KING OF THE HILL, TOP OF THE LIST [555]

Continuing my unexpectedly enjoyable mission to clear a loft of my possessions, I concluded that a particular collection of magazines I have built up over fifteen years would, like so many others, also need to go. However, for all times’ sake, this pile will be earmarked for a charity shop more than for recycling, because they were not easy to find.

Whenever I have picked up a copy of “The New Yorker”, on the rare occasion a UK newsagent had one for sale, I have treated its mix of essays, cultural reviews, fiction and cartoons as a portal to the cosmopolitan, sophisticated, noisy and outspoken city that acts like a far-away playground for my mind — I have always seen Los Angeles as more a place of industry, even if those are film and music, and London is too near to elicit the same kind of anticipation. Its art direction is second to none, its illustrated covers having been given away by me as birthday cards on a few occasions. Its pages saw the first appearances of James Thurber’s short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, a ghoulish family depicted in cartoons by Charles Addams, and articles on which the films “Saturday Night Fever” and “Coyote vs Acme” are based. The nearest magazine to that mix that is published in the UK is the satirical “Private Eye”, which I have been reading for decades now. 

However, I the nearest newsagent to me that still sold “The New Yorker”, which is least ten miles away, has now closed. Adding to my need to create space, I have inevitably decided to subscribe to the magazine online, rather than risk being cut off altogether. Knowing the origin of its source material, the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” always hit a weird note with me when they sing, “we can try to understand The New York Times’ effect on man”, but I should have realised that can reference New York-based media as a whole, having read “The New York Times” for years for a similar vantage point, although one more reactive and with less time for consideration than a weekly periodical can afford itself.

My first action upon subscribing to “The New Yorker” was to look at their archive, which turned into my looking at a gallery of thousands of vibrant covers, in all manner of styles, portraying political events to everyday life, punctuated every February by a reproduction or reinterpretation of Rea Irvin’s portrait of Eustace Tilley, the magazine’s mascot, a dandy with enough time to examine a passing butterfly with his monocle. The magazine has been a butterfly for me for quite some time, but will that change now I have finally pinned it down?

I SAW THE NEWS TODAY, OH BOY [525]

ITV News, with newscaster Lucrezia Millarini

When I previously discussed how BBC radio had no news to broadcast on Good Friday 1930, I clarified how specific the circumstances were: allowed only to report from newspapers and news agencies, the public holiday meant no newspapers were published that day, no wire services were running, and no other news was physically reported in time.

 

Today we, the audience, are like the BBC were then, primed to be on tenterhooks. The gap in time between the reception and dissemination of information has almost entirely been closed. Continuous, unedited live audio and video from anywhere can instigated at a moment’s notice by most people, ready to be picked up by anyone else. 

 

All technological and practical constraints that shaped TV and radio news have been removed. Instead of five-minute summaries or half-hour bulletins, the news is as long as you want it to be. Therefore, only you can shape what those limits are.

 

Because I will look at my phone an untold number of times per day – I don’t wish to know that number either – I can call myself up to date with the news, having looked at various reputable resources through the day, from the BBC, various UK newspapers including “The Guardian” and “The Times”, and American sites like CNN, “The New Yorker”, “The Atlantic”, “The New Yorker” and “The New York Times”. For this reason, once I arrive home from work, the last thing I want to watch is more news – a quick cursory glance through the evening will confirm if anything else has happened outside of business hours.

 

Our family, however, continues a tradition of watching the news from ITV in the evening. A half-hour regional news magazine has been anchored at 6pm longer than I have been alive, but the national ITV Evening News has become so long that, as a family, we consciously break away from it to watch something else. ITV’s evening news originally preceded the original news for fifteen minutes until 1998, when it was decided to make it ITV’s main news of the day, doubling the length to give more time to each story. From March 2022, it doubled again to an hour, adding the occasional longer investigation, but having more stories overall. The consequence, for us at least, is fatigue – there are only so many ways you can hear how human beings can be killed. Fortunately, we are relieved when “The One Show” begins.

