Andrew Reid: Curb Your Enthusiasm

They finally have us by the balls. Monopolies are forming online.

eBay. What alternative do we have to eBay in the UK? A garage sale on a damp Sunday? Not quite as far reaching is it? eBay know this and have suddenly doubled their fees to a massive 10%. That’s on top of the listing fees and PayPal fees.

Last year, eBay fees were around the 2% mark. What has prompted the rise?

Greed.

Sheer ugly greed.

Skype. Pretty big - may well end up taking over from mobile phone companies when Wifi and wireless data become more widespread, making 2G and early generation 3G mobile phone voice networks obsolete.

Who bought Skype a few years ago? eBay.

If this isn’t worrying enough for the competition, I haven’t even mentioned the biggest company of all yet - Google.

Google owns search, but not satisifed with ‘just search’ has broadened it’s horizons with mobile phones, maps, online payment systems and numerous other competition threatening giant projects.

Google maps in particular is pretty much the end for Sat Nav and companies like Tom Tom. Soon every mobile phone will have Google maps on it. “Tom Tom? Who cares?” You might say. Well this is just the small tip of the iceberg.

They even take photos of you through your bedroom window, and copyright it.

I think I’ll listen to some music to relax - this is all a bit stressful. Or maybe I’ll watch a movie.

BANG! I’m a criminal. I just watched that movie and now I’m a criminal. I just downloaded a crap pop song from the 80’s but apparently now I’m violating copyright, not simply listening to music.

It’s a bit like buying a CD and playing your friend a track from it through your HiFi whilst a dark shadowy policeman arrives on your doorstep and hauls away your friend, shouting that he’d broken directive 7162 and would have to have his memory cells purged because he heard a song without paying for it.

When presented with free means of enjoying experiences like movies and music, people will use it. It doesn’t make them shoplifters. It means that the old business model is being beaten by a new business model  - you might call it piracy, but I call it a legitimate way forward to a flat fee all-you-can-eat music & movie feast.

Who owns the music? Well, it seems some kind of completely unnecessary antiquated ’recording industry’ does, and they don’t want us to hear it unless they bankcrupt us first.

I would have nowhere near as deep enjoyment of music or film if I’d had to pay for each and every track and each and every movie.

On 6th April 2009, the EU ordered internet service providers to keep a track record of every website, email and phone call you and I make. With a search warrant, a policeman can access your private data, without so much as consulting you.

The internet is no longer ours.

It’s the property of big business and governments, and before long so will you be.

Imagine what it would have been like in the first world war as a heroic fighter pilot. Aeroplanes had only been around for 10 years and were made of wood and fabric.

On the training fields, you strap yourself into a wooden ‘bird cage’ and fire up the tiny propellor engine. You’d rattle into the air and observe the battlefield below from high up above. Your observatory man would drop bombs and take survilance photos, then you’d come back to base and have a beer.

Soon the German enemy would get wind of England’s tiny airforce of 33 planes, so the battle was now to be waged in the sky as it was on earth.

For these men, shooting down an enemy plane was nothing personal. These men were just doing their job. The wrecked plane would ignite and fall to the ground in flames, the pilot would be burnt alive, the flames from the engine in front of him engulfing him as he nose-dived. But after taking a kill, our heroes would never get to see the impact of loss on the enemy pilot’s family, the end result was not emotional - it was that of broken wreckage smouldering on the ground. They couldn’t even put a face or a name to men they’d just that moment shot down at close range.

Though one day a top ace of the British Flying Corps got a look into the cockpit of a plane he’d just shot down, the pilot dead from a bullet to the head, but also curiously a small terrier dog slumped dead in the cockpit.

The dog had been up in the plane, a mascot. The British flying ace felt something new - these planes he was shooting contained men just like himself, he was murdering man after man, their lives, the hopes and dreams along with them going down in flames. In situations such as these, there is no such thing as ‘the enemy’.

Even with the politics and technology which allow people to kill a faceless enemy, many times have soldiers looked into the enemy’s eyes as they kill, but rarely do they see the dead man’s family realising for the first time that ‘dad’ won’t becoming home again, or the moment’s in dad’s life which humanise him.

That it took a dead dog to make the fighter pilot realise this shows just how impersonal war can be. But after this, our hero was never the same. His mind got the better of him and his conscious was torn between continuing his successful elegance to his comrades and quitting altogether to get married and start a family featuring two kids and a pet terrier.

Sadly, before he could get his mind straightened out, the fighter pilot did something stupid. In the heat of battle, he swooped down over a wreckage he’d just shot down, he could bare no longer the impersonal nature of war, and flew by as a tribute to the fallen enemy. On the ascent back to the skies his plane was riven with holes from ground based machine gun turrets, and his engine set ablaze. The fighter pilot took out a pistol from a small pouch in the cockpit, and before the fire had chance to engulf him on the way down, he shot himself.

