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23:04
29 Nov 2006
A Lucky Star
There are few things in life as exciting as hearing one's name mentioned on the radio. I still get a tingle when I hear colleagues talking about me on-air, just as I hope the listeners do when it's my turn to do the mentioning. Better still, those occasions on which that mention is accompanied by 3 or 4 minutes of sheer indulgence, where a favourite record is played seemingly just for you... Magic.
With the technology to find and play just about any record from our home PC in just minutes, the concept of the request show may seem a little dated, but in fact, the thrill it brings is timeless. And to prove it, take a look at this:
Earlier today, I had a call from BBC Berkshire's reception, to say that a parcel had arrived for me. Hand delivered, the sender in question had issued such firm instructions to "pass this on to Mr Sheppard", that security guards had assumed I was expecting it. I wasn't!
Inside, accompanied by three 332.5g chocolate bars (yes, almost a kilogram of my preferred brand of chocolate!), was 'All the Roadrunning', the fantastic new album from Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris which I'd been planning to put at the very top of my Christmas list. A postscript on the label directs me to Track 6, 'Love and Happiness', to which I'm listening as I write. I'm moved to tears by the words, and by the overwhelming power of a gesture well made.
Though there's no further message, I'm in no doubt as to the identity of the sender. The choice of Mark Knopfler points to the most loyal of listeners, a lady who clearly hears every word I blather at all hours of the day and night. The chocolate, which usually arrives weekly with a card and a request, confirms it - though this week the request show has been turned on its head. Suddenly I'm the one getting the tingle.
Track 6 will get a play this weekend. In fact, it'll get more than a play; it will receive the most heartfelt dedication I've ever given on the radio, to the lady who this time didn't text or email or write with a request, but actually sent me the CD from which to play it. Listen out - this will be just for you.
Post title from the lyrics to 'Love and Happiness', written by Emmylou Harris and Kimmie Rhodes.
I must now possess one of the best percentage-win records I've ever had for a season supporting Manchester City.
Up til this season I've usually managed at least 20 matches in each league campaign, reaching a monotonous nadir in 2005/06, when I managed to attend 14 matches without a single victory.
This season work commitments have vastly curtailed my ability to follow City, to the point where this is only the second match I've been able to get to. The first one was the opening game of the season, away at Chelsea, which needless to say we lost.
Tonight, however, we dispatched Aston Villa 3-1 at Villa Park, and we did it with quite a bit of style by City's standards. Darius Vassell opened the scoring for us against his old club, and Sylvain Distin - usually at least 40/1 to score given his position at centre-back - stormed through to wrap up the win in the second half.
By the way, if you're a Reading fan reading this, you can put the pitchforks and torches away - every time I'm working on a Reading game I'm very much a Reading supporter, and I was at the Bolton play-off final in 1995 (which Reading somehow lost despite, at one point, being two goals up with a penalty awarded).
I was only 10 years old at the time so it's fair to say I don't remember much detail from the game. I do, though, remember screaming something about one of the wingers in a high-pitched 10-year-old's voice, to which the old fella next to me (no, not my dad) turned round and said: "You're bloody right, son. Keep talking sense like that and you'll have a bright future."
If ever I apply to do commentary on a game, that's going down on the CV as the one positive observation on my footballing knowledge.
To further reassure Reading supporters, it's important to point out that when Reading beat Ciy 1-0 earlier this season, I spent the last 10 minutes desperate for Reading to cling on.
Granted, this was primarily because I'd already written the match report. And I'd accidentally clicked the wrong button and published it on the BBC site - with a 'Reading 1-0 Man City' headline - five minutes before full time. So I had a vested interest in the scoreline staying the same, but even so, I was crying out for that Reading win.
Back to tonight's game and the best thing about it was the fans. For a start Villa's fans were very quiet, which is always a positive (the attendance was a pitiful 30,000 in a ground that can probably hold half that again). But equally the City away fans I was stood next to behaved themselves, which is practically unheard of. Maybe it's just because I've spent a lot of time in their company, but I maintain that City's away support has the biggest moron-to-seat ratio in professional football.
Tonight they just watched the game and sang at the appropriate points, which was a godsend compared to the traditional smell-of-drugs added to the equally essential turn-up-late-from-pub and scream-abuse-at-anything. Once or twice we've had the delightful fall-off-row-behind-you-onto-you, most notably when Uwe Rosler chipped Peter Schmeichel at Old Trafford in the mid-90s. OJ might remember that: he was there with me and ended up hugging a complete stranger.
So in summary the game was good, the team played well, and the fans behaved. It almost makes me feel like I'm missing out... but then we're at home to Watford on Monday night. And we're unbeaten at home all season. That's a match we're guaranteed to lose - I'll stay at work.
As ever, anything I write which approaches the category "film review" is completed long after everyone else has seen the film in question.
So I'm more interested in whether you agree or not than I am in providing you with a taster of a film you've doubtless already consumed, digested and, er, removed. If you're Borat, you'll have popped it in a plastic bag and taken it back down to your rather refined hosts. (An eerily similar incident really did happen to a friend of a friend, but I shan't relate it - you might be eating.)
I liked Borat a lot. Not the individual, of course, even allowing for the unrepentant charm of a man who goes swimming with his pet bear, asks women how much sex with them will cost while walking past them in the street, and sings a national anthem pertaining to potassium in front of an angry American rodeo crowd.
This is a knowing film, of course. Many times the punchline hoved into view minutes, hours before Borat finally delivered it, but as with classics of the limb-gnawing genre - think Meet The Parents - it's the agony before the pay-off which hits the mark. The moment Borat is shown meeting a group of American feminists it's not the how, but the how long.
The question mark lingers longest over the length. At the end of the film my companions - all a few years older than me, so perhaps more mature (though I'd argue that point) - seemed to feel Borat had outstayed his dubious welcome. I reckon that, at approaching 90 minutes, he was hardly trying to construct a Kazakh Lord Of The Rings (and heaven knows which rings those would be, given some of the action we see in a hotel room). It was like watching a television special on the big screen. You might not like that idea, but it sat well with me.
The odd thing is, despite the reservations all three fellow Borat voyeurs expressed at the end, I swear none of them stopped laughing right the way through the film. You can't spend the whole movie finding it funny, then pop a straight face on as you emerge and pretend you're above all that puerile nonsense. If you laughed, you laughed - admit it, a man with a chicken in a briefcase burning a copy of an old Baywatch annual made you giggle.
Of course you may not have laughed. I can think of a number of people to whom I'd never show this film. Horses for courses, as they sometimes say. In Borat's case, bears for ice cream vans.
It's not often you'll find me commenting on sport. Normally, I'd be happy to leave that for Ollie and his considerably more than passing knowledge of such matters, but since he's been busy posting about buses of late, here's a full account of Sunday's match between London Irish and Northampton. They're both teams who play rugbee leeg, I'm told...
Actually, you won't come close to getting a match report from me. It's a wonder to me that even the most talented of commentators (such as 'our Graham' at BBC Berkshire) can decipher what's taking place on a rugby pitch, let alone manage to describe it with any clarity for the rest of us to comprehend. What I can do, though, is give you an account of the day's entertainment, both up-front and backstage - for I was one of the lucky few who got to see both.
