Just because you can, doesn't mean you should

"When Qantas created the 'Kangaroo Route' [from Australia] to London in 1947, it took four days and nine stops. Now it will take just 17 hours from Perth non-stop." So declared, yesterday, the chief executive of Australian airline Qantas while announcing plans to launch the first regular passenger flight directly between Australia and Europe.

Just think about it: 17 hours, probably sat in economy class. Not even in my most slovenly moments of box-set binge-watching could I imagine being able to remain mostly inert, squeezed into an airline seat for the equivalent of how much I'm normally awake during an average day. With four toilets between 232 passangers. Even an upgrade to business class wouldn't make much difference.

Despite my phobia that Australia contains most things that can kill you, it remains a country I would love to visit. But with my occasional flights out to the US West Coast at the very edge of long-haul tolerance (my longest-ever journey - San Francisco to Taipei - was partially aided by an accidental over-prescription of sleeping pills), the only way I could ever manage going Down Under would be by stopping halfway in Dubai or Los Angeles. I know a direct flight would keep the overall trip relatively brief, but I just don't think the risk of DVT, air rage (mine or others') or being sat next to someone with personal hygeine issues for 17 hours is worth shaving half a day off the flying time.

Even the prospect of flying on a Boeing Dreamliner - a plane that actually lives up to its manufacturer's hype and is both more comfortable for the passenger and more economic for the airline - doesn't make the ordeal any easier to contemplate. You'd still feel housebound at 38,000ft, and there are still only so many episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Friends you can take.

Time still on their side - the Rolling Stones' Blue & Lonesome

Three weeks ago I spent a delightfully indulgent morning in New York City trawling through the 54-year history of the Rolling Stones at Exhibitionism, their own lavish, Bowie Is-style showcase of memorabilia, which had crossed the Atlantic following a successful run in London during the summer.

At first it felt odd to be in New York's West Village looking at a history so seeped in London's musical heritage - such as the faithful recreation of the squalid Edith Grove flat shared by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones as The Greatest Rock'n'Roll In The World™ was being formed in 1962. It was in this "pigsty" (Richards' own word) that he and Jagger, his fellow Glimmer Twin, consolidated their love of blues music and, indeed, their enduring - if somewhat tempestuous relationship. That love of the blues had been forged somewhere east of their Chelsea digs, in suburban Dartford where, on October 17, 1961, the former friends from primary school were reacquainted on Platform 2 of the town's station, with Richards sparking up a conversation about the records his future partner-in-crime was holding: Chuck Berry's Rockin’ At The Hops and The Best of Muddy Waters.

Much has been written about how London's middle class suburbs not only succumbed to the music of the Mississippi Delta, but even exported it back there (the Stones famously turning up at Chess Studios in Chicago to record their 12x5 album and discovering Muddy Waters - their hero - up a ladder painting the building's front). While this might sound a little arriviste, the Stones have put back into America everything they took out of it, which is why the choice of Manhattan for Exhibitionism's second run seemed perfectly normal.

Even if the band's roots are firmly in London - in Dartford, Chelsea, the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond that they made their own - they long ago stopped being 'just' a British band. As the recently released tour film ¡Olé! Olé! Olé! depicted, they long ago became a global brand, perfectly at home in Buenas Aires, Caracas or São Paulo, and as much a religion in many of these places as they are rock royalty. One of the points underlined by the film is how, 54 years since their first gig at London's 100 Club, the Stones remain in rude health and still prepared to chart new ground (the film sees them touring Latin America, playing Havana, a rare occurrence for a Western rock band), making you question if any of today's X-Factor crop will be around in five years' time, let alone ten times that period.

The Rolling Stones' endurance, perhaps more so than Paul McCartney, who still tours, is that they are as vital and as invigoratingly entertaining today as a live act, as they ever have been, perhaps more so. They can't need the money, so let's leave that thought at the door, which makes the night-after-night playing of Honky Tonk Woman, Sympathy For The Devil or Satisfaction (and that riff) an endeavour of both consumate professionalism and an enduring love of doing so. Of course, being paid handsomely helps, too: this year they will earn some $65 million from touring alone which, even if you factor in the cost of touring (including wages for non-'full members', like bassist Darryl Jones - who, after 20 years feels he should be an official Stone), will still furnish Jagger, Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood's bank accounts handsomely.

© Simon Poulter 2016

Snobs, cynical musos and the jealous might sniff at such business, with all that griping about how these and other heritage tour wrinklies are clogging up channels for younger artists. But the reality is that the world is a better place with the Stones continuing to perform, even if that means the only way of seeing them is to pay inflated ticket prices for vast stadium appearances.

No one would dispute that creatively, their best is behind them, as far back as those louche days of recording Exile On Main Street, Beggars Banquet and Sticky Fingers. But their mastery is undimmed. Richards is still inventing every day, be it chords or tunings, and in many respects is keeping the blues alive as the genre's originals continue to dwindle; Watts remains one of the sharpest drummers in the game, while Wood is a vastly underrated guitarist whose history goes back as long the as peer group of suburban six string-slingers like Clapton, Page and Beck; and Jagger, the ultimate frontman, a paradox of bandy-legged, arm-flailing 28-inch-waisted campness combined with the steely business sense of a corporate CEO.

With Jagger, Richards and Watts in their 70s, and Wood catching up at 69, it is still remarkable that, even with the slick circus around them, the Stones have the energy or the inclination to keep going. But they do, and if anything appear to be doing so with as much relish as ever. Which is why it might be tempting to expect Blue & Lonesome, their new studio album of blues covers, to be a lazy afternoon of bar room standards that any half decent pub band with a Stratocaster-playing lead could knock out. Thankfully, it's not. Instead, it's an accomplished, joyful jaunt through long forgotten songs, reanimating them with the right measure of authenticity, vintage amps and even more vintage guitars, and even Jagger himself demonstrating that, despite the knighthood and executive status, he is still a pure bluesman at heart. His harmonica work throughout Blue & Lonesome is some of the best you'll ever hear.

Recorded over the course of three days last December at British Grove Studios in Chiswick - just a couple of miles from the site of the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond where their residency established the band forever -  Blue & Lonesome's 12 songs dig deep into the artists that, as callow teens, the Stones soaked up, from blues harmonica master Little Walter, whose Just Your Fool kicks off the album, to the likes of Howlin' Wolf, Magic Sam and Little Johnny Taylor, whose Everybody Knows About My Good Thing includes a cameo by Eric Clapton, that other veteran from the south-west London blues scene.

© Simon Poulter 2016

Blue & Lonesome is no nostalgic meander, or even an attempt by the Stones to complete a 54-year cycle. This is more than homage, too, no faithful but predictable covers of standards, in the manner of those 'Pays Tribute To...' records K-Tel used to knock out via Woolies.

This is a band aware of their roots, reaching out to enjoy them again, as dynamically as they did in the first place. Then, it was with cheap instruments and an even cheaper home life, but always through the shared love of a music created many thousands of miles away amid the heat, sweat and toil of the American South.

The originals of the form may be all-but gone, but the music is being kept alive by, perhaps, the most famous exponent of the blues, the British band that became a global phenomenon and, six decades later, still are.

New dawn for a national treasure - Kate Bush

Of all the 1970s, 1978 comes off as having the least cultural significance. It was no 1971, with its ground breaking albums, or 1976 with the arrival of punk, 1977 with the death of Elvis and the Queen's silver jubilee or 1979 and the coronation of Margaret Thatcher and the subsequent decade of that combined ostentation with social division.

