Charles on… anything that comes along

(No, that isn’t Judy Murray in the seat in front.)
On Friday I was at Wimbledon, at the centre court, to see the men’s semifinals. Thank you, Electronic Arts, which invited me and a few other journalists (from the Sun, Sky, Comic Relief and a few others) along for a chat and also, of course, to see the two matches: Roger Federer v Tommy Haas, and Andy Murray v Andy Roddick.

It’s been a long time since I was at Wimbledon. I attended every single day between 1985 to 1992 inclusive, and that included the Monday final of the doubles in 1992 when McEnroe won with Michael Stich. (Goes away to check. Yup. Correct. Memory doesn’t fail there.) I’d also attended the second week of every French Open in that period. In 1991 I went and reported on every Grand Slam event - Australian, French Open, Wimbledon, US Open. The 1991 US event was particularly notable for Jimmy Connors’s amazing run to the semifinals, where his strange flat shots befuddled player after player used to topspin madness. “Does Connors have the perfect game to play guys like you?” I asked Paul Haarhuis, whom Connors had beaten. The slightly testy reply: “If he did, everyone would play like that, wouldn’t they?”

But by then I’d got kind of bored with the game: it didn’t seem to have the zing and excitement I’d liked in the early years. So I just gave it up, pretty much cold turkey, and didn’t go back. But that was after six years of seeing every Wimbledon final from the press seats, which are slightly above and behind the Royal Box. A great place to be: saw Pat Cash climb up the roof to celebrate his 1987 win, for example.

Fast-forward to a couple of years ago. I still wasn’t interested in tennis, which seemed to me to reach a nadir beneath words with Pete Sampras’s ascent: he turned it into a serve, volley, go home game. And he had the personality of a plank.

Then I read a piece by Martina Navratilova about some guy called Roger Federer. Specifically, this:

I was lucky enough to play mixed doubles with him in Hong Kong at an exhibition in January this year. When they asked me if I wanted to play doubles with Roger, I asked, “great, how much do I have to pay you?”. It was a real treat because he was simply a joy to be on the court with. Then he asked me to practise with him and I got to hit for 45 minutes just one on one, which was phenomenal because I really got to feel how he hits the ball.

When Martina says things like that, everyone should listen. If she wants to be on the court with someone, that’s someone worth paying a lot of attention to. When I was covering the circuit she and Steffi Graf were the only two women whose press conferences were consistently interesting, because they were. So - why the fuss about Federer, Martina?

When he hits his forehand he can hook it so that he can go cross-court or down the line, tailing away from you because of all the topspin. He can hit a forehand cross-court so that it jumps at your body, which is effective on any surface but particularly on grass because it’s almost as though he’s inducing a bad bounce because he makes the ball jump differently and that’s what his kick-serve does as well.

He’s got spin on everything, he’s got a heavy slice that stays low, he can float the ball so that it stays low and just dies on the court so you have to create all the pace, or he can knife it so that it skids through. On his groundstrokes he can hit it harder or can hit a cross-court ball that looks like it’s going to be no problem until it suddenly takes off in the other direction after it bounces.

Well, that was good enough for me. So I started watching again. And indeed, Federer is the magic that she said.

But until Friday I hadn’t seen that magic live, and the difference between live and on TV is huge, let me tell you.

Centre Court, of course, is its own special place: far more intimate than you realise from the TV. And indeed, when Federer plays, the magic is there. I was sitting at a place diagonally off one corner, quite high up (so you can confirm the line calls easily), which means it’s hard to see whether the court is open for a pass (that you can see far better when you’re directly behind the court).

With Federer playing Tommy Haas (who always sounds to me like he should be the lead singer of a German heavy metal band), the principal difference between them was the noise when Federer really smacked his forehand. It was a whipcrack, and zinged across the court. Haas gave a good account of himself - as with most pro matches, the difference was only in a few points here and there.

But it’s what the TV doesn’t show you that’s interesting. Such as how between points, if he’s receiving serve, Federer will get any ball down his end from the ballgirl/boy and slice it up the court, lazily floating along with the combined langour and intention of a cruise missile.

Then there’s the way Federer looks slightly grumpily at the court where he was when he lost a point, as though it’s somehow the court’s fault he mishit that forehand. Well, it might have been. But it’s more like a habit.

