THE RANTING BRUMMIE'S SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS …

I'm searching for modern happiness in 2015. That retro, old-fashioned kind simply takes just far too long. That sort of happiness requires patience and I don't want to wait for it. I want upgraded happiness. I want beta release patch 4.02, the "new and improved" version. This is meant to be the 21st century, the era of hot and cold running digital television and remote controlled bathwater and I demand instant gratification.

Once upon a neanderthalithic time, when men were [hairy] men and deer and sheep were worried, you had to wait to eat your meal. Even when the Mammoth Burger walk-through was open, they offered only self-kill meals. And when you brought them home, you still had to ask Mrs Neanderthal to get the fire started.

"What ?? Mammoth burger AGAIN ?? How you cook ??"

"Ugh. Start fire for cave lady."

"Hah. You probably burn cave down."

"Hah you. No can burn cave down. Buy insurance policy."

"How you start fire ??"

"Rub twigs together. Make big flame. Cook mammoth burger."

"Last time you burn fingers."

The thing is, nobody lights a fire these days. People don't even light their ovens anymore. It takes just too long to heat up a meal. It takes just too much patience. I'm hungry now, not 40 minutes from now. That's why God gave us microwave ovens. Just pop the food in and … whrrrrr … BEEP … out it comes, nicely warmed for immediate consumption. That's how I want my happiness … toasty warm and right now !!

"Ooh. No more burn fingers."

Consider the Internet. You type "electric toothbrushes". You hit "enter". Google responds: "Search took 1.02 seconds." You think "Google is ready for the geriatric ward". You click on the first result – something about an electric eel eating a balanced breakfast – and a blank screen appears. You wait. And then wait some more.

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TRIVIA QUESTION: 

Did you know that William Shakespeare once waited almost twenty seconds for a web site to appear, so he could find a word that rhymed with cardiologist ?? The web site finally appeared in 1997, but he had given up waiting by then.

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Five seconds pass. Time's up and still no site has appeared. Your instant gratification cells are offended. You surf to another site.

"Ugh. No get Mammoth Burger web site. This thing no work." Go to Mammoth Burger walk-through instead".

I don't want to walk to get happiness. I want it delivered now. Not twenty seconds later, even if it does rhyme with cardiologist. Not 1.02 seconds later. I want happiness NOW. Remember when you had to extract your posterior from the couch to change TV channels ?? That took such a monumental effort that most people sat through whole nights of television without bothering to change channels at all. Of course, that might have been because the other channel was playing Columbo.

Back in the four-channel universe there was always something on. Now we flip through 5,472 channels, which keep us busy while fishing for something worth watching. Thanks to the remote control, we can now flip channels at a relaxed pace of 15 to 20 per minute without even breaking into a sweat. It’s also pretty much the same when you buy your fruit and veg these days. No more popping down to Fred the Greengrocer, then over the road to Keith the Butcher followed by a wander up to Mike the Chemists, it’s all available under one roof at Morrison’s.

Last week I had to pick some up extra sundries and ended up asking a question that I’ve never previously asked before in my entire life … "Where are your bananas ??". It seemed like a logical question to ask. For all of my thirty-three trips around the sun, bananas were a key item to place in the shopping trolley. For the first time I could recall, the banana basket was empty. So I asked a store worker where the bananas were.

"We don't have any," he replied. "We'll be getting some in tomorrow." It took me a few moments to absorb this information.

"What do you mean, you don't have any bananas ??" I thought. "Every store has bananas." True, sometimes they are green enough to pass for bent cucumbers and they occasionally appear to have lost an arm-wrestling match with a watermelon. But there are ALWAYS bananas of SOME sort in the store … aren’t there ?? And this was where it struck me. We expect our machines each day to break yesterday's speed record. Our cars seem to be slowing to a crawl because more and more people are squeezing onto the same bit of road space trying to go faster and honking their horns louder (because we all know that cars move faster when their horns get honked LONG and LOUD, right ??).

And I expect bananas on the supermarket shelf even when it is snowing outside and they’re still hanging on a tree somewhere in Barbados. Happiness, though, is not like a microwave oven. Nor like the Internet. Not even like a remote control. Happiness does not run on the instant gratification system. Happiness takes time and patience.

Dear Lord, please grant me the patience I lack … and I want it right now !!

SEASON'S GREETINGS

At this time of year I often think of the not-so jolly programmes you see on TV, such as “Grumpy Old Men At Christmas”, where various celebrities over the age of 50 moan, whinge and complain about how much of a pain in the bottom it is.

Don’t worry though, for once, I’m actually NOT going to be one of them ...

