Dammit, Janet, am I parent or child?

Janet Street-Porter's column in yesterday's Independent On Sunday was a logical car crash, except that her intellect seems to have had a head-on collision with itself.

In celebrating Father's Day, she begins by praising parents as "unsung heroes" and ends by concluding that the solution to society's ills is for government to take on the responsibility that parents are seemingly incapable of exercising for themselves.

Having criticised politicians for blaming society's ills on parents, she then suggests that the solution to boozy Britain is to regulate the price of alcohol, which is mostly an attack on adult drinkers who can't be trusted to regulate their own alcohol intake. Grown-ups, who should be left to make their own decisions, will thus be penalised for the government's failure to police existing laws to prevent under-age drinking. Who suffers? The poor. And if those parents are irresponsible alcoholics, the only effect will be more money being extracted from adult drinkers by the government, leaving them less to spend on their children.

Street-Porter seems unable to make a point without contradicting herself. Having stated that "the vast majority [of modern teenagers] drink exactly as I did at their age," she then states in the very next sentence: "The simple reason why many kids drink today is because drink is everywhere." So, if it wasn't a problem then, why is now? Why do we need to "impose a strict price per unit of alcohol, a move demanded by every important medical body in the UK"?

Medical organisations have no expertise in this field. They might know about the medical effects of alcohol, but they are not remotely qualified to pontificate on how pricing affects behaviour, still less on whether treating adults like children is sound social policy. Her article is shot through with the absolute belief that parents are incapable of looking after their children and that the government needs to step in.

Having urged politicians and commentators to get off parents' backs, Street-Porter then urges them to leap right back on our backs with more heavy-handed, micro-management regulation of individual behaviour. She starts by lambasting those who criticise parents and ends by joining their ranks.

Mark and John

I wrote this in October 2009. I can't remember why.

John and Mark at Box Hill, May 1983

It’s not a great photo: it was taken at Box Hill, the famous Surrey beauty spot, in May 1983 and my East German camera’s four functions: shutter, aperture, focus and wind-on, were all strictly manual. So when my brother John clambered onto my brother Mark’s shoulders there was no time to adjust the exposure or compose the picture properly. I just focused and pressed the shutter. Imperfect it might have been, but I did get this one shot.

A year later we returned to Box Hill, but this time we left Mark there: his ashes barely stirred by the windless air. Now, a year after John’s death, we are still waiting to do the same for him. 

When someone dies suddenly, friends will comfort you with platitudes like “at least he didn’t suffer”. When dying is long and drawn out, there is supposed to be comfort in the fact that we have time to say goodbye, put our affairs in order, spread the grief.

In April 1984 I was at university in Birmingham, John was a soldier serving in the Falkland Islands, our eldest brother Tony was preparing to go to polytechnic in Stoke and Mark had stayed in the Croydon area after our parents had moved out to Hampshire.

On Saturday 7 April, Tony and I were visiting Mark and we went to see some friends in a drama revue. During the show, our friend Tim came on stage wearing a sweatshirt with the legend “Falkland Islands 1984”. It could only mean one thing: John was back! In the bar afterwards, I commented that this might be the last time all four of us would be together. I did have my camera but couldn’t get everyone together, so I let the moment pass.

Two days later, Mark twisted the throttle on his Laverda slightly too hard as he accelerated up Oakwood Avenue in Purley. The bike skidded into a parked car while Mark was thrown into – and through – a lamp-post. He took the full impact on the chest; his heart was torn open as it was pressed against his vertebrae. The lamp-post was broken in three. Mark was dead before he hit the ground.

There is no comfort. Death is cruel and agonising. Mark’s death was a sudden, enormous horror that had to be swallowed painfully whole. In the days that followed, the worst times were the mornings: that shapeless world between sleep and wake where for just a moment you don’t know what is real and what was a dream. Every morning for weeks afterwards, there was that half-second of hope that it had been a nightmare, before full consciousness tumbled in and crushed it.

