How to fight crime: adopt-a-criminal

Had a thought today heading down the M40 back to London after another Michelin-starred client lunch: there's a much easier way to solve Britain's crime problem.

As noted below, there's a list of about 100,000 people in Britain collectively responsible for practically all crime. These 100,000 are all known to the police; many are regular offenders. Current police strength (2002 government report) is 126,000.

So how about this: when a young policeman qualifies, give him one person on that list, and his job for the next year is to stick closer to him than his own shadow.

If he's successful - i.e. his person commits no crimes during that year - give the young policeman a promotion and pay rise, and assign him a criminal a few places up the list. This gives every young policeman some well-defined and easily quantifiable criteria with which to plan his career path, and frees up the lowest criminals to be reassigned to that year's crop of newly-qualified cops.

This makes the job of policing completely matched to ability and ambition. If you're happy being a constable, just learn about shoplifters and pickpockets; they're all you'll ever have to deal with. But if you have designs on being an Inspector, you need to get to know all the local drug lords and car theft kingpins, so you'll be ready to adopt your given criminal when the promo arrives.

The advantages of this 'discriminatory' approach are huge. First, it concentrates on convicted criminals only; citizen-hassling measures like the random search I was subjected to on Saturday just don't happen. The mass of paperwork, detailing ethnic profiles etc, becomes unnecessary, since the police can honestly say they're concentrating on people known to have committed a crime. And the top criminals get the best, most ambitious cops assigned to them as a matter of course. Less equal treatment of rights - but only to people who've demonstrated they deserve it.

Best of all, it leaves 26,000 cops free to do 'normal' police work, striding up and down safe city streets and entirely crime-free neighbourhoods bobbing up and down saying 'Evenin' all.'

So let's bring in some real accountability to British policing. Instead of all this pretense of equality and impartiality, let the cops concentrate on the real criminals. By taking away some rights from the criminal few, perhaps the 599 in every 600 citizens who don't have a record can start reclaiming theirs.

The secret policeman's blog

But as a corollary to last night's brief encounter, this policeman's blog is awesome.

I'm a suspected terrorist!

It's only a matter of time before it starts happening to everyone; I just didn't think New Labour's thinly-disguised thuggery would jackboot its way into my life so directly. Last night I got stopped and searched as a suspected terrorist.

I know it was terrorism, because reading the back of the receipt, that's the only circumstance in which the cop doesn't have to give his name. Following the bag search, and giving an excuse of 'Now I need to give you a receipt', he proceeded to take my name, address, and a personal description. I wonder what happens to these records? There's no confidentiality statement. (I wonder what my 'build' description - 'Prop' - means too, in light of recent appropriate language guidelines.)

Britain has been sliding into a police state ever since New Labour arrived in Downing St; it seems the process is now complete. This government - and the police and civil service it's succeeded in politicising - can now, it seems, do anything it wants, with barely a whimper. Overturning legal precepts a thousand years old.

The ancient right against unreasonable searches - gone. Elsewhere on the statute books, other centuries-old legal principles - lawyer-client privilege; freedom of association; right to a private life; all are fading from Britain's statute books faster than a watercolour in sunlight. The common thread: this Government hates the thought that British citizens might be doing things and not telling the government about them. Even if it's just a quiet beer and burger in the West End on a Saturday evening.

These people will soon be able to lock you away, without reason or charge, for three whole months instead of 24 hours. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. (We will, however, collect $200 from you, soon-to-be-ID-card-holding member of the British public, for the privilege of making it easier for us to arrest you.)

Of course, it had nothing to do with me looking suspicious, and everything to do with me looking co-operative. I hadn't done anything; the cop knew that, I knew that. (What have I done wrong recently? Hmmm, I vaguely remember a parking ticket in 1989.) He just detained me as an easy way of 'making his numbers'. He nodded when I asked if it was to check he wasn't stopping too many black people. It's possible I contributed to it simply by wearing an orange shirt, which would make the 'subject's description' part of the form nice and easy.

And that's the whole problem. Laws like the anti-terror ones make everything nice and easy - for the people who write them. They don't have to justify them, don't have to concern themselves with the way every bad law gets used in ways never intended (throw an 82-yr old heckler out of a conference hall when he embarasses New Labour ministers, anyone?) Bad laws just affect everyday people, while the government basks in the smug satisfaction of Doing Something. Everyone's a wrongdoer in Blair's Britain. You must be, because we said you are.

That said, I don't blame the cop: I got the impression he was as disturbed by his night's assignment as I was. While I have no love for the police, this wasn't a police action: it was a political action, straight from the desks of Blair, Blunkett, Hoon and Straw. And Britain continues hardening, as the police state truly gets a grip.

