Results tagged “Concrete Pencil”

Dan Bourke is making a few changes around here

This year my New Year Resolution is to save up enough money, by putting a bit away each month on payday, via internet banking, maybe even by direct debit, so that I can buy Canary Wharf.

And, listen up Wharfers, there are going to be some changes. Nothing too drastic, but changes nonetheless.

Dan Bourke gets his tongue in a twist over plain speaking

Do you speak plain English or do you mangle your language like its been translated online?

Into Welsh, say, and then from Welsh in Danish, and then from Danish back into English?

Dan Bourke - that big bloke from The Wharf - is going to get wet

I was sitting on the train staring out the window at the rain from which I had no coat to protect me.

Coatless, I saw the DLR carrying me was being rained on. I was late anyway and autumn was bringing rain to the East End, and there was me without a coat or even a jacket.

Dan Bourke is wary of causing offence via email

Delete from your desktop, check your gmail, do some work. Do some work, check your email, google fold-up bikes.

Google-maps search the route you would take from your house to here. Go to street view and start following the route. Get bored. Do some work. Check Facebook.

Dan Bourke is alone and scared

Imagine One Canada Square is on the desktop of your computer. Click on a floor to highlight it. Just short of halfway up. Double click to zoom in.

Click on a window to highlight it. Double click to open it and see who's inside. Hello. It's me.

Dan Bourke discovers that the world's glacial summer game isn't whiter than white

I have found the opposite of being at your workstation.

It is watching pretty much every ball of a five-day Test match.

In bed.

Dan Bourke is embracing old-fashioned fatherly uselessness, but he also has some new-fangled guilt to be getting on with

How's it going there, up there in the towers?

I'm not there, I'm in the strange exile of paternity leave. Any minute now I've got to go to Boots and buy an unspeakable object that has something to do with nipples.

The returning Dan Bourke resents the accusation that his muse has been run down by a speeding pram

There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway - although the allegiances of the Bugaboo Bee in the kitchen seem yet to be chosen.

That first bit is a quote from Cyril Connolly, a critic and writer who also said: "No city should be so large that a man cannot walk out of it in a morning," which is very hard to disagree with.

Dan Bourke is still away, but John Hill isn't going to start a protest about it

The time has come to rise up and be counted.

We've seen what happens when we linger in the shade with our apathy hanging out like a beer gut. Banks lose our money and then raid our bailouts for bonuses. The Government restricts our freedoms to protect us. The BNP weasels its way into our parliaments, and our MPs build moats with our taxes.

John Hill regrets not taking the time to become a bi-lingual swashbuckling astronaut before it was too late. Dan Bourke is away.

If you are old enough to read this, your life is already over.

As we speak, a child many years younger than you is learning languages you've never heard, or running 100 metres in the time it takes you to get out of a chair.

Dan Bourke clings to annual events in a roaring tide of "stuff"

It's a barbecue-scented, plan-hatching morning in May, which means I must be about due a column sneering at the Motor Show enthusiasts.

I've had my first outdoor swim, my first wedding and my first Pimms of the season.

Blunt - Concrete Pencil's Dan Bourke is away, and Giles Broadbent is feeling Under Seige

He sidled up to me at the bar at the Four Seasons and checked me up and down. I was vaguely aware of his presence, in his linen suit and crumpled navy shirt.

He looked like he had something to say and was fishing around looking for someone to say it to.

So, without invitation, he slid across his beer, followed its path and said to me: “Do you like Steven Seagal?�

Giles Broadbent picks up the Concrete Pencil this week (Dan Bourke is away)

The advert was wrong in the way that only adverts can be.

The advert was using the kung fu theory of advertising – weakness becomes strength; flaw becomes multi-million-pound marketing initiative.

So the advert saw dozens of people, nose to nose, in an abandoned warehouse with a slogan like “Get Closer�.

