John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Guerilla drive-in: 27 October 2008: I've always, always wanted to go to a drive-in .. well 'movie' is the only word but as you know I usually resist and use the English 'film', but .. well, it's a drive-in movie, can't be anything else.; There was word one time of some supermarkets opening their car parks late night to such things, hoping people would buy all their goodies from the shop, but it never happened near me.; Anyway .. now I'm assured this is all perfectly legal, but it just feels like it isn't .. isn't that a bad state of affairs? Anyway, I still feel like I should keep schtum about those involved. So anyway, there are a few people in Scarborough who just get on and do things, and one of those people organised a Guerilla drive-in.; Basically, the idea was to gather like-minded people together, drive to a secret spot announced just a few hours before, then the organiser turns up with a projector, wires it up to their car battery, and projects film onto the side of a building.; Then everyone else in their cars tunes their radio in to a particular frequency, and sound is broadcast through their car stereo from a low-power FM transmitter. How fabulous is that?; Last night was the inaugural event and featured a programme of almost two hours of short films, all pretty fabulous, together with faux cinema announcements and even free Fab lollies.; The atmosphere was really brilliant. It turned out to be a perfect CFS night out. Get into the car, you don't have to deal with crowds or even walk around. Take a flask of hot chocolate with you and supplies of goodies and you're all set.; Afterwards, we tried to get a view of the stars from an unpolluted spot but it clouded over, we got this rather special view of Scarborough instead.
Paypal: 27 October 2008: "PayPal would appreciate your input. In a continuing effort to provide our users with the best possible online payment experience, we randomly select registered users, like you, to participate in surveys. Your feedback will help us enhance your PayPal experience. We appreciate your taking a moment to respond. To complete the survey, simply click on the Web address shown below (or copy the address into your browser)."; So, the psychological contract set up here is "will you (our customer) help me (Paypal) to improve my service to you". I'm a sucker for that because I'm full of my own self importance and like to think I have some skills, I can help, and my opinion counts and is worth something. So, yeah, I clicked. It's rare, but I did.; And all's well for the first few questions but after, say, the sixth it said "OK, we'd like you to consider our new credit card". In other words, they started to sell to me. Fuckers! That wasn't the psychological contract. Don't open me up and sell to me! Lying, conniving, deceitful bastards.; So, not a good way to sell to me.; If they'd said "Hey John, we have a new credit card, we know your history and we think you'd get approved, take a look" then fine.; Meanwhile, a client of mine has reached his Paypal receipt limit and can't seem to satisfy them that he's not money laundering. He's answered all their questions, but they are still accepting customer's money on his website, he's then sending the products, then Paypal is returning the money to the customer on the basis that this vendor's reached their limit. The client is a distributed company with people working all over the world. Paypal seems to think this is dodgy, rather than, err, modern or normal.; So I'm moving away from them atm.
Acting Characters: 27 October 2008: Paul Elsam, the singer from a band I used to be in, Rah!Collector also taught acting at the local college and as he left that job, he summarised the course in a book: Acting Characters: 20 simple steps from rehearsal to performance which I've finally read through.; This is a world I know nothing about, so it was really interesting to read a clear and practical guide to how to act. My favourite resource in the book is the British Library's collection of recordings of English accents and dialects and there's this for non-UK accents too. Fabulous. I kinda think sometimes I could do accents really well, but I absolutely haven't passed Go yet, but it might be a fun party trick.; But the reason I mention it is because it's got perhaps the best character summary system I've seen, and that's very useful to anyone who writes or creates media because you should always write to someone, and that someone should be clear in your head. Clearly if you're designing a website for a banker, a child, the owner of a corner shop, or an obstetrician those websites will all be different, and the writing style should be different too. It helps to have a very clear, defined, written-down idea of who it is you are writing to.; I've seen one method of capturing that character, it's the one I use .. if you say you're writing to a musician then write 'musician' in the middle of a piece of paper and then build out a mind map. He or she? How do they spend their day? Are they professional or amateur, and if the latter, what job do they do? What motivates them? How do they eat, where do they live? What's their background, culturally, educationally, family. What's their family structure? How old? What's frustrating them? What makes them happy? What do they want? And so on .. build out this whole character in great detail.; Well, that's a lot to keep in your head if you're trying to act that person, and it doesn't help you react spontaneously onstage. So he's pulled out the key bits from that and organised it on one page as a character profile, covering the key personality traits, key motivators, where the power vectors lie, that sort of thing. It's simple enough to hold in your head so you can act the part, but core enough to define the character in any situation.; So I plan to use his Character Profile Sheet for future websites to define an example or two from the audience I'm writing to. If I clearly know what they want, I can write directly to them .. straight between the eyes. Cool.