Courtesy of the Voice of the Balls and Seamus O'Connor (manager extraordinaire), I was amongst those enjoying the views from Suite 3 at the Madejski Stadium, being kept well fed and watered as you can see. The party consisted of the two acts who opened the match, Eurovision alumni Donna & Joe and the legendary Foster & Allen - all providing as fine entertainment over lunch as they did on stage - plus Michael King from Radio 1, Deadly, myself, and some of Seamus' family and friends. Sir Terry had threatened to put in an appearance, but as Alan pointed out in his opening, "decided he couldn't afford to be with us after all".
Having been snatched from the sponsor's hospitality suite, Alan was pressed into service as compere for the proceedings, being handed the microphone by the Madejski's regular announcer who was slightly awestruck at the prospect!
First up, Donna & Joe, whose performance was first class, if a little wasted on the small crowd who were still trickling in from the rain. Their latest, 'Hands Up', is a catchy number, and sounded great on the Mad Stad's sound system.
Thoughtfully, Joe McCaul came off and immediately warned Foster & Allen that the 'live' pictures being beamed to the big screen, directly in the performers' eye line, were a good few seconds behind reality - "Don't look!" was the advice. Undeterred, the boys took to the stage, and the crowds went wild.
Despite our best efforts to put him off from the box, Deadly completed the wooing of the crowds, who were left in high spirits for the start of the game. We munched meantime, and enjoyed a great 80 minutes of rugby (even I found it nail biting, although Irish maintained a good lead throughout, finishing London Irish 40-5 Northampton).
During a quiet moment, Joe managed to tempt the Irish mascot, Digger the Dog, up to the box. Dogs love their wine, it seems...
Irish coffees downed, farewells said, it was back to our drivers for the journey home. Or so it seems. My next memory is waking up at home around midnight, dressed in just a shirt and a sock, wondering if it had all been an elaborate dream...
A fantastic day - with thanks to all for having me along.
Number one: for reasons not immediately clear, somebody arrived at Dayorama earlier today from the forum of the Scottish Licensed Window Cleaners' Network.
The network, or SLWCN for short, appears to be a group of Scottish window cleaners intent on providing a better service. Good on them. They've even supplied a page dedicated to explaining how the group came about. Here's an abridged version:
The first organisation to represent window cleaners throughout Great Britain was started in the late Forties and became known as the National Federation of Master Window Cleaners, then the National Federation of Master Window and General Cleaners and is now the Federation of Window Cleaners. Rightly or wrongly, it was perceived as being stuck in the past and not being proactive enough for some.
Some frustrated Federation members - along with window cleaners who would never have joined because of how they considered the “Fed” to be - decided to form the Association of Professional Window Cleaners.
As only Scottish councils license window cleaners at present, Tam Kay, who was involved in the preparatory days of the APWC, decided his efforts would be better directed in forming the Scottish Licensed Window Cleaners Network. It’s not part of FWC or APWC in any way.
It has to be said that the FWC certainly sharpened up their act in the months leading up to the APWC launch. The change of name and logo was already in the pipeline, but to accompany that, the members’ quarterly magazine – WindowTalk – was revamped with a more up to date style.
For the full version, and to find out more, click here. I'd have to register if I wanted to discover precisely which page refers to Dayorama but, with just 27 members at the time of writing, I'd feel a tad self-conscious doing so.
Second on the agenda are the many vacancies in the Doctor Who production offices at BBC Wales.
In an email circulated today, no fewer than seven job opportunities - working on the likes of Dr Who Confidential and Totally Dr Who - were announced.
Why have all these vacant posts suddenly appeared? Is there something slightly fishy going on in Cardiff? Have the Daleks exterminated the previous appointees, or should we be looking in the bowels of Torchwood for the unfortunate seven?
All highly suspicious. Still, you can imagine the horror for Amy J when it's announced the Dr Who offices are looking for new Tennants...
You might be a basketball or ice hockey fan. You might support your local non-league football team. You might watch rugby in National League 1. If you're any of those things, you probably know what it's like for the media glare to point squarely... elsewhere.
Minority sports, and majority sports at a minor enough level, are very easily ignored. After all, the people who shout the loudest often get the most attention - and there are more Reading fans to shout than there are Maidenhead United fans.
That's why it usually takes something like the FA Cup, or a bizarre story, for local sport to hit the headlines. But therein lies an advantage for anyone with the freedom and inclination to devote a little extra time to these sports - if you go to places no one else goes, you'll find stories and characters no one else knows about.
We have two world-beating hockey teams, an Elite League ice hockey team, a top basketball side, two or three top rugby clubs and plenty of strong non-league football sides in our patch, so there's plenty of people to be talking to.
For our first week we've got interviews with figures from Newbury rugby club, Basingstoke Town FC, Reading Rockets basketball team and Slough ladies' hockey club - plus London Irish analysis from our reporter Graham.
Click here to take a look. The Reading Rockets interview is particularly good, since the team are embroiled in a tapping-up scandal with rivals Worthing Thunder. Just because a sport's out of the public eye, doesn't mean nothing ever happens.
If you've been on a bus or train, especially in London, you'll have had an experience where some eejit's playing their music through the speaker on their mobile phone, just because they can.
Clearly Ken Livingstone knows the God-that's-annoying-but-they-might-kill-me sensation all too well. Earlier this week he declared that people playing their music to all and sundry on London's buses could be stripped of their travel passes and thrown off the bus in question.
What he didn't say was by whom:
Speaking before the London Assembly last week, Mr Livingstone said ... Transport for London (TfL) was adapting an upcoming campaign "to incorporate the playing of music on buses".
The campaign by TfL is designed to reduce anti-social behaviour and crime and improve "passenger perception of safety on the bus network".
Calling for an "absolute prohibition on playing music from a mobile system" Mr Livingstone said "people will be asked to leave the bus and in the case of a child with free travel concession they would forfeit it".
Ken, that's great. I hate loud music on buses too. But you're not going to catch me confronting anyone about it, and according to to Jim Buckley of the T&G workers' union, you're not going to catch many bus drivers at it either:
"It would mean the driver having to get out of his cab, thereby putting himself in a situation of potential assault," he told the BBC News website. On that basis, we don't want anything to do with it."
Can you blame them? Only this morning came another story of violence on public transport in London: a 12-year-old girl 'brutally' attacked. In that report, the driver gets rapped for not doing more:
[The girl's mother] criticised the bus driver for failing to do more to help her daughter. She claimed the bus driver did not intervene, call for medical assistance or even stop the bus ... An Arriva London spokesman said: "It would be totally unacceptable for a bus driver to behave in the manner described. We expect drivers to make the safety of customers a priority and summon the emergency services via the bus radio if requested."
Granted, you'd want your bus driver to get the emergency services in an incident like that. But get out of the cab and confront the perpetrator, whether it's a knife-wielding maniac or a bloke playing Girls Aloud at 120 decibels? I think any bus driver doing that has a death wish.
