In a recent New Yorker I read about a Silicon Valley accelerator for start-ups called Y Combinator. It’s headed by a super-smart 30-year-old gay vegetarian Jewish man (yes, all that essential info was offered gratis in the article) named Sam Altman.

Sam is a god to supplicant start-ups. His wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command means life or death to these poor hopefuls. Have you ever seen Dragon’s Den? It’s like that, but with real money. When fotoLibra was a start-up our accelerator was called an incubator, and we were carefully shielded from risk-hungry investors. All the people we raised money from seemed to want it back.

Smart Sam dropped out of college to work on a mobile app which told your friends where you were. Within a couple of years the app’s valuation was $175 million, but unfortunately people didn’t actually want their friends to know where they were so he sold the company for $43 million and became a guru instead.

Are people mad? Why spend $43 million on something people aren’t interested in? Facebook sold about 20% of its shares a year or so ago and raised more than the value of Belgravia. A little program that allows you to call a taxi is valued at more than Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer, Guest Keen & Nettlefolds and Reed Elsevier combined, and makes spectacular losses — $1.2 billion in the first six months of this year. Now we’re getting silly. No, I will not invest in your cash-incinerating start-up.

Two postulants from Norway came to see our Sam. They had the concept of an on-line temp agency, handing out freelance jobs for businesses around the world. I guess the big traffic would be linking Indian coders to American start-ups. But we can all use some outside help from time to time so I checked them out. They’re called Konsus, and of course being a child of the Cold War I read it as Konsum, the Tesco of East Germany (but without the stock).

Konsus has a clear, legible website, which you’d expect as they’d raised $1.6 million in capital before they’d ever met Sam. To my surprise one of the services they offered was content provision, which is what used to be called writing. I’m never averse to an extra buck, so I thought I’d put my name down.

I had to answer a quick-fire timed questionnaire and submit an example of my work.

So I corrected the copy on their website and submitted it to them.

I wonder if I’ll hear from them?

The educated among you may have spotted a reference from Ozymandias. You’ll remember how the C21 South Sea Bubble all ends, then:
Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Oh, I’ll take Belgravia.

konsus

Fifty years ago on October 21st 1966, at about 9:15 am, a waste tip dumped by the National Coal Board on top of a hill in South Wales began to slide.

Soaked by rain and underground streams, a huge tidal wave of slurry and tailings started to rumble downhill. In its path was Ysgol Pant Glas, Aberfan’s primary school, full of children, fresh in the morning.

They never stood a chance. The school was obliterated. 116 schoolchildren aged between seven and nine were killed, along with 28 adults.

In Wales on the anniversary last Friday there was a minute’s silence of remembrance. The Prince of Wales visited Aberfan and left a wreath and a note. By Sunday the note had been taken.

In England the anniversary of the tragedy was mentioned in passing on news bulletins. But on Welsh TV there was an hour-long television poem, written by Owen Sheers and played and spoken by some of Wales’s leading actors.

I managed to track it down on iPlayer and I watched it last night. It was probably the most moving piece of drama I have seen this century. Harrowing, shocking, tragic, emotional, sorrowful — these aren’t words of recommendation. This wasn’t entertainment. This was grief. I felt as if I’d been punched in the solar plexus. And above all, the indifference of our lords and masters, still tangible after fifty years when this utter tragedy was relegated to a minor TV channel with little or no forward publicity. I only found out about it after it had been broadcast.

Aberfan — The Green Hollow is a masterpiece of television. Whether you’re from Wales or Waikiki, I challenge you to watch (and listen) to this remarkable work without a tear in your eye and rage in your heart at the callous indifference shown towards the bereaved of Aberfan by the government and the National Coal Board.

The acting is exemplary. We Welsh do grief and passion quite well. The poetry is stunning. Owen Sheers has come of age with this. I don’t use the word masterpiece lightly — this is one. Imagine a formal, serious Under Milk Wood, and you might begin to understand. Sheers doesn’t embrace verbal pyrotechnics like his predecessor, he just builds a quiet, growing intensity that captures the essence of shock and grips the viewer.

The rescuers uncover a group of twenty dead children together, their mouths open as if they were singing — but they weren’t singing — and in front of them, arms stretched wide as if to embrace and protect them all, was one teacher — one teacher against a mountain. In that description Sheers sums up the immensity and futility of the tragedy.

In court the coroner started to pass verdicts on the causes of death — asphyxiation, catastrophic injury — until a man stood up and shouted “No sir! They were buried alive by the National Coal Board!”

Please try and see this film. You won’t regret it. You won’t forget it.

The American pop singer died yesterday. His passing was eclipsed in the media by the death of Dead or Alive’s Pete Burns, because most of today’s journalists were teenagers when You Spin Me Round was a hit and weren’t born when Bobby Vee was topping the charts around the world with Take Good Care Of My Baby, Rubber Ball, More Than I Can Say, Run To Him, The Night Has A Thousand Eyes and others. That list was done from memory.

Bobby Vee was a pop singer. Pop has never been cool. Pop was what your little sister liked. If you’re serious, you’ll want to be known by one name, preferably the surname, but no one could have called Bobby Vee just Vee. His was a name in itself, like Ellie Mae, or Mary Jean — Americans love anapaestic names.

Bobby Vee was a pleasant looking chap, not handsome, but clean cut with regular features. He had a decent voice and sang in tune. He was a classic early example of the Non-Threatening Boy, every mom’s ideal choice for their daughter’s first boyfriend. The Boy Next Door, assuming you live in a white middle-class neighbourhood.

And he lived up to the dream. He was wildly popular, he married his childhood sweetheart and they stayed together for over fifty years till her death in 2015 (OK, I had to look that one up). He contracted Alzheimer’s and spent the last year of his life in a hospice.

You know, I miss him. I never bought one of his records — I’m far too cool for that — but I looked on him with admiration. He was three years older than me, better looking, a better singer, an object of envy — he was a pop star. I wanted to be a pop star. And I enjoyed his records. I can still sing the five I listed above all the way through and what’s more play them without having to glance at the sheet music. They were simple songs, crafted by the genius of Carole King & Gerry Goffin and others. Bobby Vee was a corporate creation, built by Big Brother to brainwash teenagers like us, crowd manipulation far in excess of anything Soviet Russia could manage at the time.

Then came the Beatles. Boom. Did poor Bobby Vee have another hit? I don’t think so. Certainly not in the UK, although he did have an American #3 in 1967.

RIP Bobby Vee, 1943-2016. You brought a lot of pleasure to a lot of virgins, and there aren’t many men who could say that guiltlessly.