Credit Crunch Lunch: 26 October 2008: Credit crunch lunch .. all this for £6 something at the Clock Cafe, Scarborough. Actually, they are closed out of season, the 9th November is their last day, then they re-open on Mother's day in the spring. That cake is home-baked, by the way. And the big container is sugar. The cafe's been open since before the first world war, so more than a hundred years.
Blogging: 23 October 2008: Apparently blogging is old-hat, and Tweeting is the in-thing now. So says Radio 4, a radio programme using technology perhaps a hundred years old to make the point, based on a story written in Wired magazine, magazines being about 280 years old.; The point being that it's not the medium, it's the message that's interesting, and people will use whatever medium they find convenient at the time.; But to some extent I agree. Blogging has become popular, particularly among marketers, and marketers typically have nothing much of interest to say other than 'buy my product' which is kinda out of fashion, post credit crunch.; This blog, I'm slightly embarrassed to say, seems to be appreciated partly for the quality of its writing, which is curious because I never was very good at that at school. But also because it's occasionally controversial. Controversy has sold newspapers for many years, so that's fine with me. The problem with marketing and company blogs is controversy isn't usually desired, everyone has to toe the line and stay on message and work within the brand character. Yeah, right, fascinating.; The point, though, and to illustrate this I heard only part of the radio report because the breakfast mushrooms caused the smoke alarm to go off, and I haven't the time to seek out the Wired article to see what they were really saying, is that there are an increasing number of blogs around, of lessening quality, and .. and here's the point (and it always has been the point) .. the Internet turns economics on its head.; Normal economics says we have a finite set of resources, and as demand increases for one of them, let's say oil, the price goes up. If demand lowers, the price goes down.; On the Internet, there's no finite set of resources. Even bandwidth, memory and processing power are almost free. There's an infinite amount of stuff on the Internet. So traditional economics is bust. What's scarce, is human attention.; If you're reading this, I'm a very lucky man indeed, and thank you. Perhaps you might be better off reading Twitter, where you can watch people you've connected with say profound things within 140 characters. I'm WSJS on Twitter if you fancy following me, although I have to say I'm still not completely sold on it. It's just chatter, where's the depth? I like to investigate a little. I like my brain, it's great fun to use it.; Oh, and whereas blogging seemed to build up from Internet people with genuine things to say, everyone .. that's *everyone* .. who clicks to follow me on Twitter is an Internet marketer, and a newbie at that. Probably following a training course that told them to do it. I don't know if it's the particular corner of Twitter that I inhabit or not, but Twitter seems to have attracted Internet marketers before getting any depth, so I kinda think there are ten thousand Internet marketers swarming around there trying to find someone to sell to.; So the trick is to say something worth reading. Often you see blogs where there's a post a day or more and you can feel that underneath is an Internet marketer with a plan .. "I'll write three blog posts a day, Digg ten pages ... and I'll become a zillionnaire". It's not going to happen. I write when I've something to say and a moment in which to say it.; Something about the psychology of reward backs me up here. If you reward someone every time they do something you like, they get to expect it and all that happens is they get narked at you the day you forget. If you occasionally reward the behaviour you like, that's appreciated much more and is more motivating. So sometimes I write, and sometimes I don't, it depends if I've something to say. The quality stays up, and when I do write something, hopefully it feels good. It had better do if I want your attention.; Here's another thing. Blogging is something you do like walking, writing poetry or cooking. It's not owned by anyone. Twitter is a private company, Twitter Inc. So, hands up who thinks Twitter Inc is on a mission to persuade us away from free and open blogging into its hands so it can make some money? Blogging is dead? Sure. Along with radio and magazines and TV and talking and singing and going down the pub.