By the start of 1978, punk's vanguard of The Damned, the Sex Pistols and Television had already collapsed, leaving The Clash to keep that particular revolution going, sort of. Out of it emerged the New Wave and the punkish, somewhat less threatening likes of The Jam, The Police, XTC, Siouxie & The Banshees, Nick Lowe, Ian Dury and even Dire Straits and their bluesy pub rock. Elsewhere, rock's establishment was consolidating its lot: Bowie spent much of '78 on an epic world tour, the Low and Heroes albums behind him, while the Rolling Stones delivered the patchy Some Girls ahead of Keith running into drug trouble in Toronto. The Who released Who Are You? (yes kids, long before CSI...) and then Keith Moon shuffled off this mortal coil at the age of 32 from a prescription drug overdose.

Three years previously, a member of one of the other behemoths of the age had set in train the career of a British national treasure. While mixing Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here album, guitarist David Gilmour was handed a demo tape by a schoolgirl from south-east London: Kate Bush. "I was intrigued by this strange voice," Gilmour recently told the BBC. "So I went to her house, met her parents down in Kent, and she played me - gosh - it must have been 40 or 50 songs. And I thought, I should try and do something." Gilmour arranged for the prodigy to have a more professional tape made before arranging executives from EMI Records to come down to Abbey Road studios to hear it. On the back of what they heard, EMI signed the-then 16-year-old, who had already amassed a catalogue of 200 songs in various forms.

On January 6, 1978, the first single from Bush's forthcoming debut album The Kick Inside was released: Wuthering Heights. It was, by any stretch of the imagination, an extraordinary entrance. Released in a week when the UK singles chart was topped by Paul McCartney's unthreatening Mull Of Kintyre and included such rock monsters as Figaro by Brotherhood of Man, Bonnie Tyler's It's A Heartache and Terry Wogan's The Floral Dance, it was hard to place a song based on an Emily Brontë novel (Bush shares a birthday with the writer) with a vocal sung in a pixie-squeak of a high register.

Who was this 19-year-old, with an audacious song that might be prog rock, might be a MoR ballad, or might be simply avante garde? Whatever it was it went to Number One and stayed there for a month, the first time a female singer-songwriter had got to the top with a self-written song. Four months later Bush released the spine-tinglingly beautiful The Man With The Child In His Eyes, which went to No.6 in the charts. It had been one of the songs that had clinched her signing to EMI, when Gilmour had arranged for executives to hear Bush's demos at Abbey Road Studios. "I said to them, 'Do you want to hear something I’ve got?'," Gilmour recalled to the BBC. "They said sure, so I played them The Man With A Child In His Eyes and they said, 'Yep, thank you — we’ll have it.' It’s absolutely beautiful, isn’t it? That’s her singing at the age of 16, and having written those extraordinary lyrics."

By the end of 1978 Bush was already releasing her second album, Lionheart, capitalising on the success of her debut, though the somewhat uninspiring nature of the record - the idiosyncratic hit single Wow not withstanding - suggested a rush job. Regardless, 1978 was still the year that founded one of the most remarkable, if idiosyncratic, music careers, one that has never, ever wielded to convention or commercial expectations. Much like her occasional collaborator Peter Gabriel and the Bowie and Roxy Music she idolised as a teenager, Bush has successfully - and resolutely - bucked convention. It's hard to think of any other artist - with perhaps the exception of Björk who would release an album called 50 Words for Snow which included a song that indeed contained 50 words for snow, and it not coming across as profoundly pretentious.

That album, though, was only her 10th, and it came more than three decades after her first. Bush has always steadfastly dictated the pace of her career, sometimes haphazardly, it would appear. Her 22-night, 2014 residency at the Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith were her first gigs for 35 years. She had toured only once, in 1979, and while the death of her lighting engineer, Bill Duffield, is reported to have induced a long-standing aversion to live performance, she suggested to BBC 6 Music's Matt Everitt last Sunday that her absence from the stage was perhaps down to other forces. "After 1979 the intention had always been to do another set of shows after the first two albums," she explained. "There was never any intention to go such a long time without shows - things just went in a different direction."

Whatever that direction was, the surprise decision to appear in a live setting once more was no less artistically bold and imaginative as any of Bush's songwriting. The 22 Before The Dawn shows - captured in a triple live album released today - brought together Bush's longstanding love of theatricality (Lindsay Kemp - who'd worked closely, in more ways than one, with Bowie had been another early influence and mentor). Part rock concert, part performance art theatre, the shows were split into three acts - the first featuring hits like Hounds of Love and Running Up That Hill, with the second and third based on the two long songsuites from the Hounds Of Love and Aerial albums, The Ninth Wave and A Sky Of Honey.

Photo: Ken McKay

"I was really nervous every night," Bush told Everitt, explaining how she worried she would lose her place in the middle of her often complex compositions. "I naturally tend to race ahead in my mind, I'm always thinking about situations and running them through. Maybe it's that kind of primeval thing where you're trying to think, 'Can I get to that tree before the tiger gets me?' So my head is always moving ahead, just trying to get to the conclusion of whatever this journey is. And once we started running the show I had to be absolutely in that moment. "But I was so terrified that if my mind wandered off that when I came back I wouldn't remember where I was."

Although such apprehension has been a hallmark of much of Bush's career, she relished the challenge of creating the Before The Dawn concept. "The idea of putting the show together was something that I found really interesting and really exciting. But to actually step into it was something that I had to really work hard on because I was terrified of doing live work as a performer again," she said in the BBC interview, which portrayed Bush not as a reclusive, publicity-shy British eccentric, but as the mum and occasional pop star she has studiously worked at being seen to be.

The comfort and appeal of family life in rural Devon has certainly played a part in restricting musical output. The clear message from her encounter with Everitt is that we shouldn't expect any new material from Bush anytime soon. "The thing about [the Before The Dawn show] is that most of the material was already written. And to start something like that from scratch is another whole world of work, isn't it? It was an extraordinary thing to be involved in, especially to have got the response that we did. It was really magical. But I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to do next."

Bush explained that production of the Before The Dawn album (there are no plans at all for an accompanying video release) has taken up a lot of time, an attention to detail as fastidious as her production of new material to begin with. "​I'm desperate to do something new," she told Everitt, "I've been working on this project for a really long time now. I haven't written a song for ages." And asked if this new release represented a "full stop" to her career, Bush simply replied warmly but vaguely: "Oh no, I don't think so. I think it's just a rather big comma."

With an air of familiarity, the holy trinity returns

Facebook/Amazon Prime

Not since Clarkson, Hammond and May unceremoniously left the old Top Gear (henceforth known as "the show we shall not mention"), and Chris Evans was charged with reviving it to much expectation - somewhat unfulfilled, as it turned out - has there been, er, as much expectation about a TV show making its debut.

However, we should identify exactly what the expectations were for The Grand Tour, CH&M's vehicle for Amazon Prime, which was streamed for the first time last night. Because this was, essentially, the show-we-shall-not-mention in a different location, replete with daft blokeish banter between the presenting trio, gloriously photographed filmed sequences made even better by 4K ultra-HD technology, and exotic cars tyre-screeching their way around race tracks, accompanied by yet more daft, blokeish banter.

Despite the BBC retaining certain intellectual elements of the show-we-shall-not-mention, there was little attempt in the first Grand Tour show to compensate with anything different: the Dunsfold Aerodrome hangar studio was replaced by a giant military field hospital-style tent, pitched for the first show in the Mojave Desert; James May appeared to have received a partial makeover - well, a jacket and a new pair of suede shoes, and...um...that's it.

Clarkson remained bumptious and risk-taking with a near-the-knuckle joke early on about gypsies, Hammond remains impish and slightly irritatingly full of himself (and still with that porn star goatee), and May continues to be the fogeyish maiden aunt of the trio. Which meant that it simply worked. What the BBC failed, horrendously, to address with its continuation of the show-we-shall-not-mention is that it made no real attempt to offer anything different, presenters aside. 

Because it was this particular triumvirate of presenters who made it work. They are the holy trinity of the first show's title (even if it was meant to refer to the Porsche, McClaren and Ferrari which featured in the main film of the episode). Under CH&M, the show-we-shall-not-mention was an excuse to tune in on a Sunday evening to. It was, essentially, three oafs in a pub, like that other Sunday evening tradition, Last Of The Summer Wine - three man-children doing silly things, except with expensive cars rather than bathtubs and Nora Batty's stockinged calves. 

