1968 & all that

Went to a meeting last night to mark the anniversary of the 1968 movement in France.

I’d like to say that it re-ignited the spirit of ’68 in a new generation, but to be honest the meeting was full of the usual suspects that come to these things. Despite a rousing singing of the Internationale at the end, I have to say that whilst ’68 may have been the defining moment for a generation of the left, I fear that moment has now passed.

Certainly in this country much of the then student left have reverted to the safe middle class lives from whence they came. One particular sub-species, especially prevalent in academic circles, is the ‘New Left intellectual’ – for career enhancing purposes they had to define themselves as Marxist in the 70’s when it was fashionable. Now they can’t shake it off but having revised their revisionism so often, they have fully disappeared up their own arses. And are barely socialist any more let alone Marxist.

But bucking this trend was the main speaker – a dowdy little Frenchwoman who spoke through a translator. Still an activist today, in ’68 she had been in the thick of it. She described carrying paving stones in her shopping bags, roof top battles with the ‘flics’ and organising discussion groups at the local Renault factory. Today, if you passed her in the street she could pass as a member of the Women’s Institute (if there is such a thing in France). I found that strangely moving.

When the abused becomes the abuser ..

Sixty years ago the sinister euphemism of ‘ethnic cleansing’ wasn’t known to the world.

But today it is exactly how we would have described the bulldozing in 1948 of Palestinian villages and the displacement of 700,000 refugees to secure Israeli settlement of the region. And many more have been driven from their homes since then.

It’s a cliché that nationalism when suppressed is romantic, whilst nationalism in power is obscene. But never was it more poignantly true than when it comes to the history of Israel-Palestine

As far as Palestinians are concerned, Zionism crossed that line with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Maybe liberal Israelis could point to 1967 and the Six Day War as the defining moment when Zionism lost it’s innocence.

As a neutral observer, it didn’t come home to me until I saw on the news in 1982 the horror of Israeli forces facilitating and colluding with Lebanese Fascist militias in the massacres of Palestinians at the Shatila and Sabra refugee camps.

Today Bush is visiting the Kniset to cheer-lead Israel’s 60th birthday celebrations, describing the USA and Israel as ‘the ardent defenders of liberty’ in the Middle East. Meanwhile Palestinians describe the 15th May simply as al-Naka or ‘The Catastrophe’.

To many of us who watch in safety it is perhaps the most depressing injustice of our generation; and in a sense the fate of the Palestinian people has become a symbol of all injustice. How ironic that the fate of the Jewish people was the same symbol for a previous generation.

SATs and stats.

This week my youngest daughter, in her final year at primary school, is doing her SATs. A whole week (more or less)of tests is inevitably stressful – inevitably she thinks it’s a big deal because for most of this school year they have been preparing for them and little else.

Except it isn’t - we know from experience with my eldest daughter that the secondary school will test the kids all over again. But it is a very big deal for the school because the performance of the pupils will be a major factor in how the school is rated. So we have a system which replicates the stress of the old 11+ system without even the carrot of getting a place at a grammar school.

Last week I went to parents’ evening at my eldest daughter’s secondary school. I was half way through a meeting with one of the teachers talking about ‘learning outcomes’ and projecting levels of attainment for the end of the year, before I realised that we were talking about Cookery for fucks sake !

And this is a good school – in fact it’s officially ‘outstanding’; a rare thing, an inner city comprehensive with all the usual
problems that actually out performs the national averages.

But I’m suspicious what all these rankings mean.

They seem very much like the tick-box collecting that we have to do at work to win contracts these days – and I know that they have sod all to do with quality in any meaningful sense. On the contrary they make a fetish of the mediocre.

There are a small number of inspirational teachers; the ones that you remember for the rest of your life, whose lessons often spin off at all sorts of tangents as the kids' interests take them. That is genuine education. I can’t imagine that all those averages and targets leave very much room for them these days.

Double standards

The level of class deference in this country never ceases to amaze me.

When a nutter starts shooting at his neighbours through their windows and is subsequently killed in a drunken gun battle with the police just off the Kings Road in Chelsea, it is reported as a tragic end to a glittering career.

As of course it is when any 32 year old suffering from substance-abuse and other emotional problems flips and ends up dead.

But Mark Saunders wasn't just anybody: He was a barrister tipped to become a QC. A graduate of Corpus Christi College Oxford and a part-time soldier in the poshest regiment in the territorial army, the Honourable Artillery Company. He lived in one of London's most fashionable and exclusive areas. And apparently he also had a drink problem and kept a shotgun at home.