A hardcore of fewer than 100,000 people in the UK commit 99.2% of all crime; 50% of all crime is committed by just 5000 or so of them, and all these people are well known to the police. With this everyone's-a-suspect policy swamping useful information in a tidal wave of noise, that hardcore must be laughing.

Fade to colour

I'm big on the black. I mean, I wear black exclusively: all black, all the time. Black 501s, black T shirts, black suits and black shirts, and if I ever wore ties they'd be black. Easy to match, easy to get dressed, and it makes my dry cleaner very happy.

The trouble is, I've grown to realise that all-black loses the power of black. Black only retains its blackness if it's set against something that isn't black. (To quote Holly from 'Red Dwarf' when asked why she hadn't noticed a black hole: 'The thing about black holes is, they're black. And the thing about space - the colour of space - yer basic space colour - is... it's black.') So I bit the bullet at the weekend and bought a selection of strongly coloured shirts. Dark green, blue, wine-red, there's even an orange and a purple one in there. My wardrobe now resembles a paint shop.

There's worse. My fave shirts are Ralph Lauren's 'custom fit' - they taper in at the waist, which helps when you've got fairly broad shoulders and a fairly narrow waist - and Ralph helpfully makes them in about 20 colours; like any obsessive male I now want the full set, and not just the casual Oxfords; I'm seriously thinking about the dress shirts at £175 each. I'm in the grip of clever retailing, and my credit card is really going to suffer.

So... my days of being all black are over. But I can take some comfort from the way the coloured shirts are accentuating the black suits, giving it context and meaning. Black is still king. I'll just keep telling myself that. :-)

Undaunted by travel

Daunt Books! One of my favourite places in London. The 19th century shop has been in business since Edwardian times, and its shelves are less like a bookshop, more like the personal library of someone who clocked up one helluva lot of Air Miles. Sniff around as much as you like; you won't smell a CRM system or data mining software here. Like an Oddbins wine shop, it sells things its owner wants to sell, and it's all the better for it.

Daunt's retail space is stupidly wonderful: a perfectly-proportioned oblong room with shelves on three communicating floors, including an internal walkway and a big hole leading down to the basement. Daunt is famous for travel books. I'm in an expansive mood - it's the one weekend of the year I buy clothes, and £400 has been added to Ralph Lauren's topline so far today - so blowing £62 on travel guides and a Penguin of Bocacchio's Decameron doesn't seem such a big deal.

There's a conundrum here, I know. I can't stand that self-aggrandising grab-bag of cliches known as 'travel writing', and Daunt is big with the Brysons. But while I hate travel writing, I love guidebooks. In my teens I wandered cloudlike through Lonely Planets before hitting the Rough when I railed across Europe and America for real, returning to the Yellow Bible when I lived and worked in Asia. But today I think I found a new love: the DK guides, packed with photos and maps instead of opinionated text.

They're less about this year's restaurant or the cheapest hotel; the DK guides focus on the big stuff, Taj Mahals and Alhambras and Louvres, and let you work out where to eat and sleep. (Which is the right way to do it. Next time someone tells you about a wonderful little noodle shop they found in Thailand, check Lonely Planet. That's where they found it.) And because the maps are hand-illustrated and the photos in colour, the DK books bring places to life before you get there. I walk away with India, France, and Italy in a little cloth bag. And my fondness for this little shop undaunted.

H&M: Harpies and murderers

There are some extremes of advertising that no agency should ever breach. Ads so intrusive yet unrewarding that they do nothing except steal precious moments from your life ... minutes that you'll never, ever get back. Ads that take without giving, and do it in the most painful way possible.

And that appalling short film for a clothing chain is the worst of them.

Yes, before I pay for any film in future, I'm going to ask if that utterly abominable 10-minute 'Romeo & Juliet' ad for H&M is showing. And if the answer's Yes - I'm walking out. If I do this enough times, the cinema manager will get the message. That ad's gotta go.

It's not merely a bad ad: it's a hideous, utterly predictable but badly-paced short film of some kids and a gun while some generic 'diva' explores her vocal range, randomly caterwauling up and down the scales just because she can. During the ad's creation, the agency would've used words like 'crossing racial boundaries', 'ethnic identity', 'empathy with urban life' and the like. On the screen, it's a piece of trash so bad, I actually buried my face in my hands while it was on.

I mean, could it actually be deliberate? It's hard to make something that bad without REALLY TRYING. They've taken every camera angle and cinematic technique that looked fresh when first used (10 years ago) and tried to recreate them using retarded chimpanzees as the production team. If you think I'm joking - think again. It really is that bad.

