Sorry - the entry below wasn't supposed to be 700+ words with a second part to come. What you really should be reading tonight instead is the Save Llantrisant Post Office blog (thanks Richard). Or if even that's too much for you, have a look at something which, thankfully, defies categorisation.
It's still, just about, the time for making predictions for the year ahead. The problem with predictions, especially in the tech world, is that they have a habit of coming back way before the year's up and biting you on the behind. But on this one, I think I'm on safe-ish ground, though I wish I wasn't.
My prediction for 2008? That the public web will be decimated, and we'll only have ourselves to blame.
OK, maybe that needs a little unpacking.
What invariably delights newcomers to the internet is how public it all is. "What, you mean anyone in the world with a connection to a phone line can read whatever I want to type? That's fantastic!" Yes, of course it's fantastic. Go on, click that button. Don't be afraid. "And my holiday snaps too?" Well only if you want to. But you know, that 'Upload Photos' button's there if you ever need it. 'Ooh, and videos of me making a complete arse of myself?' Hmm, well, if you're sure...
What usually terrifies newcomers to the internet is, also, how public it all is. Or to be more specific, the full implications of that realisation that anyone in the world with internet access can read whatever you type, or photograph, or video. And that anyone really does mean anyone.
Back in the day, long before web boards were common, one of the most public things you could do on the internet was to post your thoughts to a newsgroup. One of the documents guiding you in that contained this, which had my revolution ever come about, would have been nailed to every computer with internet access:
Please remember -- you read netnews; so do as many as 3,000,000 other people. This group quite possibly includes your boss, your friend's boss, your girl friend's brother's best friend and one of your father's beer buddies. Information posted on the net can come back to haunt you or the person you are talking about.
Thirteen years on, that figure of three million makes the whole paragraph sound almost quaint, but even if the medium has mushroomed, the principle's the same. It's what burns the fingers of those bloggers (and other net users too I guess, but mostly bloggers) who think that they're talking to an audience of their close confidantes. Which they are, mostly, but then a judicious Google search blows their cover, or they change their minds on who their confidantes actually are. Then they contact their site admins or their archive delete buttons in a panic, and pray that what they've done won't cost them their friendships, their relationships, or their livelihoods. (It's an old observation, but few if any people have been sacked for the simple act of blogging. The problem's what they're blogging about.)
There is, or at least there used to be, quite a subtle distinction here between the virtual and physical worlds. I could waste another five paragraphs trying to explain it here. But I've never seen such an effective explanation of that subtlety as this one from Danny O'Brien in 2003, which with apologies to him, I'll try and butcher down to 125 words:
...In the real world, we have conversations in public, in private, and in secret. All three are quite separate. The public is what we say to a crowd; the private is what we chatter amongst ourselves, when free from the demands of the crowd; and the secret is what we keep from everyone but our confidant. Secrecy implies intrigue, implies you have something to hide. Being private doesn't. You can have a private gathering, but it isn't necessarily a secret...
...On the net, you have public, or you have secrets. The private intermediate sphere, with its careful buffering, is shattered. E-mails are forwarded verbatim. IRC [public chat] transcripts, with throwaway comments, are preserved forever. You talk to your friends online, you talk to the world...
Ah, but that was 2003, you might say, and we've got 'private' on the web now as well, haven't we? You know, social networking and that, where you choose your friends and snub your enemies? Isn't Facebook that elusive third way between public and secret that the web has been searching for?
December 22nd: Jethro Tull get mentioned in Backburner. December 29th: Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson gets awarded MBE.
December 24th: Making the Most of the (mostly BBC) Micro gets mentioned in Backburner. December 29th: one of the designers of the BBC Micro gets a CBE.
Coincidences? Yes, probably. But just in case, give John Tams and 8-bit pioneer Sophie Wilson gongs next time round...
Apart from The Peter Serafinowicz Show and late entrant, the endearingly bonkers Space Pirates, the BBC output that gave me the most pleasure this year was a TV programme all about email.
It was called At the End of the Line, and its opening shots showed a man who worked in San Francisco striding down a street in London. He wanted to keep in touch with his office. How was this possible, questioned the voiceover? Well, he simply connected his computer to his phone line, picked up his electronic mail, and acted on it.