Now imagine just for a moment that the shooting had happened in Brixton or Tottenham. And that Marks Saunders was a black man on crack cocaine, and a graduate of North London Polytechnic who worked in IT.

The papers would be talking about how gun crime and drugs were a blight on a community with a growing culture of violence. No doubt social services, political correctness and rap music would be held responsible.

Maybe the Metropolitan Police will now be setting up a special squad to tackle 'toff-on-toff' crime as a counterpart to Operation Trident. But I doubt it.

Austria needs a make-over ?

Austria’s having a bit of a bad press at the moment.

Obviously the paedophile incest in the cellar horror was never going to be good for the tourist trade. The Austrian government is trying to re-establish the country’s good name – you can just imagine the PR brief ‘emphasise the Sound Of Music and Mozart thing but play down the whole Hitler and child molesters angle’.

In this country the red-tops are carrying pictures of the small town of the Amstetten at the time of the anschluss. Unsurprisingly pictures from the time have surfaced of townspeople and members of Fritzl’s family giving Nazi salutes. The implication is something along the lines of 'see they’re all Nazis really with a genetic disposition to do evil'.

Naturally any sane person regards this kind of inherited collective guilt as absolute bollocks. Otherwise we’d be blaming all the serial killers in the USA on that country’s shameful near-genocide of its indigenous peoples and an inherited predisposition to callous violence. Truth is, no nation is any more predisposed to these horrors than any other. But when small town values predominate it doesn’t half help in keeping every thing hushed up.

And here is the serious and valid point: Culturally Austria is an affluent and conservative country with a strong Catholic influence. Attitudes that Hemmingway, in a different context, called ‘wide lawns and narrow minds’.

The sort of place we are told where neighbours address each other by their surnames and respect each others’ privacy. Where the word of the ‘head of the family’ is respected when he is asked where his children have gone. Not the sort of place where liberal nosy-parker do-gooders from social services stick their noses in.

In fact it sounds suspiciously like the Conservative vision of ‘family values’. Come to think of it - a bit like our own island of Jersey.

Almost summer music

A ride on an (almost) Summer’s evening over to the Hammersmith Apollo on Saturday. Although it’ll always be the Hammersmith Odeon to me – the venue in which I saw my first every gig – Thin Lizzy in 1978 or thereabouts.

A very different night on Saturday though; to see the Buena Vista Social Club. With 14 band members on stage I would guess that the average age was well over 70. The bass player literally had to be led off at the end – he’d just about shuffled away when the rest of the band came back for the encore.

It may be a terrible cliché to say so, but the old boys visibly seemed to come to life as they played. In true Anglo-Saxon manner I tend to show my approval at concerts by sitting with my arms folded and with the odd nod of the head. After a couple of numbers even I found a few involuntary dance-like moves overtaking me.

It hadn’t been my idea to get the tickets – my other half is big on world music – and I’ve got an inkling towards jazz - so we kind of meet in the middle when it comes to Cuban music. But I have to say that this was one of the best gigs of any sort that I can remember for a long time. And it proved that cool is definitely not age-related.

Nooooo !

I love London. Dirty and impoverished though it may be (at least the bit where I live is) - I don't think anywhere else has the same diversity, history and vibrancy.

SO WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED?

How did this city get a racist, elitist, over-privilidged Tory buffon as its mayor?

I'm still pondering it - so far I can think of three things:

Like The Sun in 1992 - it was The Evening Standard 'wot won it' - the voice of Middle England inside the capital has been running a vendetta against Ken since the 1980's and it has finally paid off.

The 10p tax fuck-up - the fiasco of a Labour government tinkering with the tax system to ease the burden on the middle classes by shifting it to the lowest paid. Whether it was a policy decision or whether someone hit the wrong button on their calculator it is unforgivable and try as he might Brown can't take it back.

Morons with short memories who didn't think of the horror of bringing the Tories back in. Make a protest vote against Ken by all means but the whole point of the transferable vote system is that in doing so, you don't have to cut your nose off to spite your face. Any Lib Dem, Green or Left List first preference voters who didn't transfer to Ken frankly need their heads examined.

Possibly there's a silver lining and people need to experience again an ascendent Tory party, particularly one run by Old Etonians, to re-discover what politics is all about and get radicalised. But I fear that it doesn't work like that and that the shameful turning point of the fascists winning their first seat in the London Assembly may be a taste of things to come ....

Keep Boris Out !