The best way to stop war is to make it personal.

Future products, I think, have a habit of revealing the true flaws in the previous product.

For example looking at the new Ford Street Ka reveals that many people who bought the plain old Ka thought they could do without a roof in sunny England, and complained that the interior just wasn’t quite plasticy enough.

Likewise, that NASA plan to replace the Shuttle with a metal bucket on a parachute reveals that NASA thought the Shuttle was a real shitter that kept exploding and killing people.

Also the fact that my year old £1000 Macbook Pro has started to creak reveals that many people have experienced this and that is why Apple have decided to make the new one out of one big laser cut block of aluminium with no joins, for £1700.

This is why they are rich.

Things are slightly different on the internet. When a website is replaced by a newer model, it’s usually replaced by a different website altogether. Whoever achieves this will turn from a slumdog into a billionaire over night.

On the internet there is a nasty little class system at work too.

MySpace and Facebook are prime examples. When MySpace became full of ‘my first komputa’ chavs we all moved to Facebook. When all the Facebook applications turned into spam and viruses which started attacking us we all moved to Twitter to be around more respectable company, such as Stephen Fry.

The problem with Twitter though, is for the first time in the history of the internet it’s actually a step backwards.

The principle is right but the website itself is far too basic, and for once in the case of Twitter, “keep it simple stupid” is not the answer.

An example - you follow lots of interesting people, let’s say just 7 of them. However if just one person per day has a case of verbal diarrhea and spews out 10 messages in the space of a couple of hours this pushes all your other interesting friends off the page every single day.

And for some reason I never feel compelled to look at more than one pages worth of Twittering.

Meanwhile on Facebook, the problem seems to be that nobody really tweets enough, because you’re all scared of what people might think (you bunch of complete cowards).

People don’t seem to be honest, or frank, or blunt, or to be quite frank and blunt - have much to say at all, with a few exceptions. It’s all become a bit safe, it’s all become a bit of a peacock show of fluff, a bit of a bluff. Photos from an uneventful night out are made to look like a 1980’s cocktail party at Elton John’s pent house.

I enjoy reading those notes or blogs from friends who risk their neck and don’t really censor themselves, especially when they have a unique style and a theme or use photos to head up their note. A spammy ‘25 things’ note is just not quite the same.

Beyond the obvious ‘look-at-me’ value from the uploader and the obvious ‘voyeurism’ from the viewer, there doesn’t seem to be much incentive to keep using Facebook, especially as we all have mobiles, email accounts and - mouths.

The reality of Facebook’s day to day ramblings are nothing like the 18th century era Marie Antoinette orgy that people like to portray them as.

As Stephen Fry would say, “It’s all become a bit low rent”.

In fact the sensible people have vanished altogether to conduct their lives in private, and Facebook is dying on it’s arse. Which is a shame really because it’s uniquely addicting, potential ego boosting and occasionally speak-your-mind joyously entertaining.

The fact is though, that Facebook, and MySpace before it, and Friend’s Reunited before that (pah!) all made absolute billionaires out of their creators.

For anybody that joined Facebook only not to really use it, or to leave later on, here is a customer waiting for a replacement.

For the millions who have flocked to the company of Stephen Fry on the not-quite-the-full-deal Twitter, there is an opportunity in waiting for some lucky inventor.

There is a slumdog out there somewhere ready to step up with their idea for the future of social networking, the customer base is huge - the whole of the world wide Internet.

I have a feeling that this time it won’t be a revolution, but an evolution of what went before.

It’s simple really. Forget stupid pokes. What would you really miss if these websites disappeared today?

What do I miss about MySpace?
The ‘my website’ feel of the customised page and the music orientated design. I didn’t miss the tatty customisations by chavs and the bad technical side.

What do I miss about Facebook?
It’s become something of a jack of all trades, master of none, witness the awful pop up MSN style chat, but it does still have it’s uses. Organising events and a spam-free friend-messaging emailer for one, and a good way to get your blogs and photos noticed, another. I won’t miss the fact that it’s now ever so out of fashion and slightly naff, and the abject failure of the open ‘apps’ side, which was once so promising. Facebook, in the last 6 months, has not played to it’s strengths.

What do I miss about Twitter?
Nothing yet, but when it’s gone due to being a bit rubbish, I’ll miss having a first hand insight into the world of famous people and being able to follow (without the many annoying distractions on Facebook) those friend’s candid enough to reveal something interesting, the moment it occurs. It’s also a good way to get a feel on the news, on opinions, on the pulse of the world’s people. As a collective text it (regrettably) makes news agencies and journalists redundant, or at the least turns huge news organisations into ‘just web editors’ collecting together 2nd hand news from Twitterers. However if it kills the tabloids and ITV I’ll be more than happy. Bad quality journalists without an interesting voice of their own when there is pressure placed on the market, will be the first to die off. However at the other end of the scale I hope professionals, like at the BBC in most cases, make it into the next decade alive.

