The Thoughts of Captain Autumn

Every day I pass the site of a fatal car crash a couple of years ago (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/england/oxfordshire/4590713.stm). It was a dreadful incident which affected a lot of local people quite deeply, and there's rarely a day even now that I don't think of it as I cycle past the area in question.

Recently it's been impossible not to, because a host of floral tributes have been placed alongside the road. They all appeared at the same time so I'd presumed it was the second anniversary of the crash, but there must have been another reason. There are a few bunches of flowers, and some names spelled out in floral lettering. Now, I've never understood flowers when people die in the first place. In the words of Holden Caulfield, who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody. And I'm not saying that just to be fatuous, I really don't understand what the motivation is. I suppose it's a desire to make some physical manifestation of your grief, to show people, possibly even the departed if you believe in an afterlife, that you care. But if that is the case, what does it mean when the flowers are just left for weeks, slowly rotting, as these have been? In some ways it's rather poignant, but there's a part of me that finds it rather depressing. It's as if there was a particular day set aside to remember these kids (and the 21 year old, all too often disregarded), and once that day had passed it could all be forgotten about until the next appointed day came around.

Which, of course, is nonsense. Anyone who's lost someone significant in their life knows that that person will leap unbidden from your subconscious into the forefront of your mind at the most arbitrary moments. Why do the people who lost friends and relatives in that car crash allow society's expectation to compel them to make ultimately meaningless gestures? I doubt that a day passes when they don't think of them, so why do they feel obliged to make a token display of an ongoing emotional burden?

The reason this has become particularly resonant to me is that it's twelve years today since my father died. And while the calendrical significance can't be avoided, the day itself is no more important than any other. I don't feel any need to go and stand by his graveside - in fact I haven't visited his grave for many years, and I don't imagine I ever will again. Why would I do anything out of the ordinary to remember him today? I think of him frequently without any red letter prompt. We had a difficult relationship, and his shadow hangs over me on an almost daily basis as my own inadequacies as a parent lead me to worry that I will end up losing my children's affection as he lost mine. If anything I'm closer to him now for understanding some of the pressures that made him make the wrong choices than I was when he was alive. So, no flowers today, or any other day. You don't need them when a person lives on inside of you.

While having a clearout prior to a relocation at work, I stumbled across an old photocopy I made when working for the Metropolitan Police many years ago. It's a form which had to be completed any time an officer sustained an injury in the course of his duties. For obvious Official Secrets paranoia reasons I've just clipped out the relevant paragraph:

There, I've said it. I don't care who knows it. I like David Beckham. And the case for the defence is as follows.

1) Beckham gave me one of my great football watching moments, when he scored that glorious free kick in the final minute against Greece. As an adrenaline-surging, chest-beating instant of unadulterated tribal passion, only Stuart Pearce's penalty in Euro 96 - which surely still brings a tear to the eye of any right-thinking Englishman - compares.

2) Beckham adores kids. In the first place anybody who has three clearly does, because any rational person would stop at two at most; but his academies show that it goes beyond that. In a profession full of sleazy yobs interested in cars, booze and the next available Page 3 girl, Beckham established himself years ago as a man who was devoted to the family.

3) In his professional life, Beckham carries himself with a certain dignity. After being told that he wouldn't play for Real Madrid again, did he sulk about it and see out the remaining months of his contract idling? No, he got his head down, worked hard and earned a recall. His work ethic is an example to young players everywhere.

4) Beckham is a patriot through and through. There is no greater pride for him than playing for his country. When he was dropped by Steve McClaren, an act which while being justified on sporting grounds was nevertheless callously handled and manipulated by McClaren to show he was in charge, Beckham swallowed it and vowed to fight for his place. (Compare and contrast that with Robbie Savage's petulant response to being dropped by John Toshack.) Even when the story was leaked that McClaren's response was why bother, he didn't let it affect his resolve. There he was again on Tuesday night saying that if ever the call comes, he will always be available to play for his country. How I wish we had more of that breed, players who realised that being picked for your national team is a singular honour. I don't know when it began that a player decided when he was done with representing his country, but to my eyes you should be proud to appear until your country is done with you. Beckham clearly feels the same, and that's why he earns my respect.

I know he's a bit thick, and he's got a girly voice, and anyone who would sleep with Rebecca Loos (allegedly) needs their head examined. But his heart is in the right place, and you can't say that about many global sporting superstars.

I see that contestants in Richard and Judy's facile quiz suspect they may have been cheated, by being asked to phone in when the winner had already been chosen.

