No thanks. Thank you.

Being the nice, polite middle-class boy that I am, I was brought up on the principle that courtesy costs nothing, and that I should always mind my Ps and Qs.

Now I'm in my 40s, and mandated by gender predetermination to be in a semi-permanent state of curmudgeon, I have found that "Thanks!" is not always the catch-all of polite appreciation.

As an employee of a large company I have discovered that there is one situation where such gratitude expressed will actually have me pulling upon the red handle marked FOR USE ONLY IN MOMENTS OF MIDDLE-AGED RAGE. I refer to the practice of using the 'Reply All' e-mail button to say, to just a single person (but copied to a cast of millions - including me) "Thanks!".

Being cc'd on an e-mail from one person to another is rarely more than attempted indemnification: "I've copied him/her, therefore he/she can consider themselves informed/looped in/involved". However, when the e-mail only says "Thanks!", the copied recipient has merely become a spectator of the most irrelevant, inconsequential and pointless of declarations. In terms of likelihood to raise one's duster in the workplace, it is beaten only by having to listen to the loud end of someone else's phone conversation. Which is a rant to unleash another time.

E-mail has, however, replaced conversation in many working environments. Few of us office drones will have escaped receiving an e-mail from someone sitting just three feet away or on the other side of a very thin wall. And, worse, when you're on the periphery of a lengthy e-mail exchange between an entire group of people, you end up wondering why that those expensive meeting rooms with video conferencing facilities had been installed, as your inbox fills up with patience-sapping, life's too short-reminding back-and-forthery.

E-mail is too convenient, and in the era of the BlackBerry dispatches are tossed off with careless abandon, at all times of the day or night. How different from the days of "Take a letter, Miss Jones".

With this ease comes the volume: last year the Internet handled almost 110 trillion e-mails. Many of them ended up in my Inbox, it would appear.

Unlike the kitchen pedal bin, which only informs you it has reached capacity when you bother to investigate that unplaceable odor wafting through the house, the message “YOUR MAILBOX IS ALMOST FULL” is a more terrifying warning of impending doom for the desk warrior reliant on an active communications pipeline. But imagine, for a moment, what it would be like to have this digital umbilical removed. Imagine having to actually, you know, talk to people, face-to-face, in the same room...

A few years ago Scottish researchers found that over a third of workers had become stressed by the daily volume of incoming e-mail and, worse, by the obligation to respond to it.

They felt that e-mail had become a distraction, that they were checking their Inbox 30 or 40 times an hour for new arrivals. That study took place five years ago, when ownership of smartphones was miniscule. Now, when even teenagers are hunched over BlackBerrys, no-doubt co-ordinating the next inner-city riot, e-mail is everywhere. Soon it will be impossible to go anywhere without e-mail catching up with you. There are cars in development that will offer you in-car e-mail, Facebook and Twitter (which will make for some pretty interesting insurance claims) and even fridges which will be able to say "You've got mail!" while also reminding you of the fact you're out of milk and houmous. So it has to stop. Or at least be curtailed.

To their absolute credit, several companies and their CEOs have taken initiatives to introduce an alternative e-mail culture in their organizations. Nine years ago, John Cauldwell, owner of the mobile phone retailer Phones4U took the radical step of banning staff from using e-mail altogether, arguing that his 2,500 staff were spending too much time handling e-mail and not enough time dealing with customers. "I saw that email was insidiously invading Phones4U so I banned it immediately," he said at the time. "Management and staff were beginning to show signs of being constrained by email proliferation - the ban brought an instant, dramatic and positive effect."

It's an idea that was picked up last year by London-based fashion PR agency Push, which banned any e-mail activity on Tuesdays to encourage account executives to use the phone more. Push didn't ban electronic communications altogether: in establishing Tuesdays as "T-Days", the agency ruled that staff could use only the telephone and Twitter (geddit?) to speak to journalists, clients and colleagues. Still, not a bad idea.

Last year Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos - a company which runs IT services for large corporations - picked up the Phones4U mantle by launching an 18-month program to eradicate internal e-mail altogether in a bid to achieve "best management practices". Breton's rationale was that only 10% of the 200 e-mails employees received on average every day had any use, which meant that the reading time associated with the other 90%, plus the minute or so it takes to return to work after looking at an e-mail of no great value, was time lost from more important activities.