Now some suggestions:

Imagine a searchable text generated by people, like Twitter but based on locations. When the US Airways plane crashed in the Hudson, you could use a Google Map’s style interface to view what people were muttering as they looked out of their windows (of nearby flats, not the plane, ahem). Similarly, a radar of famous / interesting people would be handy, because this is pretty much what all the success of Twitter is based on - and don’t let the Open Source tech nuts tell you differently. If they had their way instead of a map we’d all be searching for secret code words prefaced with hashes on some kind of black and white terminal screen.

I think the next generation website has to take some cues from video games as well. A class system could be in place where people could rise up it based on how much they say and how interesting it is. The higher class you are the more you’re noticed in the community. Community leaders would emerge and get due recognition. This would be a motivation for people to be more candid, and to stop simply looking on mutely.

Many of my closest friends are on Facebook - but because they’re not techno nerds like me - they never really say anything or use it.

Something needs to happen to motivate them to get more involved. The same person might happily play a casual game on the Wii but never write a blog. Current ways of blogging and surfing websites are not interesting enough to bring these technocasual people on board, which is a shame because they’re usually some of the most interesting ones, who actually have lives to lead

The final aspect which must be present is that the website is primarly a communication tool. Facebook has gone some way to replacing email for casual social chat, and even some business communication. This is a huge feat. It’s not effected by the same spam which blights email, when you get a message on Facebook you know exactly where it came from.

So the new website must:

Have a sense of community but with a class ladder, leaders and followers. Video game style.
Be more locally based but expandable via a location based search to gauge moods and news first hand
It must pander to people’s egos in some way.
It must have a voyeurism aspect.
It’s got to be a communication tool, a casual means of expressing oneself in the company of friends.
It must contain multimedia like photos and videos.
It mustn’t go to far and be the jack of all trades. YouTube does video, I hear

These are the key aspects, and in my next blog I’ll try and put them into a fully formed idea for a social networking website of the future.

PS

Congratulations for reading this far. You must really really really had wanted to get to something more interesting. Well… tough!

I have just booked a flight to Hong Kong to see my girlfriend and I’ve realised that being 29 gives you a good sense of how time is accelerating.

It seems like only yesterday that I was in my early 20’s. Applying that same logic to the future means I’ll be 40 in a blink of an eye!

In the grand scale of things we human beings pop in and out of existence like little electrical particles, so I better make the most of my fizz whilst I still have it.

Too often the most important things in life like girlfriends, wives and work have to be compromised for them to fit together unless you’re polygamous.

Rather than go for just 2 weeks to see Joey in Taiwan, I’ve decided to take a working holiday and do what I do already but instead of the raining sky and the old desk, I’ll have my girlfriend for company, with the warm pacific breeze and a view of a river.

In Hong Kong I’ll buy up all the shops and sell them all on eBay, and if they let me back in to get my flight back to England I’ll do it all again for the benefit of Mr eBay UK.

I also want to ride on a scooter through the mountain roads.

Instead of walking through traffic to Tesco after a days work in front of the computer screen, I’ll be able to pad around bare foot on sandy beaches with the one I love, after a days work in front of a computer screen.

It may be enough to make me leave England forever, although I will miss my oven, mum and sister.

And Mini Eggs.

The good thing about this new global world tied together with the internet, cheap flights and elastic bands like a ragged ball of wool that a kitten might throw down the stairs, is that when you go on holiday you can take your laptop with you and work your little socks off in the same place as you ended the 2 week holiday in.

The bad thing about our ragged ball of wool world is that you become torn between two homes, which even when connected with dancing multicoloured lines of thread, the fact remains that they’re very very far apart indeed.

Choosing one becomes impossible.

It’s a far cry from when our grandparents used to move around the corner when they got too old.

I guess at 29, my time has come to move around the word before moving around the corner.

Things have been very hectic recently, with almost my entire existence given over to my girlfriends.

Both girlfriends are productive persuits, full of all the joys and frustrations that life’s rich tapestry can bring.

With Joey now in the Pacific Prison of her home country, I have been spending a lot of time with my other one, the iPhone. I won’t give too much away but needless to say we’ve made love on many occasions and produced a baby. Thus sometime in the next few weeks marks the release of my iPhone game to iTunes and the Apple App Store. Happy times*

(*It has been a fucking nightmare)

So what can you expect?

I won’t give too much away but to say that it’s a twist on Lemmings, with the classic gameplay of Lemmings, featuring levels a bit like in Lemmings, and controls like in Lemmings but for the iPhone.

