Mullagh dump

Tweet When we were little, turf was a major part of our year's cycle. We lived in an estate house in Kells, but unlike most of our neighbours who used oil or coal, we used turf to keep the house warm. Thankfully, this never singled us out for a slagging, because the most bet-down families from Kells apparently used coal.

What it did single us out as, however, was as one of those odd families who travel to the 'bog'. Our father bought a patch in Mullagh bog. Our job, as kids, was mostly to turn over sods so they could dry. If they were solid and rectangular we had to stack them in airy vertical geometric structures so the wind could travel under them and dry them.

We were addicted to wildlife. We were only about nine or ten but we could already tell that the giant bird that flapped slowly and confidently overhead was a raven, and the other one was a lapwing (which made a singular sound that could be heard for miles). A proud weird little feather sprouts from its head - a silhouette rises higher than the crows - a plaintive bog-call descends from airplane heights.

There was a ditch between the two regimented runs of turf. It was deep enough to contain enough water to be a sort of river eco-system. Every July day when we were supposed to apply ourselves purely to the turf, myself and Ciarán could not stop thinking about this ditch with its relatively free flowing water. We had caught Ireland's largest moth, some remarkable dragonflys, practically every exotic butterfly going, and a newt - and we knew this ditch held treasures.

On one of the longest July days our parents made a little fire out of turf so they could boil tea. They had a bunch of mikado biscuits to make the whole thing feel like a picnic (it was; the sun was blazing). The only problem was that myself and Ciarán were vibing hard on the juniour naturalist buzz. We gobbled the mikados and got lost.

We ensconced ourselves in the part of the ditch with the thickest reeds and held a jar, still, in the water. Eventually we caught a fish. A kind of stickleback, we thought, but it was really one of these...

...a rainbow trout. It was tiny, but a real fish, caught in a crap bog in Cavan, so it felt to us like we won the wildlife lottery.

MP3: British Sea Power-Remember Me
MP3: Guided By Voices-Jar of Cardinals

once upon a time in the midlands

Tweet Another watery October evening in an east midlands town. Shadows lengthen and dead-eyed men with trophy dogs stand in weak pools of flourescence thrown from shop windows; blue plastic carrier bags straining at the handles, lumpen with cans. The smell of leaf smoke is carried up the canal, past an old houseboat, and into the town streets where it is smothered by the scent of curry and battered fish.

Children chant from a distant concrete space...

Down by the river, down by the sea,
Johnny broke a bottle and blamed it on me.

An elderly man with an Irish accent talks loudly outside a pub, thick tongued with booze, chatting to his shadow in front of a sign that promises 'all FA cup matches, hot grub, and pub games'. Inside, one or two sullen figures hug the bar nursing their glasses of tepid fermented liquid milked manually, for their discernment, from a low pressure antique tap. One of them listlessly watches the TV, which is tuned to a channel featuring pundits talking about football round-the-clock because match day alone is not enough.

anyone who thinks the man in the moon is sympathetic or sound might do well with thinking again

Soon it will be bonfire night, and small gangs of kids will take to the streets pushing prams and shopping trolleys with limp featureless effigies sitting within. The canal will glow orange in the reflected light of fires. And, briefly, there will be other colours too, ignited by the empty whistle and pop of lone fireworks and their miserable clawing arcs across a regional urban sky, severed from the context of a full display. And somewhere, something will happen. Acrid burning fur. Leering faces around the last embers of a bonfire. A shred of child-sized football shirt caught on a barbed-wire fence. 

The local papers the next day.

MP3: The Clientele-The Violet Hour

MP3: The Clientele-Geometry of Lawns

MP3: Arab Strap-Autumnal

and I need you more than want you/ and I want you for all time

Tweet It's been a lonely few weeks. I basically work alone in an office on the 16th floor of the Attenborough building, lunch alone, then walk home alone to spend the evening alone in a little one-bedroom apartment. My supervisor is away most of the time, and none of the students have returned from summer break yet. I have easily spent a handful of days where I haven't spoken a word to a soul. When that happens, I typically emit a big braying donkey sound as soon as I get in the door from work to puncture the deathly skin of silence forming about my person. I sometimes dance a silly jig too.