John was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 1990, and this merciless condition ripped his body away from him nerve by nerve, I thought somehow that the pain at the end would be less; that I would spread my grief out over years, paying it off in instalments; with a smaller payment to come at the end.

I was wrong. If anything it was worse. I wasn’t paying off a debt of grief: I was saving it up. It paid out with interest last December when one infection too many put him in hospital and he never came out.

I had planned to see him the next day, but the day he died was my company’s Christmas ‘do’: while I was winning a go-kart race, my phone was ringing in my jacket pocket in an empty changing room. His carer never left a message or sent a text, and I didn’t notice the missed call till Dad called to tell me John had died.

We finally had a funeral for John. Being the nearest to the crematorium, I got the job of collecting his ashes (3.47 kg: he ain't heavy). Chance took me close to where Mark had died, so I photographed John's ashes on the spot where it had happened 26 years before. I took a photo – again, not a great one – simply because I couldn't think of a reason not to. The kerb is so pock-marked you can't even see the damage any more.

After nearly two decades of knowing what the end would be, he still died alone. That still hurts. I find no comfort in the platitudes of “lives lived to the full” or “our lives enriched by having known them”. Mark would have been 47 in December; John 48 in September. They should still be here and I’m angry and hurt that they’re not. Grief is the price we pay for surviving.

There hasn’t been a funeral yet. John left his body to science and science still hasn’t finished with it. I don’t care for funerals anyway.

How to end an album and start a decade

Someone was asking about favourite song endings recently, and I couldn't get further than the somewhat obscure Hard Lovin' Man. Why? Because it makes a statement not just about the band that recorded it but about a whole decade.

Cacophonous guitar noise and heavy rock were still new when Deep Purple recorded this song on the first day of a new decade: 1 January 1970. Woodstock was only four months in the past, Hendrix was still alive and The Beatles had yet to record their final song. But the 60s were over, and the 70s were to be a very different decade.

Deep Purple were cheifly known in Britain at the time as the band that had recorded Concerto For Group And Orchestra with the London Philharmonic, a piece of experimentation that epitomised the limitless ambition of the 60s when there seemed no boundaries to what popular music could do in a world that could only get better. The disillusionment of the 70s prompted a tougher attitude that found its musical apogee (or nadir, according to your taste) in punk rock. The roots of that descent into anarchy are planted here.

Guitarist Ritchie Blackmore hated the Concerto and wanted the band (complete with new singer Ian Gillan and new bassist Roger Glover) to show that hard rock was the way forward. That statement was encapsulated in the title of the album, which also gave someone a wickedly simple yet memorable idea for the cover. "If this fails," Blackmore promised, "I'll play with orchestras for the rest of my life." In Rock was his rebellion, blasting in with a surge of electrical noise that kicked into 'Speed King'. The last track, 'Hard Lovin' Man', ended the same way, bookending the album perfectly.

'Hard Lovin' Man' gallops along, with a thumping drumbeat and driving bassline, overlaid by screamed vocals and searing guitar. Jon Lord, composer of the earlier Concerto, plays his organ barely in tune, as if any kind of melody would be an insult during such a brutal sonic assault.

After five-and-a-half minutes, the band sounds like it's going for a fade-out to a fast, heavy song, but Blackmore suddenly veers off on his own. Eventually the band stops but Blackmore carries on with some screeching, tuneless guitar noise. The band comes back in again, trying to corral the guitarist, but he's having none of it. Chaos triumphs over order and the band is pulled under, like the second Terminator briefly re-emerging in agony before sinking back into the molten steel . The fun new toy that was stereo enabled the guitar to tear from speaker to speaker like a victorious gladiator doing a lap of honour.

The track (and album) finally ends as the unaccompanied guitar screams, howls and eventually subsides into squeaks and pops, like the sound of tinkling glass that follows a catastrophic car crash. Blackmore has made his statement.

