Since Monday I’ve gone from not knowing that the BBC had a digital music channel called 6 Music to knowing that it faces the off switch; that Lily Allen thinks this is the death knell for new British music, David Bowie thinks stations like 6 keep the ’spirit of music’ alive and Ed Vaizey – like me – didn’t know it existed at all and didn’t particularly care. Until he listened, that is and realised it had a ‘passionate and articulate’ fan base who can presumably vote as well as creating polysyllabic soundbites.

It’s been a very quick story to catch and no doubt social networks have sagged with soggy sentiments like ‘Save 6 and save music!’, ‘Sign the petition for BB6!’ and ‘If I use lots of exclamation marks people will think I’m passionate even if I can’t punctuate!!!’. A whole 90,00 people signed up to a Facebook group in a day. The is the kind of viral marketing that people who attend Google ranking workshops have wet dreams about, that and all the pithy copy and the very public support of right on, left of centre press.

So why I don’t I want to slay the BBC for making me pay a licence fee and then having the audacity to cut funding and the chance to listen to Lauren Laverne live online? Why as a music lover am I not making 10ft banners and recruiting likeminded citizens to romp the streets spreading the music to tune in and save all that is sacred about sound? For me, it’s related to some very simple and, for those who have been committed and genuine listeners of 6, possibly upsetting factors.

The main one being that none of this is about music. Yes, there are superb broadcasters who know music and want to communicate something they’re passionate about to an equally engaged audience. They may not be totally throttled by the demands of a playlist so constricted that a GP would diagnose a severe nut allergy. But, like music television which has long ceased to devote itself entirely to music videos (an invention made wholly by MTV as a promo outlet before the channel began to think programming quasi-real series about models-turned- lobotomised-trust-funders was the way forward), the concept of staying loyal to a one source seems like an archaic business model.

This is not to say that people are fickle beats who are incapable to fidelity to a provider of content and entertainment. But the internet isn’t just for porn and posting sentences exhorting people to support various causes and tend to their virtual vegetable patch. It’s a brilliant source of new music and platforms for artists and communities to build a fan base, share content and recommend similar artists without having premises and overheads and egos to manage in order to do so.

The democratisation of the internet which made expansion to include ‘niche’ channels like 6 possible is the very thing that makes it difficult to sustain without extensive awareness that it’s there. It’s pretty difficult when your choices of Radio station are limited to listening to Chris Moyles testing whether speech counts as proof of owning a brain cell or listening to a channel that no one’s ever heard of because it’s never promoted anywhere. If you don’t know about something, how are you expected to know it exists, much less expect it to compete against a flagship product.

It could do, too. It’s hardly as if it really were the fringe venue for unsigned artists who, without 6’s patronage, will starve in a hovel in Hove. Hove is quite affluent and 6’s current playlist isn’t revolutionary. I mean, Vampire Weekend, Goldfrapp, Friendly Fires and Jimi Hendrix are all great choices. Some of the bands have Myspace pages instead of being featured, established artists. But you can’t tell me that a station that features the Arctic Monkeys isn’t populist, even if they have come over all quirky and popped Rammstein on because they probably count as world music.

I do hope that 6 gets saved. Evidently it will make a lot of people very happy to have all of their rare music back.. But if that doesn’t happen and people want to, say, discover new music among seminal works by consummate craftsmen, chosen by people who’ve run a radio station for free purely for their love of music and do this without promotion or interruption (except for news bulletin in French on the hour), I’d recommend you listen to Radio Sing-Sing. It’s French pirate radio at it’s best and it’s very, very good.

French twins. Impeccably dressed in matching cream raincoats and black drainpipe jeans, both toted carrier bags from the same shop (Joy) and whipped out matching Moleskin notebooks to take notes on artists they liked. Awesome.

Raincoats = de rigeur

The complete wanker below must have a great phsyio. He reclined motionless – presumably in rapture – for long enough to do damage to the majority of his vertebrae and confuse the little girl who tried to copy his contortions.

It’s pretty clear the art wasn’t the primary reason for his visit…

If the thought of being ogled puts you off public displays of art you can always stare in wonder at the hoarding on the building site at the back of the Tate Modern, just off Park Street. The illustrator who did this either comes from a distant solar system or has a worryingly warped view of the homeless, as the caption ‘resting on the bridge’ reveals. For future linguistic reference, perceptive illustrator, the verb ‘resting’ connotes sleep or relaxation after exertion, not ‘rough sleeping’.

