Stephen Fry's Blog, page 4

Goodbye Beard

The Fire Question

It’s very simple. I have a Samsung Galaxy III, a BlackBerry Z10 , an iPhone 5, an HTC Windows 8x and an LG Nexus 4. More or less the smartest soldiers in the smartphone army.

There’s a fire in my flat/hotel-room/bordello/ski-chalet. I have only enough time to take ONE. Which do I choose? This is the question I have to ask myself.

If you want to punish yourself press this link which will take you through all the tech blogs I’ve written, since before the arrival of the iPhone and its transformation, not to say invention of the smartphone and subsidiary app market. You will find that I have relentlessly hammered home my desire for this field to be wide and rich in its biodiversity. I do not want only Apple, or only Samsung, or only Nokia or only BlackBerry to dominate. The more variation and choice in form factors, operating systems, the more innovation in terms of your device and its response to the environment, the better. The more open hardware and software APIs that allow for medical, military, charitable, mercantile, individual, artistic and social interaction for pleasure, gain, reward and the furthering of mankind’s destiny, the better. Boo to monopolies. Hurrah for competition and innovation.

Deep breath.

iPhone

I’ve written about most of the iPhones as they’ve come out and 5 has had perhaps the most “meh” reaction from the trades and the tech journos. Financially it has I think been Apple’s biggest and best seller, so commercially only a moron could call it a flop. But there is no doubt that the words “ageing” and “venerable” are beginning to be used about the OS and its look and feel. No NFC? Still the same old keyboard, still the same old look? Time moves so fast in the digital world, never forget that. The speed with which Palm, AOL and BlackBerry headed from the cloudiest heights to the muddiest depths shows the truth of this. Of BlackBerry more later. So many have such short memories in this sphere. I wrote that a single human year is really three digital years. I first had a working iPhone in my hands in June 2007, that’s 5.5 years ago, which is 16 and half digital years. It certainly seems like that. The G1, the first Android phone, emerged in late 2008. It feels like an age ago indeed.

Android

Those first Google phones were made by HTC and did the best they could to counter the astonishing achievement of that first iPhone. By the time it was available Apple had already outmanoeuvred them with their second iPhone and the introduction of an App Store allowing third party developers to come up with their own little programmes. But Google knew that its might, capital wealth and power could allow it to be patient. Soon the virtues of an open system, different in style and fundamental outlook to the “walled garden” of Apple’s severely marshalled Software Development Kit, would (Google believed) allow cheaper options from the OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers – Google not being one of those) to flower in an ever greater, if wilder, garden. Sorry for that somewhat tangled sentence. Google were proved right: besides, while they were waiting for Android to “gain traction” they were making hundreds of millions from Apple users and their heavy iPhone use. Every Google map or search on the millions of iPhones was making Google stacks and stacks of cash.

Apple had also  shown the value of Apps, free apps like Evernote, one of the first I ever installed, and famously successful commercial apps like Angry Birds. Android users had to tap their toes and wait in frustration for a few months because developers usually prefer to start an app for iPhone. They know the exact nature of an iPhone. It has a home button and it has a screen yay big by yay big and a resolution of x3 by y3. Some Android phones have hard back and home buttons (ie actual physical buttons) some have soft ones (ie areas of screen hi-lit for you to touch). The actions of all iPhones are consistent across the range however and, maddening for developers as it might be, if your app isn’t properly written and doesn’t obey the coding and API rules, Apple won’t allow it on their store. Converting your iPhone app for Android is then the next step. Your coders have done the maths, you now have to make sure your cunning world-beater will work on an HTC thismodel x and an LG thatmodel z as well as a Samsung allthesemodels xyz, all of which have different buttons and knobs and screen sizes and resolutions and what have you. It’s like the problems the first web browsers had. How to make them work on all platforms.

Yet for all that, the rewards of Android are high. The “community” is growing rapidly. Price is a huge factor. You pay a lot less for a Samsung, HTC or LG Android device than for an iPhone. There is a greater danger of malware getting into such an open environment however, and one reads scary stories. But generally speaking, Android offers you all that is needed. A very small number of users update to the latest version of the Android OS, which is surprising and foolish and a cause of some surprise in me. Maybe it’s just that I’m so fanatical about having the latest update of every app, let alone every operating system…

Samsung

So it comes down to which model you like. Most people seem to like Samsung. Samsung is a huge company, not as big as Apple yet, but getting there. Moreover, until recently at least, Samsung Electronics were primarily a component manufacturer. Apple and all the big players are major customers for Samsung’s products. They are, weirdly enough, the world’s second largest chip builders and the world’s second largest ship builders. True story. From silicon chip to frigate and ship. Talk about a wide portfolio. Gossip is, speculation says, people are saying … (tell it not in Gath)  it would be in Samsung’s interests to design their own OS. Yes! To be like Apple, to design the devices and the OS that runs perfectly on them. Google and some of the smaller Android OEMs might well sleep uneasily in their beds…  Word is Samsung already have a prototype OS well into development. Certainly, if I were head of Samsung it’s what I’d set my team to work on. Full integration. In the beginning Palm showed that it worked. Apple has shown it works. Blackberry showed, in its heyday, that it worked. Windows on the other hand showed that not being in control of hardware but providing general software for a range of third party OEMs emphatically did not work. So they scratched their heads and came up with the compromise that is

Windows Phone

I like Windows Phone. I was there for its British launch and I applauded the guts with which MS admitted how far from the path of good design and delivery they had strayed with their atrocious early forays into the field. Windows 8 replaced the original 7 (much to the dismay of Nokia who had invested quite a lot in the first two Lumia devices that couldn’t be upgraded to 8 ) and is a fine option as your preferred smartphone OS. You get seamless integration with your Xbox (which was the only good hardware that Microsoft had ever come up with at this point, the brilliant Kinect being its crowning glory) you get little tiles that bristle with info and updates and notifications, and you get a stern Apple like SDK which means developers can’t muck around with its APIs and ways of behaving too much. Some people take to it instantly, others find it a bit cumbersome in some areas. Give it a week and you’ll get used enough to want to keep it, I reckon. The Nokia and the HTC 8x are both excellent. There’s something cheery and optimistic about them. Just about all the apps you’d want are there, as well as the business end of things with SkyDrive and Office and all that sort of howd’youdo.

BB10

So we come down to the BlackBerry which was launched today. I’ve been lucky enough to have had one for a little while to play with and I am very impressed. Everyone knows how high the stakes are for BlackBerry (formerly known as RIM or Research in Motion) – their share of the market has been falling and unless they can coax back some users it is generally regarded that they will be toast. Gobbled up by Lenovo (who gobbled up IBM, the original and biggest and most unassailable name in computing there ever was, but whose ThinkPads are now made by the Chinese giant) or gobbled up by someone else. Gobbledytoast, that’s what the wiseacres are predicting if BlackBerry doesn’t get this one right.

In a smartphone you want smart fast access to all the things you most do. Actually texting and phoning come low down on that list with most users. You want it to be easy to see your calendar, select text from something to tweet it, copy a URL from somewhere, deal with a file in your DropBox, send an email, check a friend’s facebook page, share pictures, … all the kind of thing we’re used to doing now and expect as of right. The BB10’s USP is that all this happens in one simple and smooth process. There’s none of the old in-out in-out, as Alex used to say in A Clockwork Orange.  There’s a move you quickly learn, thumb straight up and to the right and there is your “hub” all your incoming mail, texts, tweets, FB notifications, BlackBerry Messenger odds and ends and so forth. You just hold your thumb down and reel through. There’s a deep BlackBerry quality in the DNA that reminds you of your first ever RIM device, whichever that might have been. I haven’t yet worked out how to take screenshots (oh, just learned that you hold the up and down volume rockers for a second or two: simples), but there’ll be plenty of the web. It comes fully loaded with all the NFC, 4G or 3G capabilities you could want. One version has a physical keyboard the other a virtual. Both use a super spanking heuristic algorithm that learns how you type and offers a word up over individual letters on the keyboard, hovering there like ghosts, which you can just flick into your text. You have to try it to understand. Like sex, it’s much easier to do than to describe. Or am I thinking of swimming? Anyway,  whether they’ve bought the very clever algorithm which goes with the incredibly successful British dev company SwiftKey or not, I don’t know, but inputting text works very well. Like most phones the response when you move the device from landscape to portrait and back again is a bit laggy compared with the super swift iPhone response, and the copy and paste takes a little getting used to.

But if “taking a little getting used to” is the worst I can say of it, then let me say the best of it. I think the BB Z 10 (the virtual keyboard version) is one of the very very best gadgets I’ve ever played with. From the moment you slide your finger up and the gorgeous display fades subtly into view to the moment you pull down the little sleep curtain to reveal a pretty orange alarm clock, you are won over.

I wish I had more time to write more technically and more coherently, but I wanted to publish this as a quick response.

The fire question.

I’d grab my iPhone and the BB10 Z and risk getting burnt to a cinder.

Cowardly, but true. Or possibly brave, but true.

But well done BlackBerry, I say. You have played a blinder and I wish you all the luck in the world.

Whether “the market” agrees with me, only the future will decide. And the future is hurtling towards us so fast. In three months time how will this blog read, I wonder?

A final comment on “endorsements” and all that. I have never received money or goods in order to endorse them. I am lucky enough to get sent gismos all the time (many of them with “Evaluation Unit. Not for Sale or Lease” printed on the back). If I like them I say so. If I loathe them I say so too (as witness my trashing of the Blackberry Storm some years ago). I know how lucky I am to be in this position. But I do want it understood that for me it’s all about passion. I can afford any and all of these phones and when the keyboard version of the BB10 comes out, for example, I’ll go out and buy one. I could wait like everyone else, but like professional tech reviewers, I am lucky to get early evaluation units. I give away most of them once I’ve looked at them, to deserving student nephews, or undeserving wastrel friends, but I can’t be bought. Sorry to bring that up, but … just though you should know.

Much love

 

Sx

 

Supporting Pussy Riot

Dear Maria, Nadezhda and Ekaterina,

I can’t imagine how you are feeling at the moment as you begin the astoundingly unfair and disproportionate prison sentence that has been handed out to you.

