I’ve been away from home this week working in Madrid and clocking up some more air miles to add to the thousands I already have tucked away in a drawer somewhere in cyber space. The light at the end of my tunnel may have been switched off lately to save money but I have amassed enough free travel to take several choirs and all of Madonna’s ex husbands on a First Class return trip to a nice sandy beach somewhere on Mars. Great location but not much atmosphere.
But two things are stopping me. The first is that the airlines, as usual, go out of their way to make it impossible for anyone to actually spend free air points. I’m told the flights I qualify for leave at three o’clock in the morning and fly over Iraq. If I then ask the nice lady at British Airways to get me one anyway, she’ll say that they’re reserved for Sagittarians only and, even if I lie, the computer says the seats are available only in leap years or on days when a canonised saint with Blood Group A is caught doing coke at one of Hugh Heffner's parties.
The second, and more important reason that I don’t use the free travel, is that I’m starting to feel guilty about my carbon footprint. Now I don’t usually do guilt so please believe me when I say that this is a momentous event. I think the last time I felt guilty was many years ago when I strung together several rarely heard profanities and screamed them at my brother after he broke wind in a silent, yet Chemical Ali type, manner. He wasn’t impressed with me drawing attention to him and, if I’m honest, neither were the nuns at that particular school assembly.
But now the relentless nagging of the conservationists, and the lobbying of the recycling and globe hugging brigade, has at last got to me so I’ve decided the air travel will have to slow down. My carbon footprint is currently the size of a Doc Martin boot and, if it’s true what they say about men’s feet, any carbon ladies I meet will soon be swooning.
I have cut down my use of the car and I now try walking more but I’m having problems with the rest of this cherish the planet stuff. In Argos yesterday, on picking up an MP3 player I’d just bought, I was offered a plastic bag. Aware that everyone now believes my bag would lead to future babies being born with three big toes growing out of their two heads, I declined. So, of course, I carried the box I’d just bought around for three hours along with various other bits and pieces and ended up dropping them all over the street.
I know that you’re probably thinking that I should get one of these Hessian bags for life and bring it with me when I go shopping, but my new enthusiasm for the environment has its limits. I am not going to walk around looking like a social worker shopping for a nice tie dyed T shirt to wear at his wedding.
I got so fed up picking my stuff off pavements that I went for a hot chocolate in Costa. Their environmental arithmetic in counting the pennies donated from triple shot espressos meant my paper cup had a green plastic lid on it with a frog embossed in the middle and they handed me a leaflet boasting how the company is now sourcing coffee from sustainable plantations run by sperm whales. I’m sure the hundreds of trees that were cut down to make those brochures will be pleased that their sacrifice was not in vain.
And now, this week, I get back from my travels to find I have to get to grips with our council’s new waste disposal plans which mean we have a wheelie bin for rubbish, a green bin for food waste, a box for papers, a container for tin cans, one for bottles, a bag for cardboard and a further bin for my patience. I opened a wrapped sweet yesterday and thought it tasted like landfill so decided to put it in the bin. But which one? The toffee had to go in the food disposal receptacle, the cellophane in a plastic and packaging box, and then the silver wrapping in another box for tins cans and aluminium. By the time I’d walked around looking for all the receptacles, I’d worn a groove in our ethically sourced teak and ivory studded floorboards.
And the smell? Try keeping a box of old food tin cans lying around your house for a week beside a box of food waste and you’ll soon see why I’m reminded again of my brother at school assembly. Air freshener is now my new best friend as I blast millions of CFCs in to the environment to cover up the stink of saving the world. We’re supposed to be doing this so that we can stop and smell the roses that would otherwise die out, but their scent will be lost forever behind the smell of council recycling.
So I have an idea. I am suggesting that from now on we all do our grocery shopping at the supermarket as usual and then meet in the car park and eat it. We can put the leftovers and wrappings in their bins and let them sort it out while a whole new spirit of neighbourliness and friendship will rise in the car parks which will be overrun with families cooking on primus stoves and actually talking to each other. We can even organise dinner parties at the weekends with Vera Lynne singing and the kids being amused by riding the supermarket’s escalators.
I’m sure you probably think I’m Neanderthal and hopeless for not grasping this whole planet saving thing, but I promise I’ll do my best to hold my nose and get on with it.
