Try try try

Being old, I don't like the kind of music that's in the pop charts nowadays, but the other day I heard "Try" by Pink in a shop, and found it really catchy in a gets-stuck-in-your-head kind of way. I actually quite like it. In fact, Pink quite often does songs that I think are okay, and I should probably stop categorising her as "one of those awful manufactured modern singers whom I despise so much" and start thinking of her as a 'real' musician. Maybe I'll even listen to her albums. It seems only fair.

And while I'm being a grumpy old man, let me observe that a week on Thursday there are elections for the Police and Crime Commissioner for the county. Electing people to this kind of position is an extraordinarily stupid idea that I'm sure the Americans are somehow to blame for (so shame on you, all my American readers. Shame on you.) and the Nottinghamshire Police's website impressively tells visitors that "Exactly how the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) will work in practice is yet to be finalised," so it's good to know that the £75,000 salary will be well-spent. I should have stood for election, shouldn't I? I'm always on the lookout for people who will pay me for doing nothing. And since 99% of the people in Nottinghamshire don't know the election's even happening, I'm sure I could have drummed up enough support to win in a landslide.

I wholeheartedly endorse the only candidate who's so far bothered to put a leaflet through my door, and thus the only one I know exists - Dr Raj Chandran. He's a former Police Surgeon, Mayor of Gedling, Territorial Army Major and recently retired GP, which doesn't sound like a particularly great CV for someone wanting to be in charge of the police, but it's probably better than the other candidates. And more importantly, I've scanned the whole leaflet, and the spelling and punctuation are all correct, though he does seem fond of using Capital Letters more than most sane people do. His ideas seem more or less sensible, although I'm not sure about the insistence that the police need more horses, in order to "bring back the honour of Nottinghamshire".

If and when any other candidate sees fit to let me know they're running, I might change my recommendation, but until then, I urge everyone in Nottinghamshire to go out and vote for this guy - remember, if you don't vote, then some other uninformed idiot will, and it'll be your fault!

Right, I'm going to London to be a TV star. It won't be on telly until some time early next year, but I'll let you know in plenty of time to set your video recorders. Being old, I assume everyone still uses video recorders.

It's all kicking off

It's been a while since I was asked to do a memory-celebrity kind of thing, but the offers are coming thick and fast all of a sudden! There's an Italian TV show that I'm probably not going to be able to do, a BBC show that I'm going to be filming on Saturday, and a real movie that'll be shown in cinemas and everything (I'm told by the people making it, anyway) about this year's world championships. The latter two will both involve some kind of animated cartoon representations of memory journeys, too, which is awesome! There should be a lot more cartoons about memory.