It might cheer you to know that so many people around the world are thinking of you and doing what they can, through Amnesty International and other bodies, to see if your sentence can’t be reduced, commuted or suspended.

It has been a confusing time for me, as I have watched the arguments ebb and flow on Twitter and in the bars and cafés of London. Some feel that what you did was blasphemous (blasphemy has been well described as a victimless crime, but if it is against the law in your country as it was in mine in my lifetime, then some penalty might be expected) and some believe that it was a tasteless, immature and trashy protest for which they can offer no sympathy. I have read your closing statement, Ekaterina, (http://boingboing.net/2012/08/11/pussy-riots- closing-statemen.html and http://nplusonemag.com/pussy-riot-closing- statements) and I know that despite Pussy Riot’s “punk” affect and ethos, which can put some people off, that you are highly intelligent, educated and articulate people who knew exactly what you were doing and had good reason for it. Your argument was not with the religious, or with Christianity, but with Putinist croneyism within the ranks of the Orthodox Church, especially this particular building, the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

But most sensible people, whether they are Christian or not and even if they are blind or deaf to the statement there for all to read in the links above, can surely see that a long pre-trial period in gaol followed by such a severe sentence which unashamedly announced that it was given not according to strict law, but in order to “send out a message” is not just in any state that claims to be a fair free democracy.

I write this as an unashamed Russophile. I find it so hard to bear that the country of Tchaikovsky is allowing a toxic mixture of shaven-headed nationalists and fundamentalist churchmen to dictate laws on homosexuality for example. Part of your “crime” was to come out on the side of gay rights. It astonishes me how the history of Russia seems to repeat itself. Pushkin was sent into exile by an offended Tsar. Dostoevsky was taken to a firing squad and only reprieved at the last minute before being exiled too. And then in the Communist era, as we all know, artists, writers, intellectuals and liberals of all kinds were under constant threat of exile, forced labour or even execution. Now we seem to be moving towards a similar position. I am not saying, and nor would you claim, that you are the equal of Pushkin or Dostoevsky, but that isn’t the point. The fight is for free speech, and this isn’t limited only to gigantic towering titans of literature.

Some cynics (and believe me, my country is stuffed with them) will ask why I am not writing to those imprisoned in Iran or China. Well, I have the faint, perhaps forlorn, hope, that Russia and its leader might be faintly more persuadable. I know how much he and his followers hate being “lectured” by western liberals, but the fact is I find it impossible to be silent in the face of such monstrous injustice and preposterous tyranny. And that’s the point. Putin hasn’t made a monster of himself. He has made a fool of himself. It is often said that had the world laughed at Hitler early enough he would never have taken the hold on power he did. I do not call Putin a Hitler. Yet. But it is time to laugh him out of this stance and you out of incarceration.

x

Stephen

This letter was first sent to Amnesty International for publication on their website.

 

Take me to your Lieder

Words and Music

I hadn’t expected to find myself blogging at the end of my little period of purdah, behind the writing screen, closed off from twitter and the world.

I finished last Tuesday my filming for DOORS OPEN, the Ian Rankin art-theft thriller whose adaptation we’re making for ITV and since then I’ve been sitting at a desk, trying not to look too hard out of the window.

You may have heard the view-halloos and cries and squeals of pleasure and delight on Sunday evening as I stabbed my finger down onto the send button and pushed my little libretto far away into the inbox of my collaborator, the real talent in our little opera team, who has been patiently awaiting my words for a long time.

It has been a fabulous experience, quite unlike anything I’ve ever done, although I had been given the burdensome but wonderfully exciting duty of translating Schikaneder’s original Magic Flute libretto from German into English for Ken Branagh’s cinematic production of Mozart’s last and most mysterious full-length opera some years ago. That experience, taking out the words that Mozart had set to music and trying to replace them with English equivalents, taught me one thing that I am anxious to share with an expectant world. Mozart knew what he was doing. Ho, yes. The man, as Control or Smiley might say, was Good, George. Damned good. He knew his tradecraft.

This more recent task, an adaptation of an E. M. Forster short story, has been more invigorating: much less weight is on our shoulders since it this a new opera and we don’t have the best part of 300 years to betray. My collaborator, Louis Mander, is a young, preposterously talented composer, and I am an old… well there you are. Spring turned to October and eventually, as I started turning scarlet and gold and found myself decaying into November, I at last managed to deliver. I exaggerate for effect. Forgive me, all those who write in the moment I say something to denigrate myself.

But more of that as and when. Many a slip twixt wicket-keeper and gully.

Unhappy news

I’m writing because, what with all my recent concentrated deadline fury, the death of Dietrich Fischer Dieskau two days ago quite passed me by. I know of course that he had to die some time, but I never thought it would be soon. Heavens, he had reached his 87th year and had every right to leave the party. It is just that I can’t remember a time when his voice hasn’t been a part of my life and the idea of his not being on the planet is going to take a bit of getting used to.

When did I first hear that miraculous instrument? My father often had him playing on his gramophone or wireless set. It must have been around the age of seven or eight when I first became fascinated with this tenor who wasn’t quite a baritone and this baritone who wasn’t quite a tenor. He was one of a simply remarkable generation of German musicians who straddled the war years (much to their subsequent discomfort and distress all round as Furtwüngler and von Karajan inter alia discovered) and who quite simply transformed the way music was recorded in studios.

Ronnie Harwood, one of our finest playwrights (awarded an Oscar© for The Pianist of course) wrote a marvellous pair of plays about that whole issue, including the relationship between “Aryan” Richard Strauß and Jewish Stefan Zweig – whose inexplicably brilliant novel Beware of Pity I am reading just now at the suggestion of my mother. It is a flawless and quite inexplicably moving story. I say inexplicable because you never catch Zweig attempting to engage or enrage. He casts you as the protagonist of the story and you fall short. Rather as Balzac made us do with Rastignac and Dickens with Pip. Anyway, that’s a side-issue and a coincidence.

EMI and Decca

That generation of singers, conductors and musicians came mostly from a Germany and Austria that had, almost along the way, revolutionised the recording industry. When the first American engineers arrived in Munich and Berlin and saw what BASF/AEG and their reel-to-reel machines were able to do with music and radio, it resulted, I would suggest, in a bigger step change than that from tape cassettes to CD or CD to MP3 (indeed we all know many who would regard those last two step changes as step changes in the wrong direction. Vinyl or reel-to-reel for them: and tube/valve amplifiers too while we’re at it.) The modern age of stereophonic High Fidelity, or HiFI as it was known, had arrived. Voices and (in the case of opera) cast and creatures could be “placed” in studio stereo stages, instruments could be “desked” in knew ways that smote the musical world much inn the way that the first cleanings of the old masters did at around the same time. When played back, people found a new direct engagement with music that had for hundreds of years before only been heard live in bandstands and concert halls and subsequently on hissing 78 RPM shellac discs. I love concert halls, I love 78s – but this truly was something extraordinary.

Well, it’s too long a story to tell here: I could cover pages on the engineering genius John Culshaw – you know, it’s weird but I’ve never stopped to ask the celebrated impressionist of the same name if he was descended from him? – and his pioneering Solti recording of Wagner’s Ring – but I don’t have enough time.

Fine Legge

The producer Walter Legge, who married Elizabeth Schwartzkopf (or Betty Blackhead as we irreligiously and with a great sense of literalness referred to her at university when we were discovering the Golden Age of gramophone) was one of the giants of this age. Most of the greatest records being produced in the world by this time were either at the EMI Studios in Abbey Road or at Decca’s premises a little further up in West Hampstead. Abbey Road didn’t just produce the Beatles. EMI produced for Legge and his wife, the aforementioned Betty Blackhead, and for Giulini, Böhm and many of the greatest conductors in the world. I still believe Giulini’s Don Giovanni and Klemperer’s Marriage of Figaro and Böhm’s Così Fan Tutte are unsurpassed. Not that my taste matters. It was all such an adventure then, simply getting to know the repertoire.

DFD

The figure who most especially stood out as the completest musician and the performer with the most exquisite tone and taste, was, few would disagree, Dirty Fisher Dishcloth, as we dubbed Dietrich Fischer Dieskau. Poor Birgit Nilsson was Beergut Nelly, of course, and the greatest soprano of them, all, IMHO, Kirsten Flagstadt, was Kirsty Flatshag or Kristy FatSlag. How childish we were: the crudity of these names was in inverse proportion, let me assure you, to the matchless mixture of steel and radiance that marks out the great Wagnerian singer.

Music and music

With what open-mouthed ecstasy we listened to these records again and again and again. Sometimes if I so much as connect Spotify or some other music service to Twitter and a follower sees that I am listening to a piece of classical music, they will tweet something charming like “posh twat”, “Why do you listen to that boring rubbish?” or “who are you trying to impress?” I’m beyond being bothered by such tragically irremediable rudeness and intolerance, but I do hope sane, open people will give themselves time to listen to music. Classical music isn’t to be danced to, it doesn’t necessarily remind you of your first snog or your first bust up – those inestimable, moving and essential services are certainly part of popular music’s draw and connective power. Classical music, since that is what we must call it, is something else. It must be payed attention to.  It is not wallpaper or “the soundtrack to one’s life” as much other music in my life (happily) is.  It is Art.  There, I said it and I can’t and won’t apologise for making that distinction. I’d go the gallows for it. And while you may think me an elitist, I have never in my 40 years of engaging with such music encountered the snobbery that is routine amongst listeners to popular sounds, who tell you with absolute cutting certainty that this artist is “crap” and this one is “god”. I can remember the embarrassed parties at which older teenagers would muscle up to my hopeful record deck and sneer “Haven’t you got any decent music?” Some people in the classical sphere will always prefer Couperin to Alkan or Debussy to Rossini, naturally, but it’s very very rare to find the equivalent curled lip condescension as one’s music collection or playlists are “inspected” by some self-appointed schoolboy DJ. I suppose “highlights” and endless versions of Pachabel’s Canon and The Lark Ascending might cause the odd eyebrow to raise, but not from me or anyone I’d give houseroom to. Let people love One Direction and let them love Laurie Anderson, or Mahler, Reich, Kate Rusby or Alfie Boe, but don’t they DARE make anyone feel small for their loves.

