There’s a report flashing out across the tabloids about The Britster driving around in her white Mini Cooper (nice wheels) wearing curlers and using the baby-seat pointing the wrong way. There’s a picture too…WHICH LOOKS LIKE IT WAS TAKEN FROM A HELICOPTER!

And even if the pic was not taken from a chopper but from a nearby hilltop by some desperate, stalker of a paparazzo with a long lens it just raises the question: ISN’T THERE SOMETHING BETTER FOR THEM TO DO?

I remember Cher telling me a story about how she woke up one Sunday morning to find there was no milk in the fridge. So, because she’s decent kind of human, instead of screaming for a gofer she got in her car and drove to the 7-11 to buy herself a quart of her favourite lactose product. And, like most people do early on a Sunday morning when going to the market, she went in trainers and some old and comfortable clothes without bothering with make-up or an Oscar-ready hair-do.

As she was about to emerge from the market, milk in hand, she spotted, lying in wait like a SWAT team armed with Nikons and Canons, not one but a number of shutterbugs. Perhaps it’s not appropriate to share with the world what her solution was but again it raises the question: ISN’T THERE SOMETHING MORE IMPORTANT FOR THESE GUYS TO DO?

Here’s my If-Dick-were-King-for-a-day solution. If you wield a camera professionally and insist on taking intrusive pictures of famous people doing regular things without their permission (and by the way – well done ladies for for driving yourselves and running your own errands – I know a lot of people don’t) then you have to spend an equal amount of time in Darfur, Iraq, Antartica or somewhere very unglamorous doing something equally intrusive but also useful for the common good.

What makes all of this more annoying is that every member of the paparazzi I have ever met has been British. I thought we had better manners than that.
Update: According to CNN.com (May 25th) 60% of Moms think Britney is getting an unfair rap from the Media. It wasn’t just me then.

“I seem to spend my whole life wrestling resentfully with automated switchboards, waiting resentfully at home all day for deliveries that don’t arrive, resentfully joining immense queues in the post office, and generally wondering, resentfully, “Isn’t this transaction of mutual benefit to both sides? So why am I not being met half way here? Why do these people never put themselves in my shoes? Why do I always have to put myself in theirs? Why am I the one doing this?””

So writes Lynne Truss in her new volume Talk To The Hand. The writer of the essential Eats, Shoots & Leaves exclaims: “This book is, obviously, a big, systematic moan about modern life.” before going on a fascinating 200 page rant about why she is annoyed by these scourges of modern society before inevitably concluding “It is time to be plain at last. Rudeness is bad. Manners are good.”

I found it so soothing to read an entire chapter by someone else who is as frustrated as I am when sitting in a quiet restaurant only to have to listen to the person five tables away verbally abusing their better half or discussing personal medical issues or arranging a series of trysts with a number of eager lovers. Don’t they understand this is not appropriate?

I shared her fear of confronting that person who drops the remains of their McDonald’s meal on my front lawn lest I receive that universal disclaimer to “F. off!” before being threatened with some kind of injury. Her conclusion, with which I can only concur, is that “F. off!” has become the universal substitute for “I’m sorry” and is the default, knee-jerk reaction to anything which resembles criticism.

My own personal anecdote in supreme rudeness started when I was once nearly killed on my bike by an enormous SUV which lurched out in front of me in busy traffic before coming to a sudden stop. When I banged on the window of the truck to complain I watched as a small woman struggled to juggle the gears, the electric window, her child, a king-size, hot, foaming latte and her cell phone. “What’s your problem?” she whined when the window finally descended. When I explained that she had very nearly killed me she replied: “Can’t you see I’m on the f***ing telephone?”

Of course the very people who need to will never read this book and that’s just frustrating in itself.

A few weeks back Ms. K gave me 1,000 PLACES TO SEE BEFORE YOU DIE (Patricia Schultz, Workman publishing). The title has everything in it doesn’t it? Hope, wonder, death. It also raises the big Q – how will I get to do all that?

