I haven't been able to post much lately due to work (out of the office in my car all day) and also because I've been hiding under my bed and crying since finding out that I am now taking XXL clothing at Marks and Spencer. It really is quite depressing being told by a clothes label - "jeesus! You must be one fat f**cker! "

The thing is - I'm not! I'm not fat at all. But these days I can hardly find anything on the high street that fits me. It took a while around my 30's to come to terms with the fact that I can no longer buy clothes in Topman, and now at age 31 I've been reduced to foregoing fashion altogether and buying my sweaters in M&S. Soon I'll be wearing one of those huge grey dress-like t-shirts and shorts and undulating along the road like a wet lump of clay on a potter's wheel.

Although.... for some reason, my size has remained the same in expensive designer clothing...Which leads me to construct a conspiracy theory that states that clothes sizes are becoming progessively smaller now that all our clothing is manufactured in china and the far east, where the tiny factory workers can't comprehend the bloated size of us western infidels. Designer clothes made in europe seem to have not been affected by this oriental miniturisation. Am I the only one that this affects - or are others noticing this? Or is it simply a case of just coming to terms with the fact that I may be softening and spreading like an over-ripe brie?

I have to drive a fair way to and from work every day, and this means that I am often in the situation where I find something on the Today Programme is so utterly cringe-worthy that I can no longer listen to it. So I hit the button for Radio One and do a few minutes of Chris Moyles before hitting the button for Radio 4 again.

I don't even bother trying Radio 2.

Currently receiving Radio One daytime play is a new single by Britney Spears. Normally I tune out pop song lyrics because 99.9% of them are banal rhymes about 'love' and 'above', but this morning I listened to the Britney song and was intrigued to discover that she has managed to get a song about threesomes into the charts. Here are some choice lyrics:

I spent the weekend with friends near Hungerford, deep within The Home Counties sloane-ranger belt.

One thing of the few things that I admire in the upper middle classes is the idea of stealth wealth, which is taken to great lengths when it comes to car purchasing. Whilst everybody in the pub we were standing in were wearing matching Boden/ Jack Wills outfits and holding black labradors to signify their membership of the sloaney set, the cars are a far more subtle social signifier. To truly fit in and not appear too nouveau, it would seem you must only drive the following cars:

Dirty VW Passat estates

Gun metal grey Audi A4 estates

Very old silver Mercedes estates

Old model very dirty dark green Landrover Discovery

Real old proper Landrovers

Silver or black VW Golfs

Silver Subarus

I told my German girlfriend that in England, if you are ‘old’ rich you should not drive around in a flashy car, and if you are new rich you probably should. She thought this the most absurd idea ever, and went on to mutter darkly about ‘stupid crazy english people and their stupid crazy class obsessions’ Which I thought was a point well made.

Here's an interesting quote I found in a piece on passive smoking:

"Their conclusion was that ‘public consensus about the negative effects of passive smoke is so strong that it has become part of a truth regime that cannot be intelligibly questioned’."

It is only fair to note that this 'truth regime' springs up in every era (witch hunts, criminilized homosexuality, drugs laws, sexual inequality etc. have all been created by intransigent morality rather than hard logic) Whilst the list in brackets above has been dissapated by current societal mores, there seems to be quite a few new things that can no longer be 'intelligibly questioned' - global warming, smoking, paedophilia, child rearing, racism, rape...and soon even eating & drinking seem like they will be tightly monitored and constricted.

How did the libertarian acid house generation, who are now the urban dwelling bien pensant parents of our new crop of children, become such a massively prescriptive bunch?

In the past few days I have been lucky enough to read two excellent blog posts that both view the subject of 'Narrative' from very different perspectives - one about our place within the narrative of history, and the other one, of equal intellectual weight, about the narrative of rubbish cookery shows on satellite TV channels.

Narrative is a strange thing, it's something that everybody (apart from jazz musicians and beat poets) seems to need to varying extents. I suppose that people find the discontinuity of things with out beginnings and ends to be too overwhelming and it is a simplifying shortcut our multi-tasking brains desire.

A good historical narrative can be enlightening if used properly, using a narrative as a framework from which to hang various events and introduce a collection of characters and interesting asides.

The problem I have with narratives is that when we frame events within one, we can remove the chance of excitement and random events. Random events , luck and chance are part of the reason we can be bothered to get out of bed every morning. Narratives can also oversimplify and distort things in ways that are detrimental.

Above and beyond Brit’s examples of the use of narratives, others that annoy me are:

The narratives of recent popular science and history books - as best exemplified in Dava Sobel's 'Longitude' – this book was one of the real precursors to countless copycats. Giving a scientific discovery a neat beginning, middle and end, as well as good guys and bad guys (Humble Harrison versus arrogant toff Maskelyne) One of the most commonly repeated myths of science is that there is ever a ‘eureka!’ moment – most scientific discoveries happen through a combination of prevailing societal changes and endless repetition of boring experiments. Popular science books, TV shows and the like continually ignore this fact, and most people are happy to go along with the more ‘racy’ version, even if the long struggle of the scientist to clarify his argument (as in the case of Darwin) may be intrinsically just as interesting as the mythical ‘eureka!’

However, I have also had an excellent idea for a book about Dava Sobel in which I recount the way she took on the establishment by having an excellent idea of simplifying history in a really easy to read book, and became a millionaire overnight and lived happily ever after. I might cast 'facts' as the bad guy.

