California
Probably one of the most mainstream tunes on this playlist, this song made it to my top ten entirely because of it’s catchy melody. The words don’t make a great deal of sense to me, but that’s half the fun of listening to Rufus. Try listening to it in the car on a sunny day and not singing along – it’s a bit like putting a fruit pastille in your mouth without chewing it.

Between My Legs
The off-beats and the syncopation made this quite difficult to listen to on a treadmill – take that as a challenge if you will – but it would be like running to the Dogtanian theme (one for all and all for one  – Muskerhounds are always ready and all that). It’s the intelligent orchestration that makes this track stand out for me, subtle use of supporting vocals, at least until the end. Check out the dodgy YouTube videos of Dawn French doing the voiceover.

Release the Stars
The title track from Rufus’ newest album, features great use of the wind section, something prevalent in a lot of this list, but it’s the political subtext that makes me love this song. It’s a bit subtle, but those who need to ‘get it’ will do. The one you’re most likely to be singing after only one play through. Best line? ‘The more that you fight, the more they will scrutinise and realise just your size, and believe me, you are no match for the public that has seen the whites of your eyes’. Inspired.

Oh What a World
I’ve already been banging on about the great orchestrations on this playlist, but this track tops them all. From the faintly familiar vocal opening (where have I heard that before?) to a blatant and unashamed recapitulation that smacks you in the face – oh, yep, there it is, Torvill and Dean. And just so you know I’m not a complete halfwit, I know it’s Ravel, but I can’t help the mental images… When the brass and strings open up at 2:43 you have to turn the volume up and just admire the balls it takes to do something like this.

I Don’t Know What It Is
Possibly my favourite one to sing to in the car – every time I listen to this I read something else into the lyrics. I also like the train ending (’I was hoping the train was my big number’…). Particularly enjoyed playing that at full volume on my iPod in Montreal – while waiting for a train. Bit sad really…

Gay Messiah
Elton John, the Scissor Sisters, Alex Parks, everyone’s gay these days – and Rufus is no exception. Not many people have the guts to sing about it with quite so much wit however. This song features possibly my favourite line in a song, ever:

No it will not be me,
Rufus the Baptist I be

And the line that follows it, although you’ll have to download it to know what that is as my Mum may one day read this. Not that many pop songs get written in 6/8 either, which puts another tick in the ‘this guy’s a clever sausage’ box.

Go or Go Ahead
Starts slowly, beautiful, light arrangement, great vocals, builds gradually to a unison crescendo for a big chorus, I don’t know the words, but the melody and the depth of sound tell me the story on their own.

Do I Disappoint You
I find it slightly surprising given the ‘verging on world music’ approach, that this is one of the most accessible songs on the playlist. It’s certainly the one I was singing along to first when I got my first Rufus album (Release The Stars). After a while the novelty has worn off and it’s probably one that I’m more likely to skip through these days, but the brass part alone means it warrants an entry here.

Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk
To really understand what this song is about you need to know the background – I can’t be bothered to summarise here so why don’t you turn off your TV set and go out and do something less boring instead. No, sorry, nervous twitch, I really mean why don’t you read about Rufus on Wikipedia.

Beautiful Child
A completely unashamed saving of the best till last – like roast potatoes at the end of a stunning Sunday lunch. Great lyrics, great singability, incredible orchestrations, this is undoubtedly My Favourite Rufus Wainwright.

Enjoy!

For the last 13 and a bit years, I’ve been labouring under the impression that I am very emotionally retarded. That I’m not really capable of a genuine and appropriate emotional response to any situation. As a result, I steer clear of giving emotional support to people (friends or colleagues) who express themselves in an emotional way rather than in the logical and concise way that I’m more comfortable with. I can sit with someone and talk them through the issue they’re experiencing, but I won’t do the whole arm round the shoulder, give you a tissue thing. If you’re going to get upset and irrational, I’ll walk away and give you some time to yourself.

I’ve believed this for thirteen years because of my interpretation of the emotional response I showed when my Dad died. I was fifteen at the time, and, though I find it a bit difficult to admit to the world at large, when he died, I didn’t cry. I didn’t cry at his funeral, and I think in the three years afterwards I only cried once on a related subject. It’s hard to acknowledge, even so many years later, that when he died I wasn’t upset.

I’m a self-analyser anyway, and for a long time I’ve been trying to come to terms not so much with his death, but with my almost total non-reaction to it. Initially I thought that because I was quite young, and everything just carried on as normal, that I didn’t deal with it at the time. Everything that’s happened since that’s been less than perfect (dropping out of uni, not exactly pushing myself to get a challenging job etc) I’ve put down to the fact that I’m still dealing with it.

A few years ago (probably while I was in Australia) I started to realise that life goes on. That I can’t keep using what happened when I was a kid as an excuse for any crap that happens now, just because I’m scared of failure or whatever. I started to reanalyse and decided that my problem was not belated grief, but guilt. Guilt at not being more upset at the time, guilt for the way I handled everything. Dad had been ill for a long time, and we knew his condition was terminal. At that point, at fourteen, I effectively started counting the days until we could put it all behind us and move on. I was actually looking forward to ‘life after Dad’. If that sounds callous, I’m sorry, it’s just the way it was.