On a quick perusal I was delighted to find out that I’ve only got 796 places left to go. Then I started reading it. It’s 974 pages long – there’s a good chance I’ll be dead before I finish the book let alone visit those other 796 places. But on page 16 of the intro I found two very useful comments…

More important than packing a bag full of money pack a bag full of patience and curiosity; allow yourself – encourage yourself – to be sidetracked and to get lost. There’s no such thing as a bad trip, just good travel stories to tell back home. Always travel with a smile and remember you’re the one with the strange customs visiting someone else’s country.

and…

As Mark Twain once said: Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the things you did.

Amen to that.

P.S. (a few days later) I’m now reading a travel book by Rick Steve. Here’s his thoughts: Be fanatically positive and militantly optimistic. If something’s not to your liking, change your liking. Travel is addictive. It can make you a happier American as well as a citizen of the world. Our earth is home to six million equally important people.

There’s two sentences there that have just sucked the air out of my self-obsessed lungs: Our earth is home to six million equally important people. If something’s not to your liking, change your liking.

If I can master all that by tea-time this will have been a good day.

I walked out of the coffee shop in a good mood even though it was raining. There was a bounce to my feet as the rain dripped from my umbrella and I looked forward to the weekend…and then I saw the guy pulling away from the parking space next to mine was rolling up his window. As I approached my car I could see why. There were ugly, large, foaming gobs of spit all over the side of my car still sliding down the door. I’d never seen so much spit. And what was that? Was it a little puff of steam coming from the particluarly thick hunk of loogie on the door handle?

At the request of my dearly beloved I’d just returned from dropping off a large box of clothing at a downtown charity shop. Was this my payment? No good deed goes unpunished I suppose. I am left here quivering with indignation, wishing the anger would subside, and left with this forever to be unanswered question: Dear Mr. White-Jetta-Driver, was that really necessary?

I’ve raced back to Blighty to shoot a video for Il Divo and Toni Braxton which will become the anthem for this years World Cup. As I stepped of the plane a few days ago I heard a Heathrow worker singing Gene Pitney’s “24 Hours From Tulsa” and found myself singing it for the rest of the day.

Then I heard he’d died in the Cardiff Hilton. They said he’d taken a nap fully clothed and never woke up.

And now it’s a cold Sunday evening and guess where I’m staying? Yup – in the Cardiff Hilton room 423. I wonder if the bed I just took a nap on is the same one where Gene took his final zzz last week? Where does one go to find out information like that?

The year is 1980 and Jona Lewie suddenly and unexpectedly had a hit which meant an appearance, at very short notice, on the Beeb’s famous Top Of The Pops. What Jona didn’t have was a band. Step forward Bob Andrews on keyboards and your humble correspondent on bass guitar. The drummer was Bob’s friend John Hewitt but who those hot babes are I have no idea. Prepare to have your socks knocked off…(Now if I can only find a link to “Stop The Cavalry” or the Snowmen’s “Hokey Cokey”)…

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ4-IY8Iqy0

Today’s news is full of pictures of irate Muslims getting extremely uptight about a bunch of cartoons.

So I am intrigued by the synchronicity of a quote I discovered this week in White Gold another Giles Milton book about the white slave trade in Africa in the 18th century: “(writer Simon) Ockley was fascinated by Islamic culture and horrified at the general level of English ignorance and prejudice on the subject. He…argued that a deeper understanding of Islam was ‘more necessary than the being acquainted with the history of any people whatsoever.’ (In Ockley’s) monumental History of the Saracens…he took a sideswipe at all who ‘contented themselves in despising eastern nations and looking upon them as brutes and barbarians.’

“Ockley’s book included the Sentences of Ali, a collection of maxims by the Prophet Mohammed’s son-in-law, which Ockley believed to be both instructive and wise…’There is enough, even in this little handful, to vindicate…the poor injured Arabians from the imputation of that gross ignorance fastened upon them by modern novices.”

Ockley wrote these words in 1718.

