Baby Daddy

Is there something in this?

We know so much about how nature operates (and the possible problems) that we get great anxiety about keeping track of it to make sure everything is still working ok. Let me expound (vomit some words) a little.

As a recent parent I’ve found myself reading books about parenting and making the effort to keep up to date with ‘what to expect’ and ‘how to deal with it’. Mrs Monkey as I think most mums these days is even more ‘into’ it and informed. There’s a feeling that we must be completely qualified and well-versed in case we do something wrong and ruin our little bundle of ‘joy’ (possible inappropriate use of quotes there).

What tends to happen in practice that Mrs M is immersed in the mummy lifestyle and baby circuit so picks up on the collective neuroses about what should be done and when, and what he should be doing at what stage. Don’t let him do a, b, c in case x,y,z happens…make sure he drinks full fat milk in the morning rather than semi skimmed because research has shown that d, e, f… you get the jist.

I seem to use the phrase ‘awk it’ll be fine’ pretty constantly. But you can bet your bottom dollar that I’ll be making sure he wears a helmet (that I never did) when he rides his bike, and probably worry about him walking to the shops on his own (which I always did), or getting five minutes un-creamed exposure in the ‘summer’ sun.

We think we can create the perfect child by giving them the right music lessons or choosing the right pushchair. It is taboo that any conversation with another adult should take precedence over something going on with your child. When I was a child, it was a big deal if we were doing something specifically because I wanted to, it was a massive treat. Nowadays, people plan their weekends around what their children want to do, rather than having them experience life through their parents.

Is this a new phenomena? I think it might be. Certainly my parents generation and before viewed kids a lot like pot plants - looks after them and they’ll grow up ok. Don’t do anything stupid like leaving them for a week without water… but don’t obsess too much about the books that say your plant needs to be kept at 18-22 degrees, or that it needs 7+ hours of direct sunlight… or that x brand plant food is 4.6% better for leaf greenness etc etc.

Is there a similar thing when it comes to the environment?

A very un-parsed thought, but am I on to anything?

Viva la Vida – the definitive review

I don’t buy into the theory that bands have to start to get all experimental around the time of their 3rd or 4th album. This has started to become a bit of a cliché, so by deciding not to do this I applaud coldplay. Problem being that they hinted that they were going to, they trailed it as their ‘Achung Baby’… don’t think they actually said that, but it was certainly the implication. As soon as you pick up the phone to Brian Eno, you gotta bring home the avant guart bacon.

So have they? Nope, not a bit of it… It’s X&Y part deux. Or should I say, X&Y without the splattering of good songs which saved their last recording. Violet Hill is ‘OK’ but its not ‘Speed of light’ or ‘Fix you’ or ‘Talk’ or ‘Hardest Part’ or ‘White Shadows’ etc.

It’s a shame. In 2005 Chris Martin said that the band would be ‘away for a very long time’, I can’t help feeling that it would have been a good idea. And im a fan!

Good evening Belgrade

Good evening Belgrade this is the Jungle calling, these are the results of the Monkey jury…

2 pts – Bosnia http://www.bbc.co.uk/eurovision/participants/bosniaherzegovina.shtml

4 pts – France http://www.bbc.co.uk/eurovision/participants/france.shtml

6 pts – UK http://www.bbc.co.uk/eurovision/participants/uk.shtml

8 pts – Spain http://www.bbc.co.uk/eurovision/participants/spain.shtml

10 pts - Ukraine http://www.bbc.co.uk/eurovision/participants/ukraine.shtml

12 pts - Greece http://www.bbc.co.uk/eurovision/participants/greece.shtml

I’m originally from

A very subtle moment occurred in my life this morning, so subtle that it passed me by. I met a new person in my new job and upon hearing my accent he asked where I was from. My automatic answer was ‘Bristol’, then followed by ‘but originally from Belfast’. I think the moment when an ex-pat starts saying the phrase ‘…originally from…’ is a moment of transition from long term visitor to resident. This status has crept up on me.

Humbled? Really?

“I’m humbled by the blog hits I’m getting”

What does the above sentence make you think?
That I’m getting a lot of hits? Or that I’m not getting very many?

I never understand what people mean when they say this, it seems to be that it’s a phrase used in exactly the wrong circumstances. “Thank you for voting me footballer of the year, I’m humbled”, “It’s lovely to receive this Nobel Prize for the third time, I’m really humbled by your affection”.