I have fond memories of going to anti-racist gigs in the 80’s in the Jubilee Gardens with my mates from school ( – did Aswad really play every one of those benefits?).

It may give my age away but I can remember the days before we had a Mayor’s Office in London – those glory days of the old GLC. When Ken Livingston was the council leader. In those dark Thatcher years, the GLC was a local beacon of defiance, and naturally the Tory press demonised them and him in particular as the loony left.

Admittedly with hindsight some of the community groups and campaigns the GLC supported were pretty daft, and undeniably played in to the hands of their opponents. And probably laid the basis for the cronyism and corruption allegations that are haunting Ken to this day. But I firmly believe that the GLC was a GOOD THING – and this of course is why a vindictive Tory government went on to abolish it.

Ken has come a long way since his antecedents as a fellow-traveller of the obscure Trotskyist entrist Socialist Action sect. These days he doesn’t even talk about socialism – he’s an unashamed radical-populist. Which is why he's just about tolerated by the party leadership as New Labour’s prodigal son.

But he has one vital thing going for him. He’s not ludicrous racist Tory toff Boris Johnson. And no amount of stupid bendy buses, lies about the cost of the Olympics, or dodgy dealings with Lee Jasper can outweigh this.

So, in the absence of a proper socialist candidate (sorry but the front organisations of the Socialist Workers Party, or of the Communist Party of Britain, or Galloway's Islamo-apologists just don’t cut it) - I will be holding my nose and voting Ken for mayor tomorrow.

Fuel and penions

With a petrol tank on my bike the size of a thimble I have my own mini fuel crisis quite regularly. So I filled up a jerry can at the local petrol station for my own emergency supply ‘just in case’.

I then felt kind of guilty about it – like I was a victim of the hysteria that seems to take grip at the mention of ‘fuel strikes’. Contrary to the predictions we haven’t yet seen the breakdown of western civilisation because of the two-day strike of oil workers at the Grangemouth refinery.

This hysteria seems to blind many people to the perfectly reasonable position of the Ineos workers. Think of the issues at stake:

• Big companies expected to take care of their former employees after a lifetime of service with a full salary pension? Outrageous and outdated.

• Thinking that a company making profits in excess of £50million per day, with a chief executive worth £1.3 billion, should be able to afford such a scheme? Ludicrous and unreasonable.

• Workers who work 12hour shifts 365 days a year having a basic wage of £30k pa – rising with overtime to £40k? Over-privileged and outrageous.

• Unions taking limited strike action after prolonged negotiations have broken down? Selfish and irresponsible.

The pension issue is a time bomb for most of us. A whole generation now faces insecurity at the end of their working lives that was unkown to our parents and grandparents. Many have had to come to terms with this and suffer the lesser of two evils with private pensions. Some of us who work in the small business sector have always had to accept it. In the oil industry there is a group of workers who may just be able to use their industrial clout to defend what so many others have lost.

Good luck to them, even if it does mean a bit of inconvenience for motorists (and bikers).

Support the teachers

You couldn’t pay me enough to be a teacher.

And I’m not adverse to the sound of my voice, and I get quick a kick out of ‘teaching’ whether it’s doing presentations or trying to help instruct martial arts. But the thought of being part social worker, part security guard, part mentor and the responsibility for shaping young minds that goes with being a school teacher, frankly scares me shitless.

Which is why I think they deserve more pay and support their strike today.

I’m not totally soppy about this. With two children in inner London schools and a partner who is a school governor, I know that there are some crap teachers, and it’s still too difficult to get rid of them. But then there are weak individuals in every industry or profession.

However the arguments behind the strike today are really about the status of teaching itself . A lot of people in the private sector - actually most of the people I work with - are totally misinformed about teachers pay (the quoted £35k is at the top level not the average) and the hours (the unpaid overtime and out of hours working is conveniently forgotten).

But even if they weren’t mis-informed, even if teaching really was a cushy over-privileged profession; why shouldn’t it be?

Graduate trainees in city financial institutions regularly start at £35k – who do we really need most? Maybe if we go these priorities right we’d have a more civilised society.

Administrative Professionals

Apparently today is International Administrative Professionals’ Day.

It used to be called Secretary’s Day but it’s been re-branded. It started in the 50’s and I think the idea was a kind of be nice to your secretary day. Fair enough I suppose, secretaries were a pretty hard done by group of workers.

But nowadays they have gone the same way as the hand-loom weavers. It’s difficult to conceive of a time when junior and middle managers were not capable of typing their own letters or answering their own phones.