Whatever they say in press interviews about not actually getting on, CH&M's chemistry is rare in TV land, and this proved all the more endearing over the 12 years of the old show. No wonder Amazon wrote such a substantial cheque to secure their services. It did, though, take The Grand Tour a considerable amount of time to get to air. Early on, some cleverly made social media promos suggested that they were taking ages to even come up with a name for he new show, eventually settling on what is obviously a cunning play on both GT cars and the initials of the-show-we-shall-not-mention. 

While the revived show-we-shall-not-mention was soldiering on in the face of clear critical and audience resistance, CH&M including Clarkson's old schoolmate and producer Andy Wilman, were developing the concept for The Grand Tour. For all that time, however, the end result us overwhelmingly more of the same, which makes it all the more entertaining. This is only a mild tinkering with the format, a change to the can design rather than New Coke.

Opening with grey, melancholy footage of Clarkson handing in his security pass at a grim, rainy London institution (yes, we get it...), before taking off for Los Angeles, whereopon colour returned in the form of a vivid blue Ford Mustang Rocket, which Clarkson powered out of LA and into the desert, where, in a moment of faux soppiness, he is reunited with May and Hammond in similar vehicles. In Hollywood terms, the scene was an extended 'establishing shot', presumably for Amazon Prime's new audiences, but also a reminder to devotees of the old show-we-shall-not-mention of what they had missed after CH&M left the BBC.

Facebook/Amazon Prime

It's clear, though, what power they have. All three of them - even May - seem to harbour rock star aspirations, judging by the show's live musical opening, with the Hothouse Flowers doing Johnny Nash's I Can See Clearly Now before CH&M joined them on stage like a reforming supergroup to introduce each other amid bantz about the various institutions each had been fired from (though obviously not Clarkson, who merely had his contract at the BBC not renewed...).

Facebook/Amazon Prime

It was, though, then clear, from the preview compilation introduced by Clarkson that what lay ahead in terms of films, japes and larks would be remarkably similar to the tonality of their lengthy incarnation on the-show-we-shall-not-mention. In what must be a challenge for both the BBC and Amazon's copyright lawyers, there were in fact plenty of familiarities: a test track at an old military faciilty in England, a news segment (jokingly called 'Conversation Street'), and a celebrity participation segment (albeit one that turned out quite badly for the celebrities involved).

These were, however, simple mechanics to make CH&M's fanbase feel at home in a different setting. The filmed sequences were hilarious but also visually stunning (almost worth the purchase of a 4K television alone), and while retaining the innate depth of petrolheadedness of the trio's previous show, were still as much about one of television's most unique presenting chemistries. 

Whatever you might think about Clarkson, his past demeanours, lack of political correctness and his teeth (which look horrendous in ultra-HD...), about Hammond and his exaggerated delivery or May and his near-narcoleptic presence at times, theirs is a formula that Amazon has cleverly exploited. Because it looks like The Grand Tour is going to be worth the subscription price alone.

This is not America

© Simon Poulter 2016

It would be something of an understatement to say that I’ve visited America a lot. Indeed, the pages of my old passport were almost exclusively full of US entry stamps. I guess, then, that I am an Americanophile: I have embraced - pretty warmly, as it goes - its music, its culture, its fashions and its habits. Like many, I’ve been drawn in by aspiration and an odd mix of glamour and normality, by what I’ve seen on television and on the cinema screen.

Because everywhere here is a film set or a line from a song. New York is no exception. Almost 200 movies are shot in the city every year, and every avenue, every cross street, every square and every park has a ring of familiarity about it. The same was the case when I first visited the country 24 years ago, spending a month touring the West Coast. Unlike most new experiences of a different country, I felt perfectly at home on the very freeways I saw in CHiPs as a child, or amongst the hills and mountains which doubled for Korea in M*A*S*H or rural Georgia in The Dukes Of Hazard. Even for a city fame for its smog, the LA sky was as blue as I’d seen on all those myriad Glen A. Larson productions.

It’s this familiarity that has kept me coming back again and again. It requires no effort to fit right in. It might take a little getting used to tipping at first, but apart from that, even something as mundane as having breakfast in a diner immerses you in your own scene from a movie. There’s a convenience here, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, a ‘can-do’ spirit and an energy not replicated anywhere else.

You could say, then, that America and I have enjoyed a highly addictive relationship. Until now. Last week's gold-blinged, Cheeto-tanned, bizarrely-bouffant presidential election result has called into serious question my loyalty as a tourist.

For a start, the good times are over. By that I mean being a British tourist able to take advantage of exchange rates that, at one point, meant that a single pound bought you more than two dollars. That was the sort of incentive that made buying everything from CDs to the MacBook I’m writing this on worth the splurge. But at risk of sounding mercenary, the pound’s prevailing weakness since the Brexit referendum means that you start to notice your hotel charging $25 for breakfast, or Pret-à-Manger asking almost eight dollars for a tuna baguette.

The price of a sandwich has brought this year’s dramatic political events into sharp focus. The economic impact in the UK of June’s referendum on Europe is only just being understood. Christmas will be a big test, as families come to terms with inflationary prices. Here in the US, inflation has also been on the rise, feeding into the very rhetoric that fuelled the Trump victory, as he appealed to America’s squeezed middle. The parallels with the Brexit result are brutal. Listening to chatter in coffee shops and on the subway, it’s clear how America was polarised last week in a shockingly similar way to the deep chasm June's referendum carved between the liberal values of inclusion and conservative division, but also between the so-called metropolitan elites and the fiscally challenged provinces.

New York is something of a paradox in this regard: average rent here is $3208 (£2545), with a one-bedroom apartment costing around $2829 (£2244) a month; Donald Trump’s grotesque palace and HQ is here on 5th Avenue, and yet he took just 10% of the vote in this city. In Washington DC, his soon-to-be home, he took just 4% of the vote. Head out into the middle American heartlands, however, and the reasons for his victory become blindingly obvious, as small-town sentiment warmed overwhelmingly to his Route 1 philosophy. The racism and xenophobia - both implied and overt - that coloured the British referendum were a central pillar of the Trump stump, with the added air of latent misogyny to create a cartoon-like monster out of the tangerine-tinged billionaire.

As I blogged last week, Trump’s campaign persona was largely that of a Homer Simpson-like figure, loudly bragging in a bar about what he’d do if he was president. The reality, of course, is that he will, now, become president, but time will only tell whether  as to whether Trump follows through on his campaign promises. The “beautiful wall” he said would be built along the Mexican border is more likely to be just a fence, he told the CBS TV network yesterday. Hmm… What else? The ban on Muslims entering the country? Let’s see.

The bigger fear is what threat he poses to world economics and even world peace that his critics claim he will be. As some were pointing out in the aftermath of Tuesday’s result, presidents don’t just get their own way without due political process. But you can’t help feeling that America - particularly from a liberal-minded point of view - has just commenced an era of almost helpless nightmare. The prospect of Trump forming a government - with his ultra-conservative running mate Mike Pence, the excruciating Sarah Palin, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich and ex-New York mayor Rudy Giuliani all being mentioned for cabinet positions - has an air of comic villainy about it. Like The Joker forming a syndicate of all the worst super criminals in Gotham City. He’s already started by appointing Stephen Bannon, head of the far-right Breitbart News, as his chief strategist. Except, it’s not a joke. This is the world’s most powerful democracy. The world’s largest economy. The seat of the last global recession. If you have a mortgage, savings, even a job with an institution reliant on global trade, Trumpageddon should worry you. Because it worries me.

