Humph

I was catching up with the latest edition of the Best of Jazz from the BBC Radio website when I noticed an announcement to the effect that the programme will be taking a break and in future will consist of two 13 week series per year. After presenting the programme for 40 years, you might thin that Humphrey Lyttelton deserves a well-earned rest. But no, Humph - now in his 86th year - declares he wants to spend more time touring with his band!

Last year we were lucky enough to have Humph and his band as guests at the Marsden Jazz Festival. During a brief photo shoot before the concert I had the opportunity of meeting him. He is a lovely man : that phrase - so often overused - is the ideal description. Later, he gave the Marsden audience a night to remember. If having half a year without a regular weekly dose of Humph is the price we have to pay for more people being able to experience the joy of him and his band playing live, well so be it.

The Hills Are Alive With The Sound Of ....

"152", Mark said with professional distraction as his eyes swept the hazy detail of the Holme Valley, way below us. He didn't fool me, I knew he was desperately trying to locate the nearest Cottage Hospital. "Is that good or bad?", I panted. The words escaped amidst a spate of heavy breathing that would have done justice to the male lead in a pornographic film. "Well, good actually", he replied with just a tad less conviction than I would have liked. He went on to explain about the benefits of exercise which gets the pulse racing, the muscles aching, and the sweat dripping. Most of it passed me by : I was too busy fighting for my next breath.

Last week, my friend Mark had phoned to say that he had a few days off work and would I fancy going for a walk followed by a spot of lunch and a pint. I could choose the itinerary and the pub. I jumped at the chance of a day out walking the hills, breathing good Yorkshire air, drinking good Yorkshire beer. What was more, my wife couldn't veto the adventure on the basis of it placing too much strain on my frail, unfit, and overweight body : I was taking my own personal physician with me. The day dawned well : a morning mist gave way to a beautiful bright Spring day. We set out from the car park at Digley Reservoir and headed up a country lane. We were due to turn off the lane onto a footpath after a couple of hundred yards. By the time we got to the turn-off I had realised that I had made a dreadful mistake.

Mine is a body made for virtual exercise. I am a natural observer rather than a participant, and my preferred location for observing is the comfort of an armchair. But here I was facing the prospect of a five mile walk having just discovered that my lungs were no longer big enough to service my body. An hour later we were two-thirds of the way up what must be one of the still undiscovered mountains of the Western World. The guidebook told us to keep walking until we got to the top. Every time I thought we had eventually reached the peak, Mark would happily announce that there was only a few more yards to go. I became convinced that we had reached an altitude where oxygen starvation was a serious threat. I made a grab for the water bottle and collapsed on the ground. Mark took my pulse and declared me fit to continue.

We eventually reached the top. The views were magnificent. The colours would have done a Dulux Colour Chart proud. After a further hour we reached the pub and the pint tasted like the pint of your dreams : creamy, full-flavoured and marvellously refreshing. It was a very agreeable day. A day which will live long in the memory. The hills were alive with the sound of my racing heartbeat and, as Mark said, that's a good thing.

The Rock Tavern Book Club

It was a Friday night a good few weeks ago. A fair amount of ale and red wine had been drunk and the conversation flitted from subject to subject like a bee in search of nectar. What we really enjoyed was a good book a few of us agreed. What we need is a Book Club some idiot suggested (mea culpa) and within a few alcohol soaked moments the Rock Tavern Book Club was born. By the time the conversation had moved on to some more suitable subject, three of us were left to survey the fruits of our creation and toss a coin to see who would have first pick of our book of the month.

I won the toss and chose Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky partly because I had read how the uncompleted manuscript had been hidden away only to be declared a masterpiece 60 years after it had been written, partly because it looked like the kind of book which might require the added impetus of peer pressure to get past the second chapter, and mainly because it was on offer in Tescos and I had foolishly agreed to buy all three copies.

So three weeks down the line and some 400 pages later what can I take from the exercise. If nothing else, a book that will live long in the memory. It is partly the epic story of its conception, writing and eventual publication. The idea of the manuscript being carried around by her children in a suitcase as they fled from one hiding place to another. The fact that to have saved it was enough and having survived the war they were not able to bring themselves to read it for a further sixty years. It is partly the construction of the story : the cast of characters who are woven together and driven apart like the strands in a course fabric. And it is partly the stark truth of a work of wartime fiction which has been unpolluted by any trace of hindsight. This is how it must have been then. This is truth.

