The soundtrack to your life

If, like me, you have a large, unalphabetised and long-unvisited collection of vinyl, the Ion USB is like an instant time machine that will transport the soundtrack to your teenage life onto your iPod within minutes. Turn the past into the future, goes the marketing spiel. And it does. The turntable comes bundled with Audacity software (good for PCs or Macs) and Bias Soundsoap 2 which irons out some of the worst cracks and splutters of those much-abused discs. My own time journey is so far incomplete but an unexpected rediscovery were several of John Cooper Clarke's idiosyncratic works or oeuvres as I feel they should be called. Like Morrissey but funnier and darker, the sardonic Cooper Clarke still pounds the circuit in his black drainpipes, big hair and outsized sunglasses. The bard of Salford delivers his bleak vision through devastating puns in a flat Northern monotone against what are often trite tunes.  His first LP – Où est la maison de fromage? – was released in 1978 just as the Sex Pistols were shaming glam rockers into retirement. More recently The Arctic Monkeys cite Cooper Clarke as a major influence. It is difficult to convey the full effect through quoted lyrics but here are a few lines from Beasley Street:

The boys are on the wagon

The girls are on the shelf

Their common problem is

...That they're not someone else

If you want to, you can trace his verse back through a very British tradition - to Betjeman and Noel Coward - of small quotidian life and something nasty in the woodshed. Here he is in rare, romantic mode with I wanna be yours:

I wanna be your vacuum cleaner

Breathing in your dust

I wanna be your Ford Cortina

I will never rust

If you like your coffee hot

Let me be your coffee pot

You call the shots

I wanna be yours

I wanna be your raincoat

for those frequent rainy days

I wanna be your dreamboat

when you want to sail away

Let me be your teddy bear

take me with you everywhere

I don't care

I wanna be yours

I wanna be your electric meter

I will not run out

I wanna be the electric heater

You'll get cold without

I wanna be your setting lotion

Hold your hair in deep devotion

Deep as the deep Atlantic ocean

That's how deep is my devotion

Books I wish I had written

I am not about to launch into a solipsistic journey into my literary passions, don't worry. But just occasionally you read a book that is close enough to your own interests or frame of mind to stand out as one you wished had been yours. Haunts of the Black Masseur by Charles Sprawson is exactly that kind of book. Subtitled Swimmer as Hero it presents an erudite but also seductive history of the culture of swimming and also vividly communicates the physical elation of moving through water from someone who has swum the Hellespont. There's Byron leaping into the surf at Shelley's beach funeral, Virginia Woolf weighting her coat pockets with pebbles before quietly walking into her Sussex river suicide, Hart Crane swallow-diving to his death in the Bay of Mexico. He reminds us that in England everyone swam naked until about 1840; that the Germans from Goethe and Thomas Mann to Leni Riefenstahl associated swimming with a Faustian quest for spiritual perfection through godlike athleticism while in the States swimming has been inextricably linked with refuge and withdrawal. There's Esther Williams and David Hockney; Edgar Allen Poe and Yukio Mishima and of course Johnny Weissmuller and Mark Spitz. The book is a great modern example of the work of a true amateur in its original meaning. I wish I had written it.

Women entrepreneurs

Tomorrow I'm meeting Jenny Fielding, who has recently arrived in London from the US. She works for a really interesting organisation called Astia whose mission it is to bring promising women entrepreneurs into supported contact with venture funds. As someone who has been meeting and writing about entrepreneurs for a good part of my career, I was curious to drill some numbers here. According to VentureOne (a Dow Jones subsidiary) in 2007, companies run by women CEOs attracted just 2.9% of available funding in the US, down from 4.52% in 2006. The UK tally is undoubtedly even worse, although perhaps tellingly, I haven't found a reliable data source. The reason is almost certainly one of closed male networks. Venture funds tend to back people they know. Ninety-four per cent of venture fund management in the US is male. In Britain, who knows? More, probably. Ergo male entrepreneurs are 20 times as likely to get funded as their female counterparts.

Astia has an astonishing track-record of getting bright women entrepreneurs early stage funding in Silicon Valley. Running a pilot last year in New York, 70 per cent of companies who had been accepted into the Astia programme, got funded. Jenny Fielding is here to replicate the model in London and it will be fascinating to see how it works. There are, of course, some great examples of young women entrepreneurs – Christina Domecq (SpinVox), Sarah McVittie (Textperts), Julie Meyer (Ariadne Capital), Susie Willis (Plum-Baby), Cary Marsh (Mydeo) – but they (or rather we) are not winning this game en masse. Spectacularly failing at it, actually.

Beijing: three consecutive dotted letters

Apart from Beijing, I can only think of two other words with three consecutive dotted letters - Fiji and hijinks. 

Beijing and the odd world of statistics

I don't know if you heard Professor David Forrest on Radio 4's Today Programme yesterday, talking to Evan Davies about Olympic medal ranking? David Forrest is something of a world expert on sport economics and has proved a statistically strong link between a country's GDP and its medal ranking, so the USA will top the medal board so long as it remains the world's richest economy. China can be expected to do better and better in medal rankings as its economy grows. No great surprise, you might think: richer countries can afford better facilities for their sporting talent and have fewer demands competing for the spend. Money buys success right?

Not always. Professor Forrest went on to single out some notable anomalies to this broad correlation. Some countries spectacularly outperform their GDP-place, for example Australia, and others equally spectacularly underperform, for example India. Forrest went on to suggest some reasons for this: India's national obsession with cricket effectively channels all the national effort into one single team sport. Australia, by contrast, is strong in individual sports, especially swimming, and there are more medals to be won in the pool than anywhere else, so skewing their odds on the medal board. He also pointed out that the rankings are done by gold medals first so a country that has won a single gold will be ranked above one that may have twenty silvers. 

Listening to this piece got me thinking about the world of statistics and odds. How the way we have chosen to construct our Olympics medal boards reflects a value system that ranks being the best (gold) in a single endeavour way above coming second (silver) any number of times. 

As we in the UK provide fewer and fewer measures of real excellence, preferring to get more into a broader category ('A' grades at 'A' level or first class degrees), something tells me we're missing the point badly. Go for gold, be the best, or stay at home.