Since then, until much more recently, I’ve been dealing with the fact that I behaved like a shit toward my terminally ill father, even if I didn’t do so to his face, or within the family. I can’t change it, so I’ve learned to accept the way my fourteen year old self processed what was going on. I’ve actually managed to work through that in my head now to a point where I can put it in writing and not worry what other people think. While I can process the guilt about how I was before he died, I’m still having difficulty putting to one side the guilt about my apparent indifference at the point of his death.

To put this into context, my Dad died late at night on 22nd December 1995. On the 23rd I did my paper round as normal ten minutes after Mum told me he’d died. I went back to school on the 4th of January. His funeral was on the 5th, I played the trumpet, and was grinning away to myself through the whole thing because I’d played quite well. On the evening of his funeral, the 5th, I turned up to play in a school concert. Nothing stopped, nothing changed, not even a pause.

That's life

Then, a few weeks ago, I realised something.

When he died, I didn’t cry. The reason I didn’t cry wasn’t because I’m not a normal, emotionally functioning person, it was because I wasn’t sad. It occurred to me, it was like I’d already moved on. I had a eureka moment. I’ve always thought that I didn’t grieve after he died, and thought that I’d probably carried on trying to for about the next ten years. The fact is, I wasn’t behind everyone else. I was ahead.

We found out he was terminally ill in March 1995. Though I didn’t show Mum when she told me, I was distraught. The doctors didn’t think he’d make it to Christmas. They reckoned September was being optimistic. I was so upset at school the next day I got sent home. I know now that for me, the grieving process started then. I went through all the usual stages and dealt with it in all the normal ways, I just did it before he actually died. The person I’d known as Dad was already long gone, and all you’d see were occasional flashes of the old him.

After he died, and in the last couple of weeks before he did, family who weren’t so close to the situation would try and get me to show an emotional response, telling me things like ‘it’s ok to cry’. I had cried, more than they knew, but by December I was ready, to put the past behind us and get on with life as it would now be.

If you’re reading this, and thinking that I must have spent the last 13 years being miserable and thinking about this, then you’d be wrong. Life has gone on, but I’ve always felt like there was something unresolved, and I’d always wondered why I wasn’t more upset. Now, I’ve worked it out. And it feels great.

2009 is going to be an outstanding year.

Take today, for instance. Today I woke up at a reasonable hour, but stayed in bed until eleven because there wasn’t really any great reason to get up (it’s cold outside, there’s no kind of atmosphere etc…). Quick shower, some breakfast, and a decision that I may as well amuse myself in town, since I appeared to have missed Homes Under The Hammer and This Morning are still on their Christmas break.

So I jump in my car and bimble off into town. We have the (dis)pleasure of hosting a Woolworths, which was closing down today. In the hope of getting a bargain I ventured inside, only to find it closely resembled a jumble sale. Then I remembered that even at 80% off they’re still selling the same crap that I didn’t want to buy last week either.

Death of an institution

When I was a kid, this was the shop that I always wanted to go in, and because of that it holds a special place in my heart. Both my brothers at one point worked there, and one member of staff in particular (I won’t mention her name but if you live here you know what it is) always remembers me. Whether I want her to or not is another issue, but that’s for another day. But now, I wouldn’t go in there through choice for a number of reasons – the main one being (brace yourself)…

The staff are shit.

The ones who work Saturdays are all about twelve and a half and seem to have recently undergone frontal lobotomies. With a very small number of exceptions, none of them are capable of saying ‘please’ or ‘thank you’, and the avoidance of eye contact is more akin to being on an underground platform on a Friday night next to a shifty looking bloke carrying a rucksack.

The ones who dont work Saturdays (with the exception of the lady already mentioned) are all miserable buggers who wouldn’t know good customer service if it slapped them firmly in the face with a haddock so fresh it’s still dripping. I do not expect to queue for half an hour while three of you stand behind the counter arguing about whose turn it is to restock the pick and mix.

This may sound a harsh way to describe a load of people who are about to be made redundant, but it’s the truth. Good luck in the job hunt.

Hmm… Anyway… What was the point of this post? Aaah yes. The more observant iPhone users among you will notice that I’ve added an iPhone friendly thingy to make posts easier to read. If you view the full version you now also get my latest Tweet added to the front page. If you don’t know what Twitter is, you should. Google it.

Happy New Year!

In the mean time, here’s a picture from my new Dutch friend Alex that might just whet your appetite…

Keep your fingers inside the bars

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been having network problems with my iMac, and, horror of horrors, have even reverted to my XP running laptop instead. No, I’m going to stop myself right here. It’s not that painful for me to switch back to Windows as I use it all day at work, and my reliable Dell Inspiron kicks in and connects more or less every time I switch it on. I’ve only had the blue screen of death once, and that was because Norton had decided to kill it, not Mr Gates’ wonder emporium. I had offended the omni-present satan of anti-virus software by daring to install a Nod32 product and merely ‘uninstalling’ Norton’s evil equivalent first. Silly me. Nod32 is a far superior product by the way – I think it’s technically called ESET Smart Security – and I urge anyone who’s still using Norton, McAfee and whatever other rubbish is out there to investigate more on their website. If you’re looking for a way to rid yourself of all things Norton – check out the Norton Removal Tool.

