The bland leading the bland

Brit Awards – The Bland leading the Bland

Music is primal. It's about connecting and art, not business and awards. Danny Baker mentioned the resemblance between easy-going bland Katie Boyle and James Cordon. There will be no Jarvis Cocker moments with Cordon. He operates like a bad taxi driver, too much attention to the meter running and not enough to the road. The awards reward careerists. The line up of acts playing was cringeworthy. Our current twenty and thirty somethings won't have a Python, a Denis Potter, any difficult and different television, to pass onto their kids. Sanitised and bland and, in all likelihood, actually, under it all, about as wholesome as a supermarket burger.

Maybe anal retentiveness comes with knowing too much

Perhaps that's why we now live in a small 'c' conservative world. Us old gits? We only had full cream milk, and we walked the railway tracks because that was the quickest route. We had bikes without operational brakes, stopped by jamming your heels into the road and hoping for the best. We gave the dog chocolates, and grapes, and all manner of deadly-to-dogs stuff and he reached a ripe old age. Music was loud. The Who were the loudest rock 'n' roll band in the world. So their posters declared. That was a selling point, not a health warning.

Bags of nuts didn't have 'warning: contains nuts' on them.

Admittedly, while there were computers, they occupied warehouse-sized facilities and had the processing power of a petrol station watch. Our telly was black and white and my dad rigged up a large toggle-switch on the side (he drilled through the wooden cabinet to do so) that somehow ran some valves and transistors he cobbled together which enabled us to receive BBC2. Yes. Three (count 'em) channels. Playing a game involved going out, gathering a mischief (the collective noun for kids back then) and playing something, rather than sticking a cable up the arse of the telly and a DVD in the PS3. But...

...cuts and bruises sustained playing on the building site resulted in treatment with iodine and plasters, not trips to A&E and the ambulance chasing personal injury company for some compo. Food was to be scoffed as fast as possible in order to get back out playing, not something to agonise over. If my mum's cooking was anything to go by, it wasn't something to agonise about at all.

It was different. Footballers trained, then went to the pub and the bookies for the afternoon. Have no illusions, they were generally shorter, slower, less athletic, and if they came up against the current crop they'd get torn a new one. When fielding a fast bowler would stick out a size eleven boot and if that didn't work, then someone else had better chase it, because he wasn't going to.

As a nation we now celebrate the ordinary and the run of the mill. Edginess is frowned upon. Hilary Mantel wins the Booker, when Will Self deserved it for a much braver, more imaginative, but much more demanding novel.

I suppose the essence is that I think there's so much emphasis on comfort as an objective, that the joy of exploring the new and operating outside that comfort zone has been lost, and here we are: a small 'c' island.

On the coldest day in weeks...

...I was outside for most of the day. Two fleeces and a (sleeveless) jacket, and still my hands were numb and my eyes running and my ears stinging. Not so long ago it had to be the next ice age for me to reach for a sweatshirt.