Classical music is, functionally at least, beyond fashion and outside time, (though of course it can be studied in quite the reverse way). To engage you need know nothing, only to be able to sit and listen. To make the journey and visit the places the music takes you.

You will find yourself inside the most astonishing aural architecture that has ever been constructed. Frightening, awe-inspiring, forbidding at first. But when you realise that these pieces were written by people like you who believe first in foremost in love and hope, bliss, justice and connection, and that they want to take you by the hand and cause your heart to burst in your breast for joy and wonder and pity, the fear melts away. Not something one is always ready for, any more than one could eat haute cuisine every day. But when you need it, oh the difference …

A legacy

Fisher Dishcloth was a man who inspired in Mozart operas and in Wagner too (and this is a rare thing for a singer to be able to do. Placido Domingo is the only comparable figure of our time I can think of. And our own Bryn Terfel perhaps) He naturally held my attention. I still think his Hans Sachs in the Eugen Jochum recording of the Mastersingers of Nuremberg is unmatched for sheer intelligence, insight and emotional depth. In many ways, the character of Hans Sachs is more the Lear – the absolute summit in Wagner – even than Wotan: Fischer Dieskau achieved it with thrilling modesty, intensity, intellect and a complete lack of ostentation. He also I think stands as one of the very greatest Count Almavivas in all of the Marriage of Figaro’s recording history. He made his mark too with modernists like Hindemith and was personally selected by the composer to be there for that monumental moment in 1962 when Britten’s War Requiem first shattered the world.

Grain?

So pure and smooth was Dieskau’s voice (it never seemed to flicker or strain in the higher swoops of the tenor line or lose power and richness down in the darker or sometimes more buffa tones other works demanded of him) so pure it was that it incurred – I shall not say the wrath – but the curiosity of Roland Barthes – whose word was holy writ in the English departments of early 80s universities when I was a student. In an essay entitled “On Grain” Barthes wondered, in the recording industry as it was in the late 70s, with Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic as the supreme arbiters and bestsellers worldwide, if all those silken legatos and perfectly moulded rubatos had stopped us from making the primal connection between violin string and bowed and rosined catgut; whether we ever were again allowed to hear – from virtuosi like Tuckwell and Parry in the horn section or James Galway in the wind –  the spittle rattling in the tubes and dripping from the sump-hole to the floor. Would we hear the squeak of the guitarist’s fingers on the fret-board and the buzzing rattle of the reed on the lips of the oboist? All seemed to be tending toward tones and timbres of the utmost smoothness, an aesthetic that appeared to scorn what in photography we clearly know to be grain.

And when it came to vox humana, Barthes suggested, the magical purity, beauty and flexibility of Dietrich Fischer Dieskau (about whose superlunary gifts and intellect no one in the world was in the slightest doubt), dangerously (for Art), almost transcended the human sphere. Barthes allowed himself to wonder, as legitimately he might, whether this was a fashion or a permanent new product of technological advances and technical training in the human voice. And he couldn’t see it as all good. If every singer had tried to sing like DFD I would have agreed whole- heartedly, but of course they didn’t. We had Eberhard Wächter, Giuseppe Taddei and a host of alternative baritones whose voices were as different from Dieskau’s as from Frank Sinatra’s or Elvis Presley’s. Or indeed from each others’.

Well it pleased me that the hippest voices in criticism, the French structuralists and deconstructionists, were not the vain, inverted snobs or recondite obscurantist poseurs so many took them for, and that they had as high and passionate a sense of taste as any educated person might strive to achieve. I have always believed great music is for everyone, for it speaks – more than any other genre – directly to the individual, soul to soul – shorn of fashion, hipness, stories, context and baggage. Their works are for us to listen to as we will. Or won’t. But I shan’t beat that drum (out of time) again.

I just wanted to celebrate and bid auf Wiederhören to the life of one of the paragons of our age, truly one of the most supremely gifted vocalists and discriminating and insightful musicians. It was the lieder form that he so magisterially exhumed and polished and perfected before our ears, Schubert principally of course, but Wolf and Schoek too, lesser known names but now regularly performed thanks to him.

Many people when they first listen to Winterreise for example, or the better known of all Schubert’s lieder, The Trout, or Der Erlkönig feel – despite the simply unprecedented tunefulness and hummable melodic flowering – that they can’t “relate” to this genre of lilting folk songs, sung by an operatic tenor baritone hybrid, reciting poems about lonely romantic travelling and being impressed by lime trees and melting snow, which seems so buttoned up and concert-hall and swanky while pretending to be the wild woodnotes of a free romantic artist who is making a musical journey of his life. We all know autumn reminds us of decay and winter of frozen stasis and spring of promise. What could that syphilitic old (well young in fact) speccie Schubert bring to the party that might make us feel anything new?

Try it, try it do

Oh. Oh you wait. You’ll hate it at first perhaps. But leave it on. Leave it on over the next few days and suddenly, it will steal into you and never leave you. And if you never thank me for anything ever again. Thank me for that. There is a great line by Philip Larkin (well of course there is, there is almost nothing but great lines by him) – but one of my favourite is to a musical hero of his, the Jazz clarinettist and saxophonist, Sidney Bechet:

“Oh play that thing!” he cries, and then adds this, on which I and (I should guess no one alive could improve)

On me your sounds falls as they say love should Like an enormous yes.

I’ll grant you, Wigmore Hall and the QE Hall and the Festival and all the others, much as I love them, have work to do before they’ll get people in to venues that most will instantly respond to as stuffy and which will remind them of the music teachers they least liked and whose breath most reeked.

But there’s always your own bedroom.

I promise you, what Morrissey could plant in the mind of a lonely 14 year old, DFD and Schubert can plant in yours. You just have to give it a little time. It’s a new mode and it’ll fuck your head the first time you hear it. But then just you, the incomparable Gerald Moore at the piano and the melting, utterly modest, plain, simple and yet shatteringly emotional voice of one of the most perfect singers ever to be born on this planet … to die without giving it a chance would be a crime against nature and history and art.

Well. You owe it to yourself to try don’t you? Hell, I listened to Nicki Menaj. Oh I do hope I’ve spelt her right. I’ll get such beans if I’ve fluffed it…

x

Stephen

Four and Half Years On

Four and a Half Years On

People often come up to me in the street and say, "Stephen, why don't you pop some clothes on, there's a good fellow." Another thing they will ask is, "How many phones have you got with you today?" And it's that second common question we're going to concentrate on in this blessay.

I have blogged many, many times about smartphones: you can follow the trail here by scrolling down and clicking on "Older Entries" at the bottom – "older entries at the bottom"? There must be a more appetising way to phrase it than that. Oh well.

The trail leads all the way back to a posting called Devices and Desires in which I wrongly claimed that the virtual keyboard on the new Apple iPhone was a bad idea, but rightly asked for 3G and downloadable third party apps. I also mourned (more than mourned: I stamped my foot and frothed with rage) at the asininity and maddening, moronic, stubborn, suicidal stupidity of Nokia and Palm and Sony in their inability to come up with anything close to the 'iPhone killer' that the industry (and I) were demanding. Not because we wanted Apple to fall (at that time they were a far smaller company that Sony or Nokia, let alone Google, HP or Microsoft) but because we wanted the whole sector to rise and meet the challenge. To pick up the gauntlet that Apple had slung down.

Things move so desperately fast in the digital world. That blog was written just four years and a half ago, before there was Android or App Stores, before the iPhone was even available in the UK. Now we live in a world where Apple has the highest capitalisation in the world and is worth more than its rivals combined. It's worth more than … well there's a whole site dedicated to telling you what it's worth more than.

2007

If you read that blog of mine now you can see me trying hard not to gloat about the fact that I had managed to get hold of an iPhone. Today my Facebook timeline (no I shan't tell you my FB ID, but it isn't Stephen Fry, and I fear I very, very rarely use it).

myPhone, fryPhone - iPhone!

For one anxious day it was just an expensive brick as I parlayed and finagled and finessed my way through to someone at AT&T in America who would grant me roaming rights on this alien new device. This finally came through on July 7th

It's alive!!!

It's interesting to reread that blog (interesting for me at any rate) because it reveals just how ahead of its time the iPhone was. Let's have a look at their rivals and see how they're doing. In fact let's take a look at the whole idea of the future of this field as it might be understandable from a look at the past. I've just read Dan Gardner's Future Babble so I'm well aware of the futility of prophecy. Nonetheless…

Microsoft

In mid to late 2007 the Redmond Behemoth had just come up with Windows Mobile 6 for Pocket PCs, as they charmingly called their absolutely fucking dog of an operating system. Pardon the language, but nothing else will do. CEO Steve Ballmer and others at MS were the first to admit it when they launched the Windows Mobile 7 a year and a half ago (with my help as it happens)

This slick smooth slidey-tile operating system is now established and flourishing enough (weedy in its proliferation compared to iOS and Android, but flourishing nonetheless) to be called simply Windows Phone.

Microsoft are bringing out a new Windows 7 system soon that, much like Apple's Lion and upcoming Mountain Lion, will move towards converging the smartphone and PC 'experience' as people like to call it. The tail of the mobile is wagging the dog of the desktop: plenty have predicted this for some time as more and more power becomes available in your pocket, according the ineluctable certainties of Moore's Law. It's worth taking a look at this fascinating proposition.

Moore and Feynman

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's famous axiom states that the number of transistors you can fit on a chip will double every two years. Now, I expect you are familiar with the grains of rice on a chessboard image which is often used to explain the staggering rise that occurs when a number is doubled – a geometric progression leading to exponential growth. In case you aren't I'll just run over it again so that you get some idea of the monumental meaning of Moore's Law.

Rice n Easy

The story goes that an Emperor, or a Rajah many, many years ago declared that if someone could invent a game which ruled out the element of luck he would grant them any wish. A brilliant sage devised the game of chess which (so long as each player gets an equal number of goes at playing white) is indeed entirely a game of skill. The delighted ruler demanded of the sage that he name his reward.