 

Replicating daytime radio, hourly daytime news and weather summaries began appearing in 1986 on BBC One, with ITV following two years later. Largely made redundant by TV news channels and the internet, mornings on UK television are filled with people talking about the news: BBC One has “Breakfast”, “Morning Live” and an hour-long lunchtime news; ITV has topical shows “Good Morning Britain”, “Lorraine”, “This Morning” and “Loose Women”; BBC Two rebroadcasts the corporation’s global news channel, plus “Politics Live”; and Channel 5 has a succession of discussion shows from 9.15am to 3pm. Everything is up for discussion from various commentators, some appearing multiple times across these shows, some becoming identified with certain shows, like Sonia Sodha and Nick Ferrari on “This Morning”, or Kevin Maguire and Andrew Pierce on “Good Morning Britain” – all of these people also have regular newspaper columns. If you think one show is going on about the same subject for too long, or you want to hear what someone else thinks about the same subject, you have a choice of viewing. Only “Breakfast” and “Good Morning Britain” maintain news bulletins separated from commentators. Meanwhile, Channel 4 broadcasts American sitcom repeats in the morning.

 

This cacophony of news commentary is what led me to cancel my subscription to “The New York Times” once I realised I was only reading its comment section, and to complete the word puzzles. In truth, I cannot work out which of these was driving me most to the paper, but even if I agreed with what I was reading, too much of a good thing is still too much, and I haven’t played Wordle since.

 

I was planning this article just as the United States announced tariffs on countries that did not support its intention to take over the Danish territory of Greenland. Such a discombobulating story led me to constantly check my phone for updates, whether they would come or not, until I had enough of a context and grasp on the story. But “flooding the zone” of public discourse with announcements and edicts to keep politicians and countries on edge, dutifully repeated by news channels to keep us informed, only puts everyone on edge – it is an inevitably parasitic capture of the news cycle.

 

I think the only answer is to create your own bulletin – create times when you can update yourself, leave time to think, and see if there are any updates later. It may sound odd to compare it to the Muzak Corporation’s system of background music, known as “Stimulus Progression”, but it worked on the basis that motivational music be followed by periods of silence to limit fatigue.

 

I can only say this has worked for me – I have cut my phone usage by over an hour a day since 2026 began, but again, word puzzles form part of that time.

EACH MORNING OUR KEY TO THE WORLD [447]

I only buy one physical newspaper each week...

Should I remain someone that consumes as much news as I do? I certainly read, watch and listen to enough news to ask that question, but I have started feeling like I need an answer.

My average weekday begins by turning on my phone as soon as I wake up – I have a separate alarm clock – to read the front pages of a list of news and social media websites: in order, BBC News, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, Threads, the LGBT+ sites PinkNews (UK) and The Advocate (US), CNN, The Times (of London), The Telegraph, The Spectator, the New Statesman, The Guardian and The New York Times. Having completed Wordle on the last of these sites, about twenty minutes will have passed, and I am now ready to get out of bed and face the day.

This choice of sites is deliberately meant to be a broad range, including places that don’t fit my own politics. The objective is to see what truly the most important stories are, which stories are more important to each site, notice any trends and, importantly for me, read anything interesting – I am always looking for subjects to talk about, and you can’t expect these to come to you. The only reason I don’t look at the “Daily Mail” website, apparently the most-read news website in English, is because their front page has too many stories on it to discern what is meant to be important.

Once out of bed, I will put on the television to watch “Breakfast” on BBC One while I get ready for work, and once I have left the house, the news bulletins interrupting Lauren Laverne’s breakfast show on BBC Radio 6 Music will be the next source of news, unless I am looking at other stories on my phone while listening. This will continue at various points throughout the day even after I get home – a house tradition is to watch the ITV Evening News after the regional stories have played, but upon its doubling in length to an hour in March 2022, the television is consciously switched to another channel at the half-hour mark, ending my news for the day, provided I have put my phone down.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have a problem if I didn’t feel the need to check my phone so much, but having realised it has become my main source of news, it has become unavoidable. Short hourly news bulletins have evaporated from the main television channels, and I avoid opinion-led discussions of the news on TV, preferring to make my own mind up.

The issue that means I consume too much news is defining what it means to be “informed”. Requiring a broad range of sources for news means my own requirements are very high. I wouldn’t choose one channel, site or bulletin to serve as my single source, but if I was to reduce the number of places I search for news, it would feel like reducing my horizons, or not challenging my opinions enough. It may well be that I am thinking about this now because I am reaching my upper limit.

