A tune called Alice

I don't listen to the outpourings of DJs any more. But I do look at interesting things on the internet when people point them out to me. My son, John, found this hypnotic arrangement the other day and can't get it out of his head. It's made up of clips, sound loops and samples from Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland with the addition of a beat. More proof that Andrew Keen was wrong.

According to unconfirmed reports Tim Burton, the film director, is filming a live-action remake of Alice with Johnny Depp in the role of the Mad Hatter.

Cuil - the new kid on the block

Where do you want to go today? I just had a quick look at the new search engine, Cuil. It's black - nice. I can't believe I'm discussing a search engine.

Anyway this is what it says about the way it works:

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.

I put in my name (well you do don't you) and it came up with this - all about me at the time of writing. That's just dandy.

Will I swap from Google? Not sure, but it's good to have a new kid on the block.

The force is with the Keystone Cops

Don't you ever yearn for the days of silent movies? Imagine cinema now if they were still with us. For those who can't imagine.

Beer, cigarettes and social change

Beer sales in pubs are falling. Last year more than 1,400 pubs closed in the UK. Take home sales of beer, meanwhile, are increasing. The strength of beer is increasing too.

We used to put the world to rights in pubs. Now we do so on internet forums. Dinner parties are simply not the same. For a start, you are not on neutral territory, you're expected to behave yourself for the good of the host and then there's the smoking problem.

Last week I was having dinner in a pub with my wife and three others - all men. Conversation was flowing quite nicely during the main course but as soon as our plates were empty Gill and I were deserted by our companions as they went outside to smoke.

I never liked smoky clothing or smoke in my eyes but I do get on well with plenty of people who smoke. Now, however, as the law has excluded the smokers from public interiors, it is the non-smokers who are facing social exclusion.

Our social lives are changing and I'm not sure that all the change is for the better.

No Comment....No FT

I'd like to thank all those friends, colleagues and readers who have written to me in the past few days with such kind remarks about my Financial Times column. Yes that really was the last one but the FT tells me that there will be something in that space in future, written by one of its staffers.

I wasn't quite ready to give up the column but I was told that the newspaper had to make economies and staffers come before freelancers. I know how it is. It's going to be tight in the Donkin household too for a while so the FT subscription has had to go. No comment....No FT.

Simon's Cat

I wrote a column the other day discussing Andrew Keen's book, The Cult of the Amateur among other things. If you have read it you will know that Keen complains about the internet being overloaded with all kinds of rubbish. Perhaps it is. But you can still find diamonds like this in You Tube's back yard. And this; oh yes, and this.

Tuscany

I'm cautious about booking holidays. I always look at the brochure pictures for signs of building work. But everything looked pretty good about the Tuscan property we took for a week, and so it proved.

OK, there was no water when we arrived, no toilet rolls, soap, washing up liquid or kitchen rolls. It was as if the god of cleanliness had demanded a particularly thorough sacrifice from the previous tenants.

So we crossed our legs for a while as Guiseppe, the man who looks after the property, got the water running again. We shared a bar of soap and a single toilet roll for a day until we found a shop for more supplies.

But it was a small price to pay for this wonderful place that had everything you could want of a Tuscan holiday: good sized outdoor pool, indoor pool (the sort you play with cues) marvelous views, shady places to eat and bedrooms everywhere - more than enough for our party of 10.

A well-stocked vegetable garden gave us fresh salads and tomatoes every day with eggs from the chickens - all this and just half an hour from Pisa airport. The roads became progressively narrower until we ended up on a dirt track to the driveway. This ensured privacy but it didn't take long - about five minutes drive - to find a great restaurant in the nearby village.

It's not every day that Gill's mum and dad get the chance to be with all their grandchildren so we were chuffed that all our boys and their two cousins could come. The mix of generations worked well and everybody helped out so that Gill wasn't left with all the jobs.

Usually it takes me a full two weeks to wind down but this time it was pretty instant and we all feel rested. I think it helped to leave the computers at home and mobile telephones switched off. I wouldn't normally spend an hour watching an ant drag the carcass of a much bigger fly laboriously over the patio but you can do that kind of thing when time doesn't matter.

We love Florence, but our day there was disappointing, never again in July - too many crowds. Lucca, on the other hand, was something else, what Florence used to be like before the crowds descended.

The only downside was the flying - I don't like the EasyJet scrum for undesignated seats or the airport hassle that makes flying today the very worst kind of transport. Scotland next with a long drive north - but always worth it when we get there.

Bourne killer

George, our youngest son, was packing his bag for a short flight. I was reminding him about all the restrictions covering items in your hand luggage.

"Can you take keys in hand luggage?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

"You could do someone a lot of damage with a key," he said. "Jason Bourne killed someone with a pen."