"Simply this," said the sage, "on the squares of this chess board that I have designed for the game, I would like a grain of rice on the first, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth and so on until you reach the last square."

The emperor clapped his hands delightedly and called for a sack of rice – what a let off!

Ah, but do the maths, or 'math' as Americans like to call it. A chess board is eight squares by eight, and 8 x 8 = 64. By the time you have reached the 21st square, doubling as you go, you will have to put down over a million grains on it, by the 32nd, which is half way, you're planking down 2 billion grains, just on that square.

By the end the number has rocketed to more grains of rice than any kingdom could hold. On the 64th square alone there would be 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 grains. When the Emperor's CFO and senior number crunchers had told him how much he owed, they say he had the sage's head cut off as a warning to smartarses everywhere. Other versions of the tale say they made him vizier. Viziers are like Prime Ministers, only less stupid.

Moore's Law was first propounded in 1970, which has allowed for 21 iterations of the principle since then, which tells us that more than a million transistors can be fitted into the space that held one in 1970. That number will double in 2014. And double again in 2016.

Enter a fine man

Is there an end in sight? One of my great heroes was Richard Feynman. He was everybody's great hero if they love science and especially perhaps if like me they are too stupid to understand it without the help of a great communicator, a passionate and brilliant advocate. But of course Feynman was a hero to scientists too, a Nobel Prize winner, a teacher of astonishing brilliance and possessed of a mind that ranged freely over all the great questions.

Physical limits

In 1985 he gave an astonishing lecture in Japan on the size limitation of future computers. Later he gave a series of talks at Caltech, the university at which he had done most of his work, also on the subject of the physical limitations of computing, but raising too the possibility of what is now called "quantum computing."

This was not the first time he had caused a paradigm shift in the way people thought about science and technology. As early as 1960 he had astonished an audience by predicting and describing what we now call nanotechnology. On that occasion he offered a prize for anyone who could make a working electric motor no bigger than one sixty-fourth of a cubic inch (roughly .4 mm3). He offered another prize for anyone who could take the information from the page of a book and reduce it down to an area 1/25000 smaller "in such a manner that it can be read by an electronic scanning microscope". The scale he was demanding was equivalent to being able to read the whole of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin.

He paid out on the first bet less than a year later, but the second challenge took longer. Feynman paid out on this in 1986, just two years before he was struck down with cancer, an untimely death that left the American scientific community in a deep mourning from which it has barely recovered still.

For the story of those lectures, download or read online this excellent article by Tony Hey, published in Contemporary Physics in 1999. The Japanese lecture has been printed up, I have it somewhere, but not here in New Zealand where I am writing this. It's the third one in this list of his publications and is well worth reading. http://memexplex.com/ReferenceList/author=49

For more on Feynman, simply look up his interviews on YouTube. You might as well start with this one on waves, it'll give you an idea of his charisma, his passion, his restless curiosity and the pleasure he takes in the complexities and anomalies of … everything.

Parallel and Quantum computing

Anyway, what Feynman first suggested was that computers could move away from the "Turing model" of registering and addressing sequentially and look to what is known as "parallel computing". This has never really taken off, perhaps as a result of computing getting stuck in its own way of doing things and there being three decades worth of bloated 'legacy' from which there is no chance escape.

But Feynman went further and proposed the possibilities of quantum computing. At a subatomic level. Please don't ask me to explain something I don't understand. I'll ride in the jet, but don't ask me to build it. I don't mind telling you that I'm wa-a-a-ay out of my depth in all of this. I just repeat what someone I trust tells me. And then I check with my father and get the real truth as he is pretty close to being a Feynman himself.

Boil in the bag rice with chips

I suppose what it all boils down to is this. Moore's Law has plenty of years left in it and its ever more steeply growing rice-on-the-chessboard curve will give rise to chips, integrated circuits, that will go be a part of computational devices of such speed and power that they will in turn help engineers construct new kinds of machines that mimic what Schrödinger called the "entanglement" of activity at the quantum level.

Down to business

All that is fascinating and probably no more or less believable than any other prediction. If it achieves nothing more than introducing the world of Feynman to anyone who had been previously unfamiliar with it, then this blessay will have done an absolute good.

Meanwhile let's descend to the rather more banal level of the consumer devices that I have spent the best part of my adult love slavishly following, loving, hating, dreaming of and desiring?

The latest intel…

Talking of Gordon Moore (my mother occasionally used something called Gordon Moore's Cosmetic Toothpaste, I don't think he can have been responsible for that as well?) the great man will be pleased to see, no doubt, that the company he helped found has just entered the smartphone market. A deal with Orange should see Intel phones in Europe in a month or so. Intel will make the silicon, Android will provide the operating system. At the moment it looks they'll be launching with the 2.4 Gingerbread version of Android, rather than the exciting new 4.0 release, which is called Ice Cream Sandwich. As you probably know Google and the Android people like to name their distributions after desserts and cakes. Well, why not?

Microsoft, of course, are not much in the hardware business, save for their highly successful X-Box and its super-duper-hooper-whooper successful Kinect accessory. Whether Windows 7 will help revive the somewhat flagging fortune of Dell and other PC manufacturers remains to be seen. But doubtless Intel, who provide the CPUs for Macs and PCs alike will do well in either case. Perhaps it is the success of Apple's design and construction of their own A class chip (now at A5+ in the new iPad) that has caused Intel to realise that device manufacture isn't such a bad game to be in after all. So welcome, Intel.

Forehead palm smack

Goodbye my beloved Palm. In May 2007, a month before the launch of iPhone 1, they made the disastrous error of announcing the launch of a lightweight wireless keyboard, essentially a dumb terminal to service their Treo line of smartphones, which they called the Foleo. They might now claim it was a forerunner of the MacBook Air and other subnotebooks, but even if it we kindly agree that it was ahead of its time, there's no doubt it was a huge disaster for Palm.

The Big Blue lesson

There was an old saying back in the 70s: "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". What this meant was that if you ran the IT (or Data Analysis as it was called back then) department for a medium to large company you bought from IBM, or Big Blue as they were known (this was the colour of suit their salesmen and executives were obliged to wear. Oh yes, and there were schools where IBM told you to send your children too) – anyway, the point was that no matter how shite the machine you bought, you could say to your complaining Chairman, CFO and MD, "Don't blame me, I bought IBM," and everyone would murmur, "Oh well, that's alright then… IBM. Mm. Fine company. Must just be bad luck."

IBM of course, famously didn't see Bill Gates coming and in what seemed like the blink of an eye they had sold slipped down behind the speccy upstart and were selling off their consumer business to a Chinese company, Lenovo. I told you the digital world moves fast.

Sinking without trace

Well now, Palm made the same mistake. Their wonderful proprietary Palm OS was aging and rather than spend R&D dollars reinventing it for the modern, post iPhone world, they assumed that everything would be alright if they chugged along with it (they produced the Centro in late 2007) and continued to concentrate their energies on producing Windows Mobile compatible devices. How could they lose? MS was the biggest company in the world. Their operating system accounted for over 96% of all computers sold. Everyone was always going to need a smartphone that synched to a PC , weren't they? It was a cinch.

It took them almost two years to repair this mistake and decide that they should tackle Apple head on and produce a new operating system for touchscreen devices that might compete with the ever more frightening looking success of the iPhone.

Pre come…

Had they decided on this a year or so earlier when they still had the wind in their sails, they might not have been too late. As it was in 2009 the woefully underpowered and maddeningly undersized and plasticky Pre devices were launched, running their new Web OS, to the sound of rolling sagebrush and tumbleweed and the tolling of a great bell.

Such disastrous strategic, commercial and software engineering miscalculation and lack of vision brought the company down. Palm collapsed, the pieces were picked up by Hewlett Packard for $1.2 billion. HP promised to develop the OS and release tablets and smartphones running it. In fact, two years later they effectively dropped all such plans and announced that they were licensing the technology for others to play with and bring to market if they wished or dared.

Sony make believe

Farewell Palm and farewell too, Sony Ericsson. As of February 16th this year, Sony reacquired the whole joint venture from their Swedish partners and renamed it Sony Mobile Communications.

In my view Sony is the company that has most to blush about in terms of its performance in this sector of the consumer hardware market over the last two or three decades. Their brand image just couldn't have been higher or better in the early eighties when their Walkman was cock of the walk. The company and its brand image seemed unassailable. The Apple of their day, they were known for fine design and innovation and for wit, elegance, desirability and finesse in their product range. Their Trinitron displays stood out in an area of cathode ray tube TV sets and monitors and their whole range of consumer equipment from My First Sony to camcorders more or less rocked in exactly the way that today almost every they make in this arena sucks or remains incapable of standing out from the crowd.

Missing the bus

A legendary moment in modern geekery was the day in 2001 when Apple's chief engineer Jon Rubinstein went to Toshiba's HQ in Japan for a routine visit. Earlier in the year Steve Jobs had demanded a small music player of him and Rubinstein had replied that the components for such a thing didn't exist. At the Tokyo HQ Rubinstein was shown a 1.8 inch hard drive that Toshiba engineers had developed but which they couldn't see a use for. They had know idea it was exactly what Rubinstein had been missing. As it happens Steve Jobs was in Tokyo for a different reason the same day. At dinner that evening Rubinstein said to him, ""I know how to do it now. All I need is a ten million dollar cheque." Jobs coughed up and the rest is history. And the rest of the Apple's competitors were history, so far as music players were concerned.

The question I would ask if I worked, especially for Sony, is why the hell didn't we make the iPod? Sony were not only in the same country as Toshiba but they were, unlike Apple, in the music business. Sony Music and Sony Pictures, Sony Walkman, Sony industry standard video cameras and recording equipment. Sony computers. Talk about a perfect fit. Talk about missing the bus. Talk about being outmanoeuvred. Just as he was to do in the world of tele-communications six years later, Steve Jobs took Apple from a standing start into the position of the most important music company in the world. From right under the noses of Sony.

Their phone business JV with the Scandiwegians was going south too. In the year 2009-2010 alone Sony Ericsson fell from being the world's fourth biggest seller of mobile phones to the sixth biggest. The writing had been on the wall for two years, ever since the iPhone arrived and SE produced that shocking disgrace of a Symbian UIQ monster, the P1i that I railed against in my first techblog. That monstrosity was more or less a tomb stone.

