Some time around the beginning of their fourth decade, men become less interested in the gifts and presents they receive than in the instruction manuals that accompany these presents. On Christmas mornings houses everywhere are filled with fathers and grandfathers obsessively scrutinising little explanatory brochures for mobile phones and Black & Decker products as though they were Talmudic scholars with lost books of the Torah.
The gifts themselves go neglected and battery-less and end up gathering dust, but the instruction manuals are cherished and consulted frequently, the way toddlers pay more attention to the boxes in which their toys come than to the toys themselves.
This phenomenon has to explain why the first minister was given an iPod, as promised, by his wife for Christmas, as he revealed this week in the register of members’ interests, which requires that ministers declare any expensive gifts. Jack McConnell is 45 years old. Forty-five-year-old men do not listen to iPods. They do not have the time or the patience. In preparation for the blissful hush of the grave, they’ve come to enjoy pure silence too much. They look at their old vinyl albums and wonder despairingly how they’re going to fit them all inside this tiny white machine. For almost 20 years they’ve found their listening needs have been amply satisfied by keeping a CD of the Eagles’ greatest hits in the glove box. The last concert they attended was by the Electric Light Orchestra. Give a 45-year-old man an iPod and he’s most likely to sniff it then try to change channels with it.
Yet we’re supposed to believe Jack loves his iPod and has filled it with albums by Keane, KT Tunstall, Arcade Fire and REM. In other words, he just says he has to appeal to the following demographic voting blocs: Keane (professional couples); KT Tunstall (young women); Arcade Fire (students); and REM (old duff blokes like Jack).
“I use it mostly on long car journeys and flights,” he said while smoothing down his Tubeway Army T-shirt, a revelation to those of us who assumed Jack spent these periods leafing through weighty ministerial reports concerning nutmeg provision for the under-fives. It seems not. Little of it rings true, though. My bet is that Mrs McConnell bought the thing to keep Jack quiet for a week as he perused the (online) instruction manual obsessively, pausing occasionally to whistle extracts from Hi-Ho Silver Lining.
- Belonging as I do to an apathetic, zombie-eyed generation of sybaritic good-for-nothings, I’m not usually minded to protest about things, and haven’t been since 1988, when Nicaraguan coffee roused hundreds of student contemporaries to march furiously, perhaps because the starving peasant farmers were being paid way too much, I can’t quite recall.
All that changed this week, though, when the BBC announced it was ditching the UK Theme. Before you could say “pointless gesture”, I’d fired off an e-mail to Mark Damazer, controller of Radio 4. If you’re unfamiliar with the UK Theme this may be due to the fact that it’s played every morning at 5.30am. A fixture of British broadcasting since 1973, it’s a bizarre orchestral medley of Scotland the Brave, Danny Boy, Men of Harlech, Greensleeves, Rule Britannia and What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor, a weird, ghostly musical Ordnance Survey map that plays tricks on the slumbering mind.
For months I had no idea it was on the radio. I thought it was playing in my head and indicated I’d been chosen to fulfil a glorious British destiny similar to that of King Arthur or Boadicea. That may yet be true, obviously, but the UK Theme is definitely a piece of music created by the Austrian-born composer Fritz Spiegl and now to be phased out to allow extended news broadcasts, extended no doubt to cover the future abolition of further British totems such as red pillar boxes, Chelsea pensioners and Cilla Black (though I shan’t be firing off an e-mail about the last one).
The ironic thing is that the death of the UK Theme was announced days after Gordon Brown called for a renewed sense of British identity, though this may be connected with Tony Blair’s apathy on the subject of the UK Theme when asked at prime minister’s questions about its retiral. It looks like all hopes are pinned on my e-mail to Damazer: “This wonderful piece,” it said “contributes immeasurably to the ambience of the station and places its broadcasts in a cultural and historic context.” Clearly this missive has given the controller a great deal to ponder on. How else to explain the fact that four days later he has yet to reply?
- Nothing cheers the soul quite like an outraged ecologist or, if one can’t be found because they’re busy recycling chip wrappers, an outraged rambler or hillwalker. Watching their little beards twitch with pious fury as they discover some townies have the audacity to visit their mountains without being named Callum or Lewis first is one of the greatest pleasures the civilised mind can conceive. They were at it again this week, moaning that insensitive city types are spoiling vast mountain ranges by scattering the ashes of their loved ones there.
“The trouble is that when people visit mountains in Scotland they expect to find a totally wild environment,” said one Beryl Leatherland (no, really) of the Mountaineering Council of Scotland. “They don’t expect to find peaks covered with memorials, where the natural ecology has been upset.”
Neither, you’d suppose, would they expect to be lambasted after these sad events by people whose clothes rustle when they move, for the trivial misdemeanour of making five square inches of mess amid ranges that stretch for many, many miles. But when can you expect from those whose greatest pleasure is getting as far away from other human beings as they can physically manage?
Charlie's finally lost his bottle
We’ve heard a lot recently about how collecting whisky is the hot blue-chip investment tip for the future, as stocks from decommissioned distilleries run out and rediscovered malts are placed on the market.
The notion was supported this week by an auction on the internet site eBay. From a starting price of £15, a bottle of eight-year-old House of Commons whisky signed by former Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy was finally secured by its new owner for £219. The seller, who is based in Dundee, won the bottle in a charity raffle.
Whether the whisky is any good we do not know, but the idea of possessing a bottle signed by Kennedy is rather like owning the Chelsea strip allegedly worn by David Mellor during his extramarital dalliances.
Understandably when such sums are being bandied about, potential purchasers have been flooding the site with queries. “Are you sure the bottle has been in the hands of Charles Kennedy? It’s unopened,” observes one. “Is this not Kennedy’s property?” wonders another.
The seller was eager to play fair, though, saying: “Charles is more than welcome to join in the bidding.” The name of the purchaser, however, remains a mystery.