But I can’t help wishing I could just get on a plane and fly away from it all.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Saturday Night At The Movies
Last weekend I felt the nerves and guilt only the innocent experience as I was caught up for a couple of hours in a high security operation. It felt quite menacing being surrounded by mean looking guys in black suits, talking in to walkie talkies and staring at me through high powered nightscope lenses, but I tried to ignore them and carried on eating my choc ice.
This could have been a secret service stake out, a police surveillance operation or a Taliban Talent Night, but the security was much tighter than that. It was, in fact, the first screening in the UK of the movie High School Musical 3.
Working for a radio station I’m lucky and get invited to all sorts of premieres, concerts and glamorous events. I’m usually invited as the night’s piece of rough, but the trade off is that I also have to suffer going to things that put me to sleep, simply because my kids want to go. I begged and pleaded, and even managed, to get out of going to the musical Wicked, but High School Musical was a body swerve too far for me to manage and so, joining hundreds of screaming teenage girls, I took my seat at Disney’s new movie. The cynic in me wants to say it was a pile of steaming, money grubbing, manure but the cynic in me has left the building. I didn’t fall asleep, the kids had a great time and the choc ices were particularly good.
HSM3 is the current teenage feel good movie, reminiscent of more innocent times, more moody than hoodie, and the story is a bit like one of those old black and white rainy Sunday afternoon movies featuring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney where every problem is solved with someone shouting “I know how to cheer us all up, let’s put on a show”.
Got caught stealing apples? Let’s put on a show. Mom and Pop catch you listening to that new fangled popular beat music? Let’s put on a show. Been arrested shoplifting lager while smuggling coke in your baby’s pram? Let’s put on a show. In short The High School Musical franchise is as innocent and wholesome a way of parting kids from their money as there could be.
These movies will have escaped your attention if you don’t have kids but you really need to know about them in case you’re ever a contestant in a quiz where popular culture comes up as your topic for a million pounds. It’s a phenomenon selling millions of DVDs and albums, not to mention lunch boxes, posters, back packs and over one hundred and sixty other items. You can rail against it all you want but you’d be a very sad person indeed. It’s simply the new millennium’s answer to Grease or Saturday Night Fever, a movie franchise featuring the most subtle, understated and quiet advertising campaign a marketing budget the size of Iceland’s debt can buy.
I remember the excitement of seeing Saturday Night Fever for the first time and my young brain thinking how smart and witty the dialogue was, especially in the scene outside the club where one of Tony’s mates has bagged the new girl in town and taken her out to the back seat of his car. The panting noises left little to the imagination but, just after the screams subsided, I heard my first classic movie line. “That was great. Er, what did you say your name was?” Too young to be James Bond, I vowed that if ever I managed to kiss a girl, that was the line I was going to use.
The music was everywhere I went in Glasgow back then and continued for years afterwards. When I worked at a local station called Radio Clyde, alongside a disco DJ called Mr Superbad, I’ll never forget him reading out a request from a woman who had lost her son. The boy had been burned to death in a house fire and, from out of the ashes, Superbad’s solemn requiem soared suitably phoenix like. “I’m so sorry for the loss of your son in that awful fire”, he said. “Let me cheer you up with a record. Here’s Disco Inferno.”
Of course back then movie previews and premieres were much simpler events as the film companies didn’t have to surround the audience with security men worried about mobile phones and small home video cameras pirating their investment. Even if we’d had the camera technology back then the best of Koreans would have found it difficult to hide a couple of hundred betamax video copies under their coats as they approached you in B&Q car park hissing “wanna buy video, cheap?”.
But back to High School Musical. My kids have souvenir posters, notebooks, backpacks and DVDs and even my wife, who I promise you still has a photo of Donny Osmond on her key ring, has put a song from the movie as her ring tone on her mobile. It’s embarrassing to sit with her as “We’re Flying, Soaring…..” echoes round restaurants or worse, funerals.
You’ll get the chance to see the film yourself when it opens worldwide in a few weeks time and if you go then you must tell me what happens when Zac Efron climbs up a drainpipe and enters Gabriella’s bedroom while she’s lying on the bed singing. Just as he entered, my eleven year old daughter said she would burst if she didn’t get to the loo. I offered to take her but she didn’t want to miss anything and, by the time I’d finished pleading, the action had moved on.