The solution for Northern trains has been to employ a private firm on their services:
Private security guards are to ride trains in the north of England to crack down on the abuse of rail staff.
The action follows more than 300 incidents of abuse and assault on Northern Rail staff so far this year.
Rail union RMT said some of its members have been kicked in the head, punched in the face and so badly assaulted that they have taken weeks off work.
Some rail staff have suffered verbal abuse, threats of violence and have been spat at by passengers.
If you're facing statistics like that as a bus or train driver, you're hardly going to go looking for trouble by staring down boisterous youths with mobile phones at full blast. Clearly the trouble is perfectly adept at finding you without you finding it.
I'm no David Sheppard in the Mastermind category of 'bus nostalgia', but I can't help feeling conductors on buses stopped this from even being an issue. Take away the authority figure and it's no wonder mindless hooligans can do what they like on our public transport networks. Even your chavviest teenager can work out that bus drivers need to drive the bus, and won't bother risking anything by coming back there and trying to deal with that loud music. If you get on your bus and you're welcomed by a conductor with nothing better to do than watch you like a hawk, you might share your Jay-Z collection a little less casually.
Having said all this, I'll be delighted to stand in David's bus playing music when he eventually learns to drive it. I'll set my drum kit up in it...
With Twink and Winky, I share a compulsive love of Wine Gums, which often explains why whole clumps of the little coloured gems go missing from your bag whenever I'm nearby. I rarely make it from any main-line railway station to a tube or a bus without first buying and consuming an entire cylinder in two mouthfuls. I once stopped at the Severn Bridge services to buy a 250g bag "for the journey", but managed to consume the lot before I'd reached Wales.
Unlike the Wombies, though, I don't like the yellow ones much. Widely supposed to be lemon flavoured (at least, according to Wombania's study of The Great Wine Gum Flavour Debate), it's unlike the other colours in its corrosively bitter taste, and if you've ever stopped to compare the smell... yuck.
For most, the black and red gums have the edge, to the point where you can guarantee they'll be first to be exhausted at the hands of cherry pickers (who have the gall to call themselves friends, despite leaving you with a bag of yellows to finish up). You smile, but herein lies an important thing about human nature. One of the big Wine Gum manufacturers (Maynards, I think), played on the popularity of the red and black gums some time ago, and began selling bags of just those. Legend has it they were a flop, whilst sales of the standard gums continued to flourish.
So, it seems we'd rather have both ends of the spectrum. The bitter and best. One makes the other seem much better.
Yet, which of these leaps out at you?
Let's be honest, you could use a roulette wheel to select your chosen gum.
That I seem to buck this quirk of human nature is bugging me as I listen to a compilation CD I made this week. Much as I do love i-Tunes and its many cousins which answer my long-term prayer to be able to store all my music in one place, I'm also still a fan of the trusty compilation CD, which allows me to enjoy a select few favourites which work well together - if you like, the black and red records in isolation.
This week, my informal theme was "so rarely heard, but every one a winner", and the resulting collection is so good it hurts. The ecstasy of hearing Elton John's 'Part Time Love' rubbing shoulders with Captain & Tenille's 'Love Will Keep Us Together' is beaten only when Toto's 'Hold the Line' breaks in with that marvellous single drum beat and, oh, that piano, to be followed by China Crisis' "Wishful Thinking" at Track 4... And so on.
The problem is, by the time I've worked my way through Carole Bayer Sager, Chris Rea's 'I Can Hear Your Heartbeat', The Korgis, England Dan & John Ford Coley, Air Supply and more, to The Carpenters' beautiful version of 'You' (a favourite of the late Dr Wally), I feel like doing it all again. And invariably, I will - all night long. It's exhausting.
So how come the black and red Wine Gum venture failed? Sigmund Rowntree (the well known psycho-confectioner) might have concluded that to appreciate the high points in life, humans must know the other extreme; to enjoy the black, one must endure the yellow. I'd tend to agree, but for the fact I'm a self-confessed glutton, who'd happily plough his way through packet after packet of exclusively black and red Wine Gums with the same unending enthusiasm which has led to my re-starting 'You' six times (so far) this evening.
So while Twink and Winky are busy chewing their way through the yellows in search of happiness, I'll be laying back and basking in an ecstatic sea of red and black, playing The Carpenters over and over and...
If you're familiar with the concept of Facebook, you'll recognise this as an extract from a news feed:
For the uninitiated, Facebook is all about interacting with 'friends' who allow you to share their news, photos, blogs, etc. and the news feed alerts you to the latest developments in your Facebook community.
So, you might think it's strange that I appear from the above to be interacting with myself, and accepting my own offer of friendship. Well I'm not - I'm actually interacting with Dave Sheppard, from Bristol University. Yes, that's right. But a different one!
To prove it, and I feel I must, here's an extract from my profile:
And here's an extract from Dave Sheppard's profile:
Great hat, but it just wouldn't match my eyes...
As the name would suggest, he seems a very nice chap; at least he appeared to see the funny side of my invitation to become 'friends', and accepted. Good job too; as an alumnus of the University at which he's currently studying, I'd hate to think of my good name (quite literally) and reputation being besmirched by anything less than a good man with a nice hat.
Ah, coincidences... Aren't they always so impressive?
Yes, another one. Not a student, but on the staff.
And guess where he's a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Physiology? Yes. The University of Bristol!
I intend to lobby Dave Sheppard (Undergraduate) into helping me persuade David Sheppard (Senior Lecturer) to sign up for a Facebook profile. We can create our own little group; organise little get togethers where we take it in turns to phone the restaurant and ask for David Sheppard; sign each other's bills. Endless possibilities. And how many other David Sheppards might we discover at the University? Time will tell...
On another note, you'll also see from my news feed that I'm off to London Irish v Northampton tomorrow with some rather prestigious company. A full explanation and report will follow tomorrow, but meantime, I just hope he doesn't show me up. That's probably why they've put us all in a box, to keep us from offending.
I'm very much looking forward to it, always assuming it is me who's off to the rugby, of course. It says David Sheppard on the ticket...
Post title shared with Terry Wogan's second autobiography (2 of 3), a long term catchphrase from Radio 2's Wake Up to Wogan.
Just a quick one to say what brilliant pictures from Stormont this afternoon, where convicted loyalist killer Michael Stone attempted to break into proceedings armed with a gun, a knife, and very possibly a bomb.
Conveniently it was a pretty big Stormont meeting, which means all the major photo agencies were there. There can't be many occasions where what could have been a grisly attack was captured in finest detail by professional photographers.
All credit to BBC News Online for putting the pictures to full use - there's one expandable image and a gallery of a further five in their article, here.
From women and rugby (see below) to women and cricket: it's a fine night for Oxford University's female cricketers, honoured at tonight's Sports Federation Ball as the Team Of The Year. Congratulations!
To quote team member and Dayorama regular Amy J, pictured above with the Team Of The Year trophy:
"Howzat? Tell Fletcher and Flintoff we're available to fly to Australia at a moment's notice."
I think that's a plan, if only to dispel the popular Aussie notion that the England team play like girls. Our girls are better.