Rational argument would dictate that Trump’s presidency should not cut me off from the America I’ve enjoyed as a tourist. Unless white, middle-aged Englishmen are added to the list of people Trump wishes to keep out, all the things I come to America for should still be there for me. But something quite profound has happened. Something has changed in the last seven days about a country normally so tolerant, so beholden of The New Colossus - “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” - that it somehow doesn’t feel like America anymore. Stupid, I know. But when your president-elect’s first words of congratulations come from a notorious white nationalist and Holocaust denier, from French and Dutch far-right politicians, and from the gurning Nigel Farage, it’s probably time to give the country a miss for a while, at least until it can elect a president who offers more than just populist bar-room jingoism, and can instead make the values of respect, dignity and tolerance central to their philosophy.

The tea really does taste better, and other observations

© Simon Poulter 2016

So, I’ve been back in London just over a month, after 17 and a half years living abroad, which is a statement that, I know, carries a whiff of the exotic. However, I'm not suggesting for one minute that I've been off-grid, khaki-clad with a pith helmet, observing still-primitive Amazonian tribes, or carrying out a long-term study of penguins in their natural habitat, or in my wilder moments of Walter Mittydom, living the rock star lifestyle in a Malibu hacienda, occasionally doing something with gated reverb.

No, for most of those years away I've been sat in an office. Furthermore, I've hardly been cut off from my homeland. Frequent commando raids to visit family, friends, Stamford Bridge and carry out sundry business commitments, more or less in that order, have kept me in regular contact. That said, there is a substantial difference between weekend trips to the home island and living somewhere day-to-day (or, simply, "living", as I had been doing exclusively in Britain before being coaxed elsewhere).

Of course, moving to the Netherlands - and subsequently California, back to the Netherlands again and then France - as I did, wasn't exactly volunteering for the first manned Mars mission. These countries do, I established quite quickly, have flushing toilets, and if you know where to look, shops selling Marmite. But coming back has thrown a spotlight on things I had missed, or more importantly, didn't know I'd missed.

With worldly-wiseness comes additional awareness of your home country and recognition of things you'd never have been conscious of before moving abroad, or that you suddenly become aware has become a thing while you've been away. Here, I offer my first observation: cars pushing into traffic from side roads. I honestly don't recall this ever being a custom (interestingly enough, in Holland cars coming out of a side road have right-of-way, which I didn't know until it was almost too late…the first time). During my driving lessons I was taught to wait until there was a break in the traffic and then pull out. Now the norm seems to be to simply stick the nose of your car out, forcing others to stop. And often the driver in question is actually trying to blag his or her way onto the other side of the road, forcing traffic on both sides to stop. I don't know when or where this came from, or why. It's possible that it is simply a consequence of Britain's roads becoming ever more congested, as property, demographics and population increases - including net immigration - have put more cars on the streets. Another good reason for me to eschew car ownership and make use of public transport, a trait I warmly embraced in Paris, and am happy to continue as I base myself in south-east London.

This brings me to my second observation: the sense of entitlement. I blame Simon Cowell. For many things, actually. At risk of committing the most middle-aged thing I've ever written, Britain has, in the years I've been at large, developed an assumption of on-demand, instantaneous everything, from Cowell's drive-through fame culture to 18-year-old footballers skipping the traditional cleaning-the-stadium-toilets-with-a-toothbrush apprenticeship and going straight to Range Rover ownership. And don't get me going on compensation.

With this entitlement comes an erosion of civility, something the Brexit referendum seems to have accelerated, with social media becoming the prime medium to tell complete strangers exactly what is thought of them. There is some credence to the argument that if Gary Lineker or Lily Allen tweet about refugees they are putting themselves out there, and that their freedom to express themselves is rightfully matched by those who dare to troll them. But, as I’ve blogged before, spend any time on Twitter and, much like the bubbling stream of bile that is the Daily Mail and its unhinged, tin-foil hat-wearing, demonstrably illiterate readership, you will succumb to both madness and despair at how people, shielded by their keyboard and the semi-anonymity of their handle, feel entitled to say whatever the want without consequence, and without any basis of a relationship to so.

This manifests itself, post-Brexit, with Polish community centres being vandalised, hijab-wearing Muslim women being verbally abused in town centres, and knuckle-dragging thugs staging protests about claiming their country back, not that I ever noticed that it had been taken away from them. And, guess what? After Tuesday's presidential earthquake, it's happening in America, too. Let right-wing populism win, and all of a sudden there are those acting like it's 1933 Germany, when brown was the in-vogue shirt colour.

When I left Britain in 1999 there was no such thing as social media. If you wanted to complain you either wrote to Jimmy Young, Points Of View or The Times. If you wanted to rant at complete strangers there was always Speaker’s Corner. Now, you can meltdown, Basil Fawlty-style, on Twitter. Which I did, without remorse, recently when trying to get broadband installed. Broadband providers go to great lengths to draw you in with slick marketing: TV ads with Hollywood celebrities and websites that connect you to directly via chat to experts helping you pick the right package. And then the horror begins: after handing over a large sum of money, you then wait for the service to begin. Except it doesn’t, so you connect by online chat again…where it takes half an hour for someone to take up your case, only to inform you that another department handles your type of package and you should call their helpdesk. Which you do, and you then spend an hour on hold due to “a high volume of calls”. In my case, I clocked up a full three hours on hold trying to find out why BT had arbitrarily cancelled the visiting installation engineer, and then cancelled my order altogether. Here Twitter comes into its own. It’s amazing how responsive companies become when their reputation is challenged publicly. It shouldn’t be like this, of course. You should just be able to call a number and someone answers, more or less straight away. Britain’s population may have grown in recent years, but not so much that some of a telecommunications provider’s substantial profits can’t be invested in extra customer support personnel.

There are many more line items I could complain about the Britain I’ve returned to, from London’s choked, gridlocked traffic, to those Estuary accents where each sentence ends with a rising pitch like a question?, to jogging bottoms as workwear, young women wearing make-up applied by an industrial sandblaster (and eyebrows which may have been drawn with an extra thick Sharpie), to Nando's. But that could sound ungallant about my return, which would be wrong.

Throughout my time abroad I’ve eulogised about my adopted surroundings. Amsterdam remains an adorable village masquerading as a national capital. California will always be where I go for sunny people and sunny weather in a geography that offers cities as majestic as San Francisco and as relaxed as San Diego, and the eye candy of its beaches, mountains and deserts, of Lake Tahoe and Yosemite. And Paris. What can I say that I haven’t already? An architectural history museum that you can actually live in, with subsidised public transport and the amusement of people watching without being judged for it.

But it's not for nothing that for some time I’ve wanted to come back to London. For a vibrancy matched only by New York; for its culture, its art, music, exhibitions and theatre; for its diversity; for its ability to blend modernity with traditionalism; for the sense of newness I keep finding around every corner, nestled amongst the old; for the joy of taking a Thames Clipper to the football; for tea that really does taste better; for breaking my umbilical cord with the south-western suburbs I grew up in and welcoming me to the south-east of the capital.

As much as there is a degree of architectural vandalism going in London, with the rapid forestation of huge, new towers of glass and steel dominating the skyline, there is also an unshakeable excitement about the place that I notice and experience every day I step outside. Even post-Brexit, with the banks and other corporate institutions supposedly buggering off to Frankfurt and Amsterdam, London feels as resilient today as ever before. It’s new mayor, Sadiq Khan, is a force for good, putting himself about on the world stage in an enthusiastically statesmanlike manner, declaring the British capital open. If he could do something about the traffic, Heathrow and the epidemic of knife crime, he would be somewhere close to the country’s best politician (and certainly more effective than either the leadership of the party he represents or the self-serving scoundrels they are supposed to be in opposition to).

All this aside, I'm not going to make melodrama out of my repatriation. Really, there hasn’t been a lot to it. Essentially, I arrived, and then went straight down the pub. It has all been relatively easy - as really I should have expected, though that’s not to say there have been things to get used to again, not to mention things to do for the very first time. But I’ll be honest, the star of all this has been London.

