Contains: let’s resolve to bin our biggest bugbears, Bono’s unforgettable ire, plastic unfantastic, and the man who put his Gavin Stamp on saving Glasgow buildings.
A version of this appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on January 2nd 2018
A new year, and a fresh start. A chance to look ahead to the future, and correct some of the bad habits picked up over the past 12 months. After all: what better time to draw a line in the sand while there’s still time to save ourselves from the following trends:
- TV shows which pair up celebrities with random topics, such as “Allan Cumming” and “free holiday,” or “Joanna Lumley” and “champagne tasting”. This peaked last week when the BBC showed “Judi Dench’s Passion for Trees.” Unless someone plans to celebrate Stephen Fry’s love of wrestling lions, I think we’re done here.
- Any sort of Big Tech smart device that pretends to be looking up recipes or sorting through your favourite songs, but is actually spying on you and selling your preferences.
Also any Alexa, Cortana, Siri or Echo with voice recognition software that mistakes “what’s the weather in Paisley” for “What are peas”, and books you a flight to Stornoway when all you wanted was to hear Karl Denver sing Wimoweh. And isn’t it time online technology really needs to stop trying to be cute: Amazon has now made it possible for you to open a shopping profile for your pet. Already Vladimir Putin has opened one for Donald Trump. And RT has created one for Alex Salmond.
- The Nigel Farage biopic. A doomed project, especially after Kevin Spacey was mooted to play Nige. In any case, we don’t need to wait for a film about the consequences of Brexit when there’s a perfectly good shortcut that involves buying The Towering Inferno on dvd, and fast-forwarding to the moment where an electrical wire starts to fizzle on the 81st floor.
- Printers that sulkily refuse to acknowledge your commands, no matter how often you plead for them to connect or try to tempt them to accept the finest vellum sheets. Forget spoilt kids — there is nothing more privileged and financially demanding than a printer.
During an idle moment, I calculated that drop for drop, copier ink now costs more than some malt whiskies. Instead of trying to impress or seduce with Bollinger and diamonds, the person of your dreams is someone who can fire up a wireless printer, and invites you round to watch them rattle through a ream of double-sided A4, in colour.
- Scottish broadcasters banging on about snow. When the first snowflake of the season hits the ground, everyone gets a little excited. Little kids run to the window and gaze at the winter wonderland. When you get older, you discover that this also applies to teachers, RAF pilots, politicians and rocket scientists. But no-one is quite as thrilled as broadcasters, who ask you to send in pictures of your snowscene, where you are. This year however, they have started asking for photos on the radio.
Snow may come as a bit of surprise to Londoners or people on the Isle of Wight, but here in Scotland we know we are pretty much guaranteed at least one seasonal whiteout. Only Scottish broadcasters and Humza Yousaf seem taken aback by the ensuing traffic chaos, and the moment where our winter wonderland thaws a bit, then refreezes into a granite grey slide of death.
- Bitcoin. Och, just send cash. Or set fire to your tenners.
A hard rain’s a-gonna fall. Storm Dylan hit Scotland, and howled away noisily for what seemed like hours, just like Bob. Then loads of men in their forties and fifties tried to tell us that it was the greatest storm ever….
After the BBC spent three evenings retelling Little Women (with yet another Jo March who was far too pretty to be the clumsy, shovel-handed tomboyish heroine in Louisa M Alcott’s books), there’s more good news for us little ladies: Hollywood is bringing Oceans 8 to cinemas as a heist thriller with an all-woman gang of scam artists and hustlers. The A-list cast includes Sandra Bullock, Anne Hathaway and Cate Blanchett.
For the next feminist reboot to annoy whiney people on the internet, I’d like to suggest Rihanna as the whipcracking archaeologist India Jones, who travels the world stealing ancient artifacts from museums and returns them to their rightful cultures.