Although as for 'a moment's notice' - with proceedings likely to go on for some time at tonight's event, it could take them til the third test to even regain consciousness...
Bitter experience tells us that we should never expect things in life to appear as they do in the picture. Amy and OJ certainly received something of a shock on Saturday, when they realised I'm nothing like the rather average-looking twentysomething who appears in my place on the Dayorama banner, but actually a 7ft tall, tanned sex-god. I assume that's why they both gasped.
Usually though, it's a disappointment we prepare ourselves for when visiting a holiday destination we've seen (post-Colourist) on our television screens, or removing food from an optimistically illustrated box. When was the last time your Big Mac looked anything like the giant portrayal on Ronald McDonald's price list?
When this extends to ordering some flat-packed furniture, we go one step further in our anticipation. Sense tells us to prepare for the inevitable disaster on wonky wheels, which after hours of hard graft and Allen key embossed fingers, looks just about fit for the bin.
I was fully expecting this to be the case with my new desk.
What I wasn't expecting was to find it in the bin in the first place.
This is how I met my new desk, roughly three hours into the five hour delivery window I'd been given yesterday afternoon. It was a chance encounter brought about by a need to visit the wheelie bin, and indeed the only moment where I'd dared to stray from the front window in case I missed the delivery van's arrival (our doorbell is currently out of action). No van had appeared, so we can only assume that delivery had taken place earlier in the day, and in the spirit of my relationship with Argos so far, their man had decided to ditch the goods in the least obvious/probably most suitable place. Remember, I paid for this 'service'.
Actually, in spite of my frustration at waiting three hours for a man who'd already been, the desk has proved a surprisingly good purchase. It was fairly easy to assemble, and although bought only as a temporary measure (which inevitably means it will end up outlasting me and my grandchildren), it seems built to last. It does everything the billing suggested it would.
Some final wall fixings are needed, then I might consider presenting a photograph to you. If you've any sense, you'll never believe how good it looks - but I reckon it actually does.
In the world of rugby union it is a sombre time for fans and players at London Irish, as the club languish in the depths of a losing streak.
But could this be the face, if not of a revival, then at least of some life blossoming in the Irish camp?
I spend a bit of time on the online message boards used by London Irish fans, either advertising our coverage of the team (whom I've now adopted at the cost of a rather nice fleece jacket), or just checking up on the discussion between supporters.
I also, separately, work quite hard to improve coverage of women's sport, and have done quite a bit with Reading's women's rugby club, so I keep a look out for any reference to women's rugby.
All this means a message board thread entitled 'London Irish Womens Team PLEASE HELP' was bound to intrigue me. I'll let Neale, the man writing it, explain:
"Last Saturday I went clubbing in London and met a great girl. She gave me her number at the end of the night so we could arrange to meet up next weekend. To my horror, when I tried the number today it didn't work. [But] she was 19 and told me she plays for London Irish women's team.
"Can anyone help me? Where do they play, does anyone know the team or the coaches? I apologise that this isn't strictly rugby related, but I really like this girl, and this is the only thing I can think of to try and contact her."
Rugby-related or not, this has become an immensely popular talking point with online fans of London Irish - click here to take a look for yourself. Since Neale wrote his begging letter late on Tuesday it has received more replies than any of the preceding 30 topics on the message board - his letter has, at the time of writing, been viewed over 300 times.
And what sleuths the London Irish fans are proving to be!
So far, in the space of two days, they reckon they have the girl's name and her MySpace account, with accompanying photos (from whence the one above has arrived). Neale tried to help where he could, with recollections like these:
"She and her German step-mum implied to me that they were strippers. Her step-mum borrowed my mobile briefly to ring someone and I thought that number could help me out.
"I texted it saying, 'You know a German girl who knows this Irish girl,' etc, but whoever he or she was didn't want to help me. They just texted back saying 'I'm not her PA.'"
The breakthrough came when a man named Paul somehow - God only knows how - found her MySpace account, which you can view here. Her name is Roisin, which certainly chimes with the London Irish connection, and someone had left a message on her MySpace page about her liking rugby and going out to a club. It all made sense!
Lovelorn Neale kept us waiting for almost an entire day after this revelation before replying, but when he did, how we all felt for him:
"Well well well, I didn't think I had much chance in finding her. Thanks Paul!
"I thought I'd try messaging her before I posted on here again. I messaged her last night and she has logged on [to her MySpace account] today so she would have read it - but she didn't reply.
"I feel a bit silly now. She's not interested. I guess I can safely assume she put her number in wrong deliberately..."
At least he had the decency to wish London Irish well against Northampton this weekend. After all, most Irish fans are feeling about as dejected and pessimistic as our Neale.
Tradition has it that when broadcasters fill out little Q&A forms for their profiles, there's a question which asks for their worst moment on radio.
Take the BBC Radio Five Live profiles, for example, which ask for each person's worst on-air nightmare. Here are some answers:
Asmaah Mir | "When Ian Payne made me corpse during the news and I just couldn’t recover."
Nick Mullins | "Telling actor David Tomlinson that I thought he'd been great in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He'd actually been in Mary Poppins. He didn't speak to Radio Kent again."
Dalya Raphael | "Losing my voice after having rushed up five flights of stairs to make a news bulletin on time. I was so short of breath when I opened my mouth I simply couldn't talk."
Mark Saggers | "Once, I’d been banned from Old Trafford by upsetting Sir Alex, so we set up across the road on a grassy verge. All was okay, until one of the engineers accidentally touched a cable to a power line, and blacked out half of Manchester!"
If you asked me that question now, the answer would read like this:
"We turned up to do a live commentary on a local FA Cup match, and everything was fine all the way through 45 minutes of pre-match chat, up until about 5 minutes into the game.
"At that point our microphone decided to start cutting out, and we had to drop off air to switch to one of the three or four pieces of back-up kit we keep in our radio car.
"As the first half of the match went on with no commentary (songs were going out on air instead), we slowly and painfully discovered that every single item of technology was in some way broken, inoperable or useless in our situation.
"Eventually at half time we gave up - cold, humiliated, and verbally abused by a fair percentage of the local supporters."
To give you some idea of the evening, we had to set our own commentary position up using a picnic table and an umbrella next to the pitch:
Our gravest error came when we removed the umbrella, since it stopped raining. Once the game started, about 20 or so young football fans clambered onto our bench to get a better view, nearly shook it apart, and then our microphone died - my evening along with it.
My co-commentator tells me it's the worst broadcasting disaster he's had in six years at the station, so it must immediately rank as my top on-air nightmare. Hand me that Q&A form to fill out - then I'm going to go to bed, to weep softly into my pillow.
It's good to know that in a consumer world which so often leaves us spoilt for choice, I can't seem to find a bloody thing I want to buy.
That's certainly the case when it comes to furniture. With much leaning over books to be done during the next few weeks, I devoted a portion of today's revision time to buying a desk. It's something every young bachelor should have, but I've been holding out since moving in the hope I'll eventually see just the kind of desk I'm after; nothing fancy, no sliding gimmicks and glass panels to collect the dust - but a good, solid desk that's the right shape and colour for me.