And boy, do the players have habits. I’d forgotten how they love to do the same things over and over again. Wimbledon could be retitled The Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Challenge. Towel between points: Andy Murray is the champion here. He was wiping his face with the towel even though he had two sweatbands on his wrists. (Pity the ballboys and girls who had to run out to him between every point with the towel outstretched. In their future lives, they’ll make great parents for needy children.)

Which brings us to Murray against Roddick. The expectation was that Murray could win this, since he had a 6-2 record against Roddick, and had previously beaten him handily in three sets at Wimbledon a year or two back.

(Let me just point out to those who might wonder if I know anything about this game these two posts from this blog:

First, in Sept 2007:

Plus Murray has the potential to be one of the top three players in the world if he can get past this year’s injury.

Second, July 2005:

Murray is going to be top 50 within a year, top 10 - likely five - the next one. Talent will out. He made Johansson look quite ordinary for a while at Queen’s.

But Roddick, who has lost a stone recently (so I’m told), wasn’t interested in the past. He came out slamming his serve down.

It’s when you’re up against a big server that your mental strength is really tested, because you have to keep waiting for the little chance to pop up that will let you win the point, break point, game, set.

Roddick was thudding the ball in. But here’s the contrast between Federer and Murray. Haas was bombing his serve too: 126mph or so. OK, so Roddick had about another 10mph on that. But Federer was returning the serve on the baseline. Murray was about three yards back from the baseline.

What you love, if you’re a big server, is a lot of space to aim into. It gives you a feeling of freedom: you can relax. You know where the other person’s going to be, so you can pick your spot and aim for it.

That was Murray’s first big mistake. He didn’t vary where he stood. Even if he had sometimes stood on the baseline - even if it was going to be hopeless - that would have made Roddick think a little bit. If he had stood further back sometimes, so he’d have more of a chance to run at the ball, that would have made a difference. As it was, he remained in the same two places - one for first serve, one for second serve - through the match, and that didn’t help him. It didn’t put any doubt in Roddick’s mind. By contrast, in 1991 I saw McEnroe beat Becker at the Australian Open by basically standing on or even inside the baseline to return serve - bang it back and rush the net. An amazing strategy, and it worked.

Murray’s second big mistake: he wasn’t forcing the rallies. Once the points had gone beyond serve-return, Roddick was typically standing about a yard behind the baseline, driving the ball, being aggressive so that he could dictate the points. Murray, by contrast, was a couple of yards behind the baseline - and it seemed to me that quite a few of the attempted passes that landed in the net failed because he hit them just that bit further back: the ball had begun dropping. Sure, that ignores all the great shots he hit, but tennis at this level is a matter of inches (even less: the Hawkeye call in the fourth-set tiebreaker that would have given Murray a mini-break-back was perhaps half a centimetre out), and you can’t afford to give free shots.

So both those mistakes are essentially the same thing: not

The umpire’s warning in the fourth set for “audible obscenity” was daft - Murray had tried a crosscourt backhand pass, missed it wide, and yelled “No, go for the pass!” (He was down my end, my side, facing away from the umpire.) It was ridiculous; Murray was right to complain, but he held it down well. McEnroe of course would have had the referee on the court in an eyeblink. Times past.

Things you don’t see on TV: when Murray is serving, he takes three balls, and always knocks the extra back to the ballboy/girl with his racket between his legs. Always. (Why do pros take three balls? Because they want the two least fluffy ones. They pick the two least fluffy of the three.)

And then we have Murray’s third mistake, which isn’t so much of a mistake as a failing: his second serve, specifically on the ad (15-0) side. Too much of the time it was too slow, and Roddick could wait for it - expecting it on the backhand, where it would come again and again - and whack it down. From the moment that the first serve plonked into the net (because Murray wasn’t tossing the ball quite high enough) Roddick controlled the point. Too infrequently did Murray mix it up with second serves down the centre, or into the body. (Can’t find a page with that sort of analysis anywhere that would show where the serves landed and so on. Let me know in the comments if it exists.)

Oh yeah, and let’s go back to all the mindless rubbish that was written ahead of the game about Roddick’s tactics:

They last clashed in Doha in January, when Murray easily came out on top 6-4 6-2.

The memory of that defeat led [Larry] Stefanki [Roddick’s coach, and a long time ago John McEnroe’s coach) to suggest on Wednesday that Roddick could try less aggressive tactics this time in a bid to upset the Scot’s rhythm.