Rather than go into the details here I’ve decided to setup an iPhone game publishing ‘name’, which possibly could be Nanopunk, with it’s own website detailing the process of making an iPhone game from start to finish.

The website isn’t finished yet though and as you can see from the screenshot above neither is half the game, but I’ll make some predictions.

The iPhone games market will be huge in the coming years, as people move from casual gaming on laptops and PCs to their mobile phones, which are now at a level to properly do software justice.

Why? On the iPhone and Google’s Android, games can be downloaded in seconds over the air straight to the phone. This is the business model of the future.

It’s happening with the XBox and Playstation 3 as well, but the mobile game market is less mature and has historically been graphically underpowered until now, and the opportunities are bigger, and for now the novelty factor is higher.

Unlike the Sony Ericsson’s and Motorola’s of the past, the ‘new generation’ mobile like the iPhone are more akin to a tiny laptop than a mobile phone, but retain the sleek and personal touch of something which fits into your pocket like an electronic status symbol.

Yes the Sony PSP has been around for a while but it’s a separate entity, something you don’t always bring with you, and it lacks the social aspects of being a phone. It’s also completely closed off to the ingenious indie micro studios and but for a few, is dominated by the unoriginal, bloated and heavily marketed wares of large companies, which only hardcore game addicts enjoy, i.e. young men and teenagers.

Highstreet stores such as HMV, if they’re not already, will become waddling dodos.

With the iPhone, exposure is no longer determined by how big your marketing department is or how many retail and distribution connections you have.

If you have a quality game, with original ideas and appeal, it will get it’s 15 seconds of fame with the massive iPhone blog readerships around the web, on places like www.toucharcade.com which have huge followings.

If your game is viral or has an ‘X-Factor’ it has the potential to spread around like wildfire and if you’re lucky it will end up making millions. Others have already done the same, with what is essentially just a pet-project knocked up over a few months in their flat.

Exciting and revolutionary times in the mobile world, then… for now.

View a video of the prototype here (the finished version will work in landscape view)

Back when I was a student, I had a credit card.

Making sure to pay off the 50p I spent on it each month, I never wasted any money on interest. To me, wasting money on interest was a repulsive idea. Why should a student give parts of his loan meant for education, to the mega rich banking industry?

In 2003 my card only had a £500 limit so even if I wanted to buy a helicopter, I couldn’t.

Alas, that shiny £200 TV though was one temptation too many and the bank knew it, like a magician playing a card trick with me.

Slowly I began to use it more and more, but not in the way you might think.

I made around £600 a month in profit from buying and selling items on eBay, and the card’s spending power was essential for buying bargains to sell for a profit.

But the fact remains that I was a student with £8,000 worth of student loans to pay off, yet unasked HSBC automatically increased my credit limit on the card to £4000.

Maybe they wanted to support my eBay business, but I doubt it.

That, as we now know, is how they make their huge profits: to get people into debt and make a profit off the extortionate interest rates, which are well above the base lending rate. It should be illegal but it isn’t. Basically, it has now fucked up the world.

Back when the base rate of interest was a huge 6%, during boom time (it was high to prevent inflation) credit cards were charging up to 28%. That’s how much customers were being ripped off…its still not illegal though, it’s called the Financial Services Industry.

Now the interest rate is close to zero, they’re still creaming it off. I get charged around 18% APR.

Later, shortly after finishing university I had a job with a modest salary, I couldn’t afford to pay off a £4000 credit card bill let alone the interest on top of that, but the banks know that people spend what they have available to them. My debt hovered around a manageable £1000, but they still kept upped the limit to £7000 like a carrot. Why?

I had letters through the post offering me personal loans and mortgages. I, a student!

Shortly afterwards as my pay and prospects rose so did my spending power, and the bank knew that by spying on my statements.

And so they got their loot, they stole from me over the years, roughly to the tune of £3000 in interest over 7 years, but it gets worse…

The credit card was always a useful tool and an indispensible asset to my eBay business, which was doing well but this regular outgoing and incoming effected my daily balance so I never knew what the true cost of living was. It had the effect of hiding from me the truth. How much I spent on food, how much on bills, how much on direct debits per month during the boom times - I had only a very vague idea and my estimate was much lower than it actually was.

Soon the bank had increased my credit limit to £8500, without even consulting me. They knew I had no chance of paying off such a rediculous sum of money, the interest on which would be roughly £400 a month, and yet they were prepared to let me spend that much. They had other tricks up their sleeves as well, which were written in the reams of small print which nobody reads.

Article 48.9: Credit card cash withdrawals in German zoos: I have £200 of cash costing me £7 a month in interest for 2 years sat at the bottom of my credit card balance, untouchable. I had expected to pay it off the next month, when I paid £1000 off my balance, but no it ‘remains until my full balance is paid off’, which isn’t much good to me because there’s now 5 grand sitting on top of it like an elephant.