As yet, nothing has come to find me, so I decided I'd throw myself at the mercy of Reading's plethora of cheap furniture stores, who'd surely be thrusting so many eligible desks in my direction that they might manage to surprise me. After all, you can hardly enjoy an ITV programme these days (ain't that a fact) without at least four outlets falling over themselves to push perennially discounted furniture your way, so surely this would be a quick and painless solution?
Finding those outlets certainly wasn't difficult. In Reading, as in most places, they hunt in packs on modern retail parks just outside town. They're all there, DFS, MFI, Furniture World, Homebase; all of them, the Auntie Wainwrights of the flat-pack age, waiting until you come close enough to have something sold to you.
Though it wouldn't be a desk, apparently. Not only were pickings slim in terms of what I had in mind, but desks in general seemed to be in short supply. Yes, there were a few in-store, but they all seemed perfectly comfortable with their topping of papers and telephones, as did the assistants sat behind them, who hardly put themselves out to help me with my mission. They were probably too busy planning for Boxing Day.
Perhaps I've underestimated the popularity of the forthcoming Certificate of Professional Competence in Passenger Transport exam, which could explain why there just aren't enough desks to go round? Or perhaps these out of town horror-stores are just as rotten as the few desks they actually offer for sale? 'Outlets' in every sense of the word.
Accelerated by the need to lean on something, I resorted to visiting the Argos catalogue online (the paper version isn't smelling the same, these days), hoping that the quickest of fixes may still be found. Wrong. Plenty of desks, some quite reasonable, but for anything up to 36 days they exist only in pictorial form.
Above is the billing for the one which would arrive soonest. It's clearly a small flat-packed item, by definition easy for both the manufacturer and supplier to store. Yet, Argos (like so many others today), seem to have subscribed to the idea that, rather than making every effort to keep the stores themselves well-stocked, they won't even bother to offer the option of store collection. Instead they'll allow the customer to endure the inconvenience of a long wait. So much for choice.
I grudgingly accepted the inconvenience, and paid the money.
But hang on, how much money was that, exactly?...
Look closely, and you'll see that, not only am I being forced to wait for the desk to be delivered when really I'd prefer to collect it myself, but I'm also being charged for the privilege. Aren't I a lucky boy?
I'm reminded of a glorious email we once received on the evening show at BBC Bristol. It came from a listener who claimed to have sent it to his local B&Q store:
Come Wednesday afternoon, I shall read it time and time again throughout the five hour window I've been forced to write-off, sitting at home, waiting for my 'convenience' shopping to come to fruition. £4.95 well spent, I say.
Perhaps I should buy a chair and really make a day of it.
My main problem with the usual abuse the BBC is given is that some people act like every BBC employee is working on the Middle East desk at News 24 or News Online. If you remove from the equation people with a vested political or personal interest in the Israel/Palestine conflict, the number of people lobbing verbal molotovs into BBC inboxes declines a fair whack.
From my point of view it's sad, and unfair, that people prepared to tear apart the BBC's coverage of the Gaza strip don't recognise that people like me spend our whole working week right in the middle of our communities, trying to do good things - even in our very small way - that people will enjoy.
And when I say communities, there will be people expecting that to bear out a supposed attitude some dub 'hug-a-Muslim'. It doesn't.
I have spent my entire afternoon processing match reports from junior football games around the county - taking reports from parents and coaches, sub-editing them, formattng them and adding them to the web. It might well not be a service you'd ever hope to use in your life, but every match report is 20-plus kids with their names, or at least their team name, in lights on our website. The feedback we get from parents is great: their children love finding the reports online and it feels like a real public service when I'm doing it.
I have absolutely no idea, nor do I care, what creed or colour the kids playing football are. From their names I can gather that some are of Asian origin, some are of European origin, many more are of British origin, but it's the very last thing on my mind.
I've covered a few junior football matches first-hand in the past couple of months, giving up a Sunday on top of my working week to go down to a game, take photos, and interview the young players as though it were a miniature Match Of The Day. I do it because it's great fun and, for the 100 or so players and parents there, it's an extremely visible sign that the BBC is trying to do something good for them.
If junior football isn't your bag I can guarantee the BBC has someone, somewhere, doing exactly the same thing for your pastime of choice - be it music, cars, gardening, wheelchair basketball or computers. It's a shame, for me, that cynics glued to the Middle East news items don't notice it if it isn't political. We just seem to get referred to as "you BBC", as though many thousands of individual employees, each often working in entirely non-political fields, all made Barbara Plett cry when Yasser Arafat died. We didn't.
On a related note, some journalists go beyond the call of duty in ways I could never dare (sacrificing Sundays is not something for which I'm about to demand a medal - I only use that to make the point that it's not something I do because I'm forced).
Dilawar Khan Wazir is a BBC Urdu reporter based in an area of northern Pakistan running along the Afghan border. He's gone missing, months after his young brother was killed and his family attacked by militants in the area. It's likely he's either kidnapped or dead.
I find it highly unlikely Dilawar Khan Wazir is "you BBC", watching militants attack and kill family members while he reports on an area where Osama bin Laden was once thought to be hiding - an area charged with political tension. We're all individuals and some take immense risks to try to find out what's really happening. And no matter what some people may say, that's the driving force behind the vast, vast majority of reporters you will ever meet, BBC or no BBC.
I'm proud to work for the same organisation as Dilawar Khan Wazir, and I hope he returns safe and well.
It's not every day a global rolling news network launches, so the debut this week of Al Jazeera English was always going to make waves.
But the way AJE have gone about poaching top talent from British, US and Australian networks, in a direct bid to appeal to those audiences, lends the network something of an audacious air as it starts broadcasting.
A few days into its broadcasting life, does AJE provide a natural home for the likes of Rageh Omaar, Sir David Frost and Riz Khan?
Watch the very first five or so minutes of Al Jazeera English here:
I've spent all afternoon with AJE on and it's definitely not out of its depth - that was never likely given the funding the network has, the technology they've acquired with it and the names lured across.
Particularly impressive has been some of the newsreading talent. In the same week as I watched Channel 4's Samira Ahmed make a dog's breakfast of two lunchtime bulletins, it's good to see Channel 4 export Hamish MacDonald making it look so easy for AJE, and the same goes for David Foster (ex-Sky).
Newsreading should be warm, intimate and assured. Under no circumstances should you look or sound uncertain on air, which was Samira's problem in my view and it's not one AJE are without. The lady presenting alongside Hamish MacDonald in their Doha studio has an odd way of appearing genuinely petrified with her eyes while reading stories, which does very little for anybody's faith!
Some of the reporting has been hit-and-miss. The obvious area where AJE will come under scrutiny is Middle East coverage, where AJE have led with two big stories today: an Israeli air strike killing one person in Gaza, and a suicide bombing in Baghdad killing a group of unemployed builders in a queue for jobs.
The Gaza report has both sides represented - the Israeli military and Hamas each get a say - and you can feel AJE straining to make sure that's the case, even if a group of Palestinians acting as a human shield seem almost to be praised for doing so in the script. (Of course, condemning them for that action would be equally as bad, the idea is complete objectivity, or as near as is possible.)