They gave up on Symbian UIQ (which I actually really liked but which just couldn't perform the tasks asked of it without crashing or overheating) and produced and are still producing a line of overpriced and wildly underwhelming Xperia smartphones which at first ran Windows Mobile long after the rest of the world knew it was a dead duck. When they finally saw which way the wind blew, the Scandanese combine panicked into rushing out the X10, which no one bought because it ran an out-dated version of Android and couldn't anything as well as a cheaper and better HTC phone.

It is hard to believe this, yet sad and true: Sony can hardly be called a trusted name or big hitter these days. Always skating to the puck, never to where the puck is going to be, to borrow Wayne Gretzy's winning image.

All that can change of course, and let's hope it does. No one would want to see a mighty and once loved colossus like Sony come crashing down.

Nokia, Nokia – Who's There-ia?

Nokia, then undisputed number one in mobile phones were, back in 2007, producing low and medium end phones of great usability and huge global popularity. Using power efficient flavours of Symbian and a reliable and simple menu driven interface, hundreds and hundreds of millions were sold and That Ringtone was heard in every corner of the land. Restaurants kept Nokia chargers by reception on the off-chance that a diner might need a top up in the evening.

At the higher end, they chugged out silvery plastic oblongs so ugly that it gave one diverticulitis and the squits just to look at them. No one seemed to mind as high end phones weren't their 'core business'. But what they didn't seem to be able to see was that smart phones would soon be the only business to be in. Which is strange because they can be regarded as the pioneers of the smartphone every bit as much as Palm or Handspring.

As I say in that damned blog, I owned just about every model of Nokia Communicator through the Nineties and Noughties. I was sending emails from my phone in 1996 using the first communicator model, the 9000. To put things in perspective, this was five years before the iPod came into being, a longer period of time than exists between now and the first iPhone. Since Nokia knew what smartphones could do, it can only have been a misreading of the road ahead not to see how quickly the future would slam into their windscreen.

The lumbering, slumbering giant awakes…

The redoubtable Finnish giant, which started life in lumber and loo-rolls has rebooted itself as a manufacturer now of Windows Phone devices. I own a Lumia 800 and am very pleased with it, although for my taste it's a little too small and I can't wait for their up-coming larger 900. It's pleasing and, I am sure a huge relief for Nokia and Microsoft, to see such enthusiastic pre-ordering and buzz for this device, a handset on which the futures of CEOs Ballmer and Ollila may well depend.

Blame the Berry…

I think it highly probable that the wrong turn Nokia took was due to the phenomenal success of the BlackBerry, a triumph whose shadow looms large over this past ten or so years. Like Palm, Sony and Nokia in their heydays, this giant seemed unassailable and impregnable, setting the standard that everyone else must follow. It defined the second age of Yuppyism. The ubiquitous Crackberry entered dictionaries and became a metonym and synecdoche for the corporate beast of the first decade of this century: eyes forever locked on the screen, urgently rolling up and down the thumb-wheel or tapping the keyboard. So much so indeed that newspapers, which have never exhibited the strongest understanding of the real meaning of evolution, postulated the wildly impossible Lamarckian possibility of children being born with stronger and more flexible thumbs …

Storm Clouds Loom

And then, again as a result of misjudging the meaning of the iPhone, the unthinkable happened. Research in Motion, the Canadian makers of the BlackBerry began to lose the plot. RIM had produced the wondrous Pearl, the magnificent Bold … how would they respond to Apple? Oh God help us with the Storm? This haptically clicking touchscreen monster was a disaster of almost unparalleled dimensions. The sound of them being thrown from office windows competed with the screaming down the landlines to their network providers of the outraged middle-management honchos who had "upgraded" to this cataclysmic failure. No one could be found who had anything but contempt for it.

The Bold and the Desperate…

Another attempt at Storming the citadel was made before in desperation RIM tried again, dropping the name Storm forever and attempting a kind of halfway house called the Torch which while better was still nothing like what the market wanted in either direction. It annoyed the core BB faithful and had nothing to offer the young and the restless. So last year they had a shot at reviving the happier Bold brand, with a model that combined the by now de rigueur touchscreen and accelerometer with the original virtues of their finest, mid-season form candy-bar devices. That Bold, (I am fondly a 9790 as we speak marks the last hurrah for RIM in the consumer market.

RIM's leakage of millions in losses, the drop in share price from $140 to $14 in under three years, their desperately unhappy foray into the tablet market with the shame-makingly wrong and mismanaged BlackBerry Playbook (launched without an email app god help us) has proved too much for founders Mike Lazarides and Jim Balsillie (yes that really is his name, what a childhood he must have endured) They have "stepped down" as joint CEOs, and replacement Thorsten Heins has announced "A plan to refocus on the enterprise business and leverage on its leading position in the enterprise space" – and if you can understand what that means, then you're just the kind of suck… just the kind of customer they're after.

Even under the rim?

Whether Research In Motion's name has been forever blackened and whether their once omnipotent push emailing services can survive the damage done their name and reputation by the failure of their consumer devices and the cripplingly embarrassing outage of their core services last year only time can tell, and time – as I keep repeating – rushes by so fast in this digital world. The mills of God may grind exceeding slow, but not the mills of Silicon Valley. IBM, Compuserve, AOL, MySpace, Alta Vista, Yahoo, Palm … these were names that our grandchildren and grandchildren's grandchildren would whisper in awe until the crack of doom, surely? And as for Nokia, Sony, RIM and Microsoft – only a moron would ever connect their name with disappointment or accuse them of sipping at the last chance saloon. Who could doubt their eternal mastery of the universe?The winners are…

Apple of course. I say that (and I always have to repeat this) with no especial pleasure. I am not wedded to the company and have no shares in it. I admire them so long as they are admirable and admirable they have been for a long, long time. They have made mistakes, but no fatal or even wounding ones. Each error is blown up hugely because no company on earth attracts such headlines. They are accused of hype and simultaneously of an obsession with secrecy, but the fact is those who hate them are the obsessed. Ha! Their antenna doesn't work f you hold your hand in a certain way. That'll destroy them. Oh, alright. Look! This iPad sounds like sanitary-wear and is only a big iPhone, they've really goofed this time. No? OK, Ha! They've deceived Australia about 4G! And Feel! They're overheating! I'm not as good at this as the supreme leader in the field, the Macalope, a genius at teasing the Applephobes of the world.

The Big G

Google of course can also count themselves as winners. They had the foresight and muscle to come up with a much better answer to Apple. In cahoots with 83 other companies they formed the Open Handset Alliance at round about the time I was writing that first blog. The first Google phone, the G1 came out in October the following year. I reviewed it, along with the fateful BlackBerry Storm and loveable BlackBerry Bold here.

As it happens Google makes more money from the advertising revenue creamed off Apple iPhone and iPad use than it does from the ever increasing market share that Android is achieving. Four times more money! http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/30/google-makes-more-from-iphones-than-it-does-from-android/ Nonetheless Android has shown that Apple's iOS and its walled garden and tightly fenced APIs aren't the only way. The always open everywhere APIs that Android allows may result in some malware, flaky and downright deceitful apps but there's an exhilarating quality to the ecosystem. Much of this has been due to the third winner in the recent phone and tablet wars. If you've got a ribbon…

Taiwan on…

HTC. They were swimming about in shallows making WinMob phones like the HTC Touch and the 3600 that I much preferred back then in 2007. But they reacted so swiftly imaginatively and positively to the Apple threat that they could be renamed RRF – Rapid Response Force. Cheerfully designed, they sometimes sail close enough to the wind to rouse the ire of Apple's patent lawyers, but I'm afraid I just can't be doing with all this patent nonsense. It should stop now and everyone will benefit. Except the lawyers. Boo hoo.

Aaaannnyway… HTC made the first Android phone, that G1 that arrived at the arse-end of 2008 and have come up with some of the best Android phones over the intervening three and half years, the Desire, the Sensation, the XL (available with Dr Dre Beats) and now the quad core 1080p HTC One, which I hope to review soon… not available in New Zealand yet. It obviously won't be the One as despite its high specs, it's still 3G. What will they call the 4G model. The This Really, Really, Really Is The One, Promise?

Sometimes HTC (which stands endearingly, for High Tech Computer) can be maddening. How the hell do you get the back off this one without tearing your nails? How come the Rhyme has run out of storage memory when all I've downloaded are Evernote and Dropbox? And must they offer a silly proprietary twitter client? But all in all, their rapid response, their neat and zippy designs, their "skinning" of Android with HTC Sense, their server-side Hub and their competitive pricing and constant new launches have kept them very much in the game. And sometimes they come up with something so original and silly you have to clap your hands (while giggling) – The Charm – you can watch the whole gloopy film or start at about 1:13 – silly but sweet.

Which leads us to another winner.

Samsung Agonistes

(That's a really neat reference to a Milton poem by the way, so laugh damn you) – Samsung, the South Korea powerhouse seem to have emerged from the last four years in better shape than any of Apple's major hardware rivals. They've experimented with and advanced the cause of OLED and AMOLED displays, they've pushed the hardware in all kinds of directions, they've aggressively stalked the iPad since its release, to the point of plagiarism some would argue, and they have survived. They've done more than survive, they've thrived. Thriven. Throve. Threft. Thrivvled. Thropwindled. Wa'evz.

Galaxy Quest

The Galaxy tablet is generally agreed to be the best response to the iPad that anyone has yet managed to come up with. It has hardly had the same kind of seismic impact on the worlds of publishing, journalism, design, medicine and education, and can only be regarded as a follower not a leader, but if your heart is hardened against Apple you could do a lot worse.

A review! At last, an actual review!

I have spent the past week trying to use and trying to love the Samsung Galaxy Note GT-N7000. This device, you might remember, caused quite a lot of hoopla in October 2011 when it was announced and released. Is it a pad, is it a phone? No, it's a Note.

