Dan McNeil's Blog

Over the past couple of weeks, I've watched a few snippets of "The Voice".  The idea is that this is another talent show, but that people are judged on their voice alone without any consideration of their background or appearance. The concept sounds good.  Interesting at least. But every snippet I saw was awful.  Once the first selection of contestants had been made the second round was a sing off.  The idea being that contestants sing the same song, in pairs, and try to out-sing each other.  With professionals that could be bad enough, but with a group of people without stage experience whose idea of strong singing is to shout the highest note you can for as long as possible, it descended pretty quickly into a bellow-a-thon. So, I thought I'd watch the first live show just in case it got better. It didn't.  One performance (by someone called Jazz) was OK, although not really my kind of thing.  The others were shouty, out of tune and in a few cases...

I've been going to the gym for a few years now.  When I'm there, I tend to zone out and not notice other people.  I never watch other people doing their workout, just as I wouldn't want anyone to stand there and stare at me.  But there are some things which you just can't help noticing.There are loads of posts out there about the annoying guys in the gym who make lots of noise, drop weights, hog all the equipment and things like that, so I shalln't talk about those kind of things. The other day, I was in the changing room after a swimming lesson, and I noticed a guy using the hairdryer provided.  Except he wasn't drying his hair.  He was using it to dry his feet.  Not something I've seen before - but then again, I'm usually in my own little world, so perhaps it happens all the time and I just haven't noticed. Everyone has ways of timing the rest period between sets.  Personally, I just take a drink, stare into space and go for another set when I ...

Pride is a strange thing.  To have pride in something is to stand by it and say "I'm happy to be part of that".  But to say you don't have pride in something seems to be code for saying that you are ashamed of it. But for me, I'm "not proud" of pretty much everything in my life.  I'm certainly not ashamed of the colour of my eyes, but I don't have any pride in it either.  I like to believe there is a middle ground where one is neither proud nor ashamed of something. When I make something I'm happy with, or do a piece of work which I like, then I do have pride in it.  I had a loss of confidence in the middle of a sprint training session last night for instance, and I'm proud of the way I pushed through that and got the session back on-track.  That's something I did, and I can take the credit for making it good. What I lack is the sense of pride by association.  I am not proud to be British, for instance.  Don't make the mista...

"Le monde est plein de fous, Et qui n'en veut pas voir, Doit se tenir tout seul, Et casser son miroir."  (Thomas Love Peacock,  1831) Is starting a blog post with a French quotation pretentious?  Now there's a question.  But it's not a question for this posting...   The world indeed full of fools, and avoiding them is pretty much impossible.  On the tube, in the sports centre, in Waitrose, in the street - the word is full of people who do stupid things without even realising that what they are doing is stupid. Every Sunday, I have an hour of badminton booked at 9am at the local sports centre in Wapping.  The sports hall has four badminton courts.  The two near the door are in use, and the other two are behind a curtain and the space used for toddlers' football.  So, parents and kids come in through the door and walk around the edge of the badminton court to get over to play football.  Or most do. Of course, these ar...

OK.  So it's not that late.  It's only half past eleven.  But it's late for me.  It's certainly later that I'm usually on the tube.  I know that London has a second "rush hour" around 11pm at night, but it's not something I experience all that often. But tonight I was out with some work people over in West London and I headed off at a sensible time to make my way across town.  One of the joys of living relatively centrally is that cabs don't break the bank. In all honesty I'm not out that often, and so getting a cab home from the centre of town is so rare it's affordable.  But not tonight.  Not all the way from Shepherd's Bush. So I plodded my way through West London, Google Maps guiding the way, and ended up at White City.  I jumped onto the Central Line and grabbed myself a seat.  The carriage was mostly full of people lying along the seats, half asleep.  But opposite me was a guy with a funky hair cut eating a bar of chocolat...

The company I work for (well sort of) has been sending out emails recently with the subject "Expect the Unexpected" and just containing a photo of something supposedly unexpected. One of the photos, for instance, was a young girl standing next to a tin of blue paint having daubed the walls.  Unfortunate, perhaps - but certainly not unexpected, surely? Life is full of unexpected things.  Almost every day contains something you didn't know was going to happen. And that's what makes life great.  Well one of the things.  Béarnaise Sauce is another thing which makes life great.  Anyway, I digress. The other morning I was on the tube on the way to work and there was a guy opposite me.  Probably around 40 years old, he was a portly chap with stubble and a mess of unkempt hair. He was wearing earphones which were leaking sound so I could hear the tinny distant sound of a voice.  That voice was Susan Boyle.  Singing "I Dreamed A Dream".  The guy...

It's nearly two years since the UK General Election result which left much of the country scratching their heads, thinking "what now?".  For the living memory of most of the people watching the results come in, UK General Elections delivered a clear winner.  Either the Tories or Labour would win the election and plod away with their own brand of policy for four or five years and then the whole process would be repeated.  An election which didn't give such a clear winner felt, to many people, unsatisfactory.  It felt as though there was unfinished business. That business unravelled over the following few days.  The Tories had won both the most votes and the most seats, followed by Labour and then the Lib Dems a way behind them.  The maths was such that Tories plus Lib Dems would be enough for a majority in the house; Labour and Lib Dems would give a total greater than the Tories but not enough for an overall majority. Just under a week after the electio...