It is all part of 6 Music’s Kraftwerk weekend. I think I am going to be spending a lot of this weekend listening to the radio (or a lot of the next 7 days on iPlayer more likely)

I thought I might do a little analysis, just to pass the time. It isn’t easy to slot some of the headlines into simple categories because some fit into more than one – is a headline about Cheryly and Ashley Cole an X Factor story or a randy footballer story for example? Anyway, this is what they looked like in pie chart form:

All the Express headlines for 2011

All the Star headlines for 2011

The Star’s priorities are clear to see: TV and celebrities, especially Jordan and Peter Andre or Premiership footballers. Three-quarters of their headlines were about celebrities one way or another, assuming Kate & Wills to fall into that category. Only 42 headlines were not concerned with celebrities or with high-profile murders and deaths.

There were a few stories about muslims, scroungers, phone hacking (but only where it involved celebrities or murder victims naturally), and Lottery winners. The nearest it got to news was a handful of stories about the riots, Gaddafi and Bin Laden.

The Express is a bit better inasmuch as it doesn’t obssess about TV shows. Instead it obssesses about health scares and miracle cures, house prices and other personal finance matters, and foreigners. Two-thirds of the headlines fit into those broad categories, with weather, royalty and high-profile murders taking up most of the rest.

Things that may have made the headlines of other papers but did not appear in the Express or Star include:

• Tunisia, Syria or Egypt
• Libya (except about Gaddafi personally)
• Anything else abroad (except for a couple of mentions of the tsunami or how something might affect Brit holidays)
• Berlusconi
• Kim Jong-Il
• Utoya massacre
• Results of local elections, by-elections or Scottish, Welsh and NI elections
• Opinion polls
• PMQs or any other parliamentary proceedings
• VAT increase
• Cuts
• Protests
• National strikes
• Liam Fox
• Phone hacking (except where it impacted celebrities)
• The occupy movement
• Superinjunctions
• Dale Farm (surprisingly)
• Company failures

Those who read ‘proper’ papers, dutifully devouring several of the Sunday editions, and watch QT, Newsnight and all the weekly politics shows would do well to remember that for large chunks of the population this is what counts. Many only skim over the headlines of news anyway, having bought the paper for the sport and human interest stuff.

A bit sobering to consider that all the strategists in all parties and others trapped in the Westminster bubble base their ideas on stuff that a lot of us won’t even know and base their criteria for success on things a lot of us won’t see like PMQ performances, opinion polls and so on.

What was quite shocking really was the almost total absence of anything the slightest bit international. The Express is only really worried about abroad if it gives them a chance to bash the EU or if it will affect holiday destinations or prices.

The question is, does the Express only appeal to people who don’t give a shit about anything unless it might affect their personal pension, house value, health, or monthly budget or does it train its readers to only worry about those things? It has more stories about lighbulbs than parliament during the year.

As for the Star – can a paper that can run 58 X Factor-related headlines in a year and not even mention the PM, Chancellor or any other member of government (or opposition) really call itself a newspaper? Even Harry Potter gets one headline!

And here is the dilemma for political parties which is very topical – how do you write election leaflets that the readership of these papers is going to even look at, let alone pay attention to?

Front Cover

The other day I finished a proof copy of a book called The Return Man by V.M.Zigo. It is due to be published in March and I can wholeheartedly recommend it.

It is a book set in a future where a mystery virus has created zombies, but the outbreak has been containe, albeit to a very large area. Basically the entire Western half of the USA has been evacuated leaving it populated only by the undead while the survivors cram in the the Eastern safe states.

One man hid from the evacuation teams and stayed behind to look for his wife with the intention of laying her to rest if she has been infected. In the meantime he takes commissions from people in the safe states to find their loved ones and ‘retturn’ them to a peaceful death.

It is an interesting twist on the whole zombie situation, making a change from the usual flight to safety. My only reservation was that it sounded like a good outline for a film and I couldn’t see how you could really capture the whole spirit of the films on paper, but it turns out you can and this bloke has done it!

The zombies are very much in the Romero tradition of shuffling slow zombies, which is the way I like them.

All the usual elements are there but with some extra depth and background. The hero is not a typical survivalist, but a surgeon who has had to teach himself how to survive in that environment and how to hunt. Thanks to satellite connections he is able to communicate with a relative out East who hooks him up with clients and provides a link to what is happening outside. The descriptions of how society has reacted and coped is not overdone but is enough to make you think seriously about how the world would adapt – not well, with the far right taking control of the remaining states.