Complete rubbish, and utter mind games intended to lead Murray and his team astray: Murray may say he doesn’t read the papers, but it’s a bet that someone there does and that they might make a mention to him in some roundabout way. At least Jeff Tarango - a former player - does himself say that’s rubbish advice, but there’s plenty of papers that just repeated it. Perhaps the nationals need to hire a few people who’ve actually played the game to analyse this stuff.

Anyway, all of this leads us to the final, where we get Mr Five Times Already against Mr Been There Twice But No Titles Yet. It’s hard to see any simple way to pick anyone but Federer here. They’ve played many times, and Federer has the winning habit. The last time Roddick won was in March 08, when I think Federer may have been still recovering from glandular fever.

I think Federer will not make the mistakes that Murray did: he will try to break up Roddick’s rhythm, he won’t give him a consistent place to serve at, and his ground game is awesome to behold.

Anyhow, I’ll be tweeting it at @pokpokclap. Follow me if you’d like.

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• A quick thought on Federer winning Wimbledon five times (8 July 2007; score: 77.1%)
• McEnroe vs Borg: the 16th match.... in Tesco? And words on Henman (8 September 2007; score: 72.58%)
• That Wimbledon result in brief (3 July 2005; score: 72.48%)

Yes, it would. Seriously, if you’re doing one of those courses where they’re making you learn shorthand and so on, take some time to learn to code.

OK, you might think that I’m saying this because I’m in technology. Not at all. All sorts of fields of journalism - basically, any where you’re going to have to keep on top of a lot of data that will be updated, regularly or not - will benefit from being able to analyse and dig into that data, and present it in interesting ways.

Let’s be clear that I’m not saying “code” as in “get deep into C++ or Java”, though I guess you could. (After all, it might give you something to fall back on if the journalism doesn’t work out…) I mean it in the sense of having a nodding acquaintance with methods of programming, and perhaps a few languages, so that when something comes along where you’ll need, say, to transform data from one form to another, you can. Or where you need to make your own life easier by automating some process or other.

Me? I taught myself BASIC all those years ago (even wrote a completely useless game in it, though it amused some folk at school). Then a long pause, then was taught Z-80 assembler at university, and then a bit of Cobol in my first job, and then a long pause before I bumped along in HTML (of course), Applescript, SQL, and PHP. I’ve tried to teach myself Cocoa and failed pretty miserably; I’ve not got any C, so it’s all a bit mysterious to me. Perl I’ve read a book of and realised I’d need a lot longer; Javascript ditto. (I can read Javascript as though it was a foreign language.) CSS, which I think is pretty much a coding language (it tells web pages what to do) I can muddle about in. (I tweaked the usual CSS of Wordpress to produce this page.)

And what good has it been? The Applescript I use all the time, to automate all sorts of things - at work, we save hours and hours every week not having to do the text formatting of the Letters and Blogs section, the Ask Jack section, and the Newsbytes section, because I wrote Applescripts that automate the formatting. Similarly, for every story, I run a script before we start subbing that removes double spaces, turns “percent ” into “% ” (programming question: why is the space is there?) and decapitalises “Internet” (Guardian style is “internet”) except at the start of sentences.

And I can hack my own blog, and the Free Our Data blog, because I understand PHP (and CSS a bit - it took me ages figuring out how to make the FOD blog lay out a particular way in a single post; one line of CSS). And I can set up and run a MySQL database on my own machine, and store the links for all the Technology sections I’ve edited, for use to find who has linked to us which then goes into the week’s letters. Which then gets formatted by me…

But there’s a huge hinterland of stuff to be done with data that I haven’t even touched on. I haven’t taken the time to understand the Google Maps API yet; I think it’s probably the most powerful API that a journalist can presently use (which does mean I should take more time; Lord, give me a couple more hours per day, huh?), just because news becomes so much more relevant when it becomes local. Even just being able to visualise - as Fraser Speirs suggested - what it would be like if you had a militant group in the UK sending mortars across the borders as Hamas does in Israel. (I’m not taking sides. I’m showing that you need to understand people.)

My coding? Not that great. Your coding? Could be a lot better. Great coding? You’d be able to knock up something like the Guardian BNP map without a second thought. And the journalism then flows on from that, because you can see so much more clearly. If you’re tracking the data, you’ll be able to see when something changes, when something unusual happens.

None of which is saying you shouldn’t be talking to your sources, and questioning what you’re told, and trying to find other means of finding stuff out from people. But nowadays, computers are a sort of primary source too. You’ve got to learn to interrogate them effectively - and quote them meaningfully - too.

