Is Apple heading for a mid-life crisis?

I'm an MS-DOS man myself," so I was informed, 26 years ago, by Brian the IT man who'd come to fix an Apple printer in my office which, thanks to my impulsive then-boss, had universally ignored company IT policy and had Macintosh computers installed or every member of the Sky TV press office. We were regarded as freaks for having these small, squat greyish boxes with their tiny screens.

Around the same time the publishing industry was in the throes of revolution. Proper revolution. Desktop publishing was taking over, which meant that anyone working in the media was getting to play with Apple technology, either for composing copy or laying out pages.

The media world, insular beast that it is, fell in love with the Mac. But it was a lonely world to occupy. Microsoft was the king, the PC was still overwhelmingly a business tool and home computer ownership was still rare. Even when Apple ventured, properly, into the consumer technology space, first with its iMac and then the iPod, there was still a latent feeling that it was a niche brand selling expensive devices to a clique of design-conscious (some might even say design-obsessed) geeks and posers.

That, however, as we all know, was about to change. The company that began on April 1, 1976, with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne selling computer kits to hobbyists - each hand-built by Wozniak - is now the most valuable company in the world, estimated to be worth more than $700 billion with a cash pile of $218 billion. Perhaps more importantly, it's Apple's ubiquity which is the most breathtaking. At last week's Apple 'townmeeting' in Cupertino, CEO Tim Cook revealed that there are now more than one billion active Apple devices in use around the world.

Of course, this has much to do with the incredible growth spurt Apple experienced after the company - under Steve Jobs - launched that first iMac in 1997. It's unique popularising of what had been a dull, beige worktool - coupled with a sprinkling of Jobs fairy dust to talk up the-then nascent "digital lifestyle", was a stroke of genius (and, of course, designer Jony Ive deserves a lot of credit for making the iMac something you wanted to show off, rather than hide beneath a dust cover when not in use).

What followed - the iPod, iTunes, the iPod, iPhone and iPad - until Jobs' death in 2011 was, in relative terms, akin to the rapid spread of human civilisation. The iPhone and iPad, in particular, were genuine game changers (a phrase I hate, but can't ignore in this context). I probably use my iPad now more than any other technology device I own, such is its versatility and convenience. This, though, is the essence of Apple, and probably why my home is full of its hardware. Take, for example, the little Apple TV. Even though it is, to all intents and purposes, a screenless iPhone, it, too, is versatile and immensely convenient: Netflix, iTunes, YouTube and my music collection and much, much more all there in that little black hockey puck hidden beneath the TV. Or my current iMac - a machine I don't really regard as a PC but as a thin but nourishing slice of design and technology excellence.

However, not everything in my walled Apple garden is rosy. iTunes has now become a bloated mess, with Apple Music - a clunky attempt to take on streaming services like Spotify - lacking any relevance to us earlier Apple adopters who liked the triumvirate of the iMac, iTunes and an iPod to easily managed music collections. And in promoting the iPad Pro as a 'PC killer', there's every chance that it might start to cannibalise sales of its own line of MacBooks. As delightfully thin as a MacBook Air is, the 9.7-inch iPad Pro is pretty close to replacing that, too.

And then there's the Apple Watch. Really, are they being bought in quantity? Are we that in need of convenience that we can't be bothered to pick up our phone to read our e-mail or retrieve a boarding pass? With this, Apple have over-stretched themselves. Under Jobs, the company found a way of selling snow to the eskimo: computers, digital music players and mobile phones existed long before Apple applied their touch to them, but each time they managed to come up with a compelling - and often impulsive - reason for you having to own one. Not with the watch.

Apple does have some history in launching things people don't want, or don't want just yet (the Apple Newton and their 'cube' Mac computer for a start), so there's every chance that the Apple Watch may develop into a bigger business. And that is what it needs, desperately. The new iPhone SE and indeed the iPad Pro 9.7 may keep revenue ticking over as replacement sales, but there is a genuine sense that the Apple magic has plateaued.

Businesswise, there is still plenty of potential for Apple in developing markets like China and other parts of Asia, where disposable incomes are increasingly in range of Apple pricing (it still amazes me how Apple could become some dominant given that their products still command a mighty brand premium). But what is clearly lacking from Apple is a vision of its future.

We can safely assume that there will be an iPhone 7, perhaps in September or next year, followed by an iPhone 8, 9, 10 and so on. iPhones will get even thinner (probably dispensing with the headphone jack, thus forcing us all into buying new headphones...) to the extent that they will cease to feel like phones at all. Similarly, the iPad will continue to get thinner and lighter, more powerful and better suited to productivity, thus fulfilling Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller's prediction that the PC is under threat from the tablet. But in neither product lines is there any sense of true evolution, apart from design and performance improvements.

In the Mac department, Apple trundles along. MacBooks will continue to be popular with students and design types and iMacs will continue to be the choice of those who need a desktop and prefer it to be stylish (such as the White House, if House Of Cards is to be believed...). However, the Mac range accounts for less than 9% of Apple's annual revenue. Ironic, given that it represents the company's origin.

So, as it turns 40, Apple faces a mid-life crisis of sorts. Like many in their 40s, life can be good: a comfortable income and a healthy career. But as with many when they hit 40, questions start to emerge. Is this all life has to offer? Could there be more?

In converging computing and consumer electronics, Apple may have hit the motherlode - and the stratospheric financials underline this. But they are also discovering - as both traditional computing and consumer electronics manufacturers have found - that when everyone owns the 'must have' keeping the cash registers working is the biggest challenge. The consumer electronics industry, in some part, has been usurped by Apple. Bar the screen, my Apple TV box alone provides all the content that three or four separate devices used to provide. This has been the existential challenge for the CE industry now for nearly two decades, reflected in the fact that the likes of Panasonic, Hitachi, JVC, Sharp and even Sony have contracted or even disappeared completely as Samsung, with its deep (and riskily-so) pockets have taken over. Philips, my old company, has sold off much of its CE product ranges, and while innovation continues to be vibrant in, for example, its TV business, it can't be fun competing any more.

Apple long ago stopped acting as a computer company in the consumer world. In some respects, it has invented a category all of its own, somewhere in the midst of making products that serve lifestyle, entertainment and productivity needs. But that still doesn't guarantee a future. Plenty of big technology brands have fallen by the wayside as markets have matured and standalone devices that could have been milked for money have become obsolete.

We are now coming to the end of the first digital era, one that was defined by portable content, miniaturisation, and the Web. Around the corner lies the 'Internet of Things' and 'Machine-to-Machine', in which sensors and devices fragment and talk to each other autonomously. Some have predicted that the smartphone in its current guise could be obsolete by the beginning of the next decade. That's only four years away. For Apple, who's iPhone represents almost 70% of its income, that's a future that will have people within the company's shiny new spaceship HQ in Cupertino thinking very long and hard about where they want to go over the next 40 years.

Goodbye Garry Shandling, half-man, half-desk

HBO

I sincerely hope the Grim Reaper is taking Easter off. Not wishing to be flippant, especially in this Holy Week - and one in which we've seen the very worst that humankind can do to itself - but since the beginning of 2016 the passing of entertainers who have meant so much more to people than merely authoring memorable songs or delivering superlative performances has been relentless.

Every time another falls, obiturists and commentators struggle, understandably, to say something new and original, a task made so much harder by the archly innovative nature of those we've lost this year. And yesterday we lost another one, Garry Shandling.

Perhaps you only know Shandling for just two of his achievements, It's Garry Shandling's Show and The Larry Sanders Show: if so, you will have been blessed with having seen two of modern television's greatest game changers. That, I know, sounds like more of the same hyperbole, but for once it is valid.