Samsung Galaxy Note GT-N7000 © Samsung

Size sighs

The 5.3 inch screen, which is exactly yay big by yay big, notably (notably!) falls between the size of an iPad and iPhone, though it's closer to a phone than a tablet. You can exactly fit two Notes next to each other on an iPad screen and another will lie on top lengthways. I would say the display is a third bigger than an iPhone and three times smaller than an iPad. I'm sure if I was better at geometry I could work out the difference exactly, but that will have to do. Interestingly enough everyone is predicting the new iPhone 5 will have a bigger screen, but not this big, you can be certain.

Unwrapping the Galaxy Bar

Personally, I find the size annoying. I can't type as quickly on it as I can on either an iPad or an iPhone (despite Swiftkey, of which more later) or the HTC XL, Lumia 800 or BlackBerry (bless) Bold that are my current PIUs, Phones In Use.

It certainly comes with a top spec. 1.4 GHz Dual Core processor, 1080p video (full HD in other words, like the iPad version 3), two cameras (8 MBP on the back, 2MBP on the front for face-to-face calls) video and photo editing apps, any number of the dreary, useless and annoying "hubs" that everyone except us, the users, thinks we need – apps that "unify" contacts, events, reading habits and notes between Facebook, Twitter and Google accounts for example. They all lead to confusion and annoyance and duplicated or maddeningly overstocked address books and they must stop it at once.

The Super AMOLED display is gorgeous. At 1280 x 800 it's not up to Apple Retina's 2048×1536 resolution standards, but still marvellous with 285 pixels per inch, which gives a smooth warm highly engaging (or 'immersive' as we are forced by law to say these days) experience. The Note boasts the loveliest opening splash screen in history. And…

Woah there!!!

It has a stylus!!!! What? Have they run mad? Don't they know what Steve Jobs did when asked why the iPhone didn't offer a stylus. He raised up his two hands and said, "Nature took millions and millions of years to provide us with ten perfect styluses. Why insult her by adding another, less efficient one?" He may have said 'styli', but I doubt it…

The stylus is styleless…

Well Samsung is having none of this. The Galaxy Note offers a stylus with a tiny (and almost completely inaccessible and scream-inducing) button on it that uses Wacom pressure-sensitive touch-pad technology in order to add … what exactly? Complicated and elaborate ways of screen-capturing (something Android is really, really bad at) and performing other mundane tasks that would better be done by fingers and little menus or gestures. I quite see that an artistically aware stylus would be useful on the odd occasion one is moved to write beautifully or to sketch and draw, but otherwise – forget it. Perhaps Samsung are just desperately trying to add their patented ways of doing things to avoid all this hideous, upsetting patent lawyering that is making us all so cross and unhappy.

Another of their unique ideas is "tip to zoom" – fortunately this hopeless and silly idea is not the only way, good old pinching is still available, otherwise the whole apparatus would be hurled into the sea.

It got better

At first I was going to write an absolutely blistering attack on this piece of kit because within two days of using it, it was telling me that I had run seriously low on storage memory and that I must move everything onto an SD card. There was a 4GB SD fitted and all the apps I'd downloaded from the Android Market (now called Google Play) were already there. This was baffling and maddening. Eventually I bit the bullet and did a factory restart. Since then I must confess things haven't been so bad.

Hmmm….

Not so bad, but not so great either. The screen goes black and unresponsive every five or six attempts I make to access an app. It refuses to sync Twitter or Facebook through its hub, so I have downloaded the official apps at the risk of incurring another "memory low" warning. The Mail app, as it always is with Android, is inferior to Google's Gmail web app.

The device cost a shedload of money – £700 to be precise, though of course it'll cost nothing like that if you lock yourself into a deal with a network provider.

But…

The screen is gorgeous.

The notebook app is so cute. You can do nice drawing and everything, so long as your thumb can find the tit on the bloody stylus.

It looks lovely when it works. Ravishing.

Bundled up…

It comes loaded. Polaris office suite, photo and video editing software. The excellent Kies Air allows you impressive and intuitive file management through your web browser. Although infuriatingly it doesn't seem to recognise the Java on any Apple browser. I tried with Safari, Chrome and Firefox and in each case Kiese Air told me that I couldn't batch upload to the device unless I installed Java. Java is already installed and waiting to be commanded, so that is something Samsung and Kies should look at. To move any amount of music or pictures singly is not an enterprise lightly to be undertaken and I don't see why one should shell out on a specialised Mac to Android syncing programme. Lord knows I've spent enough money on Mark Space and the Missing Sync over the years… usually at the cost of hair, nails and sanity.

Also, as usual with Android, all the navigation, mapping reading, note recording and voice control (which won't give Siri sleepless nights) apps that you could want have been thrown in, with FM radio and more toys and gismos that I could list here.

Judgement?

Against all that Samsung's offering is – as my old history teacher used to say – a long way far short of being good enough. The Note runs Gingerbread, (Android 2.4) although Ice Cream Sandwich, (Android 4.0) is expected soon. To be fair, down here in NZ my reliable HTC XL hasn't got round to ICS yet either, but the XL remains much less prone to hanging apps with apologetic notes or just going black and vacant than the distinctly neurotic Galaxy. It looks as though it has all the glossy good looks of a racehorse, but it behaves as if it has some of the more highly strung and uncontrollable characteristics that go with some thoroughbreds.

I, I – it's Swiftkey

I really hope Apple and others don't think this form factor is the future, because it has taken me back to frustrated one finger prodding. This despite using the excellent Swiftkey, an absolutely essential add-on for any Android device. It is noticeable that Swiftkey's installation routine decides that the Note is a tablet, not a smartphone and bids you install its (one dollar pricier) tablet version. I wouldn't call the Note a tablet at all, it is quite clearly a large phone.

Swiftkey, incidentally, which speeds up the typing process by very impressive heuristic techniques and neat semantic guessing and disambiguation, teaches one the lamentable lesson that most English speakers start most sentences, phrases and sub-clauses with "I". One does not use the word often oneself and it therefore strikes one as a little unfair that one's texts and emails so often end up littered with implications of egocentricity. One types away not noticing that the app is opening almost every clause with that rude word, 'I'.

That aside, Swiftkey is a great British success story. 6 million downloads and counting. Of course its interference with the keyboard API isn't something Apple would allow, nor MS with Window Phone at the moment. So one of them will probably end up buying the company.

To go back to the beginning…

Each morning then, to return to the second question that opens this inexcusably long blessay, I rub my chin and ask myself this question. The Note or the HTC XL?

As a matter of course, the iPhone goes in one pocket; the Lumio or HTC HD7 Windows Phone into another (I can interchange happily there, whichever is charged and simmed up will do); the BlackBerry (bless) Bold into one more and then I have to choose an Android handset.

Samsung or HTC?

Lately I've been using the Note more and more and, as so often happens when you give a worthy device time, you start to like elements that before were an annoyance.

Alternating between both can be a bit like alternating between two cars which have indicator stalks on different sides of the steering wheel, causing you to switch on the windscreen wipers when you want to turn left. The HTC and Samsung have the volume rockers on opposite sides, so I'm always messing up there. But these are minor things. Android is a perfectly viable alternative to iOS as is Windows Phone.

Post 2007 trauma

The aftershocks that rippled out when the iPhone was launched are still being felt. Palm and Sony Ericsson have ceased to be. BlackBerry has effectively bowed and left the stage, billions of dollars poorer. Nokia and Microsoft are making a recovery after a very, very rocky few years in this sector. Google thrives off everything, off the Apple ecosystem and its lion's share of the Android world. HTC and Samsung continue to lead the field as hardware manufacturers, with LG and Motorola as blips on the screen that may be fading or growing. It is hard to tell. And of course, Intel has staked a claim in the territory.

The future…

In another four and half years, the power and memory and capacity and functionality of the computers in our pockets will have transformed these fascinating devices yet again. Near Field Communication and other forms of interactivity will doubtless cause a revolution in the way we work, play and shop in the real world. For I think the next step, as we continue to reap the rewards of Moore's Law, will involve integrating small devices, quite as powerful as today's most top-spec smartphone, into elements of cars, fridges, shop counters, airports, railways stations, art galleries, sports arenas and restaurants, whether through NFC or biometrics, we will be able to take our Cloud with us and our bank account too, wherever we go.

But what do I know? I thought I'd never type as fast on a virtual keyboard as on a physical one. I thought that green shirt would look good on QI. I thought so many things…

Toodle-pip,

 

 

 

 

Welsh Sandwich Bungee Jumpers

Bungee Jumping Madness

Douglas Adams 60th Birthday Party virtual appearance

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A Modest Proposal

Greece is the Word

I have a modest proposal that might simultaneously celebrate the life of Christopher Hitchens, strengthen Britain's low stock in Europe and allow us to help a dear friend in terrible trouble.

Perhaps the most beautiful and famous monument in the world is the Doric masterpiece atop the citadel, or Acropolis, of Athens. It is called the Parthenon, the Virgin Temple dedicated to Pallas Athene, the goddess of wisdom who gave the Greek capital its name.

Parthenon - west side © A Sampson 2009

 

The Acropolis contains other temples and represents in the minds of scholars, historians and all who care about our past and the source of our civilisation, the pinnacle of Athens's Golden Age under the leadership of Pericles; that period of peace between the wars against Persia which they won, and the wars against their neighbours Sparta, which they lost.

For students and lovers of architecture the Acropolis (over which I made a fool of spectacular fool of myself some years ago) will always remain one of the most perfect examples of the Doric order ever constructed. The Romans and Arabians later added arches, ogees, domes, pendentives, barrelled vaults and squinches to the basic elements of architecture, but the Parthenon's grace has never been surpassed. Its influence is all around us. Pillars, pilasters, porticos, pediments, architraves, entablatures, triglyphs and metopes may sound strange but we see them every day in high street buildings, town halls, 18th century churches, squares and crescents. Some people who spot trains or birds are called sad. I am a sad corbel, buttress and apse spotter – one who loves that there is a name for everything in architecture,  a full and rich anatomy.