Naturally, though, there are always the odd irritations. I hate it, for instance, when you walk into Debenhams and are nearly choked to death in a stinging, blinding haze of sample perfumes and aftershaves pumped into your face by shop assistants who look as if they’ve applied their make-up by means of loading it into a blunderbuss beforehand and firing it at their faces. And my sister and I have an uncanny knack of buying the same thing. It’s why our parents have 3 DVD players and 5 sets of kitchen knives.

Speaking of which, we now have 'Black Friday', a shopping tradition that began in the USA and is now apparently 'a thing' over here. Every year, on the first Friday after Thanksgiving, hordes of deranged shoppers play a deranged game of British Bulldog with each other in a bid to get their hands on discounted items. It’s like watching a shoal of starved piranhas stripping a cow down to its skeleton, but only marginally less civilised. I used to think it would take a lot to make civil society break down completely, but in reality, it seems the promise of 15% off a Transformers Stomp-&-Chomp dinosaur is enough to turn neighbour on neighbour into a fight to the death worthy of a Star Wars lightsaber duel. It's probably also why the Star Wars lightsaber barbeque tongs I spotted in HMV vanished before I could think, "My brother-in-law would like …."

But generally, on the whole, I actually enjoy Christmas. Our rope lights come out of box untangled and work straight from the off. I manage to watch what I eat and drink … mostly. I like creating and writing out cards for friends. I find it satisfying to wrap presents. I look forward with baited breath for the “Doctor Who” special episode and the enforced bonhomie of New Year’s Eve. My Mother’s Boxing Day buffet is always a riot and I see nothing wrong with getting some new socks, mostly because my current ones are more holey than righteous.

Christmas is definitely the best, most funniest and most magical time of the year; it’s also certainly the most frenzied. And I've got a theory as to why. A theory so ill-conceived and thought-out, that it probably doesn't even scrape the underside of 'vaguely correct'. But nevertheless it's a theory, OK, and in today's chaotic world in which technology changes so quickly that you wouldn't be surprised to look in the mirror on day and discover you've been replaced with a robot and are actually now living on the internet, and that apple you're eating is made entirely out of pixels, it’s important to have one.

You're trying your hardest to keep on top of it all, but that's like attempting to maintain a sturdy grip on a length of greased rope attached to a python that’s been doused with itching powder - in this out-of-control fairground ride of a world we need all the theories we can get, right ?? You don't have time to think of an answer to that, so I'll give you one. My theory is time is packed into year-sized units it doesn't quite fit into, a little bit like my shoes in a way, which is why it starts being compressed sometime around November and becomes hopelessly crushed right about now. To put it another way, it's like writing something on a piece of paper and running out of room just as you get to the edge, so you have scrunch all the words up together at the end.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not whining. I love Christmas, but I am under no illusions that getting it right constitutes a lot of thought, planning and a healthy dollop of hard work. I'm just saying it's made me think a lot more about how, in the run-up to Christmas that everything automatically feels 50% more hectic than it would if it were happening in the middle of spring. I can't even go to the toilet at the moment without staring at my watch and panicking about how long it's taking.

It’s no wonder that “Die Hard” was set during Christmas. Watching Bruce Willis crashing head-first through windows and machine-gunning terrorists in an ever-dirtying vest would have been downright boring if he'd have been doing it on Pancake Day, Pentecost or on a Bank Holiday Monday. And it's still the best Christmas movie out there by far.

Period.

So, whatever you're up to, have fun, eat drink and be merry, yet be thankful for what you have. Make the most of these days that only come around once a year, because they may never come again.

Merry Christmas, to all my family and friends, and those who mean so much.

LOONEY ECO-TOONS

In the annals of animated sanctimony, few spectacles shine with the blinding, sanctimonious gleam of Captain Planet and the Planeteers, a 1990s cartoon that arrived like a biodegradable messiah to save the world from the twin evils of pollution and poor narrative choices. This was a show so earnest in its mission to educate the youth that it forgot, with breath-taking consistency, to entertain them. It was as if the creators, peering into the cultural void of Saturday morning television, decided that what children truly craved was a lecture on recycling delivered by a superhero with the charisma of a municipal waste management seminar.

Let us begin with the premise, a marvel of unsubtlety that could make a sledgehammer blush. Five teenagers from across the globe—Wheeler from North America, Linka from the Soviet Union (a geopolitical relic even in the ‘90s), Gi from Asia, Kwame from Africa, and Ma-Ti from South America—are bestowed magical rings by Gaia, the anthropomorphic spirit of the Earth, who apparently moonlights as a cosmic HR manager. These rings, each tied to an elemental power (Earth, Fire, Wind, Water, and the risible “Heart”), allow the Planeteers to summon Captain Planet, a blue-skinned, green-mulleted demigod who embodies the environmentalist ideal: loud, self-righteous, and utterly incapable of nuance. The show’s moral universe is as binary as a light switch: polluters bad, Planeteers good, and never shall the twain meet, lest the Earth itself choke on the fumes of ambiguity.