I'm slightly ambivalent about this. On the one hand it's a disgraceful betrayal of trust by an exploitative television company. On the other, what do these fools expect? Do they not realise that nothing in TV is genuine, that there is no such thing as a 'random caller'? It puts me in mind of the cash for honours 'scandal'. Where's the scandal there? I'm not saying it's a pleasing state of affairs but if I'm told that people who donate large sums of money end up getting nominated for awards, well, to coin a phrase, duh! Of course they do! The honours system has been a political tool for my lifetime at least, before that in fact with Harold Wilson cashing in on The Beatles. I'm no fan of Labour but if they've decided to save time by all but issuing a price list to potential donors, then at least they're being up front about it. Anybody who is shocked that such matters go on needs to get their naivety level checked. And anybody who watches Richard and Judy in the first place, let alone picks up the phone to enter a £1 a throw contest, deserves everything they get.

Personally I'm hoping that this is the beginning of the end for the sort of televisual drivel embodied by the teatime tyrants of trivia. Now that the ogre Jade Goody has been paraded as the ignorant oaf she is (and always was, lest anybody blame her for that debacle - as Frankie Boyle said wonderfully a couple of weeks back, if you train a monkey to be a butler don't be disappointed when he starts throwing shit at the walls), how marvellous it would be if it turned out that Richard and Judy were in on the quiz scam. I'm christening it Moron-gate. Once Richard and Judy are exposed, a disaffected public will turn away from them, initiating a groundswell of public opinion against programming which takes viewers for mugs (even though they clearly are). One by one the nocturnal quiz shows will drop from the schedules, followed by the endless daytime programmes about renovating your house or clearing out your loft. The pointless satellite channels which show classics like Booze Britain (in which yobs are filmed going out and getting drunk) and Darts Players' Wives (I don't even want to know) will disappear. Eventually we will have gone far enough back in time to the halcyon days when television didn't even start until the kids' programmes, and Channel 4 was a courageous, challenging broadcaster rather than a panacea for the lascivious voyeur. Bring back 1982! Everything was good then!

So it is with no little sigh of relief that I reach the end of my five in five days challenge, grateful that Mrs Somewhere couldn't get Barry Quinn and Gavin Johnson to stick.

In a perverse way it's been a successful experiment in that it has engendered unsuccessful writing, certainly by the standards I set myself. My reason for suggesting it as 'reward' for Mrs Somewhere's challenge was to see whether I could produce entries of merit on demand, and I find myself even more in awe of people who are able to do so, because of the four entries prior to today only one of them fits that bill. The other three are very short on the sort of idiosyncracy and wryness I aspire to achieve, and in fact mostly reflect the plain curmudgeonliness which seems to be strangely in vogue in the media these days. Statistically I've pulled in as many page views in five days as I had in the previous month, but my refusal to welcome aboard those bloggers who seem concerned only with my apparently legendary obesity means that a secondary, minor aim - reaching the magic ten friends before the week was out - remains unfulfilled.

So that's me for now. No more entries until Oxford win a game. Could be a long wait, it's about 84 days since the last one.

I’ve been listening to Michel Petrucciani. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that most of you won’t have heard of him, given that he was a French jazz pianist. [Yes, I like jazz. Due to the witless parade of catchphrases that was ‘The Fast Show’, I’m guessing that about half of the people reading this will just have amused themselves by saying “Nice”. If you fall into that group, you are an idiot.] Unlike many jazz musicians, Petrucciani had no pretensions about his artform; not for him the posturing of a Brad Mehldau. Petrucciani said that too many jazz musicians were guilty of playing music for their own pleasure and not that of the audience, and while he was anything but populist the upshot of this was that he used his incomparable gifts to play music which was uplifting, enthralling and even amusing.

There were two incredible facets to Michel Petrucciani. The first was his piano playing, plain and simple – irrespective of any other factors, he was an extraordinarily powerful and emotive musician. The second was that he achieved this in spite of suffering from osteogenesis imperfecta, a genetic disease that causes brittle bones and can restrict growth, in his case severely:

To see this tiny man struggle out to the piano on his custom made crutches (or occasionally even be carried on, cradled in the arms of one of the other musicians like a small child) made it hard to believe he could possibly be about to play. He would haul himself up on the stool, place his feet on the blocks of wood which enabled him to use the pedals, and that would be the last you’d think about his size as his powerhouse playing would make it an irrelevance for the next hour or two. Only when he stopped would the incredulity return. Once, at the end of a solo show, I saw him walk off stage to be greeted by one of his sons, who must have been five or six at the time. They were the same height.

I doubt it will happen, but if through me writing this even one person goes off and listens to a Petrucciani album, or even downloads a single track from iTunes as a taster, it will have been worth it. (I suggest you try ‘Looking Up’ from ‘Solo Live’, a piece of such extraordinary beauty that it often reduces me to tears, as indeed it just has.)

I didn’t know that his disease left him vulnerable to pulmonary infections, and it was a terrible shock to me when he died unexpectedly at 36. Suddenly I understood how fans of Presley and Lennon felt upon their demise, the difference being that Petrucciani was at the height of his powers and there was every reason to suspect that the best was yet to come. I will never forget hearing the news at work, and having nobody to share the moment with, because nobody knew who he was. His music always did have an emotional resonance with me, but these days it is undoubtedly accompanied by a certain poignancy.

