The Opinion Engine 2.0:24/31:When really was the golden age?

Guest answer from Ian Jones of TV Cream.

I'm a sucker for compartmentalism.

Life is far more manageable when ordered and filed in different boxes. That's what I tell myself, anyway.

Trouble is, you need to decide which boxes are which before you begin. Then there are the criteria for keeping item A separate from item B.

And on whose terms are you trying to file, slice, categorise and datestamp the people and things you like to believe are important to you? Theirs, or yours?

Compartmentalising is addictive. You find yourself doing it while washing up after tea or lying in bed trying to sleep. Then you find yourself wanting to do it while washing up after tea or lying in bed trying to sleep. It ends with you washing up or lying in bed simply to give yourself another opportunity for doing it.

But as a pastime, it's often less personally intrusive or distressing to try doing it at one remove.

By this I mean applying a bit of compartmentalism to, for example, time itself.

I think it's fun to argue that the 1960s didn't run from 1960 to 1969, but in fact ran from 6 June 1962 to 1 April 1970: the dates of the very first and the very last Beatles recording sessions at Abbey Road.

Or that the 1990s didn't start until Tony Blair became leader of the Labour party, and lasted until 11 September 2001.

Or that 20th century pop culture lasted from the birth of Radio 1 to the death of Princess Diana.

This last time-frame is the one loosely adhered to over on TV Cream, where various people including myself attempt to make nostalgia sound as fresh and as funny as it did 10 years ago when all those clip shows were on the telly. (A time when, mark you, TV Cream was already getting on for being five years old.)

To be honest, such a rule came about more through expediency than decree.

We needed some kind of start and end point to give the site a bit of shape and focus. Perhaps one day we’ll actually manage both.

Yet all this cultural compartmentalising is again something of a diversion from applying similar sorts of itemisation to more personal matters.

And yes, it can be more fun, but only if you've already decided into which box you've put the people with which you intend to do the compartmentalising.

You can see that this can all become a bit of a chore.

Historians build and destroy reputations when splicing up the past in order to give it meaning. The idea that the whole of the 1970s could be shoved in a cabinet labelled GHASTLY MISTAKE, or perhaps more precisely GHASTLY MISTAKE WHERE EVERYONE WORE FLARES HA HA HA, has only recently, and thankfully, been challenged by more thoughtful accounts from the likes of Andy Beckett and Dominic Sandbrook.

Yet the notion of an entire era being singly and neatly summed up is surely something that appeals to all of us, not just those of a historical persuasion.

Who doesn't like to believe that the UK was a better or worse place in such and such a decade, or during so and so's reign as prime minister?

Compartmentalising something as a "golden age", however, always comes with the charge of a different, more potent kind of addiction: that of a misplaced wielding of rose-tinted spectacles, or the wrong kind of conservatism (yes, there is a right and a wrong kind), or delusion about a uniformity of excellence that once flourished and is now extinct.

In response, I would simply question the idea of a “golden age” needing both a start and end point.

Take, for example, the idea of there being a “golden age” for pop music, for cinema, or for television.

In all cases there certainly has been one. But it’s one that began when the first note was recorded, the first reel projected, the first broadcast transmitted; and in each case, it hasn’t finished yet.

These are all open-ended compartments. Which, on reflection, also happen to be the very best kind.

Ken Branagh's In The Bleak Midwinter now available on R1 dvd. Ish.

Tonight, after my usual pre-Christmas viewing of Ken Branagh's In The Bleak Midwinter via an increasingly ropey VHS recording from S4C about ten years ago, I grumpily checked Amazon for a dvd release. I've also done this pretty much every year and come up disappointed.

Not this year.

This year revealed that in December 2010, the film was released on Region One under its US title A Midwinter's Tale by the Warner Bros Archive Collection imprint, and copies are available still available.

There are still a few copies from Amazon's Marketplace.

See where it says 2 new from £11.98?

That used to be three.

Looks like I'll be watching it again in January.

Updated!  It's back up to three.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:23/31If Star Wars were made today who would you cast in which part?

Film Sacrilege. One might even say “blasphemy”. Recast Star Wars? Are you mad? But note this isn’t a question about remaking Star Wars. This is about who would be cast if time skipped a beat and George Lucas was making the series now. It’s a challenge especially since when Lucas was casting the original film he was looking generally at unknowns for the young parts with established British actors in the main roles.

Economies of scale now generally mitigate against that, actors tend to have to be established to some degree even if it's for television work and perhaps even more. So just to offer my first justification I’ve selected from known knowns rather than known unknowns. I’ve also stuck to the main roles, the kinds of faces that might appear on the posters (sorry fans of Mon Mothma).

Michael Cera is Luke Skywalker

Nathan Fillion is Han Solo

 Emma Stone is Princess Leia Organa

 Alan Rickman is Grand Moff Tarkin
 

 Kenneth Branagh is Ben Kenobi

 Anthony Daniels is C-3PO
(Eddie Izzard if unavailable)

 R2-D2 is CGI

 Paul Kasey (on stilts) is Chewbacca

 Stellan Skarsgård is Uncle Owen

 Juliette Binoche is Aunt Beru

Paul Kasey is Darth Vader

James Earl Jones is his voice
(Peter Serafinowicz if unavailable)

 Michael Kenneth Williams is Lando Calrissian

 

 Paul Kasey is Boba Fett

 Kevin Spacey is The Emperor

Paul Kasey is Greedo

Most of those are predictably self-explanatory. But since you’ve asked, Luke isn’t an action character in a traditional sense; he’s a farm boy forced to take up his calling so it doesn’t need a Chris Evans or Chris Hemsworth but a loser who could become a hero. Paul Kasey is under the suit of most nuWho aliens so has tons of experience. Plus, there has to be someone from The Wire, and Omar fits the bill.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:22/31:What's the last game you played, and did you win?

Question asked by Jess Haskins.

Life  When did everything in life become a game? Perhaps everything in life has always been a game, hence the board game. It just seems that as I age, everything from interpersonal relationships, to using public transport to shopping requires strategies, acute senses and problem solving skills which fill every decision with some element of jeopardy, negative outcomes leading to a loss of time, a loss of money and sometimes much worse. Without thinking ahead you’ll find yourself saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, missing the bus or inadvertently being ripped off in a supermarket, drip on drip of anxiety which ultimately leads to exhaustion, mental and physical.

Why does everything we say feel like it’s under a microscope and why is every conversation so fraught with danger that every sentence, clause and tone of voice has the awareness of being picked over because we’re so desperate to project a certain version of ourselves, which also changes depending on the people we’re with? Unlike most, I seem to be at ease amongst strangers because they haven’t worked me out yet, I could still be anyone. The worry only descends when those strangers become friends and I suddenly feel the potentiality to be judged and rejected so I begin to question everything, every word, which is presumably why making new friends, proper friends, trusted friends becomes impossible.

Sometimes it’s easier just to bug out, lose a life. As some of you know I work at the weekends finishing at around five o’clock and there are about five bus stops weaving through the city centre until the place where I should wait. When I began this job, it soon became apparent that because it’s only a half hour, it would always be full by the time it reaches me and it would always drive past. For a couple of years I gritted my teeth but the wait was becoming ever longer, pointless, because of the relative distances. Eventually I just decided to get a taxi home those two nights and absorb the extra twenty pound a month on top of the exorbitant bus fair (£1.90 flat fair) it would have been anyway, worth it just to get the time back and reduce my stress levels.

Even something as simple as buying a Christmas tree.  Last year we turned up at the seller a week before the 25th, as usual, and there were few trees left and the only scotch pine was more akin to a branch than an actual tree. Charlie Brown’s was larger.  So this year we decided to attend a week earlier and sure enough loads more scotches but they were far too tall for our ceiling and mostly bagged. Which is where the gamesmanship comes in. Which to choose? Eventually we came to a decision, having rejected others for being too bushy or having a longer trunk than we required, but the whole process was amazingly tense, despite the fact that any real tree looks amazing in the corner of the room with some lights on.