Well, as all of us have now discovered, what the banks have done amounts to a genocide on our livlihoods, a noose on our dreams, a choke on our long term prospects.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve been careful with your money or not, we all have to suffer the consequences of the global economic collapse.

Someone you know has probably lost their job this week. If not, then they will.

Slowly, like a magic trick unfolding, like an impossible knot forming in a rope, somehow - I still don’t know how, I had a £5000 debt on my credit card and nothing left to sell, even though I had a decent wage and had made a profit of between £50 and £700 on 90% of my eBay sales. I had worked hard for this.

And now the economy as a whole has well and truly crunched, I can’t even buy and sell my way out of it. It’s as well I still have my job as a web designer.

I know it sounds rediculous, I know it sounds stupid that anyone can build up a debt like this on a credit card over 2 years, but I’m not alone it seems.

It’s not as if the weight or urgency of the debt is crippling me or endagering my lifestyle, but that’s exactly how the banks get you to use the credit card in the first place. Slowly but surely, they’ll catch you like small fish in a huge trawler net, and your money becomes theirs. Credit cards are a con trick, an imaginary loan, which have ruined the world economy.

Rather than being in a minority, I find I’m in a huge majority. Nearly everyone of my generation has some kind of massive debt around their neck.

The plan is to give the banks yet more money so that they start lending money to each other again.

I fail to see how this helps us.

When society as a whole is bankrupt, how does it help to give the thieves who took it all in the first place yet more of the public’s money, in the form of a bail out by the tax payer?

Why isn’t the common good being used to pay off the debts of me and you? Why is it being pumped into a failing, faulty and corrupt system, which will fail again and lead to another period of economic woe?

To make matters worse, even in this crippling recession the banks are still creaming it off. It would help for them to pass down the government help, they haven’t. It would help for them to charge a more reasonable rate of credit card interest, to help me pay off my debt. But they’re determined to get as much profit as possible from my woes.

What’s also astonishing is that they now have the benefit of hindsight in seeing the damage they’ve done not only to themselves but to the entire world by pursuing this strategy, yet they don’t change.

As for us, mere citizens, we got a token 2.5% cut in VAT which amounted to absolutely fuck all but had the physcological effect of making us spend our ways even further into debt, at Christmas.

That’s the idiotic Gormless Brown’s idea of ‘kick starting the UK economy’.

The fact remains, that the banks have taken advantage of basic human nature and used it against us for their short term gains. It’s greed of the highest order, psychopathic behaviour from an essential institution, once trusted and valued.

It should never have been allowed to happen.

PS

I often wonder why our pound dropped from being worth 2 dollars in the pound, and 1.4 euros, in the space of just a few months. Now I know the terrible answer:

UK consumer debt as a percentage of GDP: 110%

The next highest in Europe is France at 70% 

In short - we’re fucked.

As a collective nation, we owe more on our credit cards than we actually earn and export in entirety. I am not sure how we’ll pay it off, and it’s only going to get worse until the banks are lynched in riots.

While I can honestly say that listening to Morrissey’s new album whilst browsing Poundland yesterday was one of the most depressing experiences of my entire life he really does come up with some powerful and moving music.

In fact, I have decided that there is nowhere else on Earth where you can get such blunt social commentary and mastery of language than in good old England.

It’s wonderful. Even when I was in Spain, because I am too lazy to speak a word of Spanish I began to yearn to hear an English voice. Sometimes whilst I’m out and about in Manchester city centre I yearn for that as well.

Well, it may not seem like it but in Manchester we’re on the cutting edge, we were the first industrialised city and you can see why the British have such incredible artistry and language.

It’s the need to express the utter pain of being on that bastard sharp edge all the time.

The daily grind at the office (it used to be the daily grind at the factory but they’ve all gone to China now).

The bleak unforgiving grey sky.

The merciless banks and corporations who take take take take take.

Well the irony is we’ll be the first when it comes to the next wave of modern life as well - complete and utter social & economic meltdown.

I admit that at the moment certain things are quite peachy in good old Manchester. I have a Taiwanese girlfriend who lives in Taiwan, my friend has a Polish girlfriend who lives in Berlin, and my boss has a Portuguese girlfriend who lives in Cheshire. But Manchester as a whole, rather than reflecting a nicely balanced multicultural melting pot, is starting to look like the Manchester of the future.

In the future England will be a bankrupt island floating ineptly in the North Sea like an oil spill, overflowing with criminal imports feasting off what’s left of our cities like diseased rats.

If that sounds a little pessimistic, and you’re probably wondering what triggered this rant off, then listen to this:

My girlfriend, a skilled marketing strategist, 29 from Taiwan, highly paid and from a well off family in beautiful Pacific breeze blessed country side, wants to come and work in England but our government doesn’t want her.