I'm writing this in New York, the self-styled ‘greatest city in the world’, a description much like The Rolling Stones being the world’s greatest rock and band. If so, then London runs it close on many points, and even beats it on others. Kind of like The Who, The Kinks and Led Zeppelin. It really is good to be back.

America has just put Homer Simpson in the White House

In Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, one of the greatest of many great episodes of The Simpsons, Homer discovers that he has a half-brother, Herb, an auto tycoon. Seeing Homer as the epitome of Average America, Herb invites him to design the perfect car, believing that his suburban savvy will deliver the vehicle for middle America. The result - 'The Homer' - turns out to be a disaster: a Frankenstein's monster of bubble domes, three horns each playing La Cucaracha, supersized cupholders, shag carpets and tailfins, with a $82,000 price tag. Unsurprisingly, it bankrupts Herb's company, leaves him destitute and bitterly resentful of the half-brother he'd only recently discovered he had. The moral of this tale is clearly be careful what you wish for.

In essence, then, America has just voted for Homer Simpson to be its 45th president. Crass, uncouth, inexperienced, boorish - the list goes on. Trump is the braggart sat all night at the bar getting steadily louder and steadily more pissed, pontificating on everything and anything he thinks he has an opinion on. At some point in the evening he will make a crude pass at the pretty blonde sat a few stools away, not realising that her 6ft 6in cage fighting boyfriend is just coming back from the toilet. It won't end well.

But this is where, precisely, the United States of America finds itself. 2016, eh? The year of unprecedented disruption, of our musical icons leaving us and our political expectations going completely awry in the midst of simply awful campaigning. Brexit was hard to accept, given the toxicity that had gone into the campaign - the outright lies and personal ambition of the Leavers, and the anaemia of certain sections of the Remainers.

The Trump victory, however, is harder to take, but there are blindingly obvious parallels with Brexit, particularly the apparent reaction it represents from a disaffected and squeezed middle. However, the fears of post-Brexit Britain pale by comparison to the potentially dystopian nightmare that might come from Trump as Commander-in-Chief of the world's largest economy and third largest nation by population.

Forget, for a moment, his own personality flaws - the implied misogyny and casual sexism, the racism, the complete disregard for anyone who could consider themselves part of any minority. What kind of administration will he offer? What will be the effect on the global economy if he goes through with his pledges on trade reforms? What will be the effect on world peace with his relationships with both China and Russia? What if he does pull the US out of Europe, militarily, effectively removing NATO's backbone, with Putin sabre-rattling and circling his wolves around the Baltic states and maybe others in Eastern Europe? All this from a man who has never held public office before, whose history of business collapses is not good, and whose reputation was largely built on the personality cult of being the host of America's version of The Apprentice.

Of course, anyone can become president - that's the dream every American child is brought up to believe. And, today, 'anyone' has. Trump is hardly Everyman, even if he talks up America's working class as well as his own family backstory. He has talked throughout is campaign about inclusiveness, and yet he couldn't have done more to alienate large sections of the population. Even in official photographs of Trump watching the results last night at his campaign HQ failed to depict anyone who wasn't corn-fed white.

There is no denying that he has connected with a large segment of the country that isn't the college-educated, liberal, metropolitan elite who populate its coastal cities, but is a sizeable slice of the country's heartland. But the truly troubling thing is that he has also opened a portal to right-wing hell with his folsky rhetoric. One female Trump supporter interviewed yesterday on Sky News actually talked up the idea of armed revolution if Hillary Clinton got elected. No wonder Trump's shock victory has been so warmly embraced by a cavalcade of the far right, from the notorious David Duke to France's Marine Le Pen and the Netherlands' Geert Wilders. It's like that scene in Blazing Saddles where a queue of reprobates - including, Nazi stormtroopers - are queing up to join Taggart's band of troublemakers to wreak chaos on the town of Rockridge.

Picture: 20th Century Fox

This is where bar-room philosophising gets you if you're not careful. And the irony of all this is that not only has America voted Homer Simpson into the White House, The Simpsons actually predicted the possibility of a Trump presidency as long ago as 2000. The episode Bart To The Future imagines a future in which the ever-ambitious Lisa has become the US president - taking over from Trump.

"We predicted that he would be president back in 2000," Simpsons creator Matt Groening told The Guardian, "but [Trump] was, of course, the most absurd placeholder joke name that we could think of at the time, and that’s still true."

Dan Greaney, who wrote the episode, recently said in The Hollywood Reporter that the episode was meant to show a vision of America "going insane". "It was a warning to America," he said. "That just seemed like the logical last stop before hitting bottom. What we needed was for Lisa to have problems that were beyond her fixing, that everything went as bad as it possibly could, and that's why we had Trump be president before her."

Scarily precident - let's hope they don't prove to be too acurate. Only the next four years will tell us...

A touch of High Fidelity with the return of the ex-

© Simon Poulter 2016

I am, obviously, totally biased when I say that the game of the weekend was yesterday's encounter at Stamford Bridge between Chelsea and Manchester, but for different reasons going into it than coming out.

Until 4pm yesterday I was the uneasy mess I often am before big games. It's an irrational neurosis, of course, but games between Chelsea and exalted opposition, or even just important cup ties, have me wound up tighter than a drum. It is - and here comes the first dig at those who think we're all arriviste glory-hunters at the Bridge - the result of years of underachievement, failure and humiliating defeats. Manchester United inflicted a particularly painful one on us at Wembley in 1994, and I've struggled - actually, failed - to let go of it ever since. Caught up in that is the lingering envy stemming from a period when United won everything and had the spending power, it seemed, to buy whomever they wanted. Looking back in cold hindsight, they were simply the best football club in the land with the best manager. It doesn't matter what their finances were like, it's simply what they were. But that period of United's imperiousness cast a long shadow over my relationship with the club as a Chelsea fan. Even when United haven't, actually, been that good (basically, since SAF retired), I have still approached games with them with queasy dread.

Yesterday's game had the added spice of the return of José Mourinho, coupled with a United that had spent generously in the summer, with all pundits, at the start of the season at least, pitting the 2016-17 Premier League season as, essentially, a face-off between the two Manchesters and their coaches. In fact, the return of Mourinho genuinely mattered least for me. Yes, it was like awkwardly encountering an ex-girlfriend with her new beau (which reminds me, I need to rewatch High Fidelity), but like adults you hopefully can move on from that.

The way Mourinho crashed and burned at Chelsea last season, almost taking the club with him through the trapdoor, fumigated any lingering affection for him. Don't get me wrong: I don't wish to sound ungrateful for what he did for Chelsea - truly, he brought about success on a scale I'd previously thought impossible in my lifetime - but last season exposed the toxicity of his personality, the vindictiveness that, when unleashed, undermines the brilliance of his successful football ethos.

Because - and I'll get on to yesterday's game in a moment - all the good, the pride and excitement that Mourinho had built up with Chelsea's Premier League title win in 2014-15, was unravelled in those first four months of last season, when negativity bred further negativity, when players' heads dropped when they should have been lifted by the coach, when the poisonous air around the club over the treatment of Eva Carneiro lingered long after Mourinho and Chelsea parted company again.

This time last year Chelsea were 15th in the league, had lost five, drawn two and won three, had been dumped out of the League Cup (a title they were defending) with Mourinho suspended for allegedly telling referee John Moss: "Wenger was right. You are fucking soft" at West Ham. In the same week, Carneiro served papers on the club for constructive dismissal. In the space of three months, Chelsea had gone from English champions to laughing stock. Halloween has often been the starting point of a nightmare period for Chelsea, usually culminating in a managerial sacking, but by this point last year, the horror had already become unbearable. And Mourinho could be blamed for much, if not all of it.