I tend to win and lose in equal measure I think, which actually a higher ratio than when I used to play computer games regularly and the only chance I had of seeing past the average first level was via cheat code entered using an Action Replay cartridge in the back of the Commodore 64.  But life has few cheat codes, bar the odd money off voucher or competition win, no way to turn off sprite detection or have infinite ammunition (at least I don’t think so).  I’ve also realised that it’s up to me to decide exactly what “winning” might be because unlike the boxed game, life itself doesn’t have any particular rules. So I’ll just keep playing and hope at some point I’ll escape the Jet Set Willy infinite death loop by myself.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:21/31:Why do you think the common discourse in our society, at political, technical and cultural levels, generally ignores the likely impending collapse of our civilisation? Answer can include things like: What are the consequences of this ignorance? How does it make you feel? What does it remind you of? What could alter it? Bonus: Avoid making assumptions about the exact nature and timing of the collapse - there are lots of possible ones, and nobody knows the future. It's probabilistic.

Question from Francis Irving.

Let's begin.  Prestissimo, please.

Civilisation is going to collapse. We won’t know how, we won’t know when, but at some point, civilisation is going to collapse. In order to answer the question we have to work from that assumption outwards. If the question was, “Will civilisation collapse?” my answer would more likely be “maybe” (illustrated by a picture of me shrugging) because to continue in the first person, even though I’m inherently pessimistic about myself, I’m optimistic that civilisation will survive. But the question is the question and so we must proceed from the assumption that civilisation will collapse.

If society is wilfully ignoring that impending collapse then it’s for the same reason that I doesn’t think it will happen. It’s because society itself is inherently optimistic and to work, to carry on, it has to assume that civilisation has a future. What’s the point of trying to accumulate wealth if you can’t spend it? What’s the point in having a car if you can’t drive it? But society is constantly as war with itself on these issues, because it knows collectively, not always subliminally that the consequences of such optimism and ignorance could itself bring about the collapse of society. But it can’t help itself. It has an addictive personality.

To say I’m disappointed would be an understatement. We should be aware of all potentialities for collapse and making plans. But there are enough clever stupid people and ignorant stupid people willing to listen to stop that from happening. It’s become an ideological fight between whether bringers of truth or lies can have the upper hand and too often, because this is a petulant, self-perpetuating machine, the latter takes precedence, largely because it’s cunning enough to offer the version of the truth which best suits their purposes. That’s how apathy develops. Why bother arguing against someone who isn’t willing to be rational in the first place?

It’s like this column/piece/essay/blogpost/blog post which could and probably should have been well researched and planned out pointing to useful articles like this one from The Guardian about how the population will increase to such an extent the film Soylent Green will look like a documentary. But the bonus section wilfully disallows me from coming to any conclusions about what the nature of the collapse will be, forces me to ignore the specifics and work in generalisations leading to woolly thinking. Which is society’s other approach to the collapse.  There are so many potentialities it chooses to ignore them all.

Which means that in the end, because society is fixed in a reactive rather than proactive cycle, the only way the situation can alter is the actual collapse of our civilisation, because then, and only then, will society, or what’s left of it, know what hit it and have some ideas on how to deal with it. But of course, we’ll probably spend so much time analysing what happened, having arguments about who was to blame, with the people who were to blame pointing to other about causes and wanting to see how they can profit from it, that it’ll stay collapsed. Which is why I have to be optimistic, because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

The Opinion Engine 2.0: 20/31: If Matt Smith was to leave Dr Who tomorrow and then the BBC rang to offer you the role, how would you play it?

Question from Risa Arendall via Facebook.

TV For a fan like me this is a two part question.  Would I play it?  Then how would I play it? My immediate answer to the first would be in the negative for the simple reason of concern at the kind of madness which has led the BBC or more specifically whoever’s running the show to offer the lead part in one of the flagship programmes to an amateur blogger from Liverpool with miniscule acting experience (a twenty week night course and understudying a public speaking competition at school). Apart from anything else we’re ex-directory which means they’d have to do some detective work to get the number which means they’d really want me and I’d be wondering whether this was their attempt to run the series into the ground.

To buy into the fantasy and assume in fact I do look, sound and have the acting ability of Laurence Fox (if not him for the twelfth Doctor, who else?) or Romola Garai (that's who else) would I take the role? Well, on the one hand it’s very seductive. It’s the Doctor. It’s the role of a lifetime, even if, like Matt Smith, you aren’t really fan before you get the call. Assuming there’s a decent writer at the helm, support from the BBC and you’re likeable enough to attract people to watch even on Christmas Day, you’re set up for life, especially now that it won’t necessarily typecast you in the way it might have done in the past. And even if that doesn’t work out the convention circuit is very welcoming.

On the other it’s hard bloody work and not just spending nine months in production with its bonkers scheduling. There’s the publicity machine, the endless interviews with people asking the same old questions, there’s the media you don’t want to talk to who’ll make up stories about you anyway and you wouldn’t be able to go out in public ever again if you’re a private kind of person. Then there’s the Malkovich element of seeing your face everywhere including the merchandise you once may have coveted. There’s no use picking up a copy of Doctor Who Magazine to find out what’s happening, because you are what’s happening.

Plus, and this is important, you’ll no longer be able to watch the show like a fan, which is at least one of the reasons offered for leaving by both Russell T Davies and David Tennant, that they wanted to be able to watch the programme again and not know what was going to happen. Which is bonkers, especially since you’re doubtless going to also be at the epicentre of merchandising freebees, boxes of books and cds and dvds turning up on a weekly basis, probably. But yes, that would be in the mix. Plus I’d be on the other side of the internet’s review nexus dealing with amateur bloggers from Liverpool describe how rubbish I am on a weekly basis.

And yet, and yet, like the tenth Doctor himself looking into The Satan Pit in The Satan Pit, there’s the itch. It’s Doctor Who. Why would anyone not want to be in Doctor Who no matter the consequences? Look at an average episode of Confidential and look at the production team at least, that family, that amazingly democratic family. Everyone says how much they’ve enjoyed working on the programme (at least the less egotistical ones, Swift) and it’s because of that family. There’s a reason Danny Hargreaves is still in there, blowing things up after all these years. There can’t be many shows like it.

In addition, for good or ill, even if you’re rubbish, you’d become part of television history. For most of the populace, Paul McGann only had one adventure as the Doctor, but he’s still the Eighth Doctor. He still appears in montage sequences, in the general historical articles in newspapers, still asked about the role, still does the convention circuit. People can barely remember who all the actors in the average soap are, or which series of Spooks this or that spy appeared in, but they always seem to know who’s played the Doctor. Never mind the fictional character, it’s become one of the few roles in which an actor can be immortalised.

So on reflection, yeeees, yeeees, I would do it! I would do it! And probably even if I wasn’t married to Billie Piper or a woman. Because actually the franchise is probably actor proof. Anyone can play the Doctor. Hugh Grant’s played the Doctor, albeit for just a few moments, and he was amazing. Arabella Weir’s played the Doctor on audio in an alternative universe story and she was amazing too. Those were twenty very good weeks and I probably would have given Henry V’s “Once More Unto The Breach…” a fair bit of welly, even if the sixteen year old version of me couldn’t remember all of it. I could be the first Doctor to improvise the role. 

Agonising over, how would I do it? Doctors seem to be rather split down the middle between those for whom its a job of acting and those for whom the role is a natural extension of their personality.  As you might expect there's some discussion as to which Who fits into which category, though there's not much argument that Tom Baker and Matt Smith were and are largely playing versions themselves.  I'd argue Tennant is somewhere in the middle, giving the "Tennant" performance which crops up throughout his work.

Legendary writer Terrance Dicks always said that you just need to write the same Doctor and leave it up to the actor's interpretation but I'd disagree.  The brilliance of Who isn't just that the show itself is flexible, or that the main character can change his appearance, it's also that his attitude is quantum locked with the needs of the story.  The Eleventh Doctor in The Doctor's Wife is a different presence to Let's Kill Hitler then Closing Time, partly because of the writer but also because of the actor's reaction to the script.

To an extent, nuWho's spoilt the gene pool because aristocratic is right out.  Unless Mark Gattis has a few ideas when he inevitably takes over, the Pertwee approach wouldn't work.  Much as we love him, or some of us do, he's something of an alienating presence, and although like all Doctors he warmed up over time, the last thing you'd want is for him to be patronising all in sundry and visiting private clubs.  He needs to be a bonkers presence, the benevolent alien with the darker side bubbling under the surface waiting to explode.