LISTEN TO ME, DON’T LISTEN TO ME [341]

Hearing the term “fear of missing out” or “FOMO” gives me no reason to fear. It sounds like a term invented to encourage you to “keep up with the Joneses” by tying that impulse to your quality of life, turning it into something too dangerous to get involved with. “FOMO” was first observed as a phenomenon by a marketing strategist, Dr Dan Herman, in 1996, reinforcing this thought for me.

I may have also dealt so often in nostalgia that I believe it is possible to return to everything. There is no fear of missing out on something because there is no way you can miss out, unless you limit its availability. This may be the result of the “Disney vault”, where The Walt Disney Company limited VHS releases of their classic films to keep them special and scarce, until DVD, Blu-ray and streaming video made this practice obsolete.

I thought the limited-edition Coca-Cola Intergalactic flavour, the first in a series of “Coca-Cola Creations”, was only to have been available in North America, but coming across it in my local supermarket was enough for me to try it. The Coke website stated that “we will collaborate to create new flavours, designs and experiences with Coca‑Cola, reimagining our iconic product in time-limited edition flavours which take inspiration from relevant moments across culture, music and gaming”. In this case, Coca-Cola was the first soft drink launched into space, on the Space Shuttle Challenger on 12^th July 1985, the day after the Coca-Cola Company announced they were returning from New Coke to the classic formula.

Starting with Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, Intergalactic turned its dark caramel colour to red, its ingredients including carrot and blackcurrant from concentrates, while the taste is much like the existing vanilla Coke, with a slightly chocolate aftertaste, at least to me. It tasted fine, but not to dissimilar to a Coke flavour I can continue to drink after Intergalactic is withdrawn.

Meanwhile, I have only just started playing Wordle, a daily online word game so successful upon its launch in 2021 that it was bought by “The New York Times” for a substantial sum. Up to now, I had only seen the yellow and green grids posted on Twitter by other players, showing how well they did in guessing what letters made up that day’s five-letter word, and where that letter was placed, although the abstract nature of just seeing the letter-less grid meant it took until an idle moment on approximately day 290 of the game’s history for me to even think of trying the game. I have since concluded the first of my six attempts to guess the word should always be “quiet”, covering two vowels and the first row of my keyboard.

Wordle is a “special edition” word game in the sense that everyone is given the same word to guess in each twenty-four hour period. With no ability to go back to previous games, and with “The New York Times” issuing cease-and-desist orders on copycat websites where you can play previous days’ games, or multiple games a day, you must make a daily appointment to play, or risk missing a game on which you can never catch up. This becomes particularly frustrating if you failed to guess the word that day, or continuously failing to get the rest of a word when you got the second half fairly easily. All word games lead me to think my vocabulary is too small, so that might just be my problem.

The abbreviation “FOMO” was coined by Patrick J McGinnis in 2004, in the Harvard Business School magazine “The Harbus”, but alongside it was “FOBO”, for “fear of a better option”, the act of not making a choice because you are waiting for a better opportunity.

To me, Coca-Cola Intergalactic and Wordle are impacted by “FOBO”. One is a further dilution of the original Coke formula that had no variations until the launch of Diet Coke, but while soft drink manufacturers are fighting to hold attention, the Coca-Cola Company itself took a bolder decision by acquiring Costa Coffee in 2019 to catch where some consumers were going. While “The New York Times” may have avoided its own fear of missing out on the next big thing by buying Wordle, closing down unauthorised copies, without offering what made them so popular as an alternative to their own product, makes me think that eliminating other options for diversifying the game was needed over providing those options themselves, especially to keep the “FOMO” factor of the standard Wordle format. 

I’M KING OF THE HILL, TOP OF THE HEAP [329]

With the street of Long Acre in London once home to coachbuilders and car showrooms, the similarly industrious Longacre Square in New York City, having taken its name, ironically also hosted horse stables, the American Horse Exchange finally closing in 1910. By then, “The New York Times” newspaper had built and opened its headquarters in the centre of the square, where Broadway intersects with 42^nd Street, and convinced the city to rename the square after itself, something the other dozen or so daily papers at the time hadn’t done.