Country Living: 18 October 2008: A friend is due to appear in the next issue of Country Living sparking, we rather hope, a lifetime of ribbing. So we tried to check out the magazine's website. There's one for the American version of the magazine, but not for the UK one.; We ended up here which explains itself on its about us page. So, All About You was launched in 2006 and is owned by Handbag.com. Oh, that's interesting, I thought I remembered Handbag.com as one of the darlings of the first Internet boom, but according to this it was set up by The Telegraph and Boots.; Now, Handbag.com is owned by The National Magazine Company which is in turn owned by The Hearst Corporation. Cosy.; So, All About You "brings together a wealth of information from six of the UK's best loved magazine brands; She, Good Housekeeping, Coast, Country Living, Prima and House Beautiful."; So here's my question. What is it that makes, say "Good Housekeeping" work as a physical magazine but not be able to sustain its own website.; Us Brits do magazines better than any country I think, I was shocked at how few there were in the US compared to a decent Smith's display here. What makes a magazine is the team's intimate knowledge of its readership. Between the magazine's team and it's readers, they walk forward together almost as family.; There's nothing stopping the same thing happening online. But clearly NatMags' experience says otherwise. Why?; I guess when you buy a magazine that might cost the best part of a fiver, you've some committment to it. So you tend to give it some time to the exclusion of others. Online, you've no committment to anything, you just surf around, follow your nose.; I think the crux of this is frequency of content. If you want someone to come back to your website regularly, like every day, to form a habit, you'd better provide good content every day. All those magazines are monthlies, so by pooling their resources they can provide great content every day and have one site that gets to the front page of Google. Perhaps alone they wouldn't get that position, and people would soon learn each site doesn't update frequently, they wouldn't check often, and once the habit's gone so is the online readership.; Marie Claire, I'm reliably informed by a lady, does provide great content on its own. And I can imagine a great system whereby the editorial team creates daily content and the online readers vote and comment, and only the best stuff makes it through into the print magazine.; So my point is great content, daily, might be something to aim for in your blog or podcast.; While I'm at it, we are in the habit of doing the Independent crossword online, and I love the 'best articles' link to the side of that which seems to show what articles people have been looking at the most, recently. But I'm a bit tired, now, of the '50 best toasters' type articles. They have no kudos at all, we've no idea who chose the items in the list, it's just window shopping junk. I look, but I don't like the fact that I do. And I'm left with an awfully empty feeling afterwards.
Peel night: 17 October 2008: Peel night at Vivaz was good. I liked Fuzzgun Sniper and Stray Scene, but mostly I was shocked at how damn good Alastair James is .. I've been looking at his mySpace site and trying to work it out. No really, he just is that good.; Not a lot of variety weirdness though. The first one I went to (2006 I think), it was delightful for the variety of acts. This time it felt like singy acoustic guitar people and then rock bands. I know the fact is there was a synth-pop band and a rapper while I was there, but I saw the whole thing barring the last four and that was kinda it. Maybe Manfat were different too but I didn't 'see' them.; Gotta say, though, the sound at Vivaz is shocking. In the middle of Manfat's set Dav shouted "these mic's are fucking rubbish". But it wasn't just that. Even synth bands sounded like they were playing in the flat above. So I spent some of the night wondering (because I've no idea) whether the idea is to get some sort of frequency analyser, play white noise through the PA, and wander around the place looking at all the frequencies and trying to 'equalise' them for the human ear, to give a basic setup for a PA. And the onstage sound? And feedback .. halfway through the night .. I think it was the Demimondaines who introduced the band and included 'feedback' as one of their members.; Vivaz gets some serious name DJs to visit .. I just wonder what they make of it.
Buy an Audi: 17 October 2008: I wouldn't normally read such a thing (maybe that's the key), but I got an email from Inchcape Audi today titled "Decisions, decisions" and I thought .. I wonder how they are angling their emails to cope with the biggest world financial crisis probably ever. I mean, an Audi isn't a cheap car, right? So I opened it up.; "There's no time like the present to be thinking about buying an Approved Used Audi" is their first line. Yeah, right. It's probably the worst possible time to be thinking things like that. It's kinda .. well, shall I slit my wrists, set up home in China or .. buy an Audi.; So basically they've ignored the credit crunch and gone ahead anyway. Maybe there's logic in it. Maybe Audi's brand character is cool and calm .. 'credit crunch, pah, I'm comfortably off and it doesn't affect me'.; Maybe they are hoping for the chocolate effect: "the credit crunch is a worry, so I'll buy myself a new car to make myself feel better".; Still, I was left with a feeling of incompetence because it was really just the same old email with nary a nod to reality. If the black death comes, America and Russia start lobbing weapons at each other and terrorists start pinching your bum really hard wherever you go ("these damn bottom pinchers really are the limit, can't the government do something", irritated from Cheshire), expect an email: "We've had a good idea, why don't you buy an Audi?"