But always clever.  And kind.  Don't laugh (though you will), but I sometimes catch myself being Doctorish in real life, running my voice off, injecting a hint of unnecessary sarcasm and searching for the right thing to say in order to diffuse whatever mood someone's in.  And problem solving, lots of problem solving.  It's not on purpose, it's not consciously "What would the Doctor do?"  It just sort of happens.  Then I notice later.  Or project it.  I wonder sometimes if it's a fan thing.  If we all do this.  That we've all played the Doctor.  Sort of.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:19/31:Are the tips in The Sunscreen Song really useful?

Guest answer from Lisa-Marie Ferla.

Life I feel as have been spending most of this month backpedalling furiously, playing catch-up. More so than usual, I mean. The fact that I thought Stuart’s original deadline of “the first week of December” for my contribution to this project was a long way off, and easily reachable, probably tells you all I need to know.

This time last year I was working in retail, an aftershock of the Great Financial Downturn of 2008. I was working for a company who probably see themselves as more than a consumer electronics outlet, and to be fair some of its innovations have come to define this first decade of the 21st century in much the same way as the death of its pioneer made particular headlines on the tech blogs I now scan in my current role here in 2011. What I’ll tell you about retail is that there ain’t no way the festive season is sneaking up on you in that environment, particularly when you’re selling the ‘must-have’ gadgets some of the richer brats of Glasgow are expecting bulking out their stockings. This December, however, I’m back working in journalism (I’ve always thought of myself as a journalist first and foremost, but it’s only this year I haven’t had to stretch the boundaries of the definition to include the word in my CV). My focus is the law, particularly as it pertains to business, and as the Government releases report after consultation trying to clear its desks and justify its existence before the country closes down for the holidays I don’t think I’ve ever found myself generating so many words.

Still, December is a great month for those of us concerned for what we’ve been missing. Some blog, somewhere, will for example have curated a list of the Best Memes of 2011 - although surely, if you missed them first time around, they can hardly have been meme-y at all.

Seriously. WTF is a “nyan cat”? Did you..?

The Sunscreen Song, which you’ll probably best remember from its Baz Luhrman-remixed spoken word single interpretation, was fourteen years old this summer. Think about that. Fourteen years (twelve, I suppose, if you’re going by the single release but the newspaper column the words come from appeared in the Chicago Tribune on 1 June 1997. That’s a little less than half a lifetime, yet I’m pretty sure you can still remember huge chunks of the words in a way you certainly won’t be able to recall huge chunks of Rebecca Black’s “Friday” when you hit your mid-forties. The word “meme” was yet to slither its insidious way into the Oxford English Dictionary when The Sunscreen Song entered popular culture, but that its words still have some sort of ageless resonance - in fact, they’re perfectly pitched to be pretty much endlessly reblogged on Tumblr - is a testament to the power and simplicity of its advice.

Incidentally, I’ve been layering on sunscreen and hiding in the shade with a book since before Boots the Chemist Buy One Get One Free Ambre Solaire made it a necessity. Pale and interesting, even if it is under a head of hair more suited to Mediterranean ancestry, beats skin cancer hands down any day. Plus, the sweat? Not so attractive.

In its original op-ed incarnation the ‘song’ carried the strapline Advice, Like Youth, Probably Just Wasted On The Young and what strikes me now as I reread its words, trembling on the precipice of my 30s, is that that line is perhaps its most prophetic. I have no idea how old its author was when she penned them but I am beginning to suspect they were never aimed at a carefree seventeen-year-old. Age is, of course, nothing but a number but as those numbers begin to stack up they’re still pretty scary. That’s why I might be eating chocolate spread for breakfast, using rich tea biscuits as a spoon, but I’ve still drawn up a list of thirty things I’m putting pressure on myself to accomplish before there’s a change in both column (a) and column (b) come June. Because I still don’t know what I want to do with my life, but the difference between 29 and and the breakdown I had when I graduated with my second degree at 22 is that at least I’m living it, to some extent, rather than hiding under the covers and considering the whole thing a tremendous amount of pressure to pile on a girl.

You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they’ve faded... You are not as fat as you imagine.

You know, 2011 was the year that I gathered my Righteous Feminist Rage to my ample chest and realised I didn’t care any more. If fifty sit-ups in the morning and regular two-mile walks with my headphones on isn’t going to flatten out my stomach then perhaps it isn’t meant to be flat. As long as I can still shoehorn my boobs into a dress that makes me look like Christina Hendricks and accessorise my eyeshadow with my shoes before I head into the office, I’m golden. Nobody has yet to call me on my continuous mission to dress like a six-year-old. You should have seen the length on the skirts I wore on my eighteen-month hiatus from #corporatelaw. Actually, you probably couldn’t. If you get my meaning.

Respect yourself. That’s the message in its purest form. Don’t waste your time on jealousy, worrying about the future or chewing over the insults you receive. Don’t put up with people who are reckless with [your heart]. It’s easier said than done, but I’m going to print that one out in 24pt font and stick it on my fridge. I wish I’d made a note of it when I was seventeen. But I probably wouldn’t have learned the importance of it otherwise.

What do I honestly believe? Yes advice, like youth, may be wasted on the young but if you don’t make your own mistakes in the first place then you’ll have no platform for recognising how right that advice was. So read as much as you can, then go out and make your own mistakes. Allow yourself five minutes to wallow in the stupidity of your decisions: the empty gin bottle, the text message you can hardly remember, the corns that will only disappear after two weeks in trainers. Then phone a friend, phone a pizza and remember that everything usually looks better in the morning.

And besides, if I didn’t mess too much with my hair I’d already look 85.

In the meantime I’m working on my list, eating chocolate spread for breakfast and looking forward to spending my next sunny holiday sitting in the shade, plotting how to turn The Sunscreen Song’s most important advice - to live in New York City once - into a reality. And when my sister asks me what I’m doing, as she turns over to get some colour on her front, I will tell her that I heard it in a song once.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:18/31:Vegetarianism.

Topic suggested by Rosie Fernandez.

Food My first visit to the Egg Café was over ten years ago for a works Christmas night out. The whole idea seemed terribly exotic. Not because it was as it is now, a vegetarian restaurant but because as now, it didn’t have a drinks license and so diners could take their own alcohol and the cafe charging a pound for corkage. Paying someone to open a bottle seemed strange until someone pointed out to me that they’d also ultimately have to deal with disposing of the bottles. There was a Secret Santa that night I now remember; I gave someone a wine carrier and I was given a Blackwells mouse mat.

Even after ten years, the restaurant/café hasn’t changed that much. It’s in a loft in Newington Buildings just off Renshaw Street at the top of a winding staircase, containing an exhibition area and as you can see from the photo I've embedded from flickr because I neglected to take a camera myself, more tables than it might seem capable of accommodating from looking up from street level. It’s perhaps slightly less bo-ho than I remember, less about sofas, but it still retains an atmosphere inclusive enough for regulars searching the mythic third place, large parties and the sharing of secrets amongst secretive people.

I chose it after meeting another friend there recently for the beginning of a night out.  After climbing the many stairs I pushed through the heavy doors into the candle-lit space unable to quite comprehend the difference to everything else outside.  The beautifully painted rafters, the wooden floors and the paintings all combined to make me wonder if I'd entered some new dimension.  "Why don't I come here?"  I kept saying to my friend, "Why don't I come here?"  So when another friend was in town for a few days, this was the perfect place for us to go.

Ordering is from a bewildering selection of food on a chalkboard behind a counter filled with prospective dishes, which is sometimes much more preferable to the monolithic mystery of most menus where the diner is locked in a bond of trust with the waiter and the chef as to what the plate will contain once a selection’s been made. It’s one of the reasons I was a regular at the late Everyman Bistro which also had the virtue of being able to watch the food being heated in the microwaves at the back.

Cash conscious, my visiting dining companion and I decided on the set menu which is all three courses and a beverage for £9.75. Orders for the starters and mains are made up front and as far we could tell because that's what seemed to work for us, diners attend the counter between courses when they’re ready which allows for a leisurely pace and there’s no sense as in some restaurants of being hurried through the meal by over attentive waiters. We’re identified by a number on a slip of paper.

This is the point in professional restaurant reviews when you’d receive a length dissection of the courses.  This being my first restaurant review (I'm winging it, can't you tell?) and lacking a rarefied palate and liking what I like, all I can say is that I couldn’t find fault. This was a meal between old friends catching up, so it wasn’t really about the food to begin with, but there weren’t any moments when the quality of anything going into the mouth interrupted the flow of conversation which in most cases, in most night’s out in fact, is all diners really want.