However, the most visually interesting thing in Southwark at the moment can’t be found in or near a gallery. It has no funding and is of no interest to the art world. Shame. The Bricklayer’s Arms bus stop on the New Kent Road is both easy to get to and quite a smart statement.

It’s reasonable to get pissed off if you’re sitting in a silent room and all you can hear is a tap dripping. But would you know it was still doing it if you moved rooms? Next door, upstairs, in the garden? Even if I took the bus to the local supermarket I can hear the rhythm of the drops at the roundabout by the trolley park at the edge of the canal where the kids dump them in instead.

Like a faulty aertex ceiling I find human suffering just as impossible to switch off to even if the steady drip, drip, drip of despair is in a distant continent, not my living room.

I did doubt this occasionally. The increasing frequency of parties, gatherings – in fact, noisy social interaction involving more than one person and a TV screen – made any kind of contemplative meditation impossible in the rented kingdom I called my home. The shared areas were a Goya etching, natural disaster in microcosm and testament that if you don’t adhere to a well-planned rota, pestilence and disease are the only logical outcomes.

That and creating a desire to change the world through a mixture of idealistic hope, brutal justice and noticing the guy who got on before I did at West Reason.

It’s a devious medium, I know. I used to think that films like The Mighty Ducks, A League of Their Own and even Jerry Maguire (you can – just about – count it as a sports comedy) promoted the underdog, gave hope to the unstoppable loser and promoted the soft values of gooey-centered liberalism. Overcome difficulties, stay together, play together. It could be a mantra for Relate, except if you think back to the heartwarming staples of your childhood (and the head-soothing hangover fillers of your occasional Sunday), you’ll realise that they aren’t flicking the V to alpha bullies, they’re the beta machinations of the status quo yelling at you to straighten up and fly right.

Take Dodgeball. The premise is quite innocent: Peter LaFleur (Vince Vaughan) has thirty days to raise $50,000 to make good on a mortgage default that threatens to see his bunch of misfit members being bulldozed by Globogym. When holding a carwash doesn’t bring in the hard dollars, the only obvious course of action is to watch 1950s style training videos, enter a dodgeball team coached by a dodgy coach played by Rip Torn. If this were a film review without a spoiler (which it isn’t) I’d state something shitty and trite like: complications abound, proving to the Average Joes that sometimes, winning is more than playing the right shot, it’s about knowing who you’re playing for. Or ‘grab life by the balls’, which is the actual tagline. But it isn’t about seizing figurative team testicles or a modern day parable about not underestimating your opponent in a 92 minute version of David and Goliath starring Ben Stiller. Dodgebal espouses far shallower, boring virtues.

The first – being part of the team means you get to take one for it – focuses around the seeming triumph of team sports over sexuality. LaFleur has to save his gym which is going to be shut down with the legal help of Kate Veatch (Christine Taylor) on behalf of White (Stiller). Because his gym is going to be shut down, LeFleur seeks salvation in dodgeball. Veatch, sick of being hit on by White, is more inclined to join LaFleur’s dodgeball team because it’s opportunistic payback and means that she can kiss girls without being sexually harassed by her employer. And because team sports are obviously magical, Veatch reveals that she is actually bisexual and obviously lusting after Peter. The loser-turned-lothario through cardio formula works equally well for Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s characters in Baseketball. Once again, mortgage foreclosure is the central catalyst for all ensuing action. In brief: unemployed turned homeless friends Coop and Remer (Parker and Stone) make up a new game that doesn’t require hours in the gym to win, argue a bit before they are finally reunited, this time with girlfriends.

The central concern here is not the crude message that you have to be ‘in it to win it’ – exhorting people to sit in semi-darkened isolation alone with their thoughts and a penknife is no formula for larks. It’s just fundamentally annoying to have team games held up as the epitome of everything sexy about human endeavour. That somehow working up a sweat will transform sexuality (mainly female) into something co-operative and appreciative of losers who run fuckawaful gymnasiums for the socially weird. Or transcend fiscal holes as a fast track to solvency and, once again, provide an out for loose spenders who can’t meet their mortgage payments but don’t see long-term unemployment and homelessness as reasons to get a job or prevent them from getting a girlfriend. Perhaps I missed the point. Maybe these films released in 2004 and 1998 are actually messages from the future transcribed into Hollywood treatments about the impending global financial crisis. In that case they’re genius for seeing a future in which foreclosure is possible for every middle class middle American, ultra-scary for suggesting that entering far-fetched national competitions (which probably cost more than the average street in Detroit in 2009 to take part in) are the answer to the economic equivalent of a black hole.