One Times Square, otherwise known as 1475 Broadway, opened in 1904, and remains the focal point of Times Square, hosting the New Year’s Eve ball drop first begun by the “Times” in 1907. The narrow end of the triangular building, which has famously hosted a Sony Jumbotron screen from 1990 to 1996, used by “The Late Show with David Letterman”, and displayed a realistically-steaming pot of Nissin Cup Noodle, now hosts a 350 foot-long advertising video wall projecting into the square, erected in 2019 to replace a number of smaller screens and billboards. However, it also resulted in removing the famous news ticker, or “zipper”, that had operated at various times since 1928. With similar video screens spreading around the building and across the square, its equivalent space in London has now moved to Piccadilly Circus.

For a building with so many eyes on it, I was surprised to hear it is mostly empty. I visited the ground level Walgreens drug store while on holiday in New York in 2011, but with only one floor towards the top used by the current organisers of the New Year’s Eve celebrations, the Times Square Alliance and Countdown Entertainment LLC, the rest of the building is used either as storage, or is completely abandoned. It matters nothing its owners, Jamestown LP and Sherwood Equities, as the tens of millions of dollars they charge in rent is for its exterior: so long as it acts as a frame for the video screens, it remains profitable.

With only a 500m²  trapezoid-shaped footprint, and only twenty-five stories, it may be easier for most businesses looking for space to find one floor in another building, instead of two or three at One Times Square. Even “The New York Times” started moving out of the building as early as 1913, as its corporate headquarters moved to 229 West 43^rd Street, itself extended in subsequent years. However, production of the newspaper continued at Times Square until the last section moved out in 1960 - even after the “Times” sold the building in 1961, the printing presses, situated in the four-storey-depth basement, ran until 1997, replaced by a more advanced facility based in Queens.

Allied Chemical, a multi-industrial corporation that, through a continued series of mergers, is the company now known as Honeywell, bought the building in 1963, two years after the “Times” sold it to advertising executive Douglas Leigh, and proceeded to re-skin it for the first time, replacing the original Gothic architecture, which made it look not unlike the Flatiron building, with modernist marble, not that you can see it properly now. The Allied Chemical Tower opened in December 1965, acting as headquarters of its Fibers division, and the Fabricated Products division. The first three floors, however, were more like what you would have found at the New York World’s Fair that closed earlier that year: the ground floor housed a demonstration of the upcoming Apollo space project, and an animated model of a city that could then be built on the moon. Displays of chemical processes took the next floor up, and the third floor fashion show displayed clothes made using Nylon produced by Allied Chemical.

One Times Square was already on sale by October 1972 for a minimum of $7 million, Allied Chemical acknowledging they had too much office space in New York City, that the displays should be dealt with by a group more experienced with dealing directly with the public, and that they were never going to get back the full cost of their renovations. The next buyer, real-estate developer Alex Parker, ultimately paid $6.25 million, and initial talk of exhibition spaces on most floors were replaced by hiring out office space to tenants, although a Song Writers Hall of Fame did open on the eighth floor. Between 1974 and 1997, the building was sold six more times, with unfulfilled proposals to replace the exterior with glass, or stripping it to a bare metal frame to use for floodlights. Demolition of the building had also been proposed in 1979 as part of a plan to create an urban renewal district in 42^nd Street.

Having looked through the numerous news articles on the “Times” website about changes in ownership and intent, the lack of consistency is perhaps the major contributor to tenants dwindling away – by 1982, there was reference to leases lasting from month to month, with nothing in the long term. Outside of the “Times”, Walgreens is seemingly the longest-running tenant of the interior of One Times Square. Their lease, signed in 2007, actually covers most of the interior, even though only the first three floors are used. It replaced a Warner Bros. studio shop, operated from 1996-2001 to compete with Disney’s store, but Warner Bros. continued to pay for the lease until Walgreens took over. I have seen evidence that the store closed again on 27^thDecember 2021, but with Walgreens’ lease continuing until 2027, and with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, I could not confirm if this was temporary or not.

The current value of One Times Square is dictated by its advertising potential: Lehman Brothers bought it in 1995 for $27.5m, with the first electronic billboards being installed in 1996. The following year, it was sold to its current owners for $110m. A four-week placement on the main billboard installed in 2019 costs from $2.5m. Perhaps One Times Square is at the point where any future construction means advertising revenue lost. Ironically, the original scoreboard-like ad screen, installed above the “zipper” in 1975, is more famous as an artwork, being the screen on which Jenny Holzer displayed the message, “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT”.