Doctor Marco gets persuaded to take on a mission to find a specific corpse in California and on the quest he hooks up with a Chinese soldier sent from outside and here is another twist as the soldier’s Chinese cultural attitudes towards the dead make him more ready to kill live people than to re-kill corpses.

All of this means that there is a proper story arc with an objective more complex than just trying to avoid being over-run, and it is written in a decent, direct style without being trashy, and there are some spectacular set pieces in it. To go into too much detail would constitute major spoilers, but I will say that there is a sequence on a stalled train and a another where the hero wants to break into a prison crammed full of thousands of ex-con zombies who have been trapped there in order to find one specific ex-person.

All through the book, while enjoying it immensely, I could not stop myself wishing there was a film of it too so I was quite pleased to see that a company has already taken out an option on the film rights. Even so, I’m glad to have read the book because it contain a lot that a film would understandably miss out.

Best of all, the book comes to proper resolution that is satisfying enough while still leaving lots of scope for a sequel, which I will be first in the queue for when it comes out.

It is difficult or even impossible to say without knowing exactly how everything would be divvied up, and just about every aspect of it makes your head hurt to think about it.

So, without being prejudiced by either agreeing or disagreeing with him, I thought that Salmond spoke well. Not bad rhetoric and didn’t go on for hours. More impressive was the parliament itself – both the building and its inhabitants. It all seemd a lot more grown-up than Westminster where proceedings always seem to boisterous and rowdy, especially for major events. I guess that today’s speech was a pretty big deal in Scotland and yet it all looked quite civilised.

It might be because there are fewer members crammed in or because the facilities are better or a bit of both, but I do wish our own parliament was in such a place, with the chair behind a desk instead of on a throne, and where each member has their own desk where they can put papers and have a bit of elbow room.

These films are what I think of as the ‘new’ Bond films. The Connery/Lazenby ones are the classics, the Moore ones can be a bit annoying now but I remember them fondly as the ones being released while I was a teenager (at least the earlier ones). It was a bit of a shock then, an an increasingly common shock these days, to realise just how old some of these ‘new’ Bond films are now – The Living Daylights is 25 years old!

Anyway, watching them all retrospectively (and, for some bizarre reason, in reverse order) rather than as seeing them as they came out I was having a completely different reaction to them. While the Dalton films underwhelmed me a bit at the time I now think they may be my favourite films and that Dalton was an outstanding James Bond.

I think it is because the plots were just a bit more restrained and plausible – no megalomaniac hell-bent on world domination from his secret lair. There were still some touches of trademark Bond silliness, like the cello ride across the Austrian border, but mostly they were quite sensible – maybe why they were not received so well?

The other thing I realised was that Carey Lowell just has to be the best Bond girl ever. She must have a picture in the attic as well, because she still looks great now at 50. Mind you, Halle Berry runs her a close second.

I realised that, for all those reasons and more, Licence to Kill is a serious contender for my favourite James Bond film. Am I alone in this?

Steve Howe with his endless swapping of guitars – he used three different guitars during one song, and then later on used three other guitars during another song. Rick Wakeman surrounded on three sides by banks of keyboards and at one point stretching to play two that were 6 feet apart. Even Jon Anderson had at least three different tambourines to bash, when he wasn’t playing the harp. Chris Squires stuck to his trusty Rickenbacker most of the time but at one point did come out with a triple-necked bass and did actually play all three parts of it during the song. Alan White stuck to the one drum kit, but he did fget to play the crotales and I’m sure I heard a gong at one point.

So, I can see why some people don’t take them seriously, but really it was a treat to watch.

It is possible I only watched a bit of it before though – just the couple of older songs. I never did really like the Trevor Rabin version of Yes and have never owned or even listened much to either 90125 or Big Generator. This time I watched it all the way through, even the unfamilar songs, but didn’t enjoy it a lot. It certainly isn’t Steven Soderbergh’s best film either.