The starter, some kind of spicy lentil soup, was smooth and tasty and not indigestibly strong in that way that indicates the chef doesn’t appreciate that there may be more courses to come. After a slight wobble, I chose the garlic bread, a large slice of tin loaf which is helpfully illustrated in the front page of the Egg’s website. It looks greasy but it was the perfect accompaniment and there’s something to be said for the effort in breaking up the bread and dripping it in the soup, so that even in a deceptively simple dish you become an active presence.

That was especially true of the mains, or at least the bolognaise I ordered which was served half with rice and half with a kitchen sink like salad that even included pesto pasta. This was based, I think, on some kind of meat substitute rather than just beans (although there were plenty of those) and came in a portion which almost dwarfed the table which meant I was half conversing with my dinner companion and half making sure that I wasn’t the messy eater I tend to be. Much cleverer than me, he’d selected a broccoli quiche which he seemed to relish.

We returned to the counter to select a desert, he a carrot cake, me a chocolate fudge which were trayed up with a large pot of tea for two. Both were again excellent, mine as indulgent and rich as chocolate fudge cake should be and somehow despite everything else my stomach was able to fit it all in, as though it was replicating the TARDIS-like properties of the café. For just under a tenner the whole meal represents excellent value.

Since the closure of the Everyman Bistro, I’ve been looking for an alternate which has the same relaxed atmosphere, easy ordering system and flavoursome food and I think I may have found it in the Egg. There’s the same sense of feeling right at home whilst simultaneously being in a space unlike most anywhere else in Liverpool which considering my oscillating comfort zone is no mean feat. As we left, my friend, who is a vegetarian said, “Good choice” and despite loving meat, I had to agree with him.

The Egg Cafe, 16 - 18 Newington, Liverpool L1 4ED (0151 707 2755). Meal for two, including tea and service, £19.50.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:17/31:What's the most exciting thing you see on the way to work?

Guest answer from Jess Haskins.

Life First, what work for me is — I'm a game designer. I work at a small game development studio in New York City called Muse Games. Earlier this year we moved our office from a loft in Chinatown to an office block in the Financial District, right on Bowling Green. In the weeks that followed our move, we experienced an earthquake, a hurricane, a flood warning, and the dawn of a protest movement: Occupy Wall Street.

I pass Zuccotti Park on my way to work every day, and I first noticed that something was happening when on my morning walk I was joined by a merging phalanx of drum-tapping, horn-tooting, sign-bearing, mask-wearing protesters. As I read their signs and listened to the sound of their chants and matched the cadence of their steps, I inhaled deeply and breathed it in. I was marching! I was protesting! At the next corner, they turned and I kept going straight, resuming my New-York-paced speedwalk, once more weaving and dodging into the crowd instead of trundling along with it in synchronized solidarity.

From then on, I watched the burgeoning movement with interest, observing the daily evolution of the protest campsite: the information desk and its staffers, the expanding library, the cardboard Faux News cameras, the print edition of the Occupied Wall Street Journal. (OWS was making its own media, as the mainstream media seemed conspicuously absent from this engaging and newsworthy scene.) Although I didn't feel the urge to participate personally, I appreciated the efforts of the protesters and admired their presence and perseverance. I sympathized with their message and hoped the movement would be a success.

Zuccotti Park ready for public enjoyment

But I don't want to talk about the park. The park is empty now, stormed and swept and cleared away so that the space could be freed up for the use of "the public" — now it's a sea of barricades and trees decorated for the holidays, ringed with police and a handful of hangers-on and of no use to anyone at all. I don't want to talk about the park. I want to talk about the bull.

A few blocks from Zuccotti Park is Bowling Green, site of Charging Bull, the famous statue representing the virile capitalist vigor of Wall Street. Our office building sits directly opposite the statue, affording us an excellent view of the daily throngs of tourists queuing up and massing around it, snapping photos, clambering over its back, swinging from its horns, and polishing its scrotum for luck. But this ritual molestation is a thing of the past — since the outbreak of the Occupation, the barriers went up around the bull, too, and now it enjoys the protection of a 24-hour security detail. The poor tourists can only stand around the outside of the pen for their photos, sometimes leaning over for an awkward hug with one of the horns before running over to pester the cops for more photos and directions to Century 21. (It's up Broadway. Just keep walking.)

A frustrated tourist reaches for the bull's horns

It's for the bull's own good. Since OWS kicked off with Adbusters' poster of a revolutionary ballerina poised atop Charging Bull's head, with a vanguard of occupiers rushing forward from the misty background, the statue, with all its loathsome, potent symbolism, must have been deemed a prime target for the movement's rage. As far as I know, no shenanigans have been attempted by occupiers (the last prank I remember directed at the hapless bovine was the painting of its balls blue during the depths of the recession over a year ago), and all I can think of is how disappointed the tourists must be. Apparently the bull is a big deal in some parts of the world, and people come from far away just to see it — then to be forced to stand back and have to grope it clumsily while stretched across a crowd barrier! For one day only I saw the cops allowing the tourists to line up and enter the pen one at a time for hugs and photos, as if the bull were signing autographs. That didn't stick, though, and the next day it was back to leaning on barricades, longing to get just a little closer to the symbol and source of all that throbbing financial potency. Just a few blocks away people were camping out 'round the clock in the deepening cold to protest a corrupt and exploitative financial establishment, while here just down the road were people who had traveled thousands of miles just to line up and fondle the testicles of the establishment's graven idol.

I thought up a game for Occupy Wall Street. It's a mobile game. There are crowds of people filling a public square, and you are Charging Bull. With a flick of your finger you send Charging Bull careering through the crowds. Every time you hit someone they fall down and some money flies out, and they yell out a slogan, like "People Not Profits!" or "Make Love Not Toxic Assets Repackaged As Junk Derivatives And Foisted On The American Taxpayer!" You eat the dropped money, which represents your score. The crowd has a a 1% chance of spawning a suited investment banker who will jostle his way through the crowd; if you hit a one-percenter, he will yell a slogan like "Get a job!" or "Corporations are people, too!," then the game immediately ends and you lose. There will also be white-shirted police officers who move through the crowd, randomly pepper-spraying people who will fall down and stop moving (but you can still hit them and get their money). If you hit the white shirt, he will pepper-spray down your throat and you will regurgitate and lose all the money you have collected so far. The game ends when you have collected all the money from the people and retire to a villa in the Caribbean. I call it Bowling for Green.

The Opinion Engine 2.0: 16/31:Republic of the Moon at FACT.

Press view invite from FACT in Liverpool.

Art When was the last time you looked at the Moon? Properly looked at it? Walking around Republic of the Moon it occurred to me how much I took for granted one of the most extraordinary examples of natural beauty, one which is accessible to our wonder every evening no matter our geographic location (depending on weather conditions) and which as the work demonstrates is almost unique in its ability to inspire both those who comprehend it with their imagination and those who strive to measure its properties, artists and scientists.

It’s apt that Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is still playing at FACT's cinema (just about) with its flashback sequences showing the production of Meliere's Le Voyage dans la lune. Like him, these artists seek to investigate humanities motivation in choosing to go to the moon through fantastical elements and fictions. The gallery guide mentions the recent Mars 500 ‘wood panelled spacecraft’ in Moscow, six men simulating a space mission on the ground. Through another prism that would be performance art.

In Enter At Own Risk, 2011 We Colonised the Moon, Hagen Betzwiser and Sue Corke imagines the work of lunar scientists on the moon’s surface, specifically the smell generated by moon dust as they re-entered the lunar module. They’ve attempted a recreation, which to my nasal cavity is somewhat like the Yankee Candle shop but through scratch and sniff postcards has been confirmed by one of the actual astronauts. One of the repeated elements of the exhibition is the revealing of little known facts about our natural satellite.

Beyond an airlock which reminds us of the preparatory processes from FACT’s previous success, ZEE, a room is set out like a mock up of the lunar surface and visitors at the weekend will be able to see the artist’s own astronaut recreating a moon mission, gardening the artificial rocks. We received a preview and its an eerie experience not least because as a group we were awed into silence presumably so as not to distract the performer from their task. We met the person behind the mask later but I won’t spoil their anonymity.

