Scary service

One of the things I now have to do as a home owner is keep my bank satisfied that the house is appropriately insured. This week is the 1st anniversary of taking out the insurance.

So, I just registered with my insurer's rather nifty website, going through a series of screens to prove that I knew both the policy details and my own personal details. All very normal in this day and age. I was duly rewarded with a page showing the details of my house insurance, including the fact that I had renewed the policy.

It even had the option to e-mail a 'certificate of currency' (in fact this was what induced me to register). So I rang the bank to see if their was an e-mail address to send it to as well as the mail, fax and phone options I already knew about.

The man in the call centre told me that, because I hadn't changed any details of the policy, all I had to give them was the new insured value. I did so, he told me what the previous value had been, and said something like "there you go, you don't have to worry about it for another year". I thanked him and hung up.

Just then I realised something: I hadn't told him who I was!

Everything in the conversation strongly indicated, though, that he knew exactly who I was. From my phone number.

I don't know whether to be impressed or a bit frightened. I'm so used to people asking for my name, date of birth, account number, password and so forth that it was a bit of a shock when I prepared myself for that ritual and it didn't happen. No doubt this was partly because what I wanted to do was rather trivial. All that could happen was a little box being ticked in the system to say 'leave this person alone for 12 months'.

Still, it would have been nice if he'd used my name, just to reassure me.

Thrill 4-20: Another Place {Garlands}

19 songs, 79 minutes, and it's still not done with!

I've covered every individual song on The Beekeeper (and subsequently vowed never to do something quite like this again) from the beginning to the end. But there's another song that travels somewhere away from the others, just within sight but remaining aloof.

Tori Amos' previous album, Scarlet's Walk, came in a limited edition that, as far as the music was concerned, was nothing more than a gimmick. A nice gimmick by all accounts, especially with a much larger map to follow the album's journey across America, but as far as I am aware there wasn't a single extra note of music.

The Beekeeper limited edition has Garlands. At 8 minutes 20 seconds, it's a lot more than a gimmick. It's longer than anything on the album proper.

It's also utterly unlike anything on the album. I doubt that's the reason it didn't make the cut, as the entire album is the musical equivalent of throwing a handful of seeds and finding out where they land. I suspect the reason was the entirely practical one of fitting as many songs as possible on the CD. Garlands would have forced two other songs off.

My very first reaction to the song was fairly negative. Its length, its status as a not-quite-album track and its repetitive opening all immediately put me in mind of Apollo's Frock, a song that I find irritating because of one major flaw.

My initial bias against Garlands came to be transformed into sincere enjoyment of the song, as I gradually realised it didn't share that flaw at all.

The flaw is this: Apollo's Frock is 8 minutes and 13 seconds long. It takes a whopping 2 minutes and 42 seconds to actually get to the start of the song, structurally speaking. Everything before that is an introduction, and it's not a very good one. It repeats itself several times - there are cosmetic changes, but the harmonic progression goes round and round in circles and even sits down at the same conclusion at least three times.

Why it feels the need to set off on this journey more than once, I do not know. When I give it close consideration, I'm driven to think of a goldfish that forgets it's already seen everything in the bowl. Me? I've heard all I want at the 47-second mark (at gunpoint I'd also accept the close at around 1 minute 42 seconds).

I'm not making this up. There is now a live version of Apollo's Frock available which proves the point, because it skips the introduction and begins at the 'real' start. I greatly prefer it to the studio version for this very reason.

The reason I now like Garlands is because there are only 34 seconds of introduction, which are highly atmospheric. Everything after that is part of a massive, slow-moving structure that could be described as having a double chorus, something that is completely beyond the conception of many pop musicians. Either 'chorus' (at the words "He's on the run..." and "Circus, these Garlands...") would be sufficient in itself musically, but together they create something more complex and more satisfying as the song rises and falls.

If one accepts that tentative analysis, then that means the 'verses' are the parts that are dominated by the figure I initially feared as the repetitive reminder of... that other song, but that I now find meditative and mesmerising. It takes me into a cold, withdrawn world from which the two 'choruses' rise passionately into flower.

It's fitting that the song sits apart from its sisters, because it's able to look after itself. As I've written each of these 20 posts, I've played the relevant song on a kind of non-continuous repeat. Press play, listen, type, keep typing for a little while in the silence before pressing play again.

Some of the songs became a bit tiresome if I took too long to finish drafting the post. In contrast, I've finished here now but I'm not remotely tired of Garlands even though I'm hearing it for (I think) the fifth time in succession. No higher praise is necessary.

Thrill 4-19: Is This Goodbye? {Toast}

There's a fine line between being overly sentimental and being genuinely touching.

I think that for me it has something to do with understatement. Consciously going for the emotional buttons in a big way tends to make me react against the attempt, whereas if an artist simply does their job and lets me choose how to react, it works much better.

Toast is an understated little song about fond memories that I find quite moving. Nothing more than piano and acoustic guitar, it says goodbye with a smile amongst the sadness. As I understand it, Tori is singing to (or about) her brother who died only a short time before the album The Beekeeper was completed, which I admit adds to the poignancy. It certainly seems to be a heartfelt song.

In my opinion it's far more effective than the similarly themed 1000 Oceans, which both lyrically and musically seemed to be urging me to feel something that wasn't quite there. Oceans is hardly a bad song, but by the standards of Tori Amos it's a little formulaic. Sometimes I'm happy to accept the formula and connect with the song, sometimes not.

The idea of this series of posts was to be about 'the thrill of the new'. It's a little hard to talk about newness with an album you've owned for about nine months, so instead I shall report that I have now listened to Toast a great many times, and not once has it failed to make me feel something.

Immunity blues

As anyone who's studied biochemistry can tell you, the immune system truly is one of the wonders of the human body. I can't help feeling though that it could do with a bit of redesigning.

It seems to spend a significant amount of its time attacking the wrong things.

The list of auto-immune ailments really is quite long. Countless individuals suffer arthritis because their joints are inflamed for no obvious reason. Almost all the women in my mother's family have a condition where they have antibodies to their own thyroid glands. My sister can no longer indulge her love of avocado, having somehow become sensitised to it. And I, along with a large part of the local population, am battling hayfever.

It nearly drove me crazy this morning. More than an hour after I took a tablet, I could hardly think because all my effort was going into breathing and not letting my nose run.

I resent having to take a drug to try and stop my body producing histamines. Can't it figure out for itself that rye grass is a not a threat to my health?

It could be worse though. I can't imagine how the immune system can get things wrong to the extent that a mere whiff of a peanut could kill, but there are people in that situation.