Going to pieces

It’s that quiet post Christmas period that I always enjoy for the sheer relaxing boredom of it all. We’re staying at the in-laws in Yorkshire and Gill has gone with her sister to the sales in Leeds. I have retreated to the jigsaw while Alan, my father-in-law, is murdering Nessun Dorma on the organ.

I had my ear bent earlier for trying to shoot a squirrel in the copse over the road. It’s one that Alan has been after for a while as it climbs on to his bird feeder. I’d seen it in the top of a shrub so he dashed off for the air gun and loaded a pellet. I crept on to the patio, armed and ready but Gill turned up at the wrong moment and raised the alarm.

It was like being caught behind the bike sheds with a Woodbine. “Come in at once, you can’t do that,” she said. Naturally I ignored her but the commotion had alerted the squirrel and it dived for cover before I could get it in the sights.

She’s gone now. They asked me if I wanted to join them but I think I’d rather be hung from the ceiling on a meat hook than rummage among the cut price cashmere jumpers in Harvey Nich's. A few years ago everyone wore lambswool because cashmere was for rich people. Now the middle classes too can enjoy that slightly softer feel to the skin if they’re willing to go elbow-to-elbow in a shopping scrum at sale time.

The jigsaw is Renoir’s Ball at the Moulin de la Galette. Gill has already done the best bit - the young girl’s blue and white striped dress - while I’m struggling with some amorphous brown shading under a table in the bottom right hand corner. He must have left that bit until last, using up what he had of the black, mixed in with the rest of the colours, never thinking for one moment, I’ll bet, of the poor sod who would try to put it all together more than a century on after a less than satisfactory cardboard facsimile of his masterpiece had been chopped in to a thousand pieces.

Alan, meanwhile, has clunked his way through Elgar’s Nimrod and now he’s on safer ground with Moon River and I’m still attempting to place my first piece of the day. We’ve done the outline. Gill likes to get stuck in to the meat of the picture but I’m never happy until the jigsaw is framed with all the straight pieces in place. This we have already achieved but I’ve just found another straight-edged piece. How can this be? I see that the lower edge of the frame is slightly shorter than it should be and find the mistake. All is well again.

We’re in to a fairly recognisable rendition of On the Sunny Side of The Street. I’ve noticed that Alan sniffs deeply on certain keys as he plays. I assume it’s an aid to concentration. A hen pheasant has worked its way around to his patio and it's pecking at the grain. The bird is safe.

“I’ve shot enough of them in my lifetime and now I’m making amends,” says Alan. “I’ve moved on to another phase.” He’s going to need quite a few tons of feed if he’s to wipe the slate clean before his time comes.

I’m pleased with the chair I’ve created in the bottom half of the picture but I’m stuck now – too many blue pieces. You don’t notice all the blue in this painting when you see it as a whole. Maybe Renoir had a job lot of aquamarine.

Time for a break; Father Christmas brought Gill an iPad which I’m trying my damnedest not to covet. But since she’s out I find it and scan down the news headlines on the Telegraph web site. One story says that a few miles down the road in Kirkheaton, the police had surrounded a house in the early hours. A police marksman had shot dead a man with a gun. I suppose it only takes a call from a neighbour. I wonder if he too had squirrels on his bird feeder.

Being southern

I can’t remember when it was or how it happened, but one morning some time ago I awoke as a southerner. Even then, I didn’t know it. The awareness has been gradual and a little bit disturbing.

The conversion must have begun on the daily commute. A few years ago everyone hid behind their newspaper. That was their wall, erected to keep the rest of humanity at bay. Now I’ve noticed they hide within their electronic devices: mobile phones, i-Pads, i-Phones, Blackberries. 3G has been a Godsend to southerners, enabling them to communicate the words “I’m on the train” to their loved ones in oh so many ways, even via Linked-in if they so choose.