AJE produces exclusive footage of Iraqi resistance fighters next, which must be where the channel comes into its own in sourcing that kind of material. I may have missed it but I've never seen anything similar on the likes of the BBC, ITN or Sky, and it was pretty compelling to watch the guerrillas trying to kill our armed forces as they train for the job. Again, it felt like the report had been treated carefully (as it should be!) and the script wasn't afraid to point out that these people are terrorists in many people's eyes.
Away from the mainstream news reporting, AJE has a global outlook which I don't think can currently be rivalled if you live in the UK. That's not because the BBC or Sky are worse, it's because that's not their aim. News 24 and Sky both want to tell you about UK stories first, because they've got a UK audience. AJE is broadcast globally and so has far more freedom to go anywhere in the world in the search for an interesting five minutes of TV. I'd like to think BBC World does the same thing but, of course, we can't get that in the UK - so AJE fills that gap.
I've seen two or three top quality reports from corners of the globe you rarely hear about via domestic UK news. The reporters that stand out in my mind are John Cookson, who went down illegal gold mines in the Congo, and Juliana Ruhfus, who posed as a tourist to film in Turkmenistan as part of a series entitled 'People & Power'. Both told their stories exceptionally well, delivering reports with personality and insight as well as good pictures. Some of the other reports I've seen this afternoon lack that personal touch, some even lack a decent voice-over.
Maybe I'm biased given my job, but for me by far the worst problem at AJE is their website. You have to pay to watch AJE on broadband, are allowed only a 15-minute trial of narrowband, and at the time of writing no video reports are available online. Plus, to be honest, the website just looks dull:
That's the main front page of the AJE site - good use of images in terms of their size, but the whole point of images on the web is their ability to grab the attention. Rendering them in grayscale might make things look a little more refined and polished, but these pictures lose any attraction to the eye and there's no life to the page. Look at the difference if you inject the colour back into them all:
Furthermore, AJE don't seem to have an equivalent of the BBC's "Also in the news" section - reserved on the front page to remind us it's not all bad. Looking at the AJE home page there's not one potentially uplifting story, it's all death, destruction, conflict and politics. One tiny sports headline about Roger Federer provides a lone glimpse of light relief. I know people might think it's dumbing down or pandering to the lowest common denominator, but I'm a strong believer in reporting the good things as well as the bad.
So the summary is: AJE looks like a strong, well-funded service populated by reporters keen to tell stories from parts of the world you won't normally hear about. In as much as that's the case, I don't think AJE is a competitor to the BBC or Sky, certainly not on a domestic level. In fact, I'll use AJE as a stand-in for BBC World to get news from a broader field when I'm fed up with UK stories.
How annoying that I'll have to leave the country to see how AJE and BBC World compare, but then people abroad I've spoken to say AJE's made little or no impression. My Iranian friend hadn't even heard of the service, while my friend Adam, in Egypt, says nobody in the country has been watching. He goes on to say the BBC's proposed Arabic TV news service will meet with similar indifference - "if you're watching in English you'll watch the BBC, if you're watching in Arabic you'll watch Al Jazeera". If that's the case, AJE might be a costly exercise in futility.
Last night, for the very first time, all four Dayorama writers gathered in the same room - and we even let one lucky winner (alright, our friend Anthony) join us for the evening.
Amy took on the role of hostess and head chef to prepare a sumptuous dinner gratefully wolfed down by all.
Meanwhile David played a Facebook-inspired game of 20 questions with Anthony to discover which friend they had in common.
And I received a healthy supply of mildly belated birthday gifts - a badge, a car air freshener, an intriguing book and a lovely scarf, which you can see in the photo.
The journey from work to Amy's flat had gone so well that David and I, to our surprise, arrived first. But it's safe to say the journey back didn't quite go to plan. We got back to Paddington for 11:55pm, only to discover that the next Reading train didn't leave 'til the ungodly hour of 1am.
Refusing to believe this we scurried round the concourse, establishing that since 9pm all the fast services to Reading had been replaced by buses, but all these buses had long since departed. So we were left to fend for ourselves with the few hundred remaning poor ingrates.
Some meticulous, almost Machiavellian planning (primarily to keep us occupied) saw us grab seats on the train in the inevitable melee when it eventually turned up, but the train proceeded to take half an hour longer than had been billed, finally arriving at almost 2.30am.
As David said, "What a lovely evening!" And as I countered at two o'clock in the morning, "If only it would end!" Many thanks to Amy for her wonderful duties as hostess and how nice to all be in the same room.
This little chap looks as though butter wouldn't melt, doesn't he?
And generally, it wouldn't have done. From all reports, he was a sickeningly sweet and good natured child, not unlike an Andrex puppy in his playful temperament, and just like those puppies, we all hoped he might never have to grow up.
But even Andrex puppies have naughty days, and today for Old Shep (the dog as he turned out), one came back to bite.
My local hair salon has just taken on a new girl, and needing a cut in something of a hurry, I decided to give her a go rather than waiting for Ms. Tried and Ms. Tested. She sat me down and made me feel comfortable, and it became abundantly clear that she was the kind of hairdresser who intended to find out all about her client, chipping her way chronologically back through the years with every grade of the clippers.
She was strangely familiar. Very distinctive in appearance and speech, almost Jade Goody-esque, though actually more like the person of whom Jade herself reminded me when she first turned up on our screens.
She was just like a girl called (shall we say) Rachael, who as a child we knew as "Boggard", a cruel playground taunt which spread like fire through our primary school. So widespread was the legend that the children developed their own Boggard variation on the game 'It!', where one naughty boy would itch himself, tap another on the shoulder and declare that he'd passed on "Boggard's fleas". To my shame, even I was guilty of passing them on from time to time (albeit because I actually did think I'd been given fleas, and wanted to get rid of them in the manner I'd been taught best).
Could this be her, all these years later, in another part of town cutting hair for a living? I concluded not. She was probably too old to be Boggard. And too tall. Yes, she was far too tall...
Moments passed, and the hairdresser was embarking on tales of adolescence, when she was interrupted by a colleague making tea.
"Fancy a brew, Rachael?", she asked.
Oh God. It was Boggard, innocent victim of childhood teasing, now a grown woman and taller than I, and... yes, she was brandishing scissors.
I went pale to the point where I was offered tea. I declined, but asked was there any way we might be able to speed up the hair cutting process a little? Mercifully, there was, and the mirror was held up just moments before the topic of primary school was due to be broached.
Judging by my resulting haircut, she probably didn't recognise me. After all, there's very little that's puppy-like about me these days. But I did feel a terrible guilt about what had happened to her at school, and although my part in things had been minimal (as a bit of a fatty, I was more often a fellow victim of gentle playground teasing), I knew the past had come back to make me blush. She'd mentioned she was a bit short of money, so I tipped generously. The very least I could do.
The haircut's taken years off me. I rather like it. The only problem is, as with any haircut, I'll be itching for days.
So, where's Osama bin Laden then? My Iranian friend reckons he has an answer. We'll call him Keith, which is manifestly not his real name, because he's extraordinarily paranoid and reckons the Iranian secret services will bump him off any day now.