The second overarching piece of evidence that sports comedy equals dark sanction for social ill? The coach figure. It’s not John Candy’s fault that his performance as Irv Blitzer defines the generic archetype (even though he’s only actually starred one sports comedy, Cool Runnings). He’s to be applauded for that. But he can take the blame for covertly championing alcoholism, the implication that if you ain’t playing the game you’re blatantly a washed-up misfit and that despite all evidence suggesting addiction and dependency, the coach is still coach. And being an authority figure means that you should listen to coach at all times, no matter how unsuitable they may be. This logic at large in Dodgeball, where Rip Torn’s coach character is presented as the once mighty, now fallen through the means of latent insanity and wheelchair usage. That isn’t so much worrying but downright discriminatory. However, kudos must be given to the Mighty Ducks for presenting the triumph over adversity narrative via the means of a convicted criminal (drunk driving) put in charge of a children’s ice hockey team as a means of rehabilitation. The flaws in this are self-evident, right?

Which is why I really like Napoleon Dynamite. For all of the film’s weird quietness and heavy anti-hero apathy, it is wise. For it knows that far from winning, the underdog who swallows the doctrine of ‘do team sports well or die’ turn out like weird Uncle Rico, playing with their balls by themselves in the yard.

Alternatively, you might favour the direct advice of the self-help book that takes basic common sense and repackages it with enough complication to encourage you to part with your cash money. If you’re particularly diligent, you might want to read widely to analyse all the advice that’s out their for you. Like reading ‘The Rules’ and not calling because ‘Men are from Mars’ and women use Venus razors. Or for the more pop-lit savvy, take a popular phenomenon and make manic cross-references between it and aforementioned basic common sense and, behold! A new philosophical A-road to happiness with all of your favourite mini-series characters to guide you to self-actualisation.

My personal favourite has to be The Zen of Zombie: Better Living Through the Undead by Scott Kenmore. I haven’t actually read it, just the synopsis on Amazon – but I think beyond all reasonable doubt this was the best book you could have bought to salve your psychic woes in 2007. Where else could learn to ’slow down and move at your own pace’ and ‘devour those irritating people who get in your way?’.

That’s a rhetorical question by the way: I’ve applied my extensive knowledge of the zombie in pop culture to basic principles for staying alive to save your money, and soul in three easy steps to zombie self-help.

1) Eat to eat, not to live. Zombies don’t eat to live, they’re dead. But they also don’t have body image issues, which is surprising given that they’re decomposing. Nor are they aware of the hundreds of books packed onto the shelves this January in an effort to cash in on the extra squidge we made over the festive season exhorting us to make like ’skinny bitches’ or eat like French women or basically eat more vegetables and don’t eat dessert as a food group. The zombie diet isn’t diverse, but it does contain a lot of protein and avoids unnecessary amounts of carbohydrates and sugars which are easy to store as fat. There’s no remorse in the zombie diet: see food move, eat food, find more. Tap into your primal neanderthal and take a hunt-gather approach to your food – treat it as prey and marvel as you make a waistline.

2) Don’t overthink it. Life is full of grey nuances and paradoxes which are impossible to reconcile. So don’t. Or do. A lot of the time there are some very basic, very simple forces at work that create the outcomes we strive for so frenetically. Zombies eat brains and rely on theirs not getting shot through. They don’t get awarded doctorates but they’re pretty successful at what they do. Keep it simple, make like the uncarved block and go about your business mindfully and without unduly harsh self-judgement.

3) Don’t defect, be direct. People run away from more absurd things than zombies all the time and create elaborate excuses to give irrational fears some semblance of structure. Zombies are just that – they exist without apology or self-recrimination and offer no rationale for their actions. This is not to say that mindless killing is cool, it’s just an example – okay? Man up to the life chores you’ve left undone and backed away from and work through them mechanically. Drool at the corners of your mouth optional.

Things That Might Not Work Out by Jennie Albone – Ignite London 18 November 2009 from hurryonhome on Vimeo.

It’s a dark art, talking. It got lost somewhere and IMS, powerpoint and the internet got the blame. In English classrooms throughout the country, students flail through Speaking and Listening assignments unable to connect with their audiences, talk in sentences and do more than read off what’s projected on the wall. Successful consultancy firms are investing in presentation skills training for their workforce because ’soft’ skills like eye contact and not soiling your bespoke suit actually, really matter.

It’s exciting, then, that events exist for people to talk passionately and knowledgeably about things. That these events draw capacity crowds. Crowds of polite, interesting people who don’t hurl things like insults or faeces at the speaker.