The weird thing is that I think of it as the ‘new Yes’ so it was a bit of a shock to realise this was from 27 years ago, which is more than a little scary. Its probably more of an 80s thing though, because I quite like some of the later Yes material. And it is a terribly 80s film. Not just the music, which is more straightforward and less proggy than before or since, but also the clothes and even the film style – loads of those cheap video effects and split screens: all the things that are worst about the Mike Mansfield-directed Jean-Michel Jarre concert videos.

I may have to go down later and watch one of the other concerts to clear my mind – perhaps the Live at Montreux or Keys to Ascension.

By contrast Nestlé have made a formal announcement with a target for completion by the end of this year. I know from recent experience that it can take a year to plan such a move (actually it can easily take a lot more than that) so this is going to happen. They must already be drawing up plans, starting staff consultations and ordering 18 miles of CAT-5 cables. So what does all this mean for the local economy of Crawley, or should that now be Crawlé?It would be easy to get swept away in a wave of hyperbole, in fact the Crawley News might already have done that. Their story talks about the company “bringing 1000 jobs to the town” though other sources like the Croydon papers, the BBC and Nestlé’s press release all refer to the move of 840 office-based staff.

Will that mean more jobs for local residents? In the short term it may not. With a move of only 22 miles between two locations joined by a straight road and an even straighter railway line in a time of recession I reckon most Croydon-based staff will make the move. Quite a few might even live here or in places closer to here than to Croydon, and for them it will be an easy choice.

Those living in Croydon have a slightly harder choice but I think they will make the move. During relocations a proportion of staff take the opportunity to take redundancy, especially if they are near retirement. With such a short move that might not even be on the table for them. My company moved a site of 200 people from London to Crawley the other year and quite a lot of them did move even though it was nowhere near as convenient. Some of them faced an extra hour or more travelling. From Croydon it is only about 15 minutes by train to Gatwick with dozens of rush hour trains.

Very few people will find the change in location a real struggle, except financially for those on low wages who would find an extra £50 a month a burden. Even then they might find it cheaper to move if they are renting in Croydon.

There will be some new jobs though. All those cleaners, security guards, and other support staff are probably contracted out and it is possible Nestlé will just enter into new contracts with local firms for the new premises. So initially there will be a slight boost for anybody local looking for lower-paid jobs.

There might be a bit of a boost for local shops, cafes, pubs and other places but nowhere near as much as the negative effect on Croydon. The current building is pretty close to lots of local places that will lose a lot of business but the new building is quite isolated up near the airport. True the staff could jump on a Fastway into town, but mostly they won’t. I work on Manor Royal and very few people from there go into the town centre at lunchtime.

In the longer term it means that anybody looking for a job in accounting, HR, IT and other areas will one more major employer they can apply to, one more chance to ply their trade without having to suffer the commute into London and that has to be good.

I don’t think the benefits will be as large or as quick as the out-and-out optimists or Crawley council’s economic development press releases will imply but it will be a positive impact. And it means that the next time they get involved in child labour controversies or buying milk from Mugabe’s wife the Crawley lefties will have a shorter distance to travel for protests. On the other hand, with so many PR disasters behind them the company may well go on a charm offensive with all sorts of local sponsorships.

The most significant impact could be on traffic around the airport, depending on how many of those 840 (or 1000) people intend to drive to work.

The big question is whether the signs at Gatwick station get changed. As any seasoned commuter knows, the station signs at East Croydon all proudly say “East Croydon – home of Nestlé”. Obviously that will have to change, but will they want to do the same here? Or will they see how it goes first?

I’d be interested to know what the staff think about it all. Are they looking forward to it? Dreading it? One word of comfort for them, it may be that the move to a modern building can offset some of the pain.

Since I already have 4 live CDs by Yes, not to mention 10 live DVDs and VHS it was a bit of an indulgence. Did I really need a 4th live version of And You & I or Roundabout on my PC or yet another verson of Starship Trooper? Probably not, but I just couldn’t resist it. for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, although it is not my ideal Yes line-up it is, as far as I know, the only official release featuring both Benoit David and Oliver Wakeman. I think he was only a second keyboard player on Fly From Here.

Secondly, it does contain a few tracks that aren’t on any of the other live albums I have – Machine Messiah and Tempus Fugit from Drama and Astral Traveller. I think Jon was always reluctant to do songs from Drama for obvious reasons.

