On the weekend Mrs. Toad and I used a City Car Club car to tool around the place trying to find a camera for the Toad Sessions.  They’re really useful things to have available, those cars, because you sign up to the scheme, they’re all over the city and whenever you need one you just take it.  Easy peasy.

Anyhow, when we turned on the stereo it turned out someone had left a compilation CD in the player when the car was last used, and the first song that came from the speakers the second we pressed the on button was the wonderful Can’t Hurry Love by Phil Collins the Concretes.  This is hardly a well-known song, or at least so I would have said.  Not obscure exactly, but it was a genuine surprise to hear it.  Fascinated, I flicked back to the start of the CD – The Concretes was song six or seven or something like that – and what should come on but The Boy With the Arab Strap by Belle & Sebastian.  It was like a gift from the gods of music nerdery!

Next came a couple of Arctic Monkeys songs – Fake Tales of San Francisco and Mardy Bum, two of their better ones – and then something else I can’t remember, and then this bizarre bit of music that sounded quite like Ian Dury & the Blockheads, but wasn’t.  By this point I was singing the praises of our mysterious benefactor as if he or she were some sort of benevolent indie god.  It didn’t last, unfortunately.  There was some shitty hip hop after that and then it descended into the sort of shit you imagine an ageing indie kid might be forced to put on his compilation by his girlfriend.  That sounds rather sexist, and it is, but Mrs. Toad said it before I did, so sod off.

So it may not have ended up as the euphoric celebration of indie serendipity which it teasingly suggested it might be in the beginning, but it was still a wonderful accident of circumstance, particularly starting with that Concretes track.  And it got me to thinking how cool it would be to make a pile of Song, by Toad mix CDs and then rent City Car Club cars one at a time and every time leave a little musical present behind when we return the car.  It would be amazing.  I suppose a lot of people would just think it was shit and throw it out, but I wonder how many people would listen.  And how populist do you think you’d have to make something for them to stick with it long enough to discover some hidden gems?

The Concretes – You Can’t Hurry Love

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Belle & Sebastian – The Boy With the Arab Strap

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I barely know how to react when I read articles like this one. A large part of me is on the verge of launching into a massive rant about self-obsessed fuckwits who manage to turn something as incredibly simple as diet into the carnival of self-loathing naval gazing that it has become.  And another part of me is just sad.

Funnily enough, I think I went to school with Michael Pollan, who wrote the article. Not as mates, but I think he was a few years ahead of myself and Mrs. Toad at Vienna International School. Maybe it’s a different Michael Pollan.

Anyhow, yes, food. Well his first three sentences read thus: Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly Plants.  A masterpiece of economical, impactful writing. Michael (or Mr. Pollan I suppose, if it’s not the fellow from Vienna) goes on to explain that food does not mean Food Products, it means actual, fresh, raw ingredients. But honestly, is any of this news to anyone? I read the article, and beyond the interesting explanations of the politics of the food industry and their lobbyists, and a little about the biology that means sugars are no longer slowly digested by our systems when we ingest them and instead flood into us unchecked, there’s not much there that isn’t amazingly fucking obvious.

Does anyone, anyone out there really think that when they eat things from containers labelled Really Incredibly Healthy and Organic and Pure and, erm, Cuts Carbon Too! that they are eating anything more than the same old processed shit that they are in the other boxes? People fiddle with certain quantities of trivial levels of particularly buzz-worthy ingredients (No Transfats! Bursting with Omega 3*!) and peddle it to us like the idiots that we are.

Eat fresh food all the time and cut down on the meat. Not too much booze either. It’s fucking obvious. I know when I am straying from this advice, and I know I have to accept the consequences. What’s the fucking problem? Are we that desperate to excuse our lack of self-control? Our greed? Or are we just really, really stupid as a species? Eat less, get some exercise, don’t eat shit. How many millions have been spent pimping hugely over-elaborate versions of that really simple and really obvious statement?

I really should start Mr. Toad’s Stop Fucking Moaning Life Coaching, shouldn’t I. I might have a slightly higher than usual suicide rate, but a few weeks of being told to shut the fuck up, stop whining and just get the fuck over yourself would do most patients a lot of good. And dishing out a good beating to those exploitative charlatans like Patrick fucking Holford and that witch-faced coprophiliac Gillian McKeith wouldn’t do anyone any harm either.