As with any technological advance, e-mail has it's place. But as a working tool, it has its drawbacks. When more and more people admit to checking their work e-mail while on holiday for no other reason than to reduce the pileup of unread messages when they return to the office, something is clearly amiss. 25 years ago would you have gone into the office every day during Christmas to check for unopened letters or faxes? Of course not.

Other tools are out there which do the job of e-mail just as well: Atos, for example, is replacing e-mail with a combination of a Facebook-style social network and the dear old telephone.

In other companies, Twitter-like applications have been developed, which have the added advantage of encouraging workers to be brief. Given that time is, arguably, the most precious commodity we all have, a carefully crafted 140-character message instead of a lengthy, stream-of-conscious braindump sent to one and cc'd to several hundred more would not only get to the point, but would be the kindest act of humanity one worker could do for another.

And speaking of humanity, let me leave you with this thought: a single e-mail has a carbon footprint of 0.04g, and an e-mail with a PowerPoint presentation attached to it weighs in at 0.4g of CO2. Worth remembering that, next time you e-mail the colleague sat opposite you...

Now is the winter of our discontent

"He's a disgrace to Liverpool Football Club. Some players should not be allowed to play for Liverpool again. With the history that club's got and in a situation like today, he could have caused a riot."Sir Alex Ferguson on Luis Suárez, Saturday 11 February, 2012

Have we had enough rancor yet? Or do we need more? If so, we surely don't need two of the most famous football clubs in the world supplying it.

Fabio Capello's petulant flounce from the England job this week may have become expensive collateral damage in the Ferdinand-Terry race row, but there was no requirement for anyone - least of all Liverpool's Luis Suárez, Manchester United's Patrice Evra or their respective clubs and managers - to reopen football's other simmering feud, with it's distasteful undercurrent of open and implied as well as accidental racism.

Things were bad enough two weeks ago when Evra was booed by Liverpool fans every time he touched the ball during the clubs' FA Cup tie. Players get booed like this for the most petty of reasons: Ashley Cole, who still gets booed by Arsenal fans for accepting the Abramovich coin in 2006, added Newcastle supporters to his fan club when he cheated on his Geordie wife, Cheryl Cole (the apparent singer, talent show judge and national sweetheart once found guilty for assault in a racially-tinged incident involving a Surrey nightclub's toilet attendant).

It is a normal part of player baiting, one has to accept. But booing a black player for making a complaint about an opponent making a racistly malicious remark? Different league. Likewise, did my own fellow Chelsea supporters really need to boo Rio Ferdinand for being Anton's bigger brother? Nope.

With the memory of their toxic last encounter only two weeks cold, Liverpool and Manchester United needed to tread very carefully before their league meeting yesterday at Anfield, given that it was also the reverse fixture from the game in which Suarez made his original remark to Evra, and since he was banned for eight games for the offence. If you then ice the cake with this North-West derby being one of the most contentious rivalries in sport, everyone needed to be on their best behaviour.

So, the sight of Suarez refusing to shake Evra's hand during the increasingly pointless pre-match love-in was probably one of the most brainless things I've ever seen a footballer do (and let's face it, there are plenty of brainless acts from which to choose).

However, the thing that troubles me more than else is the lack of club management in this issue. Kenny Dalglish - one of the most hailed figures in the modern game - has been relentlessly criticised for his lack of condemnation of Suarez in the first place. You would have thought he'd have gone the extra distance yesterday to tell Suarez to just get on with playing football and not inflame things further.

If it was disappointing seeing the idiot Suarez blanking Evra's handshake - itself an offer of profound significance - it was as disappointing to, again, find Dalglish implicitly supporting his striker by his lack of guidance and his lack of admonishment after the game.

There was, for years, a whiff of unfounded racism around Liverpool, with suggestions that the club had a policy of not signing black players, despite signing Howard Gayle in 1977 at a time when there were still few black players anywhere else in the-then First Division. Dalglish has done his club no favours at all by standing by Suarez by not saying anything about his behaviour towards Evra.

Liverpool isn't a racist club, and Sir Alex Ferguson's barbed reference yesterday to "...the history that club's got" didn't help, not that anything the Manchester United manager says when on such viperous form ever does (although I go some way to agreeing with him that Suarez was a disgrace for not shaking Evra's hand -  small gesture that would have travelled a thousand miles).

I don't believe that racism exists on any institutional level in football. It can't, surely? True, apart from the occasional Korean or Japanese player, there is a distinct lack of Asian players in the senior echelons of the game. But the idea of racism still being an ingrained problem, given the immensely black and white make-up of most professional teams (a fact that has hardly needed pointing out in recent years) is nonsense.