So far, so pedestrian, but what made At the End of the Line such an astonishing watch was its transmission date: Monday 14th March, 1983. The computer in question was a pre-Macintosh Apple II, and it was attached to the phone via two sucky cups and a box described by the voiceover as a 'modulator-demodulator'. It was all very slow. You could see the electronic mail appearing block by block on the screen. But it worked.
I first watched that programme's series, Making the Most of the Micro, at the age of nine, when I was the proud owner of a Sinclair ZX81. (I'm still the proud owner of one, but it doesn't see much use these days). The programme's description of bulletin boards, worldwide libraries searchable from your home computer, and personal electronic mail must have seemed inevitable to me. Computers would all be connected together one day, wouldn't they. Wouldn't they?
Almost ten years to the day later, I managed to send my first inter-city email. It's fair to say I never looked back from there. Fourteen more years down the line, I sat watching At the End of the Line again, for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century. Only this time, I was watching it via a link to a trial service on the BBC's computers, on a connection running ten thousand times faster than the one shown in the programme. And taking all the computer wizardry for granted.
Predicting future technology's a tough job. Futurologists such as Ian Pearson and Peter Cochrane are paid well because they appear to have very finely tuned crystal balls. If you want to join their success, just hit on the right, rich seam of technology and extrapolate it into the future: it sounds easy, as long as you know where to look for the right seam to start with.
And when future predictors get it wrong, we can at least laugh at them in hindsight. Take, for instance, this long-lost clip from the BBC Archive (ok, I know it's a spoof but bear with the promised cheap YouTube link) of a group of people from 1981 trying to predict what music would sound like in the year 2000. I think Tony Rudd deserved a place in all our record collections...
According to well-informed astronomers, the winter solstice will happen in the northern hemisphere at 6.08am GMT on December 22nd. Hang on - that's today. I guess that makes it Hastily Constituted Jethro Tull Day right here on Backburner.
The Imagined Village is one of those ideas that sounds so good on paper, you suspect it'll be a complete failure in practice. The concept: take musicians as diverse as Billy Bragg (good stuff), half of Waterson:Carthy (good stuff), Transglobal Underground (good st... hey, why isn't Temple Head on YouTube?), Benjamin Zephaniah, and some bloke called Paul Weller. Get the Afro-Celt Sound System to glue them all together. Shake well in a rehearsal studio for a few weeks. Record album. Tour. And you end up with one English folk-rock supergroup. In theory.
So does it work? It shouldn't, of course. Adding gifted solo artists to existing line-ups often ends in very bad musical collisions. It should be a sludgy, cumbersome mess.
Except, as you've probably guessed, it isn't. As evidence, Cal enjoyed them so much I'm turning green at the gills. And as further evidence, here's what they've managed to do to Hard Times of Old England:
The Countryside Alliance expects, I suppose,
My support, when they're marching to bloody Blair's nose,
But they said not a word when our Post Office closed...
What I really like about their reworking (seriously, have a look at it) of the traditional song is that it's pretending to be a song about England, when in reality it isn't just about that country. It's a song that I'd file in the same category as Capercaillie's Waiting for the Wheel to Turn, June Tabor's rendering of Maggie Holland's A Place Called England, and Steve Eaves' Afrikaners y Gymru Newydd. It's a song about a small nation battling against the double-edged sword of globalisation. And it's all the more powerful for it.
It's an unusually cold and characteristically damp Swansea Saturday at the end of November, and you're not quite sure why you're here. After all, what you're about to do is something that you've managed to convince yourself many times you're not interested in. Besides, you're not even convinced that you're the type of person who would enjoy this.
You were the sort in school who, rather than run to the ring of people shouting 'Scrap! Scrap!' would suddenly remember a thousand other things you needed to do in your lunchbreak. In lessons, you'd far rather do scores of sums than write anything needing the remotest degree of imagination. And despite fitting the demographic of those who might wish to wander into the realms of fantasy, programmes from Blake's 7 to Buffy managed to pass you by. Some might argue that what you're about to do owes more than a little to role-playing, yet despite the best efforts of many people, the mere mention of that activity still gives you an involuntary twitch in the left shoulder.
All of that doesn't explain quite why you're parking your car in Mumbles, early on an overcast afternoon, and taking part in a battle practice.