It really is hiding because these devices do not command exclusive attention. No, the southerner is always alert for danger: the danger, for example, of someone sitting next to them on the train (fellow humans are held at bay by coats and bags left strategically on the vacant seat). Other southerners understand this coded behaviour and will do anything they can to find their own empty double seat and sometimes even stand rather than disturb the heavily defended seat.

There must be a bit of me that’s forever northern, since, if there is no alternative double seat I like to seek out the heavily defended seat and force its occupant to move the dumped accouterments to the overhead rack. But this northernness is swiftly suppressed. Once seated I do not speak.

The only time I have seen train-based southerners communing in recent months was in a discussion between three of them who had i-Pads, one of whom was a new user. The other two took great delight in showing off their skills to ensure that their fellow southerner was capable of maintaining his insularity, i.e. southernness. Being a southerner without an i-Pad, and, therefore, possibly poor (another race entirely to the southern middle class), I was not invited to speak. A true northerner would have chipped in anyway, something about it being warm for this time of year, but I hid behind a newspaper while remaining alert to every word spoken. Such behaviour reminds me how I have changed.

The rudeness of southerners has to be experienced to be believed. They have no trouble blanking you if you say “hello” when passing them in the street, even if you say it again, loudly and more aggressively, waving in their face the £10 note they have dropped.

When serving you in a shop, the southerner will look sideways, downwards, anywhere but directly at you, the customer. The message is quite clear: you are nothing, merely the piece of humanity attached to the rectangular piece of plastic which is the only thing that means anything to the southern shop assistant.

Southerners avoid displays of individuality if they can. They prefer to be part of the crowd. It’s a survival behaviour. They know that if they stand out in the workplace they may get fired. They also know, instinctively, that the best way to get promoted is not to rock the boat.

The worrying thing is that as an exiled northerner who has spent almost half my lifetime in this alien land, I retain a somewhat dated image of northerners as chatty, cheerful people, always ready with a smile and a cup of tea. But southernness is catching. Like a virus it has spread northwards in to offices and railway carriages, particularly among the young where everyone speaks like a metrosexual Jason Manford and laugh themselves silly at southern comedian Michael McIntyre who has, to his credit, performed the impossible in showing southerners how to laugh at themselves.

Friends sometimes ask me if I’ll ever go back north to live. But it’s too late. I find myself in a social limbo, too southern to stand at a bar and chat about pies, too northern to understand the etiquette on escalators (that last bit isn’t true; you’re dead if you don’t learn to stand on the right pdq). There’s only one solution: turn into Adrian Chiles.

Where are the sledges?

Whenever it snowed when I was a kid, out would come the sledge and I'd be off to the nearest hill with my friends and we'd return long after we should have been home for our teas.

Sledges came in all shapes and sizes. Few of us had proper toboggans. Typically a sledge would be a few pieces of wood hammered together by our dads with rails screwed on to the underside of the wood. But they flew down the icy cobbles and we'd get bruised and cut if we hit a kerb stone or lamp post.

As the snow thawed we'd make the most of the last scrap until it was gone. We still threw snowballs even when the snow had turned to ice. You knew about it when one of those ice balls smacked you on the head.

We'd come home with chapped legs and raw knees - yes we sledged in short pants - all rosy cheeked and ready for the stew and dumplings that our mothers knew we needed. "Sithee 'ere, these'll stick to your ribs," my Auntie Joyce would say, thrusting a hot bowl of stew under our noses and we'd wolf it down and get back out in the snow. I still love the snow and when it covered the estate on Saturday morning we put on our thermals and took the sledge off the wall to make the most of it. Christmas shopping could wait; there were snowmen to build. Maybe three hours later when we'd made our snow angels, two snowmen, a snow man on a seat, and run up and down the hill countless times, chatted with neighbours as they walked to the shops, and left a Christmas message on the hedge, we came in for some lunch.

But something was missing. Where were the kids? Where were the snowball fights? We saw an odd sledge outing as the day progressed but very little. I tell you where they were: they were inside their houses, sitting in front of screens, either watching telly, playing computer games, or engaging in "instant chat" with their friends. Somebody sneaked out long enough just to smash up my snowman but he didn't build his own. Would I swap my childhood for that of today? I don't think so.