David Shrigley: 15 October 2008: We went up to the BALTIC yesterday to see David Shrigley's talk and he offered to sign books, so when we got to the top of the queue he said "have you got a pen?" What artist doesn't carry something to write or draw with? And if he offers to sign books, how weird not to have a pen. I'm not moaning, just curious .. isn't it weird? Maybe that wasn't David Shrigley at all, maybe it was his brother.
Naming your kids: 12 October 2008: When you're naming your kids, consider something unique (what's good for Zappa may well be good enough for all of us).; I've just had fan-contact from someone who I don't know, so I Googled them. Turns out someone of that name was accused of a crime a few years ago, was found to be innocent, and apparently came to live in Scarborough.; But I now have that link in my head. If I meet this person, I'm going to be wondering whether they are the accused. The problem is: what if my fan is a different person of the same name?; So, name your kids something unique so they can be Googled and face the consequences of their actions, whatever they may be.; I benefit by association with the other John Allsopp who lives just off Bondai Beach and writes about web standards and microformats. Hopefully some people will confuse him with me and think I'm an intelligent author. But I might not be so chuffed if he was a convicted paedophile.; I think I'll have Guitar Festivity Concrete Allsopp, and Slaughterhouse Pickpocket Allsopp. Yeah. They'll sound good in the school register. Rock and roll. OK, I'll put the dictionary away :-(
X Factor: 12 October 2008: I like the X Factor and I think it's a great way of finding new talent and selling music. Honestly. Obviously that's got to be counterbalanced by Peel/Mark E Smith type systems where people can define their own space, but if we're going to have middle of the road, mass appeal artists and I were to design ways to find them, X Factor is pretty much what I'd design. And I don't understand the down-the-nose look I get when I say that.; However, two things are really putting me off.; The main thing is it feels like a cult. There's something going on that breaks these wannabe stars down, by the looks of it so they can build them back up again according to what they want. It's all voluntary, of course, but by doing things like taking people off to some luxury villa in St. Tropez, they are dangling an enormous carrot and saying "you can only have this if you do what I say". The roots are all there in psychology, the risks in judges comments is a major part of it. It's particularly distasteful when applied to Rachel who presumably had all that control stuff done to her in prison .. this just feels like another control structure, another prison, another way of trying to tame her.; As a result of that, every contestant trips out the words "I really, really want this so much" as if life will stop if they don't win. Often they gesture around the aforementioned villa, as if it's not recognition of their talent that they want, they just want the lifestyle. Jeez, what .. is this a generational thing? I'm thoroughly sick of hearing it. I just want someone to turn up, tell the judges to f-off, and basically have the attitude "whether I've can sing or not is for you to decide, but you can't have my soul .. the villa and lifestyle doesn't even enter into it". Wasn't there an American winner of one of their early, similar shows who took off in her own direction? Lesbian as I recall, can't find her name though.
Stop Losses: 10 October 2008: So, the descent of the FTSE today was exacerbated by stop loss settings where shares reached the pre-set point which their owners defined as "if it reaches this point, sell, I don't want to lose any more", and as more sold, so the FTSE dropped and triggered more and more.; Sure, that's simplistic, but, isn't that just a very, very unstable design of the whole system? I mean, no first year computer science student would design a system that would just fall off a cliff like that. Jeepers, who's supposed to be overseeing it?; I'm sure when those stop loss levels were set, no-one thought they'd reach that low, but hey, they have.; Apparently what happened is called a Minsky moment.
Crunch: 9 October 2008: The most curious thing I've seen written about the financial crisis was when the US bailout was first suggested and it was in a reader's letter. Put into UK terms it went like this. That UK bailout arranged yesterday will cost each UK taxpayer £1,610. Instead of giving that money to the banks, why not just give every UK taxpayer £1,610. What's the first thing we'd do with that? Put it into our bank account. Then, we'd spend it. The banks get their money, and we solve the recession thing too.; What's wrong with that then?