So, then, yesterday. That Chelsea demolished Manchester United 4-0, providing some, admittedly petty respite for that 1994 embarassment, has nothing to do with Mourinho, revenge or any other misdirected emotion. In fact the real emotion of yesterday's game was more to do with commemorating Matthew Harding, the man whose investment pre-dated that of Roman Abramovich, and whose infectious fandom and largesse saw a club struggling with survival actually stay afloat. You could argue that Harding's money brought renewal to Chelsea that made it more attractive to Abramovich.

Yesterday's win was for Harding. But also for Antonio Conte. Like his compatriot Carlo Ancelotti, Conte has brought a dignified presence to the managership of Chelsea. Yes, it's a little alarming to see him windmilling so frantically on the touchline, but then in his post-match interviews and press conferences you see a gracious, charming and funny man, completely unbound by the neuroses that gnaw so visibly away at Mourinho. Even yesterday he had to drag the spotlight away from his team's moribund display by creating an argument with Conte about nothing (apparently the Portuguese was upset that his rival was trying to get the crowd going when the score was already 4-0 - this from a man who complained that Stamford Bridge was TOO quiet...!).

Removing Mourinho and even Manchester United from the equation, yesterday's game was delightful entertainment for a Chelsea fan. Every player - even David Luiz - did their jobs, and did them well. The wingback/three-man-central-defence system worked a treat, N'Golo Kante is looking terrific in his distribution, tackling and posession, and even Pedro scored. Pedro. After 28 seconds of the opening whistle. Happy days.

Still waiting to land

© Simon Poulter 2016

When you've been squashed into an economy class seat for several hours, the very last thing you need is for the captain to announce that you'll be remaining in that state longer than intended because the airport you're expecting to arrive at can't fit your plane in.

For London's creaking Heathrow Airport, such an announcement will usually be a precursor to your plane circling around one of the airport's holding points for what seems like an age. Having grown up in south-west London, there's only so much I can take of watching the area repeatedly pass underneath the wing while the pilot negotiates a landing slot with air traffic control, mindful of a rapidly dwindling fuel supply.

Going in the other direction is not much better, either. Such is Heathrow's limitations that it can often take up to half an hour of crawling along a taxiway before your plane is finally in the air. For some short trips, like those I've regularly made over the last 17 years between London and Paris or Amsterdam, it often feels like you spend longer taxiing than actually flying.

But now, with the political debate about Heathrow's expansion hotting up again, it's depressing to think that whatever the solution - a third runway at Heathrow, a second at Gatwick or both - south-east England's chronic runway shortage won't be resolved any time soon. 2030, is the earliest we can expect an improvement, and that's a liberal estimate, allowing for further legal and political challenges and then actual construction of a runway or runways.

The irony of this for me, in my frequent journeys in and out of Paris and Amsterdam, is that arriving at either city is never frustrated by delays. Charles De Gaulle regularly operates four runways at once - two for take-offs, two for landings - while Schiphol has up to seven runways at its disposal. And with both airports benefitting from good transport links, it's no wonder that foreign business travellers consider both these cities more accessible than London. Post-Brexit, with companies - including London's financial community - considering alternative locations, both Paris and Amsterdam become very attractive propositions. Frankfurt, too, with its vast airport.

Heathrow is an anachronism, after all. Originally opened as just a small airfield in 1929, by the end of the Second World War it had grown into a major hub for long-distance military transportation. However, it was never designed for the volume of traffic it handles today (it is the world's sixth busiest by passenger traffic) and is now operating at 99% capacity. And that's not even taking into account the environmental and obvious safety hazards it presents London, with the majority of landings happening in the westerly direction, requiring inbound traffic to fly across London from east to west.

The question, then, is why build another runway at Heathrow at all? Why not just add a second at Gatwick, or another at Stanstead, or better still, go through with Boris Johnson's plan, when mayor of London, to build a brand new airport in the Thames Estuary. This idea would have addressed the capacity issue in one fell swoop, plus it could have been achieved relatively more quickly, and would even deliver better connectivity to, not just London, the national transportation infrastructure altogether.

However, that ship - to mix metaphors - has sadly sailed. But we're still no nearer to resolving the fundamental issue about easing south-east England's airport capacity. For those of us who fly regularly, especially for their work, we are being committed to a never-ending cycle of political arguments and fudges, followed by legal challenges before there is any outcome. Which begs the question - if 2030 is the earliest before any new runway or airport capacity could be available, what will air travel be like by then? It's safe to assume that Star Trek-style teleportation won't quite yet be available, but it's also safe to assume that the current exponential growth in commercial aviation won't have arrested itself by then.

Not that any of this is a new topic. Discussions about Heathrow expansion go back to the Harold Wilson government of the late 1960s, and have periodically cropped up in the decades since. David Cameron made a pledge in 2009 that no new runway at Heathrow would be built. However, following last year's backing of a third runway at Heathrow by Sir Howard Davies' Airport Commission, Cameron promised a new decision by the end of last year. Still, though, nothing. And now it's the turn of Theresa May's government to make a decision...which it has now pushed out to sometime next week. Possibly. Maybe.

With high-profile Tories like Zac Goldsmith, whose Richmond Park constituency sits underneath Heathrow's final approach, threatening to quit the party over airport expansion, cabinet minister and Putney MP, Justine Greening also opposed along with Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson maintaining his mayoral stance, for now, the matter threatens to become evern messier, politicially, than at any time in its long history. Prime Minister Theresa May has told her cabinet that once the airports sub-committee - which she chairs - has made a decision, there would be a full public consultation on it...which would take the matter to a final vote by MPs at the end of 2017 or the beginning of 2018.

London's class new mayor, Sadiq Khan - who has been doing a sterling job in promoting London's availability to do business post-Brexit - is understandably angry about the continuing logjam. "Now, more than ever, businesses need certainty and stability in order to make investment decisions," Khan said yesterday on the Heathrow decision. "Instead they are getting dither and delay." Khan favours building a new runway at Gatwick Airport, "which can be built quicker, cheaper, and without the years of legal and political battles that Heathrow clearly faces".

A good point, but sadly, for those of us stuck in economy, either circling over the Home Counties or looking out a window at Hounslow at ground level, it's going to be a long, long time before any relief is in sight.

Your move, Mr. Bond

As friends and family will attest, I have a ridiculous affinity for pop trivia. This only worsens when I find myself in, or perilously close to, a location with a strong pop culture connection. For example, I once spent an afternoon in Los Angeles getting shots of street signs on Mulholland Avenue and Ventura Boulevard just to make a short video set to Tom Petty’s Freefallin’. Later in that same LA trip I risked arrest for 'doing a Hugh Grant' by driving repeatedly through the ‘No Cruise’ zone on Sunset Boulevard, purely - and obsessively - to get the perfect shot of the sun setting in order to match it to Steely Dan’s Hey Nineteen (which begins with the line: “Drive west on Sunset to the sea. Turn that jungle music down, just until you’re out of town”).

In the Seattle suburb of Renton - principle attraction, the factory that makes the Boeing 737 - I spent a wet Sunday morning trying to find Jimi Hendrix’s grave. When I did I was astonished to discover that, at the time (1998), there was nothing more to mark the final resting place of rock’s greatest guitarist than a slab with the outline of a Stratocaster on it and the inscription “James Marshall Hendrix - 1942-1970”. I'm pleased to report that since then the grave has been appropriately ‘upgraded’ with a gazebo that now draws in fans to pay proper respect.

More recently in Paris, on discovering I was living right across the road from an apartment which featured in a pivotal scene in The Bourne Identity, I launched a tour of other locations from the film, mostly to satisfy myself that they were as seen. I’d already set a precedent for such film-nerdishness when I first moved to Paris, realising that I was just around the corner from Avenue d’Eylau, which appears in Thunderball as the HQ of SPECTRE.

Here in Florida this week I am equally doused in film and television trivia, especially due to how much the state has appeared in the Bond films, most notably Licence To Kill and Daniel Craig’s first outing, Casino Royale. Which leads me neatly - if highly tenuously - on to the prospect of whether Craig himself will put in another appearance as 007.