YOU'LL NEVER LIVE IT DOWN UNLESS YOU WHIP IT [111]

When you can no longer tell yourself that all will be OK in the end, and how it can’t possibly get any worse, you confide in the relentless march of time: it must be over soon.

The twenty-second amendment of the United States Constitution means that Monday 20^th January 2025 is the latest possible date that Donald Trump must vacate the office of President, even if he ends up serving two consecutive terms.

With the prospect of a Trump presidency lasting into my forties – hell, “The Simpsons” may still be producing new episodes by then – I need to plan for what lies ahead.

When the date of a meeting with North Korea was first announced, I refrained from writing about a post-Trump world because I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, even if I previously said that was something he never needed before [link]. However, after the commemorative coins were minted, Trump cancelled the meeting, then said it was back on, then said “we’ll see,” then attacked “The New York Times” for the umpteen thousandth time, I feel safe that the level of chaos Trump has created around himself is enough to imagine I may, one day, be able to look past it.

I do not expect public discourse, let alone politics, to return to how it was, because people have been emboldened by what Trump has said, either in opposition or in agreement to them. It is all the news has become: racial hatred, sexual assault, cultural wars, identity politics, immigration, democratic processes, the due process of the law, and “alternative facts” – everything is conjecture, everything is debatable, and we all have to live with that, apparently.

What I do know is that everything will find its centre, or equilibrium once more, even if it has to make a new one, as people take stock of where everything has reached. All the rhetoric of “drain the swamp,” and “Make America Great Again” – originally Ronald Reagan’s slogan, without the inclusive “Let’s” – implies that the core of what the United States was has been lost, or destroyed, although you would only talk your own country down in the way Trump has if you were insistent that you were the only person who could fix it.

The only reason I can feel sure of this, apart from hope, is that this situation sounds a bit like what happened to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, as people failed to grasp his concept of “deconstruction,” which he intended to be a continuing re-evaluation of Western values, as done by previous philosophers, and not a destruction of them, with the intent of making your own ones. Derrida had to explain that the notion of there being a “centre” was a functional one, as there had to be a centre that helped to form our understanding. Then again, when all you have is the text, the words, to hand, you have to see them in the sense of how they have been used. For Trump, this is all we have, no matter how badly it is presented, or spelled, on Twitter, in a form that relies on impulsivity, ahead of deliberation, time, and thought.

I hope it is clear that this isn’t a repudiation of the way politics is currently conducted in the United States, but of the way conduct is currently conducted. The lessons that the next President may take from Donald Trump may be to engage with their population in a similar way, or find different ways, but any American who may feel the same as me, a non-American, does not have a President that effectively represents them – we’ll just have to wait and see how long before that changes.

IT’S THE THEATRE OF FINANCIERS [99]

If I ever win the lottery, I would invest in premium bonds. I know the National Lottery is now the main way to win a cash sum, but having now looked further, I can maintain my fantasy.

Bonds are used by governments and businesses to borrow money from investors for a fixed period of time. Interest on the amount borrowed is paid to the investor at regular intervals, and the investor gets their initial sum back at the end of the term. Premium bonds are different in that the interest is instead issued as a monthly prize draw, and the bonds are held indefinitely by the UK Government, through National Savings & Investments, until you request your investment back.

This is all fine, so long as the business or government can pay back its debt to you. The Gibson Guitar Corporation, makers of the Les Paul since 1952, are currently facing bankruptcy, and not just because guitar-based rock music is currently not as popular as electronic-based rap or hip hop: it is running the risk of being unable to repay on bonds it issued to expand its business, which now includes audio brands like TEAC, TASCAM, Pioneer, Onkyo, and even the audio-video-multimedia arm of Philips, leaving the Dutch company to focus on its “health and wellbeing” products.

In other words, for a rock music singer and musician like David Bowie to issue his own bonds, in 1997, required an unsurpassable level of confidence, although this had been proven – in 1985, he became the first artist to release his back catalogue on CD, only two years after CD players became commercially available, and in 1996, “Telling Lies,” from Bowie’s  album “Earthling,” became the world’s first downloadable single, selling 300,000 copies.