I am not sure that the Rock Tavern Book Club will survive. I hope it does. Having imposed my choice on the two other members of this very exclusive club it seems only fair that they take their revenge. Whatever, we will always have Paris.

Important Announcement : Product Re-Launch

I have decided to re-launch myself. Regular readers of these postings will not be too surprised by this announcement as I have been heading in this direction for some time now. The old Alan Burnett was very much last-century and as a brand it was getting tired, even perhaps a little stuffy. The product range had also failed to keep up with both modern tastes and modern technology. A radical change was needed - a product re-branding and re-launch. Over the last few days I have - like some latter-day René Descartes - been challenging every belief and value-judgement, every aspect of the social, intellectual and biological super-structure upon which the very concept of Alan Burnett rests.

I gave considerable thought to a name change : after all such things can be achieved relatively easily. Indeed, it can now all be done on-line for just £34. But there were two serious arguments against such a change. First, it is much more difficult to decide on a new name rather than to merely accept the one fate has offered you. One is always in danger of falling under the spell of current fashion or whatever name might be in the news at a particular point of time. Arbuthnot Wilberforce sounds fine now but might be thought of as idiosyncratic in years to come. And anyway, some time ago I had forked out good money to buy alanburnett.co.uk and I have a Yorkshireman's aversion to wasting good money.

Having rejected a name change, the re-branding would have to be more subtle. I immediately activated alanburnett.co.uk from its long cyber-sleep and it now acts as the main portal for the new brand. So far it says "The Personal Website of Alan Burnett" which I think is a very good start. Like all strong brands, I needed a logo and I have spend some considerable time today designing one. I am not absolutely convinced it works. The idea was to be sufficiently blurred and impressionistic to cover up both my imperfections and my collection of double chins. It is supposed to stress the brand essentials : a quizzical questioning - light and heavy, deep and insightful. I felt quite pleased with it until Amy, the dog, pointed out that it makes me look as if I have dropsy. Consequently I am launching an open competition to design an alternative logo. The prize, needless to say, is substantial.

The more observant reader will have noticed another change which has accompanied the re-branding. After a fifty-odd year love affair with Arial (or Helvetica as she used to be known) I have abandoned her for a young, slightly more curvaceous model - Trebuchet. Trebuchet, designed by Vincent Connare in 1996, is a humanist sans serif designed for easy screen readability. According to the blurb, it takes its inspiration from the sans serifs of the 1930s which had large x heights and round features intended to promote readability on signs. The typeface name is credited to a puzzle heard at Microsoft, where the question was asked, "could you build a Trebuchet (a form of medieval catapult) to launch a person from the main campus to the consumer campus, and how?" The Trebuchet fonts are intended to be the vehicle that fires your messages across the Internet. "Launch your message with a Trebuchet page".

So here I stand, at the dawn of a new era. I have a new web-site. I have a new font. I am about to be re-launched. My message can be launched with a Trebuchet page. All I need now is a message.

Has My Dog A Carbon Footprint?

I decided to calculate my carbon footprint today. It's just that we have a lot of dinner parties coming up and I thought it might make an interesting conversational gambit. You know the kind of thing : "mine is so big, how big is yours?". Anyway it is a vital statistic that everyone should know in this new green world. Indeed it is the kind of information you will need to declare on everything from an application form for a passport to a claim form for a new pair of false teeth. Name, address, telephone number, date of birth, body mass index, carbon footprint.

It is good to know that there is no shortage of very useful websites you can go to which will help you calculate your footprint. They are all slightly different in their approach, but most of them involve calculating your primary footprint (your individual carbon dioxide output based upon your use of energy and transport) and then adding on your secondary footprint (your share of all the other things that go on in society). As gas and electricity consumption tends to be a household purchase, most of the calculators allow you to feed in total quantities of energy used and then divide that by the number of people living in the household.

And this brought me up against my first major problem. Can I count the dog? It is an important question as without Amy there are just three of us and with her there is four. She is statistically significant. Leaving her out would bump up the carbon footprints of the rest of us by .... err by .... em .... well by a lot anyway. I tried doing a search of the various websites looking for guidance on this issue but to no avail. It remains one of the great unanswered questions of the modern age. Does my dog have a carbon footprint? One could argue that she doesn't because she is merely a passive consumer of energy and has no say on questions such as whether the fire should be turned on or whether we should watch TV or sit around the piano and sing songs. But I have no say in such questions either so if she manages to escape a carbon footprint then so should I.