Keith insists it's a dead cert that Osama bin Laden is in Iran - or at least, was until recently. It's a theory I'm willing to entertain as highly plausible, although Keith has so little evidence that I'm not about to worry I'm missing the story that could make my career (cue egg on face when all this proves true).
Here's Keith's reasons for believing Osama to have been in Iran:
"I went to Mashad - it's a huge city close to the border with Afghanistan, and there's this posh hotel a bit out of the city centre. It was the most expensive hotel in Mashad, called the Qasr, which means 'castle'.
"We drove past it and my uncle told me to look at it. The hotel is meant to be closed for refurbishment but that's odd, because it's massive. You wouldn't close the whole thing down for refurbishment, and apparently it had been closed for ages.
"I couldn't see any sign of refurbishment - like scaffolding, builders etc - but the place was completely and utterly surrounded by soldiers and tanks. That's weird, because the place is very quiet and out of the way.
"Another uncle of mine said he was dispatched as part of a security team, taking various politicians to a secret location in Iran using an army helicopter.
"He tells me Jack Straw and some US politicians were there, and that it was all being kept very hush-hush."
Keith went on to tell me Straw and the US politicians had been negotiating for Bin Laden's release from Iranian custody to a neutral country. ("Hello, Switzerland speaking? ... Oh for God's sake, have you any idea the trouble we got into last time?")
Now I'm not so sure about the part involving Jack Straw. In fact, I reckon this is symptomatic of all the problems engulfing speculation as to Osama's whereabouts. Yes, the above information is consistent with Osama hiding out there, and yes, other articles freely available online suggest the same thing, but where's the evidence? I've just had to fend off accusations from the very same Keith that the BBC are wilfully suppressing this sort of information, But, with the greatest will in the world, how is anyone supposed to report that?
There's absolutely no evidence for the whereabouts of this man. If you know otherwise, I'd love to hear from you.
I'll be missing the live television extravaganza that is Children In Need tonight. From your point of view that's probably a good thing or else I might have ended up live-blogging it, which would only compound your misery if you're no fan of such things.
It feels like a decade since I actually last watched the main Children In Need event, and not even Terry Wogan's bubbling pecs will tempt me back into the house tonight, but good luck to all - I'll still be making a donation.
Of course, for some people Children In Need has already taken up hours of their time. On that note congratulations to Dayorama's very own Mr Sheppard, who formed one half of a team broadcasting right the way through last night to raise money. I assume he made it to the end! I certainly didn't and I imagine he's still sleeping it off, so we'll have to wait for him to tell the full story.
Last year Children In Need raised in excess of £33,000,000, which is a fantastic amount. If this year's total is similar, it stands to be beaten four times over by this week's EuroMillions jackpot, running at £120,000,000 according to all their advertising.
I can tell you right now that if I win that, I'll donate half of it to Children In Need immediately. That's how confident I am that I won't, although I've lobbed a never-to-be-seen-again £6 at four EuroMillions attempts. So, what could I do with £120m?
Renew Dayorama for the next two million years
Pay for a third of the BBC's relocation to Manchester
Purchase roughly half the Chelsea squad
Buy an Airbus A380 superjumbo
Buy a fleet of three hundred Pagani Zondas, and maybe give Amy J the use of one
In these environmentally friendly times, replace the Pagani Zondas with a fleet of six hundred bendy buses, or, alternatively, fund the operation of 60 London bus routes for a year
Or how about the grand combo: renew Dayorama for the next 50 years (£3,000), waive my BBC salary for the rest of my lifetime (let's say £1m), buy Shaun Wright-Phillips back for Man City off Chelsea (£24m), buy a Learjet (£5m), three Pagani Zondas (Amy J will crash two of them, £1.1m), subsidise one London bus route with ten bendy buses I procure (£4m), and throw in a country house with 100 acres, football pitch and swimming pool (£3m).
All that and I've only spent a third of the prize money. Sod it, Pudsey can have the rest.
In the past, I've often gently scoffed at people who lay claim to that near-oxymoronic status, "working at home". It's a little like those students who write into radio programmes and claim to be battling with a dissertation, or intensely revising for an exam (I did that throughout my GCSEs, A-Levels and degree courses, so I know it's a lie). Really, they're listening to the radio.
But in my case, over the next 23 days, I will be working at home. More precisely, I'll be working my way through this:
This is the home-study course which prepares you to earn a Certificate of Professional Competence in National Passenger Transport, or Passenger CPC as we budding experts are allowed to call it. It's a qualification which the transport manager of every bus and coach firm in the country must have to his or her name, and since we aspire to begin running our own bus company in the new year, I too must have it.
It's surprisingly comprehensive. Roughly equivalent to an A-level in its difficulty, it covers everything from the rudiments of running a business, to the very specific laws affecting bus and coach operation. I'll be required to answer 70 short questions, and 8 extended response questions on a case study.
When will I be required to do all this? Well, in precisely 23 days from now...
The exam, a full-day affair, takes place only three times a year, and if we miss the next one, we can wave goodbye to our hopes of being up and running much before July 2007. So with great haste, I journeyed to Wembley to pick up my CPC pack from instructor Henry, who thinks it may be just about possible to meet the December 8th deadline.
It's been over two years since I last crammed, and then it was done alongside running a student radio station and working at two BBC local radio stations in the evenings and at weekends. Today, I fear I may have to combine the two once more, and since time is of the essence, I may even end up taking the books into the studio.
Let's see if it really is possible to listen to the radio and study at the same time...
Having attended a (very useful) training day run by one of BBC News Online's sub-editors yesterday, here's an error I imagine he'll be wanting to correct.
This man could turn one of my dreams into reality.
Here's what I wrote back in late April 2004:
I have been doing some thinking. And I have concluded that the world's ills will be solved by a single invention:
The ability to beam power.
What this means (well, it should be fairly self-explanatory, but Amy reads this so it needs expanding upon) is that just as we beam radio signals, visual signals, light signals etc, so we should eventually work out how to transmit power without the use of wires.
Click the link above and you'll find I proceeded to go a bit mad with this idea and envisage a future where we all kill each other.
But the concept of being able to somehow wirelessly transmit power is extremely exciting, even if I'm hardly the first person to have thought of it - some bloke called Tesla got there before me. It's strange that, for a technology that would transform our lives, wireless power has barely been mentioned... until now.
US researchers have outlined a relatively simple system that could deliver power to devices such as laptop computers or MP3 players wirelessly.
The concept exploits century-old physics and could work over distances of many metres, the researchers said.
It's Prof Marin Soljacic, whose portrait sits at the top of this article, leading these advances in wireless power. The big plan he and his team of researchers have is to use resonance - the concept whereby something vibrates at a certain frequency. Apparently if you try this with electromagnetic waves, you get wireless power.
At least that's the theory (and I imagine the theory is a little more complex than that, but that's the basic premise). The team have only tested this in computer-based simulations, but according to the article these models 'suggest it will work'.
It's a bit grainy and certainly not broadcast quality, but it's a home video from the very early 1990s which has been freeze-framed then snapped on a mobile phone camera, so we may be asking a bit much. But I hope you get the general idea. It's a kids' football match at a birthday party, and a penalty is just about to be taken.