The sad part is that it is in absolutely no-one’s interests to point out that this just isn’t that complicated an issue.  Two hugely parasitical industries – the big pharma companies and the alternative medicine quacks – make millions from fuelling the prevaricating and the self-indulgent hand-wringing.  The shrinks profit from all the neuroses and the marketing whores and the manufacturers benefit from peddling us all this tosh.

Even the NHS, who actually would benefit from people following the simplest and most effective advice, can’t be that blunt because it quite simply is neither self-obsessed enough for most people, nor does it place the blame anywhere other than our own doorsteps.  We all know we should eat fresh food, presumably, so if we are not doing it then who else can possibly be to blame but ourselves?  Unfortunately that is not a very 21st Century answer.

The Fall – Eat Y’rself Fitter
Great Lake Swimmers – Put There by the Land
Belle & Sebastian – Meat & Potatoes
Eels – Hospital Food (Live at the BBC)
Willy Mason – Where the Humans Eat

* Omega 3? Fucking pointless.
**Incidentally, these antioxidant supplement pills have been comprehensively shown to do you no fucking good whatsoever. Eat your greens instead.

I read an interesting but slightly frustrating article in The Scotsman the other day, all about kids’ top ten favourite and least favourite things to read. There was a fair bit of hand-wringing about the emergence of blogs and lyrics websites in the favourites, and the inevitable presence of Shakespeare in the least favourite – not among the writers, funnily enough, but among the parents of the kids in question.

This is an age-old conservative reactionary mistake (we all have a conservative reactionary inside us somewhere, this is not a political dig) of confusing the medium with the content. There is nothing inherently good about a book, nor superficial about a website. There are some pretty shitty books out there, there really are, just as there are a massive number of pointless, vacuous websites. I have learned a lot recently from excellent blogs and sites written by the exact same professionals that write the books.

It is one of the things that people who lay into the online world as full of lies and fluff (which it certainly can be, I am not denying that) tend to forget: a lot of the time the actual, genuine experts cross media quite happily, often so they bring to bear the full weight of their knowledge and expertise unshackled by editors and sponsors with agendas and word counts. And then of course there are some very talented amateurs to be found as well.

Aside from that, the idea that books are inherently good because they are books is also silly. Have any of you seen some of the empty headed, badly written, poorly conceived, scantly characterised and just plain fucking inaccurate stuff that gets published? I have read some genuinely awful, awful books in my time.

Websites are interesting because they drive home what is going to become one of the central skills of the internet era: the ability to interpret the quality of information. Anyone who thought history class was pointless is suddenly going to have to think again, because the concept of primary and secondary sources and the ability to evaluate the agenda of the writer is becoming crucial. This always existed with books, but people tended to be less aware of it. Political and historical books in particular have always needed careful scrutiny for the bias of the author, and often the publisher as well.

This is even more the case with websites, not because they’re so unreliable, but because a lot of them are very good indeed. If it was all bollocks this would be obvious fairly quickly, but it’s actually the good ones that make the crap ones harder to spot.

There is some evidence that kids are getting pretty good at evaluating what they are reading (note lack of source: bad information) and I would honestly have more faith in the abilities of people who have grown up in the internet world than people who have not. Adults are proving particularly bad at critically evaluating what they are being fed online as well. Forming little echo-chambers of people who will never challenge your opinions is pretty easy on the internet, and even when people do use evidence to add weight to their views by linking to papers and studies, they are often able to lie blatantly about the contents, safe in the knowledge that no-one will ever follow up.

So rather than teaching our kids that the internet is bad and books are good, or that people in chatrooms are paedophiles (honestly, it’s just not that easy to pick up teenagers in chatrooms, and believe me, I’ve tried) we should instead be focussing on a lesson absolutely all of us need to learn: how to tell the good shit from the bad shit and, when someone tells you something, to make sure that it is true. When the differences can be very subtle indeed and there is always someone with a lot to gain from fooling you, it is becoming both harder and way more important.

Eels – Old Shit/New Shit
Belle & Sebastian – Put the Book Back on the Shelf
The Decemberists – Billy Liar
Gene – Truth, Rest Your Head (Live)
Fela Kuti – Truth Don Die