Wanting to achieve as low a footprint as possible I took the executive decision to count her in as a member of the household (I balanced this value-judgement by deciding not to count the rabbit on the basis that he is pretty stupid). This then brought me up against my second major problem. The result of your carbon footprint calculation differs depending on which website you use. The calculator at the website of the UK organisation "Carbon Footprint" decided that I had a footprint of getting on for 13 tonnes of CO2 per year - well above the UK national average. It is even worse if I use the Sky Carbon Footprint calculator, with that my footprint is 13.5 tonnes. I was feeling pretty low until I chanced on the BP Calculator and with that I came out with a footprint of just 8 tonnes per year, significantly below the national average.

So my top tips for reducing your carbon footprint are :

1. Shop around. Leave that computer switched on a little longer. Surf the web a little more carefully. There is a calculator out there which can help you save the planet.

2. Get a dog so that you can share your carbon footprint with a four-legged friend.

The Boxer

My dear wife accused me of becoming eccentric today. I thought she might have spotted me writing down a lamp post number in my little black book whilst we were on our daily shopping expedition (she is still on holiday). But no, the source of her accusation was the fact that, during a two hour tour of the shops in Brighouse, I had managed to buy eight boxes. "But I like boxes", I patiently explained. "You're becoming eccentric", she replied as she made a bee-line for Wilkinson's.

I had in fact lied to her. I do not like boxes, I adore boxes. If given the opportunity of initiating my own religious cult, I would put boxes at the very centre of the act of worship. For me boxes have a mystical significance. They create order out of chaos : which is surely the rationale of any religious system of belief. You can take a diverse collection of disparate objects - pens, bull-dog clips, hearing-aid moulds, die-cast model cars, CD cases and spectacle frames - and enclose them within the systematised confines of cardboard or plastic squares and oblongs. That which can't be stacked can now be stacked. That which can't be found can now be found. Given the importance of boxes to my philosophy of life, buying eight today was not a sign of eccentricity - it was an extended act of worship.

Ever since being a poor boy I have liked boxes and now for the first time I can tell the story. Having squandered my resistance to the charms of boxes for nothing more than a pocketful of promises, I discovered that we were being told nothing but lies and jests..... But that is another song.

The Smell Of Social History

My wife is on holiday this week and therefore I am first on-call for any shopping trips when a more serious shopper is not available to accompany her. Today we went to Redbrick Mill in Batley. Redbrick Mill is "a lifestyle shopping location" which means it's a converted mill full of posh furniture and French antiques. With their vast open floors, old textile mills are ideal for conversion into such emporiums and Batley has become something of a national centre : Redbrick Mill is just one of several recently converted outlets located on something called "Mill Mile" which boasts, and I quote, "an inspirational shopping experience". Now I am going to try very hard not to be diverted down the path which examines the strange concept of the words "inspirational" and "shopping" sharing the same sentence. That would be tantamount to moaning, and I am attempting to restrict my "moaning posts" to just three a week.

So, there we were exploring the four floors which are home to "some of the biggest names and cutting-edge brands in interior design" (in case it means anything to anyone, there is - amongst others - Habitat, Heal's, Tansu, Fiori Bacchanalia, New Heights, and Feather and Black). After two floors of distressed leather footstools and gourmet kitchen pasta-coolers my eyes were beginning to glaze over and I found myself entering that near-trance like state that is equally known by Tibetan monks and husbands forced to go shopping. And then we got to the third floor.

We both immediately caught the smell which seemed to permeate the whole floor, but it was Isobel who identified it first. It was the smell of wool : the lanolin aroma that had been soaked up over the decades by the wooden floors and beams and was now being returned to the inspired pilgrims to this lifestyle shopping location. The looms were long silent, the bales of wool just a memory captured on sepia photographs. The clanking belts that drove the thrusting, shafting frames were long gone. But the smell of the wool remained, fixed in the very fabric of the building. It was enough to spark a torrent of memories. Isobel was face to face with her father again, transported back to the mill where he used to work. I was back in the West Riding of my youth when the wool mills were still the driving industrial force of the region. Once again it reminded me that, of all the senses, smell has perhaps the greatest capacity for stirring memories back to life.

