Frank Turner - Wessex Boy (Official HD Video)

Considering I've spent the majority of my life traveling in the opposite direction of where I started out, I've never been able to relate much to those oh-so-sincere pop songs about how much your love your home town, or those tunes about going back to your roots (although I do love the Bon Jovi / Jennifer Nettles collaboration Who Says You Can't Go Home?)

That all changed when I heard that the song I've posted below was being played on Radio 1 - a folksy, acoustic number about being a "Wessex Boy" from my home city, Winchester!

It's a very cute song, and I like the video - filmed, of course, in the heart of the cathedral city. A big shout out to the talented Frank Turner for immortalizing the place of my birth into such a lovely song.

The Changing Face of the High Street - via Weblog Awards 2007

Well, somewhat surprisingly, scrubby journalist Neil Clark managed to win the Weblog Awards 2007 'Best UK Blog' by a surprising margin, with sterling support by some of his blogging buddies (both of whom actually deserved to win the coveted price far more than Neil!)

To give the man his credit, he won fair and square and has been fairly gracious about winning. In his victory post, he printed an article of his from last week's Morning Star - the very same article I quoted in my post below (because of it's ridiculous opening line.)

The charge sheet against the Anglo-Saxon neo-liberal model is a long one.

If you can work your way through all of it (Neil's typesetting leaves something to be desired and there aren't any gaps between paragraphs) you'll see it's actually a delightfully suburban piece lamenting the destruction of the great British High Street.

You know the drill. A Starbucks on every corner, normally opposite a McDonalds and a Pret a Manger. The big businesses swoop in and try to make all High Streets look the same. The Daily Telegraph do this sort of stuff much better and never vomit out the word 'neo-con' once.

But to give Neil his due, his article has a point. Whether I was working in lovely Winchester or gorgeous Newbury, the cobblestone streets and medieval buildings were home to a uniform list of shops. Next. Phones 4 U. HMV. Pizza Hut.

It never really bothered me that much, since Winchester and Newbury had lots of lovely independent shops around the corner and down the side streets - it was brimming with the 'Mom & Pop' places Neil is lamenting the end of.

But the fact is, both streets DID kind of look the same. In fact, so do many High Streets up and down England. The same shops. The same crap. The same pedestrian precincts and various cookie-cutter clones hawking The Big Issue.

It's all rather sad, really.

Neil points out that things are different in Europe - and that's true.

In Niort, the lovely city near where my parents live, the city ordinance has kept the big, national chains out of the centre of the city and billeted them in the 'big sheds' on the outskirts of town.

If you want to go to Conforama, Gifi, Gemo or Geant, you drive out to enormous industrial estates with plenty of parking and all the stuff you need.

The centre of Niort, on the other hand, is filled with small, independent shops, little bars and restaurants and has a lovely atmosphere. On market day, it's a lovely, bustling community full of French spirit and joie de vivre.

But the downside?

During other times of the week, it's deserted.

An absolute ghost town. You can walk down the street and not see a soul. Shops shut at weekends and often on Mondays, too. Unless people are in 'for a jolly' they normally do their shopping in the cheap, convenient 'big sheds.'

Winchester High Street, on the other hand, was always bustling. There were crowds of people at all hours, plus buskers playing their music. It was vibrant all the time - even if you sometimes had to put up with some git from Phones 4 U shoving a flyer in your face (and I refuse to read anything that replaces the word 'you' with the letter 'u')

That's purely because the big name shops - the nationals Neil was complaining about - were there, in the High Street, offering people what they wanted.

And what people want is the crux of the issue - and why we can all lament the demise of the High Street, but short of a fascist revolution, there's not much we can do about it.

People go where they'll get what they want. And the sad fact is that companies like McDonalds and Starbucks became international superpowers because they cater to that.

If somebody could convince us all to give up our double mocha choca lattes overnight, the likes of Seattle's finest would soon disappear into the ether - but the fact is, we need our overpriced caffeine hit and we'll go wherever we can get it.

The problem exists in America, just like Britain and France.