The last Apollo landing was by the Soviet Union, when in 1976, the Lunik 24, an unmanned probe stopped off for twenty-four hours and collected moon rocks. Leonid Tishkov cherishes that fact and in Private Moon he personalises it by presenting a series of photos illustrating the story of man who meets the moon and decides to spend the rest of his life with it. These are beautiful evocations of the city, illuminated by the moon itself carried about like the heart in the promo for Rodger Sanchez’s Another Chance, a reference he probably wasn’t intending.

Similarly its unlikely Sharon Houkema had the rippling moon of the surface of the water in the opening titles of Arena, the BBC’s arts strand when producing M3, but as it ebbs and flows on the wall above us, it replicates the same broken quality in a clever adaptation of an overhead projector. As the accompanying text describes: “The moon image – often surrounded with mysticism, romanticism and fantasy – is rendered (un)intelligible, yet the magic doesn’t disappear, it merely switches position.”

The point were science and art properly coexist is in Andy Gracie’s Drosophila Titanus a small display which gathers evidence of the artist’s attempt to breed a fruit fly capable of withstanding the extreme conditions on Titan (Saturn’s moon) (which you already knew) (sorry to insult your intelligence). When Gracie says the experiment could take many thousands of generation it gains an epic quality even on discovering the life cycle of the fly is nine days. One of the outcomes will be in seeing how mutant strains and deformities can speed up the process.

Liliane Lijn imagined in 1992 a moment when she’d behold it and see the word printed across it in block capitals, the celestial body becoming a metaphor for the female body which it already effects indirectly. He decades long project has resulted in a video piece representing her vision which shifts every twenty-six hours in time with its actuality, the natural lunar cycle suggestion a gender transformation as SHE becomes HE and back again. In the darkness of the media lounge, moonememe is accompanied by the voice of Lijn and a friend vocalising these shifts.

If you take my advice you will visit the media lounge then Gallery Two first because for once it’s Gallery One (opposite the box office) which provides the grand finale and perhaps one of the most original, astonishing, exciting art pieces these thirty-seven year old eyes has seen, a work which taps directly into my whimsy gene with its poignancy. Glimpsing at it through a window on an exterior wall as I arrived for the press view suggested this would be a simple reproduction of the control room for a moon mission.  I was wrong.

At which point the title does much of the work. Agnes Meyer-Brandis’s The Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar Migration Bird Facility takes it inspiration from Francis Goodwin’s Jacobian utopian fantasy novel The Man in the Moone, which recounts the diary of one Domingo Gonsales who’s carried to the moon in a chariot by geese and the artist has bred eleven of the fowl at an analogue for the moon in Italy, the secret success being that instead of simply faking these elements, we’re seeing their behaviour live.

None of which really describes the excitement of being in the room, the attention to detail of some of the elements, and it’s not supposed to. You have to visit, even for ten minutes, even if you’re primarily in the building to go the movies (though chances are whatever you’re seeing will have a tenth of the imagination of this). It’s rare that I become quite so evangelic about an art piece but along with the accompanying film which charts the development of the experiment, Meyer-Brandis captures the magic of Melieres through even more dimensions than Hugo.  Breathtaking.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:15/31:Are You Easily Distracted?

Guest answer from Karie (@kariebookish).

Life The fact that I had to be asked three times to contribute this piece says a lot. I am not sure if I can blame impending middle-age or the internet. What did you say .. oh, look! A funny dog video! All I know is that I have been meaning to make that important phone call for two months and I nearly forgot the postal deadline for sending Christmas presents abroad but I am able to tell you all about a trampoline being blown away in Scotland and a dog chasing deer outside London. Has my brain succumbed to memes?

Maybe our brains are not wired for this post-industrial age of information. Information used to have gate keepers: people who made sure that we did not get distracted from important local news by stories about US mall officers tracking down owners of lost envelopes. These days our gatekeepers seem to be the people who find the most obscure piece of news and spread it via Reddit or Metafilter until it ends up on Twitter and then Facebook where your aunt will read it and email it to you three months after you first plus-'d-oned it. Can our brains be trusted to filter the deluge of information and suss out which are the important things to remember?

So, the way information has disseminated has changed irrevocably. Arguably the ways we receive, store and process information have also changed. Twenty years ago the critic Donna Haraway wrote her famous “Cyborg Manifesto”. The manifesto uses the concept of “cyborg” as a feminist metaphor, but Haraway's essay is eerily prescient. We receive, store and process information as though we are machines although I'd say we are closer to being conduits than actual machines. Can we be so distracted that we forget we are human?

I used to think of myself as a woman of the modern age – someone who looked at buildings as machines and saw art as an escape from emotion. I confess there has been a change and that I am more a romantic in the old 19th century sense of the word. I find myself becoming increasingly interested in the ideas of authenticity and origin. Words that I should be rejecting as obsolete in this day and age. I think I am reacting to my own distracted state of being: I crave slowness and I need time to think in order to connect to myself again. I read books (not on a Kindle although I am clearly the demographic for it) and I knit (preferably from yarn so authentic that I know the name of the sheep) – both gestures reaching back through time though interestingly also both infinitely now gestures.

2011 was the year of protests, so the media tell us. I like to think that my brain has protesting against what I have been doing to it. Will 2012 be the year of Luddism? Will I remember to make that phone call and write letters? Ask me next year.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:14/31:Torchwood's Web of Lies.

TV  Revisiting Torchwood’s Miracle Day, this summer’s great televisual disappointment in any form is rather like picking at a scab, but for completion sake I did buy a copy of the blu-ray if only to see if the commentaries would offer any indications as to what went wrong. Recorded during post-production for the last episode by Russell T Davies and Julie Gardener it is possible to hear some weary exhaustion and with all of the criticism and qualifications of their own work, we can now take the view that they had a massive loss of confidence when faced with working in a new idiom and followed too many dodgy notes from Starz as to how to make the programme.  Meanwhile, it sounds as though the BBC just left them to get on with it.

Amongst the other extras are a deleted scene which allows us to watch Alexa Havens park a car outside an airport over and over and over again (and for no good reason it turns out) and this “motion comic” Web of Lies originally released on iTunes in ten weekly chunks during the original broadcast. Already finding the forty-five minutes or so of the main series quite enough to slog through per week I decided to leave my enjoyment of this as late as possible and so here we are at the closing of the year. I could of course have waited until next year’s Doctor Who drought but decided that the last thing I wanted was for Torchwood’s Miracle Day to spread across any more of my calendar, especially since it looks like it’s never coming back anyway.

In the event, Web of Lies is about as I expected with just a few surprises. Split between two time frames, it sees Holly, a surprisingly connected young woman, investigating the shooting of her brother during Miracle Day and in parallel, a flashback sequence set during Torchwood’s first season in which Gwen travels the world searching for a kidnapped Jack, the two stories ultimately segwaying in a way that Immortal Sins failed to. At half an hour it doesn’t outstay its welcome and Jane Espenson’s script flows pretty well so long as you keep in mind that the reason everyone keeps repeating themselves every three minutes is because we’re skipping the week in between, and narrative leaps are because the interactive elements are missing.

The pre-release/publication/download excitement was because of the appearance of Eliza Dushku as the lead though there’s two obvious disappointments. As well as the aforementioned isolation from actual Torchwood, thereby nullifying hope of a kind of faux-Faith/Jack stand-off, Holly isn’t drawn to look like her either, the artist clearly a fan of Maggie Hopey from Love and Rockets (see above). Of course, in animation such things aren’t to be expected, but since the rest of the cast includes Jesse Eisenberg and Daniel Craig (at least in terms of drawing inspiration), it’s a shame the artist didn’t decide to give Eliza her tru calling (sorry). Perhaps she was cast after the design work was done.

There’s no Web of Lies Confidential so we don’t really know what the production process was like, but it’s fair to say not all of the animation works and in this case the “motion comic” label is designed to set the viewer up for something fairly rudimentary. It’s at about the level of the Shada remake with some moving parts, so although the rendering of the Cardiff characters is perfectly fine, the multiple facial expressions of Eve Myles captured, especially the one in which her eyeballs seem to envelop half of her face, their heads often wobble back and forth in a very curious manner like office toys.  The two or three frame style of walking will be familiar to fans of 8-bit computer games.