The former of these two ground-breaking TV shows would probably have been the first most people outside of the Los Angeles stand-up comedy circuit would have known of Shandling. Pre-dating Seinfeld by three years, It's Garry Shandling's Show presented a similar concept, a sitcom about the stand-up comedy of its star, and focusing on male neuroses with more than a hint of Jewishness about it too.

What made Shandling's show so unique was that it was a sitcom where the borders between fiction and reality were never fully clear: set largely in an apartment which faithfully duplicated Shandling's own Sherman Oaks home, Shandling and his fellow cast members would frequently break the 'fourth wall' as they acted out scenes from the comedian's own hang-ups.

Addressing the audience in character wasn't particularly new: George Burns had done it many years before in his own sitcom, and Oliver Hardy had made the exasperated stare-to-camera a staple of his films with Stan Laurel, always to hilarious effect. But Shandling and co-writer Alan Zweibel found a new purpose in their show which ran from 1986 until 1990.

Two years after It's Garry Shandling's Show ended, Shandling hit comedy gold again with the unbelievably prescient Larry Sanders Show. Johnny Carson's retirement from The Tonight Show in May 1992 became far more than a major media event - it triggered the now-infamous battle between David Letterman and Jay Leno to succeed him (superbly chronicled, by the way, in Bill Carter's authoritative tome, The Late Shift).

To this Brit, until I visited America for the first time at the end of 1992 I had never really appreciated the cultural importance of US TV's late night talk shows. Chat shows in the UK were hardly zeitgeist-grabbing: Terry Wogan's show on BBC1 three nights a week often appeared to be nothing more than an outlet for publicists, rather than anything that would set the conversational agenda in workplaces the following morning. And while Michael Parkinson may have held the position of Britain's king of chat for his A-list interviews since the 1970s, there was little edge to them, even the more memorable encounters.

In the US, however, the late night talk shows held a commanding presence in the TV schedules, partly due to Carson's legacy. They were prized properties for the networks, maintaining affluent demographics up long after their recommended bedtimes with their formula of hosts' monologues, celebrity appearances, banter with sidekicks and wacky stunts. This was much to the delight of premium advertisers who paid healthily to associate themselves with the late night pack.

Carson had, in the words of Scottish comedian Craig Ferguson (who took on his own show - The Late, Late Show) been "your best pal and uncle and dad rolled into one", but with a cheek and a subversiveness. Letterman, more so than his rival Leno, took that cheek and subversiveness and added a proprietary brand of wiseass cynicsm. "The only person I ever watched was Dave," wrote Ferguson in his memoir American On Purpose. "He was funny and bitter and I got the feeling he secretly (or maybe not so secretly) despised showbiz." That was probably more than just at the core of Shandling's Larry Sanders.

The Larry Sanders Show was never meant to draw on the late night war of 1992, but its arrival on HBO in the midst of conflict in the August of that year was remarkable in its timing. The added spice was that Shandling had often filled in for Carson and was even considered at one point to be another potential replacement.

More than a quarter of a century on, the Sanders show is still - and should be - considered the standard by which any other satirical sitcom should be measured, and its legacy looms large in so many great shows that followed in its wake - The Office (in all its international incarnations), Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm, 30 Rock, The Thick Of It and its American cousin, Veep, Extras, Episodes, Alan Partridge - the list goes on.

Perhaps this is not surprising: spend any amount of time around the entertainment business and you will encounter its paranoias, its hang-ups, its narcissism and its insecurities, all of which Shandling captured so brilliantly with Sanders and his entourage on a fictional late night talk show.

Much like his mostly-self portrayal on It's Garry Shandling's Show, Larry Sanders took another angle on Shandling himself, now supplanted into Hollywood's morass of vanity and insecurity. The difference, though, was that The Larry Sanders Show wasn't focused entirely around Shandling's character - in one episode memorably and sycophantically described by producer Artie (the exceptional Rip Torn) as "like one of those goddamn creatures out of Greek mythology: half-man, half-desk."

Many of the wickedly funny plotlines spun from Sanders' on-screen sidekick, the relentlessly dim Hank "Hey now!" Kingsley (Jeffrey Tambor). Supporting characters also took on prominent plot pivots, played by then-up and coming comic actors like Janeane Garofalo as acid-tongued talent booker Paula (succeeded by a pre-24 Mary Lynn Rajskub), Jeremy Piven, Wallace Langham as smartarse head writer Phil, and Breaking Bad/Better Caul Saul's Bob Odenkirk as Sanders' reprehensible agent Stevie Grant.

Everybody on The Larry Sanders Show possessed egos that were easily inflated and dangerously fragile, starting with Shandling's own character and his self-popularity obsession and, on occasion, the size of his arse. The delicious irony of this, however, was that Shandling and his co-writers regularly used The Larry Sanders Show as an opportunity for celebrities to willingly send themselves up. David Duchovny - then in the throes of his original X-Files fame - often appeared as a guest on the fictional Sanders' show displaying a barely-concealed homoerotic attachment for the host, an attraction that hilariously made Shandling's character even more unnerved (Shandling would later appear in a semi-spoof episode of The X-Files, Hollywood AD, alongside Duchovny's then wife Téa Leoni).

From Jennifer Aniston to Robin Williams, Alec Baldwin to Henry Winkler, and Warren Beatty to Warren Zevon, very real stars lined up to appear on the show, as much a testament to Shandling's creation, given that these same stars would simultaneously be appearing on the promotional circuit of all the for-real late night talk shows of the day.

Garry Shandling may have started out as another Midwest shuckster plying the LA comedy clubs, but over the course of the 12 years that he made It's Garry Shandling's Show and The Larry Sanders Show, he carved himself out as one of Hollywood's sharpest observers. Credit, of course, shouldn't go entirely to him - there were co-writers on both projects - but when you look back on them now, they were both of their time and ahead of their time.

As the real late night talk shows can often be accused of, American TV is often formulaic. Neither of Shandling's most memorable creations could be accused of that. Even if his subsequent acting career didn't ever plough such rich furrows, these two shows will ensure a prominent place in TV's hall of fame, reminders that right before the 'golden age of television' came along, with heavyweight, earnest and deservedly-praised 'must-see' shows like The Sopranos, The Wire and Breaking Bad, one slightly nerdy, stereotypically neurotic Jewish comedian from Chicago broke through barriers and accepted norms with two hysterical shows that will always be regarded as nothing but genius. No more flipping.

I don't know how she did it

So, barely a day after Twitter turned 10, and not long, either, after this very blog had examined how beneath the surface of its piano-playing cats, corporate puffs and celebrity updates, lurks a primordial ooze of hate, that this happens:

Allison Pearson, a 'star' columnist for the Daily Telegraph and author of novels such as I Don't Know How She Does It (made into a movie starring Sarah Jessica Parker, apparently), tweeted what, I suspect, absolutely no one else was thinking as news was still coming in this morning from the apparent suicide bombings at Brussels' Zaventem airport and Maelbeek metro station.

Well, I was somewhat wrong in this regard. To compound Pearson's incompassionate folly, UKIP's suburban golf club captain masquerading as a politician, Nigel Farage, then retweeted her ridiculous missive. Farage, however, was not alone amongst his swivel-eyed brethren, as UKIP's defence spokesperson in the European Parliament then issued the following hastily-written, typo-ridden statement:

The smoldering corpses near the American Airlines desk at Zaventem and the mangled remains of commuters at Maelbeek station had barely been attended to when already an admittedly tiny section of the political elite started seeking to exploit the abhorrant attacks for their own narrow agenda about the UK's membership of the European Union.