Sad to hear about the death of the architectural historian Gavin Stamp. An enthusiast and activist, he lobbied hard for Glasgow to be recognised for its excellent Victorian buildings. When Mr Stamp and his wife bought the Glasgow home of Alexander “Greek” Thomson, the great classical architect was little known outside Glasgow. Now — largely due to Stamp’s efforts — he is celebrated the world over.
Mr Stamp taught architectural history at Glasgow School of Art and produced a book on Alexander Thomson that is worth hunting out, which argues that while Thomson is less well known than Charles Rennie Macintosh, his work was distinctive, and arguably even finer.
Some years ago, Gavin and I hit the streets of Glasgow to make a radio show about his favourite and unfavourite landmarks. The plan was a twenty minute chat, with Gavin holding forth, while I held the microphone and occasionally poked him with verbal sticks like “oh, but surely we have to embrace modern design occasionally.”
We gathered a small crowd at Glasgow Central Station, where Gavin pointed out the use of light and the station’s sense of a grand arrival or departure.
Two hours later, we were still striding through the city, propelled onwards by the indignation that made Prof Stamp such a passionate defender of historic buildings and a waspish critic of contemporary architecture. He was especially caustic about the way Glasgow’s neglected buildings - towering reproofs to the council and indolent landlords - would often conveniently go on fire, removing their problematic presence from the cityscape
Stamp loved the Necropolis, but St Mungo’s Museum was dismissed as “Fort Weetabox”, and the city fathers got a tongue-lashing for demolishing St Enoch station, Glasgow’s version of St Pancras, and installing “a shopping centre of dismal mediocrity” in its place. We even trekked out to the Gorbals to admire the derelict grandeur of the Caledonia Road Church.
Scotland, said Stamp, used to produce architects in numbers out of all proportion to the population. Stamp departed Glasgow for Cambridge ten years ago, amidst uncertainty that his post would remain at Glasgow School of Art. He is much missed, and you wonder who in Scotland now champions great architects and calls out for conservation. Rather looking away when city landmarks are neglected or destroyed, we need more Gavin Stamps, prepared to ask difficult questions about the lack of action and preservation.
Bono is under fire for calling modern music “very girly.” But really who cares that dinosaurs like Bono regard guitars and “young male anger” as its beginning and end of rock music. This is the tax-dodging U2 frontsman who can’t even give away his music free on iPods and iPhones without an angry backlash. Bono, modern music can struggle on, With or Without You.
A fortnight’s drinking, eating, unwrapping and discarding is ending. The bottle banks are brimming and bin bags pile up.
In his latest diaries, the actor and playwright Alan Bennett has been complaining about putting out the bins. Sorting through what can and can’t be recycled and allocating paper, plastic and food into the correct coloured receptacle takes “a diploma in rubbish” apparently.
I find myself nodding along with Al. Standing in the rat run behind my house, can lead to lengthy debates about bubblewrap — is it recyclable plastic, or landfill rubbish? Paper cups should be recyclable but the waterproof wax coating is not. And what about Christmas wrapping?
File used paper plates, or pizza boxes (who knew grease and cardboard was an insurmountable issue) incorrectly, and you lay waste to everyone’s efforts.
Of course one answer is to produce less packaging, and develop a bigger domestic recycling industry to cut down on the need to find foreign customers and on the energy needed to move waste. We also need to look beyond coloured bins; surely the combustible nature of a lot of dry waste means we could be converting it into energy, instead of landfill mountains.
Who doesn’t love a medal — as Muttley proved every week in Wacky Races. So I have no problem with society rewarding those who genuinely make a difference. On the other hand, anyone who has ever donated ‘significant’ funds to a political party or politician should be automatically ineligible for a public service honour. Maybe we should bin the New Years Honours List and just ask the Queen to “like” people on Facebook.
Finally: I just caught up with Eric Ernie and Me, and it is rather brilliant about Eric’s almost ruthless perfectionism, Ernie’s stifled ambition and the terror of a blank page. Kudos to writer Neil Forsyth, and some surprising but great casting choices