But like Shada and dozens of missing episode recons, it’s the performances and writing which generally carry things. Eve and Jack are at about the tone of Torchwood’s radio series and there’s a strange nostalgia to hearing them refer to absent friends even if the actuality of that old series, as we’ve noted in recent weeks, left a bit to be desired (a bit?). Dushku is a bit hesitant at first but soon the Faith/Tru/Echo paradigm kicks in and almost makes up for the lack of proper Torchwood action for her. The story resolution even seems to make sense of a section of the main series, although arguably it should have been up to the main series to do that. Presumably they decided it was already overburdened with stuff.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:13/31:What is your favourite building?

Guest answer by Ruth Moss (@smashpoetry).

When Stuart asked me to write a guest post on the subject of my favourite building I was stumped.

If he’d asked me about my favourite place, it would have been different. Ravenhead Greenway in St. Helens where I used to walk the dogs I used to have. Greenwich Park in London, where I’d go on early morning walks to shake off hangovers and comedowns, back in the early noughties. Abercromby Square in Liverpool, where I’d sit and read DH Lawrence novels, wearing a polo neck and drinking wine from a plastic cup. A farmer’s field in Newton-le-Willows where I once spent an afternoon with a pretty girl and a suitcase. The underneath of the stairs up to Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral where I once spent part of a night out with a handsome young man and … well, I’ll leave that there.

However, the question was about my favourite building, and not my favourite place.

I’m not especially well-travelled, and on the odd occasion I’ve been further than the UK I’ve been more interested in going on long walks and assessing the local landscape; when I’ve been indoors it’s been more for the content of the place (art galleries, museums, libraries) than the building itself.

I’m just not a building person; the only places I really enjoy spending long periods of time indoors are my house, and the houses of people with whom I enjoy spending time. It’s not that I’m unimpressed by great architecture; it’s just that I can’t fall in love with it in the way I can with the great outdoors.

However, I didn’t want to let Stuart down. At first, I thought that perhaps my own house is my favourite building; a simple two-bedroom mid-terrace in St Helens, but decorated throughout with vibrant matching colour pallets with bright bunting, various unusual car-boot finds and generally made to look cheerful and quirky without overstepping the line into tacky. I have, as one might say, made it my own; me and my son spend quite a bit of time there so it has to be a gorgeous place to live.

High ceilings, a faux-marble fireplace, steep stairs and a rickety old landing combine to make it architecturally interesting, if not high art. But as for it being my favourite building? I wasn’t sure. It felt like cheating.

It was only when I was on twitter, reading my stream, and saw a tweet from someone I follow, that I realised I do indeed have a favourite building. I’d forgotten about it, primarily because I don’t really think of it as a building as such; I’d categorise it more as a place, but still, it has walls, and foundations; bricks and mortar; it’s fairly old, too, and architecturally very interesting.

It doesn’t, however, have a roof.

It did once.

The tweet I saw was from @BombedOutChurch and was about something Urban Strawberry Lunch was putting on there.

My favourite building is St. Luke’s Church in Liverpool. It sits at the place where Bold Street turns into Hardman Street. Once a fully-functioning church, it’s now used by musicians, artists, CND campaigners, Yoga teachers, local characters and anyone in need of a bit of solace. Often, walking up Bold Street, music can be heard coming from inside the church drawing in interested passers-by.

Bombed in the Liverpool Blitz on 5^th May 1941, St. Luke’s suffered heavy damage; its roof entirely demolished but its walls and steeple miraculously left standing. Trees and plants now grow inside the church; strawberries and buddleja adorn brickwork and seats made of haystacks nestle in the grass for weary tourists or locals.

If I was a religious person, I’d imagine this as the perfect place to commune with God; a man-made building but a carpet of grass and a roof of sky; a perfect meeting of humans and creation. I’m not particularly religious, but it does seem to me at least serendipitous that enough of the church survived to turn it into what it is today; a calm, serene meeting place where people can come together with many differing ideas and share them in an atmosphere of peace, serenity and covered by a ceiling of clouds.

For me, too, it’s my perfect building. Not only is it beautiful (of course churches are beautiful; they were meant to impress peasants, like I would have been back then) but the inside is the outdoors.

You can find further information on the bombing of Liverpool here, further information on St. Luke’s Church here, Urban Strawberry Lunch’s website is here and twitter feed is here.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:12/31:Will the physical book become obsolete with the advances in technology? Could the same fate befall the physical act of love?

Question from Zoe Pattulo via Facebook.

Books However obsolete Google has now rendered most of my undergraduate degree in Information Studies, there were still plenty of lectures and seminars that in glancing forwards towards technological revolutions retained some of their resonance. Back in 1993 it seemed inconceivable that the internet would become so prevalent that it would effect our ability to retain knowledge causing us to rely on the devices at finger tips rather than the one which evolution has given us, yet here I am unable to remember the name of one my favourite actresses without recourse to the IMDb (it’s Barbara Stanwyck and now that I’ve typed it into something I might have a chance).

The other surprise, a few weeks into the Information and Society course was the death of the book, or at least a book made from wood pulp with physical pages. Even laptops at the time were hulking great big things and the idea that they’d become small enough to hold in the hand, something akin to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or Star Trek’s PADD seemed, for obvious reasons, like science fiction. Apart from anything else, we were all still writing this down on a A4 refill pad with a biro. Laborious perhaps but why would anyone want to give up something that flexible, permanent and undeletable without recourse to whitner or a match?

We were even tasked with listing all of the reasons why books might survive and the cumulative list on the white board was about what you might expect. That paper books are tactile, easy to access, resilient, not as susceptible to technological failure, enjoyable to pick up in a book shop and smell excellent when brand new. That last one was probably mine. Especially glossy text books, particularly if they’re employing a heavy duty paper. Yum. Anyway we all looked at that list and decided that electronic books or whatever they’d be called might happen, but they’d be a niche item. People would still want books. Wouldn’t they?

Well, hum. From Alison Flood of The Guardian, Friday 12 August 2011, 14.36 BST: “Sales of adult fiction in hardback so far this year have fallen by over 10% according to book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan: by this point last year, sales of the format had reached £29.7m, while this year they stand at £26.6m. Cheaper paperback sales, in contrast, have only fallen 6%. Hardback sales have fallen in volume as well as value, BookScan said, from 2.8m copies sold by this point last year to 2.6m this, echoing a trend over the last two years: 8.5m copies of adult fiction hardbacks were sold in total in 2009, compared to just 7m in 2010.”

It’s the near death of physical books, people. Read the whole article and find quotes from various members of the trade commenting on how hardbacks are themselves becoming the niche, premium products with eBooks likely to continue to “cannibalise” their sales. But there are two details which you might have missed – I did first time around and which are relatively important for present purposes.  (1) “Cheaper paperback sales, in contrast, have only fallen 6%” and another which isn’t even mentioned but is very important – that (2) generally hardbacks and eBooks are published on the same day often months and months before the cheaper paperback.

That’s important, and here’s why. My Dad is big fan of historo-fantasy writer Diana Gabaldon and after hearing she had a new book out duly sent me to Amazon to see if it is available in paperback. His preference for paperbacks goes back to when he was working. They were easier to hold on the bus and even the doorsteps he reads took up less space in his bag and even now he finds hardbacks unwieldy to hold. Plus they’re cheaper. Amazon reveals the paperback isn’t published until 25th October 2012 but that the hardback is out this week. So after the usual sigh he handed me his credit card details and we ordered the larger edition.

The eBook edition is out the same day and I wondered what might have happened if he was still working and he had a Kindle. Would he have bought the eBook version. Having just asked him, he said he might, especially after I’d explained to him how a Kindle and the other readers that are available actually work. But what about the other commuters with small bags and far to go, and not wanting to carry around a hardback for the sake of reading whatever’s printed inside? Might not they also buy the eBook, especially if the alternative is waiting up to a year for the more portable option (with the exception of an audio version but let’s not go there)?

I’ve had a hunt around online and although I can’t find specific evidence of that, this page offers some kind of profile of an typical human eBook reader: “Your typical “e-book power buyer” (i.e. someone who buys at least one e-book every week) is an urban or suburban 30-44 year old with a full-time job. Next in line are 45-54 year olds, followed by 18-29 year olds. Not surprisingly, people in the 55+ age category buy the fewest e-books—at least, for now.” So actually the typical human eBook reader is exactly the kind of person who’d want a portable version of the book and perhaps has the disposable income to offset the loss of a physical item.