As a British citizen living abroad for almost the last 17 years - 15 of them in two EU-member countries - I have my views on Britain's part in the "European project". But regardless of which way I would vote, most of my experience of living in the Netherlands and France has been positive.

Being in the Eurozone has allowed me to be paid in a currency that I can then spend easily elsewhere in the region; I've been able to drive on a Dutch driving licence in the UK, France, Italy and Spain without it bothering anyone; and I've been able to move from EU member country to another, and then another to work, live and benefit culturally from the experience, and hopefully make a positive contribution locally.

When the Schengen Agreement was signed in 1985 by Belgium, France, the-then West Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, Islamist terrorism was something that happened elsewhere. It was something you heard about on the news happening in Lebanon, the West Bank and other parts of the Middle East. The UK was more concerned with Irish terrorism in 1985 than jihad. Even the attempt by a nascent Al-Qaeda to blow up the World Trade Center in New York in February 1993 didn't seem to be placed by the media or the political world as coming from a wider, global terrorist agenda.

But that all changed on September 11, 2001. Because the world changed forever on that day. A chain of events that can be traced back to the British and French carve-up of the Arab lands after World War I, through World War II, the depths of the Cold War and Russia's invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, had all led, in one form or another, to 9/11. And in the decade and a half since, we have existed in an almost perpetual state of war in one region. Children have become teenagers in the belief that their country's soldiers only wear desert camouflage, that their armies only need one colour of paint for their vehicles.

However, that "region" soon became exported: to Madrid on March 11, 2004 and London on July 7, 2005. Just as terror was brought to New York and Washington in 2001, the war on and with terror was no longer 'just' a regional problem. For the last decade it has been an Indonesian problem, a Philippino problem, an Australian problem, a Turkish problem, a French problem, a German problem, a Swiss problem, an Italian problem, a Spanish problem, a British problem.

In Madrid in 2004, blame was eventually placed on an imported cell comprising Moroccans, Syrians and Algerians, but in London in 2005 the culprits were home-grown: three British-born sons of Pakistani origin and a fourth born in Jamaica but had been living in the UK since the age of five.

Ease of movement throughout Europe had had nothing to do with them. They'd come down from the north of England to deliver their gruesome carnage. Indeed in many subsequent plots in the UK since 7/7, terrorism and cells in other parts of continental Europe had barely been mentioned, though it would be foolish in the extreme to expect that jihadists in Belgium, Germany and elsewhere were not completely unconnected, more so with the rise of ISIS and the exodus of disaffected youths from these countries to join the murderous death cult in Iraq and Syria.

Events in Paris last November, and again in Brussels today, have underlined the ease of movement with which terrorists have in continental Europe, especially the example of Salah Abdeslam, who managed to evaid capture for four months only to be apprehended running out of an apartment just a couple of blocks from his family home in Molenbeek.

But to believe that locking down Britain and removing it politically and structurally from the European Union will in some how make the UK safe from all this is about as naive as it is possible to be. In 1997 Britain imposed one of the world's strictest firearms bans, but that hasn't stopped the flood of guns coming into the country and into the hands of criminals. And with the murder of Lee Rigby, we saw in bloodthirsty detail that a terrorist needs only a kitchen knife to create the desired effect. And very little passport control at all.

To politicise attacks like those this morning in Brussels, merely to drive the discussion about Britain's EU membership, is wholly wrong. And, anyway, if the UK wishes to be safe, better coordination and intelligence sharing amongst Europe's security services can only improve the chances of preventing the next attack. That doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the political and financial union of 28 states.

Just because you can acquire a Kalishnakov rifle in France and Belgium as easily as a daily newspaper doesn't make Britain any more or any less vulnerable. Just ask those who were on the Circle Line between Liverpool Street and Aldgate on July 7, 2005, or just outside Edgware Road station, or the Piccadilly Line between King's Cross and Russell Square, or on the number 30 bus at Tavistock Square.

More importantly, if you want to make a case for the UK leaving the European Union, don't be such an inconsiderate ghoul that you do so while the blood and scattered body parts of another bombing are still where they were cast by a suicide attacker. And, secondly, try and apply some fact-based reasoning: terrorism doesn't hold a passport.

As Twitter turns 10, is the Twittocracy out of control?

In comparison to the world that exists in the comment sections of online articles of the Daily Mail, the 'mood slime' oozing through New York City in the Ghostbusters films is relatively benign.

Should you make the fatal mistake of going to the Mail Online for anything other than its excellent sports coverage, and you then click on a story - really, any story - you will be, at a glance, rewarded with the most frightening representation of modern society. It is one which makes Faustian visions of the underworld look beatific. It will remind you of Jack Crawford's advice to Clarice Starling in The Silence Of The Lambs: "Believe me, you don't want Hannibal Lecter inside your head", such is the insanity let loose in these forums.

The Daily Hate is where the unmoderated go to dispense their batshit-crazy opinions, their apalling spelling and even worse grammar (be warned if easily offended by "your" instead of "you're"), and their utterly noxious views on celebrities that have just appeared in a miasma of covert bikini pictures (supported, as the paper's 12-year-old caption writers invariably write, by descriptions of "a leggy display" or "a busty display", or pointing out "plenty of side boob" and its escapist cousin "under boob"), and to generally contribute to a seeping wound of unsolicited bile about people they would never otherwise be able to engage the world at large with directly.

Twitter/Danny Baker

The simple solution, of course, to taking umbrage at this somewhat unsolicited and mostly anonymous bile is to not "go directly to comments", as appears to be the activity name for people who see one of the newspaper's crackpot headlines (such as one once hilariously announcing that Goebbels was paranoid about Adolf "Hotler" - HOTLER! - sleeping with Frau Goebbels) and make straight for the veritable cuckoo's nest below the main story.

In this regard, the Mail is rather like Australia. Knowing, as you do, that throughout its landmass and coasts lurks most of the world's things that will kill you, you are empowered with the knowledge and good sense to avoid it. By the same token, you know that anything directed by M. Night Shyamalan will render you in need of clean underwear, and anything with Mrs. Brown's Boys in the title will leave you reaching for the will to live. So the Mail's readers forum, and indeed the Mail itself, is put sensibly off limits.

Twitter, however, is another matter. Depending on your popularity - and, face facts, it is your perceived popularity that determines this - you are completely at the mercy of the world. Twitter is like actually visiting Australia and spending your entire time naked as the day you turned out, coated in honey, while attending a meeting at the corporate HQ of the entire wasp species before scheduling a restorative dip later in the country's tiniest body of water known to harbour crocodiles. Who haven't dined in months.

This may sound a tad over-dramatic, but there have been times - moments of idleness you could characterise them - when I have been drawn to individuals' tweets and then gone crashing foolishly into the "conversations" that have either preceded them or come afterwards.

A recent example concerns Al Murray, a figure known to British audiences, mainly, as the ironic 'Pub Landlord', a standup comedy character based on the boorish, right-wing UKIP-loving barkeeps who, like Londom black cab drivers, will opine on many things that get liberals hot under the collars of their hair shirts.

Whether in character or not, Murray - an Oxford-educated descendent of the 3rd Duke of Atholl and a great-great-great-great-grandson of the novelist William Thackeray - appears to take great delight in engaging Twitter fascists to the extent that you actually see their little rubber bands going snap. It is an art, and an intelligent one, and one in which - credit where due - Murray will march straight into his own online Agincourt without so much as the blindest concern for his own safety. A recent engagement by Murray on the not-too-light topic of anti-semitism was like watching Jason Bourne take down allcomers in an alley, except even now I can't recall who was fighting whom about what, largely because it was a Saturday night and I was in decent supply of gin, tonic and ice cubes.

