It was fitting that, as a I drove in the rain to work this morning, the voice on the radio was Humphrey Lyttelton.

So, thanks again for the music and for making me laugh so loud that the bloke parking behind me had to do a double take.

You kept me company one last time until the rain stopped (I can never get this right and I’m close to always wearing a coat for the trudge to the office) and reminded me that no matter how confused and bad things seemed Mrs Trellis’s day was often worse than mine.

If you missed the tribute it’s available online here and there is a tribute from the Clue team this Sunday on Radio 4.

Posted by Mark at 10:09 PM | Permalink

Have you got a hobby ? Do you need to carry a piece of paper with your human and civil rights documented on it just in case you get arrested or assaulted by a security guard ?

That’s what more and more photographers (both amateur and professional) are having to do. I’m planning to take my camera into London this weekend and for the first time I will have The UK Photographers Rights Guide with me.

Think that’s paranoid ? Well have a read of what happened to Curly recently :

Sex pictures shock! « Curly’€™s Corner Shop, the blog!

“€œI’€™m sorry sir, this is obviously a terrible misunderstanding, but I suppose you realise that we get more and more of these calls every week these days. I was looking at a bloke‒s camera recently, and I can tell you the pictures weren’€™t the sort that you have taken

What I cannot understand is, you said someone in The Sundial rang 999 and reported me, I haven’t been anywhere near The Sundial, I haven’t been anywhere near the park, you said I was tracked by the CCTV cameras, so you should have known that I’d been in the fairground!

So sorry sir, we have to follow these calls, and may I thank you for being so co-operative. Have a good day sir”

Then check out this video where six security guards and a policemen were usefully engaged stopping a photographer in a public street.

Sadly, this sort of thing is becoming more and more common. Photography is not a crime, the vast number of photographers are law abiding individuals.

If you feel strongly about this issue please find out the name of your MP and write to them.

After all we all have cameras and if this continues we are all a potential threat.

Posted by Mark at 8:23 PM | Permalink

“More squash ?”, I ask K.

Day one hasn’t been easy. Aside from all the fun of finding the right person at work to solve a problem and in the process roaming the world from east to west and a few points south of the Equator I think we both need time out.

Luckily we have next week off and just need to get through this week and the new, healthy, low calorie regime.

Posted by Mark at 10:26 PM | Permalink

There’s a really interesting piece over in today’s New York Times comparing the successful photography on Flickr with the fine art photography of past years.

Virginia Heffernan - The Medium - Television - Internet Video - Media - Flickr - Photography - New York Times

“A photography blogger who posts under the name Thomas Hawk is a Flickr regular, and he told me in an e-mail conversation that there is not a single Flickr style. But he conceded that intense postproduction processing is necessary for popularity on the site.”

Perhaps that’s where I’m going wrong, not enough time spent in Photoshop…

Posted by Mark at 7:55 PM | Permalink

After a warm, sunny day by the sea at Sandbanks all we needed this evening was the sound of the cicadaes to bring back even more memories of Cuba.

Tonight we really were in the presence of musical royalty. On bass Orlando “Cachaito” López whose Uncle Israel “Cachao” López invented mambo music. At 75 years young Cachaito is still touring and is the only musician to have played on every track on every album in the World Circuit Buena Vista Social Club series of CDs. He was featured in the Wim Wenders documentary Buena Vista Social Club and has been a constant member of the late Rubén González’s, and Ibrahim Ferrer’s world-wide touring groups.

Manuel “Guajiro” Mirabal (another spritely 75 year old) featured on trumpet playing just as well as he did when he started his first residency with the Riverside Orchestra at the renowned Tropicana Club in 1960. He is a senior member of both the National Revolutionary Militias ceremonial band and the General Staff band of the Cuban army and has played at many welcome ceremonies for numerous heads of state, gracing the tarmac of Havanas airport with ear-splitting fanfares.

Manuel Galbán, Cuban pianist, organist, and guitarist - the founder of the Havana doo-wop quartet Los Zafiros - featured on guitar with Amadito Valdés playing percussion while Jesus “Aguaje” Ramos (one the babies of the group at a mere 57) played the trombone and lead the band. Barbarito Torres played the laud, a Cuban instrument which is a distant cousin of the lute.

So many of the great names of the Buena Vista Social Club have now sadly passed away but if tonight is anything to go by Cuban music is in safe hands.