I don't have anything personal against the people of Accrington, and I really don't have anything against their football team either. I just hope they get relegated.

Let me explain.

As keen students of lower league football will be aware, there is a mysterious link between Accrington Stanley and Oxford Utd. In 1962 Accrington fell out of the football league, and were replaced by Oxford. 44 years later Accrington romped back into the league, and anyone who's been round these parts before will know just who they replaced. Many thought it just a curious coincidence, but for those of us involved there was something far more sinister at play. There is clearly some inverse cycle of success and demise which inexorably ties these two otherwise incongruous cities. Anybody who doubts this need only look at the bottom of League Two and the top of the Conference, poised as they are for another twist of the knife by the footballing gods. And so I find myself willing ill towards a team which my club has never played, which has never done us any harm, which fought back from some fairly low periods to get to where it is now. Under any other circumstances I would be urging them to succeed. But there is a greater malevolent force at play here and I am prey to its capricious whim. I'm sure most Accrington fans are similarly watching the Conference results, rejoicing as we stumble from one dismal draw to the next. I don't blame them at all. They know we are, to paraphrase Brian London, just prawns in the game.

Nothing would make me happier than for Accrington and Oxford to play their inaugural league game against each other next season. But if it takes them coming down for us to go up, then so be it. So please guys, do your worst.

[Accrington fans, fear not - we're not even going to make the play-offs.]

Imagine the excitement at Autumn Towers as two new invitations land on my weblog doormat. Two! Never before has my verbose persiflage elicited such a frenzied reaction. As always, let us examine closely the candidates.

First in line is Monica Thomson. Monica is one of those bloggers who are particularly dedicated to a given topic - in this instance, diet pills. Monica is very keen for me to learn that her favourite brand of diet pills is now available over the counter in the US. If only I'd been alerted to this weblog earlier, I could have followed the gripping tale of how they were approved for sale in Mexico, although strangely pharmacists didn't seem to be stocking them, and of how Americans were paying high prices to import them from Europe (odd indeed that we over here should be more proactive in helping the lardy folk of the world than their spiritual home.)

However, I'm not convinced that Monica has been reading my weblog all that closely and really wants me for a friend. In the first place there's the instruction to "Forget all those sleepless nights due to your obesity", neither of which afflictions pertain to me. Apparently "The self-esteem lose due to obesity can coat you of all those parties and get-togethers you and your close mate might have had". Now, it's possible from reading my weblog to discern my self-esteem issues, but my close mate can confirm that she manages to drag me to a party or get-together on a roughly biennial basis, and as such I certainly don't feel that I've been 'coated' of such occasions, either by my alleged obesity or any other spurious cause.

Further inspection reveals, I fear, the source of Monica's irrational obsession. According to the profile page, Monica is male. Do we have issues Monica? Are we a little confused, and is lashing out at all and sundry, calling them fat and telling them what to do about it, our defence mechanism to deflect our own insecurities?

On the other hand, Monica's weblog seems positively apposite alongside the other invitation, which is to a weblog called poppydoggy.blog.co.uk. Unless there is some deeply strange hidden agenda here, this weblog relates the stories of a dog called Poppy, "a dog who's outlook on life is cynical, yet so true! Join Poppy as she rants about how other people in the family are so much better trated than her, why tails are so useless, and what really goes on in a dog's head when it sees a cat". Now I've tried to keep this a bit quiet, because I know from experience that even just saying these three words instantly transforms me into a sub-Hannibal Lecter figure in the eyes of most English people, but... here goes... I Hate Dogs.

I know, I know, I'm an evil monster who should be struck down by a bolt of lightning, but there it is - I hate them. I don't have any childhood trauma to excuse it, I just hate them. I hate everything about them. I hate the way they yap and bark, I hate the way they intimidate small children, I hate the way they intimidate grown men like me who are terrified of all but the most minute and pathetic of them, I hate the way they defacate all over the place with impunity, I hate the way they smell, I hate the way they leave hairs everywhere, I hate every last thing about them. Put together the amount I hate alcohol, mobile phones, Premiership football fans who never actually go and see their team play, cars, Madonna, Big Brother, Gordon Ramsay, tomato ketchup, Keane, Noel Edmonds, Waiting For Godot, hand held computer games, Robbie Savage and having sciatica and it still doesn't come close to how much I hate dogs.

So, all in all, a weblog detailing the travails of a dog is probably not for me. To make matters worse its author is a 13 year old girl, and no 39 year old man in the world with more than three brain cells in his head would subscribe to a weblog written by a 13 year old girl. I wouldn't accept an invitation to join freekeithjarrettcds.blog.co.uk if it were written by a 13 year old girl.