Bourne, in fact, could be quite a liability on aeroplanes as he turned out to be a master at killing people with everyday objects, variously dispatching assorted assassins with a pen, a rolled-up magazine and a towel across the three Bourne films.

What might be left in the Bourne armoury? A beer mat? A fluffy pink slipper? A haddock?

Absurd, I know, but not that long ago we would have thought the same of a bottle of aftershave or a shoe for heaven's sake. A few years earlier we wouldn't have balked at an umbrella but it did for Georgi Markov. It's a shame he never read Robert Ludlum.

Stop press: If all else fails Bourne could always reach for the couch.

There ain't no justice

If you have not managed to watch the drama series Criminal Justice running all this week on BBC1 get over to BBC i-player and catch up while you can. It's one of the best pieces of TV drama I have seen for a long time.

The courtroom scenes brought back a lot of unhappy memories. I have been to crown courts many times in my life as a news reporter but only once as a witness - an experience that I wouldn't want to repeat in a hurry.

The case involved the prosecution of a British Rail guard accused of assault occasioning actual bodily harm. According to the prosecution, the guard had beaten up a passenger in a darkened first class carriage because the passenger, holding a second class ticket, had refused to leave the compartment.

It was one of those old-style compartments with two rows of three seats facing each other. The passenger, a young man, had been drinking at a Christmas lunch in Leeds and had settled in the middle seat of the compartment. When instructed to leave by the guard he refused, so the guard stood over him and rained blows on his head.

The guard told the court he had been acting in self-defence, believing the passenger had possessed a knife. The jury, which had been shown pictures of the victim's badly bruised head - found the guard not guilty.

As a barrister in tonight's episode of Criminal Justice pointed out, a jury must be convinced "beyond reasonable doubt" that the accused is guilty.

A solicitor in the drama said: "I know that the vast majority of those I defend are guilty and half of them get off."

Violent attacks on rail guards are not uncommon. Violent attacks by rail guards are rare. When the guard was committed for trial in Liverpool his trade union staged a 24-hour stoppage in protest against "violence on their staff."

A problem for the prosecution was that they had just the one witness - the belligerent young man who had been attacked. I was that witness. The external bruising has long gone. Inside it's still there.

MPs save kitchen cabinet

We're desperately in need of a new kitchen so I think I'll have to become a member of parliament. MPs have just voted to retain their so-called John Lewis list with allowances for home improvements - such as £10,000 for a new kitchen - and other "essentials" like a wide screen TV (up to £750).

The problem is I'm just not sure which party to join. I suppose the obvious choice would be the Monster Raving Loony Party but, wait, the Church of the Militant Elvis Party sounds interesting.

With 26 names on the ballot paper, the Haltemprice and Howden by election, forced by the resignation of Tory MP David Davis, is fielding the largest number of candidates that anyone can remember.

This suggests to me that it is time that election deposits need to rise. If so many people are prepared to risk losing their £500 deposits, perhaps the economy is not in quite such bad shape after all.

Thinking outside the box

One day last week the postman called before I had removed the newspapers from the letter box. I get quite a lot of post, often with book packages, and he always tries to squeeze them through the opening.

This time he excelled himself, pushing the newspapers through so they were in a crumpled mess within the cage on the other side. There was a book in the post and it was so tightly wedged I had to unscrew the cage from the wall inside the garage. The newspapers were so ripped they were almost unreadable.

We have a sheltered area before the front door and a mat that always stays dry. The paper boy and previous postmen used to leave mail and newspapers there and it was much easier to open the door and pick them off the mat.

Today I saw the postman as he approached the house. "Please could you put the post on the mat in future? It's getting wedged in the box," I said.

"Sorry, we're not allowed to do that," he said.

"Doesn't the customer have a say in this?" I asked.

"And who gets the blame if it goes missing?" he said.

"Well most of it's crap so I couldn't care less," I said.

We live in a very safe area where neighbours still watch out for each other. It's not one of those London streets where people throw fish and chip wrappers over your hedge and where every second passer-by is casing the joint.

The postman told me we could collect the mail from the depot. They would love that - not having to deliver any more. Our local sub post office has just closed and some of the services have moved to a supermarket on the edge of town.

I wonder if dispensing with deliveries, replacing them with collection points in supermarket car parks perhaps, is a long term strategy of the Royal Mail? I wouldn't be surprised.

What irritates me most is the postman's response: "We're not allowed." Whatever happened to employee discretion? Who are these managers who are dictating policies to the people who do the delivery jobs day in and day out? The delivery staff are the people who should be making judgements like this. They're the ones who have to take the flack from people like me.

Yet it won't be long before I go to some winter seminar when there'll be some top Royal Mail human resources executive pacing up and down the stage talking about empowerment, engagement, performance management and "thinking outside the box." If only they would.

Link: The Royal Mail and employee health.