Just this Saturday, Tina and I got up early and nipped to the Post Office. On the drive back, we were feeling peckish and fancied some breakfast. We were just debating between Burger King (who do these sausage-in-croissant things) and McDonalds (with their famous McMuffins) when we spotted 'Steve's Place' on Livingston Avenue, which was an apologetic little cafe just opposite 'The King's.'

We popped in there instead of the big name places and had two delicious breakfast bagels (two eggs and cheese for her, sausage patty for me) and it was made fresh on the griddle, right in front of us. The bagels were fresh baked and the whole meal - which was about twice the size of the apologetic McDonald's portions - came to under five bucks.

Yet despite the delicious food, great service and cheap price, customers would still see the big Burger King sign and drive right past Steve's to get the processed, frozen, reheated stuff.

And that's the crux of the problem. People.

People are the ones who make the choice and when they vote with their dollars (or pounds, or Euros) they put little places like Steve's out of business to support bright, shiny Burger Kings, Starbucks and McDonalds.

The only way to solve what Neil Clark laughingly coined 'turbo-globalism' is to convince millions and millions of people to stop going for the 'cheap and easy' big-business options and support the little 'Mom & Pop' independents he's so fond of. And the problem with that?

99% of the world won't.

Oh, for stuck up Telegraph readers like me, who lived in gorgeous places like Winchester, that was fine. We'd pay a little more and establish that we supported the independents (besides, the McDonalds in Winchester is the most poorly run and inefficient in the world)

But the rest of England, Europe and the world won't.

They want things cheap and easy. They earned their money and they want to get the most out of it - and that's why places like Wal-Mart and their ilk will always survive.

So 'convincing' people is out.

The only other option is to eliminate free choice and 'make' people shop at the independents. And to a certain extent, that's what's happened in France.

Laws and ordinances have protected the city centres and kept out the big businesses. In France, with their unique and delightful mentality, that's worked well. France has deep socialist roots and such buggering about the mechanics of local business is tolerable.

I don't think the same can be said of England or America.

Besides. The very idea of 'telling' people which shops can and can't exist in our High Streets is pretty miserable. If some self-important officials start telling us where we can and can't spend our money, we're not living in a democracy any more.

People deserve the right the choose where they shop. The fact that we're all idiots and make the wrong choice doesn't change that in the slightest!

All I can say is: Ignore Neil Clark's angry socialist rhetoric - but think about his point. The answer doesn't lie in Neil's gloriously outdated socialist fantasy (in which the government wisely spends and redistributes our hard earned money for us.) But we don't have to lie down and let the likes of McDonalds and Starbucks walk all over us, either.

We have a say. We have a voice. And next time you feel like a jolt of caffeine or a quick breakfast snack, look at the five pound note in your hand and ask yourself whether you want to give it to: The smiling shareholders or a hard working guy trying to earn an honest living.

Then shop (and, in effect, vote) accordingly.

We can't turn back the clock on the big-business blitzkrieg - but we don't have to contribute to it. The choice is yours.

Nanowrimo Day 2

Nobody said it would be easy - but surprisingly, it is - thus far (and long may it continue.)

So far, on day two of Nanowrimo, my horror story is being squeezed onto the page at a nice pace. I'm not quite sure where it's going - in fact the story's already veered dramatically off course - but it's going and that's the main thing.

Last year, Nanowrimo was an enormous focus of mine. I used to scurry home from work to diligently work on Bootleg Boys. This year, I'm not quite so passionate or excited about it, but the discipline Nanowrimo encourages is helping me put a story down on paper that had previously only existed in my head.

If I had been writing this without a deadline, I'd have spent so much more time on description, setting and other important foundations - but digging right into the meat of the story is quite compelling. I wonder if it will be as easy to read as it is to write.

But, of course, that kind of thinking is the kiss of death to a Nanowrimo'er. Don't think. Just write. Make the bloody great mess and tidy it up in December.

All I know is that I've got a very confused NHS doctor, a wounded policeman, a terrified nurse and a mysterious priest holed up in an abandoned Royal Hampshire County Hospital - and there's a very dangerous creature lurking in the shadows.