It gave me inspiration for an advertising slogan Disney can have for free for their campaign. It sums up the wholesomeness of the movie and the perfection of the cast. The line reads “High School Musical, where no one ever goes to the toilet”. Not even the security men.
This could have been a secret service stake out, a police surveillance operation or a Taliban Talent Night, but the security was much tighter than that. It was, in fact, the first screening in the UK of the movie High School Musical 3.
Working for a radio station I’m lucky and get invited to all sorts of premieres, concerts and glamorous events. I’m usually invited as the night’s piece of rough, but the trade off is that I also have to suffer going to things that put me to sleep, simply because my kids want to go. I begged and pleaded, and even managed, to get out of going to the musical Wicked, but High School Musical was a body swerve too far for me to manage and so, joining hundreds of screaming teenage girls, I took my seat at Disney’s new movie. The cynic in me wants to say it was a pile of steaming, money grubbing, manure but the cynic in me has left the building. I didn’t fall asleep, the kids had a great time and the choc ices were particularly good.
HSM3 is the current teenage feel good movie, reminiscent of more innocent times, more moody than hoodie, and the story is a bit like one of those old black and white rainy Sunday afternoon movies featuring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney where every problem is solved with someone shouting “I know how to cheer us all up, let’s put on a show”.
Got caught stealing apples? Let’s put on a show. Mom and Pop catch you listening to that new fangled popular beat music? Let’s put on a show. Been arrested shoplifting lager while smuggling coke in your baby’s pram? Let’s put on a show. In short The High School Musical franchise is as innocent and wholesome a way of parting kids from their money as there could be.
These movies will have escaped your attention if you don’t have kids but you really need to know about them in case you’re ever a contestant in a quiz where popular culture comes up as your topic for a million pounds. It’s a phenomenon selling millions of DVDs and albums, not to mention lunch boxes, posters, back packs and over one hundred and sixty other items. You can rail against it all you want but you’d be a very sad person indeed. It’s simply the new millennium’s answer to Grease or Saturday Night Fever, a movie franchise featuring the most subtle, understated and quiet advertising campaign a marketing budget the size of Iceland’s debt can buy.
I remember the excitement of seeing Saturday Night Fever for the first time and my young brain thinking how smart and witty the dialogue was, especially in the scene outside the club where one of Tony’s mates has bagged the new girl in town and taken her out to the back seat of his car. The panting noises left little to the imagination but, just after the screams subsided, I heard my first classic movie line. “That was great. Er, what did you say your name was?” Too young to be James Bond, I vowed that if ever I managed to kiss a girl, that was the line I was going to use.
The music was everywhere I went in Glasgow back then and continued for years afterwards. When I worked at a local station called Radio Clyde, alongside a disco DJ called Mr Superbad, I’ll never forget him reading out a request from a woman who had lost her son. The boy had been burned to death in a house fire and, from out of the ashes, Superbad’s solemn requiem soared suitably phoenix like. “I’m so sorry for the loss of your son in that awful fire”, he said. “Let me cheer you up with a record. Here’s Disco Inferno.”
Of course back then movie previews and premieres were much simpler events as the film companies didn’t have to surround the audience with security men worried about mobile phones and small home video cameras pirating their investment. Even if we’d had the camera technology back then the best of Koreans would have found it difficult to hide a couple of hundred betamax video copies under their coats as they approached you in B&Q car park hissing “wanna buy video, cheap?”.
But back to High School Musical. My kids have souvenir posters, notebooks, backpacks and DVDs and even my wife, who I promise you still has a photo of Donny Osmond on her key ring, has put a song from the movie as her ring tone on her mobile. It’s embarrassing to sit with her as “We’re Flying, Soaring…..” echoes round restaurants or worse, funerals.
You’ll get the chance to see the film yourself when it opens worldwide in a few weeks time and if you go then you must tell me what happens when Zac Efron climbs up a drainpipe and enters Gabriella’s bedroom while she’s lying on the bed singing. Just as he entered, my eleven year old daughter said she would burst if she didn’t get to the loo. I offered to take her but she didn’t want to miss anything and, by the time I’d finished pleading, the action had moved on.