© A Sampson 2009

Doric elements were not the only thing that came from Greece. 5th century BC Athens was a city state that gave us Aristotle and his devising of logic, categories, ethics and poetics; Plato and Socrates led ceaseless quests for the discovery of the truth behind people, phenomena and politics. Their refusal to take as true any baseless, unprovable assertions made by priests, tyrants and hierarchs but instead to examine honestly from first principles took nearly two millennia to be rediscovered by the renaissance and then enlightenment philosophers who shaped our modern world very much with Periclean Athens in mind. Euclid and Archimedes are to this day heroes to all mathematicians and engineers. Their blend of rationalism and empiricism is at the heart of all science and sense. The sheer magnificent beauty of Euclidian geometric theorems and their proofs, has never, most mathematicians would agree, been surpassed.

The duty of Athenian citizens to play a part in justice through the tribunals on the Areopagus Hill was taken seriously, as was democracy in the form of regular voting: there was even an agreed assumption that theatre as a total art form that combined mask, dance, poetry, drama, history, music and religious ceremony was an essential element of public life and formed part of an open analysis of Athenian identity. As Nietzsche pointed out in his supreme The Birth of Tragedy, the Greek people had gone from tribal blood feuds, war and savagery to a peak of civilisation in a very short time indeed. Nietzsche chose the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus as representatives of the two sides of the Greek (and of course all human) character. One part harmonious, reasonable, artistic, musical, mathematical and idealistic, the other consumed by appetite, lusts and loss of reason through desire, greed and ambition. Whether we call these Freud's ego and id or Forster's prose and the passion, which we must "only connect", no civilisation I can think of seems so clearly to display through its art, rhetoric, philosophy and politics just what it is to be a human, a social and collective being, what Aristotle himself called in a phrase almost worn away by universal use, "a political animal".

Of course we are not talking about an ideal society. Slavery, the subjugated role of women, open paederasty and xenophobia, helotry and harlotry – these are not things wholly in tune with the temper of our own times. Read E. R. Dodds's masterly The Greeks and the Irrational and you will see they weren't all algebraic geniuses with a bent for brilliant oratory and logical exposition. But Athenian education, open enquiry, democracy, justice and a harmony of form in sculpture and architecture were quite new to our world and indeed their ability to question themselves is one of the things for which we are most indebted to them.

We have them to thank for the Olympic Games too, and the next Olympiad of the modern age will of course be held in London in 2012, and very excited and pleased about that I am. Excited and pleased because I love sport and always and automatically want to line up on the opposite side of cynics, curmudgeons, wet-blankets, pessimists, and (literally in this case) spoilsports.

I am also excited and pleased because the occasion — the largest regular gathering human beings on the face of the planet — offers…

 

A) a remarkable opportunity to appease the dead spirit of the great Hitchens

B) to make up to some small degree for our recent devastating and pathetic humiliation in Europe

C) to redress a great wrong and

D) to express our solidarity with, affection for and belief in Greece and the ideals it gave us.

 

The Hellenic Republic today is in heart-rending turmoil, a humiliating sovereign debt crisis has brought Greece to the brink of absolute ruin. This proud, beautiful nation for which Byron laid down his life is in a condition much like the one for which he mourned when they were under the Ottoman yoke in the early nineteenth century, taking time off from the comic ironic tones of his ottava rima masterpiece Don Juan to insert this mournful threnody….

 

The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!

Where burning Sappho loved and sung,

Where grew the arts of war and peace,

Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!

Eternal summer gilds them yet,

But all, except their sun, is set…

 

And where are they? And where art thou?

My country? On thy voiceless shore

The heroic lay is tuneless now—

The heroic bosom beats no more!

And must thy lyre, so long divine,

Degenerate into hands like mine?

 

'Tis something, in the dearth of fame,

Though linked among a fettered race,

To feel at least a patriot's shame,

Even as I sing, suffuse my face;

For what is left the poet here?

For Greeks a blush–for Greece a tear….

 

Two years ago a new and beautiful Acropolis museum was completed, allowing visitors a much more intelligent enlightening, captivating and informative journey through the history and meaning of the Acropolis than the rather rocky hillside rambles of the past.

View of the Acropolis (south) taken from the balcony of the museum. © A Sampson 2009

A year earlier, in 2008, the Italian and Greek Presidents had taken part in a ceremony in which a fragment of marble sculpture taken from Greece and left in Italy 200 years earlier was returned to Athens. This small fragment had been taken by the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Lord Elgin.

The greater part of the haul was taken to England where they have been housed in the British Museum in London since 1816 under the now highly charged name of the Elgin Marbles. Even at the time plenty of Britons thought the Ottoman Empire's granting permission to take so many elements of the Parthenon (and the stunning Erectheum, the temple with its famous caryatids further down the hill) away from their home and into London was little short of looting.

MARBLES

What has all this to do with Christopher Hitchens, polemicist, shamer of Clinton, Kissinger and Mother Teresa, champion of Orwell and Payne, scourge of tele-evangelists and mountebanks everywhere? Well, in 1997 Hitchens wrote a book called The Parthenon Marbles, the Case for Reunification. In it he lays out how, inspired by reading Colin MacInnes (of Absolute Beginners fame) on the subject, he threw himself into finding out more about the marbles and  came to what he saw a frankly irrefutable case for their return.

Parthenon Marbles - west pediment. © A Sampson 2009

It was, as the author Simon Raven pointed out, the Greeks who maintained that anyone who tells you what happens to a person after they die is either a fool or a liar. The speculation over Hitchens's soul's fate has been as disgusting and degrading as the age of indulgences, sold pardons and chantry chapels, but comes as no surprise to anyone. His legacy however, his doctrine of decency, his war on bullies, tyrants, liars and frauds, now that can be honoured and it can be called, if you wanted to do so, his imperishable soul.

Arguments for keeping the Elgin Marbles in the BM usually boil down to:

 

A) If Elgin hadn't appropriated them they would probably have rotted or crumbled away so we saved them and deserve to keep them

B) Once you go down the path of museums returning ransacked treasures to their countries of origin then all the great museums and galleries of the world will have their collections dispersed to the great detriment of scholarship, visitor access and common sense

C) Every year, more people see them in the British Museum than visit Athens, so to move them would be to reduce their availability to be seen.

 

Argument A is most peculiar. As Hitchens put it, if you rescue furniture from a neighbour's fire and keep it for them while they rebuild their house you then give it back, you don't claim rights over it. Hitchens points out in his book how gracious Greece has been about the whole affair. It was Melina Mercouri (at whose funeral he was a pall-bearer), the actress, singer and politician, who really got the campaign going and always conducted it, on her part, with great good grace.

The British Museum has been utterly intransigent over point B. "Over my dead body" appears to be the view of each successive Director. The current chief, Neil MacGregor has had a brilliant tenure but is quite as foursquare against the return of the marbles as his predecessors. It is axiomatic that no museum or gallery ever likes to de-acquire. "What next?" they cry. "Every mummy, every Babylonian pot, the Rosetta Stone? The Royal Game of Ur? The Madonna of the Rocks and Rembrandt's self-portraits at the National? Cleopatra's Needle?"

Well, the answer to that is NO. We are discussing a specific part of an existing building, which we now know can be properly and professionally curated and displayed. The argument "Oh, once you go down that path…" has never held water. The weirder kind of libertarians said it about seat belts. "Oh, once you make people wear seat belts it'll be helmets and roll bars next…" that kind of drivel. "Once you ban hunting, they'll ban fishing." If you ban citizens from owning Uzi machine guns it doesn't mean you're "going down the path that will lead to the banning of shot-guns and peashooters. Get a grip everyone.

Humans have will. We can go down a path and then turn left or right, or turn right round. Legislature is, perforce, nuanced and (we trust) skilfully drafted precisely so as to introduce regulation with the minimum loss of wider rights and liberties.  "Going down the path" of the return of the Elgin Marbles need not be fatefully precedential. We could decide to let it not be. Of course plenty of countries will seize their chance to have a go at demanding returns of this artefact or that, but this is happening anyway. The Parthenon affair is a special case. Italy returned their fragment two years ago and haven't been badgered, bullied and ballyragged since.

Parthenon Marbles - east pediment. © A Sampson 2009

Greece made us. We owe them. They are ready for its return and have never needed such morale boosting achievement more. And it would be so graceful, so apt, so right.

As for Point C, visitor numbers, well that is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, not to mention a counsel of despair. As Kevin Kostner almost said, 'If you move it, they will come."

Not everyone likes the new Acropolis museum it must be admitted: apparently its construction flattened  the musician Vangelis's charming house and the reinstalled friezes would, say some scholars, be hardly more 'authentic' in their new home than they are in Bloomsbury. But the stone quarried from Mount Pentelikon, the dazzling white pentelic marble from which the Parthenon is made, is for Greece what the marble of Carrara was for Michelangelo and it belongs in its homeland, it expresses it. There really is such a characteristic as terroir. Which is why something as disgusting as retsina tastes so delicious on a beach in Patmos and so horrific in a warm kitchen in Wincanton.

As it happens the British Prime Minister's office and the Department of Culture , Media and Sport are, even as we speak, planning a 'Great' campaign in which they wish to show the world what is Great about Britain (in fact the Great is really of course is a geopolitical term, as in Greater Manchester, not a profession of superiority, but never mind). I am patriotic I think. I fact I know I am. And like most people who truly love their country, I don't think it perfect but want it always to strive to be better, nobler, kinder, smarter. I want to be proud of it. Some will see the 'Great' campaign as a Ladybird Book version of Blair's embarrassing Cool Britannia 'initiative' back in the 90s. A step back to a heritage museum Britain where we're all the best of (Julian) Fellowes and grandeur parallels diversity, tolerance and innovation. I wish them well and offer this thought:

What greater gesture could be made to Greece in its time of appalling financial distress?  An act of friendship, atonement and an expression of faith in the future of the cradle of democracy would be so, well just so damned classy. The City of London whose "interests" Cameron wishes to protect, but which independent observers say is now if anything less secure in its hegemony than ever before, has buildings in which people sit all day betting "against" Greece,  or "taking positions" as they would rather put it. In other words they get home from the office happy in the thought that their transactions have hurled another thunderbolt into the land of Homer and Plato, Themistocles and Pindar. May they rot.