A battle practice? Er, yes. For reasons best left to your subconscious, you've decided to see what the local historical reenactment group get up to on their weekends. You've decided that it would be a good idea to spend your Saturday afternoon trying to avoid being hit by spears, axes and swords, whilst hoping, probably forlornly, to do unto others as they will undoubtedly do unto you. To say the least, this is rather a left-field choice of leisure activity. But today, you're going to party like it's 999.
Like a student cramming for an exam they're doomed to fail, you run through what you already know about the group you're meeting. This turns out to be a reasonable amount, because you've known of these people for a long while. When you first came to Swansea, many years ago, you came across them in Freshers' Fair. Despite having no intention of actually joining, as the sort of student who put their name down for everything, you signed up anyway. And because they were one of the most photogenic societies there, and you had a film to use up in your camera, you foolishly returned a day later to ask whether you could take their photo.
Unfortunately for you, they wanted to include you in the picture as well. As a victim.
You did admit, much later, that the result was probably worth the jokingly extreme nature of the experience. In that one adrenaline-fuelled second you realised two things: first, that their weapons were actually blunt, and secondly, that knowing this didn't make the things a whole lot less scary.
You also know a bit about these people because this isn't the first time you've been to one of their practices. Last time, though, you weren't a participant but an interviewer, who'd seen fit to ask the student paper whether they wanted a piece on the group. A combination of your lack of organisation, and your ability to turn the most promising interview subject into the most leaden prose imaginable meant that the piece never got published. But here's the thing - all that afternoon, you were itching to have a go yourself. Being you, you never plucked up the courage to ask whether you could have a try, and the itch remained unscratched.
Until, that is, last September, when you once again came across the group at Freshers' Fair (you were only there for the freebies). Recognising the bloke in charge of the stall, you went over and had a chat.
"Oh, it's you! So will you be joining us this year then?"
"Nah, don't think so. Might have done a couple of years ago, but that moment's passed now."
"Oh well, fair enough. You know you're welcome to try it any time."
About two months before that, I'd tentatively dipped my toe into a new leisure activity. This activity was an attempt to scratch an itch, and to find out what I might enjoy doing (a topic I still have little clue about, generally, in life). And I absolutely wanted to blog about this new experience as I was tasting it for the first time. But strangely, I decided that I wanted to look back at it from a hindsight of at least six months. I wanted to reflect on how I'd been, and I was aware that the activity was so left-field and out of character, I didn't want anyone to know about it until quite a while afterwards. So I started drafting the first 400 words of the blog's very first entry. And I didn't get any further.
The file's been looking accusingly at me (as arbitrary collections of data do) for many years now, and a couple of computers later, 'wiblog admission.txt' still survives. I was thinking of ignoring it yet again. The problem is, I've just noticed the date when I first tried what I thought would be my new hobby. St Andrew's Day, five years minus a day ago: Saturday November 30th, 2002.
So, I've promised to myself - over the weekend, I'll dust down the entry (EDIT: more like 'entries'), finish it off and make all 1500 unnecessary words of it public. Even though, in terms of the activity, I decided to sod the game of soldiers after my second taster, I want to remind myself of where I was, and just what I decided to try in an unshielded moment five years ago tomorrow.
Oh, it's written in the same slightly restrictive second-person prose style that I nicked off Simon Armitage and later used in Nine Days' Wonder to such effect ('trite, smart alec... not as clever as it thinks it is' - hmm, maybe I'll link the TLS review instead.)
The website of Pete Ryder. Pete is a historic buildings consultant who has many cats. Under the guise of Meady-Ochre Music, he happens to sing a silly song about his daughter visiting Australia, with a chorus about wombats that goes down well with certain festival-going clientele. I can't tell you which CD is the one with that song on it: it's your job to find that out. Hint: he seems to me like the sort of person that doesn't mind answering email.
One for the "so what do you actually do, then?" pile, as well as a way to push up the Google ranking of the project I'm managing: SALT Cymru gets some publicity. (Or, if you prefer, dyma gyhoeddusrwydd i SALT Cymru.)
Oh, and having used up his stock of two, the SALT Cymru press officer (i.e. me) is in need of some more saline puns, in Welsh or English. Any offers gratefully received, apart from the ones about 'salient points', cause that's not the same etymology...
