished until the arrival of man, thought to be as recently as 2,000 years ago. Early settlers followed the same pattern as everywhere else on the planet by killing everything slow or stupid enough to be caught, big enough to look dangerous, or small enough to fit in a cooking pot. Viewing wildlife as lumps of protein rather than creatures worth preserving is an attitude still prevalent in some parts of the island today.

Although the island has an enlightened approach to animal conservation in theory – it has, for example, been illegal to kill lemurs or keep them as pets since 1964, and there are a number of protected national parks – the authorities continue to struggle with the difficulties of policing such a huge area.

Another problem is that Madagascar is one of the world’s poorest countries. Not long ago the island’s economy was fragile enough to have been sent into a tailspin by Coca Cola changing to a recipe containing less vanilla - a major Madagascan export - only for the economy to recover on the introduction of vanilla-rich Coke Classic.

The average Malagasy has an income of less than $300 per annum, and only 30 per cent of the island’s population of around 19 million lives in cities. The rest are dependent on agriculture, often at subsistence level, and are competing for resources with some of the planet’s most endangered species.

It’s all too easy, then, to imagine a scenario where a Malagasy farmer might be peacefully making his way home through the forest at dusk, his mind elsewhere, when a huge rat erupts from the vegetation of the forest floor like one of the more sophisticated types of landmine and hangs in the air in front of him, defying gravity just long enough for him to raise his shotgun and give it both barrels.



The Malagasy Giant Jumping Rat (Hypogeomys antimena)
The size of a domestic rabbit, the giant jumping rat has developed the ability to leap a metre into the air. While entertaining, this is unconvincing as a survival measure, as all even a dim-witted predator has to do is to stand still and wait for the rat to come down again. The ability to leap into the air and then immediately hurtle a kilometre sideways, or twenty minutes into the future, would obviously be better, although no doubt both those techniques would have their drawbacks.

Perhaps the rat relies on the predator feeling so embarrassed at missing its prey that it just keeps going, blushing and hoping none of its friends have seen it. Or, just maybe, the rat has heard that its major nemesis, the puma-like fossa, is also endangered, and thinks that it may be able to stay in the air long enough for the fossa to become extinct. It’s a bit unlikely, but who knows what a rat thinks?

Although the rats’ spring-loaded hindquarters are an interesting development, a better evolutionary tack would have been the ability to produce more offspring. Jumping rats are commendably but fatally restrained in their sexual practices – they are monogamous – and a litter usually consists of only one or two young, many of whom are lost to predators, both the indigenous fossa and introduced species like cats and dogs.

In fact the rat is at risk not from being used as target practice by nervous Malagasy peasants, but, inevitably, from the loss of its habitat to farming – the slash and burn approach to agriculture is still rife in Madagascar and impacts almost all the fauna on the island, herbivore and carnivore alike.

Coming next - the fossa.

Sounds like...

Even though I left Belfast in 1973, I still have quite a strong Northern Irish accent. I didn’t realise how strong until a few months back. I was in a pizza restaurant in London with a bunch of Soo’s pals and their partners. (In a rare attack of culture we’d been to The Globe Theatre to see The Merry Wives of Windsor, which was reasonably funny by Shakespearian standards. Which is not that funny, actually.)

Anyway, as all of us are middle-aged or worse, it didn’t take long for the conversation to come around to health, good and bad. Someone asked me about the medication I take to control my blood pressure. “Atenolol,” I said, “and amlodipine.”

“Oh, that’s terrible,” they said, “Do you take anything for it?”

“Yes,” I said, “Atenolol and amlodipine.”

“But do you take anything for it?”

“For what?”

“For the pain.”

“What pain?”

“You said you were in a lot of pain.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Yes you did.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Yes you did.”

And so on. For about five minutes. Eventually one of us (I can’t remember which one) realised what the rest of you probably figured out a while back – in a noisy pizza place my accent makes the word “amlodipine” sound as if I’m complaining about searing agony.

How we laughed. And how empty our lives must be, to find hilarity in such meagre things.

God Bless Us, Every One

Five months since putting anything on here – it’s a damned disgrace. And when I do decide to come back it’s inspired by another TV programme…

Disappointingly, Eoghan Quigg’s failure to win the final of The X-Factor this weekend didn’t result in civil disorder in his native Northern Ireland. Based on the carefully orchestrated teen hysteria which met the Quiglet when he went home for a visit last week, his relegation to third place in the competition should at least have resulted in a burning car or two.

After all, apart from drinking, urban violence is what the Northern Irish do best, and it’s a shame to let something like that just fade into the background, especially when you’ve got what is, compared with some of the previous reasons for burning down the neighbourhood, a perfectly serviceable excuse.

