Alan Coleman

I love Christmas, always have done. I can remember vividly getting worked up into a frenzy as Christmas came closer, school finished and family started to congregate in houses far too small for the purpose.

Looking back, it was all about the build up as the day itself was always, for some reason or another, a bit of an anti climax. The waiting,  the familiar smells and tastes, The Poseidon Adventure on our portable black and white TV, the old man disappearing up the pub and Mum struggling to cook all that food for all those people. Happy days.

As I got older and started going out and drinking myself, the focus seemed to turn towards Christmas Eve as the pinnacle of the season’s excitement. Finishing work, a few days off, beering it up in decorated boozers and round people’s houses. The continuous soundtrack of Slade and The Ronnettes blaring from juke boxes and Halfords aftermarket car stereos. More Happy days.

One particular Christmas Eve I came home shitfaced and vomited on the sofa, couldn’t be bothered to clear it up so just turned the cushion over hoping nobody would notice. It was my Grandma who came back from church the next morning and bubbled me to the old man. Very fucking Christian Grandma, cheers.

By that point Christmas Day had become one big blur, the whole thing mired by an unearthly hangover and paranoia about the previous nights activities.  Being uncontrollably drunk in front of the family, warm cans of lager, steamed up windows, shitty moods and dried up Turkey. The reality of Christmas.

Tomorrow will be Christmas Eve and as usual I can’t wait. In a couple of weeks I’ll have forgotten the tears, hangovers and the shit presents and will be wishing it was Christmas all over again.

Happy Days indeed.

It’s only been a few days since the it was announced that NOW was finishing with its last edition today, it all coming  amid the phone hacking scandal that is currently gripping the nation. My Tweet Deck has been working overtime trying to cope with the amount of  tweeters and bloggers feeling sorry for the workforce and bemoaning the end of 168 years of British media history.

Which raises question, is the end of The News of the World really such a big deal? It’s not as if we’re losing a great tradition of fine writing, insight and social commentary. No, nothing of the sort, because The News of the World has always been a pile of utter shit.

It doesn’t even look very nice, its overtly aggressive design has changed little since the 70s very much like the conservatism it champions. Awful. All this talk of justice and high level reporting, really? This is the Newspaper that has a history of taking the moral high ground on practically everything, whilst at the same time dragging the conscience and morality of millions through the gutter. Should we really be mourning the passing of an institution that has a morbid fascination with with sexualising both violence and young women at the same time? Sex, children, violence and women, in no particular order and preferably at the same time. Anything to boost circulation, to sell copy,  make money and titillate the nation.

The only aspect of this whole debacle I feel sorry about is that The News of the World didn’t have to face the humiliation of going bust. As for the people who worked there, they’ll have to join the dole que. Just like everyone else who loses their job, like the Miners had to, the people The News of the World demonised back in the early 80s whilst licking up to Thatcher.

Nothing ever lasts for ever.

I remember watching the Space Shuttle launch shortly before my tenth birthday, at a small school in the Essex countryside. The sun was shining outside as  we gazed in amazement at the school television, it had buttons on the front and 3 channels. It was soon after we had a visit from an American basketball team from Weathersfield Airbase, the biggest people we’d ever seen.

The launch we watched on that wooden Televsion on the 12th April 1981 was Columbia’s first mission, STS 1. It was a memory I relived yesterday as I watched Endeavour launch its last mission, STS 134, from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida 30 years later.

What struck me about yesterdays launch was how similar it was to the first one I saw, why would it be any different? The thing is, it’s not as if I’ve been that interested in the program during the last 30 years, it’s pretty much passed me by. It’s a bit like getting into a band shortly before they split up.

Yesterdays launch was as exiting as the first time I watched it, awesome. Great watching online too, complete with Specky banter and realtime launch info. Wicked.

