UKHamlet's Blog

“She has the sweetest darkest side. And when it comes into her eyes I know iron and steel couldn’t hold me.” From An Audience With The Pope from the album The Seldom Seen Kid by Elbow.

Elbow have largely flown under my radar, acquiring an accretion of awards and celebrity plaudits as they flew by. Both the Brits and Mercury music prizes have landed on their collective mantlepiece and despite looking like a young, straight Stephen Fry, Guy Garvey has delivered on his promise to add to their predominantly female fan-base. With the release of “The Seldom Seen Kid” and their introduction to my car stereo, they have a male fan too.

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They’ve been around for a while – forming in 1990 as Mr Soft – as wrong a title as you could possibly contrive without assistance. Rock bands are never soft, particularly “alternative” rock bands and that’s where Elbow have pitched their tent. To their credit, they realised the error of their ways and thanks to Denis Potter and the character Philip Marlow, from his mini-series “The Singing Detective”, they switched to Elbow, which according to Marlow is; “the most sensuous word in the English language”, not for its definition, but instead for the way you feel when you say it. I’ve been reliably informed, the inside of the elbow, the crook, is very sensuous anyway. I’ll get back to you on that one once the research has been done.

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The Seldom Seen Kid, is the latest of four albums from the band, released in March 2008. Preceding it were: Asleep in the back, Cast of thousands, and Leaders of the free world. The progression in skill, both in terms of song writing strengths, and production are clearly illustrated if you listen to each of the albums in succession. They are now at the peak of their powers and it really does show, because there is scarcely a track on the album that isn’t of the highest of standards. Continue reading

“Blimey, are you listening to Obama’s missus?” Lol missed the usual pleasantries.
“Trying to, but someone’s on the phone spoiling it.” I was and he was.
“Soz mate, I’ll shut the fuck up, shall I?” He took my silence as the affirmative it was meant to be. For the next three minutes we both sat there, either end of a phone line, not saying anything, but meaning everything. When she’d finished my lip was trembling, and I couldn’t say anything anyway. The sharp intake of breath with a slight terminal shudder coming from the Westminster end of our line told me I was not alone in this respect.

Few politicians, if any, can inspire me to an emotional response with their words. I get the occasional flicker of anger, but even then it subsides quickly, replaced by a weariness borne out of several decades of despair. Even fewer politician’s wives can evoke any kind of response at all. Michelle Obama is different though.

Her powerful speech to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School in Islington took my breath away. The sheer passion, and emotion evident in her voice, the message her words conveyed and the response she had from her largely teenage audience, all spoke of a woman who not only believed what she was saying, but knew how to say it and not just to the hundred or so youngsters in her immediate audience. Her voice broke too as she referred to the girls as “diamonds”, my heart broke at the same time because I knew, I knew exactly what she was saying. Better still, anyone watching now knows about those hidden diamonds, just waiting to be discovered and polished.

The real Michelle according to Google

“If you want to know the reason why I am standing here, it’s because of education,” she told them.
“I never cut class. I loved getting As, I liked being smart. I liked being on time. I thought being smart is cooler than anything in the world. You, too, with these values, can control your own destiny. You, too, can pave the way.”
“For nothing in my life ever would have predicted that I would be standing here as the first African-American First Lady. I was not raised with wealth or resources or any social standing to speak of. I was raised on the South Side of Chicago — that’s the real part of Chicago.” Continue reading

Oooo... myself....

Have you noticed how call centre people, shop assistants, customer facing civil servants and local government officers and occasionally TV and radio personalities have started using “myself”, rather than “me”, or “I”? As if this were not bad enough, they are also juxtaposing “I” and “me”. The commonest error is to use “I”, because it sounds posh. It’s not; it just reveals the paucity of your knowledge of grammar. So stop it, now. 

These are the very same criminals who use “lesser” instead of “fewer”. Flogging is too good for them, but before I go around beating these low-lives, and probably getting myself arrested, I thought I’d explain in simple terms how to use me, myself and I. Continue reading

Spam is everywhere now. You can’t open an email account without it being infected with this most modern of afflictions – the doorstep salesman in your inbox. The main problems are: the sheer volume, the monotony and the lack of quality. Surely someone, somewhere has something to sell me other than body part enlargements, stiffeners and painkillers. Well, yes, actually they have.

I had an email – quite uninvited – that purports to increase the likelihood of someone responding to my e-marketing efforts. Yeah, I can see the cynically raised eyebrows: so YOU’RE a spammer too, you’re thinking. No, I’m not. I do send out lots of emails, but only if people ask me. There’s the difference. Anyway, they reckoned I was more likely to respond because they’d sent me a picture that was personalised to me. Clever, I thought, but unlikely to do more than interest me in buying the technology that produces personalised pictures to amuse my friends. Once I’d seen the prices, that went West instantly. Still, it gave me something to blog about today.

Martyn's Apple

It’s quite nice, I’ll admit, but not exactly the kind of thing that would make me want to check out anything other than the technology that did it. I think this one gets filed under “interesting, but useless”.

After tearing up the formbook to beat Samoa in the sevens RWC final, Wales reversed their pool defeat to the Argentinian Pumas to emerge victorious and find themselves crowned as World Champions.

Full article on the Cardiff Guardian

“I being of sound mind…”

Last Will and Testament? No, this is a service level contract. The training department has decided that they want to become a semi-autonomous organisation within the company and as such have sought to renegotiate their inter-departmental agreements.