Invisible man

I hate breakfast time in conference hotels abroad. Whenever I walk in to the breakfast room it seems to be packed with people chatting away amiably and they are all strangers to me, even the people I know, it seems, who are in their own huddles with not a spare chair.

This happened to me in Estoril in Portugal this week at the World Yacht Racing Forum. There was one spare table but I didn't want to sit alone. Instead I wandered up and down trying to choose something to eat and drink. At home this is easy - there's a kettle, a packet of cereal and maybe a carton of juice, but the choice at the hotel is impossible. I sidle up to the coffee machine, place a cup under the nozzle and press a button half-heartedly. The machine rewards my lack of conviction with its own ambivalence so I walk away.

There must be dozens of different kinds of bread and buns and cakes and croissants and jams and cereals I don't recognise. There are about five different juices but I'd like orange juice and the orange juice jug is empty.

I spot an empty table but before I reach it a woman has seated herself there. There are many pretty, vivacious women at the conference and she isn't one of them. I don't know her but I join her anyway and try to make conversation.

It turns out she's not at my conference but at a neighbouring conference on sailing hardware. Her speciality is paints and coatings. If there is one thing worse than watching paint dry, it is hearing someone describing paint. She apologises for the dullness of her trade and I, trying to be the gentleman, assure her that paint is fascinating.

She must have decided that if there is one thing more boring than describing paint it is someone who nods with apparent interest. She leaves the table in search of a bun. As she returns I decide it's time to try the coffee machine again but a waiter appears and offers to pour me a cup. Waiters - they're never there when you want them but they almost leap out to block your escape when you're trying to avoid them.

So we sit there a little longer, me and the paint lady, mostly in silence, having exhausted the subject of paint and coatings (which I can only conclude is another word for paint). Finally she can stand it no longer and flees to the sanctuary of her conference where paint people mix.

By the end of breakfast my fragile social resolve is in tatters as I retreat in to a natural semi-autistic state that finds comfort in staring at the floor. In this state I know that all social gestures are futile.

In Philip Pullman's book, His Dark Materials, there is a character, a boy, who can stand in a room and appear invisible to people. They simply don't notice him. I can identify with that boy.

It makes no difference when I make an effort. I might look up and smile at someone known to me and heading my way, but they pass by with not a flicker of recognition. This happens to me all the time.

I think if I was wearing a toga, produced a knife and stabbed one of these people in the chest, he would groan and say: "Et tu....sorry do I know you?"

What price the gift of writing with your eyes?

This is the story of Tony Quan, a man who can write with his eyes. It is also the story of James Powderly and the Creators Project.

James tells his own story far better than I can.

Assuming now that you've visited the site and heard Powderly speak, I wonder if you will agree that this is a truly inspiring story. I like it because it challenges various perceptions and prejudices but mostly I like it because it makes me feel good about people.

It's the story of a man who was a "corporate aerospace engineer" who worked on the Mars exploration rover, among other things, and who gave up this work to work in a laboratory called Eyebeam and through that set up something called the Graffiti Research Laboratory.

That word graffiti will probably trigger an emotional response in most of us. For some it will be a negative response, stoking preformed prejudices. That said, I'm sure we're prepared to overlook any prejudice when we see the cool things that Powderly and his collaborators are creating using light projections to "draw" graffiti on buildings. It's called light tagging.

It's up to you to decide whether it is art, just as it is up to you decide whether the spray-paint tagging of graffiti artists such as Tony Quan, who used the name Tempt in various places across Los Angeles, merits the description, art and artist.

But whatever we think about graffiti, I would challenge anyone to be unmoved by the way these new light tagging technologies have been used to help Quan who has been afflicted for the past seven years by the muscle-wasting illness, ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), sometimes described as Lou Gehrig's disease.

While he has lost movement in his limbs he still has control over eye movement. Coupling that movement to the light projection technology has enabled Powderly and his team to give Quan the ability to write and draw again.

