'My Week' by Dan Stevens | The Telegraph

Dan Stevens column in The Telegraph

My week: Dan Stevens

Dan Stevens By Dan Stevens
6:30AM GMT 20 Nov 2011

Farewell then, Silvio Berlusconi – the Frankie Cocozza of European politics.

I notice that Berlusconi nobly delayed the release of his album of love songs to deal with his country’s financial crisis. Maybe now Silvio is indisposed, Simon Cowell might favour his musical fortunes over those of the disgraced Dohertini and recoup some of the Italian deficit with a multi-platinum album.

There’s one question that bugs me more than most: “What are your interests?” It’s probably why I could never fill out a job application properly. Anyone who can answer this succinctly tends to unsettle me. I suppose I’ve always been interested in “Teds”: Superted, Bill & Ted, Father Ted or Ted Hughes. In the past year I’ve also discovered TED, an organisation that brings together people from the worlds of technology, entertainment and beyond to share innovations and beautiful thoughts. This week I attended my first Ted “salon”, a delightfully 19th-century-sounding event with a distinctly 21st-century edge. Imagine a series of short talks on topics ranging from memory to the possibilities of 3D printing to Lady Gaga, punctuated with mind-bending digital photography and polyrhythmic percussive guitar. It was as if someone had created the perfect day at college and handed me a glass of wine. Most of these talks are uploaded to ted.com, where you can hack the bracken from your neural pathways in your pyjamas, should you so choose, and click away your curiosity. It may have killed the cat eventually, but before then it made for pretty fascinating paw prints.

Remember it was Armistice Day recently? Not far from where you are reading this, there will no doubt be a war memorial – often simple, sometimes beautiful structures. We need municipal space devoted to the memory of servicemen and women and the sacrifices that form our national bedrock. Memory is an act of revisiting, both mentally and physically: a tangible memorial site is not a political symbol but a touchstone with our history, without which we are nothing. The Sunday Telegraph is doing a good thing in launching its campaign for more Lottery funding to be invested in their upkeep and for harsher punishments for vandalism. The value of these memorials far exceeds the worth of their copper or brass, and anyone defacing them should be seen as destroying vital cells in our collective human consciousness.

Dan Stevens is Editor-At-Large for thejunket.org

My week: Dan Stevens

The Telegraph

Racing finely tuned Lamborghinis and getting to know the 'virtual assistant' on my new phone has this week given me hope that 'the future' might finally be upon us. Then again, I am still waiting for my hoverboard

Dan Stevens Photo: REX FEATURES

By Dan Stevens

6:30PM BST 22 Oct 2011

I’m still waiting for the future. In my lifetime I’ve witnessed computers wrested from the preserve of the programmers and phased into every hand and home, I’ve seen entire music collections shrunk to the size of a packet of chewing gum, and I now have a shiny new phone, which houses Siri, my new “virtual assistant”, who talks, writes my texts and tells me what the weather’s like in Glasgow. With every release of a new Apple product it feels as though we edge a little closer. But I’m still waiting for my hoverboard.

It is nearly 2012 and you did promise. Maybe I was too impressionable when the Back to the Future films were released, but my “HG Wells moment”, if you will, the point when I can say “Lo! As it was foretold, here is The Future!” will not come until I can hover to a local café, kick up my board and pick a fight with a man called Biff.

I nearly did take off last week when for my birthday I got to drive Lamborghinis very, very fast for a day at Millbrook. I’m not what some might term a “petrolhead” – I learnt to drive relatively late and I still couldn’t tell you exactly where a sparkplug goes – but I do love to drive and I do like my cars.

And my word these are beautiful cars: mini stealth-bombers, so immaculately finished inside it’s like driving a finely hand-stitched bespoke shoe.

But there was something I’d misunderstood until I’d driven one. You see, I’d always assumed that the flash guy pulling up at the lights in his “lambo” was purposefully revving his machine, showing off: “Roar! Look at me! Man drive car!” In actual fact, packed inside each one is an erotically-engineered bull that, upon being asked to slow down, stamps and rages quite independently of its driver, demanding to be let out of its pen to mate with every other car on the road, especially that cute little Nissan Figaro over there. Even Siri was scared.

I was delighted and proud to share my birthday this week with the launch of a new online quarterly called The Junket for which I am editor-at-large (my grandest role to date). It’s an eclectic barrel of words, with pieces on breastfeeding, the Berlin techno scene, opera, shooting squirrels, and more. I commend it to your curiosity.

 

 

DAN STEVENS

INTRODUCING THE BRAND NEW

ONLINE QUARTERLY
THE JUNKET

WITH DAN STEVENS AS EDITOR AT LARGE