I joked on twitter about feeling like the Wichita Lineman and about going to the corner shop for crisps just to interact with another human, but sometimes I have felt that isolated. That old cliché of being alone in the city while surrounded by thousands. Thankfully, I am moving in with some guy in a couple of days. He is a PhD student, so at least we have something in common in that I can tell him how horrifying the viva is, before breaking into a forced laugh and saying 'ah no, it's not that bad...' (while my frozen eyes tell a different story).

I intended to get out of Leicester last weekend to see some of the sights, but got waylaid by 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' (excellent) and Civilisation IV (which I dared to start playing in spite of the associated risk of late nights and lost hours). I'm going to head out this weekend and see some of the midlands countryside. There is an interesting looking folly nearby called 'Old John', which is a tower on a relatively remote hillside with an arch that makes it look like an ale tankard. Morris dancers sometimes dance around it, and I like to think that at night spectral Morris dancers also do - because Morris dancers are spooky as fuck that way. When you google image search 'Old John' there are lots of lovely photos of the seasons in coloured flux around it and, best of all, plenty of shots with the moon shining mystically through the gap in the arch.

it were round the back of 'Old John' last November if I remember right. But folk round here don't want to talk about that anymore. Let bygones be bygones.

MP3: Glenn Campbell-Wichita Lineman

I recently read that Glenn Campbell has Alzheimer's disease which made me very sad. I've worked very closely with people with Down Syndrome who were dying of Alzheimer's and there is just no positive spin you can put on it. It is one of the most dreadful ends of all, for the sufferer, for their families, and even for the staff who work with them. It's something that I think about again and again, and half the reason why The Caretaker tracks I posted last week fascinate me so much. Music is definitely the last consolation for the person with Alzheimer's. 

For example one man, on his death bed, was very frightened and lost, but his family had gathered around and sang his favourite song, 'My Forever Friend' by Charlie Landsborough, as he passed away. I could barely cope with watching this, but managed to hold it together. As the family sang, his fright gave way to a relaxed expression of recognition before he died. The thanks and the peaceful finality that he and his family got to experience was just such sad relief. Maybe because Glen Campbell is a musician, he will find his own solace in music as the world darkens?

Wichita Lineman is my favourite song and I've written about it here before, twice I think. I still listen to the song and consider it a lot. Of late, I've been thinking about how Jimmy Webb's lyrics have the rich ambiguity of written poetry (which is rare enough in songs because the background music tends to add that extra dimension of rhythm and depth. The best song lyrics can read flatly as poems). For example, the 'whine' in the wires could mean either the whine of interference or, more poetically to me, the sound of the wind moving across them and creating a voice-like sound. Who hasn't heard a fence or a telephone line 'sing' that way in high wind? Also, why does he switch from the first to the third person towards the end of each segment and ultimately, the song - 'the Wichita lineman is still on the line'. It widens the frame we see the Lineman in, and makes his fate seem metaphysical. I think the song works on one level as a metaphor for purgatory. The cyclical instrumental coda at the end certainly evokes something never-ending and sad. The lonely soul caught in a heartbroken eternal loop.

WONGAAAA! (advertisements for myself)

Tweet There's a book knocking around at the moment called 'The Filter Bubble' which I haven't read but which, according to the book reviews, has an interesting central premise. This premise is that the internet provides the illusion of a universal archive that can be freely searched, whereas the reality is that the search engines make a lot of algorithmic decisions for you based on personal factors such as your search history, and 'tailor' the information obtained to match your search query accordingly. In other words you are not objectively searching Google (I'm not picking Google arbitrarily, they are at the forefront of this) any more. You are searching a tailored version of Google based on your geographical location, what you chatted about having for lunch on Gmail, that embarrassing medical condition you looked up the night before, and your entirely innocent curiosity about what sort of stuff is in the Al Qaeda handbook. The search engine guys will maintain that this separates the wheat from the chaff and saves the 'searcher' effort. The rest of us (or at least the intelligent ones) say this sounds creepily like a corporate driven push to curtail individual intellectual inquiry in order to sell a few more targeted ads.