If you love and enjoy this music please help to support it by contributing to the Music Fund For Cuba, By doing this not only will you help support young musicians in Cuba but also keep the name of Kirsty MacColl, who first started the fund, alive.

“Culture is an indispensable component of identity and quality of life, because it makes people grow”
Abel Prieto, Cuban Minister for Culture, 2003

Posted by Mark at 11:17 PM | Permalink

It’s been a sad year for jazz in Britain.

First the loss of George Melly, then the closure of the DAB radio station The Jazz and now the death of Humphrey Littleton.

For almost as long as I can remember there’s been a Humph. In the 1970’s, sitting at the kitchen table, it was his voice on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, a programme he chaired until his death. Much like Kenneth Horne on Round the Horne he was the school master straight man at the centre of comic madness evolving around him as he grew into the best of grumpy old men. He missed the last live performance a few days ago but sent a recorded message. “I can’t be with you tonight as I am in hospital. I wish I’d thought of this before”.

A few years later Humph was with me as I drove in my first car to gigs on a Monday night. By then I’d given up the violin as a bad lot and his programme The Best of Jazz was a companion and a guide to the new world of jazz. Sadly he gave up the show recently frustrated by the non-jazz trails that he was later forced to make room for every week in the broadcast.

I guess the world can be divided into two. Those who knew Humph as the guardian of Samantha on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, “Samantha does a few chores for an elderly gentleman who lives nearby. She shows him how to use the washing machine and then prunes his fruit trees. Later he’ll hang out his pyjamas as he watches her beaver away up the ladder”, and those he knew him as the jazz musician.

Luckily I knew of both and met and worked with some of his alumni of musicians. My time with people like Bruce Turner and Malcolm Everson were full of tales about Humph. He protected his private life by changing his phone number if someone discovered it and had his house built in the shape of a square with the windows facing in but his love of his music and loyalty to those he saw potential in helped nurture and develop many careers ranging from Helen Shapiro to Stacey Kent. In 2001 he even played with Radiohead, appearing on their track Life In A Glasshouse and performing live with them at Glastonbury.

I guess that sums up a lot about jazz in this country. Despite all the adversity it somehow survives. It appears when you least expect it and in the oddest places. From Humph’s Bad Penny Blues (the only jazz track to make it into the UK singles chart) to Radiohead through to his radio work the very essence of the man was fun and music.

As it currently says on his website :

“As we journey through life, discarding baggage along the way, we should keep an iron grip, to the very end, on the capacity for silliness. It preserves the soul from dessication.

Humphrey Richard Adeane Lyttelton, trumpeter, clarinettist, bandleader, broadcaster, writer, journalist and calligrapher born May 23 1921; died April 25 2008

Posted by Mark at 8:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The plan had been to go into town for a quiet drink.

Walking back we went past the restaurant and waved at the owner.

One thing led to another and we find ourselves sitting down with some wine and pizza ….

Posted by Mark at 10:02 PM | Permalink

Me : “What did you have for lunch today ?”

K : “We went out to the pub, but I was good and only had a chicken sandwich”.

Me : “Well that’s low calorie”.

K : “What did you have that needed the frying pan ?”

Me : “Errm toast with black pudding and a fried egg, but I was practicing making fried eggs”.

Something tells me this won’t be easy…

Posted by Mark at 10:17 PM | Permalink

“If money go before, all ways do lie open.”
The Merry Wives of Windsor, act 2, sc. 2, l. 168-70

Sadly no money went before.

Happy St. George’s Day. If you fancy a holiday on this day in the future sign the petition here.

Posted by Mark at 11:18 PM | Permalink

I have given in to Microsoft.

Since I took this new role I simply have too many things to track on a day by day (and often hour by hour) basis to process them all on paper in a Moleskin with a pen. It’s taken the fun out of sitting with a notebook, thinking about what needs doing and carefully writing it down. The pages I was using for work are a scrawl of crossings out, annotations and colours.

Now I just have the persistent ping of the alert box and a long list of red, angry alerts.

Posted by Mark at 10:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It’s not every day a man offers you the services of a six foot, white Pegasus.

Then again it’s not every day you get to hear if someone passed their interview at the London College of Fashion. Tonight we were at K’s Aunt’s to meet with family from Australia and with her Uncle Richard who lives closer by and is the proud owner of Pegasus.