It would, though, be foolish to dismiss the signs of its lingering presence: the exit of Micah Richards from Twitter following the posting of racist comments against him, and the utterly vile comments posted yesterday against former Liverpool player and now talkSport presenter Stan Collymore show there is no shortage of morons out who are either racist, or stupid enough to think anonymously sending racist comments to black sportsmen and media personalities is clever.

British football is possibly teetering on a precipice when it comes to race: the next England manager will, potentially, have to deal with a team split between the anti-Terry lobby and those who can't care less. We don't need the remaining four months of the domestic game mired in a worsening atmosphere of poison.

When We Was Fabio

A Ferdinand

Amongst the many things I struggle to comprehend, the origins of World War 1 have long been a fruitless source of bafflement.

The facts, as they stood, are that on 28 June, 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand - heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire and inspiration for a Scottish art rock band - took a bullet from a cross young Bosnian and, within a month, most countries, it seems, were piling into France and Belgium for a punch-up that would leave more than nine million people dead over the course of the next four years. How we went from one event to another is a mystery to me.

Skip forward, if you will, to Sunday, October 23rd, 2011 and the Barclays Premier League encounter between Queens Park Rangers and Chelsea.

An exchange of words between another Ferdinand - the home team's Anton - and the visiting club's captain, John Terry, results in a conflagration that is continuing to take lives, proverbially speaking, almost four months on.

Last Saturday What Would David Bowie Do? remarked on what an utter mess the original incident at Loftus Road had left football in. If you missed it, here's a handy summary:

• Terry is facing a criminal trial for his alleged "public order offence" towards Ferdinand (A) and had the England captaincy taken off him because of the impending court date 
• Terry and Ferdinand are now at the center of collapsing inter-team relationships
• QPR captain Joey Barton rants about the affair and Terry's deferred court case on Twitter
• Ferdinand's brother Rio gets booed by Chelsea fans after giving his public support for Anton in an ill-advised TV interview on the eve of the Blues meeting Manchester United
• QPR captain Joey Barton is, apparently, threatened with jail for contempt of court by ranting about the affair and Terry's deferred court case on Twitter 
• Players threaten a toxic split in the England camp if Terry even turns up as a squad member for England's pre-Euro 2012 fixtures as well as the tournament itself
• England are now without a captain four months before the start of a major tournament

And now, to that list, we can add "England seeks new manager". Again.

Fabio Capello's resignation tonight - bizarrely, scant hours after Harry Redknapp, widely tipped to be the next England manager, was acquitted of tax fraud charges - was coming. The Italian was incensed that the FA's senior executives didn't loop him into the decision to strip Terry of the England captain's armband.

Capello was known to be an enormous fan of Terry's on-pitch leadership skills, even if his off-pitch track record left something to be desired for the notoriously discipline-minded coach. Capello had, of course, been responsible for sacking Terry after his affair with Wayne Bridge's former girlfriend, but had also reinstated him in as bold a statement of his determination to have Terry lead the national side, come-what-may. 

The FA's decision to sack Terry before English football's reputation got any further out of hand may have been a sensible (and unavoidable) action, all things considered, but in blanking Capello, the Italian's days in the post were numbered. Capello did little to hide his ire, giving an Italian TV interview in which he said: "They really insulted me and damaged my authority," and that he "...thought it was right that Terry should keep the captain's armband." Capello's strong conviction was that his captain had not been convicted of anything: "In my opinion one cannot be punished until it is official and the court - a non-sport court, a civil court - had made a decision to decide if John Terry has done what he is accused of."

As Harry Redknapp was walking away from Southwark Crown Court, Capello was walking in to Wembley Stadium to meet FA chairman David Bernstein and general secretary Alex Horne. The expectation was of a terse meeting. The expectation, too, was that this would also end in Fabio Capello's reign coming to an end.

When the digital jungle drums of Twitter sprung to life to report that Capello had indeed resigned, few people were all that surprised, any more than they'd be surprised that the odds on Redknapp replacing him were shortening with every second.

The official statement from Bernstein was the expected dull-as-dishwater affair, stressing how "...Fabio has conducted himself in an extremely professional manner." and that in accepting Capello's resignation they were "agreeing this is the right decision," followed by the obligatory platitudes about thanking Capello for his work with England and to "wish him every success in the future".