“I'd rather slash my wrists than do another one,” was the somewhat nihilistic statement Craig gave Time Out last year when asked. Even taking a little actorly petulance into account, Craig was reacting to the fact he'd taken such a physical punishing making Spectre. Perhaps, at the time, the prospect of a fifth outing as Bond was too much. Cue a flurry of rumouring and theorising as to who could take over, with Tom Hiddleston instantly installed as lead favourite, purely, it should be noted, on the back of The Night Manager (and despite the fact he would be too fey and too posh). In the same frame came Idris Elba (a good shout, actually), the bloke off Poldark who takes his shirt off a lot, Tom Hardy and Damian Lewis, and sundry other himbos on the Equity register. There were even some creditable attempts by the likes of Gillian Anderson and Emilia Clark to throw their respective hats into the ring.

But, while a female Bond or a black Bond might make for interesting change of direction for the 54-year-old series, it would still be regarded as tampering with the DNA of the most longest-running and lucrative franchise in film history, something producers Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson have had little room to play about with. Whether they or anyone else likes it or not, the mould for the screen James Bond was set by Sean Connery, and Craig apart, the Bonds that have followed - George Lazenby, Roger Moore (to some degree...), Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan, have been more or less the same type.


Craig, of course, was the “wrong” Bond, when he was announced: five-feet-ten-inches and blond. And, yet, he has revitalised the franchise. Some would even say that he has finally unlocked the hold Connery’s legacy had over the character. For those of us - and there are many - who found the final Brosnan outing, Die Another Day an overblown and, frankly, ridiculous mess of CGI and ludicrous plot devices, the Craig films have restored Bond to the gripping spy adventures that Connery established in the first place.

“I got the best job in the world doing Bond,” Craig said on Saturday at the New Yorker Festival, sporting blond hair for a new film which recalled Robert Shaw in From Russia With Love. “The things I get to do on a Bond movie, there’s no other job like it,” Craig said. “If I were to stop doing it I’d miss it terribly. I get a massive kick out of it. And if I can keep getting a kick out of it, I will.”

So, is this a change of heart? Well, for one thing, Craig is believed to be contracted to do a fifth Bond film, but such arrangements are never absolute. However, when challenged about his wrist-slitting remarks, Craig joked: “They say that shit sticks, and that definitely stuck,” adding that: “It was the day after filming [had ended on Spectre]. I'd been away from home for a year,” adding that the physical strains of one of film’s most physically demanding roles had taken its toll.” But, not wishing to appear ungrateful, said: “Boo-hoo. It's a good gig. I enjoy it.”

Even if his comments to Time Out were somewhat in the heat - or the pain - of the moment, his quip about “It would only be for the money” may have a ring of truth about it, being reportedly offered up to £120 million to play Bond again. Officially there are no plans for ‘Bond 25’, but given the way these films are made, don’t be surprised if, next month or in December EON productions calls a press conference at Pinewood Studios.

“A Bond movie is by the skin of your teeth,” Craig explained in New York on Saturday. “You get it shot and six months later it’s released. There’s no time for focus groups. You make the movie and then you put it out. It’s one of the most thrilling things as an actor you can do. It’s the way Barbara likes to shoot.”

Ultimately, Broccoli will make the decision on Craig being offered the role again, or whether they move on. “There’s this constant debate about who's going to be the next Bond,” Skyfall and Spectre director Sam Mendes has said recently. “The truth is – and here’s the headline: it’s not a democracy, it's not The X Factor, it's not the EU referendum, and it's not a public vote. Barbara Broccoli chooses who's going to be the next Bond: end of story.”

Craig himself has confessed to being ambivalent about who might take over the Walther PPK if he did decide not to do a fifth Bond film, but has also suggested that the calibre of replacement needs to be high. “You’ve got to step up. People do not make movies like this any more. This is really rare now. So don’t be shit.” One thing is certain, there’s little chance that Bond 25 won’t get made - this is Hollywood, after all, and if anything, the four Craig Bonds have revitalised the series. Anyone taking over now would be stepping in to a golden opportunity. And for Craig himself? He’s only 48. Roger Moore was 58 when he ‘retired’ from the role, although by then it had become preposterous. Craig clearly has a strong sense of his own ability to play he role. It would be nice to think he’s got one more in him.

Paradise is still here

© Simon Poulter 2016

It's not uncommon, evidently, for people to move house and then immediately go on holiday. Moving - no matter from what to what, from wherever to wherever - is one of life's great stressful events (although just outside the Holmes & Rahe Top 10, which has the death of a spouse at No.1 followed by divorce, imprisonment, death of a relative, marriage, getting fired and retirement). In my case, it's been the stress of finding somewhere to live in London that I can a) afford and b) accommodate all that I have acquired over 17 years in a variety of homes of different sizes in different countries.

Progressively downsizing has been a healthy, liberating experience, as long as I don't stop to calculate the money represented by all the stuff having to be thrown away, though some decisions - yes, you, the ten shot glasses never used - are easier than others. The stress of moving, in my case, has been compounded by the time it has taken for all the admin to go through. As I've relocated to London for my job, there are so many processes to be taken care of with the movers, landlords at both ends, cutting off broadband suppliers and finding new ones, and then the actual act of watching one's goods and chattels getting packed up and then appearing on the other side.

Moving is an act of faith, but not so much through the fear of things getting damaged or not turning up at all, but from combatting an utter sense of hopelessness as 200-plus boxes turn up and you have to figure out what they contain. Pre-printed labels such as "Master Bathroom" (clearly this agency is used to moving those who can designate more than one bathroom with grandeur) but also "Clothes" in handwritten scrawl aren't exactly the guide you expect, especially when boxes thus marked contain neither anything for a bathroom or, indeed, clothes, and you must decipher labels such as "schooews", which is so very much neither "shoes" or "chausseurs".

To rid myself immediately of sky-rocketing blood pressure I am finally taking my 'summer' holiday. Yes, I'm well aware that it is autumn, but this is just the way it looked back in April when I didn't have a move date at all. Of course what I couldn't predict is that this would also be the week immediately after a Category 5 hurricane barrelled through the Caribbean and Atlantic coast, causing hundreds of deaths in Haiti and untold damage to Cuba and the Bahamas, and giving the US states of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas a major case of the heebeegeebees. And guess where I've gone? Yep, Key Largo, Florida, the thin sliver of land - made famous by Humphrey Bogart and the Beach Boys - in the chain of islands stretching down to Key West, the southernmost tip of the contiguous United States.

Down here, the rich have their holiday homes, and from the air, expensive yachts appear like white paving stones hugging every available piece of land. It's all in stark contrast to the shanty villages of Haiti now dealing with the bloated corpses and outbreaks of cholera Matthew left in its wake. It's sobering to think that when a hurricane hits the United States the insurance assessors are there within hours of the ordeal being over, cheques are written and life moves on. God only knows what life must be like for those living on an island just two hours' flying time south of where I'm sitting writing this. Getting stressed about removal boxes is one thing, having the roof of your tin shack blown off by 160mph wins is something else entirely.

Matthew's threat to the southeastern US hasn't entirely subsided, though having performed a loop that began at it its point of origin off the African coast, and has taken it back out into the Atlantic again, it would appear to be losing strength. Just as well, as I could do with some actual rest and relaxation this week, not cowering in the bathtub with a torch and a portable radio. Florida is certainly both exceedingly warm (which is pleasant) and slightly blowy (nice, but don't get any blowier). The sun is out and that will do me nicely as, like a faded, Botox-addicted screen star, I try to stave off the onset of the winter months by just a few days in tropical climes.