advertising was always cynical but warhol realised branding had an evolved aesthetic quality

The reason I'm going on about all of this (yes, there is a reason. The 'heap doesn't go into abstract web-thinking unless there is a practical root) is because of stuff I've noticed on my preferred browser, Google Chrome, since I moved to England. You see, almost every website on which I click has a space for targeted ads, and I guess because it is a Google browser, it is Google who are running the algorithms that generate the ads I see on every site I browse. This means that whether I am on the Irish Times or merely "http://>>>>>>*search* yellow toenail embarrassing  medicine?*" I will see the same ads all over the screen, in the places where the present site allows ads, (now slyly incorporating both BLANK sides of the screen on certain sites I once enjoyed - NME, hipsterrunoff, one accidental click and you are filling out a form about Captain 'cunt' Morgan). 

Anyway, before I moved to England, these ads were mostly about travelling, air fares, or mobile phone packages. Then I landed here, went on Google chat, and made a fatal mistake. I said to a friend or two "I'm waiting to get paid". So Google decided I wanted a Wonga payday loan. 

What's Wonga, you might ask? Wonga is a horrible, horrible, payday loan company that charges over 400% interest to desperate people who need cash. Their ads on TV are as 'targeted' as possible, coming on during programmes that they know their desperate demographic might be viewing. But, you know, there might be the odd dilettante watching TV who sneers at Wonga, or careful housewives/ stay at home dads who tut at their ridiculous interest. Not to mention the fact that their ads can be turned off until the break is over. So maybe TV isn't the optimum means of advertising for Wonga.

What I am confronted with now, is a deeply integrated Wonga ad on many websites I like that also support ads. It is so unremittingly relentless I want to fucking kill it. I pray for another internet ad, any one - to the point that I might start chatting about being king of the universe on gmail chat to see what the tailored web hucksters try to sell me for being king of the universe. 

fackin' make summat aesthetic out of this Warhol

The ad itself is horribly annoying, featuring a CGI granny either on rollerskates or lifting dumbells, with one rollerskate or dumbell representing the number of days until your next paycheck, and the other representing the amount of cash Wonga is willing to generously 'gift' you until that beautiful, beautiful check. She pops up everywhere. Every available square of advertising space. You'll see her rubbery little granny head, and the word 'Wonga' repeating ad infinitum (which I presume is a Pavlovian trigger to cash short Brits as 'wonga' is Brit slang for cash) as you browse the web. 

This shit is not just advertising, it is in fact a sort of relentless bullying. And, moreover, it is based on stuff I casually disclosed in private chat. I mean, if I said in my first England google chat 'oh call me Croesus lads, can't stop wiping my arse on tenners' do you think this Wonga shit would be making my browsing such a misery? No. I'd have ads at the side saying things like 'Hangliding lessons in the peak district', or 'sick of wiping your hole on tenners? try our super absorbent twenty'.

It's the thin edge of an Orwellian wedge.

MP3: The Who-Heinz Baked Beans

That song was to make a funny point. The song below is on the same album, and it is just one of my favourite sixties songs ever. The free gift is 'I Can See for Miles', which beats 'Tomorrow Never Knows' in a way - don't ask me which way, please, it's just a lame psychedelic hierarchy in my head. Get 'em while they're hot. They'll be gone tomorrow.

MP3: The Who-Our Love Was

MP3: The Who-I Can See for Miles

Asleep on the Compost Heap - Ad free since 2007.

Apparat and the Devil's Walk

Tweet This is an interview I did with Apparat for the present print issue of AU magazine. He was probably the chirpiest and most pleasant guy I ever interviewed. His new album, The Devil's Walk, is a big earnest affair full of real heart.