A day before the space shuttle launch in 1982 Mr Atkins, our primary school teacher at the time, asked us to find out something about the men who pioneered space travel. Easy I thought to myself, just look up Neil Armstrong, that’s all we knew about space, Neil Armstrong.

At home, we had half a set of encyclopedias that had been inherited from my Grandma. It was a gamble as to whether or not you’d find what you where looking for depending on what books from the collection still existed.

Book A was missing which meant Armstrong was out of the question. After asking mum (Always quite taken with anything Russian) about  spacemen, I looked up Gagarin’s name and was rewarded (by chance) with three paragraphs about his first trip into space, an orbit of the earth in Vostok 1, taking 1hour 48 minutes.

The accompanying photo was what got me most, grey, shiny and unmistakably Russian. Amazingly it’s the one currently used in Gagarin’s entry on wikipedia. Quite how I recognised it instantly after 30 odd years when I can’t seem to remember where I currently live, is beyond me. Relaxed, happy, almost laughing. His confidence and huge beaming smile seemed to belay everything that everyone was saying about the Soviet Union at the time. Look at the picture and judge for yourself, he was a great guy then and if he was here today he’d still be a top bloke.

During the Vostok Program, colleagues were asked to vote for the member of the program to fly first, 17 out of 20 voted for Gagarin, incredible.

The following is how a Soviet Air Force Doctor evaluated Gagarin’s personality in 1960, 8 months before his mission into space:

Modest; embarrasses when his humor gets a little too racy; high degree of intellectual development evident in Yuriy; fantastic memory; distinguishes himself from his colleagues by his sharp and far-ranging sense of attention to his surroundings; a well-developed imagination; quick reactions; persevering, prepares himself painstakingly for his activities and training exercises, handles celestial mechanics and mathematical formulae with ease as well as excels in higher mathematics; does not feel constrained when he has to defend his point of view if he considers himself right; appears that he understands life better than a lot of his friends.

In that sense Yuri Gagarin was a childhood hero of mine. All everybody else at school wanted to talk about was Neil Armstrong and how he walked on the moon, a magnificent achievement in its own right, but for me I was always more intrigued by Gagarin’s ground breaking solo voyage into space and around the earth. When I was younger the Soviet space program portrayed in the media in the west always looked a little bit  home made, like the whole thing was being put together by a bunch of enthusiasts, which I suppose it was. I was drawn to the spirit of the people who built and developed technology under the Soviet regime.

It’s a shame that Yuri’s life would be cut short at the age of 34, apparently amid suspicious circumstances. Ironically, the very same society he championed through his achievements would eventually bring about his downfall.

Yuri Gagarin, Hero of the Soviet Union and space legend.

As the tabloids scream with excitement, “Our boys launch submarine missile attack on Gaddafi”, an important question has to asked. Where is this latest spark of genius going?

We could do what we did in Iraq the first time around in the early nineties. Make a lot of noise with tanks and planes then leave without getting our hands dirty or really achieving anything at all. Or we could do what we did in Iraq the second time around.  Justify a cripplingly expensive military campaign with lies and deceit  in order to satisfy the religious egomania of pious men (and Jesus).

In both cases it’ll be innocent families picking up the tab, both here and abroad. There, it’ll be relatives blown to pieces and ignored as collateral damage. Here it’ll be young men who could have done something with their lives being hyped up as “The bravest of the brave”, by politicians whose own offspring will be tucked away safely at a select school.

Hollywood couldn’t think up a name for the latest campaign, and I doubt even Guy Richie could either.  It’s called Operation Odyssey Dawn.

You couldn’t write it any better.

Perfect for the glorified tabloid cartoon layout of  “Our boys” in action. The perfect fit for the suited man making the chopping action outside number ten. The perfect soundbite to accompany “It is legal and it is right”, just because a public schoolchild tells the foolish poor that it is so.

Yet another military endeavour, another opportunity for men to sprout soundbites on BBC News, to go to church on Sunday and pick up accolades.

Yet another opportunity for waste.