But Ramavich the Romanian rapist, 46 with no desernable charm or intelligence, can simply walk in through the front door, EU passport in hand, knife in the other, and carry on with his criminalistic urges until eventually someone notices and sends him to a nice comfortable jail cell at our expense.

Then he’ll be let out again and begin hanging around Piccadilly Gardens dragging his victims backwards through the snow whilst picking their pockets.

I struggle to make sense of the fact that whilst there are millions of low skilled immigrants staring at us with their glum uncaring eyes over the counter at Subway, my beautiful Joey isn’t allowed in due to a ‘points’ system.

I struggle to come to terms with the idea that whilst there are millions of jobless English people sitting at home watching the lottery draw, our major construction projects are done by Italian companies who employ cheap Russian farm dwellers that send all the worthless pounds we give them back to their families in Kazakhstan.

Anybody, from anywhere, from any culture, can see that this approach to immigration is a bit fucked up.

But there is a small light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s very ironic indeed.

Our currency has now dropped to such a pathetic level against the Taiwanese dollar, that the wage Joey quoted on her visa application is now worth a third more in pounds than before, which qualifies her for those extra 2 points required for the fabled working visa.

So it looks like I may get to see my girlfriend again.

Thank you, Gordon Brown.

For the latest on the fire see my Twitter at
http://twitter.com/commanderspike

My girlfriend Joey and I have a joke, where we speak to each other in cat language: “Meow, meow, meow?” making sure to include some body language and a change in tone of voice every now and again, carrying meaning in the otherwise repetitive use of ‘meow’. It’s based on a YouTube cartoon called featuring a cat called Detective Mittens, who is - yes you’ve guessed it - a detective cat with a detective style hat.

Well tonight I am a rubbish detective too.

A few hours ago my friend and I were trying to install Leopard on my Mac Mini, and as we did so he discussed his latest projects, the setting up of a free clinic for children in India, and the fact he was going to blog about it, photo document it and publise it through the internet in general. A good idea I thought, seen as those his blog is pretty popular and new tools like Twitter are becoming better known. Twitter was recently discussed on the Jonathan Ross show by Stephen Fry of all people. Both celebrities can be followed on Twitter, and as I watched their feed of messages this evening, Russell Brand also began using it for the first time.

It’s like Facebook status updates and photos without all the other rubbish.

Well, irony upon irony: within an hour of the huge fire breaking out in Manchester city centre that evening at least two other people were talking about it on Twitter, locally. One, a radio producer for Key 103, the other an IT professional living nearby. Both locals. I meanwhile was posting my first ever Tweets with my photos from the fire.

Prior to that, Andy and I were lucky enough to catch things quite early on. (See Andy’s blog here)

Bidding goodbye after getting the Mac up and running, we smelled burning out in my apartment’s courtyard and smoke in the air. Thinking my building was on fire, I craned my neck upwards but with not seeing any flames, I went back inside again. It was 1am. Andy called me a few minutes later to say that he’d found huge billows of smoke hanging over the city centre. I came out, camera in hand, and we walked to the site of the fire on Great Ancoats street, which was lined with hoses, fire engines and policemen.

When I got back to Twitter about it, my flat mate James, a professional broadcast journalist for the BBC on North West Tonight, had returned from his night shift and asked if he could borrow the photos for tomorrow’s news bulletin. He’d seen the update on my Facebook status, which linked to my Twitter feed.

All this new technology, whilst often quite mundane, has interesting implications for the news agencies, who may find themselves outnumbered (if not out skilled) by a load of roaming amateurs twittering into their iPhones. I am not sure I like this brave new world of news, for not everybody is a journalist or a detective. Most of us are Detective Mittens, just typing stuff into Google or snapping away with our pocket cameras without a thought toward quality or authenticity.

So, after my rediculously amateurish journalism exploits had ceased for the night, I began to turn my attention to amateur detective work.

From the numbers of the buildings on the opposite side of the road, Andy had deduced that the site on fire opposite was number 57 Great Ancoats Street.

A little Googling by Detective Mittens revealed that the site was home to a huge construction project, from a construction group named BSC.

BSC have been leaving a spectacular mess of unfinished sites around the city centre. Once destined to be huge residential towers, these ambitious projects have been cursed from start to incompletion.

At first we thought the tower on fire was BSC’s Sarah Tower, and although I am now not really sure whether the site on fire is that of the Sarah Tower or the more generically named Ancoats Street Tower (pretty sure that’s the one as the Sarah Tower is near the canal), you could reasonably suggest that BSC is one hell of a cow boy builder.

According to a further article offered up by Google, all of BSC’s Manchester projects are on hold due to the credit crunch. Previously they have constantly flouted health and safety laws, to the extent that a Polish workman actually DIED on site at the Sarah Tower. Other sites had live unfused electrical lines coming straight out of the ground supply into onsite tools and equipment.