And I'm only on page 14.

Goodbye WinFM

On about 22 hours, 107.2 WinFM will be no more.

The radio station that once gave me my leg up into the radio industry is being reinvented, changing it's name to 'Dream 107.2.'

I'm very sad to see 'Win' go. Unfortunately, due to intense competition in the region, plus the growing popularity of iPods and personal listening devices, WinFM has been struggling a bit recently with dropping listener figures and advertising revenue.

With this relaunch, Tindle Radio will hopefully put in the money, time and (most importantly) love needed to rejuvenate the station. Win deserves it!

And old hands like Phil Marriott are still leading the charge, which is great!

It's people like Phil who've made WinFM such an awesome little station. I've worked for quite a few radio stations in my time and thoughout the shifting markets, the one thing I've realised is that no other FM station ever seemed to earn such love and loyalty from it's staff.

There's something magical about little WinFM that makes everybody who works there put just that little bit more effort in.

I made a ton of great friends working with WinFM - and worked with some really talented folks. One of the best things about working for such a little station was that we all had a chance to muck in and do things, both on air and off. I was a humble advertising exec, but I still managed to become 'Rolski on the Road' in the morning and found myself dragged into the studio on more than one occasion.

Win was the launching point for many people's careers. Even people who had firmly established radio credentials before they came to Win probably still remember their time there fondly. I certainly have fond memories of working with them. It's bittersweet that those times are over.

Even now, having left WinFM a number of years ago and got a great job working for a national radio network over in America, I look back at my experiences of Win and consider them some of the finest times I've ever had working in the radio business.

Goodbye, WinFM. You'll be missed.

Crop Circle Madness

One thing Hampshire's never been short of are crop circles.
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These curious phenomena have appeared around Winchester for decades. Nobody really knows why - except the enormous rolling fields make a wonderful canvas for these distinctive markings - and it's easy to enjoy them in all their glory from the big roads like the M3 and the A31.

Tina's mother called the other day and randomly suggested Tina stand in the middle of one to enjoy it's mystical 'healing properties.'

Curiously, a crop circle appeared in a field of peas next to Intech just a few days later, on the A31/A272 junction. Since such startling serendipity had occurred, Tina and I decided to try her mother's theory out.

This was our introduction to the world of Crop Circles.
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Our Crop Circle.

Tina and I pulled to a halt on the A272 heading towards Petersfield to plot our trek to Winchester's latest crop circle. This was within spitting distance of the Matterley Bowl, site of some of the most famous crop circles originating from the early eighties.

As you can see from the picture - our crop circle looked deceptively close. In actual fact, the circle had an enormous diameter and was miles away from the road in the middle of an enormous field of infant peas.
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Tina and I bravely set off to try and locate the centre. This was more of an adventure than we'd originally anticipated. Obviously we didn't want to go trampling the farmer's crops, so we tried to locate tractor paths to wade through.
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The tractor trick was something we learned from Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, two Brits who started making their own crop circles back in the late seventies. In the nineties, they revealed their secrets - including that all crop circles are intersected by at least one set of tractor tracks. This allows chaps like them to get to their target without leaving a tell-tale path hacked through the crops. The lack of an entry point keeps a determined few still believing that crop circles have extraterrestial origins.
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Whether or not aliens were behind our crop circle, Tina and I found Bower and Chorley's tell-tale tractor tracks and headed off through the forest of peas.

Peas are actually surprisingly dense plants. By the time we'd gone too far to turn back, the ocean of Bird's Eye's favourite was practically swallowing us. I managed slightly better than Tina, being a mite taller. But the only way was onwards and upwards to our target...




One thing both Tina and I noticed was that the peas grew considerably taller and greener the closer to the circle we got. While they'd generally been at elbow length for my poor wife, they green crops started to swallow her up completely as we neared our destination.

Eventually we managed to reach the crop circle, which was immense. If it had been Doug and Dave (or some of their followers) who'd created this immense swirl of fallen crops, they'd been very busy boys.
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Once we'd made it, Tina soaked up the mystical energies and I did a little bit of research into the crop circle itself.
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The first thing that I noticed was the way the crops had been bent over.