Another admirable troll jouster is Jess Phillips, the Labour MP for the Birmingham consituency of Yardley. I mention Phillips not out of any political affiliation, but as an example of how Twitter has gone too far in giving people an unbridled voice. In October last year, Phillips appeared in a House of Commons meeting to discuss a debate about International Men's Day. "As the only woman on this committee, it seems like every day to me is International Men’s Day," she commented. "When I’ve got parity, when women in these buildings have parity, you can have your debate. And that will take an awfully long time."

Cue the River Styx itself breaking its banks, with Phillips facing threats of rape - yes, rape. On the one hand, you can rationalise it by saying that such people use the anonymity of Twitter as their shield. But on the other hand, you have to recognise that someone capable of making such a threat could also live right next door.

I really have very little interest in or regard for politicians (who are largely self-serving egos on legs, sorry), but in Phillips I genuinely admire her integrity to speak freely and with authority (her recent brouhaha comparing New Year's sexual assaults in German with an ordinary night in in Birmingham had the sound basis of Phillips having worked closely with womens' abuse charities). Quite understandably, on this occasion she lost her sense of fun: "No internet today. Being told that 'I asked for it' regarding threats to rape me is not fun. Its not 1st time in my life I've heard it." she tweeted, adding: "Today my son is 7. I'm glad he is not old enough to go on internet and find all the people threatening to rape me."

Most of the nonsense Phillips puts up with on Twitter is deflected with good humour. But on this occasion, lines were crossed. This, of course, raises the question about why anyone would want to put their head in the proverbial lion's mouth on a platform as public as Twitter when such swivel-eyed, foil hat-wearing lunacy lurks predatorially in the bushes. Least of all celebrities. There are many questions one might ask of Lindsay Lohan for posting lascivious pictures of herself on Instagram, but is there any - any - justfication for members of the populace to openly call her a "junkie whore", just because there's a button beneath her post that allows you to write something?

As with the Mail, looking up replies to celebrity tweets can be a frightening, faith-in-humanity-sapping experience. I'm very serious when I say that you simply should avoid them. Because you will wonder what sort of society we live in. You will question what absence of civility allows people the belief that even with their Twitter identity completely unguarded, and their name and profile photograph on show, they can say anything to anyone, let alone the famous, via this passive-aggressive medium than they would have the bollocks to say to their face?

For those of us in the communications game, Twitter - unlike Facebook - has been a boon. Companies and corporates have leapt upon it for its instantanious immediacy. Celebrities have embraced it in a way that, as someone who used to court the PRs of the famous, I find quite refreshing.

There are many celebs out there who do Twitter just right: Gillian Anderson, an actress who by my book can do no wrong, is one of the funniest celeb tweeters out there, especially when she's baiting David Duchovny.

But even she can't put out something of genuine interest to her fans without some dipshit tweeting something juvenile to her. So is it right that they can, or should "@GillianA" just ignore the serious invasions of her public image that she often has to put up with?

My point here is that in the olden days our contact with the famous was strictly controlled by their publicists. We only knew what they were saying or thinking because a journalist, or a magazine or a TV interviewer had been granted annointed access to the schleb, and even then under some threat of violence, or worse, if agreed terms of reference were breached.

Now, we don't have to wait for showbiz hacks to describe the mood of a Hollywood star as they wilt from that day's umpteenth interview. Because, thanks to Twitter, we know that Johnny Famous isn't the surly hack-hating git an interview might portray him as, because he's just tweeted a Vine of his cat doing something cute, leaving us under no misapprehension that JF is, actually, normal and a bit of a laugh in real life.

Sometimes, however, it works against them. Stephen Fry has been, without doubt, one of the most prolific users of Twitter and one of its earliest celebrity proponents. However, he has also fallen vulnerable to its darker side, and has taken himself off it three times in sensitive reaction to twiterverse reactions to things he's said and done, including last month's BAFTAs when do-gooders thought he'd caused genuine offence by describing costume designer (and, actually, close friend) Jenny Beavan as "a bag lady".

Despite stressing his longstanding friendship with Beavan and that he was indulging in nothing more than joshing, Fry closed down his account on February 15 following a night of trench warfare with people accusing him of mysoginy and worse. In a post on his personal blog entitled "Too many people have peed in the pool", Fry wrote that he hadn't so much slammed the door on Twitter as "stalked off in a huff throwing my toys out of the pram as I go", adding "It’s quite simple really: the room had started to smell. Really quite bad."

He described Twitter's early halcyon days as "a secret bathing-pool in a magical glade in an enchanted forest", noting how "we chattered and laughed and put the world to rights and shared thoughts sacred, silly and profane. But now the pool is stagnant. It is frothy with scum, clogged with weeds and littered with broken glass, sharp rocks and slimy rubbish. If you don’t watch yourself, with every move you’ll end up being gashed, broken, bruised or contused. Even if you negotiate the sharp rocks you’ll soon feel that too many people have peed in the pool for you to want to swim there any more. The fun is over."

Of course, Twitter remains what it is to its 300-plus million active users. But Fry does have a point, if a tad melodramatic, when he said "Let us grieve at what Twitter has become, a stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended – worse, to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know. It’s as nasty and unwholesome a characteristic as can be imagined...the tipping point has been reached and the pollution of the service is now just too much."

Ending his post by quoting Martin Luther King ("I am free, free at last"), Fry left no one in any doubt that he was glad to be rid of a beast which he, in some part, helped to build. When I joined Twitter in February 2009, it was because celebrities like Fry and Jonathan Ross had been raving about it. And, yes, part of the attraction was indeed the somewhat voyeuristic proximity with which it brought us mere mortals to the famous.

But there is a genuine argument that, with Twitter, you had to be careful what you wished for. In the ten years to the day since Jack Dorsey sent his first tweet, it has brought about a global emancipation, even if - as an early market research study found, it is still predominantly split between a predominance of "pointless babble", conversations, items of interest, self-promotion, spam and news.

Unless you hold a position of great prominence, you can tweet in the manner to which the concept was born - 'microblogging', which to all intents and purposes means "stream of consciousness". It can be funny: got a good joke? Tweet it. You won't even be bothered by the tumbleweed blowing through your timeline as you get zero likes or an absence of retweets. And then again, you get lucky and your under-the-influence bon mot about the Eurovision Song Contest gets launched into orbit and the retweet count goes berserk.

Twitter does put you out there. If you're prepared to commit yourself to the Twittersphere, be prepared for unsolicited reactions. I admit to have indulged in a little light trollery myself recently when Lord (Alan) Sugar tweeted his barmy idea that José Mourinho got himself fired deliberately because he wanted out of Chelsea.

I was prompted - pint in hand, it must be said - to repost his tweet with the comment that it was "either the dumbest theory since Mourinho said he could revive [Radamel] Falcao's career, or Lord S is on to something". This then prompted Sugar - who doesn't suffer fools gladly at all (and manages his own tweets accordingly) to reply "Shut up". And, I think, he blocked me.

You can't blame him. However, here began the beginning of a painful afternoon. Retweets of my post, comments to it, comments to his retort - Sugar and I were dragged unwillingly into other people's personal dramas. It very soon became the worst 'reply all' nightmare you could muster. Three days on, like remote outposts returning their ballot boxes, comments, retweets and likes were still appearing like random aftershocks, all from what I'd thought was a measured piece of smart-arsery, albeit from the relaxed confines of the saloon bar.