Surely it would be more correct to say “I’ve be voted ugliest no-hoper in college, I’m humbled”, “I’m humbled by the courts decision to brand me a pervert” etc.

“It’s humbling to think of how many people bought my records” etc, I hear it all the time and think, humbled? My arse.

I could have won the Turner Prize

[greatest hits redux] 

…seriously, i really think i could have been in with a shout of the Turner Prize, if only i had my video camera set up correctly, and in time.

Let me set the scene. In the foyer downstairs at my office, there are three lifts, on this particular morning one of the lifts wasn’t working correctly, the interesting thing was in the WAY it wasn’t working correctly.

All seemed well, I walked into it and joined a few other people, the doors closed, then opened again as if someone had just pressed the button in time, it was 8.45 so inevitably someone else got in until the lift was full. This door opening thing usually only happens 3 times before you get a long beeeep and the door closes for good. On this occasion the door was closing for 5 seconds then opening for 10 seconds at infinitum.

It created a peculiar effect. People would realise after the third or forth closure what was happening, then leave and get another lift but people arriving in the foyer would witness the lift emptying and think , ok good timing, get in the lift and the cycle would continue.

If i’d known it was going to happen i would have set up a video camera, recorded the phenomenon and submitted it as a performance art piece for the Turner Prize.

In fact, i might set it up atificailly and see what happens!

Life is an art project

Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher. In the 19th century he predicted that over the next two centuries, the philosophy of nihilism - purposelessness and despair - would take over the western world, leading to an unprecedented level of violence and worldwide war. Obviously, he was correct.

However, Nietzsche only made this prediction so that he could also put forward a way of defeating nihilism…ART.

To be more specific, Nietzsche recommended that the way of defeating nihilism was for each individual to treat his or her life as an ongoing and unfinished work of art. The simple work of “giving style” to ourselves, expressing to the world our “overflowing creativity,” would give us a way to “Say Yes to Life”. This, argued Nietzsche, would stifle nihilistic pessimism.

I like that idea… or at least the idea of that idea.

I’ve created a little piece of Nietzschean/Sartrean art myself… check it out and let me know what you think

Jebus: Martyr or Murderer?

‘Murderer’ is over egging an already well egged pudding - but it has a nice controversial rhythm to it. Anyway, let me tell you a story passed down to me for generations (say).

They say Jebus was born miraculously in a small town just north of Cardiff, a thousand years ago during the English occupation. He was a bit of a thinker and philosopher and when he came of age some people started to say he was ‘the one’, god’s messiah.

As he travelled into Cardiff one spring morning crowds gathered to greet him as their saviour, he didn’t do anything to correct their assertions so the rumours grew - as they did quite often in those times. He did a bit of a speaking tour talking about god and hinting that he was their long-awaited messiah, but then things started to go a bit sour.

There had been rumours of wondrous miraculous happenings, so a caravan of the sick and the needy started to follow him around. One day he was on the way to a wedding when some people stopped him and said… about 10 percent of our children die before they reach the age of 2… what can we do about it? But instead of telling them about water purification, antibiotics and general child heath care (which if he was god, he would have of course known) he said… sorry, I’m on the way to a wedding… but you’ll like this… while I’m there I’m gonna take some of that pure water which you need, and then I’m going to turn it in to wine, yazam! We is going to par-tay. The villagers used their god-given rationale and knew that this couldn’t be the actions of a loving god so they continued their messiah search.

It kept happening… one day on the way to a friend’s funeral… a group mothers came to him and said, our children have all died in the last month of an infection, dozens more are sick, they were innocent kids who we loved, if you are god can you be merciful and raise them from the dead? He said… hmmm , nah sorry… but tell you what how’s about I resurrect my mate Lazarus instead. The mothers where less than impressed, especially when he refused to give them any hints as to why infections spread in the first place (which he of course would have known).

The mothers decided that if someone had this kind of power, yet chose not to use it (apart from the odd party trick), and chose to let these innocent children die that it was tantamount to murder, or at least man slaughter, certainly not the actions of a loving god - so they continued their search for a messiah. Jebus wasn’t the one. There were later rumours of a personal resurrection, but he’s conveniently lifted himself up into the clouds to heaven… the mothers rolled their eyes with a chuckle and continued to worship Yahweh like they always had.