Hmmm - the plot thickens. In fact the city council is very worried about one site in particular, because it’s in danger of falling down.

The fire at 57 Great Ancoats Street tonight may help that to happen sooner than the council think.

As for the cause? You decide…

A single moment can sometimes sum up an entire history, and it happened to me one morning in Berlin, a German man waited on the edge of a busy road and suddenly in a scene which wouldn’t be out of place in a classic movie, his wife ran into his arms from across the street and they embraced as if meeting after a long time apart.

Berlin has been liberated from war by love.

It has that special spirit about it… and everything that happens in this great city feels heightened by it’s terrible history.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t still have a dark underbelly. I was arrested.

It all started when we decided to go on a bike tour of the city. I’d missed it a few days earlier, because we got lost. I’d met an Australian fashion designer called Alicia the day before so we decided to catch the U2 line rather than walk to the pick up point. However she took 20 minutes in the bathroom, putting on makeup. It was OK though, or so it seemed, because we could make it to the station on time, with minutes to spare.

The underground stations of Berlin are huge, the trains a lot larger than in London. As I put my €5 note in the machine to pay for a €1.30 ticket it spat the note out again and again, when suddenly a haunting woosh arrived from the dark tunnel to my right and we got on the train regardless. It was a 10 minute journey when suddenly just 1 minute from the stop a plain clothed policeman emerged from nowhere, asking to see tickets.

Alicia had a few days worth of tickets on her, and as she went through them the inspector seemed irritated and impatient, and just as our stop arrived, he turned to me. “He’s just doing his job” I thought, “however this is awfully unjust”.

So I ran.

The German crowds were swarming up the stairs to daylight, so I took a right turn, ducked and ran towards what I thought was a tunnel under the stairs. The policeman shouted in German…”Polizi! Polizi” it all seemed very harsh.

He grabbed me. I was wearing a bright orange Superdry rucksack and he managed to get his hands on it, he pulled me back and dragged me to the ground. My head was forced backwards to the staircase, where I saw everyone staring in shock. Then I caught sight of Alicia looking at me open mouthed.

We’d missed the bike ride.

There was not much reasoning to be done with him now, and he didn’t speak English but he did fine me: the standard €40 and I avoided a night in a cell. 

The nightlife of Berlin is pretty dangerous too. I can’t see this happening in Health and Safety Manchester: whereby a bathtub of flammable beer froth is ignited by a madman with a flame thrower. The bar had a beach in the back yard meanwhile inside was a metal dragon overlooking the dance floor. With a loud THRUUUUUU every 20 minutes everybody’s shocked faces turned by instinct, glowing orange, to gaze up at the amazing flame throwing dragon.

Restaurants are open into the early hours of the morning, at midnight it’s not uncommon to see people chatting over candlelight whilst downstairs in the basement a DJ plays thudding beats.

At White Trash / White Noise, a gothic burlesque bar with geek chick waitresses and a roving palm reader, the restaurant upstairs provided the food whilst the indie club downstairs provided the music. In the middle was a pub.

It’s stylish and sexy.

The historic heart of the city isn’t quite real. It was flattened during the war, a few shards of burnt and bullet riven stone still remained pointing upright out of the smog. But they restored it so you’d hardly ever notice, other than the chips and blemishes they left behind as a reminder. In the East it was a different story, huge soviet concrete towers replacing the quaint German houses of pre-war times. 

I went for a massage in the East of the city and as I walked through the streets it was like being in Russia. It had a cavalier rogue heart of indie clubs and graffiti in the city centre, whilst on the outskirts the soviet fountains, parks with Eastern European sculptures, poured concrete tower blocks full of bohemian Russian looking girls, the circus on an abandoned field, the makeshift beach volley ball courts all have a charm of their own.

In West Berlin, it’s a political diplomat’s playground, Run Lola Run style. Expensive hotels recently visited by Barrack Obama, the huge park full of wi-fi surfing laptop dudes and dudettes. It’s still like a different city.

Berlin covers a huge area, with not a hill in sight. Bikes roam the streets, there’s fewer cars and less noise than in any other European capital. Although there are 3.5 million Berliners, they’re spread out over huge wide roads, tall residential blocks and chic new flats.

The stories from the past are incredible. The Nazi party lead by Adolf Hitler has been quite rightly banished from sight. The site of his final days - Hitler’s WWII bunker is now a car park next to some flats. The locals, fed up of tourists asking where the bunker is, have now got a discrete sign with a map on it of the car park which shows the layout of the bunker below. Hitler’s legacy quite rightly is not something to be proud of but there is no doubt he created some incredible infrastructure. The transport system means you’d rarely need a car at all.