And that is how it happens. I would still maintain that my banter with Sugar was just that, and he is more than grown up enough to not take offence (in fact my exchange was quite mild in comparision to his baiting of Piers Morgan...). But such is Twitter's openness that there isn't much between light ribbing and the kind of wholesale billiousness the likes of Jess Phillips and Stephen Fry have endured. And there's worse, much worse. In fact, there are times when Twitter emulates the darker spaces of the Internet with some of the exchanges people become embroiled in, of a breed that makes the Mail Online's comment sections look as serene as a summer's day on the Serptentine.

Working as I do in corporate media relations, I recognise that social media has its boundaries. Even though anyone in a position of responsibility will make clear "views are my own" in their account bio, you can never, ever cross a line. Even my invariably grumpy missives about Chelsea, written within Guinness-sweetened distance of the pub's big screen, must submit to the social media breathalyser before I commit them to the general public.

It's called self-restraint, something clearly lacking in the nefarious ocean that bubbles just below the apparent freedom of speech Twitter provides. Before the age of social media, I'm sure people led more civil lives. Nutters who wrote to newspapers or public figures would do so in green ink (this is not a myth, by the way) but there was moderation, not to mention a good deal more respect at large. Now, there are no such screens.

The Internet has democratised society, but there are occasions when you wonder whether it has become overly emancipated. And in the process, you do wonder who who - or what - is lurking out there...and possibly only next door.

TV sofas - the politics of the left and the right

In our shallow, insecure times, people place great store in where they sit. It's something which has become increasingly felt at companies operating 'hot desking' policies, where workers no longer sit at the same place automatically, thus preventing desks from filling up with personal photographs, 'amusing' signs about not being mad to work there, and accumulated lunch detritus.

When it first began in - where else? - Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom, hot desking wasn't perceived as a sign of disappearing job security. It was embraced as part of the zany, anything-goes, free-yourself-from-convention culture that went with all those skateboarding, surf shorts-wearing offices in California.

"That's my spot"

But when the practice spread to corporate offices in Europe, where notions of employment security have a very different texture, the idea of workers not expecting to have "their spot" each day came as a shock. Not knowing quite what the etiquette was, passive-agressive disputes broke out over computer mice or the adjustment of seat heights. But old habits die slowly, and even in offices with no allocated seating, people generally still plonk where they've always plonked...until some interloper appears to upset the peace.

In television, where you sit is important. In the Sky newsroom some years ago, there was a large and fairly uncompromising Kiwi by the name of Scott Chisholm, who co-presented evening news bulletins. Chisholm had his spot, and few seemed willing or brave enough to challenge it. There was something clearly of the animal kingdom about all this.

And thus it proved when another newsroom alpha, Chris Mann, appeared in that part of the Osterley safari park and had the temerity to use Chisholm's desk, possibly out of provocation. At some point afterwards - I can't now remember the exact chronology - Chisholm and Mann ended up in a clothed version of Alan Bates and Oliver Reed's wrestling match in Women In Love, resulting in Mann taking a trip to the Royal Free Hospital in north London. Trebles and sackings all round.

BBC

Hopefully, then, things won't end up quite so testosterone-fuelled on the set of BBC Breakfast, where the clean-cut vicar's son Dan Walker (he of Football Focus and not working on Sundays on religious grounds fame) has just replaced the retiring Bill Turnbull after 15 years on the famous red couch.

Without so much as a by-your-leave, Walker was installed in Turnbull's old spot, on the right-hand side of the sofa - the 'camera left' position as the viewer sees it. This apparently caused viewer Adele Clarke great umbrage, and she wrote to Radio Times to complain that Breakfast producers were being horrendously sexist and that by rights, the longer-standing co-anchor Louise Minchin should now be automatically 'promoted' to the left of frame as the senior presenter.

In few other professions where you sit counts. A judge, obviously. A school headmaster, possibly. On an aircraft, the captain - and therefore commander - always sits in the left-hand seat. That IS a convention of authority. In all these cases, none are a matter of gender, either.

In the case of its flagship breakfast show, however, the BBC maintains that who-sits-where has nothing to do with seniority, but one of aesthetics. Breakfast producers apparently screen-tested Minchin in the camera left position and Walker camera right, but it just didn't work visually. That should be obvious: Walker is 6ft 6in and, as any photographer will tell you, putting that in the middle would just look weird - and if anything, would have made Walker even more prominent.

Chris Evans - a tall bloke himself, and who always sat camera-left to Gabby Roslin on The Big Breakfast - refutes the BBC's visual argument as "absolute tosh", but then I've never seen him sat anywhere else when there's a co-presenter to his side. Photographic composition has to count, even on a news programme, but that clearly hasn't been what this brouhaha has been about.

BBC

What Minchin herself thinks about it all is not fully clear. Tittle-tattle travels fast from wine bar to wine bar in medialand, though, and given the leaky-sieve nature of most newsrooms, it's no surprise that there are murmurings that she was pushing for the perceived prize spot on the Breakfast sofa, but then this is so far unsubstantiated. Frankly, though, until the subject came up in the Radio Times, I don't think anyone had thought less of her sitting to Walker's left, or any more of Walker sitting to her right.

That hasn't stopped a full-on media storm, of the kind only the media likes to create for its own amusement. In today's Guardian, Miriam O'Reilly - who sued the BBC for ageism after she was dropped as presenter of Countryfile - blamed "deep-rooted misogyny" in TV newsrooms for the left-right arrangement and the apparently unspoken rule that the senior presenter always sits on the left-hand side of the screen.

I agree that ageism is endemic in television, but then there are so many 'isms' in the entertainment business as a whole. Whether it's good roles for older women in Hollywood or that Bruce Forsyth was (until his departure) too old to host Strictly Come Dancing, there's always strong argument that such biases exist. The counter argument is always that television, like cinema, is a visual art, and therefore if it looks good, it probably is good. After all, did we ever get wound up by Valerie Singleton, Peter Purves and John Noakes sitting in that order on Blue Peter?

TV news journalists, however, do get annoyed by such things. They consider themselves serious journalists rather than light entertainers (though the editorial agenda of Breakfast sometimes says otherwise...). Authority counts perhaps as much as it does for the airline pilot. Positioning Minchin as the lead presenter of Breakfast is no bad thing. Few have raised the fact that Walker is younger than her, which means that she now has what looks like a lanky teenager in his first suit sat next to her. That should indicate seniority to begin with, but in television - as so many aspects of life - perception is nine-tenths of reality. Personally, until Ms. Clarke's letter came up, I - and I suspect most people - probably never gave it any thought. It's just two people on television, with a director, in the case of Breakfast, ensuring that his or her choice of shots is as visually appealing as they are editorially beneficial.

However, what this argument seems to forget is that television is also an aural medium, and none more so than breakfast news when viewers are only paying partial attention to what's on the screen. Who speaks, rather than where they sit is just as important. That's why awkward moments are so commonplace when two TV presenters can't decide who is going to read what on the Autocue. Perhaps, then, the real issue is deciding who gets to say "Good morning, you're watching BBC Breakfast with X and me, Y" than who has a hierarchical superiority based on where they sit.

In America, however, things are less subtle. As Anchorman's Ron Burgundy highlighted so brilliantly there are unbreakable formulas in television news. Visit any US city and watch the local evening bulletins: there will usually be the slightly older, seasoned male hack sat next to the younger, perfectly-coiffed hackette. I've probably never even noticed it, but the convention of man-left, woman-right is no doubt upheld pretty much everywhere. What you then get is the over-excitable "sports" guy to their right and a weather presenter clamped to their left. That is, surely, convention, but also perhaps one of familiarity (much like American supermarkets, whose layouts are always - to me at least - exactly the same).