Let’s hope the recession will result in enough unemployment, poverty and subsequent boredom and bad temper to get Ulster’s disaffected youth back out on the streets where it belongs. I bet there are literally dozens of policemen in Derry these days who’ve never had even a piece of paving stone thrown at them, never mind a petrol bomb. Bunch of pansies.

The most interesting thing about The X-Factor is, of course, the procession of self-deluding lunatics we’re invited to laugh at in the first few episodes, as the programme consistently produces finalists who are merely third-rate versions of Mariah Carey or Westlife. This year’s winner was kicked off the show three years ago for not being good enough, and guess what? She still isn’t.

Quigg was, inexplicably, tagged as “cute” throughout the show, despite looking like the result of a hideous but fruitful sexual encounter between Dickens's Tiny Tim and a ventriloquist’s dummy. The programme supplied him with a vocal coach, but not, tragically, with someone who could teach him to smile like a real boy. Never mind, despite the bronze medal, Quigg has probably got a bright enough future, as long as he’s happy with his name coming just in front of the words “now appearing in Puss In Boots at the Alhambra Theatre, Leicester.”

Bonekickers

This may be the wrong place to recommend a TV programme, and I have to confess that I've only watched one out of the first three episodes, but I have to mention this piece of truly awful dross for (at least) two reasons.

The whole sorry enterprise is about a quartet of unconventional, wisecracking, maverick archaeologists who shout a lot and have adventures, and if your instinctive response to that is to make sure the safety's off and there's a round in the chamber, then you're pretty much on the right track. It's the same gut reaction as that early encounter with the sado-masochistic albino assassin monk in the Dan Brown thing. You expect the worst, and that's precisely what you get.

Anyway, here's why you should still watch it. Firstly, Bonekickers is, quite possibly, the most laughably dreadful "drama series" the BBC has ever commissioned, and should be required viewing for anyone contemplating writing a screenplay, in terms of "under no circumstances do it ANYTHING like this unless you want to be laughed at".

We're talking serious bad here; plot lines, dialogue, characterisation, casting, lighting, editing, special effects, background music - all completely atrocious. If Bonekickers isn't in the "Dire Warning" section of every film studies course in the country within a couple of years, then I'm not a bald, portly Irishman with a bad attitude. And I am.

Secondly, while I'm not often a supporter of the "so bad it's almost good" school, d'you know, it almost is. After flinching and rubbing my eyes in disbelief a few times during the first five minutes I started to snort and giggle quietly to myself, a response I maintained for the rest of the show. I shall be watching the rest of the series, because, having found a programme that can make me laugh out loud after spending all day writing press releases about plasterboard I'm not going to turn my back on it.

On a scale of one to ten, Bonekickers is off the scale. In both directions.

The Hill District

We’re off for a week’s holiday in the Lake District. For the benefit of my one regular American visitor (and here I’m using “regular” in the sense of “reasonably frequent” rather than “average”, because Bob’s from Iowa, and who the hell knows what’s average for Iowa?) I should explain that the Lake District is a district in England where there are a lot of lakes.

And hills. It could quite justifiably be called the Hill District. But it isn’t, so let’s not waste any more time on that one. What most people do when on holiday in the Lake District is climb the hills and look down at the lakes, unless they can’t be bothered, in which case they sit by the lakes and look up at the hills.

Of course, if you actually live and work in the Lake District it’s likely that you ignore the hills and lakes and just complain that it rains all the time, which it does. Hence the lakes. And the clever name.

Anyway, it’s a place I love. If you can handle slightly demanding hill walking (the kind of walking where you might have to use your hands occasionally – the guidebooks call it a “scramble”) it’s quiet and still, and the air tastes like spring water, and there’s nowhere on the planet I’d rather be.

Back In The Swamp

It seems that the only time I post anything on here these days is to apologise for not posting anything on here, and now I’m doing it again. But today’s a little different.

It’s exactly a year ago today that I gave up my job as a corporate lickspittle and decided to wander the earth having adventures. Like Caine from Kung Fu, but a bit chubbier and a lot less Chinese. To date I'm still in Surrey, which is perhaps not that impressive, although Redhill is certainly the sort of place where you can have adventures. Just not the kind you'd want.

It’s been an oddly fragmented twelve months, and I’m still not making a living out of writing or music as I’d hoped, but I’ve been back to college and gained a formal journalism qualification. I’ve had news stories, reviews and feature articles published in several papers and magazines. I’ve interviewed music journalists, trauma victims, comedians, and the Climate Change Director of Greenpeace in Europe, which is pretty grown-up by my standards.

I’ve discovered that, to my surprise, I’m better at writing news than features, and better at both of those things than subbing, which, as a natural pedant, I thought I’d be good at. I also procrastinate like crazy unless faced with a deadline.