The common theory - or at least what Chorley and Bower claim to do - is to gently flatten the crops to the ground with a length of plank - using a rope and a central point to create the geometrically perfect circles that this phenomenon is famed for.

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That wasn't exactly what we discovered in our crop circle. The peas had been flattened, yes. But they weren't pushed down in any one particular direction. Like badly brushed hair, clumps of the peas were crushed in all directions.
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The stalks themselves were bent and warped - many of them pulled out of the dirt completely. The couple of pictures I took didn't really manage to capture the strange conditions of the flattened crops.
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The thing that was really funny was exactly where the circle was located. As you can see from my 'cowboy pose' picture, just across the road from the crop circles was Winchester's science and technology institute, INTECH.
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With it's alien looking buildings and enormous satellite dishes, it's almost possible to believe that curious aliens could have been zooming around, checking it out. Why they'd stop in a field of peas to 'mark their territory' however is beyond me!

Anyway. After snapping a few pictures, Tina and I braved the seas of peas and waded our way back down the tractor paths towards our car.
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No close encounters occurred during our adventure!

Crop Circles

Our little crop circle adventure did inspire me to find out a little more about the phenomenon. I'd first heard about crop circles in the eighties and nineties, when I was growing up on a farm in Four Marks. We used to drive down the A31 (where Tina and I discovered our crop circle) and those massive fields of wheat, barley and oilseed rape were regular targets.

But crop circles actually have a far longer history than that. The first mention of crop circles actually took place back in 1678 (exactly three hundred years before Chorley and Bower started making theirs.)

A woodcut pamphlet was circulated around Hartford Shire depicting the devil cutting a strange circular pattern in a field of crops - the pamphlet explained that a farmer was so infuriated with the outrageous prices he was being charged for his crops being cut that he'd rather "the devil himself" scythed them down.

Next came John Rand Capron, a Victorian scientist, who recorded strange circular patterns in crop fields following a violent storm in Surrey during 1880. These seem to be the earliest dated 'crop circles' as we know them today. He blamed strange cyclones for causing them.

But crop circles didn't really hit the headlines until the 70's and 80's, when they started cropping up across Hampshire and Wiltshire in significant numbers. Newspapers reported that this sudden pandemic of circles were created by natural phenomenon. Other people suggested that they were created by aliens, marking their visiting sites after arriving on earth.

It appears the truth was far more mundane.

In the 1990s, Doug Chorley and Dave Bowers, the first and most famous 'circlemakers,' held up their hands and claimed responsibility.

They'd been busted by man's greatest enemy - the wife.

Dave Chorley's wife had pinned him down, wondering why he was disappearing off late and night and why there was such high mileage on their car. Dave reluctantly revealed that there wasn't 'another woman' like she suspected - just fields and fields of strange symbols he and Doug had created in crop fields across the county. She went to the papers and the rest is history.

Yet despite Dave Chorley's confession, crop circles continue to appear and people continue to believe that there are extraterrestial origins behind them. But who can really blame them?

When Tina and discovered 'our' local crop circle, we were filled with excitement and enthusiasm. While some student of Chorley and Bowers is probably responsible for it, Tina and I still found it fun to believe - even if only for a second - that this one is linked to something slightly more mysterious.

Crop Shop

After three months of fundraising, the big day came on Tuesday. Tina marched off to Pablo Alvarez' salon on Bridge Street to get her lovely locks lopped for charity.

Tina had originally set out to raise £5,000 for cancer charity Brainstrust. If she achieved that, she promised the shave her head completely! Perhaps that worked out as reverse psychology (plenty of people offered her money to keep her hair) because Tina missed her target. However, she still raised a whopping £620 and managed to help raise Brainstrust's profile with her exploits.

Fortunately reporters from the Hampshire Chronicle were on sight to record Pablo's handiwork.

Thanks to everybody who donated money to Tina's fundraising! See the results here.