The back catalogue was the reason for issuing the bonds, as Bowie sought to end his obligations to his former manager, Tony DeFries, who he had split from in 1975. DeFries owned 50 per cent of Bowie’s recordings from up to 1975, and a claim to half of Bowie’s share of the royalties for them, and a sliding scale of those recorded after it to 1982, which includes the “Low,” “Heroes,” “Lodger” and “Scary Monsters” albums. With these payments to DeFries due to continue in perpetuity, and with DeFries using the contract to release compilations of material without Bowie’s approval, such as recordings of old sessions for the BBC, Bowie would need to take full ownership of his catalogue to stop this exploitation of his work.

The investment David Pullman was the inventor of the “Bowie Bond,” and has since become head of his own company that has done similar deals for other artists. Under his idea, the next ten years royalties for David Bowie’s back catalogue would be secured, at an interest rate of 7.9 per cent – Premium Bonds only offer 1.4%. With all the bonds bought by the Prudential Insurance Company of America for $55 million, keeping them for the full period, despite their ability to sell them on, it was up to Bowie to preserve the value of the songs that were now his – more touring, and more playing of the hits. Bowie even branched out into further enterprises, with his own internet service provider, BowieNet, in 1998, and 2000 saw an online bank, BowieBanc, which only reached around 1,500 customers. More conventionally, 1999’s “Hours” album became the first album to be available for download ahead of its physical release (by two weeks).

Of course, Bowie was accused by his peers of selling out, of turning himself and his work into a commodity or utility, and the changing nature of the music industry, especially the threat posed by MP3 streaming sites like Napster, caught it out. The Bowie Bonds, as a result, were relegated to near-junk status by the credit ratings agency Moody’s, despite Prudential not selling them – Moody’s didn’t think Bowie would be able to pay Prudential back on time. Having said that, Bowie continued to look at the long game, as shown in an interview with “The New York Times” in 2002:

“The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing… Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again.”

Having looked into this, I am unsurprised David Bowie went into semi-retirement for a few years, before springing “The Next Day” upon everyone in 2013. With his future secure, his future worth proven, and with familiarity probably breeding a little contempt, it was time to let the prophecies, and the marketplace, play themselves out. It is not romantic to talk about money and art together, but when one is needed to preserve the other, it becomes unavoidable.

READY TO SHAPE THE SCHEME OF THINGS [1]

I had intended to start like this:

“Like when a man came to John Lennon, on a flaming pie, to tell him, ‘you are The Beatles with an A,’ the title ‘Dancing with the Gatekeepers’ came to me in a dream.”

However, after checking I had got this right, I found I could not use it. The “flaming pie” story came during a 1964 interview to promote an album, but “The Beatles” has also been explained as a play on Buddy Holly’s backing band, the Crickets, or on the name of a biker gang in the Marlon Brando film, “The Wild One” (1953). I could still have used it, but the possibility it may not be the right story was enough for me to leave it.

What made me drop the story completely was reading an interview Paul McCartney gave to "The New York Times” in May 1997, after recording a song and album named “Flaming Pie”: “There are still a lot of things we have to fudge because of compromise. If we don't all agree on a story, somebody has to give in. And Yoko [Ono] kind of insisted that John had to have full credit for the name [in ‘The Beatles Anthology’]. She believed he had a vision. And it's still left us with sort of a bad taste in our mouths...

I cannot say this was what Yoko Ono intended, but the “flaming pie” is too good an example of attempting to stop a debate without acknowledging all the facts. For someone that wants all available evidence to hand before making decisions, it makes me want to do something...

This sort of thinking is where “Dancing with the Gatekeepers” came from. In my dream, where I, apparently, could sing, I recorded an album with this title. It was meant to be either an art rock or electronic album, and while I don’t remember the track listing, one song ended with me shouting, “all they have are words” over and over again. I must have been listening to a lot of David Bowie during that day.

“Dancing with the Gatekeepers” could sound like a mystical battle of good versus evil, but it is much more positive to me: taking delight in the challenges life gives you, and having fun with those that think they have all the answers. It is also a title that could be used on anything, so I must make use of it.

So, until a record company signs me up, I’ll be writing a (mostly) weekly blog about whatever comes to mind. If anything, it will be more about me trying to make sense of an issue, why I think the way I do, or why I am expected to think something, rather than coming to a decision. Ultimately, I want this to be a fun exploration of the stories we tell ourselves.

What do I think of the “flaming pie”? It led to a good title for a Paul McCartney album, I know that much...