There are countless narratives on natural history shows – a good example is the recent brouhaha over the polar bear seen standing on a single melting iceberg, drifting out the sea. The voice over and the music pointed to a horrible death of the bear by starvation or drowning, due to nasty mankind’s evil global warming. Turns out that the bear was perfectly fine and the entire ‘backstory’ had been added in the editing suite. They are particularly bad at adding stories to family groups – painting animal parents with all sorts of noble human characteristics, and generally chopping up all the footage to make winners and losers, struggles and triumphs seem like they were captured in sequence on camera. I genuinely think that many people don’t realise this subterfuge at all when they watch nature programmes.

And the worst narrative of all is the one on X Factor – I have hardly watched the show, but the onscreen manipulation of the audience is breathtakingly obvious – in fact it would not surprise me in the slightest if the entire season is scripted from the moment the finalists are picked.

Some might argue that the addition of narratives to our lives (and it seems to be a phenomena that has recently upsurged) is a method for us to compartmentalise an increasingly complex world. However, I think it is mostly being propagated by cynical people like Cowell and other media execs as a pablum for our increasingly infantilized population. Turning life from confusing reality into a simple child's storybook.

Whilst bimbling around oop north I decided to visit the top of a large hill, known as The Stang. I had been there previously, at approximately the same time of year, although it had been dusted in beautiful snow before. I visited again because it was the place I saw my first Grouse, and I wanted to see if there were any more to be found.
Just over the brow of the hill I parked my car in the same place as last time, killed the engine and wound down the window on the wind-less side. Almost immediately a group of male grouse appeared on some grassy tussocks before me and began fluttering around each other, echoing their marvellous call
'go back!go back!go back!'. Pretty soon, other grouse joined in and we could see their white spectacled heads popping up everywhere across the mottled heather. Above is a blurry long distance shot I took of one about 20 metres from the car.

As a southener I find the grouse very exotic and I must say that seeing them again in such profusion made my spirits soar. They are certainly an altogether more sensible bird than a pheasant.

...and then, as a bonus, as we were driving back down the hill again towards the pub, this lovely lady below was standing very still and waiting for us to take their photo!

Back from a weekend in the distant North - (only the second time that I have ever ventured past Leeds). We spent our time wandering around the area close to Barnard Castle which all in all seemed a nice little place.

Best part of our trip though had to be the simply mind-bogglingly awful hotel that we stayed in on Saturday night. The photo above doesn't begin to come close to capturing the feeling as we turned down the blasted yew covered approach in the driving rain close to midnight, somewhere in the remote hills outside Richmond. Passing through the arch of a ruined abbey, the glowering pile hove into view, surrounded by mist and mostly plunged in darkness. There were no other guests. We sat laughing in the car for a while before running through the rain to be greeted at the door by a scruffy old man who booked us in with hardly a word.

The staircase was crowded with dusty black stags heads, and a murky painting of a pack of wolves savaging a deer covered in blood. By this stage we were in hysterics. It could not have been more spooky! As the only guests using one of the 30 or so rooms, we were given a upgraded suite at no extra cost, with a tiny dark four-poster bed. Luckily we experienced no ghostly visitations in the night, although I was very worried about my feet sticking out into the pitch-black room.

For breakfast we sat alone in the centre of a large echoing dining room and were served an appalling grey full english by an eastern european man/woman whose only words were 'tea?coffee?'. On check-out, the scruffy man yet again said almost nothing. How the hotel survives is beyond me, yet we drove away laughing and thinking that it was so bad, it was almost excellent.

I'm here this weekend ^ - going for some bracing walks in the dales! will report back next week!

A list of things that arn't very old that 20 somethings probably wouldn't even know about:

...not saying I liked many of them (I HATED the Levellers), just that I can imagine plenty of kids who are 20 now who were 5 or 6 at the time and wouldn't know anything about this stuff. I'm sure Ned's Atomic Dustbin must be due a comeback by now

Over here, Gaw talks about the march of time and the fading of shared experiences. I was thinking about something on a similar theme only this week, as I stood in an excellent pub with my father as he held court with his cronies.

We all know pubs are dying, thats a given, and people of my generation seem to be as upset about it as everyone else. But it's a fact that people of my age group simply don't use the pub as older people do. For men of my father's age, the pub is an automatic destination. Staying the night in a strange town? Sniff out a welcoming looking hostelry and chat with some locals at the bar. This is so instinctively done that I honestly think if you asked him he would say that it's not something he would think about, it's just something you do.

For people of my age group who are uninterested in the binge-drinking townie barns that have infected the nation, pubs seem to have lost their pull. None of my contemporaries would go regularly to a pub on week nights, as they think this would affect their work performance - something that would never occur to a man like my father. They might go on a friday night for a few, but only with friends and never alone, and I can't imagine many of them striking up a conversation at the bar.

We've become so much more insular. We feel no compulsion to reach out to others, no draw in the shared camraderie of some blokes having some pints, playing spoof and setting the world to rights. I feel no special affinity to drinking culture particularly, but I do feel that we are losing a valuable part of a cohesive society, the ability to connect if only for a short period of time, and have to engage in conversation with someone who may be from an entirely different background to yourself. Being able to do this is a valuable tool in life, and it's a shame that our youth may never learn the joy to be had in briefly becoming concious of other lives and cultures, and the exitement of being in a place where the path of the evening becomes random and uncertain, a place where friends can be made, and adventures can happen.