MP3: Apparat-Ash Black Veil

Listen to any one of the tracks on Apparat’s lush new album The Devil’s Walk, and a natural first response might be ‘who are these guys’? You see, the complex, densely arranged, and multi-instrumental music on the record sounds like the work of a post rock band such as Sigur Ros. That it was made by a man who is still better known for wearing the cap he started out with (techno producer and DJ), is testament to Sascha Ring’s irrepressible talent. But not surprising. Ring has refused to stand still over the course of a long career that began with dance-floor oriented techno and since progressed to take in ambient music, collaborative electronic pop, and now, on The Devil’s Walk, a grandly ambitious sounding full-band endeavour that could be one of the year’s biggest crossovers.

skullz r us

“It’s quite an organic sounding record” says Sascha sounding cheery on the phone from his Berlin home. “That definitely comes from playing with a band. Even though you will hear electronic sounds and effects in there, the timing is human and I like that”. Indeed, he seems to have taken to the band experience like a duck to water, joking about touring “rock and roll style on a Nightliner bus”, and being able “to experience this whole different music lifestyle”. Yet the transition from playing solo perched behind a laptop, as he used to, to being the front man of a proper band must have entailed some difficulties? “It was difficult to play live for the first few shows” he says, describing the few gigs he has already played touring the new album in Europe. “It took me quite a few shows to do that transformation from laptop geek to some kind of frontman. I had to realise that there are quite a few eyes on me including the audience and even the band. If I act insecure that’s going to transfer to the guys in the band and to the crowd. It’s not going to be fun”.

It sounds like he is describing one of the classic points of divergence between live dance and rock. Whereas the rock experience requires personality, onstage hi-jinks, presence, and charisma, the DJ’s or producer’s traditional function is more anonymous - it is the cult of the track which counts, and the person selecting the music is in the background, physically situated behind a mixing desk or laptop. Sascha elaborates on a slow realisation he experienced around these differences, “you could say the kind of music I’ve been making for quite a while now is ‘listening’ music, but when I’ve played it live I’ve always compromised in a way. I always ended up remixing it for the live situation, putting in beats that weren’t there, because I played club shows all the time. But with this record I want to do it differently. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy doing it the other way before, but artistically it is just more rewarding to play the music appropriately to a crowd that appreciates it”. And it seems like he’s gotten over the awkwardness of the early shows too. “Yeah, I’m definitely more into it now and it’s getting more fun. I realise that of course playing live is going to be fucking hard for me if I am that introspective dude who doesn’t connect with the crowd. If I play like I enjoy it, then the crowd enjoys it, the band enjoys it, and that’s what makes it easier. This is a lesson I’ve learned”. 

Another big learning experience for Sascha was discovering a hitherto untapped ability to sing. “That first happened when I was working with my friend Ellen [Alien] on our collaboration Orchestra of Bubbles. I was basically forced to do it. Since then I’ve been singing more or less for myself in the studio”. Interestingly, this chance moment was a creative eye-opener for him and it appears that discovering his singing voice has had a significant effect on the increasingly emotive path his music has furrowed since. “I realised that the human voice is more or less the most direct instrument you can play”, he says. “It’s really intuitive and the result is often much closer to a creative idea than it is if you need an interface like your hands or a computer to capture an idea. When I worked on The Devil’s Walk I wanted to change my way of working. I didn’t want to just layer sounds to make a song more intense like I used to do before. I wanted to build the song quite close to the original idea and its emotion. That’s the reason I sing so much on the record; not because I had my story to tell, but because of the emotional qualities of the human voice as an instrument”.