The big question was always going to be how does Benoit David cope with being Jon Anderson? For me the answer is that he is OK. Better on some songs than others. I think he comes across better on the unfamiliar songs, which makes it a bit of a shame this didn’t include any of the new tracks (though I’m sure that album will be out this year).

In some places he did seem to be struggling a bit, but to be honest Jon sometimes did but he always got away with it because there wasn’t someone he was living up to. At the root of it all is the problem that Benoit is impersonating Jon rather than being himself and that is always hard to pull off. Any time you try to add anything, a little flourish or a different intonation it will be assumed that you couldn’t do it the right way. Mike Yarwood used to end his shows with impressions of singers like Tom Jones and Frank Sinatra. No matter how well he did them, nobody would have wanted to see him do a whole concert as Frank Sinatra if they could have the real thing instead.

Considering the circumstances I reckon he does a good job and doesn’t distract from the rest of the band who are on absolutely top form. I think that Steve Howe puts in his best performance ever on this CD, truly outstanding, Oliver Wakeman is as good as his Dad or Igor Khoroshev, and Alan White and Chris Squire are as solid as ever. In fact White puts in a fine solo in Astral Traveller that is reason enough to get the album.

Despite the initial misgivings about having a stunt vocalist, I really enjoyed this. The sound is far better than the House of Yes album and the inclusion of some less familiar tunes makes it worth having. On top of all that it comes beautifully packaged and with a 3rd disc of video extras like interviews and live clips.

I haven’t watched the DVD yet. Saving that for a rainy day.

The box design for Betta Bilda set No. 3

In one of those strange coincidences I had some thoughts about toy building blocks this morning, specifically Betta Bilda bricks, and then in the afternoon a colleague raised the topic of Lego in a conversation, giving me the opportunity to voice my recently-formed theory about Betta Bilda.During the 60s, when everybody else seemed to have Lego, I was one of the few kids in Basildon locked into the Betta Bilda standard. It was like a fore-runner of the VHS/Betamax battles in a way. I don’t know why I took the road less travelled because I am not one of those people who can remember every detail of their childhoods. Just one more reason why I would be terrible on ‘I Love 1974′.

Anyway, it might have been an my mother’s choice either for economical reasons or because of the Airfix brand name, or it might have been my choice – because of the Airfix brand name. I do remember that I was mad for Airfix model kits so it is likely. What is sure is that once you have a starter kit and a couple of packs of extra bricks you are in the realms of what the economists refer to as ‘sunk cost’ because if you decide to collect a different system of bricks you have wasted what you already have, because Lego and Betta Bilda bricks looked very similar but were not compatible at all.

Lego was the big brand. It had brighter colours, flashier boxes, and even back then it could be used to make more different types of model. Betta Bilda was a lot more austere and, dare I say, nerdier. It was great for building miniature houses, with some very specialised architectural extras allowing you to make quite accurate models, but not really suited to making aeroplanes, spaceships or lorries. Looking at the boxes for the Betta Bilda sets, they all appear to be aimed at aspiring 1960′s town planners.

Some of my schoolfriends teased me about my choice of bricks a bit. In a way I wished I had Lego so that I fitted in with everybody else and could swap bricks like the others did, but secretly I actually preferred my own set because it had things Lego didn’t – like a working drawbridge with little cotton chains to raise and lower it, as well as some other parts which were specially designed for making castles. The drawbridge was actually quite a fragile part, though as far as I recall I never did break it.

The relevence of all this? Aside from an excuse to wallow in a previously untapped well of nostalgia it reminded me a bit of my relationship with Apple products. When I got my first mp3 player it was the mighty iRiver iHP-120. It didn’t have the cool of the iPod but in my opinion although it didn’t do everything the iPod did, it did its one thing better. The only drawback to not having the market leader mp3 player is the same as it was with building bricks – compatibility. Back then it was the greater availability of Lego sets, now it is the inability to find any decent docks for an mp3 player not made by Apple.

I don’t think the analogy holds up very well, but Betta Bilda seems a bit Linux-y to me. Doing what it does well but not appealing to the masses. A bit nerdy and worthy and overwhelmed by rivals grabbing market share through making people want to conform.

Is that a bit forced? Yeah I think so too, but I didn’t realise until today how much I enjoyed playing with those Betta Bilda bricks and kind of wish I had been nerdier and tried making architecturally accurate models of my house rather than getting seduced by the curved bricks and crennelations of the castle accessories.