OK, so I'm not exactly H&M's target customer. I was in Ralph Lauren's Bond St cave today; was I mentally tossing a coin between a preppy £65 Oxford shirt and a £5 top for pregnant council estate teenagers from Oxford Circus? No. But that's missing the point: even to teens, this ad isn't interesting, because it doesn't convey the genre it's trying to imitate. There are things you like, things you don't like, and things that are just plain bad.

What the FUCK were they thinking?

Some day I might have a daughter, but I swear I will never, ever, buy her anything whatsoever from H&M.

Neil French bites the dust

The truth hurts: female creative directors have effectively got my old boss the sack. He's a guy who delights in being politically incorrect, and even if you know why it's true - there just aren't enough female CDs around to make the average quality very high; it's the same with motor racing or professional boxing - it seems the girls in the audience took exception seriously enough to worry WPP head Martin Sorrell. (Although knowing each of them, I'd guess both men had a laugh about it over the phone.)

What was he doing still working at 61 anyway? He was on a million bucks a year when I last saw him, and that was five years ago.

Met head honch to quit?

Hmmm... pity it had to be over a single media event rather than his career record - but it looks like Metropolitan Police Chief Ian Blair is on his way out.
This Blair, like his namesake at No 10, is scarier than any terrorist, because he's one of the quiet ones: intelligent, soft-spoken, a picture of calm reason. Yet in his own way, he's badder than the maddest of mullahs. Just like Tony, he's made the mistake of confusing his personal beliefs with his job description: he thinks he's one of the chosen few, with a natural right to harrangue us about what we ought to believe and how we should be behaving.

Blair believes that arresting Kate Moss for her cocaine use is a good use of police time. (Maybe he just wants an excuse to drop by her flat.) And a 'duty' to prosecute middle-class drug users 'as an example'. (Really? Aren't police there to stop crime, rather than lecture us on private morals or conduct public floggings in some kangeroo court of his opinions?)

To reach the top of the UK's biggest police force takes a lot of qualities: toughness underneath with political smarts on top. While Blair may be going, it's likely his replacement won't be any different. And Britain continues to sleepwalk into a police state.

Lookin' for Jesus

A sign in the local supermarket asks for help finding a lost dog called 'Jesus'. I'd volunteer to help, except that I'd crack up laughing at the way everything would sound like a C&W song title...

- I walked around the town, huntin' high and low for Jesus.
- I looked everywhere for Jesus, but Jesus wasn't there.
- I kept callin' out for Jesus, but he didn't answer.
- I lost Jesus, and now he's never comin' back.
- You won't find Jesus in the back of your car.
- I wandered in the wilderness, just looking for Jesus.
- I'll always remember the day Jesus left.
- I called out in vain, for Jesus was gone.
- I've been lookin' for Jesus in all the wrong places.
- Have you seen my special friend? He answers to the name of Jesus.
- All I want is to throw another stick for Jesus.
- And of course, if anyone does volunteer to look for the dog, they'd have to call it a 'mission'.

What's funny is that an Isle of Dogs (ha) neighbour had a boxer called 'Satan'. Losing that dog would be even more interesting, especially at night...

"Davis attacks Cameron on drugs"

Front page of The Guardian's web edition. Now THAT'S something I'd pay to see: two prospective Tory leaders having a full-on fist fight while high on heroin.

Lord of War

After the disastrous 'Revolver', I knew I had to get back into the cinema quickly or I'd lose faith. Work has got in the way the last two weeks, but tonight: Nicholas Cage in 'Lord of War'. Makes up for everything. WHAT a film.

Brilliantly scripted, with just the right pacing - feels like an action film, even though it's not typical of the genre. And Cage is perfectly cast: a deadly arms dealer, who doesn't look deadly at all. The most terrifying thing about arms traders is that they're just that - traders. Men in suits. See it.

In other news: I did The Nike 10K today. 30,000 amateur runners puffing around London's parks, all wearing Nike T shirts. I love the sheer power of a brand that can do this - Look! My identity's so wrapped up in what I wear that I paid £45 to advertise the company! But it was a fun race, if crowded, and unlike a Triathlon's run section, I hadn't had to swim 1500m and bike 40km to get to the start.

Transport for London emails, er, running late

London's Northern Line is out for the count today, due to 'signalling equipment failures' (in fact, the guys have walked off the job) and helpfully sends subscribers to its news service an email when such things happen. (Example here.)

The email was sent at ... 13.44.

Life under water

The 2005 World Bikini Championships!

Otherwise known as my gym.