And now 288 years later we’re still in the crapper. Granted Milton’s book describes at great length and in appalling detail the horrific torture the white slaves were put to while incarcerated in Morocco but the thought remains: What have we learnt in these intervening 3 centuries with all our instant messaging, cell-phones, CNN updates and our global village? Certainly not understanding or tolerance of our neighbours.

I was given “Nathaniel’s Nutmeg” by Giles Milton as a gift in 1999 but only started reading it last week. The tale seems frighteningly prescient reading it now – far more so than if I’d read the book when I’d received it.

Nathaniel’s Nutmeg is a historical novel documenting in great detail the excessive lengths the English and Dutch went to during the first half of the 17th century to obtain that most valuable of commodities: nutmeg. At the height of their endeavors the two countries were at war with each other spending millions of pounds and guilders to send troops, merchants, engineers and settlers half-way round the world so that the precious spice could be brought back and sold in spice-hungry Europe. Thousands of men died in the conflict and there were frequent scandals involving imprisonment, torture, hideous untimely deaths, cronyism, mystery illnesses and the fleecing of vast quantities of wealth by a well connected elite at the expense of the common man.

Sound familiar? Look at the daily news from Iraq and the Middle East and by substituting oil for nutmeg all that’s missing is another powerful country for us to be at war with.

The Dutch and the English, both enormously rich and powerful countries at the time, squabbled for decades and eventually it all came down to a small island called Run which is about the length of your average Jumbo Jet runway. After a blockade which lasted four years the Dutch kicked the Anglos off the miniscule plot and had the entire East Indies to themselves. Rubbing their hands together with glee and anticipated security they continued to ship the as-valuable-as-gold nutmeg back to Europe where the owners of the Dutch East India Company grew wealthier and fatter.

In a separate incident a couple of oceans and continents away the English had booted the Dutch from a small settlement called New Amsterdam without a single shot being fired and had built themsleves a shiny new fort. The Dutch were furious.

Finally the squabbling super-powers agreed to talk and when they totted up the score the Cloggies and the Limeys both realised they’d spent fortunes and whined that the other side owed them gazillions in lost trade and stolen foreign real estate but the deal-breaker was ownership of the two small islands: the Limeys wanted Run back and the Cloggies wanted New Amsterdam back.

An agreement was reached. The Dutch got to keep Run and their precious nutmeg trade and the English got to keep New Amsterdam, which they promptly christened New York, and then went off in search of other opportunities to exploit innocent folk and make fortunes in what would become India.

And now 350 years later here’s the update. The English and the Dutch are fast friends and both rather small players on the world stage; Run is an “unknown and unspoiled atoll” in a region whose ‘capital’ has “a couple of stores, a fish market, two streets, two cars…and the former Dutch governor’s residence which today lies empty and abandoned,”; New York is worth considerably more which is of little use to the English as they no longer own it; and, most importantly, nutmeg is no longer a commodity on which huge fortunes and empires are built. The good news is that Holland is full of Indonesian restuarants and England full of Indian ones.

Last year while visiting Houston I noticed to my amusement that the place is filled with Vietnamese restaurants. They say those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Am I being too naive, too pessimistic, too simplistic to suggest that within a century or two oil will be a valueless commodity, that America will no longer be a superpower, and that every street in America will have its own Iraqi Restaurant?

At the end of the tale it is quoted that, “Under King Charles benevolent rule the directors (of the East India Company) were granted…extensive rights: to acquire territory, declare war, command troops, and excercise civil and criminal jurisdiction.” For King Charles read Bush for the East India Company read…well, you know the usual suspects.

I read someone’s christmas blog today which said: “Jesus Christ died 2005 years ago – Get over it!”

I thought this was hysterically funny, laughed out loud and thus felt the need to share it with you. Though…er…if he was born on Christmas Day 2005 years ago and he died at 33 doesn’t that mean he died 1972 years ago? And what incredibly bad luck being born on Christmas Day too. No extra presents.

Anyway what ever creed, color, orientation you may be HAPPY NEW YEAR. And Peace.