World of more

In my job as an IT consultant for a largish consultancy, I got involved in a project where the primary pitch to the client was along the lines of: "build an e-commerce website, the stock market will love you for it." It was true, this was 2000 and the market was still enjoying the early hand-holding stage of its New Economy romance. Any venture with the prefix e- attracted press and cash like a new popstar, and everyone was scared they were going to miss the boat. The second part of the pitch was: "you're a very traditional [read bureaucratic] company, you can't do e-commerce, you should build a separate business with a separate culture to succeed, we can do it for you". Classic consulting of the type my company just doesn't do, we seem to prefer to spend our time building systems rather than spouting about the latest fads, and certainly never believe that we're best placed to do the high level strategy consulting. Amazingly the client agreed to ...

For a good portion of my life to date, I thought I would change the world. Maybe I'd invent a new form of transport, such as cars on legs or the hover bike. Perhaps I'd write a novel that quietly and unfussily became a life changing favourite of millions. Perhaps I'd rival Lance Armstrong for domination of the professional cycling calendar. With age my grandeur driven dreams are scaling back; I'd settle for being a junior cabinet minister or assistant manager of a non-league football club. But I still seize the chance to change the world for the better whenever I can. And so it came to pass that I made a suggestion to our company procurement department that we get some better Post-It notes, as the packs that fill our cupboards only barely qualify for the adjective adhesive and have the embarrassing habit of fluttering from the wall like autumn leaves as long workshops drone on and on. In a transparent attempt to shame me, my suggestion did not disappear into the n...

Over a long enough time period, nothing happens to anybody. For proof, conduct the following simple experiment: phone a friend you haven't spoken to for at least six months and ask them what they've been up to, chances are they will reply something similar to "ah, nothing much". If you're me the conversation will then die, and you will have to invent a dinner that has just finished cooking, a sudden knock on the door or a small housefire as an excuse to hang up and end the embarrassing silence. Social faux pas aside, I hope you concur that I have proved nothing happens to to anybody. Now try this experiment: phone another friend you haven't spoken to for at least six months and ask them "what did you do yesterday?". Don't accept a short answer, genuinely quiz them about where they were when they woke up, how they got to work, what happened to them during the day. Lo and behold, plenty of things happen to everybody all the time. If you lis...

Compared to our previous (two? three?) separations, this one was remarkably free of histrionics. Neither tears nor angry words clouded the final severing of ties, just a fug of inevitable and knowing sadness that surrounded us as we sat in the quiet Monday night pub and she said the words that despatched me to singledom. Her face normally carries a pale sheen of anxiety when she's about to break bad news; a patina of stress and bottled-up emotion laid over a foundation of worried sleep. Her skin looked healthy this time and there was a previously absent calm certainty in her voice that invested her words with weight and credibility. After a mostly fun year of weekends and nights together, I'd suspected that the next step in our relationship would be make or break. By December, I predicted to myself, we would either be choosing curtains together in Peter Jones or individually working out whether to send each other Christmas cards. We'd not really talked much about the f...

Based on a sample size of one gig and two albums, I am confident in my assessment that the Drive By Truckers are peerless rock gods. Barry introduced me to The Dirty South, their latest album, praising it and playing it on one of our innumerable trips to the hills. It didn't stand out that much alongside all the other folk/rock he subjects me to on those long car journeys but when he offered me a spare ticket to a rare London gig I thought it would make an interesting departure from a normal week night out. At the small and sweaty Camden Lock, in a not-quite-full venue peopled by middle-aged rockers, slightly misplaced London fashionistas and a baffled me, the five Truckers sauntered out unassumingly on stage and then took control of the evening. Every rock and roll cliche came true in the small gap between where I listened slack-jawed and where created their tender and ferocious sound. They played with such obvious enjoyment and drunken exuberance I was converted from dispassio...

Hi there, you don't really know me. I'm your best friend from when you were five, our mums kind of kept in touch and so you had to invite me to your wedding. Or maybe I'm a close school friend's new boyfriend. Perhaps I just wondered off the street, you didn't seem to mind. Anyway, I wanted to thank you for the great time I had at your wedding. I enjoyed the ceremony. I could only just pick you out of a police line-up if pressed, so it was hardly an emotionally charged experience for me, but you chose some good readings and it was all clearly heartfelt and blessedly short. The bride looked beautiful, but perhaps she's always gorgeous, I've got no history to compare it to. Your great aunt's an interesting character isn't she? As I didn't know anybody else and she looked lonely I wound up talking with her for over an hour whilst the photos were being taken. Once you get past her hearing problems she's got plenty of tales to tell; life i...

For convincing proof that atheists must be correct, look no further than the panda. A glamorous icon for the WWF and cuddly toy of countless pre-pubescent girls it may be, but it's also clearly the worst designed animal ever. Consider: the average male panda weighs 100kg, that's bigger than me and nearly half the size of my flatmate. Its padded paws (the panda, not my flatmate) hide fearsome claws and vicious incisors line its mouth. It is, in short, plenty capable of killing and eating tasty mammals and reptiles (the panda, not my flatmate, although he probably could do). Yet, a few million years back, pandas decided to give up eating meat and focus instead on bamboo. Whatever prompted their decision to become vegetarians - a dodgy madras, a flyer from Greenpeace - dietary efficiency was not a consideration; they can only extract about 20% of the nutritional value of the green shoots they cram into their mouth. They shit nearly pure bamboo. They have to spend almost th...

And another thing while I'm on the subject of the Chinese language : it's impossible to speak. Well, obviously it's not impossible, 1.3 billion people are currently proving me hopelessly wrong, but you can't just flick through the language section of a guide book and just pick up some useful phrases like you can with European languages*. You don't know that to start with though, so it's easy to convince yourself that Chinese is like all the other languages you've attempted on holiday. Flicking through the the pinyin gives you nothing to contradict your initial belief; spicy chicken is simply gong bao ji din . That looks pretty straightforward, how difficult can it be to order? You spent a week in Sardinia without any Italian language and got by just saying prego and molto bene , Mandarin looks a cinch. Foxed copy of the Lonely Planet in hand then, you march into a restaurant, hold up four fingers in case the waitress has difficulty counting the number o...

On a freezing cold minibus, driving over icy freeways from Xi'an to the wondrous Hua Shan , the Chinese Vincent d'Onofrio lookalike sitting next to me is whiling away the hours like any Western teenager - ferociously texting on two phones simultaneously. As I watch over his shoulder, fascinated, he is filling screen after screen with Chinese characters using just a standard numeric keypad. I have no idea how he's doing it. The spare and elegant efficiency of the Roman alphabet, with its tiny set of written symbols capable of supporting every word known to man and plenty more besides, can be fully appreciated when compared with the beautiful mess that Mandarin seems to be. If I were running a project to design the written representation of a spoken language and my technical architect came back with written Chinese I'd be livid. Each morpheme has its own symbol or logogram , and by some counts there are 60,000 such logograms. According to the Lonely Planet, even the...