I have to confess something at this point. It’s not as shameful as revealing your greying thong to traffic lights in an epic binge Britain session. Or that your monthly spend on hair extensions exceeds the GDP of most countries (or, perhaps more apposite, the fiscal deficit). But, I’ll be honest, until a few months ago I’d never heard of Ignite or O’Reilly media.

You might not have either, and that’s okay. Basically, O’Reilly supports Ignite (and various other ventures) as a powerful but benign older brother, as well as spreading innovation knowledge through services, conferences and technology books. The Ignite concept is innovative in and of itself. Speakers have five minutes in which to enlighten their audience about a chosen topic without faffing, deviating or shameless self-promotion. And to make sure it only takes five minutes, they have twenty powerpoint slides – changing every 15 seconds – to make that point.

I keep saying ‘they‘ or ’speakers’. Partially because I want to retain some detachment from the clearly deranged girl in the video at the top of this post. And also preserve the belief that my discourse isn’t actually comprised of ‘um’ filling with a bit of ‘nice’ and ‘yeah’ garnish. But mainly because this is a worldwide event in which people from diverse industries and specialisms come together to talk.

Particular favourites from November 18th were: Ben Hammersley’s, ‘The Sex Lives of the Great Renaissance Masters’, Matt Baker’s Diarrhoea and Dodgy Doners: What’s Special About Bacteria’, Ashley Beningno’s error(e) 404: Italy as a Country Not Found and Matt Edgar’s ‘1794 – So Much to Answer For’. Possibly a purely personal subjective preference, but you’ve got to love anything based on sex, death, bowel movements or heavy-duty sarcasm (preferably not a heavily sarcastic bowel movement).

In a generally greying, get-your-coat-it’s-freezing-and-we-can’t-afford-the-central-heating, hang on a sec – Greenland’s got oil and it’s prepared to sell-out and burn out for it, basically bastard upcoming winter, thanks have to go to Amy Thibodeau and Dan Zambonini for organising the first Ignite London event. Because valuing speech doesn’t have to mean standing outside in an inhospitable London November and watching scary fundamentalists compete at Speaker’s Corner.

The truth, that the UK is in fact populated by knicker-flashing ladettes who – when they’re not vomiting over walls and decorating traffic lights with their comedy hen headwear – are terrorising the law-abiding menfolk with their brutal beatings and street justice. That this ‘frightening’ wave of ladette violence (up 300% in seven years) in the ’streets of no shame’ comes from our schoolgirls (the ‘worst for binge drinking in Europe’) who graduate to ‘marathon pub crawls’ in headline-hitting freshers weeks before drinking to ‘hold their own’ with male colleages in the workplace.

And that, Daily Mail, is why we can never co-exist peacefully. Not because I don’t like your ‘truth’ and the bizarre power you’ve afforded women and their tanked-up reign over the city streets after dark. Not because your selective shots of the nation turned to a circle of sambuca hell bear a sinister resemblance to the candid images of female celebrities you deride on a daily basis. No, it’s because you’ve willfully jumped on the Binge Britain bandwagon and refused to connect it with a history of over consumption combined with dubious stastistical analysis.

People get drunk. Even the Institute of Alcohol studies concedes that ‘heavy sessional intake’ and ‘drinking to get drunk’ are not a new phenomenon; it is reported ‘at least as far back as the Vikings’. This – binge – is not a new thing. Take London. It was notorious in the thirteenth century for the ‘immoderate drinking of the foolish’. In 1751, Henry Fielding remarked on the ‘new kind of drunkenness’ that sprang from gin and threatened to ‘destroy a great part of the inferior people’. Dostoevsky, that ‘everyone is in a hurry to drink himself into insensibility’ (1832). So no surprise then that in 2008 over 1/3 of adults exceed the daily drinking limit (ONS).

What the Office of National Statistics doesn’t highlight in bold with an alliterative, apocalyptic headline is that the survey format that collects drinking data has changed since its inception in the 1970s. Whereas the survey now asks about the size of wine glasses it didn’t originally. A trivial detail perhaps, but one worth factoring into judgements about drinking habits. Especially since wine consumption seems to have doubled in the last ten years.

I know, I know. Statistics just aren’t considered sexy unless they’re inflated to the size of a newly-divorced celebrity glamour model, but it’s worth mentioning that the standard error of this survey has increased between 1997 and 2008.