My mother died in December, which is something I’m still getting used to. I’m shamelessly trying to figure out how to get an article out of the event. She’d be proud of me for that. I’m also, as a result, an Irish landlord – like most Irish landlords, of course, I live in England.

Even though I’m determined to make a living out of creative stuff, at the back of my mind I’ve always thought, if the worst came to the worst, I could go back into a finance role. Last week I offered to help someone with an Excel spreadsheet. Spreadsheets were my life for fifteen years, up until I left Nortel Networks last year, and I consider myself an expert. I tried to explain how to do this advanced thing. I couldn’t remember.

So that’s it. Once your gills have gone you can never go back in the swamp.

God Only Knows

I’ve spent some time in the company of Christians recently, and, although they’re pretty annoying they’re probably less likely to try to murder you than the other annoying people in Redhill who aren’t Christians.

By and large they seem to be nice people, as long as you ignore the fact that they’re all a bit nuts.

Now, I’m an agnostic. That’s not me being wishy-washy, it’s just an admission that there’s a lot of stuff I don’t understand. If I contemplate the mysteries of the Universe I just don’t understand how stuff works.

The Christians I’ve met seem to understand how stuff works, at least to their own satisfaction. Up to a point.

Then I ask why God fucks us around so much. “Ah, say the Christians. You wouldn’t understand.”

So that’s why I’ve decided to just not understand on my own and cut out the not understanding bit that involves God.

Blowing Goats

It’s just been announced that the Royal Navy has stopped using goats in decompression experiments, which will come as a surprise to those who didn’t know they’d been doing it in the first place. Which was pretty much everybody, I should think.

In a press release which encourages the response “WHAT??!!”, or, indeed, “NO!!”, it’s claimed that goats were chosen because “their skulls are a similar shape to those of humans”. Now those are goats I don’t want to see. In fact, I don’t even want to think about them. My dreams are weird enough already.

It wasn’t all bad news for the animals. “They were never placed under water and they were not alone. Other goats were in there too," a defence official said yesterday, in a badly misjudged attempt at sounding reassuring.

Apparently the hapless creatures suffered brain damage, amongst other unpleasant effects. Presumably the difficulty in assessing whether a British sailor had suffered brain damage or not was the major barrier to using humans in the experiments.

For some reason they’ve stopped selling chipmunks in the pet shop across the road from where I live. I have a strange fixation with chipmunks – they’re quite cute, but they have an odd reptilian slitheriness which I find repellent but oddly hypnotic.

They're like squirrels. But worse. I used to go and stare at them until I began to feel worried and then go home, which was interesting. I miss them.

But there’s a lot more weird stuff out there to capture my imagination. “It is the first new species of giant elephant shrew to be discovered in more than 126 years" says Galen Rathbun of the California Academy of Sciences, referring to his latest discovery, and I, for one, will not be taking the time to argue with him.

It’s in Tanzania, which means I’m unlike to get a look at a real one, but at least the BBC have photographs.

Watch Them Burn...

Our family carbon footprint is probably that of an overfed yeti with Himalayan toe-bloat and we don’t yet run one of those hybrid cars which are made out of wattle and run on lentils or something, but Sooz and I do our best when it comes to recycling.

The local council pick up garden refuse, paper and cans every week. I’m constantly embarrassed by the number of beer cans. “Good party?” ask our neighbours. “Uhh, yes. Yes, party, right. Ahem.” I mutter, looking shifty.

I’ve taken to holding back the empty dog food tins so that I can put them in a layer on top of the Budweiser empties, but as the neighbourhood knows that we have only a terrier small enough to use a cat flap, it’s pretty obvious that I’m hiding something.

Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that, while the council collect the cans, we have to take glass and plastic bottles to the recycling centre ourselves.

Glass is okay. I don’t have a problem with glass, apart from the tiny broken shards that sometimes creep into the box and lacerate my best bass-playing finger when I’m not paying attention.

Wine bottles are great. They’re a reminder of gentle, drunken evenings with friends. Their very greenness is pleasing to the eye, particularly when the sun’s shining through them. And when you force them through the rubber grommetty things there’s a gorgeous suspended moment and then a satisfying crash. "I love the sound of breaking glass", as Nick Lowe once put it. And who doesn’t?



It’s the plastic bottles I can’t abide. There’s something fat and smug and insolent and yet insubstantial about them. They bounce out of the crate because they’ve been stacked too high, and anyway you should know better than to try to stack them because they don’t weigh anything.

They make an irritating flubbery bonking sound as they hit the floor, and you want to kill them by stamping but you don’t because it will do no good and that makes you insane with rage.

One day I’m going to follow them all the way to the place where they recycle them in the hope that I can watch them burn.

Multiple

According to The Daily Mail, Britney Spears may have multiple personalities. Which comes a surprise to those of us who thought she didn't even have one.