Most people will agree that the former Milan, Madrid, Roma and Juventus coach gave a mixed return on the £6 million a year the FA furnished him with for his expertise. Although the stats show Capello had a creditable 67% win rate as England manager there was consensus that England hadn't made much more progress under him than they'd done under Sven-Göran Eriksson. These stats must also be balanced with England's abject performance in the 2010 World Cup, including the ignominy of another tournament exit at the hands of bloody Germany.

Perhaps the timing of Capello's resignation wasn't too bad after all: four months is a long time for the new man - whether Redknapp or anyone else on the bookies' shortlists - to come in and get the squad prepared for Euro 2012.

Whoever does come in will be picking up one of sport's most poisoned chalices. I wouldn't mind betting, either, that come the start of the Euros the chalice will contain more than a drop of the taint still traceable from whatever stupid comment was uttered in the heat of battle, one autumnal Sunday afternoon in West London.

Like a pebble dropped onto a still pond, the Ferdinand-Terry affair has triggered a series of concentric ripples that, by the time they are reaching the shoreline, are becoming extremely choppy indeed. Choppy enough to leave casualties - and careers - starting to pile up.

And we thought the Dutch were self-destructive

What a mess. What an absolute, utter mess. John Terry has the England captain's armband unceremoniously taken off him for a second time in his career because he is considered too much of a liability to team unity.

For once, you can't fault the Football Association. What else could they do? Having seen Terry reinstated by England coach Fabio Capello (after he lost the armband previously for having an affair with teammate Wayne Bridge's girlfriend), the FA was then confronted with the prospect of the national captain heading for a major summer football tournament with a criminal trial for allegedly making a racist remark on the other side of it.

Terry's sacking as skipper only addresses one part of the problem. Reading striker Jason Roberts claims that the England dressing room at Euro 2012 “could be toxic” if Terry is even involved in the tournament, even as a member of the squad. And he claims his view is based on comments from England players he knows.

Chelsea are standing by Terry as club captain in the whole debacle, which began on October 23 when the defender is alleged to have called QPR's Anton Ferdinand a "f****** black c***" in a heated off-ball moment during their clubs' Premier League encounter. Chelsea's backing of Terry is understandable at such a critical stage of the domestic season, but one can wonder whether this is the start of the 31-year-old player's footballing career unravelling.

It shouldn't be forgotten that Terry has not been found guilty of any offence - either a football disciplinary charge (the alleged incident between Terry and Ferdinand was not recorded by the match referee, so no charges could be brought by the FA) and the criminal prosecution - built from, apparently, lip readers and YouTube footage - is clearly sub-judice.

But with the footballing world around Terry looking increasingly divisive - with black professionals even asking critical questions of Chelsea's black teammates for either backing him or not publicly criticising him - whatever really happened in that fleeting exchange between two players, in the heat of an intense Sunday afternoon London derby, is casting a bigger stain on the career of a player who's ability on the pitch has been habitually undermined by events off it.

© Twitter

The FA's announcement yesterday - which, apparently, Fabio Capello knew nothing about in advance - has led to the inevitable stream of invective and counter-invective online.

Joey Barton, the QPR skipper and a player with hardly a spotless reputation (two criminal convictions for violent behaviour - a six-month prison sentence for assault and a suspended sentence for actual bodily harm to on teammate Ousmane Dabo) spent much of yesterday evening ranting on Twitter about the case involving his club colleague Ferdinand. This included a particularly ugly spat with TalkSport's Adrian Durham and the Daily Mirror's Darren Lewis, in which Barton branded them "spineless maggots".

Much of Barton's stream of bile was legally borderline, but in one tweet he was spot on: "Once the issue went out of the FA's control, it was always going to get messy. They should have dealt with it instantly. Now its a farce." Indeed, had the affair been investigated by the FA back in October, and a referral to the police made instantly, there is a chance that the legal proceedings could have been commenced earlier.

As much as I support John Terry as captain of my football club, and as much as I fully support the "innocent until proven guilty" principle, I wonder whether the lawyers who pushed for Terry's trial to be held after Euro 2012 were thinking about anyone else's interests than their own. All the time Terry - still, arguably, the best candidate for England captain (sorry Rio, we don't need your expert long-ball punting skills...), drags this affair behind him, there will be a foul smell surrounding English football itself.