That release window has to be a sticking point. People have no patience, and why should they when media companies still attempt to impose artificial release windows which is presumably how a lot of people view this hardback/paperback gap. If through some bizarre set of circumstances, music publishers decided to attempt to save vinyl by delaying the release of cds and downloads for a year after the initial hotwax publication, the price of turntables would clearly increase, especially the ones which easily plug into PCs for the transformation into mp3s, crackle and hiss intact. It’s why the gap between theatrical and home release of films is ever narrowing.

It’s almost as though they want physical format sales to fail, and who could blame them? Even taking into account the environmental cost (as if that’s even an issue), there’s the whole process of printing and distributing paper books which is becoming ever more expensive thanks to the likes of fuel prices. Much easier to have the consumer effectively duplicate it themselves when they download. Plus, since the books can’t be resold or lent out easily (though libraries are trying their best even if they’re not going to be here much longer thanks to the drop in funding), readers are forced to buy brand new copies of everything, which is a major shift.

Now all we need to do is ask those young commuters if they’d buy the paperback instead if it was available on the same day. If they’re anything like me they’d still buy paper books. But then they’re not anything like me because I don’t have an eReader, will wait for a book to be published in paperback and don’t often read newly published books anyway, unless they feature a Time Lord in the lead role or is a four hundred year old play. The Caitlin Moran was my first in ages and I’m now deep into rediscovering the classics after deciding to collect the latest gorgeously designed edition of the Oxford World Classics.

Aha, and aha, what about Borders? What about all those US chains closing? What about the gloomy future of Waterstones and the independent book retailers? Some of that might have been about eBook sales, but it’s mostly because of people like me buying from Amazon and charity shops. Yes, but what about the death of the cd? Of vinyl? Isn’t that the same? That’s a portability issue too. Why lug around all those shiny discs when your mobile phone will play the same music. Oddly enough, I’ve gone back to my cd player because it’s more practical for listening to audiobooks because it allows you restart in the middle of a track and sentence.

All of which said, do I think the physical book will ever become obsolete with the advances in technology? Yes, probably, but it’ll take centuries, assuming we’re all still here. People just like paper books and it’s not until there are enough of us who’ve only ever been exposed to reading eBooks that there will be a change, the collective memory moves on, for the same reason I’m not scrawling this into a stone tablet or writing this on cloth. Apart from anything else, it’s a matter of usability. Hand someone a book and they immediately know what to do with it. Hand them an eBook reader and the learning curve begins.

The physical act of love, like the unexpected segway, will never be obsolete. This isn’t another topic discussed during my Information Studies course but there have certainly been enough films before and since which have tackled what a non-physical act of love would be like, usually involving virtual reality (The Lawnmower Man) or whatever the orgasmatron was (Sleeper). Or perhaps the question means in terms of onanistic pleasure thanks to electronic stimulation, either on a screen or in the hand, in which case you should never knock that sort of thing. To paraphrase Woody Allen in Annie Hall, it's sex with someone you love.

But to risk going a bit Swizz Tony from The Fast Show, we’ll never give up the physical act of love with (I’m assuming the question means) another person for much the same reason we can’t quit books. Because they’re tactile. Because they’re easy to access. Because they’re resilient. Because they’re not as susceptible to technological failure. Because they’re enjoyable to pick up in a book shop (not, let’s face it, I would know) and especially because they smell excellent when brand new. Well, alright, that’s stretching the metaphor a bit (a bit?) (bye, readers), but there’s no substitute for being with a person, especially someone you love.

Apparently.

What both questions really underscore is that people prefer the physical reality of things. Even eBook readers are things, even if we stop using paper for new releases, people will still have to hold something in their hands, just as people still want to hold people in their hands. Another way of interpreting the question could have been “will the physical act of reading become obsolete with the advances in technology?” but I still don’t think so. Film, television and theatre can offer unforgettable experiences, but as I’ve discovered myself in rediscovering reading there’s something very intimate about a book, an intimacy that is irreplaceable.

[Updated:  BBC's Imagine programme covered much the same topic tonight.  it's now available on the iPlayer.]

The Opinion Engine 2.0:11/31:What was the first album you bought and when and how? Listen to it again. How do you feel about it now?

Guest answer from Alison Gow.

Music When Stu asked me to write about the first album I bought my first thought was “Wow, it feels like yesterday”, and the second was “ohthankgodit’sacoolone”.

It would take a confessional journalist of Liz Jones proportions to get me to admit a Tight Fit first album purchase... luckily I can admit to it being Scary Monsters and Super Creeps, by David Bowie.

I had, of course, bought singles before - from the wonderful, cave-like Dale’s record store in Tenby’s Tudor Square. I was massively in awe of the imposing owner, Laurie Dale (dad of Charles the Corrie actor, fact fans), and fascinated by, and a bit scared of, the Iron Maiden album covers.

But an album was a big purchase for a nine-year-old - proper sums of cash were required for one, and also it was a commitment I didn’t feel ready to take.

Then my brother intervened.

Martin, four years older than me and the star of the local rugby and cricket teams, was cooler, more popular, and swore better, than anyone I knew.

Despite him warning me that when I started Big School I was not to tell anyone we were related, on pain of pain, and having once frightened me so badly by pretending to be a particularly dreaded Dr Who monster that I fainted, I idolised him.

His best mate had been given an album for his birthday he didn’t want, need or intend to keep and so was selling it.

My brother decided the person who should buy it was me - probably because he wanted it but wasn’t prepared to fork out - and so the pair of them proposed I should hand over some cash (I think it was £5) and in return I would be given music by someone I’d never heard of.

Astonishingly, I agreed and a couple of days later the album, with its weird cover art, was mine.

It was the most baffling, inexplicable thing I’d ever heard. Some of it was in Japanese - Japanese! - and it featured random swearing. I remember leaping, salmon-like, across the room to turn down the volume on It’s No Game Part II before my mum walked into my bedroom in time to hear someone sing the word ‘Shit’.

On a record player with built-in, tinny speakers, even the parts in English were hard to understand; ‘These pieces are broken’ became ‘these pieces of cocaine’ in my tuneless rendition for months... til I found the lyrics sheet, still inside the album cover.

I didn’t understand much of it but I absolutely loved that album. I loathed Fashion, with its nonsense “Beep Beep” refrain - it did ok in the charts - but that was the only track I’d skip.

I loved, loved, loved Scream Like a Baby - I had very vivid mental images of that song, probably informed by WWII films (it’s about political oppression so I was close, but no cigar) - but was baffled by Ashes to Ashes; all I knew was that it sounded terribly sad. My brother told me it was about a drug addict and hinted it was a sequel to an earlier song. My next trip to Dale’s saw me order a copy of Space Oddity (album) which earned me an approving nod off Mr Dale.

So, Stu asked me to listen to SMSC again for this blog post, and think about how it made me feel.

I have a digital copy now, of course, but I also still have my original, rather tatty album, which is as unscratched and loved as ever and it was that I dug out to replay.

Funnily enough, I hadn’t listened to it for years, digitally or otherwise so it was a rediscovery.

Even though I knew it was coming, the brash, shocking introduction still made me jump - all you hear are the crackles of the needle and vinyl, suddenly punctured by guitarist Fripp’s drawling chord on It’s No Game Part I.

What really struck me was how much of my childhood is tied to this album.

I didn’t just play it, I did what behaviourists term ‘active listening’ - questioning myself about how the songs made me feel, and what they brought back.

What I realised was something I hadn’t really thought about before - that this album, bought on a whim, really redefined my relationship with my brother.

We bonded over Bowie and, throughout our teen years when we behaved, at times, in pretty horrific ways towards one another, it was a common ground to which we could retreat.

We would discuss songs, the Bowie looks, have ‘what happened to his eye?’ conversations (pre-internet it was not easy to find out), compete for the best mix-tape, and go on buying sprees. Martin - with a job as glass collector in a local pub - earned more and bought the ‘rarities’ (imports and picture disks mainly) and I bought albums. I still have them; I can’t imagine what would make me part with them, even though all the tracks are on my iTunes.