The Planeteers themselves are a masterclass in tokenism, each a walking stereotype so thinly drawn they make cardboard look three-dimensional. Wheeler, the American, is a brash, hamburger-chomping firebrand, because what else could represent the Land of the Free? Linka, the Soviet blonde, is all icy pragmatism and vague Eastern Bloc exoticism, as if her character was designed by someone who once saw a postcard of Moscow. Gi, the Asian water-bearer, is predictably studious and serene, while Kwame, the African, is grounded, noble, and about as fleshed-out as a pamphlet on sustainable agriculture. Ma-Ti, poor Ma-Ti, is saddled with the power of “Heart,” a nebulous ability to feel things deeply and communicate with animals, which in practice means he’s the team’s emotional support intern, perpetually sidelined while the others hurl elemental special effects at oil slicks.

And then there’s Captain Planet himself, a figure so absurdly over-the-top he could only have been conceived in a boardroom drunk on self-congratulation. With his cerulean skin, emerald mullet, and a costume that screams “discount Superman,” he swoops into every episode to punch pollution in the face, because nothing says environmental stewardship like a good old-fashioned fistfight. His catchphrase, “The power is yours!”—delivered with the gravitas of a motivational speaker at a corporate retreat—implies that the audience, presumably a gaggle of eight-year-olds eating sugary cereal, holds the key to saving the planet. Never mind that the show’s villains—Eco-Villains, naturally—are so cartoonishly evil they make Snidely Whiplash look like a nuanced character study. Hoggish Greedly, Looten Plunder, Dr. Blight, and their ilk are less antagonists than walking PowerPoint slides, each designed to embody a specific environmental sin with all the subtlety of a smokestack belching black fumes.

The show’s pedagogy is its most galling feature, a relentless sermonizing that treats its audience like intellectual compost. Every episode follows the same formula: the Planeteers stumble upon an environmental catastrophe—deforestation, toxic waste, poaching, you name it—caused by one of the Eco-Villains, whose motives are invariably greed or malice, because complexity is the enemy of dogma. The team bickers, combines their powers to summon Captain Planet, and then defeats the villain through a combination of elemental pyrotechnics and moral superiority. The episode ends with a “Planeteer Alert,” a segment so didactic it makes after-school specials look like avant-garde cinema. Here, the show pauses to lecture its viewers on practical steps to save the planet—turn off the tap while brushing your teeth, recycle your soda cans—delivered with the fervour of a televangelist hawking salvation.

What’s most risible about Captain Planet is its unshakable belief in its own moral purity. The show positions itself as a beacon of enlightenment, yet its worldview is so manichean it could double as a medieval morality play. Polluters are not misguided or complex; they are evil incarnate, cackling as they dump sludge into pristine rivers. The Planeteers, meanwhile, are paragons of virtue, their every action sanctified by Gaia’s approval. There’s no room for grey areas—no discussion of economic trade-offs, systemic challenges, or the messy realities of environmental policy. Instead, the show offers a fantasy where a blue superhero can punch an oil spill into submission, and children can save the world by composting their apple cores. It’s a vision so simplistic it borders on insulting, as if the creators believed their audience incapable of grasping anything beyond a bumper-sticker slogan.

The animation itself is a fitting metaphor for the show’s ethos: cheap, repetitive, and faintly patronizing. Backgrounds are recycled with the diligence of a recycling plant, and the character designs are so generic they could have been churned out by an algorithm tasked with “teenage archetypes.” The voice acting, while featuring luminaries like Whoopi Goldberg as Gaia and Meg Ryan as Dr. Blight, is hamstrung by scripts that prioritize preaching over personality. Even the theme song, a bombastic earworm that promises “Captain Planet, he’s our hero,” feels like an exercise in self-parody, its upbeat tempo clashing with the show’s relentless moralizing. And yet, for all its flaws, Captain Planet is a fascinating artefact of its time, a relic of the 1990s when environmentalism was transitioning from fringe activism to mainstream piety. The show’s heart—pardon the pun—was in the right place, but its execution was so heavy-handed it could crush a landfill’s worth of good intentions. It wanted to inspire a generation, but instead it delivered a lecture, wrapped in a cartoon, tied with a bow of self-righteous certainty. Its legacy is one of noble failure, a testament to the dangers of mistaking propaganda for storytelling.

In the end, Captain Planet and the Planeteers is less a show than a sermon, a blue-skinned homily that mistakes volume for vision. It’s a reminder that even the most laudable causes can be undone by a lack of wit, depth, or humility. The power, it turns out, was never really ours—it was in the hands of writers who thought a mulleted superhero could solve the world’s problems, one heavy-handed episode at a time. And so, we salute Captain Planet, not for saving the Earth, but for reminding us that even the best intentions can curdle into caricature when they forget to respect the audience’s intelligence.