Great preparation for the national side in the run-up to a tournament that is meant to restore the nation's pride after the ignominious embarrassment of the South Africa. I expect the Dutch, with their talent for self-destruction, must be laughing in their clogs.

When Two Tribes Go To War

As anyone who regularly attends English Premier League football matches will attest, the idea that in this prawn sandwich-munching, bring-the-wife-and-kids-for-a-family-day-out, multi-million pound fan "experience" era of the game, its nefarious side has been completely extinguished would be regarded as foolish.

No doubt, things are vastly improved, certainly from the days of my own youth, when standing in 'The Shed' of Stamford Bridge made owls out of inquisitive boys, as we rotated our heads fully through 180 degrees to see the newest outbreak of mayhem on the terracing behind us.

There is no doubt, too, that the orchestrated warfare that erupted with grim regularity in the '70s and early '80s between entire armies of clubs' fans - Millwall and West Ham, Chelsea and Tottenham, Arsenal and Leeds - has disappeared from the neighbouring streets of these clubs' grounds (although it would be the height of naïveté to suggest that it has disappeared altogether).

There is also no doubt that in recent weeks the word "tribal" has crept back into the football writers' lexicon as the supposed 'race rows' between Liverpool's Luis Suarez and Manchester United's Patrice Evra, and Chelsea's John Terry and Queens Park Rangers' Anton Ferdinand have been ratcheted up.

Tribal is not just an unfortunate word in the racial context, but entirely inappropriate in the actual context of what it is to be a football fan. I don't consider Chelsea or my fellow Chelsea fans any more of a tribe as any other group with whom I claim association - be it England supporters, owners of the complete recordings of Nick Drake, or corpulent male professionals in their mid-forties from the south-west suburbs of London.

However, fate, irony, some perversion or a combination of all three contrived to bring Liverpool and Manchester United, QPR and Chelsea together last Saturday for the FA Cup 4th Round's lunchtime kickoffs. Sports hacks couldn't believe their luck with the column inches they were gifted to stoke up the tension - and risk creating self-fulfilled prophesy. For things easily evolved from being about four football players, to being entire sets of supporters pitched against each other.

For a start, the North-West derby just didn't need it. Liverpool-Manchester United was already one of the longest running team rivalries in professional sport; Suarez from one side was serving his suspension, while Evra from the other had returned to his football. Unfortunately The Kop didn't receive the memo, and spent much of the game's rancourous 90-plus minutes barracking the Frenchman for being "a lying bastard", amongst other choice suggestions, for reporting Suarez to the FA, the result of which being the Uruguayan receiving an eight-game ban.

The Ferdinand-Terry affair, on the other hand, was still an open goal. Ever since the QPR-Chelsea league match on October 23rd when Terry is alleged to have made a racist slur against Ferdinand, the Chelsea and England captain has been allowed to play on by the FA, as they maintained the position that he was facing a public prosecution, rather than an FA disciplinary charge, as Suarez had.

I am sure that some legal expert somewhere will explain the significance of the two, different situations, but to me, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Metropolitan Police, in claiming to have sufficient evidence to charge Terry with a public order offense, did the FA a favour, as it allowed them to totally swerve the tricky issue of their national captain being accused of racism.

So, if Terry is found not guilty, he and the FA will simply go back to some form of normality, and if found guilty, his England career as captain and player would most probably be over. Responsibility well and truly offloaded.

Unfortunately, things were ballsed up - quite literally - by QPR drawing Chelsea in the FA Cup 4th round, in a tie to be played just days before Terry's case opens, today, at Westminster Magistrates Court. No doubt under the most hawkish of legal advice, nothing official had been heard from either player or club on the matter since Terry was charged - until it was revealed, on the eve of the cup tie, that Ferdinand had received in the post a "malicious communication" (which, according to different reports, contained either an air gun pellet, a bullet or a shotgun cartridge).

Naturally, the package lacked a return address, but the nods and winks were already heading the way of Chelsea fans amid suggestions that some form of highly misguided  support for Terry had been enacted. Internet discussions sprang to life and Chelsea's historic - and unwanted association - with far-right groups became a convenient charcoal brick with which to warm up the barbecue further.

Thankfully the Ferdinand mailbag became a sideshow to the less injurious topic of "Will they? Won't they?" and whether Ferdinand would shake Terry's hand in the somewhat ridiculous pre-kickoff 'Respect' handshake ritual between the two teams.