Now, can you recognise the protagonists?
There's plenty more where that came from. Maybe next time I'll find a way to convert the entire video (including the penalty - do you reckon OJ scored it past me, or not?) into a form suitable for posting online. This is a veritable treasure trove, I tell you...
The map is a satellite view of Long Ashton, near Bristol.
purple shows the route I took in my car;
blue shows the route I took down along Providence Lane;
the gold dotted line shows the A road I could perfectly well have carried on going down.
Right, now let's explain what Providence Lane is and why I ended up going up, and down, and up, and down, and up, and down it.
Trying to get back down to the M5 from Bristol after a training day, I was following my sat nav, which is extraordinarily reliable. Whenever it doesn't work properly, it's because I've messed up. And so it proved in this instance: it wanted me to turn left, I couldn't get into the lane to make that turn, so I had to carry on into the village of Long Ashton.
The sat nav spent about a mile insisting I turn around, but I couldn't fnd a suitable spot to do so. Eventually it gave up and said, well, why don't we just go down Providence Lane. That'll get us back on the right track.
The moment I turned right into - or rather, up - Providence Lane, I knew we were in for some trouble. It's called Providence Lane for a reason, in that you need divine providence to somehow make your way along it unscathed.
Initially we were met with such a steep gradient that we almost rolled straight back down it even in second gear. As the Dodge slowly struggled up the incline, Radio 2 saw fit to strike up with the James Bond theme tune. This was to prove a fitting accompaniment for the next five minutes.
I strongly urge that you go along Providence Lane once in your life, simply to experience what it's like driving down a road expecting to get killed. It's like having your own pocket Basra just outside Bristol. For the truly authentic Providence Lane experience, do it in the dark and the rain like me.
Providence Lane just becomes more terrifying with every hairpin bend. It starts as a normal road on a steep incline but that easy section is complicated by cars parked on all sides, reducing the road to a single thoroughfare but seducing drivers into thinking you can do a fair speed down it. Ten seconds later you're forced into the most almighty test of the brakes you could imagine as a 4x4 swings round the bend, lights on beam, into your face.
Get past the tarmac stage and we're into proper farmland. Click here to take a closer look at the satellite route and you'll see features I had no idea were there as I tried to keep myself alive: a golf course, football pitches, a quarry (for God's sake!), another golf course, and so it continues.
At the end of Providence Lane you need to leapfrog a B road down which cars are rattling at breakneck speed, and that'll take you onto Longwood Lane. At the end of Longwood Lane is a second B road, at which junction the cars get a second chance at you - hurl yourself blindly across that and you're on Weir Lane, then Manor Road, which emerges a mile or so later onto the A road of our choice at Abbots Leigh. By this stage we are single-track all the way through dark, damp, dense foliage.
Do remember, however, not to check your route when you get home. Otherwise - and at this point I refer you to the dotted gold line - you will realise you could just have stayed on the A road you were on to start with, gone half a mile further down it, and ended up in the same place. But where's your sense of adventure?
Everybody's in bed here in Somerset, on the first night of my five-day escape from the world of work (although true to form, I've managed to crowbar a BBC training day into it so as to avoid withdrawal symptoms). Nothing is stirring, not even a mouse (I'm using a touchpad).
So when my mobile phone buzzed in the other corner of the room, I let it go, since I can never keep my voice down and I'd only wake the entire street answering it. But five minutes later it did its trademark ultra-long voicemail buzz, so I answered it and waited for the message.
Knock me down with a feather, but long-time Dayorama reader Amy J has somehow teamed up with short-time Dayorama contributor David to record a voice message! In the extraordinarily funny sequence that followed they left me with no idea how this had been arranged, but made it abundantly clear both were decidedly tipsy.
Listening again it takes the pair 20 seconds to get past "hello", then another 20 describing how scared I might be. Then we have David on a pet topic - pubs - which Amy interprets as secret BBC code, and complete confusion descends.
Bless them, they don't seem to understand that I can't answer the phone. They've just tried to ring back and left a second message calling me a coward. And to think, as my mother would say, "that David says you drink a lot when he's on air". (She's threatening to boycott the show if he continues to peddle such lies.)
Still, as for the real Dayorama drinkers, it's nice to know they're both enjoying their Monday night out. It's going to be a long week, and I'm hundreds of miles away from either of them...
Surely I've had that subject title before? People are complaining that I haven't posted recently. I've got the day off work today (for not particularly pleasant reasons), but I suppose I have a few moments to post. What is new in my life? I have too many clothes. My Father told me this yesterday. He may well have come to this conclusion since my entire bedroom had become my wardrobe. But, Dads being Dads, he just built me a new one. Well, he sort of discovered a new one. Anyway, the long and short of it (short in my case) is that I now have another wardrobe. I can buy some more clothes now.
I'm getting a cleaner. OJ laughed when I told him this. But there is good reason. OK my flat is a box. But I'm in work, sometimes for 16 or 17 hours a day. Come Saturday morning I don't want to spend my time cleaning. Nor do I want to come home to an un-clean flat. It is always tidy, but it will be rather good not to have to worry about the cleaning part. At least I won't be like my Mother: she always used to clean before the cleaner came. It drove my Father bonkers.
I need to do some ironing. I missed by Sunday evening slot. Do they repeat Songs of Praise?
I'm getting concerned by the number of references to buses on this website. A reader came up to me the ot
Dilawar Khan Wazir is a BBC Urdu reporter based in an area of northern Pakistan running along the Afghan border. 
Newsreading should be warm, intimate and assured. Under no circumstances should you look or sound uncertain on air, which was Samira's problem in my view and it's not one AJE are without. The lady presenting alongside Hamish MacDonald in their Doha studio has an odd way of appearing genuinely petrified with her eyes while reading stories, which does very little for anybody's faith!
AJE produces exclusive footage of Iraqi resistance fighters next, which must be where the channel comes into its own in sourcing that kind of material. I may have missed it but I've never seen anything similar on the likes of the BBC, ITN or Sky, and it was pretty compelling to watch the guerrillas trying to kill our armed forces as they train for the job. Again, it felt like the report had been treated carefully (as it should be!) and the script wasn't afraid to point out that these people are terrorists in many people's eyes.
Amy took on the role of hostess and head chef to prepare a sumptuous dinner gratefully wolfed down by all.
The journey from work to Amy's flat had gone so well that David and I, to our surprise, arrived first. But it's safe to say the journey back didn't quite go to plan. We got back to Paddington for 11:55pm, only to discover that the next Reading train didn't leave 'til the ungodly hour of 1am.
Refusing to believe this we scurried round the concourse, establishing that since 9pm all the fast services to Reading had been replaced by buses, but all these buses had long since departed. So we were left to fend for ourselves with the few hundred remaning poor ingrates.
Some meticulous, almost Machiavellian planning (primarily to keep us occupied) saw us grab seats on the train in the inevitable melee when it eventually turned up, but the train proceeded to take half an hour longer than had been billed, finally arriving at almost 2.30am. 