The day out at Redbrick Mill was an enjoyable one. It was a day which left an impression. We discovered a destination we can take visitors to which illustrates how Yorkshire has now come to terms with its post-industrial status. We can show them Bo Concept, Bollingbrook and Cole's, Le Boudoir and Ice Interiors. But I am going to take my son there. I am going to take him up to the third floor. I am going to say "take a deep breath and smell". I am going to say "that is the smell of your past".

Kid In A Sweet Shop

It is weekend so I am going to avoid going on about life or work or lamp posts or any of the other big issues I normally focus on. I am going to take a leaf out of Edwin's book and open up a small trap-door into the battery drive of my psyche. Whatever turns you on and all that. In my case, it is music. There are deeply boring reasons why I care so much about music (if you have experienced tinnitus and deafness for 10 years, believe me you love music). But hang on a minute, I am preaching again. Stick to the music.

For some time I have been wrestling with the "kid in the sweetshop" syndrome which is almost a natural consequence of the digital age. When you can have access to almost everything anyone of note has ever thought, written, played, painted or sung - where do you start. Over the months my music collection has grown with almost algebraic momentum : I am so busy acquiring new music that I don't have the time to listen to it. So I have called a stop to acquisition for the time being and I have introduced a structured listening rotational schedule (or SLRS as I will refer to it).

I am limiting myself to just 10 CDs per week. These alone will populate my MP3 players and my Media Player "Now Playing" list. I am going in search of depth rather than coverage. It is the birth of a new me: a thinking, reflective, contemplative type of chap. For those remotely interested in such things my SLRS list for the first week of this unique experiment is as follows:

1. Songs of Love and Hate : Leonard Cohen (because, as I have said before, Leonard is a Saint)

2. Close Your Eyes : Stacey Kent (because I am in love with Stacey Kent and have been for years)

3. Compact Jazz : Chuck Mangione (because it is a nice sound)

4. Confluences : Jean-Louis Matinier (because I like the accordian)

5. Flirting With Twilight : Kurt Elling (because his voice goes places other voices can just dream of)

6. Waltz for Debby : Bill Evans (because he can make the silences between notes as mesmerising as the notes themselves)

7. The Bob Brookmeyer Quartet : Bob Brookmeyer (because the valve trombone is my favourite instrument)

8. Cello Concertos Vol 1 : Vivaldi (because it makes a change)

9. The Easy Way : Jimmy Giuffre (because its mathematics made into music)

10. Tal Farlows' Finest Hour : Tal Farlow (because this was chosen at random from my selection and, as you know, I am very fond of a bit of serendipity)

It Goes

It goes, it goes! The wake above is coming from our boat ("Worcester",) caused by the new electric motor drive - running at about a quarter-ahead.

The moment all the more poignant because when we tried yesterday, um, nothing happened. Lacking an instruction book we'd cavalierly removed a bit we shouldn've. (A flurry of emails and phone calls to the parts supplier eventually revealed our error.)

At full ahead, the boat leaps forward like a racehorse from its stall. Almost. Strangely enough there's a slight delay as the motor builds up speed and then the boat suddenly shoots forwards. In our case restrained by the mooring ropes.

And even at full power, you basically can't hear the motor except nearby and with the deckboards not in place. The noise of the water is greater than that of the motor.

What now? Well, some wiring for the generator and ancilliaries to be completed... but in a week or ten days, all should be ready for sea trials. On the canal (not even the river until that's stream subsides a bit!)

And a big launch party? Ah well, sadly one can only take ten people on board at a time... so several smaller ones, I guess!

Tonight Matthew, I'm Going To Be A Foreign Correspondent

Have you ever had one of those mornings when you wake up and you know you have the answer? As readers will know the question which has been dominating my life of late is "what can I do with myself" And this morning, as the flakes of sleep fell from my eyes, I discovered the answer. I will become a foreign correspondent.