For K it’s a trip back fourteen years to meet the Uncle who used to wait up for her to come back from her job at the pub to sit up with her with a cup of tea and a cigarette. All these years later there’s one less smoker but it’s clear from the smiles and laughter that the years haven’t broken that bond.

For Sophie today was the end of long journey from personal statement to application, via the creation of a portfolio and one stressful interview. Now it’s down to the London College of Fashion and their selection process. Her mind’s now on a week in New York and around the kitchen table we all swap favourite restaurants and the best time to see New York from the Empire State Building and just how long it will take to get through Terminal Five.

Of course the easiest way to get there is by Pegasus…

Posted by Mark at 11:24 PM | Permalink

I can’t remember the last time I was at home on a Sunday, let alone home and ironing but after the plans to spend a day in London, visit a gallery, have lunch out and do a little shopping had to be abandoned the only thing left was chores at home….

Posted by Mark at 8:01 PM | Permalink

The problem with visiting a place like Windsor Castle is the number of questions you come away with and the overall sense that you should have paid a lot more attention at school to history.

Just who is the Duke of Albany and why did he get buried in that impressive chapel ?

If Henry VIII is here where is Elizabeth I buried ?

What would this country be like if Charlotte Augusta, another tragic Princess of Wales, had lived, if we never had a Queen Victoria and the Victorian era never existed.

Posted by Mark at 7:25 PM | Permalink

“I should ask you to put on hard hats”, Enzo said with a wink as he moved the chain across the foot of the stairs.

We’ve had a lot of opportunity to sit and study the Caffe Piccolo recently. After the months behind the builders hoardings it emerged with a clean, uncluttered interior and a cheerful, attentive staff.

There is an understanding that a successful restaurant should have a sense of theatre, be well managed and efficient and the owners of Caffe Piccolo do just that.

Tonight we met the owner Ali and his manager Enzo and found ourselves upstairs admiring the finishing touches to their new wine bar. It looks like it will be as well finished, and as popular, as the restaurant downstairs.

“We had an old couple in here the other day with a picture of this place when it was a snooker club”, said Enzo, getting rather too close to the unprotected stairwell for my liking. I can vaguely recall my Father saying he used to drink here in his youth and I wonder what the next floor up looks like. “I’m going to have an office up there”, Enzo tells me as we walk back downstairs.

“You want some Limoncello ?”, he asks as we settle into the large leather sofa.

“You do fresh sandwiches at lunchtime, don’t you?”, I ask wondering if Enzo will have WiFi.

Posted by Mark at 11:48 PM | Permalink

“We should do something to celebrate St George’s day, we don’t make enough of our culture”, I said to K as we walked down to Martin’s.

Like all the best plans the whole event was very last minute and a great opportunity to catch up. Things have moved on since the last time Fhai was away. Gone are the “tray specials” which Martin used to cook and he now has broadband (but still no sign of email from him).

Today instead he fed us with Shepard’s Pie, with a Union Flag drawn in the topping with a fork. St George would have been proud.

Posted by Mark at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A collection of news about the Nation’s favourite store :

BBC NEWS | Business | Tesco sees profit rise to £2.8bn

Tesco has reported an 11.8% rise in underlying annual profits for 2007 to £2.846bn, meeting analysts’ forecasts.

Group sales at the UK’s largest retailer rose to £51.8bn, up 11%

Tesco shares rose 7.29%, or 28.50 pence, to 419.50p at close of trade.

Nothing wrong with a little profit is there ?

BBC NEWS | England | Merseyside | Gran in Tesco boss planning war

A grandmother from Merseyside has applied for planning permission to demolish the home of Tesco chief executive Sir Terry Leahy.

Dot Reid is retaliating against plans to bulldoze her home and 71 others in Kirkby, to make way for Everton’s new stadium and a Tesco supermarket.

But we all need progress and we can’t build this Tesco without the space. Someone has to move it’s people houses or another profit developing shop friendly local grocer.

Tesco stocks up on inside knowledge of shoppers’ lives | Business | The Guardian

Tesco is quietly building a profile of you, along with every individual in the country - a map of personality, travel habits, shopping preferences and even how charitable and eco-friendly you are. A subsidiary of the supermarket chain has set up a database, called Crucible, that is collating detailed information on every household in the UK, whether they choose to shop at the retailer or not.