It's been a while since I got down to the pool in the evenings - usually it's a sneak-out session in the middle of the day. But I realised last night: since my gym's in the West End, it's where girls head after a hard day in the fashion business. And girls in the fashion business tend to be slim, young, and hot.

Now, you might think this is a good thing. Trouble is, I'm there to train, and it takes serious concentration to maintain your stroke when every three seconds a bikini'd blonde sluices past in the other direction. First, involuntarily holding the stroke too long in order to admire the view screws up my bouyancy, since my body starts losing its horizontal pose in the water, legs sinking and head bobbing up. Second, glancing back, forward, or even up to the poolside destroys all rhythm, and I have to reset my pace. Third, I'm no good at bilateral breathing, so I find myself doing the return leg at higher speed with only a wall to look at. None of this deliberate; my body's just responding to three million years of evolved male behaviour.

This isn't lecherous ogling, either: I simply admire the female form, and an athletic female body is truly a work of art. Sculpture and fitness - body as art, body as machine. Two sides of worshipping the peak human form. An unbeatable combination.

And as a result, I can't even break 30mins for the 1500m.

If this goes on, I'll have to switch to the City branch of this gym. I'm pretty sure flabby merchant bankers aren't going to be much of a distraction.

Travel writers: get away from it all

I realised today that I despise travel writing.

It happened in a Waterstone's, hunting down a newly-paperbacked Neal Stephenson. Passing the 'crap writing A-Z' section, I saw one titled 'Fried egg and chopsticks' or something - take one guess what the cover photo was.

I didn't even need to glance inside; the title said it all. It's one of those trite, look-at-me-aren't-I-clever, glorified diaries written by people who think the ability to get on a bus in a place where they don't speak the language somehow makes them special. Who think that having a different skin colour and a better credit rating somehow qualifies them to sum up whole civilisations on their laptop screens. Well, it doesn't, and it's about time someone said something about it. So...

Note to travel writers everywhere: I DO NOT WANT TO READ ABOUT WHAT YOU DID ON YOUR FUCKING HOLIDAYS!!!!

Maybe it's just that I've spent so much of my life overseas (oops, they've got me doing it now); but whenever I read a travel book I'm yawning within paragraphs. I can tell, from Page One, just what the book's about, where it's going, and how it's going to get there.

Look, most of us got sick of that 'Wot I did on mi holidays' stuff in junior school. Some few, perhaps longing for a childhood they wish to return to, continue writing such essays later in life, and call themselves travel writers. People desperate for approving attention, who probably still stick their hands up when the boss asks a question during a meeting. People who really, deep down, just want a gold star and an A+ at the bottom.

Well, here's your report card from me, you snivelling little twerps:

YOU ARE NOT FUCKING INTERESTING! SNAP OUT OF IT!

Your 'hilarious escapades' and 'cultural misunderstandings' do not demonstrate you're a footloose adventurer living life on the edge; they just prove you're a bumbling idiot who couldn't be bothered to prepare for his trip properly. That 'gruelling trip' (trips are only 'gruelling' for travel writers; the rest of us quite enjoy them) across the 'vast plains of this troubled region' (the only thing that 'troubled' it was your presence within its borders) on which you formed a 'strange kind of friendship with a toothless old man' (NO YOU DIDN'T!!! YOU JUST TOOK HIS MIND OFF HIS HAEMORRHOIDS!) - it all screams the same message as a thousand others when committed to paper. An ultra-smug feeling that nobody else experiences life quite as deeply as the writer, that their 'quirky approach to life' is worth an ISBN and charging money for.

Travel writers are condescending by nature, because they automatically put themselves several social strata above the people they write about. Here's a thought, travel writers: try travelling among your OWN people, and see if you feel the same sense of smug faux-wonderment at equivalent cultural events:

"My adventures began with a gruelling trip from the little-known areas of southeast London, taking the No. 7 bus to Russell Place. As the ancient Routemaster snaked through the endless Council estates of this troubled region, I formed a strange kind of friendship with the hooded young man opposite, who was carving exotic patterns into the PVC of the seat with a Stanley knife. Not speaking generational code, I could not understand his drug-addled, semiliterate mumblings, but when he threw the contents of a red cardboard packet at me - fried potatoes cut into oblongs, a staple of these people - I realised he was offering me food, and that I must give something in return. For a dreadful moment I thought my laptop - with all its precious writings! - was the only gift with which I could complete the transaction, but as he gestured with the Stanley knife in the age-old manner of his people, I somehow persuaded him to settle for my mobile phone."