The leader article in this month's Third Way ('that necessity for all thinking Christians with money to waste', as its reviews editor once put it) is, lo and behold, the beginning of Rowan Williams' Swansea University lecture.
And nestling at the bottom of the editorial is the footnote that the lecture transcript is now available on archbishopofcanterbury.org, which sure enough, it is, here. So given that you can now actually read what the man said, and given how close I've been to becoming a Low Anglican version of BBC Four recently, I faithfully promise this'll be my last post about all this.
At best, I'm agnostic when it comes to rugby. Yes, I know that doesn't fit with me being raised in the Gwendraeth Valley, the secret location of Wales' national fly-half factory as immortalised by Max Boyce. To the despair of my late father (a life-long Llanelli supporter, a lifetime debenture holder at the old Cardiff Arms Park) I showed neither the inclination, nor particularly the aptitude, to excel at the sport. At school, my father was briefly in the same First XV as Carwyn James, famed Scarlets and British Lions coach. In his teens and twenties, my dad played for Cefneithin RFC, a fearsome and respected local team. It's fair to say that his rugby-playing genes passed me by. Suffice it to say you're lucky if I can even catch a ball, ovoid or spherical, and asking me to run with it is really pushing your chances.
But even rugby-ambivalent me can't escape paying tribute to Ray Gravell, who was buried today. He was more than merely one of the best centres Wales is ever likely to see. He was more than a double Grand Slam winner, or legendary member of that Llanelli side that beat the All Blacks in 1972 (a whole year before my birth, but still something that resonated through my childhood). He was a gentleman in the literal sense of the word, and as fine a broadcaster and communicator as he was a rugby player.
Most people who met Grav have a story to tell, so here's mine: a long-suffering school friend and myself had taken it on ourselves to create a radio programme for a competition in the Urdd Eisteddfod. As part of that (and I'll admit, the main reason we wanted to do it) I managed to wangle us a visit to the BBC studios on Alexandra Road in Swansea. It was a Wednesday in a 1991 half-term. We were there to interview Sulwyn Thomas, then a Radio Cymru equivalent to today's Jeremy Vine. Over weekday lunchtimes, Sulwyn hosted a phone-in show and endured highly opinionated callers. Grav was in the Radio Cymru office, preparing for his next request show, having finished that week's live broadcast a few hours previously.
It was coming up to the midday news, and Sulwyn had to end his spiel at precisely 11:59 and 54 seconds in order to leave a clear gap between him finishing and the time signal pips starting. His task was not to crash the pips. Crashing the pips, in radio, is regarded as something of a mortal sin. You should at all costs avoid it on live broadcasts but it's sometimes inevitable (listen to the end of most Today programmes if you want proof). And sure enough, at 11:59 and 55 seconds, Sulwyn crashed the pips.
12:00 and 4 seconds it was, the news was coming from Cardiff, and the imposing presence of Grav had rushed into the control room. Sulwyn's producer rolled his eyes. We hurriedly switched our microphone on and hit Record on our cassette deck. Grav crescendoed:
"He crashed the pips! Sulwyn crashed the pips! GRAV NEVER CRASHES THE PIPS - GRAV SHATTERS THE PIPS TO SMITHEREENS! HE SAYS - 'LOOK HERE PIPS, I'LL GIVE YOU PIPS! I'LL PIP YOU TO THE LEFT, I'LL PIP YOU TO THE RIGHT, AND IT'LL BE PIP PIP HOORAY TO THE LOT OF YOU!'"
And then, he switched out of broadcast mode, had a genial chat with us both, wished us all the best for the Urdd competition, and was gone to madly career about Sulwyn's studio for the rest of the 3-minute bulletin.
And that's how I'll remember Grav, because that's what he was to me - receptive to people's needs, a clown when called for, serious when not. I could go on and say how he lent his name to an accent, or how my mum still swears blind that we're distantly related - our family were Grevilles from the same area as Grav, so she may well have a point. The rest of Wales may remember him differently, but I'll remember him as the guy whose stream of time-signal-related consciousness helped us win that competition sixteen years ago, and I'll appreciate him for that.
Without descending into soggy untheological cliché, here's hoping that Grav is now somewhere where no-one ever crashes any pips. If they do, though, I'm sure he'll be on hand for the entertainment.
Backburner 
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