The worst writer on Fleet Street

I have plenty of bad habits, but self-deprecation is one of the worst. But if I'm honest with myself, I'm actually a good editor, which is lucky, since that's what I'm paid for. The downside is that it does strange things to one's brain, such that even now I'm worrying about the second comma in that last sentence. Or should that be 'past sentence'? Still, at least I know that the question mark goes outside the quote marks. And so on. And don't ask whether I should allow myself a verbless sentence like the last one. Or whether I should start a sentence with 'and'. Or 'but'. Or 'or'. Want a fight about it? Bring it on. I'm good at this. Being a good editor doesn't mean I'm any good at writing of course, but if you've got this far then you're probably prepared to give me the benefit of the doubt.

One rule of editing is that any piece can be improved by deleting the first paragraph and the first sentence of the next, so you can ignore all that preamble and start here. My job means dealing with 80,000-word screeds by experts who know everything about their business but next to nothing about communicating in English. I edit their work, I suggest ways to improve it and I warn the ambitious ones against trying to produce great literature, but I don't expect much. However, I do expect much from professional writers, which brings me to Kevin McCarra of The Guardian.

In a world where talented journalists can't find work, it offends me that one of the best newspapers in the land employs, on staff, a chief sports writer who cannot write.

I don't want to be an internet troll here. I have two friends who write for the same paper as freelances, one of whom has just been subjected to a virulent piece of abuse from a blogger who has made nasty and inaccurate assumptions about her based purely on her name. I'm sure McCarra is a nice guy who knows his subject and I don't want to upset him beyond saying he should go on a writing course. And I can't believe I'm the first person to have suggested this. Look at the opening paragraph of his report on Birmingham City's victory over Arsenal in the Carling Cup final on Sunday:

If Birmingham City held one advantage over Arsenal it lay in the art of endurance. A side striving not to fall out of the Premier League reached a peak in their history by defeating opponents who took far too long to discover impetus in this Carling Cup final. After 89 minutes, the substitute Obafemi Martins thrived on hapless defending to notch the winner. Alex McLeish's side had brought the club their first trophy since taking this prize in 1963.

This is not a paragraph. It's a vaguely related set of sentences that bear little or no relation to each other. It could almost be written as bullet points, the flow is so lacking, and yet it's the first paragraph of the paper's main report. It might be forgiveable if McCarra had been attempting a stylistic opening (albeit a botched one), but all his writing is like this.

Not having a thread is bad enough, but losing it half-way through a sentence is simply incompetent. Let's see how McCarra handles the winning goal in a major cup competition:

Koscielny moved as if to kick a long ball from Foster and distracted his goalkeeper Wojciech Szczesny. He then let possession spill to the Nigerian Martins, who…

Well, we're getting really excited here, since this is a rare description of a goal (Robin Van Persie scored a terrific equaliser for Arsenal, but his name is not even mentioned in McCarra's report). We're so excited, we can almost ignore the missing comma or the fact that we don't know whether "he" refers to Koscielny or Szczesny (readers will assume it's the defender, but anyone who saw it knows he must be talking about the goalkeeper). We just want to know what Martins did. Did he…

pounce on the loose ball and stroke it into an empty net

react fastest with a striker's instinct to follow up and score

charge into the penalty area to punish the mistake, tearing the Gunners' dreams to tatters and sending the Birmingham fans into raptures

Any of those standard football-reporter clichés would do, but no, this is McCarra's effort:

He then let possession spill to the Nigerian Martins, who came to Birmingham last month on loan from the Russian club Rubin Kazan.

And that's the complete description. There really is no excuse for this. It's not a case of bad sub-editing. Heaven knows, I've been a sub-editor and I've fouled up enough good pieces with inept subbing, and bad subbing doesn't look like that, unless The Guardian employs a sub whose only task is to squeeze the rhythm and logic out of all McCarra's work. Maybe the same sub also inserted the nonsensical word "co-conspirators", to distinguish those who conspire together from one who conspires alone.

This rant isn't part of a personal grudge. Do you think I do unpaid, fantasy subbing on every article I read? That's what Wikipedia is for. McCarra only caught my attention because Guardian sports reports became so difficult to read that I felt compelled to ask, "Who wrote this?" And the same name kept cropping up. Look for yourself.