It gave me inspiration for an advertising slogan Disney can have for free for their campaign. It sums up the wholesomeness of the movie and the perfection of the cast. The line reads “High School Musical, where no one ever goes to the toilet”. Not even the security men.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Money's Too Tight To Mention
www.paulcoia.com
I received an update on my pension forecast this week and what miserable reading it makes. Being one of these insufferable people who first paid in to a pension after my first paper round, I was horrified by the latest printout which looks like the sales graph from a firm selling asbestos flavoured cigarettes.
I realise that it may recover over the many, too many, years I have left until I retire, but perhaps it won’t and I’ll be left wandering the streets, tap dancing and playing a harmonica with an old paper cup at my feet for donations – not from music lovers, obviously. This stealing of my old age is the reason I’m finding it tough to remember that I usually see myself as being one of nature’s givers; unnaturally kind, diffident, and unstintingly selfless to others - especially when they want to talk about me. The global financial mess is starting to hurt and I’m struggling to prevent the milk of human kindness in me from turning distinctly cheesy.
I can, on occasion, fall for sob stories and feel sympathy for despots, dictators, murderers, granny bashers and, at a push, Manchester United supporters, but don’t ask me to sympathise right now with investment bankers. They have been getting away with little brain and big rewards for too long and multi tasking for them has been screwing our pension funds and their wives at the same time. But now the game’s up and they’re pleading that they didn’t get it wrong, they were simply as unlucky as a duck who’s allergic to feathers.
We all know, of course that this is nonsense and that they brought it on themselves, so I couldn’t even muster a tiny bit of sadness as I watched the mobs marching through the streets of Washington this week with placards calling for them all to be jailed. I was only sorry that I couldn’t be there helping to round up anyone in a pin striped suit and send them on a camping holiday in a nice orange boiler suit, to a little place near Cuba. Does this make me a bad person? If it does then as Michael Jackson, another great magician at making money disappear, once said, I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m really, really bad. And I don’t give a stuff.
The banking fraternity has been licked more effectively than the glossy new food stamps they’re bringing home and they have experienced the insecurities and pitfalls that we mere mortals take for granted. Pawning their Blackberrys and tossing aside pretensions while binning their spreadsheets and wiping their bottoms with yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, these masters of their own imploding universe are now using words like Doomed, Bankrupt and Unemployed rather than Hedging, Derivatives and Short Selling.
So, it’s been one giant leap for the world’s money men and one small step for the English language. Somehow, whilst sewing elbow patches on their Saville Row suits and rushing round Poundstretchers spending their Job Seeker’s Allowance, they have started speaking English again. They are now, as they used to call it when they had a job, talking Vanilla.
An acquaintance who works for one of the banks that has just been taken over has four cars, two large houses with no mortgage on either and spends more on school fees in a year than I earn. His daughter told me last year that she had been put on the school council which now meant, and I quote, “interfacing with the Teachers in a different way to rationalise pupils’ input”. This poor kid was then thirteen years old.
Her dad would have previously described his current situation as having Short Term Cash Flow Issues Due To Endogenous Retreat In The Employment Market but no one was in any doubt about what his daughter was saying as she arrived at her school the other day and announced to her classmates, “We’re poor now”. Mind you, the word Poor is relative as daddy has a few million squired away in the bank so I’m not taking round food parcels just yet.
One of these newly unemployed Wall Street numpties rang me last week from New York. His name is Ronald and I have never met nor heard of him before. He has now taken a new job selling shares and rang me with a jolly voice that even Ronald McDonald would find nauseating, telling me I will erect a statue to him in my garden and worship it each day as he’s going to make me millions. He can’t understand why I won’t buy shares from a complete stranger on the ‘phone so, refusing to accept No for an answer, he capped it all this week by saying “let’s start small then to give you confidence. Can I put you down for seven hundred thousand dollars worth?”.
My laughter drowned out whatever he said next and I told him, in words of four letters, never to call me again.
You may not agree with my lack of sympathy for people like Ronald but I hope you can see why I’m finding it difficult not to laugh out loud at their predicament. Of course it’s serious and, as these sharks look for alternative employment, we will all be affected by new scams as well as the existing fallout - everything from our house sales falling through to pensions being decimated even further. But at last we can have a conversation with these people who have stolen our peace of mind. Even if English isn’t their first language they can now understand words like Stuffed! Get Lost! Game Over! Goodnight!