‘Emotion’ – it’s a word that crops up again and again talking to Sascha, and it is as good a descriptor as any for the stirring ebb and flow of The Devil’s Walk. Another good descriptor might be ‘romantic’, in the literary as opposed to the Hollywood sense. Does he consider the music on The Devil’s Walk romantic? “Yes, definitely. It’s funny you should say that, because the title of the album is taken from a poem by Shelley”. Intriguingly however, while he willingly criticizes the state of Berlin techno for other reasons (“too much formula”, “increasingly affected by club owners and money and profit”), he doesn’t see romance or emotion playing a role in that sort of music. “I only did one DJ night this year. But I realised that night that techno works not because of emotion or anything like that. Techno has a function. It is functional music that helps people escape. I mean if you think about it, it is a dark room full of people dancing and fucking strobe lights and repeating music. That is what it is for. And that is beautiful in its way too”.

The location where Apparat recorded The Devil’s Walk was about as far away from a strobe-lit darkened Berlin warehouse as you could get. “We recorded it in Sayulita in Mexico which is a beautiful place, and the studio was near the ocean”, he says; and while he feels that the location did not inspire the songs themselves, “the beautiful weather and location” had a definite effect on how they were recorded. It also influenced the cover art, an ornate ‘day of the dead’ style image of Ring dressed as a Conquistador presiding over a table full of skulls with the Devil’s shadow looming behind him. “That was inspired by the painter Posada”, he says. “When I visit another country, I always try to find out lots about its culture and when I checked out Mexican art I discovered this guy Posada. The guy was quite a social critic, and then I discovered that Shelley poem and found out he was writing about the same sort of thing. The meanings are similar and very relevant today”. The poem and Posada’s art prod and satirise the hypocrisy of the moneyed classes, and it is not surprising that they chime with an East German wary of his adopted home city of Berlin becoming a “techno industry”.

Yet in spite of the album’s earnestness and all the talk of romantic poets and political painters, Sascha Ring remains animated at heart by a party spirit. “I can’t wait to go on the tourbus with this record”, he says, sounding like the polar opposite of every moany rock star ever, “it’s going to feel like a school trip”.

We need to talk about Koze

Tweet DJ Koze-Estrella

The year is buttoning up and walking briskly into the darker months and I think it's at a juncture where I might venture that when it comes to house and techno, DJ Koze's label Pampa will be the one talked about most warmly around the year end log fires. Kozalla is a careful curator, and there is a lovely sense of the label starting to develop a hugely identifiable 'feel' as Kompakt did, even though it has only reached its eighth single release.

The 'feel' of course is pure Koze. Eclectic, perverted, surreal, sometimes romantic (he was closely associated with Kompakt for many years after all), but mostly not-serious. He could be the Vladimir Nabokov of techno. If techno is a language, Koze wants to play with it. He is fun that way. He is also profound, and the two are not unrelated. In fact, Koze finds more profundity through messing around than an army of frowning identikit Omar-S-worshipping formula purists might through a million years of a million soulless productions.

Here are five cool Koze-related things I love.

#5 Pampa 008 Die Vögel - Fratzengulasch

Pampa's most recent single comes with a video which has to be seen to be believed. An up-close panning shot moves slowly over an old German school photograph that teems with scribbles, and faces that pull blink-and-you'll-miss-em shapes to the rhythm. If there are video prizes going in Germany this year, I hope to fuck this is in contention. As for the song itself, well there is no doubting why it appeals to Koze. Rich as butter production, off-kilter tribal beats, drunk bier-keller brass, and a sinister bunch of school children-of-the-damned singing a Germanic choral ditty (which I vaguely presume is their equivalent of the religion songs we sang in primary school). This is exhibit A in why Pampa rocks. Exhibit B coming up.

#4 Robag Wruhme - Thora Vukk

Robag Wruhme - Ende

Last year Pampa got the production of the year with Axel Bowman's Holy Love. This year, they've netted a pretty big fish of an album. Robag Wruhme's expansive, heartsick, home-listening masterpiece, Thora Vukk, is a crossover album that is breaking hearts everywhere. Listen to its beautiful pay-off with Robag playing call-and-response with his kid and quiver at the delicate beauty of it all. Now, on to the man himself (okay his remixes first).