The eye-writing project took just 10 days. Powderly says: "And then on that last night of that 10 days of development Tony Quan wrote for the first time in seven years - using his eyes."

A footnote: amazing as it is, you won't find this story in your Guardian or Daily Telegraph because most print journalists still source news stories in conventional ways, drawing from a daily news agenda, usually led by political, business, court and sports events. In time, probably quite soon, this story will emerge in to the mainstream through the pace of referral multiplication on Facebook, Twitter and blogs such as this (or all of them used together).

I came to it, through Stumbleupon which I would commend to you as a service that finds web sights that match your interests.

I can't remember when it was I began using Stumbleupon on the internet. Suffice to say it was years ago. When I say use, I might spend five or ten minutes every now and then flicking through web sites, using the Stumble button on my task bar.

Just to explain, for those who may not be familiar with it, Stumbleupon.com is a web search engine that selects web sites for you to look at based on various personal preferences you have registered with the site.

Instead of being presented with a random site selection when you press the button it provides something more likely than not that will interest you. Sites are "discovered" by other stumblers and given "like" or "dislike" ratings (which are also noted by the StumbleUpon recognition software). It's the same kind of mechanism that allows Facebook and Google to spot your interests and target you with what they consider to be appropriate advertising.

Anyway this is just a preamble to explain my use of the verb when I tell you I stumbled on this site last night. I mentioned it with a link on Facebook and it seemed to resonate with some people so I'm mentioning it here too.

I'm fascinated by career paths and anything that challenges a belief that we have to follow a predefined pattern in careers. If you have ever read The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, you will have some perception of what it must be like to have a fully functioning brain that is "locked-in" by the inability to communicate.

Is searching through the sands of Mars more important than the gift of communication to a paralysed man? I suppose that's a question of perspective, context and personal values.

Want for nothing this Christmas

Christmas shopping? Bored with slippers and perfume? Looking for ideas? You've come to the right place.

First understand this: it's good to shop. Governments are searching constantly for growth in the economy. The only way we can do our bit is to spend, spend, spend and get more stuff. What better time than Christmas to indulge ourselves?

So tear up those charity begging letters and forget the starving millions for once. This is Christmas and for the sake of business everywhere liberate the consumer within. We were born to consume. It's why we exist.

Believe me, I know how easy it is, even as consumers, to fall into the savings trap, putting money away for a rainy day. Resist that temptation. Even worse, if we're not careful we might begin to think we've got everything we need. Well here's something that, deep down, instinctively, we know to be true: that's impossible.

Now shop with confidence in the knowledge that you can never have enough. If you need proof, then read on and get the credit card ready because you won't be able to resist this year's specially selected gift choices brought to you exclusively by Donkin Life. Here goes:

It's always a struggle to find something suitable for your tightwad golf-playing uncle. Not any more. With this twilight tracer ball, he can creep on course at night, avoiding those pesky green fees, and whack his way round in the dark.

How about your student nephew, finding his feet during his first year at university? Assume that he's already worked out his priorities and colonised the student uni dart board. If he really wants to prove himself to the ladies he'll need to work out with this dart-hand developer device. And if it fails with the ladies all that work won't be wasted.

What about your teenage daughter? It's a difficult age and girls need to find themselves. Whatever you do, keep her away from the washing up. It can be stressful. One sure way of doing this is to encourage her to maintain her manicure. To that end this Blow Monkey Nail Dryer will prove a godsend. You know she deserves it and at that price why not get one for each hand?

Still sleeping with your loved one? No-one wants to disturb their partner when caught short in the night. This glow in the dark toilet roll, ensures that a grope in the dark is reserved for under the sheets and not the trip to the bathroom: a must for lasting relationships.

There seems to be a glut of new products designed to ease our night-time excursions. It must be a symptom of modern living and the onset of 24-hour lifestyles. If you want to stay ahead of the trend, particularly if you work as a Golf Club caretaker worried about the threat of new year incursions, you might add a pair of night vision binoculars to Santa's list. At £70 they're not cheap, but neither is a round of golf these days and that's part of the problem. Better to be safe than sorry.