And the profile of these burgeoning ‘bingers?’. The kids, by statistical accounts, seem to be alright. 19% of men and women over the age of 65 conduct their heaviest drinking sessions alone. 22% of men and 14% of women over the age of 65 drink every day compared to 8% of men and 25 of women aged 16-24. And the knicker wielding women of front page fame? It seems that on the day they has most to drink, women drinkers were ‘most likely to have been drinking with a spouse or partner’. Try googling ‘posse of senior citizens wreak havoc and wreck civic amenities in happy hour gone horrible’, or ‘degenerate housewives: women in relationships drink more’. Any luck? Not even on google image?

Dear Daily Mail. Alcohol causes serious problems. Its abuse and misuse is a serious problem which causes untold damage to hundreds of thousands of people, their families, friends and loved ones in this country each year. It puts a strain on the health system and emergency services. It is not a pastime, a defence for date rape or a harmless hobby. But equally harmful is ridiculous journalism that refuses to engage with the issues and favours publishing pictures of hen parties with cellulite because that satisfies a sense of schadenfreude. If you must indulge in trite titillation, please do so responsibly and only in moderation.

The stuff looked like fresh orange juice. It even had orange juice in it. A fresh glass; cold on the counter, above my eyeline. Teary with insane thirst I craned my head at a respectful angle to see where I was pawing, grabbed it and emptied the contents into my gaping gannet mouth. Whatever it was, the burning bile forced tears out of shocked ducts as the full force coated my gullet and impacted on my stomach. Agony. Murder. Treachery. Clutching my innards I wailed for assistance and waited for a nurse to come to my assistance and unpoison me. There were, after all, two in the house to minister to my tragic state.

Both came. Neither bore the hallmarks of the caring profession as they noted my quickening pulse, reddening cheeks and distinct lack of balance and laughed as I cried with hoarser vowels. The medicine which I had magicked away in my mouth in a single gulp was one of two doses. The other dose was held in my cousin’s hand.

Necessary explanation

No, dear reader. This is not the memoir of an uncontrollable alcoholic. My name is not Frey, my life is not in a million little pieces and I tend to walk more than twelve steps at a time. Whilst I’d like to write like Hemingway, taking the method approach is only going to end up in a big mess without a wallet, fixed address or friends.

But I do like gin. And recently, my education in it has taken me from a messy experiment as a seven year old in the family kitchen to gin palaces, tasting botanicals and mixology lessons in concept bars.

Memory #2

Holding it closely to my nose with my back turned from the stage lights ten feet away, smell was my primary compass. Inhaling deeply from the bottle, a ragged man sidles up next to me and implores for change or salvation or something. He should have distracted me, pulled me away from my desire to consume and back to liberal, humanistic sensibilities. He doesn’t. I’m only aware of a scent resembling French perfume that I want to wear inside and out. And soon enough, he’s distracted too by a woman who appears to be very pregnant who starts kicking him and screaming unmentionables in our collective faces.

I’m not old enough to have meandered through Hogarth’s London into dram shops or witnessed life expectancy cut short by careless booze-soaked parents neglecting their children. But my first encounter with 209 gin, surrounded by actors in a vault in London Bridge feels like a suitable homage to the fabulous vulgarity of the gin palaces that took the interiors of fashionable boutiques, lit them with gas lamps and promptly redecorated the walls with iniquity. Plus, the recommended retail price is reminiscent of the 1751 Tippling Act that took some humble bathtub moonshine and added a 1200% tax markup for good weights and measures.

(Recent) Memory #3

Cassia bark tastes like cinnamon. Grano di Paradiso was – at one point – as valuable as gold in Ghana. By EU regulation, gin is defined as a juniper-based drink exceeding 37.5% ABV. It’s London Fashion week and my bottom (which exceeds catwalk regulation specifications by at least three miles) is sitting in an open air bar designed by Tom Dixon and receiving a crash course in gin origins and history.

I’ve managed to negotiate my way past a tent of gazelles without screaming ‘eat pie and be more ugly’ and suspend my disbelief at hearing an art director’s brief (’be more fabulous’ isn’t a cliche, people, it’s a real, live industry-specific instruction). I can, just about, be told that this is all ‘magical moment between night and day where anything could happen’ and keep a straight face (outwardly). But I can do sweet FA about my instincts and a lifetime of associations.

My first experience with alcohol was the taste of gin. Memorable and painful. Facilitated by (inadvertent) theft from a parent and conducted away from society’s gaze in an antisocial mess on the floor. Slightly unfortunate and more than a little bit ironic that nearly twenty years on, I’m trudging the streets of Soho to find the one place that stocks my favourite brand and paying £35.00 for the stuff.