The company refuses to reveal the information it holds, yet Tesco is selling access to this database to other big consumer groups, such as Sky, Orange and Gillette. “It contains details of every consumer in the UK at their home address across a range of demographic, socio-economic and lifestyle characteristics,” says the marketing blurb of dunnhumby, the Tesco subsidiary in question. It has “added intelligent profiling and targeting” to its data through a software system called Zodiac. This profiling can rank your enthusiasm for promotions, your brand loyalty, whether you are a “creature of habit” and when you prefer to shop. As the blurb puts it: “The list is endless if you know what you are looking for.”

But as far as Crucible is concerned, the company admits it has “put great effort into designing our services” so information is classed in a way that circumvents disclosure provisions in the Data Protection Act. Clues about the content of dunnhumby’s database have appeared in the company’s marketing literature. Crucible, it says, is a “massive pool” of consumer data. “In the perfect world, we would know everything we need to know about consumers. We would have a complete picture: attitudes, behaviour, lifestyle. In reality, we never know as much as we would like.” But Crucible, it suggests, has got much further than rival systems by pooling data from several sources and then using the vast Clubcard data pool to profile customers.

Together, Crucible and Zodiac can generate a map of how an individual thinks, works and, more importantly, shops. The map classifies consumers across 10 categories: wealth, promotions, travel, charities, green, time poor, credit, living style, creature of habit and adventurous.

Surely that’s not bad? Doesn’t that mean that we all get the best product at the best price? But how can food be any “cheaper” when it’s produced mainly in the Third World by farmers already on the breadline?

Posted by Mark at 10:33 PM | Permalink

Press Gazette - Photographers lobby Parliament over police curbs

Labour MP Austin Mitchell is planning to take a delegation of photographers to the Home Office to protest about the growing number of cases in which police officers and others try to stop professional and amateur photographers taking pictures in public places.

Mitchell, MP for Grimsby, has already tabled an Early Day Motion at the Commons which has been signed by 131 MPs, giving it wide cross-party support.
Mitchell said he tabled the motion because of the increasing number of occasions in which police and others had tried to stop people taking pictures in public places.

“People have complained about photographers being stopped from taking pictures by police, PCSOs, wardens and by various officious people,” he said.

“People have a right to take photographs and to start interfering with that is crazy. It seems crazy when the streets are festooned with closed-circuit television cameras that the public should be stopped from using cameras.

“The proliferation of digital cameras and mobile phones with cameras means that everybody carries a camera these days.”

Just remember today it’s a guy with a large Nikon camera, tomorrow it could be you with your camera phone who gets arrested, questioned or cautioned.

Posted by Mark at 5:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I’ve been rushing today, probably faster than I should have been, so an understanding of light, photons, reflection and transmission may just explain where I went wrong.

Thanks to Florida State University we can now enjoy the late, great Richard Feynman explaining it all with four videos of one of his lectures available here.

Feynman is an amazing character. He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb and was a member of the team that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. He pioneered the field of quantum computing and introduced the concept of nanotechnology. All that and an enthusiastic bongo player.

Posted by Mark at 10:14 PM | Permalink

Few people; home cooked Sunday roast beef; treacle pudding and custard.

I may be cured.

Posted by Mark at 8:37 PM | Permalink

“Health is not valued till sickness comes.”
Thomas Fuller

All I seem to have done today is sleep and discover the medicinal benefits of Marks and Spencer’s crisps.

Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Posted by Mark at 5:31 PM | Permalink

So I finally gave up and called the duty doctor today.

Rather than heading into London for a drink with a couple of good mates I’m looking for the emergency chemist armed with a prescription and a small plastic pot.

Catch you all later, after some painkillers.

Posted by Mark at 6:22 PM | Permalink

I’ve decided it’s time to upgrade.

Movable Type 4 has been out a while now and seems pretty stable it also supports a few features I’d like offer here such as iPhone support, the ability to subscribe to follow up comments on postings, threaded comment responses etc. Oh, and it’s something vaguely technical and geeky to do.

The other reason is that increasingly the content for this blog is being pulled from other sites across the Net. I now use Flickr for pictures (and perhaps video), Google Reader for things I find in other RSS feeds, Twitter to update Facebook and for microblogging and Friendfeed as a means of pulling it all together. Now I need a better solution to present and syndicate that content on my blog.

But, at the moment, that’s a little way off. I need to move some pictures around, remove some old sub-sites and free up a little disk space before I venture into the world of PHP.