Riding on the underground train, the U2 line this time with a ticket, I arrived at the Zoo Station whilst listening to the track of the same name on U2’s album Achtung Baby, recorded in Berlin. The sound of this album perfectly sums up the ambience in Berlin. It’s still industrious but it’s confident and laid back…Berlin is getting less poor, but it’s still sexy.

David Bowie came down from his drug ravaged mid 70’s high in Berlin to record Low and Heroes. It’s still a fertile ground for creative people. Freedom of expression, having been downtrodden for so long has been restored.

When the city was split in two by the Berlin Wall, the death strip separated families, lovers and friends. Many were shot in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s trying to cross from East to West. The East was controlled by the Russians whilst the West was run by the allies from the war, America, France and the UK. The Russians erected a huge TV tower as a show of strength. Immediately after it’s completion in the late 60’s it began to sink into the ground. They had to secretly enlist Western engineers to sort it out. There was mistrust on all sides where today there is trust and togetherness.

A woman was shot trying to escape to the West and now there is a small memorial on the edge of the park to some of those killed crossing the wall. Others were more devious. One man found himself separated from his East German girlfriend one day. Alone in a bar, he met someone else who looked just like her. After a few months he’d take her on holiday, but not to Paris or London, but to East Berlin. In a hotel they made love and in the morning she woke up alone, her passport and papers missing along with her lover. Meanwhile her charming lover drove his reunited East German girlfriend through the checkpoint, papers in hand. What he didn’t know was that the woman he’d just used so badly had a politician father, and the man was later jailed for 15 years - separated from his East German girlfriend forever.

I had a Beatles mid-60’s moment when I explored Tantric massage. Incredible. On relaxing days off from sightseeing and nightlife I visited the huge thermal baths, health spas which would cost a fortune in the UK are just part of everyday life for the Germans. 

On the final few days of the trip I met a girl named Joey, and wanted to visit her in Munich when she left the next day. So I missed my flight and made plans to stay until the next Monday. I’d have an extra weekend in Munich but because of the Oktoberfest it would cost me £200 to travel there and back for my flight from Berlin. But I hope to see her again.

I’ve left behind a city I really connected with and this is what I saw on returning to Manchester: a student girl weeing in the street, squatting and rocking after a night out of too much drink.

It’s summer and Facebook has become a boring twitter in my ear.

“So and so is counting down to the festival”

“So and so is buying a tent for the festival”

“So and so is counting down to the festival every day for the next 30 days”

Andrew Reid is counting down to Berlin at 100hz. How would you like that, festival goers? How interesting would it be if I uploaded my entire travel itinerary to your laptop with a Steven Hawking voice reading it out every single day until I fucked off on a plane?

Is this constant stream of counting-down there to drown out the sound of an empty void of a life, the occupier of which has nothing to say and nothing to do until the next big piss up? *

I have also noticed another strange facet of human behaviour, as revealed by the summer festivals. a) that students can afford a £300 weekend in a muddy field and that b) girls get very excited about sex in tents.

Isn’t it kinky, having sex in a tent?

Just don’t thrust too hard or the airbed will explode like a burst balloon, powering out of the tent and down the road like a kamikaze military hovercraft on it’s way to Vietnam.

Yes, isn’t it kinky. Once you finally get all the images of Barbara Windsor in a Carry On film out of your mind and get down to business all you need to worry about is that nearby tractor, which could reverse over your naked arse at any moment.

Don’t scream too much either, as you might wake up your single friend in the other tent - actually don’t worry about that because he’ll be awake all night anyway, with images of Barbara Windsor’s tits flapping about in his head whilst pondering the meaning of not having a girlfriend - i.e. that the meaning of his life is somehow lacking in this context (or along those lines).

I guess the students all spending my money on £300 festival jaunts don’t need to worry about at least one of these things while enjoying the music and sex in their tents. Mercifully they’re too young to remember Carry On Camping. Instead they feel very trendy about paying £300 to sleep in a muddy field in the middle of nowhere.

At the British Grand Prix, the atmosphere on the camp site and the partying was one of the main features of the weekend. But I find it strangely puzzling that girls going to festivals get so excited about tents when you have 40 of the best bands in the world on your flap-step. I’d even be so cynical to claim that the girls don’t actually go for the music and that they just want to escape modern life.

Could it be that tents at a festival give people a feeling of intimacy and togetherness which office work just doesn’t quite provide?

I’m all for getting back to that way of living but when all is said and done I don’t share the excitement about sex in a tent, buying a tent, or anything to do with tents, especially when it costs £300 to see the Kaiser Chiefs.

* Disclaimer: no offence intended, its not your fault your life is shit**

** Again no offence intended, I was only joking there ***

*** To all my festival going friends I was only joking throughout the entire blog ****

**** Accept if you’re a cock, then all offences intended *****

***** Disclaimer does not apply for cocks