I hope the ones who are still in employment can understand these four letter words too. Sort. Your. Mess. Fast.
I received an update on my pension forecast this week and what miserable reading it makes. Being one of these insufferable people who first paid in to a pension after my first paper round, I was horrified by the latest printout which looks like the sales graph from a firm selling asbestos flavoured cigarettes.
I realise that it may recover over the many, too many, years I have left until I retire, but perhaps it won’t and I’ll be left wandering the streets, tap dancing and playing a harmonica with an old paper cup at my feet for donations – not from music lovers, obviously. This stealing of my old age is the reason I’m finding it tough to remember that I usually see myself as being one of nature’s givers; unnaturally kind, diffident, and unstintingly selfless to others - especially when they want to talk about me. The global financial mess is starting to hurt and I’m struggling to prevent the milk of human kindness in me from turning distinctly cheesy.
I can, on occasion, fall for sob stories and feel sympathy for despots, dictators, murderers, granny bashers and, at a push, Manchester United supporters, but don’t ask me to sympathise right now with investment bankers. They have been getting away with little brain and big rewards for too long and multi tasking for them has been screwing our pension funds and their wives at the same time. But now the game’s up and they’re pleading that they didn’t get it wrong, they were simply as unlucky as a duck who’s allergic to feathers.
We all know, of course that this is nonsense and that they brought it on themselves, so I couldn’t even muster a tiny bit of sadness as I watched the mobs marching through the streets of Washington this week with placards calling for them all to be jailed. I was only sorry that I couldn’t be there helping to round up anyone in a pin striped suit and send them on a camping holiday in a nice orange boiler suit, to a little place near Cuba. Does this make me a bad person? If it does then as Michael Jackson, another great magician at making money disappear, once said, I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m really, really bad. And I don’t give a stuff.
The banking fraternity has been licked more effectively than the glossy new food stamps they’re bringing home and they have experienced the insecurities and pitfalls that we mere mortals take for granted. Pawning their Blackberrys and tossing aside pretensions while binning their spreadsheets and wiping their bottoms with yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, these masters of their own imploding universe are now using words like Doomed, Bankrupt and Unemployed rather than Hedging, Derivatives and Short Selling.
So, it’s been one giant leap for the world’s money men and one small step for the English language. Somehow, whilst sewing elbow patches on their Saville Row suits and rushing round Poundstretchers spending their Job Seeker’s Allowance, they have started speaking English again. They are now, as they used to call it when they had a job, talking Vanilla.
An acquaintance who works for one of the banks that has just been taken over has four cars, two large houses with no mortgage on either and spends more on school fees in a year than I earn. His daughter told me last year that she had been put on the school council which now meant, and I quote, “interfacing with the Teachers in a different way to rationalise pupils’ input”. This poor kid was then thirteen years old.
Her dad would have previously described his current situation as having Short Term Cash Flow Issues Due To Endogenous Retreat In The Employment Market but no one was in any doubt about what his daughter was saying as she arrived at her school the other day and announced to her classmates, “We’re poor now”. Mind you, the word Poor is relative as daddy has a few million squired away in the bank so I’m not taking round food parcels just yet.
One of these newly unemployed Wall Street numpties rang me last week from New York. His name is Ronald and I have never met nor heard of him before. He has now taken a new job selling shares and rang me with a jolly voice that even Ronald McDonald would find nauseating, telling me I will erect a statue to him in my garden and worship it each day as he’s going to make me millions. He can’t understand why I won’t buy shares from a complete stranger on the ‘phone so, refusing to accept No for an answer, he capped it all this week by saying “let’s start small then to give you confidence. Can I put you down for seven hundred thousand dollars worth?”.
My laughter drowned out whatever he said next and I told him, in words of four letters, never to call me again.
You may not agree with my lack of sympathy for people like Ronald but I hope you can see why I’m finding it difficult not to laugh out loud at their predicament. Of course it’s serious and, as these sharks look for alternative employment, we will all be affected by new scams as well as the existing fallout - everything from our house sales falling through to pensions being decimated even further. But at last we can have a conversation with these people who have stolen our peace of mind. Even if English isn’t their first language they can now understand words like Stuffed! Get Lost! Game Over! Goodnight!
I hope the ones who are still in employment can understand these four letter words too. Sort. Your. Mess. Fast.
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