This caught the I.T department on the hop, Jiffy our I.T. Manager quickly realised this has nothing to with golf or rock climbing so delegated it to Mungo, the User Technical Support Manager. This was a rare moment of perspicacity for a man who quite frequently scores lower in tests than the Doom artificial intelligence parser. Mungo on the other hand is a thinker, although in a weasel-like-avoid-work-at-all-costs fashion admittedly. He took one long look at the draft letter and returned it to Training with a series of grammatical corrections scrawled in the margin.

This is a classical negotiating gambit, the opening shot of the three-phase postponement strategy. This comprises; quibble about technicalities like grammar and definitions, reject the entire document and replace it with something completely meaningless, wait for the counter blast and repeat phase one. It’s the management equivalent of

10 REM
20 KILL *.*
30 GOTO 10

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Ciara Adams... sigh

This is an unashamed plug for a singer who surely deserves a wider audience than she’s currently getting.

Ciara Adams is a charismatic and versatile performer . Her background in opera, theatre, and cabaret, and her undeniable soul for jazz combine to create a delectably original style.

Ciara’s new record, Last of the Bohemians produced by Tim Abraham at the Hive Studios in Toronto, blends her style with an influence of pop, electronica and contemporary groove. The record contains her own original music with the addition of a soaring cover of the French torch chanson La Bohéme by Charles Aznavour and an original rendition of Compay Segunda’s Chan Chan, made famous by the Buena Vista Social Club.

A classically trained opera singer, Ciara moved to London, England shortly after graduating from Queen’s University. In London, Ciara attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. While at the Guildhall, Ciara had the opportunity to study the music of Kurt Weill in Italy, opening up an entirely new world of influence including the songs of Jacques Brel, Hollaender, Tom Lehrer, and more.

After graduation, Ciara recorded a series of Children’s CD’s for National retailer Mothercare, and performed on stage as an ensemble member at The Royal National Theatre. Ciara has even found herself singing Irish folk music in a Mongolian Ger and Fauré on the streets of Toulouse.

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Ian Kerr, private investigator, could be named more appropriately, but only just. He is to be prosecuted by the Information Commissioner for allegedly selling private information to companies in the construction industry who wanted to vet potential employees.

Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner says he seized documents on individuals that had comments appended such as: “communist”, “definite problems, no go”, “lazy and a trouble maker”, “do not touch”, “orchestrated a strike” and so on.

Kerr kept an illegal intelligence database on over three thousand individuals, of which the commission said: “This is a serious breach of the Data Protection Act. Not only was personal information held on individuals without their knowledge or consent, but the very existence of the database was repeatedly denied.”

So, here we have a man trading illegal information to companies on individuals who were participating in perfectly legal activities such as trade union membership being brought to book. It’s probably the tip of the iceberg though. An employer I know has been approached on a number of occasions by investigators who have offered services of this kind. How serious they were, I have no idea, but their existence and this case leads me to believe this is the norm rather than the exception.

The construction industry is particularly hairy arsed and most of the people at the top of the ladder are incredibly thick: classic examples of the buoyant characteristics of faecal matter. So getting caught with their dicks in their hands is par for the course and not particularly surprising. The Tarquin and Rodney set that run the City, the banks and the blue chips are not so stupid. They have the common sense to cover their tracks and not employ dumb-arses like Kerr.

The truth of the matter is the board rooms of Britain are populated by men (and a few women) who are of a similar political mind. Their social standing is an irrelevance, but a disproportionate number of them are from similar social backgrounds, mostly what used to be described as the old ruling classes. The latter is increasingly becoming less the case, but the former is entrenched. You simply do not see anyone with a left leaning outlook in positions of responsibility in these companies. There are virtually no exceptions to this rule.

Now, there may be many reasons for this, not least the simple fact that if you are of the left you probably do not attempt to climb the corporate ladder, but surely there might have been a few exceptions to that rule. Or even one.

When was the last time a leading banker, industrialist or anyone at the top of British business was criticised or complemented for being too socially responsible? How many companies have policies that make Trade Unions irrelevant? Because that’s the crux of this matter: if Trade Unions didn’t need to exist, they wouldn’t. Continue reading

Ronny cries all the way to Nat West

The press has been in a lather about Fred’s pension recently - and to be fair, the revelations that his pension isn’t just £600k, £650k, or even the figure I’ve given of £693k, but actually tips the scales at a humongous £703,000 – which is sufficient to make even the most steadfast of editors to self-righteously foam at the mouth. I’ll admit I did a bit of foaming too, but it’s all just jealousy really. I’d have a bit of that if I could.

Anyway, to put it into perspective – the oily footballer Ronaldo has been offered £200k a week salary – so Fred’s annual pension is roughly three and half weeks pay for the Portuguese international. The difference, as my mate Kev says, is Ronaldo hasn’t lost anyone twenty-four billion pounds. Still, £200k a week for falling over is good money by anyone’s standards.

Postscript. It appears Sir Fred is getting ten grand for doing eff-all for about about a month. This has got Wapping beating their collective bishops again, barking out headlines of outrage and contempt like he’s done something wrong. So what guys? It’s the system you wanted. Just saying, like.

We don’t get on very well. Me and Liz, I mean. She’s not aware of this, which is as well, because I’d probably end up in a car crash or something.  That said, I’d like to pay her a little tribute, and it’s this: you take a great photo, love.

Gawd bless yah ma'am