TV producers are not stupid. In Los Angeles I often used to watch the frankly ridiculous 'zoo' madness of Fox's Good Day LA, a morning news show which seemed focused solely around its venerable anchor Steve Edwards. Either side of him, weather presenter Jillian Barberie and entertainment reporter Dorothy Lucey basically talked over each other. Producers presumably thought this gonzo coffee-and-cacophany format 'wacky'. All the viewer got was a silver-haired news veteran and two screeching blondes engaged in often incomprehensible banter. That's not a sexist comment - it was so obvious what was going on.

Back in the UK, Sky News, like its American cousins in the Murdoch empire, has never been short of criticism that its on-air talent is there more for aesthetic appeal (Adam Boulton not withstanding...) than news credibility. There's no doubt that Sky's presenter roster is blessed with what could be politely termed "visual appeal", but to its credit, there are also some very good journalists who front bulletins. Ever since it launched in 1989, Sky News has mainly operated a two-anchor approach and, yes, often with the male anchor to the left, but not always.

Sky

Sarah-Jane Mee - a very good anchor indeed - currently holds the 'primary' role on Sky News' Sunrise while Eamonn Holmes recovers from hip surgery (notably Gillian Joseph also takes taking the hot seat at weekends). Nobody seems to have an issue with any of these arrangements, and no one makes a big deal out of them - it's simply what works for Sky.

And, at no point has it been suggested that there is any inferiority to the whoever takes the co-presenter seat. That said, Holmes himself only underwent the surgery after putting it off for years fearing that he didn't want to be seen as "old" through television's notoriously youth-obsessed eyes (he's 55). That, back to O'Reilly's comments, is the bigger issue.

Reality bites for Chelsea - so now its time to fix the problem for good

© Simon Poulter 2016

At some point today, Barry Bright, an ex-estate agent and the former chief executive of both Sittingbourne FC and Gillingham FC, as well as a sitting member of the Kent Police Authority, sat down at his desk at the Football Association and, like Elliott Ness trying bring down Al Capone, looked at every angle that could have Diego Costa's automatic red card ban extended for his generally industrial behaviour against Everton in Saturday's FA Cup quarter-final. 

Because, with the FA concluding that Costa didn't bite Gareth Barry - duh! - there was still a rabid desire by the body's Independent Regulatory Commission to make an example of the Brazilian-born Spaniard. Predictably, the media has already started their braying: "He had intent," they suggest. By that token, looking at the usual expression on the face of an enraged Diego Costa, the span of intent could range from a ritual disemboweling to a nuclear attack. 

So what about: "He made a rude gesture to Everton fans"? Well, he was photographed making a horizontal V-sign, much as most rap stars and, now, all football players do when someone sticks a camera in front of them. It was hardly Harvey Smith.

And then: "He was about to bite Barry, but then decided not to" -- since disproven by Barry himself; Or: "He looked at the referee a bit funny": well who could blame the combustible Costa from not getting a tiny bit peeved with the out-of-his-depth Michael Oliver for the bruising attention his shins had been getting all afternoon from Everton's defenders.

In the end, the inevitable: a charge of improper conduct, for his alleged behaviour "after being shown a second yellow card in the game," according to the FA's official statement. In addition, Costa has been given until Wednesday "to provide his observations" over that "alleged gesture".

So, while Mr Bright and his chums do their best to keep Costa out of sight for what remains of this dismal season for Chelsea, there needs to be a similarly forensic and zealous investigation carried out by the club itself themselves as to why they will end 2015-2016 with nothing to show for it. That's unless, pathetically, they really, truly regard avoiding relegation as a trophy to be proud of.

Because with no more Champions League (perhaps for a long while) and no hope of a Wembley visit this year, Chelsea's season has run totally barren. True, Guus Hiddink has restored confidence and their league form since his arrival has been impressive, but this is still only by comparison to the abject moribundity that they'd allowed themselves to fall into under José Mourinho. Hiddink's salvaging of their league status is big, but put into the wider perspective, it's been one of survival.

And, so, Chelsea can now coast to May 15 when they play Leicester City - perhaps by then Chelsea's successors to the Premier League title - on the final day of the season. What circularity: a season that began on August 8 last year at Stamford Bridge with Mourinho losing the plot over the doctor, ending with Roman Abramovich having to watch Claudio Ranieri - the "dead man walking" he sacked in 2004 - walk through a guard of honour made up of Chelsea's players.

Perhaps it might wake the Russian into accepting how out of shape his club really is. How this club may have acquired an incredible haul of trophies since he took over, but for each of those trophies there is a discarded manager and the perception amongst the rest of the footballing world that Chelsea is a club lacking soul, humanity, class, respect and heritage. Those are all accusations you will hear a hundred times a day on Twitter from the trolls, but even I have to admit they're a tiny bit right.

When I was a child I had no real understanding of why I supported Chelsea. I just did. Liverpool and even Ipswich Town were in the ascendency of the old First Division. Chelsea had a perceived glamour, because they'd been moderately successful in the 60s and early 70s, and bizarrely had picked up a celebrity following that included, yes, Raquel Welch. But after winning the European Cup Winner's Cup in 1971, the next time their trophy cabinet would be opened was to receive the Full Members Cup in 1986, which is about as prestigious as listing a swimming certificate next to your degree.

So, when the away fans taunt us with their "shit club, no history" and "where were you when you were crap" jibes, I pretty much know exactly where I was. Which is why the arrival of Abramovich has been something we've all embraced. Because we have had success. Oodles of it. We've even played some exhilarating football, not just under Mourinho, but also under Ancelotti, Di Matteo, and - dare I say it - Benitez. Avram Grant even took us to a Champions League final. Yes, him.

This season, however, has proven just how tenuous success can be. Champions one minute, relegation candidates the next, while relegation candidates one December become champions-elect the next. Chelsea, have reminded us how, in general,  English teams are mediocre in Europe. Arsenal will soon follow once Barcelona have done the inevitable in their Champions League second leg (and there's a club with a moribundity about it that makes the vibe at Chelsea look quite peppy).

Chelsea will always be my club, just as they always have been. My first visit to Stamford Bridge at the age of 10. There in 1983 when they almost were relegated to the Third Division. There in November 1991 when they were beaten 3-0 at home by Norwich in front of just 15,000, with Dave Beasant culpable for two of those goals. We ended that season, the last before the Premier League began, in 14th place.

Abramovich was supposed to have saved Chelsea from the turmoil of financial collapse, legal disputes and Ken Bates. His spectacular injection of funds was supposed to have bought us the best players and Europe's finest training facilities. Our academy system was supposed to have generated next generations of homegrown. Abramovich's own vision was for Chelsea to become the new Milan, challenging the likes of Bayern and Barcelona for the European cup each season. In fact, he wanted Chelsea to be the new Milan so much that he bought Andrei Schevchenko and eventually persuaded Carlo Ancelotti to become the manager. Although he sacked him the season after the Italian had delivered a league and cup double.

It's when you examine this relentlessly unending dysfunction that you have to admit, reluctantly as a Chelsea fan, that the success and the silverware - while nice to celebrate with open-top bus parades - have been achieved without any long-lasting foundation. 12 managers in 13 years is the sort of track record that we scoff at Newcastle for. We rightly pillory Mike Ashley for the poisonous atmosphere he has instilled on Tyneside, but we ignore the continuing ineptitude behind the scenes at our own club, one in which our Under-18 and Under-21 sides continue to win trophies, but see no progression to the first team. One in which 36 players end up on loan throughout Europe, with only very few of them showing any chances of getting a game for the club they signed for. One in which the answer to one crocked striker is to bring in an even more crocked striker, not play him, and then bring in a more crocked striker and not play him either. And just where are Papy Djilobodji, Marco Amelia, Matt Miazga and Danilo Pantic, transfer deadline signings? Nope, me neither.

