Aye, (Head)Phones
I’m not in the market for a new pair of headphones. My venerable Sennheiser HD450s are still doing fine for over-the-head use, and the same brand have provided me with a series of earbuds for mobile use. But I tried a pair of Beats by Dre phones in an HMV the other day, just to see what all the fuss was about.
They looked pretty good, felt comfortable, and sounded great. But the price!
Apparently Apple bought Beats more for the streaming service than the phones. That makes sense: if they’d wanted a headphone company they’d have gone for Sennheiser, obviously (and if they cared about earphones in general they wouldn’t have made horrible ones for years).
But you’d think that if they wanted a streaming service, they’d have gone for Spotify, which is surely more established.
So I suspect the truth may include a combination of the two, plus a degree of cool cachet, in what is perhaps a demographic that they don’t currently reach.
Either way, if the next iPhone or Mac comes with a cool pair of phones (unlikely though that may be) I won’t be unhappy.
Kippers for Tea
I usually post before elections. This time I didn’t get round to it.
The results of the European parliament elections were horrendous, of course. But one slightly good thing may come out of it all.
IMHO the single biggest contribution to UKIP’s success is the fact that Nigel Farage was never off the BBC in the last few months. More appearances on Question Time than anyone else, for example. Constantly consulted on the radio about anything even vaguely connected to Europe or immigration (or anything else, it seemed).
In short, it’s the fact that the BBC treated them like a mainstream party that has caused — or at least helped — them to almost become one.
I see a close parallel with the way they give climate-change deniers equal time with climatologists whenever there’s an environment story; the intent being balance, but the effect being to give undue weight to the views of a tiny minority.
Here, though, they went far beyond that point, to where I feel they were guilty of violating their mandated requirement to show balance.
So the potential good outcome: at least people of the right can no longer say that the BBC has a left-wing, pro-Europe bias.1
-
Not that that was ever a very fair point; you just have to look at the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, for a counterexample. ↩︎
Religion, Faith Schools, and 'The Great Pumpkin'
Another from the "never posted" series. Again, I don't know why I didn't post it. It seems pretty finished. It's also wildly out of date, stemming is it does from 2006. 2006! That's eight years ago now! Where the hell does the time go?
Anyway, the original piece follows.
Religion is much in discussion at the moment, it seems, and atheism even more so.The Archbishop of Canterbury has said that
the ideal of a society where no visible public signs of religion would be seen — no crosses around necks, no sidelocks, turbans or veils — is a politically dangerous oneBut no-one has been trying to do that. True, there have recently been two cases in which employers have restricted what their staff can wear, with regard to items related to religions. Now, whether employers should be able to insist on such restrictions is one question, and a valid one to be asked; but it’s not something new, nor unique to religious clothes.
And it’s not as if anyone other than British Airways has done anything to restrict the display of Christian symbols. The woman in question there was in a uniformed occupation, and the cross violated the uniform code. Case closed. Do you think it would have been any different for a police officer or ambulance driver? If you want to get the uniform rules in your job changed, speak to your employer, go through your union, or whatever: but keep the courts out of it. Similarly if you are in a non-uniformed job with a dress code.
All of which is different from – almost orthogonal to – the case of Jack Straw asking Muslim women to remove their veils during a conversation (note: asking, not insisting; during a conversation, not forever).
I got the impression from the radio news this morning that the ArchieCant was trying to play the “persecuted Christian” card, railing against the overwhelming forces of our secular society. But having scanned his actual article, I see that that is not quite so. Rather, he is warning of the dangers of a society which only allows state-sanctioned religions to exist. Fair point, but again, not something that anyone is suggesting in Britain.
There’s no excuse for a Christian leader to complain about his (and it is always “his”) religion’s place in modern Britain (or, even more so, America). The various Christian churches, and the church of England in particular, hold a remarkably privileged position in British public life, from the head of state being also the head of the church, through the tax-free status of religions, right up to the exclusively-religious nature of Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’ (and that’s not even mentioning the ‘Daily Worship’ or the complete takeover from 8 on Sunday mornings).
Then the Education Minister Alan Johnson has changed the former intent of the government regarding allowing non-believers (or different-believers) into new “faith” schools. Now don’t get me wrong: I am utterly opposed to “faith” schools: one great thing that America gets right, in my opinion, is it’s implementation of the separation of church and state that bans states from enforcing religious observation in schools, and I would happily see it removed from schools here. But we are where we are, and if there are going to be new, state-funded schools that base part of their teaching on a religion, then I think that the worst thing possible would be for them to be exclusively pupilled by kids from families who are followers of that religion.
And remember I went exclusively to state Catholic schools in Scotland.
The State of Me, by Nasim Marie Jafry (Books 2014, 4)
Well this is an interesting one. Nasim is an old friend. Or it might be more accurate to say she was the big sister of an old friend. She lived two doors down the road when I was growing up. Her younger brothers were both close friends of mine. A few weeks ago I came across some old email, and it made me think of them. I knew that Nasim had had a story or two published, so I googled her. Found her blog, discovered she’d had a novel published, ordered it from Amazon, and here we are.
In doing all this I got back in touch with her and with her brother, Yusuf, who I haven’t see in I don’t know how many years. So it’s all good.
But what about the book, I hear you ask?
Well, it’s not the kind of thing I’d normally choose to read — or not without a serious recommendation from a friend, for example. But it’s really, really good.
It’s a fictionalised autobiography, in that the protagonist goes through the same experience with contracting ME (Myalgic Encephalopathy) that Nasim herself did. And it’s set partly in Balloch, where we grew up.
Far more importantly, though, it’s a really good book. The characters are believable, especially the protagonist, Helen. That might be just as you’d expect, as they’re drawn from life; but I strongly suspect that it’s no easier to write a convincing character based on a real person – even yourself – than to write one who is completely imaginary.1 We are drawn in to her inner life, her loves and her problems, and we are glad to be.
When she is laid low by the hateful condition, we feel her every twinge and ache. When she falls in love we fall right with her. And that’s an important point: this isn’t a misery memoir; it’s by no means all about the illness, or even about Helen’s responses to the illness. ME affects and influences everything in her life, but she still manages to have a life, and Nasim makes it an interesting one, one we’re happy to share for a while.
Yet at the same time she manages to educate us about ME, through Helen’s own learning about it. It is still a little-understood condition, with underfunded research and mistaken guidelines from NICE.
All in all, it’s a fine debut, and I look forward to reading more from Nasim.
-
And of course, consciously or not, writers always draw on the real people they’ve met when constructing their characters. What else is there, after all? ↩︎
Secret Diaries
Sad to hear of the death of Sue Townsend. I didn’t keep up with the Adrian Mole books after the first couple, but I was always happy to see her byline in the paper or hear her on the radio. And I did enjoy those early books and the TV series.
Interesting to learn from this Guardian piece that the first one was published at around the same time as The Smiths’ first gig. Adrian would probably have approved.