Posted by Mark at 10:52 PM | Permalink

I have a guilty secret.

Well, actually more than one but this one has been playing on my mind lately. I do it most Sunday mornings quietly when everyone else is asleep.

I love the videos on Cool Hunting. Short films about odd things with amazing and interesting music from little known composers.

I’ve thought recently about getting my father’s old cine camera out to try. I’ve even found a place that sells the filmstock but the hassle of getting it from analogue to digital to allow me to edit it rules that out.

Today Flickr has announced support for video uploading. Videos are limited to 90 seconds duration and in a rather steam-punkish turn of phrase Flickr call them “long photos” as a means of sharing a slice of life. Can’t wait to try this myself and the idea of being restricted to just over a minute appeals to the Haiku lover in me.

While you wait for me to charge the video camera why not check out the new Video! Video! Video! pool and this amazing post.

Posted by Mark at 10:37 PM | Permalink

Cranberry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cranberries are a source of polyphenol antioxidants, phytochemicals under active research for possible benefits to the cardiovascular system, immune system and as anti-cancer agents.

Cranberry juice contains a chemical component, a high molecular weight non-dializable material (NDM), as noted above, that is able to inhibit and even reverse the formation of plaque by Streptococcus mutan pathogens that cause tooth decay. Cranberry juice components also show efficacy against formation of kidney stones.

Raw cranberries and cranberry juice are abundant food sources of the anthocyanidin flavonoids, cyanidin and peonidin, and are also rich in petunidin. These compounds have an unknown effect on human health (see anthocyanidin and peonidin). Although they are powerful against human cancer cells in vitro, their effect when ingested by humans is unproven, showing poor absorption into human cells and rapid elimination from blood.

Nonetheless, since 2002, there has been an increasing focus on the potential role of cranberry polyphenolic constituents in preventing several types of cancer.

Cranberry tannins have anti-clotting properties and may reduce urinary tract infections and the amount of dental plaque-causing oral bacteria, thus being a prophylaxis for gingivitis.

Despite all this good work I’m rather fed up with them today in all of their forms….

Posted by Mark at 5:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Thanks to those nice people at Londonist I have one of my pictures featured in the review of the Olympic Torch “Procession” this weekend.

The other pictures I took can be found here.

Posted by Mark at 5:26 PM | Permalink

Even if you had wanted to there was little chance of seeing the Olympic Torch today.

Shielded within the blue tracksuited “flame attendants” with a ring of police men who had long before abandoned plans to cycle alongside supported by more police in black protective suits it was virtually impossible to see who was running and just where the flame was.

The crush barrier pens allocated to protesters in Whitehall were soon overflowing. Free Tibet, Burma, Falun Gong and civil rights protesters spread out to the Cenotaph causing the police to call in the lorry to setup additional barriers and more police to watch the banner waving crowds.

Many years ago a poet described Tibet as “a place where snow lions dance” today in the snows of London it’s roar was heard again.

Posted by Mark at 11:22 PM | Permalink

“The last time I was in here a man asked me which side I ‘dressed’”, I said to K as we waited for our first course.

We’ve been looking around for a nice place to eat and drink within walking distance for a while now and perhaps we have found it.

This building used to be the branch of Burtons in which my father had his suits made. I can just remember the red carpets, gold rails and wooden shop fittings of the original store. The impressive sweeping suitcase, where it led I never knew, has gone with all the other trappings many years ago when it became a double glazing showroom.

After years of neglect it is now the Piccolo, an impressive Italian restaurant complete with a deli from which you can buy the ingredients to make your own meals. Very soon upstairs will be a wine bar, perhaps we have found our place at last…

Posted by Mark at 11:28 PM | Permalink

Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind - New York Times

The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others.

So that explains what went wrong today then…

Posted by Mark at 8:56 PM | Permalink

“Was that fish called a Hess ?”, asked K as we stood in the chippy.

I stopped wondering if I could justify a large portion of chips on the basis that today is Fat Wednesday just long enough to consider if battered Hess was Max Mosley’s favourite supper. After all we had birthday cake waiting for us when we returned from the sea chippy.

The reason for all this excess ? K’s Aunt Florrie’s 80th birthday and it’s also Fat Wednesday…

Posted by Mark at 8:07 PM | Permalink

1. A new suit
2. Wonderful evening light
3. Jools Holland Live

Posted by Mark at 10:41 PM | Permalink