I can't believe that in the week that Mrs Somewhere is trying to get people to read this weblog I've not only fessed up on the alcohol issue, but now I'm out of the closet on the much more inflammatory canine one. Even I hadn't realised that my urge to self-destruct was so strong. Tomorrow I must write something incredibly populist. Stand by for Why Westlife Are Even Better Than Coronation Street.

I have an unusual relationship with alcohol, certainly for an adult male. I think it's revolting. Some alcoholic drinks are worse than others, but they're all disgusting. I'm convinced that almost everybody feels like this when they first try alcohol, and it is only through peer pressure that people buckle (and eventually come to enjoy it, of course, as happens with prolonged exposure to anything). This is particularly true of men and beer. Beer is the foulest liquid ever created, and I refuse point blank to accept that anybody enjoys it without enduring a long period of acclimatisation.

The reason I mention this is that there is a commercial on television at the moment for Carling, which features a flock of starlings swooping around in unison to some awful rock band singing about going out tonight. At the end the word 'Belong' appears on screen. The first time I saw it I wondered whether even beer drinkers are so stupid as to fall for a campaign so blatantly aimed at their most neanderthal tribal mentality (I think they probably are), but now I'm wondering whether it isn't an in-joke from some subversive advertising agency employee who feels like I do about beer. I imagine that in his next meeting with Carling he'll be pitching the idea of a flock of sheep all being rounded up. At the end the caption 'Tell Us What To Do' can come up.

But it's not my personal distaste for alcohol which makes me wonder how life might be were it banned. I realise this will never happen - far too many vested interests and tax income at stake apart from anything else - but at the same time I defy anybody to tell me that the social fabric of British society is enhanced by the ready availability and over-consumption of alcohol. 43% of violent crime, I read a couple of days ago, is attributable to it. Not to mention all the drink driving, miscellaneous aggression and public vomiting. But none of this makes any impact on the relentless celebration of the culture of alcohol in this country which insists that going out and drinking until you're incapable is a valid pastime. Anything else that caused the level of carnage that alcohol does would have been severely restricted years ago, but nobody would dream of tackling this most sacred of cows. It's an Englishman's right to drink all night and throw up in the gutter, and heaven help the politician who tries to impinge on that.

In case this all makes me sound like a sad old git, I've felt like it since I was about 18. I came to sad old gittishness early. And I feel I should also apologise to Mrs Somewhere, who I believe may be trying to encourage people to read my weblog this week, for starting my five consecutive entries with an opinion which I am well aware puts me at odds with about 99.9% of the British public.

Right, team. Steely Dan are touring America in May, and somehow we have to use our wit and resourcefulness to ensure that I don't miss them again. I missed the last tour, and have managed to put it to the back of my mind and pretend it never happened. But the fact is that if I don't hear 'Godwhacker' live before I die (or more likely one of the members of Steely Dan does) I will expire unfulfilled.

Here are the problems. Some are more manageable than others.

1) I don't have a passport.
2) I have absolutely no money at all. I realise this is a fairly indiscreet fact to broadcast publicly, but my impecuniousness has reached such an advanced state that it has rendered me uncharacteristically uninhibited. And it is a fundamental obstacle to being able to go, although I should clarify at this point that I am not asking for any acts of largesse, unless one of you is wallowing in Bransonesque splendour and would like a detailed and prolix account of the trip in return.
3) Mrs Autumn would probably also like to come along, given that she is a keen amateur Steely Dan enthusiast, so we need someone to look after four kids aged between 4 and 12 for a minimum of three days.
4) I have an overpowering sense of duty to my family which ensures that if I indulge myself to an unduly self-gratifying level, I am so burdened by guilt that I can't enjoy whatever hedonistic activity has taken me to such a state. For example, I needed the approbation of an online football caucus to go to a football match not covered by my season ticket. I know, it's a pain.

So somehow you all need to pool your intellectual resources and devise a plan which will get round all the above substantive and psychological issues and deliver me (or possibly us) to my (or possibly our) utopia. "Stowaway" is a word which keeps popping into my mind. Alternatively, find a way to make me happy I can't go. Good luck with that one.

Of course we may get lucky and find that Steely Dan tour Europe as well this time. The three tour dates already announced (May 6 New Orleans, May 12 Orlando, May 24 Darby Philadelphia) reveal that they are creeping slowly east - by 9 degrees between the first two dates, and 6 degrees after that. Also that the time between the dates is doubling. If they continue to move east by 3 degrees less each trip (which unfortunately will start them going west fairly soon), and the time between them continues to double... I make it that they'll be reaching the Greenwich Meridian round about 3 July 2060. I will be 92 years old. Becker and Fagen will be 110 and 112 respectively. By that time I might be able to afford a T shirt as well.