#3 Heiko Voss - I Think About You (DJ Koze remix)

The original version of this track is a Kompakt staple, a gorgeous disco kiss-off to Michael Mayer's Fabric 13 - vocal, glittery, funky, and a million miles away from the first half of Koze's weightless remix. Being a man of many talents, he does the one thing The Field does so well (basing almost an entire track around a highly compressed snippet of one vocal), does it once, then moves on to the next project. The Field meanwhile is on his third album of this craic. No harm in that. I just need a foil for Koze's dexterity.

#2 DJ Koze - Mrs Bojangles

This is the bananas high point of Koze's present style of production. A barely containable tech-house monster that, if it was an entity, would probably be that green flubber stuff in the Robin Williams' film. Sexy flubber, though. For Mrs Bojangles is sexy. It also contains all the hallmarks of another preoccupation of Koze's, gender bending. When he remixes vocal tracks he often auto-tunes voices to switch their genders. It's no surprise then that this is not the 'Bojangles' we are already familiar with from the Sinatra song, and if you listen to the vocals in the track, they pitch shift between one sex and the other fairly regularly. Thick-as-fuck, surreal, demented, gender-bending, tech-house filth that still sounds ahead of its time. G'wan the Koze. The B Side Dr Fuck is well worth a spin too. 

Onwards to the serious one (turns out he can do serious).

#1 DJ Koze - Brutalga Square

Before I get into the nuts and bolts of Brutalga Square, a bit more on Koze - as these five tracks of my own personal taste can only shine a shard of light on his oeuvre. Koze has a background in hip hop, and was also behind the hugely influential Hamburg electro band International Pony. He also won German DJ of the year more times than I've eaten strudel, and has probably done the best remix of your favourite indie band. He's an artist.

OK. Brutalga Square. This 2003 track is an anomaly in Koze's catalogue in that it takes itself very seriously indeed. To me, it psychically prefigures stuff like Efdemin and Pantha Du Prince with those bell/metal sounds that evoke either the sound of industry (perhaps more in this case) or cathedral bells (perhaps more in Du Prince's case; is Efdemin in the middle? maybe), two things of which there are no shortages in Northern Germany*. 

The metallic clanking in Brutalga is tacked to an ominously compelling narrative of rising tension that bears no comparison to any other techno track I know; 'Brutalga' is a very appropriate sounding word. By the time the big drop draws near, it sounds like the rest of the track is pulling itself into a tense grey corner to escape from it. The moment of release/carnage is followed by an intense sandy sound, which always has me imagine ship decks getting scrubbed down or rusty industrial shit getting hauled over the oily shores of Koze's hometown of Hamburg. 

It's an uncompromising masterpiece.

*An aside - I had a dream that I once met Efdemin and we had a chat about bells. Or more specifically, about a really serious looking bell shop I saw in Berlin. He told me that bells are the bomb and took me into the rafters of a church overlooking what seemed like an entire continent at night to poke around with bells. 

Wut you want one more? Oh all right

DJ Koze - All the Time

Tiny Gradations of Loss

Tweet Do you want to really kill the buzz at the next house party you go to? Sure ya do.

Just wait until the party iPod gets to that stoopid bit in the Florence and the Machine song where she's screaming "RAWWLORRRADOGDAYRAAAAAAA" and the kitchen is an orgy of sweaty dickheads hi-fiving, then slyly press play on your cued-up secret weapon - a plangent concept album about Alzheimer's disease.

MP3: The Caretaker-All you are going to want to do is get back there

"Way to kill the buzz Broseph. What is this creepy shit anyway?", says the only person besides you in the kitchen, as tuborg cans spirit silently away, and dust motes fill the air. "It's the Caretaker", you tell him, as the Stoneybatter garden stretches through soft night towards a pier lit by swaying electric bulbs, past hundreds of shadowy figures, smoking soldiers, dancing couples, and the green light at the end of Gatsby's dock.