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Clay Shirky is scarily clever. This is a guy who in 1995 found the internet and pretty quickly wrote an article titled “The Price of Information has fallen and it can’t get up“:

The price of information has not only gone into free fall in the last few years, it is still in free fall now, it will continue to fall long before it hits bottom, and when it does whole categories of currently lucrative businesses will be either transfigured unrecognizably or completely wiped out, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

And why?

Remember the law of supply and demand? While there are many economic conditions which defy this old saw, its basic precepts are worth remembering. Prices rise when demand outstrips supply, even if both are falling. Prices fall when supply outstrips demand, even if both are rising. This second state describes the network perfectly, since the Web is growing even faster than the number of new users.

I wish I could have foreseen that in 1995. Or perhaps I just would have gone and hidden under a desk. The implications for content businesses are scary.

And now we come to a more recent interview, with the Columbia Journalism Review - that’s the full text there, so set yourself some time aside.

It touches on many points, such as that “there’s no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure”, and that if you thought the internet has pitched us into a world where nobody reads long-form content, you’re wrong; TV did that, 30 or 40 years ago.

But what also occurred to me that is not said anywhere, ever, yet seems to me to be ineluctably true is that part of the falling-away of long-form content (which includes novels and newspapers and other things that require some time in a quiet place) is down to the way that life is just getting more intense.

Is it just me, or are people generally having to run harder to keep up? I’m intrigued by the question of how many hours people have to work to have the “average” standard of living. I’m sure there’s data that American workers haven’t seen an increase in living standards over the past howevermany years. I wonder if the same exists for Britons, Europeans, people all over the place? Even as living standards rise, the rising tide means that if you fall out of the boat you’ve still got a lot of swimming to do.

Maybe Shirky deals with that. After all, he’s a clever guy.

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• The tin ears of vox pops (10 March 2005; score: 22.05%)

This is really techy, and only for those who find themselves in the same situation as me, frantically searching Google for some nugget. No media or financial info here - ignore and move on.

Here’s what happened. I thought one of my databases needed another table (don’t they all?). So I clicked in CocoaMySQL to add a table. Nuh-uh: /* ERROR 14:48:53 Can't create table '#sql-ca_36' (errno: 13) */

Uh? Tried again in a different program, MySQL Administrator. Same result. Tried while logged into to MySQL as root. No luck. So I spent some time tweaking permissions in the administrator. No luck. Clearly, MySQL couldn’t change the structure of its own tables. That seemed a bit remiss.

Puzzled, I searched around a bit - but got nothing that seemed helpful. Except some people had had bad installs… hmm.. Aha! I’d had a problem a couple of months back where a key system program got corrupted - everything else was fine, so I’d done an Archive and Install, and just dragged over the folders holding MySQL (and its data: it all lives in the folder referenced by /usr/local/mysql (get there by going to the Finder and typing Cmd-Shift-G and then enter /usr/local/) - which is usually itself a symbolic link to the folder holding your version of MySQL.

The Apple guide to installing OSX is intended for server but works perfectly well for your own. The key lines are those about getting the right permissions:

Note that at this point everything is owned by root — meaning the mysql account won’t be able to write to the databases under var/ nor be able to create the mysql UNIX socket in the run/ directory. Since we want to run the MySQL database under the mysql account, and not under the root account, we need to change the group association of /usr/local/mysql to the group mysql, and the ownership of /usr/local/mysql/run and /usr/local/mysql/var to the mysql account, as follows:

sudo chgrp -R mysql /usr/local/mysql
sudo chown -R mysql /usr/local/mysql/run /usr/local/mysql/var

That fixes things. But then you need to apply them to the enclosed items too - see the popup at right. Apply to enclosed items, and you’re done. There. A bit of a pain. But maybe it’ll sort someone out who’s flummoxed.

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OK, I have queried Google and the places it points me to extensively, and now it’s over to you physiotherapists, chiropractors and other readers on the lazyweb. I mean, if I can’t crowdsource a diagnosis for my knee, then what the hell use is the intertubes?

(Everyone else may find this utterly boring, and self-indulgent. Which it is. You’re completely let off reading. It’s an experiment, OK?)

OK, so here is the history. Because I broke my finger (don’t ask) I wasn’t able to play squash - my favoured form of exercise - so I went on a running machine. First time for an hour (no trouble) and then three days later for half an hour (no trouble) and then a week after the first one for another half an hour, on quite a tough program. I don’t recall any knee pain after any of them.