So, back to my Mac… I’ve been experiencing very crap reception to my wireless network (provided by a Netgear DG834GT wireless router), and just before the weekend, I started getting the dreaded message ‘There was an error connecting to the Airport network…’. It could see the network, and others, but it just wouldn’t connect. I’m a Mac beginner, and had no idea how to solve it. My laptop, my iPhone, and the other PC in the house were all connecting fine, a good job, because I used them to trawl the forums for answers.

Nothing.

Today, having bunked off work early to go and pick up my foreign currency for my rather exciting holiday next week, I had a couple of hours to spare and decided to solve it. I lugged the whole thing downstairs to right next to the router. It could see it, but it couldn’t connect. I figured it wasn’t a problem with the Airport card.

I restrict access to my wireless network by MAC address, so Just for a quick try I deleted the iMac’s MAC address from the approved list on the router, and then re-entered it. I don’t know why, but it worked. Full reception, no problems. Obviously now I’ve moved the whole set up back upstairs, the reception’s gone rubbish again, but at least I can check Facebook now.

I’ll worry about the rest of it later…

Let me back track…

In 2004 I had the pleasure of spending an extended time in Australia (have I mentioned that yet?!) during which time, because I was occasionally working, I had an Australian bank account (with ANZ), which came with a switch-like debit card facility. Very quickly I discovered that when making purchases I would be asked for my PIN, rather than asked to sign anything. This was initially confusing but I got over it. I managed not to get obsessive about who could see my PIN when I was typing it and also managed not to get my account hacked.

Fast forward a year or so, I’m back in the UK and my bank has just introduced chip and pin. This is on a bank account I’ve had since I was 12. That’s a long time. I’ve had the same PIN since then as well, and my bank has always (by way of annoying inserts in my bank statements) preached that this information is sacred. Previously, I’ve only shared this information between me and the hole in the wall I’m huddling against. Suddenly, this is a problem.

Now, I have slightly obsessive tendencies anyway. I don’t mind admitting that. I shred EVERYTHING that has my card number on it, even if several digits are blanked. I no longer use my debit card in one particular bookshop and stationery chain beause they once charged five payments of £7.95 to my card on the same day for no good reason. I got the money back, but it’s the principle. I still shop there, so on reflection I’m only inconveniencing myself with this not very dramatic stance, but that’s what principles are all about. So you get the picture.

Suddeny, I need to find ways of protecting my PIN from prying eyes without putting my hand over it like a seven year old who doesn’t want anyone to copy their spelling test (and yes, I did that too). That would clearly be very uncool and indicate to the person processing the transaction that I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw them (they wouldn’t know of course that my year 7 discus record still stands, so potentially that could be quite a long way). It has long been my opinion that supermarket staff etc should avert their eyes elsewhere while the special bit is being done, and for the most part, people do that. But you can have too much of a good thing.

Mr Morrisons (that’s quite clearly not his name but it’ll do) takes this concept to extremes. I place my goods on the belt, he scans and I pack. He presses buttons and announces the total. Warily, I remove the card from my pocket, and hand it to him. He takes it (not forgetting his manners) and slots it into the machine, pressing one further button on the till. Then, while announcing ‘if you’d just like to enter your pin’ he rotates his whole body through a full 180 degrees, as if to demonstrate the extent to which he is not trying to see my PIN. Trying not to wet myself laughing at his theatrical tendencies, I enter it, press enter, cough slightly and say ‘OK’. Before he completes his pirouette and turns to face me.

What is that all about?! Obviously it’s preferable to him standing there gawping at me, but could he not just look out of the window? Or back into the store? After a few hours on the till he must be quite nauseous.

It’s no wonder you never see him on the cigarette counter any more, he’d never stand still…

They served frozen roast potatoes.

This is a phenomenon I just don’t understand. If I go to a florist, it’s for fresh flowers. I don’t go to florists I buy flowers in Sainsbury’s, but that’s not the point. If I go out for a curry, I don’t expect it to come sealed in a polystyrene container ready for me to pierce the lid and microwave. So why do restaurants think it’s ever acceptable to serve potatoes that last saw earth in 1997 and have been held in a pseudo-cryogenic state of suspension ever since?

They’re not crispy on the outside. They’re not soft in the middle. They go from unnaturally yellow to black in far too small a space of time. To be blunt, they’re just not good enough.

Pubs and restaurants of Britain, sort it out.

Aunt Bessie should be shot

I came back just in time for Christmas with about a squillion photos on CD (God bless digital photography) which I put carefully into a CD wallet and therefore never got out again. Today I decided they deserve to be seen. And laughed at. So I’ve published them. 206 photos largely of people whose names I can’t remember in places whose names I can’t remember. And this is the edited highlights. So why bother at all? Well, contained within the selection are some memories of events, people and places that I could never forget.

Enjoy. I did.

Australia - 2004

A ten month jolly generates a fair few photos. This, believe it or not, is just a selection of them.

205 Photos