Manfat Voodoo: 7 October 2008: There is something deeply beautiful about Manfat Voodoo and I've been trying to work out what it is. Part of it was in Dav's (Dav White, singer/writer/artist) comment before going on at Beached that "hopefully everyone will be sick of cocks-out rock bands by the time we come on".; Manfat Voodoo are quiet and gentle. Their songs have melody and fingerpicking guitar. Their mentors are early bluesmen. Damion (guitar) will casually pick out a beautiful 1 or 2 minute improvisation, flying circles over the start of the song before finding a landing pattern and dropping us neatly on the ground, trotting into the first bars and we're away.; But there's a blokeishness to the whole thing which I'm finding curious. Scanning the song lyrics, I don't see any words for emotions, it's never explicit, and they are delivered in a matter of fact way with quips aplenty to give the actual emotion an outlet. I mean, I'm exploring Dav's songwriting talent here. If, as a non-songwriter, you sit down to write a lyric, the first (comedy) thing you'd think to do is to write "I love you" and wonder, "why?" or "how?" and write about that.; But here's a master at work (no, really, PRS Atom songwriting annual award winner). One song is a list of gun manufacturers, seemingly sung to the melody of "Favourite Things" from The Sound Of Music. It's an awesome thing, in this case taking all the baggage and associations of words like Kalashnikov and Beretta and compressing it all into a song.; There's travel, prescription drugs, diseases and great humour too. Songs written purely from what was written on a bus ticket. A forthcoming song is reported to have no words in it, just numbers. History, too, is a big theme, wartime, Russia and Edwardian England. And those are interspersed with songs about everyday life and experiences: "I like Shandy", and tales of Manfat's long history.; The blokeishness thing? I'm just musing about Manfat Voodoo's popularity and I'm mixing them up with one of my favourite topics. I'm just theorising that the way Manfat deliver their songs provides depth and meaning, subtlety and beauty, melody and gentleness, without any risk of making you cry in public. No overt shows of emotion. This isn't Shirley Bassey. So, it's safe from this sort of embarrassment.; So, it's all right making a lot of noise, but Manfat Voodoo have more about them. They take a net and catch the world and turn it into beautiful songs and stories and leave you better, more connected somehow. If you're open, you'll love them. They play the Hole in the Wall, Scarborough on Thursday 9th October from about 9pm. Subscribe to their YouTube channel, check this out in contrast. Come to the gig with a spare few quids and you'll be able to go home with Erasmus Darwin and the Chicken Ladder, a seriously beautiful, world class album.
Shares: 7 October 2008: I got up this morning (de derr de der), went downstairs to make breakfast, put the radio on and Radio 4 said shares were rallying, the stock market was thinking shares had fallen enough and things felt better, the FTSE was up 100 points. By the time I got upstairs with the breakfast tray, it had fallen off a cliff again, under by 20 points (it got down to 50) on the back of bank shares dropping by .. well Royal Bank of Scotland shares were down 40%. It really is something else ain't it?
More Radiohead windup: 4 October 2008: I spotted more Radiohead stuff in the Grauniad today. I had my suspicions, but yes, it turns out Thom York is a public schoolboy and art student .. nothing wrong with that I guess, but it puts them on the Blur side of the fence rather than the Oasis one.; I'm just having fun winding Radiohead fans up now, because I was going to illustrate todays lecture by comparing Thom York with Joe Strummer, but guess what .. Joe Strummer is the son of a diplomat, former boarding school resident and went to Central St. Martins. So yeah, revolution, but guess what? Bet he would have gotten a tidy inheritance regardless.; John Lydon then, but I had to work at it :-); The reality is we relate to people like us and I'm not a public schoolboy cum art student. I'm from a small-engineering town in the midlands, my mum and dad met at the local steelworks, she raised us and then became a teacher, my dad was made redundant when the steelworks closed and moved to work at the local power station. I went to a comprehensive school, then dropped out of university. That's normal for me. Mind-you, I can't say I relate to that life much now.; And, I absolutely believe in education. So if you're an artist, you've really got to go through art school .. it's going to be incredible rare someone good comes through without 'proper' training. Politics the same, it doesn't work any more just to be a Lech Walensa-type figure, you've got to know the world you're in.; I can't even have the point that art school students don't 'speak to me'. That's complete prejudiced bullshit because some of my best friends are former art school students, I love that world and actually I'm a little embarrassed by what I've written so far. But I'm exploring my point .. OK?; So, what is my point? I think it's to do with brand