Among the worst travel writers are white Americans - because everything they write is through the narrowest of cultural contexts: they see only the differences that keep us apart, not the similarities that can draw us together. Here's a thought, waspish ones: try going for a hamburger on the rough side of town, and see if you can keep my attention writing about THAT. As an American abroad, you are the most cossetted, overprotected human being within the city walls; back at home you're the same as everybody else. Can your writing survive when the crutch of the exotic gets swept away? Almost certainly not.

In fact, there's only one subgenre of travel writing worse than Americans abroad, and that's British people (always 'Brits' in this permanently jolly section of the bookshop) who've made a home in France or Spain, and then written books about... making their home in France or Spain. Go on, read them. They're practically written to a template. There'll be a chapter on the 'dramatic decision' to move abroad, followed by the chaos of moving 2.4 snot-nosed children a couple of hundred km (yeah, those EasyJet check-in queues are really bad, huh?) Then there'll be a chapter devoted to discovering problems with the heating/cooling/plumbing, where, we are assured, the 'overseas adventure' nearly came to an end, there and then. (The way these people write about a burst pipe, you'd think every house in the Dordogne is permanently on the brink of collapsing into a pile of dust.)

After that they'll document family arguments. (Husbands and wives quarrel over money and interior design - oh, be still, my heart.) Next come the 'trials and tribulations' of getting the kids into local schools, followed by the joy - or despair - of cooking your first dinner with homegrown vegetables. And at the end, a reflective chapter written a year later, in which they tell us about their now perfectly normal life, or agonise about the events which led to them giving up and going back to the UK ('Blighty'.) Either of which makes the book COMPLETELY FUCKING POINTLESS.

GROW UP, PEOPLE! THERE ARE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE DOING IT! YOU. ARE. NOT. SPECIAL!!!

(Three and a half million working adults in the UK are functionally illiterate; they have problems catching the No 7 bus, yet somehow many manage to work, draw wages, and support families. Now THAT'S hard. THAT'S something I'd read a book about, except - well, you get the idea. But a middle-class educated family driving onto a ferry to 'escape the rat race' or the 'pressures of fast-paced London life'? Do they fucking expect me to applaud that? Nowhere do they ever reflect that most people don't have the choice.)

What's worse is that travel writing has been so much better. 'Travels around my bedroom' is a masterwork. Tocqueville's America or Hemingway's Spain evoke real people and real cultures; even Gibbon's Rome is at heart a work of travel writing. These people were driven by the experience of travel, not the need to convince others how great they were.

So perhaps... all the travel writing the world needs, has already been done. In fact, I'd go further: there is NO good travel writing being done today, anywhere in the world. For the same reason there are no good oral histories in development, and no great cave-painting subculture. Times have just moved on. In a world of £10 flights and broadband, the only piece of travel writing anyone needs is a train timetable; we can do the rest ourselves.

Let's face it, travel writers are just bloggers who sniffily think they're something more. But if more of them did real blogging - putting their prose on the web, for free, having to gain an audience for themselves, taking commented criticism on the chin - they'd discover just how crap they all really are.

So if you're truly 'curious about the world', travel writer, try travelling to your local Waterstone's and looking in the fucking Remaindered bin. You'll see how many of your books are in there.

Revolver

Guy Ritchie's 'Revolver'. Where to start?

I love cinema more than most things - not just the film, but the experience of seeing a movie, sitting there in the dark bathed in the flickers and drenched in the stench of popcorn and stuck cola. I'll watch almost anything; on one quiet weekend I paid to see 'Resident Evil', twice. I even like Threes: Godfather III, Terminator III, I love all those thirds people don't rate. But 'Revolver' is one of very, very few films I actually considered walking out of.

It's not just a bad film; it may be the worst film ever made. It tries to be deep, yet it talks down to its audience, hammers their heads with endless repeated dialogue, uses captions as a substitute for thinking, worse than Deckert's voiceover in the pre-Cut Bladerunner. The premise - a convict spends seven years between a master con artist and a chess grandmaster, and through the walls of his cell learns how to execute the perfect crime - isn't fulfilled; even the camera angles aren't up to much. This is the film of a Guy who's just okay, thinking he's ten times better than he really is.

Time to face facts: Mr Madonna only had one movie in him. 'Snatch' was little more than a rescripting of 'Lock, Stock'; 'Swept Away' got swept under the carpet. And 'Revolver' seals Ritchie's fate. Walking out of the cinema, I felt cheated, cheated. Worse than M Knight Shamalamadingdong's betrayal with the weak ending of 'Signs'; beyond even that sorry overextended trailer called 'Fantastic Four'.

Go home, Ritchie. You're done here.