There is much talk of "repatriating powers" from Europe amongst Eurosceptic and even middle-of-the-road politicians. To repatriate a power takes treaties, rows, enmities, alliances and betrayals. To repatriate a collection of stolen marbles take good will, moral courage and a decisive belief that right can be done. Oh, and I suppose a Hercules transport aircraft or large ship. Rope, voiding, bungees, castors. That kind of thing. Bean-shaped foam too I shouldn't wonder.

How can we British be proud until we sit down with Greek politicians and arrange for the return of their treasure? It would be a dignified, but a thrilling celebration. No need for head-hanging apology or anything silly, just a recognition that the time is now right. Remember that dipping of the head, that bow, made by the Queen to the fallen of Ireland on her last visit there? Symbols mean a great deal. If the Hulture Secretary, Jeremy … oh, you know who I mean … or the Prime Minister or his Desperate Deputy did have the grace and guts to make this gesture, perhaps at the opening of London 2012 and then following it up in Athens with a full reinstallation it will achieve many things: it might remind us of what we all owe Greece, it might encourage us to visit the country and spend a little tourist money on its ferries, islands, temples, attractions and dazzling beauty: those blue seas, the warmly hospitable people, the theatres, temples, statue, beaches and bottles of resinated Domestika.

Such a fine gesture might also help make the rest of Europe decide we are not always the perfidious Albion they have traditionally believed us to be. I believe we would gain far more than we lost. A simulacrum in plaster or resin could hang in the BM where the real ones now do and an series of photographs could display the process of the return and the history behind it.

I certainly wouldn't rename them the Hitchens Marbles, Christopher would bridle and writhe at such a thought, but those who wanted to, might discover the part he played in this long struggle and know that he wasn't all about trashing icons, vilifying statesmen or taunting faith-healers. He once defined an educated person as one who knows the limits of their knowledge. His own self-professed philhellenism stemmed as much from the great gift Greek civilisation had given him and has given all of us– the confidence to doubt, to reason and openly to question. To know how little we know. To be curious about ourselves.

It's time we lost our marbles.

x Stephen Fry

 

A London secret shared

I believe every great country should have a great capital. Naturally, a metropolis will absorb plenty of resentment and bitterness from the provinces, that's as true of London as it is of Paris and Rome, Washington, Moscow and Madrid. But as a provincial boy growing up in Norfolk, I dreamt of London almost every night as I tried to fall asleep. Reaching it seemed like an impossible dream. I am tired of having to apologise for it. It is one of the wonders of the world.  I love Norfolk no less, nor Yorkshire nor Gloucestershire nor Burnley. But hell, what a city London is.

This is a Britain where metro-hatred and provincial arse-licking has led to such fatuous absurdities as the farcical moving of the entire BBC sports department to Salford months before the Olympic Games come to London. Read that back twice and forbear to weep, groan, roar or wet yourself laughing.

Where does one begin with the BBC's "regionalism"? They destroy local radio but move to Salford to "appease" the North. As if "the North" is one place! Do they think the citizens of Sunderland and Leeds are cheering because there's a new BBC media centre in Salford? I should think even Mancunians are pissed off by it, let alone Geordies or Lakelanders. In-fucking-sane. But don't get me started. Oh – you did.

Takes deep breath. Calms down.

Right…

Central London, like all great capitals, has its grand cathedrals, palaces, memorials, parks, public spaces, fashionable shopping districts and wild Bohemian quarters.

But also, like most great cities, it has its hidden secrets. Tiny little gardens, yards, alleyways, statues, institutions and passageways that maybe just metres away from the thronging concourses of Leicester Square or Cheapside, and yet are as quiet and undisturbed as a village churchyard.

One of my favourite areas of London is St James's, that area bounded to the north by Piccadilly, to the south by the Mall and St James's park, to the east by Haymarket and to the west by the Ritz and Green Park. Of course the very name summons up the worst images of elitism, aristocracy and old-fashioned, self-serving grandiosity. This is London's clubland. Whites, Brooks's, the Carlton Club, Boodles, Bucks, the Reform, the Athenaeum, the Oxford and Cambridge, the Travellers and even Pratt's (it's true). For all but a tiny percentage of you reading this, such places are at best amiably preposterous hangovers from a bygone age and at worst a symbol that Britain is still the same hide-bound, class-bound society it ever was.

I'm not going to go into all that. I'm just speaking of one who loves to wander around. I love to glance up at Blue Plaques and try to recreate in my mind the days of horse: when phaetons, landaulets, berlins, curricles, stage coaches and grand equipages dominated the streets that are now owned by vans, Boris bicycles, motorbikes, taxis and cars.

Let us just look at St. James's Square in particular. Whenever I pass the north east corner I marvel that the memorial to WPC Yvonne Fletcher is never unattended. There are always fresh flowers and hand-written notes. In 1984 a member of the Libyan mission shot and killed her from a window of the embassy during at anti-Gaddafi demonstration which she was helping to police. The murderer got away, such are the laws that govern diplomatic immunity. It is hard not to whisper now, as I pass, "Don't worry. He's gone now." If I thought that way, I would fancy that she is now sleeping more soundly.

Just next door to the ex-embassy is the house where Nancy Astor lived and entertained. It now has an "IN" painted on the left hand column of its portico and an "OUT" on the right hand. This is typical English eccentricity. I'll tell you how it came about.

Lord Palmerston, the 19th century prime minister, used to live in a fine mansion on the north side of Piccadilly called Cambridge House. It was so grand it that it had a carriage sweep, with one gatepost marked IN and another marked OUT to prevent collisions and assist the flow of arrivals and departures. After Palmerston's death the house was sold and turned into a club, called the Naval and Military (not to be confused with the Army and Navy or United Services or Cavalry Club, oh no siree. This is clubland, nothing's that simple). The Naval and Military club's nickname, on account of the gateposts, was "The In and Out".

Fast forward many decades and the Navy and Military moves to Number 4, the old Astor homestead in the North east corner of St James's Square (by the way, note that it is always St James's ­– never just St James). These new premises have no carriage drive or gateposts, but the Naval and Military painted up a completely meaningless "IN" and "OUT" either side of the front door just so that it can keep its affectionate nickname. Batty but  somehow adorable.

Even battier is the name of just one of the other clubs in St James's Square. The East India, Devonshire, Sports and Public Schools. I mean, what? You couldn't make it up.

Elsewhere it's all a bit corporate. BP have their HQ there as do Rio Tinto Zinc and other so-called "blue chip" companies. The address still has great cachet around the world.

On the north west side is Chatham House, Britain's leading foreign office think tank. William Pitt the Elder (later Earl of Chatham) lived there. You may be familiar with the "Chatham House Rule", a protocol agreed at meetings between politicians (or indeed businessmen or any other group of people). The rule is understood to mean: "whatever is said here can be repeated outside this room, but you can not say who said it or who was present at the meeting." They use this phrase around the world now I believe.

But I want to concentrate your attention to the building in the north west corner, between Chatham House and the afore-giggled-at East India, Devonshire, Sports and Public Schools Club.

The London Library.

The London Library is, I believe I am right in saying, the world's largest independent lending library. Which is to say it is not affiliated to a university, it is not owned or subsidised by any local council, by government or any public body. It was founded by, amongst others, that monumental man of letters Thomas Carlyle. The list of current and past members is astonishing. Darwin, Dickens, Gladstone, Thackeray, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, Agatha Christie, Rudyard Kipling, J. B. Priestley, T. S. Eliot … and these days members include its president Tom Stoppard, and writers like Sebastian Faulks, A. S. Byatt, Claire Tomalin, Simon Shama and, even, er, me.

You wouldn't believe that its modest entrance (well I agree it's a grand address, but there is a more discreet back door in Mason's Yard behind) could reveal so remarkable and beautiful a building.

There are fifteen miles of shelves containing over a million books dating back to the very beginning of printing: you can clamber across the marvellously mysterious original 1890s catwalks and gantries or luxuriate in the light and modern Art Room. They never throw a book away and there are NO FINES! You can keep a book as long as you like or until another member asks for it, in which case a polite letter will ask if you could return it at your earliest convenience.

Art Room of the London Library © Paul Raftery

 

You don't have to live in London, in fact a third of the over 7,000 members live outside the city. There's a postal loans team who'll send you the book you want, and there are unique internet archives (including every past edition of the Times newspaper as well as dozens of scholarly journals and databases).

One of the miracles of this unique institution is the quality of the staff. They seem to know where everything is and will hunt down what you're after with zeal and good humour. Some of the cataloguing is inspired. The Science and Miscellaneous collection is especially highly prized. Books about Coffee, Explosives and Dreams jostle happily alongside works on Home, Duels, Yachts and Cheese.

You can bring in your laptop and find just the cranny, desk, table or sofa where it best suits you to work, study, chase ideas or dream.

The London Library is one of Britain's best kept secrets. Because it's private there is an annual fee, which is reduced for young people, but which I won't pretend is a small consideration. Nonetheless the advantages are enormous and just think what a present it would make for someone you love. Subscription to a place that can become a mixture of college, West End Club, snug, den, writing room and welcoming island – and all just a stone's throw from Piccadilly Circus.

London Library Lightwell © London Library 2011

I know that municipal libraries are feeling the pinch horribly. Feeling the punch might be more accurate, right in the solar plexus, and of course many of us are anxious to believe that public libraries have a real future in the internet age. The London Library may seem like an elitist enclave, but actually it is just another example of what great cities can achieve over time and can keep alive with care and continuity. Its existence isn't a threat and never has been, to public libraries, or to the great British Library in St. Pancras. It costs no more than many gyms, and what gyms can do for your body, this magical place can do for your mind.

If the subscription is beyond your reach I'm sorry to have tempted you, but maybe it won't always be thus, and maybe you can save up or hint to an aunt or uncle… there are student prizes offered too.

Anyway. I have no vested interest in getting you to join other than the enthusiasm that anyone who enjoys something is anxious to communicate.

x

Stephen Fry

Their website is London Library and, bless them, they're on Twitter and their Facebook page is http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-London-Library/198017356050 You can also Email: visits@londonlibrary.co.uk for news of free guided tours.