values. I had no clue that Thom Yorke was a publicly schooled former art student. It just felt that way. With Joe Strummer, you wouldn't get that feeling.; So I think it boils down to branding, and your voice and your image. It's a marketing thing. With Joe Strummer the whole point was he was supposed to be speaking for the ordinary person. With Radiohead, it's all a bit too mainstream and a bit too middle class. I know it's wrong, but what I always feel with Radiohead songs is Yorke's just whining about not being able to get a parking space.; It is an interesting thing this, because I'm really curious about how much someone like Russell Brand's image is crafted .. it obviously is .. and how much of it is actually him. What's he like at home, is the thing?; Barring the clothes, I can believe Brand's probably quite like what we see, and I think the beauty of Noel Fielding is that we believe his public face is his true one.; I don't think, for instance, anyone believes Roy 'Chubby' Brown is like his stage persona off stage.; So there's something about authenticity going on here too. Rock and roll is kinda owned by ordinary people, whereas visual art is rather more intellectual and highbrow. I'm not saying it should be (at all), I'm talking marketing and public perception now. So for an art school student to make a rock band, that doesn't feel authentic. To go to stage school and form a rock band is fine. To go to art school and make art is fine.; So maybe there's another thing going on. Maybe Radiohead are saying "we all went to university, we're all middle class, we all own our own homes nowadays" so whereas with the same background the Clash made their image to appeal to the masses of the time, Radiohead appeals to Thatcher's children and made their image to appeal to the masses of this time. I wonder how deliberate that is. My problem is, 'middle class' isn't hard enough. It's too cossetted and too wilfully ignorant of the issues around us. So yeah. The reason I don't like Radiohead turns out to be because I'm blinkered, prejudiced, and a misery guts (even more so now I've upset my artist friends). Interesting. I still don't like them tho.; A friend replies: "aren't Coldplay at least first cousins of Radiohead .. they're not Kylie but aren't too difficult either. Isn't it the safe place that The Police used to occupy once the edge had gone off punk and real reggae was too black? I'd imagine there's an equivalent for each sub-generation of teens .. but it's the overwhelming pointlessness of the music .. if you haven't got your head beyond some of the childish angsts that these guys push then it is sounds for comforting children. You've got to fear for the quality of thinking and feeling that allows these guys to thrive." Shocking. Just remember, I didn't say that :-)
Fat Face Night Ride 2008, Scarborough old town, tomorrow: 3 October 2008: Gosh, this is exciting. They say "Now into its second year, the 'Fat Face Urban Downhill race' is a fun downhill (mountain bike) race for most competitors and a real good opportunity for the professional riders to show off the skills of the in front of a massive crowd, racing down the steep and testing course from the top of the rocky headland on which stands Scarborough's medieval castle down to the sea front & pier." It's tomorrow, see you down there
Radio 4: 1 October 2008: I keep having breathtaking emotional Radio 4 moments, usually after I've woken up late or am preparing breakfast late, maybe after 9am. This morning I got a moment with Amnesty International's expert on Afghanistan on how the death of a prominent policewoman highlights the plight of women in that country, and a beautiful moment with Ali Smith (I'd never heard of her) whose words tumbled fast yet accurately and in control as if she were overseeing a rockfall, letting us peer into her encyclopaedic, kalaedoscopic mind .. I felt she was an olympian wordsmith, someone completely on top of her art .. beautiful. If you're fast you could listen again.; I've been meaning to write this for a while, because another one that struck me deeply (although I really can't actually remember the details) was the recollections of a chap who had been taken to one of the Nazi concentration camps. Upon arrival the group was split into two groups by some famous Nazi name, he got into the group that lived and laboured, building weapons and equipment to aid the Nazi war effort. Years later there was a sequence of letters between this chap and .. maybe it was the head of the camp he was in, in which the German chap ended up inviting him to dinner, but he felt he had to decline the invitation because he really just couldn't forgive. Might have been Albert Speer. Might not. Anyway, it was one of those stories that just stopped me in my tracks and I sat and listened. Couldn't not. While the kettle boiled and clicked off and the almonds cooled in the pan.; Now .. these are ordinary morning broadcasts on a national radio station. That satisfies my need for a dose of reality, for recognition and sight of the enormous gears that move around us while we shop in Waitrose and worry about the price of petrol.; So. Radio 4. Thank-you, you're fabulous.