Possible data point: the day after the last run, I played a game with the youngest of the children - who weighs 10kg+ - in which I crossed my legs and he’d bounce on the foot. So that would be putting a lot of strain over the knee attached to the foot. And as it happens that’s the knee that hurts. But that was two weeks ago.

Symptoms: If I crouch down, bending both knees, the affected knee (right) starts to feel as though something is being squashed - like trying to compress a cushion. And it becomes really painful; I can’t crouch all the way. I can’t pull the lower part of the leg back to touch the upper part (which I can on the left): there’s too much tightness across the top of the leg, on the quadriceps as it comes over the knee.

It doesn’t hurt to straighten my leg; doesn’t hurt to twist my lower leg. If I hold my leg up and bend it, I feel tension on the outside of the knee. If I stand and then gradually crouch, I feel a tension from the top of the inside of the knee diagonally down to the bottom of the outside of the knee. And the muscles on the outside of the knee are enlarged; in fact the whole of the front of the knee seems a bit enlarged. The swelling isn’t obvious except in comparison to the OK knee; then it is.

It doesn’t stop me moving around; I’m just aware of it, particularly when I’m going up stairs; don’t notice it going down. But it’s there, almost all the time.

And that’s about it. My guesses are, in order
-ligament strain: because my knee was bent and turned when child3 was bouncing on it, I’ve strained the ligaments on the outside there. It just seems like a long time to heal.
-bursitis. Might explain the apparent swelling, but the precise location of the feeling of stress doesn’t seem to fit the cause.
-tendinitis: inflamed from running? Possible, but I’ve never had it before.

OK, do your worst. What’s wrong? I’ve tried taking ibuprofen, which has little effect.

Oh, and I plan to play squash competitively tomorrow (having tried it out on my own this afternoon; no pain, just a little tightness, which actually eased when I played. Aches afterwards but not much of it.) The clock is ticking!

(Perhaps a new category needed: self-indulgent wibble.)

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From the Wikipedia article for Ohai, which is a place in New Zealand:

(The version on the right is the post-edited version “removing dumb vandalism”. Spoilsports.)

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I’ve been meaning to write this for a couple of weeks - since I got back from holiday, in fact. In France, it rained at night and the sun shone in the day. This seemed a good arrangement. And with no TV and no internet, there was time to read.

I read: Belle du Jour, by .. um.. Belle du Jour; Bringing Nothing to the Party, by Paul Carr; The Other Hand, by Chris Cleave; and The Last Juror, by John Grisham (it came free with a magazine somewhere).

First BDJ. My wife (she’s a novelist) read it first because she wanted to know if it was real. On finishing, she went “hmmm…”. I began reading it. And gave up one-third of the way in.

Why? Because I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that there was a single person writing it. Or if there were, then I felt that person was just lying to me all the way through. (And I didn’t think much of the writing either, tell the truth.)

An instance: at one point, she goes to a big awards dinner with her friend B (or G or X - it’s like the secret service). Yup, her friend B - who she says is “a bouncer at a gay pub”. A what? I didn’t know there was such a job. And if there is, is it really so well-paid that you’ll be getting along to awards dinners - unless it’s Gay Pub Bouncer Of The Year? I’m sorry, but I couldn’t believe at least one-half of that scenario. And when you stop believing that sort of thing, what are you left with? Are these diaries of life, or what? And how strange that none of the clients she dealt with was ever unattractive, rude, smelly. Again, you’re sure there’s no fiction involved here?

I spoke later - on getting back - to some people who I thought might know. (I know, I know, it’s been debated endlessly.) I’m assured by people like Zoe Margolis that BDJ really does exist, and is one person. Well, OK, I’ll have to accept that. But it turns out too that many of the details are obscured; she isn’t Jewish, for example, and there’s much more that she purposely obscured to protect her identity.

Well, OK, fine; conceal yourself. But then don’t be surprised if people giev your book up less than a third of the way through, because it’s not the truth, and it doesn’t work very well as fiction either.

On to Paul Carr’s Bringing Nothing To The Party - subtitled “confessions of a new media whore”. What’s it with my holiday reading and whores?

Anyhow, this is a completely different thing: Carr, who started the Friday Thing, is compellingly honest about his desire to make it rich like (it seemed) all the other internet people in London - Moo, milliondollarhomepage, last.fm, that sort of thing. And so he tried to get an internet startup, er, started.

