Mark Watson's Blog, page 5

Why awards ceremonies make me shudder

The tuxedos, the thank you speeches, the host with his in-jokes. I can

Nature/nurture

I'm afraid I don't know the name of anything that grows.

I'm sitting outside my room in a nice hotel somewhere in Hampshire (or, to be less James Bond about it, Winchester). The baby -- my charge for the evening -- is sort of asleep just the other side of the door. I'm enjoying the last of the sunshine; I have a glass of wine; things are about as good as they can be. (See how the optimism is working? I could have said "As good as they can be, given the cancellation of We Need Answers" or "...

Can anyone help this man?

Readers! Help me play agony uncle to Chris.

As you'll know if you have been following my blog -- and I apologise if not, as some of this won't make much sense -- a number of themes have recurred many times already, and will continue to recur. They include setting ourselves personal challenges and working on them collectively (as seen in the Ten-Year Self-Improvement Challenge [TYSIC:], which I will be summarising later this week); embarking on bizarre team efforts (like the iPod, which...

I didn't go to Live 8 or wear a "Make Poverty History" wristband

So about this Senegal trip.

I had mixed feelings about taking it on, and not just because it would involve leaving my very small baby with my very tired wife in order to go somewhere where I might not be able to contact them. That's right, in some parts of Senegal, they don't even have a functioning 3G network. Imagine.

And that wry remark is a clue to the source of my unease, which is that I've always felt a bit odd about rich people going out to Africa, posing in front of cameras for a...

My Over the Rainbow addiction

The fact is, I just love competition.

This weekend saw the final of Over The Rainbow, the BBC series in which a selection of massive-eyed, desperate girls competed for the role of Dorothy in a new West End production of The Wizard of Oz, presided over by Andrew Lloyd-Webber. For many people, the above sentence summarises most of what is awful about the BBC, light entertainment, and the world in general. OK, we're all now accustomed to the fact that it is not possible for anyone to be...