DIE HARD POETRY

For those who’ve never seen an action film starring Bruce Willis in an ever-yellowing vest, this is a famous poem used in the film “Die Hard with a Vengeance”.

"As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives.

The seven wives had seven sacks.

The seven sacks had seven cats.

The seven cats had seven kits.

Kits, cats, sacks and wives, how many going to St. Ives ??"

The answer is of course, ONE, as the bloke with all the wives was NOT going TO St. Ives, but actually coming FROM it. But let's examine this poem in detail.

First of all, we have a man with seven wives. Little bit dodgy, but for all we know he could be a Mormon, so let's not pass judgment on him on that front, shall we ??

Next line; the seven wives had seven sacks. This doesn't mean that there was one sack each, oh no. This means each wife is carrying seven of these sacks. No mention of these wives being hot air balloons, so they can't be ballast. So the question remains: why is each wife carrying seven sacks ?? If it's for the purpose of carrying stuff, why not just have one big sack, or maybe a horse and cart running behind them ?? It's asking a bit much to ask each one of your concubines to drag along seven great big stonking brown hessian bags.

Moving on, the poem examines the contents of these sacks. The answer: cats.

Each of these sacks is carrying seven cats. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't PETA and the RSPCA trying to put a stop to this sort of thing ?? Cats are social creatures up to a point, but the point does not extend to being tied up in pitch darkness with six of their fellows. These will not happy cats be. And unhappy cats tend to transmute very rapidly into violent cats. So it’s safe to say that each one of these sacks is probably wriggling like a python that’s been infected with an especially bad case of mad cow’s disease.

Let's do some math here whilst we're at it, seven cats x seven sacks: so therefore each wife owns 49 cats !! With seven wives, this brings the total of cats to 343 unhappy felines, a force to be reckoned with probably worse than a Dalek with a headache.

But no !!

These sacks are not full yet !! It's bad enough that seven cats are being forced to coexist in a rather small bag, they had to bring the family too !! Each cat is nursing a litter of seven kittens, so as well as the adult cats each sack contains forty-nine little ones, all of whom are probably learning to fight very quickly. So we now know something else ... every single one of the 343 adult cats are females who have recently given birth.

Ah, I think a picture is forming. Obviously this chap owns a cat farm, and was taking his female cats to another cat farm in St. Ives, or in this case, a cat stud farm. But this doesn't explain the sacks. Nor why each cat had exactly the same number of kittens.  The suspension of disbelief of this poem is being stretched so hard that the underpant elastic's showing.

Some more maths - we have forty-nine kittens and seven adult cats. If we count a kitten as half an adult cat, each sack now contains THIRTY-ONE AND A HALF cats. This is one sack, remember, and each wife has seven of these. So now each wife is staggering under the weight of a whopping 220.5 cats !! If we say each cat weighs about four kilograms, which would make them rather scrawny, that makes 882kg being carried by one wife !!

That's nearly a whole metric tonne !! And add insult to injury this Mormon cat-farming bloke isn't carrying a damn thing !! And what’s more, this brings the total amount of cats in his party to a rather mind-blowing 2041 !!! So we now have the sorry state of affairs of over two thousand rabid moggies screeching, mewing, scratching, biting and struggling all over each other, not to mention shredding vast quantities of kitten lumps everywhere and sending clumped, matted hairballs flying all over the show !!

I think I can understand why the narrator of this tale felt moved to write a poem. It should have gone like this …

"As I was going to St. Ives I met a Mormon cat farmer with seven wives.

The seven wives were groaning under the weight of seven sacks each.

The forty-nine sacks were making rather distressing screeching noises, what with there being seven cats within each of them, engaged in several dozen fights to the death.

Then this Mormon cat farmer took me aside and said: 'Look, do you think you could take some of these cats off my hands ?? They're driving me up the wall'.

Whereupon I kicked him in the knackers, set his own wives on him, released all the (remaining living) cats and threw the sacks into the river because I don't appreciate this sort of thing complicating my holidays.

Then I went down the beach, put my I-Pod on and listened to “What’s The Story [Morning Glory] all day long."

And BTW, the original "Die Hard" is still the best Christmas film ever.

BEING NOSTALGIC ...

During the school holidays of the 1990's, I remember spending hose long, warm, summer afternoon listening to those long, warm songs on "[What's the Story] Morning Glory". One of the tracks seemed to suggest that, unless I got off my bed, took off my headphones and actually did something with myself, ten years would go shooting past and everyone would be wonder where I was while they were getting high, in a champagne supernova in the sky.

"What a load of rubbish." I thought at the time. We bizarrely received no real drug education back then to speak of but we didn't need it. Oasis were a living, breathing example of what recreational pharmaceuticals could do to the human mind. Ten years, as any teenage boy knows, is a century. Pretty soon, I was 18 and time was still floating around like a sycamore pod floating in the gurgling current of a mountain stream. If anything, there was even more spare time on my hands than there had been in my childhood, mostly because I wasn’t wasting so much of it on pointless maths homework.