I went straight to Google (I am giving Yahoo a rest pending the outcome of my job application with them) and typed in "I Want To Be A Foreign Correspondent". I was pointed towards a very useful Factsheet produced by the Overseas Press Club of America which provided a wealth of advice. It also brought the first potential problems. The essential requisites include a knowledge of foreign languages, copious quantities of energy, an adventurous spirit, and the ability to survive in hostile environments. Those who know me will already have spotted the potential flaw in the grand plan. I have no foreign languages (even my command of English can be iffy at times), I have as much energy as a drained Duracell, my spirit is so unadventurous that I once turned down the chance of training to be an accountant because it might be too much of a risk ...... and I am a natural-born coward. So another idea hits the dust?

Now just hold on a minute. I suddenly remembered what I had written down in my Yahoo application form. My special skill is finding innovative solutions to problems that have not yet been identified. If there was ever a time for an innovative solution, it was now. The innovative solution I eventually came up with was "if I can't go to become a foreign correspondent then the foreign correspondent role must come to me". After all foreign is a relative term. I could be a foreign correspondent based in Britain reporting for ... well for someone or other. All I needed to do now was to find the problem which hadn't yet been identified. Again, a flash of what can only be described as pure genius came my way.

The Bakersfield Californian does not have a foreign correspondent based in Britain. As far as I know it does not have a European correspondent or even a correspondent based outside the City limits. In an e-mail to the editor sent earlier today I identified their problem and provided them with my innovative solution. I would be their foreign correspondent. I even sent my first dispatch (I will not reprint it here for copyright reasons). What a scheme. What a man. As my mother used to say to me - "Alan, you are so sharp one day you will cut yourself".

Application Error

This weekend, thousands of doctors will be taking to the streets in the UK to join protest marches in London and Glasgow. So what are they protesting against - low pay, long hours, the future of the National Health Service? No, the cause which has got their stethoscopes swinging to the beat of a pipe and drum band is a new on-line job application system called MTAS. The introduction of MTAS is a central part of the government-inspired reform of medical training in the UK, known as "Modernising Medical Careers". As a result of the new system all junior doctors are applying for their jobs - all of which will start on the same day - using the same newly-installed computerised system. The results are, of course, chaos.

It is not just the centralisation of a system that does not need to be centralised (although everyone would be well advised to avoid being ill on the 1st August 2007 - the date all the new appointments will take effect). It is not just that the new system is based on a largely untested software system which appears to have major flaws built into it. It is that the system has been designed in such a way as to compartmentalise the application process to allow "objective assessment" based on pre-determined criteria. Under the system application forms are broken down into sections and distributed to different sets of assessors who mark according to rigorous scoring regimes. CV's are not allowed during the shortlisting process and therefore everything rests on a series of unconnected value judgements. Even the interviews are undertaken by a revolving series of mini-panels. At no point in the process is anyone taking the responsibility of making an overall judgement based on all the information which may be available about a candidate.

The result of this process is that thousands of highly-qualified and eminently suitable junior doctors are going to be without work in August - or working in Brighton when they wanted to work in Bradford, or learning the skills of the heart surgeon when they wanted to become a GP. It is a story which is becoming too familiar - when untested software "solutions" team up with misdirected equality filters beware.

My interest in the case of the protesting doctors was occasioned by a more general thought process about job applications in the global age. Is the move to paperless, on-line applications a liberating or a constraining development? In the old days applying for a job entailed a number of built-in "effort-filters". You had to search through newspaper columns looking for a suitable post; write for an application form; complete the said application form; return it .... etc. Now you can do on-line searches and complete on-line application forms in minutes. In some cases you don't even need to find a specific job to apply for, you can go down the speculative application route. So are the results from the new system better than those of the old one? I feel an experiment coming on.

Now there is this chap I know (for the sake of argument let's call him Alan Burnett). Reasonably qualified and with experience in everything from tidal flood defence work to political campaigning, bus conducting to web-site designing. He's at a bit of a loose end at the moment, kicking his figurative heels, blogging even (always a sure sign). I have persuaded him to complete an on-line application form for Yahoo (I'm getting to like Yahoo more and more and they were so good about lamplitman). He used the "Can't find anything suitable" section which basically says "here I am, come and get me". The application process took about three minutes and involved responding to a few very general questions like "Why do you want to work for Yahoo?" He was honest throughout, listing his main abilities as thinking and finding innovative solutions to problems not yet identified. He has already received an acknowledgement - his application is currently being considered. No doubt he will keep us fully informed of developments.

In the meantime, spare a thought for those junior doctors on Saturday.