But maybe the problem was that their minds where too small to comprehend the wonder of why Jebus was actually god’s son, and if only they had opened their hearts a little more to Jebus they would have believed… as opposed to following the non-related Jesus of Nazareth who WAS of course, the one, as his actions and the evidence is a lot more compelling.
Happy Easter

The Algebraic god

To early man, the sun rises from its hollow in the ground, processes over his head before submerging into the earth in the other direction. The wind randomly gathers and calms to power his fishing boat to feed his children. Flowers and vegetables emerge magically from the soil every spring bringing with it nurturing life and sustenance. All tempered by the random terror of earthquakes, volcanoes and hurricanes.

Not only where there unknown unknowns like nuclear physics, but there were lots of known unknowns such as basic anatomy, circulation and respiratory as well as the ins and outs of animal and human reproduction - the miracle of life itself.

How did we as a species, summon the courage to even leave the cave never mind to survive and thrive? I read a book some years ago now, by the anthropologist Pascal Boyer - I don’t think it would be too much hyperbole to say that it was a turning point. It is called ‘Religion Explained’ and I read it to learn more about how ‘other’ religions emerged. The can of worms was probably open before I read it, but this book spilled them out all over the floor.

He riffs on the idea that ‘Blind Faith’ is a healthy and natural human phenomenon. It’s perfectly acceptable and desirable that before Galileo worked out how earth isn’t the centre of things, and in fact the earth rotates around the sun… that people had to just have faith that the sun would rise every day (some still did a morning dance just in case). They had no tools or knowledge to rationally determine how or why it would. They had to make some assumptions just to get on with the business of living. It’s completely helpful and normal to see it as a mystically defined ‘black box’ or even personify it as a deity.

The point is I suppose that this is blind faith, and it’s ok, and in fact helpful. The Greeks gave names to the black boxes (Aphrodite, Apollo, Thor, and Zeus). The problem surely comes when after a few generations people start to take these gods too literally, develop dogmas and then when a bright mind inquires how the stars fit in the sky - people call him a heretic for daring to deny the authority of Apollo.

Likewise Adam and Eve is a perfectly helpful algebraic black box until it causes people to
limit their investigations into the origins of man. The ‘universe instigator’ god is helpfully algebraic until it colours our investigations into universal origins.

Perhaps the unhelpful kind of faith is that which allows for acceptance of supernatural claims based on less than convincing evidence rather than the kind that helped Newton explain the natural world. It’s the kind of faith which a makes a suicide bomber believe that he communicates intimately with a loving Allah or for a Christian who lives his life in the light the resurrection and virgin birth of Jesus, not because he is necessarily convinced by the evidence but because he has faith in the dogma.

I don’t see this kind of faith as a virtue; it’s not blind faith, its blinding faith.

The best concert i ever attended?

[greatest 'hits' redux]  

In my late teens and early 20s this would have been a question to which I could have replied immediately, with my top 5… and this top 5 would have changed yearly! My circle of friends were very into going to gigs - it wouldn’t be unusual to see 4 or 5 a month.

But now days I maybe get to 3 or 4 a year, none of which seem to really compare to the emotion and excitement of those heady days in the mid 90s.

So, therefore I think im about ready to say that my greatest concert experiences are probably behind me - and I can now objectively look back at the ones I remember as being great. (im limiting it to ‘event’ gigs in venues of over 500 or so)

Cracker, Mandela Hall. They were/are pretty unknown, I heard the single Low on BBC Radio 1 once, and it became my immediate favorite song. My buddy AD and I learned the words to the songs in an instant, and when we heard they were supporting Counting Crows on their tour – well it felt like Christmas.

The Stunning, Olympia Theatre, Dublin. The Stunning were a great band, one of those Irish bands that were only really big in Ireland, but with a couple more ‘hits’ could have been a household name. AD got me into their first album by playing the tape on a loop, in his VW beetle multiple times! Their second album was just as good, and we heard tell of a gig in Dublin that summer. So we got tickets and drove to Dublin (if I remember rightly we took a wrong turn and ended up driving for hours through IRA bandit country). It was a midnight start for the gig and the place was packed with the big names of Dublin culture and music. The band seemed to the treating every song like it was their last and the crowd bellowed their love at every opportunity. It was only at the encore that we realised that it was their last ever gig (everyone else seemed to know), the singer thanked his parents in the ‘royal box’ and thanked the fans for all the good times. We drove home in the Beetle as the sun was rising, knowing we’d witnessed an event.