"The Caretaker is Jack Nichols...no wait, it's the German avant garde composer Leyland Kirby. He made a series of albums where he heavily treats old music samples to evoke memory corrosion and decay. A subject of great mystery and melancholy that fascinates him to the point of, well the point of distraction. You see, the last thing the brain of an elderly person with advanced dementia responds to is said to be music."

"Broseph, what was this music aga...what's his na...."

"The Caretaker is you aged 80 and aged 8 at the same time, here, playing together"

"Where are we?"

"Your back gar...standing still in the nettles with your twin brother, stung knees, holding glass jars, still as sentr..."

"We're catching bees..."

"Yes, be..."

MP3: The Caretaker-A relationship with the sublime

La petit mord

Tweet My favourite genre writer is the horror novelist Ramsey Campbell. The thing I like best about him is the power of his descriptive prose to invoke an uncanny atmosphere. Even in sub-par books (plotwise, characterwise) he has this ability to eke a mental landscape of pure dread out of provincial British life. One of my favourite novels of his contains a passage where the central character slowly becomes aware that all the terraced bungalows they walk or run past during a crucial part of the story replicate themselves in a supernatural fashion - similar wallpaper in one house after the other after the other after the other, like a bad trip. Last Thursday I walked through Leicester at a weird hour and definitely noticed what he was getting at; the ability of shadowy houses to rear threateningly into perspective. Red bricks dull in the dark, suddenly appearing at strange angles in the cracks between other buildings.

I also noticed an unsettling thing; a cigarette burning alone on the pavement and stinking up the night utterly detached from its 'smoker'. The road it was on is about half a mile in length and nobody was around. It was a lonely urban sight, like the time I saw a pigeon eat a chipstick out of dog doo doo in Kells, or when my twin brother and I considered a soiled Huggies pull-up with a pringle on it in the centre of the road in Ringsend - "symbol of Celtic Tiger" was his take.

Anyway, I'm a week into my new job. The coolest thing about it so far is that I take something called a 'paternoster' to get to my office which is on the sixteenth floor of the tallest building on campus. Yall want to know what a paternoster is don't ye? Wut no? Well I'm going to tell you anyway.

A paternoster is an endlessly rotating lift named after the Rosary because it presumably mimics the path of beads through religious fingers. You know the bit in the Simpsons when Millhouse's Dad pathetically proclaims after his divorce 'I sleep in a Race Car, do you?' and nods to his race car shaped bed? Well just imagine me saying 'I go to work in a paternoster' in the same tone of voice to get the full effect of me boring you with this mundane fact. 

Related to this mundane fact is the fact that on a recent train trip from Leicester to London I saw both a crop circle and the Weetabix factory. A confluence of oddness that completely confirmed everything I think (love) about England. On the same train journey an entire family initiated conversation and friendship with me, which is another brill thing the Brits do so well. 

So my new job, the deets. In my new job I work with people who are investigating people taken in by the biggest fraud online at the moment, the west African romance scam. The facts pertaining to this scam are so horrifying that I've spent the last few days just thinking about it and why other humans would do such a thing to their fellow bipedal creatures. There is a lyric in a song by Arthur Lee, 'alone again or', where he sings 'I think people are the greatest fun'. I always loved this lyric because, to me, it was another person singing about just how cool and nice other humans are - in a gobsmacked psychedelic way admittedly. Now that I am involved in this field of research I'm not too sure. 500,000 Britons are involved in the scam as victims and it costs the country 3 billion a year. I obviously can't disclose identifying personal information about the victims, but those who are scammed are so gentle, warm-hearted, and trusting, that it is genuinely freaky to think of the level of depersonalisation (or whatever way the scammers rationalise it) mentally required to defraud them. Check it out on Crimewatch here. Also, while I don't think it happened in his case, the scammers push the envelope and humiliate their victims using chat cams. It's the bit that disturbs me most, because there's no financial benefit in it - just the 'benefit' of seeing a vulnerable fellow human humiliated in the cruelest way.

I'm happy I've ended up doing this job because it means I can help people tangibly. 

MP3: Love-Alone Again Or