So how did I feel when I listened to Scary Monsters for this blog? I felt grateful it had introduced me to Bowie’s amazing music, a little amazed at how well it had stood the test of time, and I felt a wave of affection for my big brother.

Because without him, this could have been 900-oddwords about Tight Fit.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:10/31:Can you truly love someone you have never met?

Question asked by Tonia via her friend on Facebook.

Life  Of all the questions I’ve been asked in this past couple of weeks, this is the one which has really caused me to stop and think. Not because I don’t have an answer. To save some time, my answer is no. What’s created the difficulty is how to frame that answer over five hundred or so words, because it’s also an answer for which the complexity is in the working out, and I didn't want the result to be covered in red pen.

So you’ll forgive me for dropping the artifice (assuming that dropping the artifice isn’t an artifice in and of itself) and structure and go with my gut (see what I mean?). What my gut says is that to an extent I don’t have the emotional maturity to really understand why. My lack of emotional maturity has become a useful prop when trying to explain why human beings are generally so awful to each other. I don’t understand because I don’t have the “emotional maturity”. But it’s true. For various reasons, I don’t.

It was much simpler for the pubescent version of me, the one who kissed his poster of late 80s Kylie each night before he went to bed, who compiled scrap books about the Minogue and in those pre-YouTube days filled VHS tapes with interviews and pop videos but who’d also travel one stop on the bus so that he could smile at the mysterious tall girl in the brown uniform so that she’s smile back when he alighted just outside his school, early enough that his friends wouldn’t see. He’d say, yes, yes you can.

Fiction also suggests that yes, it is indeed possible to truly love someone you’ve never met. Apart from courtly romance, there’s the famous scene in City Slickers, a film that is otherwise becoming increasingly relevant the older I become. It’s the famous “one thing” scene in which Jack Palance’s old cowboy Curly explains to Billy Crystal’s Mitch that the secret of life is the “one thing”, a “one thing” which is different for everybody.

But the earlier part of the scene, the preamble, is more pertinent here as Mitch asks Curly a question which is particularly pertinent.

Mitch: You ever been in love?
Curly: Once. I was driving a herd across the panhandle. Texas. Passed near this little dirt farm right about sundown. Out in the field was this young woman, working down in the dirt. Just about then she stood up to stretch her back. She was wearing a little cotton dress, and the settin' sun was right behind her, showing the shape that God had give her.
Mitch: What happened?
Curly: I just turned around and rode away.
Mitch: Why?
Curly: I figured it wasn't gonna get any better than that.
Mitch: But you could have been, you know...with her.
Curly: Been with lots of women.
Mitch: Yeah, but you know, she could have been the love of your life.
Curly: She is.

I’m thirty-seven now and know it’s not that simple.

For one thing in social networking, which I think is the context of this question, where the idea of meeting someone becomes more ambiguous, can you have “met” someone if it’s not in real life? Dictionary definitions suggest an acquaintance is enough and you can certainly become acquainted with someone via Twitter or Facebook. Many are the relationships and even marriages built on an initial web friendship, but have any of those people really been in love before they’ve met in real life?

I’ve "met" people online, perhaps even become a bit infatuated with them. But I don’t think I’ve ever been in love with any of them. For all the ways in which we’ve connected, I’ve always had the niggling suspicion that they could never be that perfect, moreover that the person I’m speaking to is unlikely to be the person I’d see in real life, largely because I’m sure, I think, the person typing these words he isn’t the person he is real life.  The people who have met me are best placed to judge that.

I have been in love. A lot. I don’t know if anyone’s ever loved me back, but there’s something I do know. That if there are any women I’ve truly loved, it was always because I’d become friends with them first. When I have been truly, madly, deeply, although they’ve been objectively attractive it’s not that which has made me love them. It’s been about how they’ve made me feel both while I was around them and all the seconds in-between.

Someone asked me recently if any of them where the love of my life. My answer was that I hoped not, because I knew they didn’t love me back, at least not that way, at least as far as I knew, and that would mean I’ve nothing to look forward to. But I’ve also been horrible at noticing the signs which explains the qualifications. If someone had loved me, truly loved, I probably wouldn’t have noticed.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:9/31:Weren't we happier before the internet?

Guest answer by Laura Brown.

Life Remember when you didn’t know what a trending topic was? Remember when students had to go to a proper library and research from proper books instead of just Googling their essay question? Think back to when that eejit you only send Christmas cards to out of guilt got in touch once a year and you weren’t forced to read their hilarious insights into how their pet pooch prefers mega chunk biscuits instead of petachunks, or whatever dogs eat.

Happy wasn’t it.

I for one was more productive before the Internet. Perhaps I should clarify, before the Internet stretched its malevolent hand over my world and cast a shadow over it. Granted, I was 18 before I sent an email. This is not because my parents likened internet usage to developing a healthy relationship with alcohol or casting a vote – although they probably should have done – but because it was 1998. Mobiles needed a bag of their own and everyone had pay as you go. You stayed in touch with people by, you know, talking to and seeing them. You shopped in proper shops. You read the news in newspapers. There were changes and technological wizardry yes. Instead of whirring and burring into life the super duper Nintendo had replaced the gigantic BBC computer in our living room. But life and the happy routine was much as they always had been. We did the shop on a Saturday. My dad rang his mother on a Sunday. I came home from school at 4.30 and proceeded to speak for at least to hour to every person of my gang.

It was content. It was ordered. It was safe.

It is no longer safe. Danger lurks behind every click. My day can be thrown into disarray by a simple status update. I now know my friends are pregnant because they tell me on Facebook. I read my news online with my netbook perched on my lap or squinting into my smartphone. I am contactable 24/7, and don’t my clients know it. I have developed a cramp from leaning over too small computers with too small screens in uncomfortable chairs. These are merely aesthetic concerns and selfish ones at that.

No my real concerns about the Internet and its effect on our general mood lie deep within its
underbelly. We are crueller online. We revert to childhood, taunting and teasing. The Internet, particularly comments boards and social networking sites have become one big playground where the school bullies have been replaced by the boy who can type the fastest or the articulate left-leaning journo with a sharp tongue. The weakest is anyone.

We have real double standards. We abhor right wing media from stitching up members of the public, yet we will gleefully mock their journalists and columnists. We don’t know how many have written the text that appears under their name or whether it has been modified by a sub editor. We don’t ask. We criticise not just their writing but their looks, their mental state, ability to procreate, the paternity of their mother and their relationship to various despots in history. And we do it in an instant, for laughs, with no remorse. There are no consequences online.

We do not have real relationships. On my first day of marriage, in between watching Liverpool lose to Arsenal, having a friend breakfast, looking moonily into my husband’s eyes, I told all my friends (many of whom had not been invites to said event) on Facebook. I cannot have been the only bride who considered it might reflect a real cut in cost to invite people via Facebook. There must be someone who has done it.

Look at the effect the Internet has had on our national media. How much is content about being a bastion of virtue or a chase to get hits, add comments, generate bitchy, trolling debate in a bid to get advertisers. The Mail Online is the most popular news site in the UK yet it can’t make a profit out of advertising. The Internet doesn’t make money. It might help you widen your business and it has created new jobs but it hasn’t been successfully monetised yet. How much of that is because of how we behave online?

Society never truly became free until we realised that we don’t have true freedom. Instead we have limits placed on our freedom and behaviour to ensure we can all have a reasonable level of liberty that doesn’t encroach on other people around us. Yes, I would like to slap the irritating woman next to me on the bus. But I could take a picture and tweet it. Isn’t that just as bad? As much as Paul McMullan might have taught us this year that privacy is only required by paedophiles (why is there no punctuation mark for ‘what the fuck’ by the way?) in fact it is one of the cornerstones of our freedom. Respecting eachother’s privacy and right to it is a bastion of our culture. Until we start adopting the same kind of rules online the Internet will make us worse not better. As #thewomanontheleft or Jemima Khan who was outed by an erroneous super injunction busting twitter feed as being Jeremy Clarkson’s mistress, when she wasn’t.

Online we behave as though we have no personal responsibility. It has become a mad, bad world of all that is wrong about how we communicate. Even Wikipedia has been bastardised by Bell Pottinger (yes, Ed, allegedly) There is no safe haven online. Until we recognise that the Internet needs to be an extension of our civilised society we will never really reap the benefit of it. Or perhaps a reflection is exactly what it has become and that’s why it feels so rotten to the core.