Actually I’m pretty sure these skills were easy enough to acquire - but having someone else do these things for you was a status symbol. Laptop, email voicemail and open plan offices have thankfully made much of this corporate petty bollocks obsolete.

In fact I don’t know anybody who has a secretary. Of course there are some executives who live in the management stratosphere who have PA’s. (People like Sur-alun-sugar the nation’s favourite fat cat bastard). I guess PA’s can fill some kind of practical function in being gatekeepers for their bosses – managing access and running the appointment diary - they get to know all the corporate skeletons in the cupboards. But they’re not really secretaries at all, they're a kind of middle manager - and possibly a backdoor way by which women have been able to by-pass the corporate glass ceiling.

So who is an ‘Administrative Professional’ these days ? The only people who would use that title are probably jobs-worth petty bureaucrats who think that they aren’t working class because they get to wear a polyester tie, and have a BTEC in business studies.

Although actually Generation X-ers in clerical McJobs are the real equivalent of the down-trodden secretaries of the past. So rather than 'Sending a bunches of flowers to your secretary-day' it might be more appropriate to have 'Mourn the loss of proper jobs in manufacturing-day'.

Humourless

‘It’s political correctness gone mad’ tends to be a clarion call for the small minded whenever their bigotry is challenged.

But it does seem apt when train drivers’ union ASLEF picket the premier of black comedy ‘Three And Out’. The storyline is apparently about a tube driver who having two suicides throw themselves under his train seeks out a third to get the compensation and compassionate leave.

I’ve not seen it so I can’t vouch for whether it’s funny or not. Mackenzie Cook was superb as Gareth in The Office, rather less so in ‘Sex Lives Of The Potato Men’. Ultimately as a black comedy, the funniness criteria is the only one that really matters.

Picketing the film because it touches your own sensitivities tends to make you look like a humourless twat. Maybe the shop workers union USDAW should have picketed ‘Are You Being Served’, or the bus workers could have done the same for ‘On The Buses’. But the only real offensive aspects of these series were that they were complete shit.

With local elections in London where public transport features as a massive issue, and when tube workers are demonized as the enemy within, it’s probably rather bad tactics too.

Teenage kicks

Channel 4’s Skins finished last night, with all the characters if not killed off, certainly dispersed for ever. I know I’m not the demographic that’s supposed to be watching it, but I think it’s genius – ridiculous and poignant at the same time.

I’m also pretty sure that a lot of the cultural references are wasted on me. But substitute Special Brew for the pills, 80’s metal for the trance, and obviously all the fashion, and essentially it’s me and my friends aged 18.

It captures that brief window when everything seems possible, it’s all still to be discovered and the whole world centres around your friends – a kind of intensity that will never come again. The human tragedy is probably that we forget so quickly how it is to feel that way - and lose something in the process.

Which is why it should be compulsory viewing for every 40-something, especially if they are a parent. And it’s bloody funny too.

Trade unions - initials & names

My trade union (Unite) has spoken out about bullying in the workplace – of clergymen by their parishioners. I’m a bit taken aback by this. As an ex-Catholic I can’t really think of clergymen as a part of the labour movement. And I was amazed to find that I am now in the same union as them.

I joined the print industry in the days of the closed shop and of jealousy and rivalry between the unions. In my naïve enthusiasm I initially joined the wrong union - SOGAT (Society Of Graphic Allied Trades). Trying to move to the correct one for my actual area of work, the NGA (National Graphical Association) was ludicrously difficult and achieved with only slightly less hassle than re-partition after a civil war.

But even when this was done I found that we didn’t really consider ourselves part of the NGA at all. We had merged only a few years before and still thought of ourselves as SLADE (the gloriously named Society of Lithographic Artists, Engravers & Process Workers). Not to be confused with the ex-ASLP (Amalgamated Society of Lithographic Printers) and definitely not with ex-NATSOPA (National Society of Operative Printers & Assistants).

All of which convinced me that craft unions were basically bollocks. Whilst everyone was arguing about differentials and giving archaic craft designations to new technologies, employers like Murdoch were busting the unions. And a new generation of people were coming in to the industry from design and IT backgrounds who the craft unions wouldn’t let in and who didn’t see the point of joining anyway.

For a too short time we had what had always made sense; a single (more or less) union for the printing / graphics industry - the GPMU (Graphic Paper & Media Union). But it was too late and financial pressures meant that we got swallowed up in a series of mergers with super-unions. Accordingly we traded initials and acronyms for vague and silly names – firstly Amicus and now Unite. Meanwhile fewer and fewer people see the relevance of being in a union – in fact the main benefits of memberships are cited as legal support, insurance and financial services.