REM, Slane Castle. Slane gigs were always more about the day than the actual gig, but in the case of this one I remember being completely un-impressed by the 99 support acts (apart from spearhead who were great). After 5 hours of standing there I really just wanted to go home… but REM were mesmerizing – it was around the time of ‘what’s the freq Kenneth?’

Hothouse Flowers, Ulster Hall. I just remember them being so cool, great songs belted out with intensity and a real sense of something communal. A few years later I saw them again in the Limelight bar (with about 2000 fewer people), totally different kind of gig, but once again, memorable.

Elastica/Ash, Limelight. I know its very Britpop, but there’s no use censoring my taste in retrospect. Ash were the support act, they were still in school and this was their first real gig – a great feeling of these guys are just like us as we moshed around. Elastica were at their peek –and I still maintain, very underrated.

U2, RDS, Dublin. Zoo TV comes home. We slept out over night on the street at the Virgin Megastore in Belfast to get tickets,  so much was the anticipation. The concert was mind blowing – almost overwhelming, it felt totally important (if that’s not to pretentious). I think history will laud  Zoo TV, I think that Achung Baby and that tour was as important to 90s music as Beatles/Stones were to 60s Sex pistols/Bowie to the 70s etc. (nothing like a bit of hyperbole) (Rick Astley to the 80s?)

Radiohead, Queens University. They had released OK Computer on the Monday – the only album I’ve ever queued for before the record shop doors opened. They were about to become the greatest band on the planet for a while, and to our almost disbelief, there were roomers of a ‘secret’ gig in Belfast on the Tuesday. Myself, AD and SG got down to Belfast town centre at 7am (if memory serves me) to queue for one of the 100 tickets… we were about 578th in the queue! We hung on anyway until 9am when we were officially told no. I can still feel the disappointment. But with 2 hours to go before the concert I got a phone call from good friend and local rock Svengali, SO,  that there were 2 spare tickets going – I jumped at it, but then had to take the decision to ditch SG … who was very and rightly p1ssed off! (only for a week or two, but still mentions it).  The gig it self was a bizarre experience, the greatest band in the world playing to 100 or so people in a university hall, it was ethereal, almost other-worldly. The sounds and melodies of that album are still amongst my favourite.

OK, number one U2, Earls Court, London. AD and I didn’t have tickets… we got them from a tout just before it was due to start.  Bono had been flying home in between earls court shows to visit his dying father, which added to his connection with the songs. Once again emotion and passion in every song, reaching out to every one there. AD and I weren’t even sitting together, but when we met up after… AD looked like he had tears… I mocked him (of course) but I had been welling up all through it. We actually paid a fortune to see them again at Slane Castle a month or so later – but it was a waste of money – nothing beat that earls court show.

Got to admit, it’s getting better

 

Again this is just a nugget of a thought, non parsed, ill thought out and under researched. What t’internet was made for! It’s a topic I’ve touched on before a little bit, so you’d think I’d have worked out what I was trying to say, but alas…

A week or two ago we’d some Jehovah’s Witnesses or something come to our door to tell us the good news that the world was going to pot, all we have to do is turn on the news to see what a state the world is in.

That kinda attitude disproportionally annoys me… how can someone claim that the world is getting worse? Bad things happen, but they always have and to say that the world is somehow ‘getting worse’ shows an embarrassingly naive knowledge of history.Never mind world wars, work houses, slavery, plagues… for goodness sake, its only 20-30 years since the world was on the cusp of complete nuclear annihilation… now that the threat of this has somewhat receded, can Mr Witness at least admit that a spate of stabbings on the local Points West news (the example he gave), while tragic, is small bananas… and the very fact that it makes the news, is a positive.

TwoBigYellowCranes (regular commenter) brings to light the tragic case of the man who was killed last week in Belfast, in front of his pregnant wife. I’m not saying that TBYC isn’t right to highlight this, but i remember the days, all too well when this wouldn’t even have got a mention on the local news, because of all the other tribal killings, shootings and punishment beatings. We do ourselves a disservice by not recognising progress. Sometimes the glass IS half full.