However, when you hit your mid-twenties, everything changes. Time straps a jet-pack to its back, lights the afterburners and sets off at Mach 5. The sun flies through the sky as if God's got his finger on the fast-forward button. Blink and you can miss a whole week. This was hammered home during the summer when I inadvertently ran into some old school friends in an old haunt of ours in Rednal. We used to go there a lot in the early 90’s, which we all agreed, seemed only like yesterday.

It's weird, isn't it ?? No-one ever says when you're in your twenties; "Gosh, it only seems like yesterday we were fifteen." But god, the time from when your dreams are smashed and you realise you'll never be a Formula One driver, to the time when your body starts to swell up, go wrong and fall to pieces really does go by with the whim and vigour of a Noel Gallagher guitar solo. When I was 18 my friends and I went to the pub, when we were 21, we still went to the pub. Nothing ever happened, nothing ever changed, and then, all hell broke loose.

One of us moved to France, one of us died in a drug overdose in a nightclub, one moved to America and got divorced, one had had a lung and most of his bottom removed and one was moved out of his flat by social services to secure accommodation in Solihull … for no reason at all. Ten years ago we only ever used to go home whenever we ran out of money, or whenever the managers ran out of patience. In 2014, we all left because we had lawns to mow, and lofts to clear out.

I simply cannot believe how quickly time blazes past these days. It’s like God has taken the job of marking time away from Oscar Peterson and instead given it to Ozzy Osbourne !! On Saturday afternoons I used to listen to music simply to pass the time until I could listen to some more. I had the time to read entire books and not only listen to Oasis songs, but work out what they meant. I used to travel fast purely for fun, now I only travel fast just to keep up with the clock. I despair when I read in the papers about people who have given up city life thinking that when they're in the countryside time will settle down again and float past like a dandelion poppy in the breeze. But this isn't the problem, it's NOT where you are, it's WHEN you are.

In the old days you got married and had children in your thirties, made a few quid in your forties, enjoyed it in your fifties and retired in your sixties. Now you either do nothing in your teens, nothing in your thirties and by the time you're reached your forties you're dumped well and truly on life's scrapheap, a five-chinned has-been with a spent mind and saggy man-breasts. This means you have to try and cram your whole life into your twenties.

And that's why it whizzes past at eleventy million miles an hour.

Well, I'm 33 now, and I have decided that I want the Gibson back. I want to be lying on my back, chewing grass, and doing nothing but thinking about what my final words might be. And I have already decided how that end will be.

I want to drunk, warm and happy, and then I want to explode.

A BLOKE'S PERSPECTIVE ON THE 'TWILIGHT' FILMS ...

There comes a time in every man's life when he must confront the cultural phenomena that sweep through the zeitgeist, leaving in their wake a trail of bewildered men, myself included. I speak, of course, of the Twilight saga, a series of films that have somehow managed to turn the ancient myth of vampirism into a high school melodrama with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

My initiation into this world was not of my own choosing. Picture the scene: I, a seasoned critic of life's more refined offerings, thrust into the cinematic equivalent of a teenage diary entry. The plot, if one can dignify it with such a term, revolves around Bella Swan, a character so remarkably devoid of personality that she makes wallpaper seem vibrant. Her love interest, Edward Cullen, is a vampire with the emotional range of a marble statue, which, oddly enough, is his physical condition in daylight.

The first film, with its brooding atmosphere and dialogue that could make even the most ardent poet wince, sets the tone for what is to follow. Here, we are not dealing with the likes of Dracula, where the horror is palpable, the stakes high. No, in Twilight, the stakes are... well, to be frank, they're about as high as a teenager's angst level. What's truly fascinating, in a car crash sort of way, is the love triangle that ensues. Bella, caught between Edward, the sparkly vampire (yes, sparkly - a concept so ludicrous it defies commentary), and Jacob, the werewolf with a penchant for shirtless scenes. One might think this a metaphor for the eternal battle between the cold, cerebral, and the warm, passionate. However, it's more a testament to the script's inability to decide on its own mythology, let alone its characters' destinies.

The films are littered with moments that drag on, not unlike the teenage years they depict. There are scenes where characters stand, gaze into each other's eyes, and then... more standing. It's as if the director was paid by the minute of silence rather than by the narrative development. Yet, one must give credit where it's due. The Twilight saga has achieved what few franchises dare: it has made vampirism mundane, werewolves into mere puppy love, and romance into something one might find in a tween's diary, complete with doodles and hearts.