I stopped reading the BBC's website at the end of last year when its standards began plummeting. I started buying (yes, buying!) The Guardian because I like quality and I care about football. I can find (and sometimes supply) amateurish, opinionated drivel for free online. That's what the internet is for. A national newspaper should do better.

Fly me to the moon or Basingstoke (Valentine's Day special)

It’s the time of year when Valentine’s Day sidles up to me with her sweet smile, whispers in my ear and then vomits on my shoes before grabbing an unshaven amateur poet by the crotch, gargling a Sambuca and staggering to another club where people who are more fun than me go to have a good time.

It’s ten years (to the day!) since I last celebrated Valentine’s Day in any meaningful way (apart from the notorious Grapefruit Incident of 2007, but that’s another story). I have some talents in other areas, but my love life resembles the Bognor Birdman contest: year after year of launching myself hopefully, followed very shortly by a predictable drenching. It’s a record of under-achievement that would put the England football team to shame. And I’ve only got time to write this blog because of the following text message:

“Sorry for the late notice but i wont be able to make it tonight … deadlines … items delayed …wont be an early finish … postpone until next week? Sorry about that. Thanks.”

A-----  13:17

But I’m not here to grumble, nor to name any of the unfortunate women involved (don’t worry Angelina, our secret is safe). And the characters mentioned earlier are not based on anyone I know but are entirely the product of my deranged imagination (I, on the other hand, am entirely the product of my ex-wife’s deranged imagination).

February 14 is the one day of the year when I’m truly, blissfully, heart-leapingly happy to be single. Why? Because I’m a bit of a romantic, and today is far and away the least romantic day of the year. It’s the day when the most tender, considerate and loving of men turn into scheming liars. In their hearts, their faces and their deeds they will lie more desperately and miserably than they have ever lied before. Why? Because they have to pretend that they’re enjoying it too.

Men hate Valentine’s Day. No sooner has the pressure of Christmas been banished, with the presents bought and given and the drinks cabinet emptied, than the looming storm-cloud of February 14 darkens the horizon. Her favourite restaurant? Best ring up now, because this is the only night of the year (except Mother’s Day) when every restaurant is fully booked, and you don’t want to take her down the kebab shop or you’ll be in danger of getting skewered yourself. And if it’s a romantic weekend away, then you’re probably too late already. The best hotels in the most beautiful locations took their first bookings on February 15 last year and by mid-January there’s only the Holiday Inn in Basingstoke left*. Are the flowers big enough? Did you remember that she hates fondant centres? Should you buy a present as well? Will those earrings match? A man can’t enjoy Valentine’s Day. The best he can hope for is to survive.

Valentine’s Day explodes the myth that women are romantic and men aren’t. Men do dumb things like arrange surprise weekends away or buy chocolates when they’re not feeling guilty and their loved one isn’t feeling hungry. Men try to conquer the Antarctic and defeat tyrants, fly to the moon or cross the Channel in a bathtub. Almost always they do this to impress women (or occasionally to get away from them – I admit the argument doesn’t hold every time). If a woman wants to impress a man, all she has to do is wear a slightly redder lipstick and leave the top three buttons of her blouse undone. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to discourage that. I like to think I’m as shallow as the next man.

At its heart, romance is about letting your emotions inspire you to do stupid things on a whim. If women did that, the kids wouldn’t get fed and the laundry would start to pile up. Even if gender roles are changing and some men know how to operate a vacuum cleaner, the mindset is still there: women are fundamentally more organised than men. Romance has its place, and its place is February 14, which is why this is the one day when it is impossible to do anything romantic. When romance is organised, diarised and pigeon-holed, it loses everything that made it romantic in the first place. In short, it becomes sterile and emasculated. 

So I’ll wish you all a happy Valentine’s Day. Me, I’ve got to go. My Pot Noodle is getting cold.

* At the time of writing, the Holiday Inn in Basingstoke had three double rooms available from £135 plus breakfast.