Reasons to be cheerful:
Child mortality at record low
Gap between crime rates and fear of crime
UK homicide rates failing (note that the 2000-2003 jump is seen as largely down to better recording)
Life expectancy set to soar

Who do you think you are?

This is one of those posts were I have no idea where it’s going, one of many. It’s such an obvious idea, but I find it really interesting. It’s the idea of family, heritage, race, ancestors and national culture.

I was watching a program a while ago called “Who do you think you are?” When celebs track their family tree - it’s a surprisingly interesting program. This week it was Barbra Windsor, the arcatypical East Londoner. Sure enough her parents and grandparents had been born and bred within the sound of the bow bells, but what struck me was when she went back a generation more and found that they have come from County Cork and Scandinavia.

I don’t know much about my family tree, but I can go back to my great grandparents on one side as County Longford shop keepers, and on the other side as county Down farmers. The interesting thing is, anything further back than that, I have no idea - for all I know they could all be Russian, Italian, Polish.

With that thought in my mind it strikes me as strange for anyone to have a over inflated sense of nationalism. Seeing themselves as ‘true’ English or ‘true’ Irish or whatever - even Babs Windsor is quarter Irish/Scandinavian. After a generation or two an immigrants family can be truly integrated to the point where they can even find themselves being jingoistic about their ‘adopted’ country.

I have a Czech friend who lives near me and it strikes me that in 100+ years our respective great great grand kids will probably just see themselves as English and maybe not even know our original nationality - and maybe complain about the Paddys and Poles coming in and taking all the jobs etc.

Were it is different I suppose is with skin colour. If I was literally green, with green skin then my great great grand kids would know that they weren’t originally anglo-saxons, and more importantly others would see them as ‘different’. If Obama’s parents came from Albania rather than Africa he might just assume that he could trace his linage back to the Mayflower - and it wouldn’t mater either way.

There is a nugget of something worth saying here.

Mass Child Poverty?

A hundred thousand children in Northern Ireland are living in poverty, it emerged today. New figures published by the Northern Ireland Assembly also revealed that 44,000 of them are living in “severe poverty”. Committee chairman Danny Kennedy MLA said: “There can be little doubt that having more than 100,000 children in Northern Ireland living in poverty and 44,000 children living in severe poverty is unacceptable in the 21st century.

Not that I don’t want to believe the Bele Tele or indeed our esteemed assembly but, seriously? That can’t be true unless the meaning to the word poverty has been seriously degraded. To me poverty means the possibility of not having enough food today, no clean drinking water, living in a cold disease ridden squat, living on the streets picking a pocket or two, leaving school at 10, working down coal mines by the age of 12, parents dead from aids and your infected, life expectancy under 40 etc etc etc etc.

If any of these kids own an Xbox or can afford to buy McDonalds or have a myspace account… then as far as grumpy old me is concerned, they aren’t in poverty! Not because I don’t think the lives of people should be continually bettered, just that it completely downgrades the real poverty of children in Darfur, Brazil, Bangladesh, Angola etc .. it leaves people thinking aww those poor Brazilian street kids, they’re just like Jonty in Andersonstown who’s ma can’t afford to buy him a new iPod.

Relative poverty should be called something else, because I’m relativly poor compared to Bill Gates.

Songs from the shows

I’m no fan of musical theatre. Well, fan is a big word… I have been to see a few musicals, and yes, like them… but that doesn’t make me a fan… The last one I went to see was Spamalot, which was in fact brilliant. My mate GE was with me and she was a big fan, so I allowed myself to be swept along, which is always the best way I feel. Before that I went to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - it had all the great names… WILMOT-BLAIR-BIGGINS!!! A great show.

Understand that I’m not gay or ought, but I love musicals.

Last night on the south bank show (embarrasingly for the best part of a decade I thought Melvin Bragg was Billy Bragg’s dad - I was shockingly fished in by someone!) Anyway the show was about the making of Viva la Diva which ‘stars’ opera singer Katherine Jenkins and Ballerina Darcey Bussell. (It’s notable that Bussell looks really like the thin one offa trinny and Susannah, and Jenkins is fairly hot!)

Truly truly awful: Jenkins can sing but is a rubbish dancer, Bussell can dance but can’t sing. But they both had to sing and dance songs from Broadway. My word, an absolute car crash. The opening night in Manchester was a peer ‘through your fingers’ experience as they sang out of tune and bumped into each other a lot.