Where it’s so compelling is in his description of how hard you have to work the spinning wheels to make the Emperor’s new clothes that so many startups wear. They’re not just surviving on fresh air; they’re wearing it too, and trying to sell it to anyone who’ll listen - angel investors, venture capitalists, the press. Seeing the crunch come like a slow-motion car crash is compelling reading. Recommended.

And then we come to The Other Hand, a work of fiction by Chris Cleave. How to describe this? It’s a fantastic novel. Cleave’s first book was Incendiary, about people bombing a train in London. It was published on July 7 2005. Ouch.

That thought gives you some insight into the sort of writer Cleave is: he’s tuned in to the things that are going on underneath the patina of society.

Anyhow, The Other Hand.. is about a British woman who has a finger missing from her left hand, an African beach where she lost it (and not in the sense of “I’m sure I left it here..”), the woman who were there, the British woman’s husband.. and also immigration and asylum policy in the UK, the Home Office spin cycle, women’s magazines, national newspaper opinion columns, and of course four-year-old boys who are certain they are Batman. Clear enough?

The quote to mull over: “As I stood there in my green bikini with my hands over my tits I realise that I had freeloaded myself into annihilation.”

It’s a great book, a fabulous read that despite - or perhaps because - it’s fiction is far more true to life than BDJ. It’s got the graininess of life. Highly recommended.

And finally, John Grisham’s The Last Juror, which turns out to be about a local reporter in a Mississippi paper who buys it out - in the 1970s - when its owner dies. It’s engrossing, quite long (it covers about a decade) and full of realistic touches. I’d expected that it would end with a huge car chase, explosion and last-minute rush into a courtroom. Not at all; the ending is almost an anticlimax. It reads more like Grisham’s paean to the lost times of small newspapers and small towns: when there weren’t Wal-Marts in every town, when the small stores were the lifeblood of the place, when you knew pretty much everyone you needed to.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
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Freeman	Fripp

I was looking at the copy of Exposure, by guitarista Robert Fripp (made wayyy back in the 1970s, but still highly recommended) and started wondering… where have I seen that sort of puggy face before? Something about the line of the nose and mouth… who can it be?

And then it hit me: as seen in The Office, and that sitcom everyone’s forgotten about, and the (really quite good) film of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the separated-at-birth twins: Robert Fripp and Martin Freeman.

Got any other favourite separateds?

Later… listening to the Fripp album, I realise that there’s a clear line that extends from Fripp and his experiments right through to Queens of the Stone Age, my latest favourite band. (As regular readers will have noticed.) They both like music that goes in very non-obvious directions, yet sometimes stray into very tuneful areas that anyone could have written. If you like Fripp’s stuff, there’s a good chance you’ll like the desert rock of QOTSA; and vice-versa. WEll, it works for me.

Laterer… this comparison (musical, between Fripp and Homme) becomes even more true if you listen to Homme’s Desert Sessions, where he gets together with a bunch of people and makes an album in a week. Desert Sessions 9 & 10 sounds very like what Fripp might put together in such a mood.

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• Did you read about the USB vacuum cleaner? (27 July 2004; score: 30.19%)

David Mitchell wrote the second of two terrific sports comment articles for the Guardian on Friday (could be he’s going to do more, certainly hope so). In I want a long rest from a game that never sleeps, he notes that

Despite the fact that no matches are being played, football still dominates the press. And what are they talking about? Transfers. Essentially, “Human Resources”. So-and-so is reported to be meeting what’s-his-name about a new job. AN Other is in talks with thingummy about a move down south. I mean, what’s next? Reports on clubs’ heating bills? In-depth analysis of a damp problem in one of the stands at Anfield? Even for football-lovers, those who don’t find the game dull and alienating, this transfer guff must still be pretty boring. So why is it so avidly read?

Bloody good question. (Though it does beg the question - that is, assume - that it is avidly read. Is it?)

Are other sports so hated and inadequate that their actual matches are considered less interesting than football’s behind-the-scenes admin? Is football really such a “beautiful game”, such an all-consuming passion for everyone except me and a tiny number of other freaks, that the majority cannot bear to be parted from thoughts of it even for a few weeks? If everyone loves it so much, am I being cruel for disparaging it at all, and not accepting its media domination as rightful?