As a bloke, my perspective on these films is one of bemused horror. Here is a world where the most pressing issue seems to be whether one should date a vampire or a werewolf, rather than, say, the existential crises that actual adulthood bestows upon us. In the end, Twilight is not for the likes of me, nor, I suspect, for anyone who values plot over the sheer spectacle of teenage longing. But perhaps that's the point - these films are a mirror to a demographic I've long since left behind, a reminder that not all cinema need be profound, just as not all love stories require depth to be adored.

So, here's to Twilight, the saga that turned vampirism into a high school drama, and made me, for a fleeting moment, wish I could go back to the simplicity of teenage infatuation, if only to understand why one might choose a life of eternal night over the warmth of a sunlit day.

A WINE REVIEW ... (SORT OF !!)

As I sit down to this humble task of reviewing a bottle of wine, one might wonder why a man of my usual proclivities, more accustomed to the critique of culture, art, and the human condition, would stoop to the level of beverage commentary. Wine-tasting you see, considered as a public performance, is the most successful confidence trick since the Emperor’s new clothes. The participants gather in solemn conclave, armed with glasses no larger than a thimble yet priced like Fabergé eggs, and proceed to treat a simple agricultural product as though it were a cryptic message from the gods.

First comes the tilt and swirl, a manoeuvre executed with the gravity of a brain surgeon positioning a scalpel. The purpose, we are told, is to “release the aromas.” In practice it releases mainly the taster’s conviction that he is doing something profoundly sophisticated. The liquid climbs the sides of the glass like a mountaineer who has taken a wrong turn, and everyone nods approvingly, as if centrifugal force were a mark of civilisation. Next, the nose is inserted—often to a depth that suggests the taster is trying to inhale the entire vineyard. Eyes half-close in rapture. A pause. Then the pronouncement: “Graphite… undergrowth after rain… a hint of liquorice and old saddle.” One listens in vain for the honest admission: “Fruit, mostly.” But honesty is not the point. The point is to produce a verbal bouquet more extravagant than the liquid itself, a bouquet composed of nouns no two people can ever agree on.

And yet, here we are, with a bottle of M&S's Chenin Blanc in hand, a testament to both the democratization of wine and perhaps, the democratization of taste. The label promises "citrus and tropical fruits", a description so vague it could apply to a fruit salad at a mid-tier hotel breakfast buffet. But, with scepticism as my companion, I pour the golden liquid into a glass, and I am immediately struck by its hue, a reminder of autumn sunsets rather than the harshness of the British winter outside. The first sip is a revelation, not because it's ground-breaking, but because it's so unpretentiously enjoyable. Here's a wine that doesn't demand you to have a PhD in Oenology to appreciate it. There are notes of lemon, yes, but also a whisper of something akin to mango, if mango had gone on holiday and come back slightly disappointed. It's crisp, clean, and utterly devoid of the bombast one might associate with more self-important vintages.

It is the kind of wine one would take to a dinner party hosted by friends who appreciate good company over good wine - a rare breed, these days. It's not the wine you'd discuss at length to impress a sommelier; it's the wine you enjoy while discussing life's more pressing matters, like why British summers seem to have abdicated their traditional duties. At £7.99, it's a steal, not because it's cheap, but because it offers more than its price tag suggests. It's the kind of wine that makes one ponder the irony of wine snobbery when, at the end of the day, what we all seek is pleasure in a glass, not a lecture on vintages and terroir.

In this age where every glass of wine seems to come with an essay on its heritage and lineage, M&S's Chenin Blanc stands as a beacon of simplicity. It's not about the wine; it's about the moment. The vocabulary of wine-tasting is a triumph of pseudo-precision. Terms drift about like expensive fog: structure, minerality, length, grip, tension. Each is vague enough to mean anything and authoritative enough to silence dissent. To question them is to reveal oneself as a philistine, which in this context means someone who thinks wine is for drinking.

And in that moment, this wine does what all good wines should do - it fades into the background, allowing the laughter, the conversation, the joy of good company to take centre stage. So, here's to you, Marks & Spencer, for producing a wine that reminds us why we drink in the first place. Not for the accolades or the pompous tasting notes, but for the sheer, unadulterated pleasure of a well-spent evening.

THE TOP 20 THINGS I WOULD DO IF I WAS AN EVIL OVERLORD ...

1) My Legions of Terror / henchmen will have helmets with clear plexiglass visors, NOT face-concealing tinted ones !!

2) My ventilation ducts will be far too small for a human being to crawl through.

3) My noble half-brother, whose throne I have usurped, will be killed, NOT kept anonymously imprisoned in a forgotten cell of my dark, dingy dungeon near any possible escape routes.

4) I will NOT use any plan in which the final step is horribly complicated, e.g. “Align the 12 Stones of Power on the sacred altar then activate the medallion at the moment of total eclipse”. Instead, it will be more along the lines of; “Turn on that thing there”.