Whoever told them it was a good idea, was less than inspired.

Indonesian Knights

This may or may not be interesting - as with most QMonkey musings, it’s one of those ‘stories’ again - part of a finite resource which will someday soon run dry, not unlike the oilfields of Arabia. I’ll then have to investigate more renewable post sources. A few years ago I spent a year working in Singapore, it involved quite a lot of travel in SE Asia, visiting remote power stations to install software. The actual job was as boring as it sounds but the trips made for some interesting copy.

One of those trips was to a little remote town on the north cost of Indonesia, called Paiton. Myself and fellow Irishman Sean were joined on the trip by our new recruit in the office, Catherine (Catherine was a local Singaporean, who was in her mid 20s like me, but wasn’t really ‘up for the banter’ and eventually resigned after 2 months saying she couldn’t work with Sean and I. How embarrassing!). We flew from Singapore to Surabya with Gaurda Airlines - a scarily stereotypical journey, if there had been chickens roaming free in the cabin they would have fit right in - I took extra notice of the ‘in the unlikely event’ announcement!

We were met at the airport by a driver in one of those ubiquitous Toyota vans. The journey to our apartment was to take about 2 hours, it was late at night so I figured I could maybe get some shut-eye.

People often talk about scary car journeys, but with this one I KNEW we were going to crash, I was just praying that it would be a small crash and there wouldn’t be too many injuries. It was no better than a dirt track, no road markings, but heavy heavy traffic in both directions, no one travelling below 70 mph and our driver overtaking at every possible chance. On a number of occasions we forced the oncoming trucks to brake hard to avoid us - and we did bump in to a number of cars along the way… barely acknowledged by the driver! Sean, Catherine and I didn’t say a word for the entire trip but when we arrived we all just started to laugh manically… well… Sean and I laughed… Catherine just stared at us, shaking her head.

Next day we headed to the Power Station and did our bit - no really problems as expected. The main guy Pieter was a South African who’d be living there for a few years and was keen for Sean and I to join him for a night out in the village. I was a bit hesitant and said I’d maybe stay behind with Catherine… but that was greeted with cheeky smiles and winks… it all got a bit embarrassing, so I ended up going out with the boys. Paiton village had no street lights and was really just a succession of open air stalls, hawkers selling exotically smelling street food and questionable women hanging around doorways. The locals mingled in the middle of the street, constantly bumping into people on bikes, old rickety cars and even oxes (oxes or oxen?).

We were the only white guys around - but everyone was very friendly and some of them seemed to know Pieter. We headed into a bar and the lady at the door said, hello Mr Pieter, your usual table? No idea why she said that, because there only really seemed to be one table… it was a white plastic garden style table in the middle of the room in front of a big screen. All this time I was trying to look like a ‘cool’ man of the world… in a ‘I do this sorta thing all the time’ kinda way… but the screen had me worried. The worry enhanced slightly as all got our own ‘personal bar maids’.

So the three of us sat around the table, with our personal maid standing beside us, pouring the Bintang beer into our glasses and grinning a lot. Their job seemed to be constantly shower us with complements… Mr Peiter you so funny, Mr Jonny you so tall etc etc.

It was at this point that I made a complete tit of myself - my maid was very keen to keep the glass topped up, so every time I took a sip she topped it up - catching me quite unawares and causing me to spill it all over myself. Much running around to find towels and dabbing of t-shirts ensued.

After I’d been cleaned up, and made to look like a complete amateur, Pieter nodded to the head waitress and she shuffled around at the bottom of the screen. I started to get very nervous - I’d no interest in any hanky panky and this seemed to very much be what was on the cards. Until all became clear… IT WAS KAROKE NIGHT! Sean was handed a microphone and the words to Brown Eyed Girl came up in the screen. He belted it out with gusto, with his maid sitting on his knee swaying along.

Once I knew that It wasn’t about the hanky panky I was WELL into it…which is weird because I never seemed to get to the end of my beer  … I started to find it very ironic and, well, the makings of a good story. I shuffled through the booklet of songs… and selected With or Without You… I was on my feet… blasting it out, in a shack in the middle of Piaton, dancing a long to it with my personal maid… she said Mr Jonny you such a good singer… I said… thanks I used to be in a band.

Oh my giddy aunt… I did actually say that… I’ve gone red even now as I type it. I might not publish this post - these kinda things are best left unpublished!