Yeah, well, I wonder this too. But then I saw a picture in the Observer today, which showed a picture of Bill Nighy in front of some giant letters.

The way he was in front of them, the letters seems to spell out “AC NOW”. Hmm, I thought, sort of like AC Milan.. except this would be AC NOW, the great giant media creation with players so famous that they’ve moved beyond being famous for actually playing football. You know, like David Beckham, who - if I’m remembering this right - occasionally turns up for practice sessions with LA Galaxy, though nobody cares if they live, play or vanish off the face of the earth.

Well, why not have that? Why not a football team whose stars are all so famous they never actually play any matches? They’d just be the subject of eternal press conferences about who was going to join them, or leave them, or where their new manager - some celebrity in his/her own right - would appear in endless press calls talking about how their strategy would move forward now.

Of course there’d come a reckoning, when they’d have to play. But that’s OK: for the boss who runs the club, which makes millions from merchandising, finding ways to not get a match played is incidental. Oh dear, the groundskeeper sprayed weedkiller all over the pitch. Dangerous even to play. Oh hell, the lights failed. And so on.

I see it as a TV series - a sort of Trevor’s World of Sport, but in a football milieu. Seriously. Come on, it’s asking to be sent up. Get in touch..

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Quote of the day re golf, courtesy John McEnroe. But what is sport? (18 May 2008; score: 66.19%)
• Just another week in PR-land.. oldest to newest (23 May 2007; score: 55.02%)
• It would be nice if the press release didn't contradict itself within two paragraphs (6 November 2008; score: 54.62%)

Courtesy of Tom Watson, Cabinet Office minister, I was invited on Thursday night to 11 Downing St (I’d been in No.10 before, when Alastair Campbell stalked the earth). The occasion: a reception for “digital entrepreneurs”, though also - it turned out - to give a namecheck to the Free Our Data campaign as an inspiration to said minister, who says he wakes up and thinks “How can I free another dataset?”

Was I impressed? You betcha.

But while we stood listening to the speeches, I noticed (with someone else) that below us, on a patio, there were two people sitting in some chairs, with two bottles of wine and two half-poured glasses on the table in front of them. One of the men was wearing a open-necked light pink shirt, looked vaguely like Simon Cowell (slightly younger) from that distance. The other was.. blimey, it’s Gordon Brown, dressed in dark suit, dark shoes. Is there a prime ministerial uniform, then?

We couldn’t hear a word that was being said - too far away, through a window - but the hand and body language was fascinating. The younger man was a shoveller: hands together on one side, then both move across and push, or come together and push forward.

Brown listened intently. Once or twice he took a note, dragging a piece of paper from a jacket pocket. Once the other guy pulled out a single piece of A4, folded twice, blank on the back, and gestured at it as though it were a short list of things that weren’t quite right. Neither drank from the wine glasses while I was there. Brown sometimes leant forward, sometimes sat back. His body language was listening; then he began talking, and his hand movements were also shovelling, but they seemed like defensive shovelling: the palms turned outwards, as if trying to get something away from him. And then he too did the move-and-shovel routine. Take it from here, put it over there. Shovel, shovel, push and push.

There was something about the tableau that felt fragile. I could have taken a picture with my mobile, but it would have felt intrusive, rude -especially since we’d been asked not to take any pictures inside No.11. (Describing it here is different from a picture, which is just wrestled out of its context; here you have to imagine the scene yourself rather than have it presented.). It was a beautiful summer’s evening, the sun forcing through the trees wet with the heavy showers that had fallen earlier on. And two men discussed.. something, surely important.

It was fascinating to watch; we couldn’t figure out what they might be talking about. Policy? Spin? How to reach voters on some topic? What the effect of oil prices would be? Whether the NHS should impose choice? Who knew? But it was interesting as much as anything because it provided a picture of someone prepared to have a long, detailed talk, listening as well as talking, clearly accepting that he didn’t know everything about the topic. You don’t often see politicians in that unguarded state; only when you get inside the compound, beyond the razor wire, and see them at their ease do you get that insight.

Then they got up and went inside, still not having (in the time I’d watched) touched a drop. Perhaps Gordo prefers a whisky..

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Perhaps if she had called it "The Da Vinci Emporium"? (14 March 2005; score: 57.69%)
• Pop go the comments (27 July 2004; score: 41.74%)
• So what's the tradein value of Trident? One careful owner, never used.. (4 December 2006; score: 41.64%)