Dan McNeil's Blog

Time flies, doesn't it?  Especially at my age.  I'm 37 now, and I can feel 40 looming on the horizon beckoning me towards it with promise of expanding waistline and grey hairs.  Although I've found a few of the latter already. It doesn't seem like four years since I last wrote about the Brit Awards.   Back then I wrote about how they had become "safe" to such an extent that they were now boring.  Last night, we had the 2013 awards and I watched - as I always do - thinking that this year may be different.  This year may be edgy.  This year may be fun. And so it started.  Rizzle Kicks attempting to interview people on the red carpet on their way in for an hour on ITV2 trying to build the excitement.  Muse promised a huge spectacle, Robbie Williams was his usual self and various winners of talent shows walked past wearing next-to-nothing complaining how cold it was.  Maybe it would've been less cold if they'd bothered to actually wear clothes sui

It's that thing.  The thing where I don't have anything to say, but feel as though I have to write something in here.  So here is something. I went to Seattle again recently.  My job is taking me there relatively often at the moment, meaning I'm going to set to see the place in all seasons.  This season isn't a flattering one for Seattle.  It's cold and wet and rather grey.  My time there was pretty much all spent working; I was there to work after all; but I did get to a bar one night. Bars are like airports, when you're inside one, you could be anywhere in the world.  Then you walk outside and it hits you.  "I'm in America, I'd forgotten that". There is one way to tell country from country, and that's the toilets.  Don't laugh.  Genuinely, different countries have different shaped toilets and urinals.  In some places they are wide and shallow, in other places they are small and deep.  In some places, then flush automatically, in