I’m pretty sure I’d be hard pressed to find a fellow member of Unite any more who had a clue what my job was or what companies like mine do. That’s a pretty good acid test. Industry based unions made sense but I’m not sure that super-unions do – there seem to inevitably become lobbying groups rather than workplace-based.

And I wish the clergymen would just bugger off and form their own ARSE (Association of Religious & Spiritual Employees).

Ink & Iron

With a taste of Spring in the air I fancied a ride up to Birmingham on Sunday to the annual Ink & Iron show at the NEC. Custom bikes, tattoos and a ride in (short spells) of sun – what’s not to like?

So I was thoroughly pissed-off to find that the show has been canceled at short notice. Apparently the West Midlands police have advised that they couldn’t guarantee public safety. This of course is in the context of the supposed escalation of the ‘biker war’ between the Hells Angels MC and the Outlaws MC. Allegedly.

With the murder of Gerry Tobin last August, and the attack at Birmingham airport in January there is clearly some serious shit brewing. But I have no insights into these events to offer - and neither I suspect does anybody else outside the two clubs, whatever the self-appointed experts are saying in the tabloids.

The clubs are effectively a closed world that has nothing at all to do with ordinary bikers. And whatever you might think about their antics, no outsiders have been involved in any of these incidents – the general biking public are not at risk.

What this is about is a massive over reaction on the police’s part, fueled by media hysteria. Remember we are not talking about suicide bombers walking into the NEC – a small but visible police presence at the event would be enough to assure that any business the clubs might want to conduct is done elsewhere. But obviously a simple stewarding operation at an event that merely affects a minority sub-culture is not a priority.

Imagine the outcry if a football match was canceled on similar grounds.

Put that light out

I was surprised to learn that like so much of the Olympics, the whole torch carrying thing was a modern intervention. Apparently it was first used at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Fantastic, you really couldn't make this stuff up ...

I'm a bit slow off the blocks on this one - but just how marvelous were those scenes from London and Paris as the Olympic torch was assailed by demonstrators ?

It's not often that protesters face a win-win situation. But here it is for once. If the torch is extinguished it's a propaganda coup and if the authorities crack the protesters' heads - then the image that goes around the world is that of the repression of legitimate protest.

Hopefully by the time the torch eventually gets to Beijing the the credibility of the Chinese government will have taken a bit more of a battering at each city it passes through.

Bike DIY

Motorcycle Storehouse, the mail order supplier of all things custom and performance for Harleys has a slogan: 'A biker's work is never done'. It certainly isn't when you are a complusive tinkereer like me.

I've experienced what is euphemistically known as the oil blow-by phenomenon. This is a peverse peculiarity of Harley Evolution engines that vent the oil breather into the air filter. The idea is that oil is sucked into the carb and burnt off. Only it doesn't work - there's more oil mist than the carb can handle so it just collects in the oil filter and then drops onto the engine casing or your boot and scares the shit out of you that you have an oil leak. It gets worse if you have a performance air filter. And worse again if you have the 1200cc re-bore. I've got both - so I thought I'd better do something about it.

So I picked up an oil breather kit from Ebay. This weekend I'd thought I would fit it.Last night I took the air filter off. Or tried to, but I stopped as I realised that I was fast rounding off the original recessed breather bolts that held it on. A quick trip to Halfords before it shut to see if I could get a better socket was a non-starter. Asking for an imperial rather than a metric tool is guaranteed to get a blank stare. Trying to explain that I wanted a six point rather than a twelve point socket (that's what had done the damage) was even more so. Next morning I took the tube to Buck & Ryan the mecca of obscure tools in Holborn, and got the 9/16" deep walled six point socket I wanted. Except it still couldn't get a grip on the fucking bolts.

I took a deep breath and phoned the nice man at the local bike shop. He took one of his own sockets and put it onto a lathe to get rid of the lip at the end so as to get better purchase on the damaged bolts. Happily this worked. I returned home expecting to now finish the job in about half an hour. But instead I found that the breather kit wouldn't actually fit with the air filter. The plastic backing plate required drilling new mounting holes, sealing up old mounting holes, and recutting away some of the moulding. Thankfully my other half's jewellery making Dremell came to the rescue for that. The coast should have been clear to now fit the bloody thing - except the bolts supplied were too big and wouldn't fit the new mounting arrangement. So back to Halfords for some smaller (metric but sod it) bolts to hold it all together. Finally I got the fucking thing on - the best part of 24 hours after starting an half hour job.