Speaking of hot and windy, I arrived in the US just in time for last night's presidential debate. One can only hope that Hurricane Donald will, too, run out of energy and head out to sea to be downgraded from absolute nightmare to "bullet-dodged". The revelation going into the debate that Trump had been shown on video demonstrating acutely a misogyny many had suspected him of for a long time (and there's more vide to come, so I hear), was simply further evidence that this great land I'm in would be beyond insane to elect as leader of the free world and the world's largest economy, a near-caricature of a loudmouth shock jock, replete with sexist and racist tendencies, amongst a longer litany of offences. Trust me, I have my doubts about Hillary Clinton, too, but she's certainly not the lesser of two evils. There's only one of those in this equation.

I've probably spent more holiday time in the United States than anywhere else. Some people like Thailand, others a beach in Spain. For me, the US has been my go-to destination (it actually hurts my head to be more adventurous). It's there for you and there's no effort involved, which is exactly what a holiday should be about. I've only been coming to Florida for a relatively short time - 2011 was my first visit - as I'd previously been put off by being one great theme park full of British tourists. But in the four trips I've done since, I've found Florida to be a wonderful state just to switch off in - the Keys in particular - to enjoy the sound of the sea, the laid-back Caribbean vibe, and enjoy a culture infused with so much of the delicious cocktail that makes the States so united. I just hope America makes the right decision in a month's time, and doesn't make a choice that would keep me away from this country on principle for the next four years.

We're getting the band back together

One of pop's near certaintities is that as soon as a band splits or a member leaves, they will spend the rest of their days answering questions about a reunion. Even now, 46 years after The Beatles broke up, 36 years after John Lennon was murdered and 15 years after George Harrison passed away, Paul McCartney still - I don't hesitate to expect - gets asked if he'll ever reform the band with just Ringo. After all, their contemporaries The Who managed to lose both Keith Moon and John Entwhistle and still carried on, so why not the surviving Fabs?

Pink Floyd effectively came to an operational end when Roger Waters accrimoniously walked away after original Wall tour, threatening to take the band's name with him. David Gilmour, Rick Wright and Nick Mason soldiered on, but the Floyd really had run its course creatively. That, though, hasn't stopped Gilmour playing their songs on his solo tours (which, until his death from cancer in 2008, included Wright on keyboards). To some, this is milking the canon, but to others it's keeping the flame alive. There would, no doubt, be a combination of the two should Led Zeppelin ever reform. That, however, is currently unlikely. Robert Plant maintains a somewhat icy distance from overtures from both Jimmy Page and promoters offering lucrative sums to get getting Zeppelin back on the road. "I'm not part of a jukebox," Plant frostily declared to Rolling Stone in 2014, preferring to stick to his own course, which has, for the last few years, involved touring with his Sensational Shape Shifters band, playing some Zeppelin songs, albeit with a world music twist.

Unless there's unfinished business - and there rarely is - the only reason for these old bands to reform would be to fleece mugs like me out of their hard-earned. And here, one must absorb the fact that we're no longer just talking about rock's pioneers getting back together. The '90s are catching up, too. The Spice Girls (and I clearly don't need to point out that this is not in the same oeuvre as the mighty Led Zeppelin...) have returned to the studio, though minus Sporty and Posh, and thus wish to be known as "Spice Girls GEM" (Geri, Emma and Mel - geddit?). "There's a lot to be said for bowing out on a high note," Mel Chisholm has said, and she is probably the only Spice Girl who could actually hit a high note. At least she regognises, to borrow from ABC, that was then and this is now. They had their moment, why try and recreate it?

Which brings me to Oasis. Last night's premiere of Supersonic, the warts-and-all documentary about the band that arguably were Britpop, provided a platform for Liam Gallagher to opine that his band (the one that effectively broke up via a basket of fruit being flung across a Paris dressing room, leading to Noel describing the incident as "a plum from a plum") should reform - and should never have split to begin with.

"If it happens tomorrow, I'm ready, my bags are packed. If it happens in a year, I'm still ready, if it happens in 10 years, I'm still ready," he told Sky News, but adding that he would not be begging Noel to make it happen. "There'll be no cap in the hand and no banjo, you know what I mean? If it happens, it happens, if it doesn't, it fucking doesn't, we move on."

Given that the brothers G have engaged in fraternal skirmishes via the media (and, in the case of Liam, Twitter) since the 2009 split, with the barbs as cruel and as harsh as they are, actually, quite funny (the junior Gallagher has taken to calling the elder "Potato" in tweets), it would be hard to imagine them coming together. Noel was notably absent from the twin Supersonic premieres in London and Manchester, despite being a co-executive producer with his brother. "He won't be here," explained Liam acidly. "He's in one of his really, really, really, big houses, probably eating tofu, while having a fucking face peel. Ain't that right, man of the people?".

Beneath the acrimony, there might be a glimmer of brotherly love, but not much. "For someone to ruin my Oasis career to further his own, we have got to get past that a little bit," he told Sky. In a wildly entertaining interview in the October issue of Q, Gallagher went further: "If the guy doesn't want me back in our band then I don't want to either. I don't want to be in a band with someone who doesn't want me."

The conundrum, then, is what if Oasis did reform? Arguably, their albums since Be Here Now in 1996 delivered ever-decreasing rates of return on originality and, it should be said, quality. Noel's High Flying Birds project has produced two very good albums, whereas Liam's Beedy Eye outfit patently didn't. Shortly before their split there was something of a return to form by Oasis with Dig Out Your Soul, but the truth of the matter was that they were constantly retreading old ground. Definitely Maybe and What's The Story, Morning Glory? were genuinely era-defining: the whole schtick of a band of Mancunian scallies fronted by two cocky, lary and amusing brothers (you can find a guide to some of Liam's greatest pearls on my former blog), playing simple, self-written guitar-songs was a tremendous reminder that, as Simon Cowell and his evil empire pervaded the charts, Britain could still produce memorable headlining guitar bands.

But is any of this enough to warrant a reunion? Seeing the Stone Roses three years ago at the quaint Le Cigale theatre in Paris was a reminder of the good and the bad of revisting the bands who made your younger self. While it was fun to pogo amongst an audience of similarly adidas-clad fortysomething Brits, nothing could recreate the energy of the Roses the first time around.

The danger of an Oasis reforming would be the same. There would have to be something new. Something good. Very good, in fact. Noel and, surprisingly perhaps, Liam are both good songwriters, but if - and this is an epic, planet-sized 'if' - they were persuaded to get back together, it couldn't be to become a latterday Status Quo. Noel gave ample demonstration of his ability to find a new writing voice for both his High Flying Birds albums, but any return by Oasis would have to tap into what they were good at in their '90s prime, and radically jettison all that diminished their musical credibility in the albums that followed.

Supersonic, a collection of home movies, live footage archive and new interviews, will resurrect that original period, charting the brothers' rapid rise from Burnage council house to the landmark Knebworth show in 1996. Directed by Mat Whitecross, who was responsibe for the Ian Dury documentary Sex & Drugs & Rock And Roll, Supersonic is also backed by the production talent behind the Senna and Amy biopics, including Asif Kapadia who directed both (here as an executive producer). As with those productions, the audience gets to make its own mind up about the underlying characters of the Gallaghers itself, rather than ensure a narrative about the wider contemporary context of Britpop, Cool Brittania or the pre-Iraq Blair era. The film picks at the fraternal chemstry, and the wild early days of Oasis fuelled by booze and drugs and a rock'n'roll hedonism not seen since the period of music history they've been accused of copying so faithfully.

Being released in this, the week I've returned to Britain, having left in 1999, Supersonic revives memories of a period when the country appeared to be enjoying itself, with a hitherto creatively moribund music industry dusting off the verve - if you can excuse the pun - that made it a world leader in the mid-60s. The irony was that Oasis were the Stones to Blur's Beatles, despite their obvious obsession with the Fab Four. The emphasis here is on "were". While neither Gallagher has given an outright refusal to get the band back together, they're a long distance apart for now. And maybe, that's the way it should be left.