5) The artefact which is the source of my power will NOT be kept on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragons of Eternity. It will be in a socking great big dirty safe-deposit box with a big lock. The same applies to the object which is my one weakness.

6) If a group of my henchmen fail miserably at a task, I will NOT berate them for incompetence then send the EXACT same group of idiots back out to try the same task again !!

7) When I've captured my adversary and he says, “Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about ??” I'll say, “Nope”, and shoot him. No, on second thoughts, I'll just shoot him, and THEN say “Nope”.

8) After I have kidnapped the beautiful princess, we will be married immediately in a quiet civil ceremony, NOT a lavish spectacle held in a castle in three weeks' time during which the final phase of my plan will be carried out !!

9) I will NOT include a self-destruct mechanism unless absolutely necessary. If it is necessary, it will NOT be a large red button marked “Do Not Push”. The big red button marked “Do Not Push” will instead trigger a spray of bullets on anyone stupid enough to disregard it..

10) When my guards split up to search for intruders, they will ALWAYS travel in groups of at least two so that if one goes missing, the other will immediately initiate an alert and call for backup, instead of quizzically peering around a corner.

11) I will NOT design the Main Control Room in my impenetrable fortress / space station so that every single workstation is facing away from the door !!

12) One of my advisors will be an average eight-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be immediately corrected before implementation.

13) All my slain enemies will be cremated, or at least have several rounds of ammunition emptied into them, NOT left for dead at the bottom of a cliff near a village of wise, kindly old martial arts teachers !!

14) My vats of hazardous toxic chemicals will ALWAYS be covered when they are not in use. Also, I will NOT construct flimsy wooden walkways right above them !!

15) I will NOT employ any device with a digital countdown. If such a device is unavoidable, I will set it to activate so that when the counter reaches 117, it explodes just as the hero is just putting his plan into operation.

16)  I will NOT utter the sentence “But before I kill you, there's just one thing I want to know”.

17) If an advisor says to me “But my liege, he is but one man. What can one man possibly do ??”, I will reply; “THIS, you pillock !!”, and shoot him between the eyes.

18) I will NOT have a son. Although his laughably under-planned attempt to usurp power would easily fail, it could also provide a fatal distraction at a crucial point.

19) I will NOT have a daughter. She would be as beautiful as she was evil, but one look at the hero's rugged countenance and she'd betray her own father … especially if the hero looks like Johnny Depp.

20) Despite its proven stress-relieving effect, I will NOT indulge in ever increasingly loudening maniacal laughter.

Now, if the makers of “Stardust”, “Star Wars Episodes I-III”, “The Princess Bride”, “The Mummy”, “The Chronicles of Narnia”, “Eragon”, “The Golden Compass”, “Enchanted”, "The Spiderwick Chronicles", and all those fantasy films we’ve been subjected to over the past few years could PLEASE bear these rules in mind !!

Thank you.

DIARY OF A TECHNOPHOBE

I used to think that the greatest invention of the twentieth century was the paperback book. Not the aeroplane, not television, not even the atomic bomb—though God knows that one kept us on our toes. No, it was the cheap, portable, dog-eared volume you could slip into a coat pocket and take to a café, a train, or a hospital waiting room. You could underline it, spill coffee on it, lose it on a beach and feel a genuine pang of bereavement. The book was a companion; it had weight, smell, texture. It aged with you. Now the book has been digitised, and with it, everything else. The library has become a cloud, which sounds poetic until you realise that clouds dissipate. One server farm hiccup and your entire collection of Proust, your annotated Shakespeare, your guilty stash of detective novels—poof. Gone. Not burned in some heroic auto-da-fé, just quietly unplugged in a warehouse in Oregon.

 

And we accept this. We even celebrate it. The tragedy is not merely that objects have been dematerialised; it is that experience itself has been thinned. Conversation, once a slow, exploratory dance conducted over wine and cigarette smoke, is now a staccato exchange of abbreviations and emojis. Where we once risked misunderstanding in the pursuit of genuine connection, we now settle for the illusion of immediacy. A heart emoji is not affection; it is the digital equivalent of a nod across a crowded room. Efficient, certainly. Intimate? Hardly. We have gained access to all human knowledge and lost the ability to concentrate on any of it for more than thirty seconds. The scroll is infinite, the attention span finite. We boast of multi-tasking while achieving multi-distraction. The mind, once a deep well, has become a puddle reflecting nothing but its own ripples. And memory—poor, betrayed memory. 

We no longer remember; we bookmark. Photographs once lived in albums that gathered dust on shelves, forcing us to confront the passage of time whenever we opened them. Now they live in phones, sorted by algorithm, served up by facial recognition software that knows our dead relatives better than we do. The past is no longer a country we visit; it is a feed we scroll through while waiting for coffee. I am not a Luddite. I type these words on a laptop, and I will press “publish” with the same casual indifference with which I once posted a letter. But I miss the friction. I miss the resistance that paper offered to haste, the way a book forced you to inhabit its pace rather than impose your own. I miss the sense that culture was something you carried inside yourself, not something you streamed.