The oil breather kit was only about £35. The new socket was £5 (plus as I'm a tool fetishist I also brought several other sockets also at £5 just in case). I gave the nice man at the bike shop £20 for his trouble and ruining one of his sockets. The new bolts from Halfords came in some ridiculous multi-part blister that cost £10. And the tube fare was another £5 or so. In total about £50 worth of buggering about in addition to the cost of the original part.

From long experinece that's a fairly typical bit of bike DIY.

Stupid but smug

To protect our kids apparently anyone with an e.mail address such as a.nonce@pedophiles.com will find themselves banished forever from social networking sites.

That’s pretty much the drift of the governments’ proposals to tackle convicted predatory abusers who contact children online. Oh yes - and if they give a false email address when they register with the police on their release, then they face five years imprisonment.

Have the fuck-wits who came up with this ever actually used the internet – do they have the slightest idea how easy it is to get an email address ?

It’s the same kind of thinking behind the debate about taking cannabis up to Class B status. People living in some kind of unworldly cocoon can feel sanctimonious and smug in making glib and hollow proposals that will have no impact on real problems, to the applause of an ignorant baying mob.

Welcome to dumbed down Britain.

Finest Hour ?

It’s the 90th birthday of the Royal Air Force.

Inevitably there will be talk of ‘the few’ and of Spitfires and Hurricanes. Rightly so - the achievement of the Battle of Britain pilots was a heroic and vital contribution to the war against Nazism.

But it’s worth remembering that the origins of the RAF do not lie in its ‘finest hour.’In fact they're downright ugly, and chillingly close to the new world order.

The emergence of a separate air force, as opposed to the Flying Corps of the army or the Air Service of the navy, lay in the theories of a new type of warfare that emerged at the end of the First World War. The Italian theorist Douhet and the visionary HG Wells predicted a form of strategic bombing that would target cities and civilian populations. Wars would end swiftly and decisively, rather than in the attritional slog of the trenches.

The theories were adopted by Trenchard, the founder of the RAF and were summed up with the slogan ‘the bomber will always get through’. Inter-service politics played a part too – if the RAF was to concentrate purely on battlefield ground targets, reconnaissance and dominance of the airspace over the trenches, it might just as well stay a part of the army.

After the First World War the British armed services reverted to their peacetime role of policing the empire. Ironically two of the trouble spots were Mesopotamia (Iraq) and the North West Frontier (Afghanistan). And the newly formed RAF formed a cost effective alternative to traditional troops on the ground. In the 1920’s it was estimated that it would take 105,000 British and Indian troops to conventionally police the revolt in Iraq. With the presence of the RAF it was actually achieved with a force of only 14,000. This was made possible by a campaign of terror bombing – the punitive incendiary bombing of villages that harboured insurgents and the use of chemical weapons – mustard gas was dropped on Kurdish and Shia rebels.

Arthur “Bomber’ Harris the architect of Dresden and Hamburg’s destruction was a squadron leader in Iraq. And Winston Churchill was an early advocate of these new efficient methods:“I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes to spread a lively terror”.

None of this need diminish the memory of aircrew, including some of my own family, who gave their lives in 1939-45. But in these times it does seem appropriate to remember exactly how we got to have an air force.

Cool or pseud ?

There’s a row going on over at The Guardian on-line about one of their columnists singing the praise of the Moleskine notebook. Of course the Guardian’s art, design and architecture blog is a pretty easy target if you want to take the piss out of people who wear black roll-necks (I have several by the way). Fair enough up to a point.

But I like Moleskine diaries. I also like Converse Chuck T’s. And Apple Macs. And Harley Dvaidsons. And Jack Daniels. Maybe this just makes me a sad wanker because, as comments on the blog make clear, there are always cheaper, better 'value', utilitarian versions available of just about any iconic item you can think of. Usually from Tesco.

But the trouble with that argument is that if you take it to its logical conclusion you deny the existence of quality. (Quality that is in the abstract sense of the word as Pirsig uses it in ‘Zen & The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance'). A world without it would be a totally grey dis-utopia. With no design or art.

Of course it’s highly personal and we all apply a concept of quality only to those things that matter to us personally. So for me, yes when it comes to bikes it’s a Harley, a BMW, a Guzzi or a Triumph rather than a better performing or better value Japanese clone. But when it comes to clothes – who gives a shit ? – it’s £10 M&S jeans rather than £100 on the designer equivalent. Go figure. It’s a matter of taste.