Lots of people like food at Christmas but hampers are so last year and who wants yet another box of chocolates? If you know a man who likes a bit of leg - and what man doesn't - why not get him eight, all perfectly cooked and still attached to this oven-baked tarantula. The spider is real so give yourself a warm glow in doing your bit for the environment. Why squash 'em when the world needs protein?

Warming to the environmental theme, some people need a little reminder about the plight of animals in our crowded world. Overfishing should be a big concern for all of us. What better way to remind your friend, then, than this stuck goldfish bath plug. It's telling me that fish are in a fix. Are you getting the same message?

Great presents, every one, but I know what you're thinking: there's always that special friend who will insist she wants for nothing. So get her nothing this year. At £5.99 it's a steal. But hurry while stocks last.

Getting in to hot water

Gill drinks hot water. I don't understand this. I came back from the station this morning and she was drinking it as she often does.

I just don't get it, I really don't. What is so marvellous about hot water? "It's better than cold water when it's snowing outside," she says. Well there's some logic to that.

But what's wrong with tea or coffee? "I like tea and coffee but sometimes I'm happy with hot water," she says. No this doesn't work for me, I need more. Ten minutes of waterboarding drags it out of her.

That hot water drinking fad, she reveals, emerged from drinking green tea. The tea leaves would stay in the pot and could be used several times by simply pouring on hot water. But over time the tea would get weaker and weaker, so weak, in fact, that eventually Gill realised she was happy with hot water.

I've noticed this trend in her tea bag usage. For Gill to use a single tea bag for a single cup of tea would be inexcusable extravagance. The bag must always be preserved for a second cup and, I suspect (although she will not admit this), occasionally a third.

I'm wondering if there could be a market for hot water: hot water cafes perhaps with a list of choices behind the counter just as you can get different types of coffee at Starbucks. There'd be the original of course for traditionalists who come up to the counter and say: "I'll just have a hot water to go, please."

But trendy types would want something a little je ne sais quoi: l'eau chaude peut etre.

Or maybe we could offer "tea without" or a skinny latte extreme, or water at different temperatures: piping, luke, tepid and aired.

So the order would go something like this:

"A cup of luke please?"

"Tall, Grande or Venti?"

"Tall."

"Milk or sugar?"

"As it comes, please."

"To drink in or out?"

"In."

"Croissant?"

"Pardon?"

"Would you like a Croissant with your water?"

"No thanks, I'll have some dry."

"Dry?"

"Bread. What else could it be?"

"Well we sell dry by the glass. That's how some people like their water these days."

They think it's all over

I remember the World Cup in 1966. Football then was an honest game played by honest people and watched by honest men and women on the terraces. Footballers were commanding good wages but you didn't find the middle men, agents and fixers and multi-million pound marketing budgets that influence the game today.

There were no allegations of corruption in FIFA back then and, had there been, I'm sure it would have responded in rooting out the bad apples. Today there are documented allegations that certain members of FIFA's governing executive have taken bribes and yet its president, Sepp Blatter, has done little or nothing to investigate these claims.

Instead, today its executive awarded the 2018 world cup to Russia, a country that, according to the latest revelations on WikiLeaks, has been described by a Spanish prosecutor as a "virtual mafia state". Russia and FIFA seem made for each other.

Perhaps it is time for the United Nations to involve itself in sport. It could launch a Nations Cup for all those countries and their national teams who have become disenchanted with the way the World Cup has been run.

I cheered the day I heard that London had been chosen to host the Olympics in 2012. But I didn't feel the same about yesterday's vote. FIFA is a tarnished organisation. There was something grubby in the way that our football stars, leading politicians and royalty stoked the egos of this undeserving committee.

They used to say that no-one could bend it like David Beckham. But Beckham was out of his depth among that lot. The best way to deal with Sepp Blatter and his cronies would be to leave them to rot in their own barrel.