Tony McArdle/Everton FC

In today's Daily Mail the excellent Martin Samuel accuses Chelsea of lacking a philosophy. He is totally right. What is the club philosophy? More importantly, what is the club's strategy? And did the two brilliantly executed goals by Romelu Lukaku on Saturday do anything to remind those who make decisions at the club that their player buying and selling strategy is a mess? As Danny Baker so eruditely tweeted: "Chelsea fans watching Lukaku. Like seeing the girl you dumped at 17 go on to be Jennifer Aniston." Ditto Kevin de Bruyne.

What was the long-term purpose of Abramovich turning a semi-fashionable but constantly under-achieving London club into one that came to regard itself as having a birthright to be in the European elite if that status eventually fizzled out through the club's own doing? Mourinho can't be blamed for the whole of Chelsea's malaise this season (though clearly a lot of it). And it would be wrong to go after scapegoats when it is obvious that the club's inconsistency and lack of stability is clubwide.

That said, much frustration or even anger should be generated by Michael Emenalo, the technical director. Not much is really known about Emenalo, or why he was appointed to such a pivotal position within the club - responsible for player development as well as talent acquisition, along with Abramovich acolyte Marina Granovskaia who handles transfer negotiations. I'm sure the latter has done a pretty good job in getting good deals from a financial point of view, but has this duo delivered anything much when it comes to players?

Antonio Conte (assuming it is he that becomes the 13th manager of Abramovich's reign) will no doubt demand new players. Indeed he's probably already handed in his shopping list. Fine. A new coach brings in fresh blood. But what about all the dead wood? Will he be able to reduce the ridiculously wasteful player loans? Will he make more of an effort to see youth promoted from the cup-winning 'development' sides?

Cynics might scoff at terms like "rebuilding" and "transition" - and with some merit, too - but these are what Chelsea now needs. Accept that John Terry is no longer viable. Accept that Eden Hazard is no longer willing. Accept that Costa would rather be anywhere else. Accept that if you're going to buy players, you'd better have a vision for them, and play them. Unearth the talented 18, 19, 20 and 21-year-olds the club has about the place and discard the panic buys and acquisitions that were doing anyone else a favour but the club. Build up a new core, one that in principle can emulate the spine that Čech, Terry, Lampard and Drogba provided for so many of those successful Abramovich years.

If that responsibility does fall to Conte, it will be interesting to see just how far the 46-year-old gets. Though we never know anything of Abramovich's true ambitions, he had recognised in re-hiring Mourinho (mainly because he couldn't get Pep Guardiola and Mourinho couldn't get Old Trafford) that they would aim to establish a "dynasty" at Chelsea. This, despite the knowledge that 'long-term' for Mourinho never means more than three years. Within 24 hours of signing a lucrative contract extension last August, the Portuguese was jumping up and down at his club doctor. And the rest of the season, and indeed the dynasty building, would simply have to be put down to experience.

To look at this mess positively then, we must adopt the phrase "today is the first day of the rest of your life", an expression that is both simplistic and, yet, alive with positivity. Chelsea will stoicly chalk up the last seven or eight months as character building. But they will have to do more.

Bringing in a manager like Conte is not, in reality, any different than any of the 12 "permanent" managers they've brought in before. He'll be no more of a miracle worker than even The Special One. His reputation is good, but not especially impressive by comparison to any other elite manager.

The question is whether he'll be able to buck the trends that have thwarted others. He will need assurances that Chelsea is his to rebuild. Experience has taught us that is unlikely. For until Abramovich shakes himself free from the hangers-on who "advise" him, who convince him that the likes of Emenalo are qualified to make big strategic decisions, Chelsea could hire me for all the good that it will do.

Stretching legs - why long-haul could be getting longer

As this blog commented on last month, air travel leaves much to be desired. For the most part, getting crammed into a toothpaste tube with wings is simply a necessary evil for those of us who have to travel for business or personal reasons.

Living and working in Paris and, increasingly, London, flying just about edges out taking the Eurostar between these two cities, a journey which, since last summer especially, has carried the considerable risk of the train getting stuck in or just outside the Channel Tunnel thanks to miscreants disrupting services in Calais (yeah, I know, desperate refugees escaping unspeakable horrors in their homeland getting in the way of my highfalutin' business meeting...). Call me precious but I really don't fancy the idea of being locked in a carriage without air conditioning or electricity for the nine or ten hours that some Eurostar passengers have been forced to endure while the authorities try and sort out track intrusions.

This does, however, bring me to a travel horror of a different sort: long-haul flying. Though my musings on aviation might suggest otherwise, I'm really not that well travelled. I've been to Asia just the once (via a fifteen-hour flight from San Francisco to Taiwan, on which, for the only time in my life, I managed to get some proper sleep courtesy of misreading the dosage instructions of sleeping pills I was offered). After that, the longest I've spent in the air has been between Europe and the US West Coast.

When I first flew from London to Los Angeles in 1992, I had barely been anywhere, let alone the other side of the continent on the other side of the Atlantic. I had no idea what 12 and a half hours sat in the smoking section of a Virgin 747 would be like, especially with a chain-smoking bit-part actor next to me, knocking back V&Ts like they were going out of fashion while boring me rigid about episodes of Murder She Wrote that he'd appeared in (since IMDB-verified, I have to admit). Until he passed out.

Nothing could prepare me for the world of disorientation that jet lag would induce for the first time. The next morning I drove out of my airport hotel and, instead of heading towards the 405 freeway and north to Hollywood, I drove east into South Central, barely months after the summer riots of 1992. A young English tourist conspiculously driving a shiny new Dodge Dynasty through Hawthorne was not the wisest decision jet lag could have mis-made for me. So, by the time I realised I was on Rosencrans Avenue, near its junction with Normandie Avenue and therefore epicentre of the trouble, I decided that a U-turn might be wise.

In the years since, including a spell living in California itself, I've grown used to the endlessness of flying out West from Europe, though these flights are becoming somewhat more tolerable as the aircraft servicing the routes have become newer and more efficient. However, I realise that these flights pale into insignificance when compared to other routes.

Last week an Airbus A380 of the Emirates airline made what is believed to be the longest non-stop scheduled commercial flight by distance (the record for duration is still held by a Quantas flight from Dallas to Sydney which took 16 hours and 55 minutes). However, this could be eclipsed by Emirates commencing a route from Dubai to Panama City (due to launch this month but postponed - again - until next year) that will clock in at 17 hours and 35 minutes, though this is still shorter by distance than the Auckland trip.

New planes with better engine technology are enabling these marathon flights, which no doubt benefit the bottom lines of the big carriers, such as the rapidly expanding Emirates and Qatar Airways, as well as Australia's Quantas which, through geographic necessity, has always had to be at the end of the longest routes on Earth.

But what do they do for the passengers? Given how the business of air travel is all about balancing profits with the passenger experience, the thought of spending three-quarters of a whole day crammed into an economy class seat fills me with mortal dread. Cabin innovations on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and the Airbus A380 and A350 are supposed to improve cabin pressure, air circulation and even ambient light, but from my own experience, nothing can relieve the strain of being squashed into economy class rows, where the legroom has grown ever-tighter, and even the number of seats per row has increased.

Unless you have a generous employer or are one of those air miles nerds who apparently can fly anwhere in a premium cabin by some form of black art, long-haul really is not fun. And as economy class sections become more cramped, the armrest duels, the seat-recline mind games and the awkward social etiquette of getting past (or clambering over) two or even four other sleeping passengers to get to the toilet during a very long-haul flight is the stuff of nightmares.