The advert was promoting a brand of chewing gum. Yet none of the hundred or so regimented folk sharing their personal space were joggling their jaws by so much as a nanometre.

Concrete Pencil - This week, Dan Bourke is angering the machines...

When you sit idle at your workstation, it’s best to at least try to fill your time productively.

By this of course I do not mean that you should find some work that no one has asked you to do and show initiative, or anything so ludicrously self-defeating as that.

No, far better that you try to get free stuff or win things on the internet.

Now for one reason or another I don’t get to do nothing nearly enough in my work any more. But I have been commuting my suited body to these towers for nine years exactly now, so I’ve had my share of downtime.

A fellow waster and I have tried to win holidays in the Caribbean, several generations of PlayStation, free Lottery tickets, DVDs, BMWs, digital cameras. You name it.

I haven’t actually won anything, of course, but the process was not without value.

Concrete Pencil - Dan Bourke bares his soul (anything else costs extra)

When did it become acceptable to go to a strip club?

Because I’m sure it used to be frowned upon. Like many of my generation, I grew up Indie. We were right-on. We read the NME. We sneered at straight society. We were rebels with a million causes.

The only strippers we came in contact with were the ones hired for stag parties. These, more often than not, came dressed as policewomen, allowing sitcom writers a wealth of hilarious mix-up scenarios.

Now, it seems, they are everywhere and could be anyone. Yes, even that mild-mannered secretary sitting opposite you.

And everyone seems to think it’s fine to get up close and personal with them.

Concrete Pencil - A weekly column by Dan Bourke, the sixth most powerful man in his circle of friends

I JUST met everyone’s favourite 19th century French travel writer Alexis de Tocqueville on Facebook.

I’d given up on Facebook – of course I had, I follow the herd, and the herd are calling it evil. I was one of the first of the herd to notice, of course, but I kept myself alive in the realm of the SuperWall and the bloody foodfight because I need to keep in touch with certain people ahead of a certain important social function (the Concrete Wedding).

But I have been sucked back in, because it has told me what my friends think of me.

Concrete Pencil - Dan Bourke discovers The Land Before Starbucks (and meets a friendly French person)

I HAVE just been to France. It is like a foreign country.

What do they think they’re doing over there? Haven’t they heard of the 21st century?

Their towns look the same as they did 50 years ago – a hundred even! There are no huge Barratt property developments, they just rent those “cute� houses with the “pretty� shutters.

I didn’t see one Starbucks. There wasn’t a gastropub within 50 miles of where we were staying. No olives on the bar, people? Hello?

Concrete Pencil - Olympic musings from the lofty desk of Dan Bourke

WE could see the orange flame of the torch from the 22nd floor.

The Olympic bus stopped up Churchill Place, and then the sinister blue tracksuits were turning left by Credit Suisse, where we once handed out papers with the latest on the Flaming Ferraris.

We’d watched it on Sky all morning – monks and coppers, green parka protesters waving their banners – and we’d all agreed we’d go down there.

Some of us wanted to boo or do something more – and who can blame them? Who isn’t for a free Tibet?

For me though, it was more a case of just wanting to witness something big happening.

I HAVE discovered some excellent words recently.

Mythomanic – someone who tells compulsive lies about themselves.

Like a man of my acquaintance, we shall call him M, who was always claiming that he had beaten Tim Henman at tennis, that his dad invented jeans and that he was an Olympic fencer.

The last time I saw him he told us he was off the next day to train the South African Air Force in South America, and that he was some kind of spy, but couldn’t tell us for whom.

Later, when we tried to put him, dead drunk, in a taxi he refused to tell the driver his address, repeating “it’s classified�.

Dan Bourke's Concrete Pencil - The meaty goodness of opinion, sandwiched between News and Sport

IT couldn’t be more exciting. It’s the talk of the office, of the whole Wharf.

You know what I’m talking about: Leon.

A new sandwich place, offering food that’s really different from other stuff here.
And not just sandwiches. Other stuff too. Real food.