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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
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Daily Blah for... Friday, February 24, 2006
On the Town
Most Americans are surprised to learn that I'm not from London, and that I've never really lived there. I don't know why this should come as such a shock. There are approximately 58 million people in the UK, and only 10 million of them live in the capital. So instantly suggesting that any Briton hails from London is the conversational equivalent of playing Russian Roulette with five loaded chambers -- or assuming that an American comes from California.
All of which ranting is merely to say that London is an unfamiliar and exotic place for me, too. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the city, and I was reminded of that today, traipsing around the Oxford Street area for my green card interview and embassy-mandated medical appointment on what surely must be the coldest day of the year. The wind was a bitter one, throwing grit into eyes already watery, and not even three thick layers was enough when the snow started falling while I waited in the 9:30am appointment line outside the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square.
The place, I have to say, couldn't look more like the compound of a military dictatorship if it tried. I pity the poor embassy workers, who are really pleasant people and must be quite embarrassed to go to work every day past the concrete bariers that have effectively closed off the entirety of this beautiful Georgian Square and park, through the acres of barbed wire, past the machine gun-bearing guards -- the fact that they're British bobbies made it more sinister, somehow -- and past the potential immigrants made to wait in a mismanaged queue outside, all of them cold, many of them pushing to the front, as if they have to go through an enforced training session to act like huddled masses, poor, tired and hungry, before they can enter the land of the free.
On the inside, after I was forced to surrender my Palm at the third and final security check, all was smiles and efficiency. I barely had a moment to crack open my book before I was called. The woman behind the first bullet-proof window and I had a nice conversation about her daughter wanting to be a journalist. The guy behind the second window asked just one question -- how long had I been working for Time Inc. -- before approving the green card application, pending medical exam. I was almost disappointed. Aren't you going to ask me lots of delicate questions like whether I plan to become a citizen, and what it is I do that's so special? Don't you want to take a look at the hot-off-the-presses magazine cover I edited? Here, check out my lapel pin: the stars and stripes and the Union Jack entwined.
It all seemed a perfect metaphor for post-9/11 America. Those on the outside experience nothing but the scary machine guns and the barbed wire. Within, there are droves of perfectly decent and often exceptional human beings, but they toil in obscurity. Most aren't even aware that they present such an intimidating face to the rest of the world.
Then it was back out on the bitter streets of London, with four hours to kill before my check-up. There's only so long you can sit in Selfridge's nursing a pot of tea. So I walked the streets, cursing the howling wind and the growling, smelly diesel taxies. What a dirty, overcrowded, endlessly badly-planned town London can seem sometimes. How often it strives to hide its immense wealth of culture and history behind crumbling or concrete facades.
But then my wandering took me up Marylebone high street, and the sun broke for a moment over a row of Georgian terraces, and I passed an antique shop called Blunderbus, whose old-fasioned bottle-glass windows displayed Napoleonic hats and swords, and I marvelled that the shop next door could stay in business -- had, it seemed, stayed in business since Victorian times -- selling nothing but ribbons.
In a matter of minutes, I had left the London of muggles far behind, and was browsing in a bookshop that looked halfway between a library and a church organized around a large and delightful stained-glass window. A woman was doing sums with her daughter -- not homework, mind you, but mental sums, just for fun -- and the air was thick with whispered literary anecdotes. Yes, I thought, it's possible I really wouldn't mind living in London.
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