Twitter/Christopher Adams

The New Zealand Herald's Christopher Adams live blogged from the Emirates Dubai-Auckland flight to see how his fellow passengers were holding up, though he admits that he had booked into business class, making any immediate drawbacks around him of the sixteen-and-a-half-hour flight a clear case of 'First World problems'.

Exploring the economy cabin, Adams didn't see any greater suffering than any other long-haul flight. The 500-seat A380 wasn't completely full, either, possibly the result of fuel economy weight restrictions (Emirates will fly the smaller Boeing 777 on this route on a regular basis).

This begs the question of whether such a non-stop journey of endurance would be popular to begin with. Super-long distance flights, such as those from European cities to Australia or New Zealand, get broken up by layovers in Dubai or Doha. Some choose to stop off for a day in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Personally, I'd say that was sensible, even if it did cut down on time at the eventual destination. All I know is that if I ever brave the journey Down Under - a trip fraught with claustrophobia on the way and the world's deadliest things that could kill you when you get there - I could never do the journey in one go, even if the technology existed for an airliner to fly non-stop.

As it is, there is no shortage of routes, notably starting out in the Middle East, which clock in at over 8,000 miles, and which require supreme stamina to endure in all but the most luxurious of flying classes. Perhaps its no surprise, then, how airlines like Emirates and Qatar, with their reputation for opulance in the premium seats, can sustain flying the current crop of jumbo jets from Dubai to Auckland, Los Angeles or Houston. These airlines advertise themselves as being luxury experiences - one has a TV commercial suggesting that your travel itinerary could take you to New York before whisking yourself off to a tropical island in the South Pacific, before you then travel to Dubai. Clearly, this particular airline's advertising agency had no demographic in mind that would fly anything less than first class, because putting in the miles like that in the cattle section would surely not be any fun at all.

The North London derby - time for Arsenal to grow a pair

Football derbies rarely stand up to the hype and expectation, but then rivalries in football rarely actually deliver the goods when the teams involved actually meet. Tomorrow's encounter between Tottenham and Arsenal at White Hart Lane does, at least, come at a truly fascinating time for the Premier League, with Leicester City finding themselves unexpectedly in the "it's theirs to lose" position, with Spurs - who were hardly regarded as stalking horses back in August - holding something of the psychological upper ground over their near-neighbours Arsenal.

If, though, one expectation has come good, it's the manner with which Arsenal have frustrated yet again with their own shortcomings. In August we were - as is tradition - entertained with predictions that this would "definitely" be their season, and that Arsène Wenger's signing of Petr Čech was a masterstroke (though now he's out for the next three or four weeks with a calf injury, perhaps less so). And, yes, the fact that they're still in-principle challenging for the title pays certain lip service to that general belief.

But then, to anyone with even basic perception, the facts remain as plain as the noses on our faces, that Arsenal are doing just what they always do - dozing off in January and then scraping into the Champions League.

Perhaps that's what Wenger wants? Perhaps he holds so much power around the Emirates Stadium (and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that he does) that the Arsenal hierarchy have no greater ambition than ensuring the turnstiles keep turning and that perpetual European qualification each season can be measured in terms of revenues, profits and a business model, rather than exciting the fans.

Because it can't be fun to start a season with so much self belief that predictably and, apparently, relentlessly, it comes unstuck once the Christmas decorations have been taken down. Arsenal fans surely can't be satisfied with the relative mediocrity of European qualification each season without anything really meaningful to show for it. And, clearly, they're not.

"I have never heard the Arsenal supporters as angry as they were at the Emirates on Wednesday night when their team lost at home to Swansea," Thierry Henry has written in The Sun. "They were less patient than I have ever known, booed one of the manager’s substitutions and groaned every time a pass went astray or a tackle was lost. The stick that Arsene Wenger has been getting is not personal. People judge what they are seeing, although some maybe go too far in the way they express their unhappiness."

Wenger has hit back with a statement that reflects both his perceived lack of passion and his legendary myopia: "Thierry Henry has his opinions. He has not found the measurement of the fans' angriness, of 60,000 people, straight away - because he sits in the best seats of the stadium."

I'm not going to trot out the old 'boring Arsenal' trope because they are, or should be, better than that. But you can't help pointing the finger at Wenger's demeanour as the reason for Arsenal's 'just so' record in recent seasons.

I'm sure any of the Premier League's perennial strugglers would love to have Arsenal's problems, but even I find myself exasperated at Wenger's apparent inability to deliver on the potential. He talks a lot about his team's mental strength, but when it comes to actually applying it, they fail. Look back over the 2007-8, 2010-11 and 2013-14 seasons, when Arsenal had the league's whip hand in the first few weeks of the new year. This season, as in those, history has repeated itself.

Even their remarkable 2-1, dying-seconds victory over Leicester on Valentine's Day should have been the spur to climb to the very top and make camp. And, yet, they haven't won since and are now six points adrift of Claudio Ranieri's league leaders, and three points behind the North London rivals they meet tomorrow.

Football purists are drawn to Wenger because of his footballing intellect and the fact that he has clearly produced teams of elegance and impact. But that reputation is fading before our eyes and if we were to be honest, league positions and European competition oddly mask this fact. The gap between greatness and failure isn't much. Look how Chelsea went from all-conquering champions to relegation-threatened disappointments in the space of just three playing months, only to be picked up again as the Premier League's form side under Guus Hiddink.

This actually prompts comparison between Wenger and his bête noire, José Mourinho: because Chelsea's stunning demise from August to December was clearly the result of the wrong pyschology, attributable to Mourinho's own negativity. Wenger might have the same problem, albeit with a more attritional effect. Yesterday, Arsenal's Alexis Sánchez told US satellite broadcaster DirecTV: "With the players we have, I believe we can win the Premier League. However, sometimes we lack the hunger, the mentality that we are winning 1-0 when we go out on to the pitch. Sometimes we lack this hunger to believe that we can be champion." Isn't this exactly the malaise that befell Costa, Hazard, Fábregas and Co.?

Contrast that with Tottenham: 66/1 outsiders to win the Premier League title when the season began (Leicester, by the way, were 5000/1...) they were expected by several pundits to end the season no higher than 6th. That could still happen, of course, but Mauricio Pochettino has confounded the experts with his young side, one that still shows deficiencies, especially up front, but which has applied greater resillience and without all that much hyperbole, either. Moreover, he has brilliantly exploited the travails of Manchesters United and City, Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal - all of whom were predicted, in August, to complete the top five.

Compared with Wenger, there is an air of absolute reality about Pochettino. He is neither daunted by the challenge of tomorrow's derby, nor stoked up on hubris to take it for granted. "It’s not a decisive game," he says, "but it is important for us and for them." He knows that the points distribution between the top five can still change as the run-in looms, but his reaction to Wednesday's defeat to West Ham - a game that could have taken them top - contrasts with the blustering from Wenger.

As a Chelsea fan, I'm clearly conflicted as to whom, out of Spurs and Arsenal, I'd like to see win more. Which is why, like almost every football fan in England and, I believe elsewhere, I hope Leicester City go on and pull off the unprecedented. Nobody deserves the league title more out of any of the teams in sight of the prize, even if in the north-eastern part of London there remains a residual sense of entitlement.

As those of us in south-west London have had to concede, bloodlessly it has to be said, success is not only earned, but the effort requires the right mindset. If Arsenal still want to go for it - and there's nothing saying they can't - their manager needs to end the torturous pondering and instill in his team a sense of achievable achievement. And, to put it crudely, a pair of bollocks.