Perhaps the young will never feel this absence. They were born with screens in their cots, raised on the dopamine ping of notification. For them, the analogue world is a quaint museum exhibit: “Look, children, this is how Grandad read the news—on actual paper!” They will pity us, as we once pitied those who had to crank automobiles by hand. Yet I suspect that even they, in quieter moments, feel the hollowness. The screen is always bright, always responsive, always there. It never closes its covers and leaves you alone with your thoughts. That is its genius and its curse. It has abolished solitude without creating companionship. In the end, the digital revolution has not liberated us from drudgery; it has replaced one kind of servitude with another. We are no longer chained to desks or factory floors, but we are tethered to devices that demand constant attendance. The master is now in our pocket, and it vibrates whenever it wants our attention.

The world has changed. Where once we exchanged numbers with the simplicity of pen and paper, now we're expected to engage in a digital dance that feels more like a tango with a machine than a human interaction. My mobile phone, a relic from the early 2000s, serves more as a reminder of simpler times than a tool for modern communication. Its lack of "smartness" is, paradoxically, my shield against the incessant beeps and buzzes of modern life. This transformation into a technophobe is not without its merits. There's a certain satisfaction in resisting the tide of progress, in choosing to live slightly out of step with the current. It's akin to listening to jazz in an age of electronica; there's beauty in the discordance, in the refusal to conform.

Yet, as I ponder over my digital conundrums, I can't help but feel a pang of nostalgia for the days when technology was an aid, not a master. We've come to a point where our devices dictate our lives, where every moment not spent staring at a screen feels like time wasted. Perhaps my technophobia is not fear but a longing for a time when life was less about connectivity and more about connection. In this digital dystopia, I stand as a quaint figure, perhaps anachronistic, but with a silent plea for a return to the simplicity of human interaction over the complexity of human-technology interaction. 

May we all find our way back to a world where technology serves us, not the other way around.

THE GREAT COFFEE CONUNDRUM

In the labyrinthine world of caffeine, where every turn promises enlightenment or despair, one finds oneself at the precipice of a great conundrum. Coffee, that dark elixir beloved by the masses, has become not just a beverage but a statement, a flag under which one declares their social standing, political alignment, and perhaps, their very worth.

Once upon a time, in the roaring '90s, Starbucks was but a whisper, a mere suggestion of what corporate America could do to our daily ritual. I remember it well, a time when the only coffee drink that piqued my interest was the Cappuccino Blast at Baskin Robbins, which, let's be frank, was more akin to a frozen dessert than the wake-up call we all desperately seek. But then, during my university years, I found myself in a world where Starbucks had carved out a niche not for its coffee, but for its celebrity patrons. Steve Martin, Rob Lowe, and Julia Roberts - all under the same roof, sipping what I can only presume was the same overpriced brew that would soon conquer the globe.

Fast forward to today, and Starbucks has morphed into a behemoth, a corporate entity so vast it casts a shadow over every independent café. Yet, in this world of conformity, there's a rebellion brewing (pun intended). The coffee conundrum isn't just about choosing your brew; it's about choosing your tribe. One reads of the Starbucks cult with a mix of amusement and horror. There's something almost Yankee-like about it, the ubiquity of its presence akin to spotting a New York Yankees cap in any city in the U.S. - unmissable, ubiquitous, and to some, utterly detestable. I must confess, like many, I've steered clear of this corporate colossus, preferring instead the character and soul of a local coffee shop, where the coffee might not promise the world but delivers a piece of it.

Yet, the narrative isn't entirely one-sided. Starbucks has its defenders, those who see beyond the corporate façade to the convenience it brings, the consistency in a world that's anything but. There's even a whisper of redemption in their fair trade offerings, though one wonders if this is more a marketing ploy than a genuine commitment to ethics. In this discourse, one cannot ignore the voices from the blogosphere, like those on "Oh, did I say that out loud?" where the love-hate relationship with Starbucks is dissected with the precision of a surgeon. Here, the coffee isn't just a drink; it's a mirror reflecting our societal values, our economic status, and our very identity.

But in this coffee conundrum, where does one stand? In the end, it's not about the coffee; it's about the choice. Whether you're sipping a meticulously crafted espresso from a local roastery or gulping down a Pumpkin Spice Latte from the chain that shall not be named, you're making a statement. And perhaps, in this great coffee debate, the real conundrum isn't the choice of coffee but the choice of self we make with each sip. 

So here's to coffee, in all its forms - may it continue to be our daily conundrum, our morning ritual, and our excuse to pause and ponder the world around us.