In this the ever-reliable "friends close to the star" suggested that Ferdinand would blank Terry (which would not be a first for the defender - Wayne Bridge came close to the old thumb-to-nose finger waggle gag when he confronted Terry on the pitch for the first time after it was revealed he'd been enjoying relations with Bridge's then-fiancée).

Shortly before kickoff on Saturday it was reported that there would be no team handshake at all. It was explained that they didn't want to risk a handshake snub towards Terry prejudicing the court case about to open today. In truth, the QPR players had decided as a team on Friday to blank Terry, causing a cataclysmic humiliation for the Chelsea and England skipper, and the FA itself.

The only thing this messy piece of PR really prejudiced was the ability of football to stand up above racism itself. Whether Terry did call Ferdinand a "f****** black c***" or not is now for a court to decide. The fact is that Ferdinand and his teammates could have shown themselves to be bigger indivduals by accepting Terry's handshake and moving on. They may have believed it was supporting the cause, but instead it would only have prolonged and provoked things further.

And there lies the biggest issue of all. If you go looking for a rift you'll find one and make it larger, and racism and tribalism are two causes football could do without. If Terry did use such a slur, he's an idiot and should be punished. We all know that many players are blighted by a red mist that descends in the heat of battle. It is debatable as to whether Terry's alleged epithet, uttered in a high-pressure London derby his team were losing, makes him a congenital racist. Stupid, but not malevolently racist.

He is , however, a role model, a senior player and his club and country's captain. In both jobs, he works every day in multi-cultural squads, being a high-profile ambassador for the FA's Respect and the 'Racism - Kick It Out' campaigns. He needs to command the utmost respect from the players he spends most of his week in the company of. And he should have remembered that before opening his mouth in a game monitored by 13 high definition television cameras, unprecedented online scrutiny and the video pinboard that is YouTube.

In no way do I endorse racism or the use of language that draws malicious attention to someone's racial origin, physical appearance, sexual preference or any other tag.

Football is strange theatre. I doubt any, or at least many, of the fans who chant "Yiddo" towards Spurs supporters are card-carrying Nazis, or even know the significance of the slur. And while I've always baulked at the despicable song that refers to Auschwitz, one is wearily resigned to the fact that most members of this chorus line are morons braying with their fellow terrace sheep in complete ignorance of true anti-semitism, and certainly the full, sordid and abhorrent ugliness that was the Holocaust.

The Evra/Suarez and Ferdinand/Terry spats are no more than that - spats. What we have to avoid is the creeping return to English football of the Neanderthal monkey chants that are still projected towards black players from the terraces and stands of football grounds in Spain, Serbia, Poland and Germany. As it is, an eagle-eyed smartphone owner caught sight of an idiot at Anfield on Saturday impersonating King Louis. This shouldn't be allowed to be a return to the disgraceful banana-throwing days of the 70s, when the likes of Luther Blissett, the young John Barnes and Chelsea's heroic pioneering black debutant Paul Canoville ran a gauntlet of hate and ignorance from their own supporters.

I like to think that football has moved on and, for the most part, it has. Supporters might still mockingly draw attention to Liverpool fans' employment status, to Arséne Wenger apparently lacking both a plan and money, and to Ashley Cole having the temerity to cheat on the nation's unoffical sweetheart, Cheryl Cole (God help him if it was Susan Boyle), but this is no more than mild joshing, baiting to get a rise out of the opposition rather than any declaration of war.

Football really isn't a matter of life and death. It's a game. You scream your lungs out at your own midfield, the myopic referee or the small contingent of noisy away fans (who will give as good as they get), all in the name of giving a match some atmosphere. Within this pantomime will be some of the funniest songs, the sharpest wit and the most cutting of self-depreciation. Left to itself, it's harmless. It just doesn't need journalists to turn it into something else, as we all know that friendly abuse can quickly become something decidedly unfriendly.

'Tis the year of heroes and hobbits

Last Tuesday's announcement of the 2012 Oscar nominations presented a formidable, if predictable, list of the worthy and the wise, with The Artist and George Clooney's The Descendants front runners, and Steven Spielberg's Warhorse, Woody Allen's return-to-form, Midnight In Paris, and another Parisian tale, Martin Scorcese's Hugo also in the hat for Best Picture. 

Smart money is on The Artist, a silent movie. Smart money is also on Meryl Streep for her performance as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, which some of us might wish was a silent movie.

Anyway, enough of the anachronistic satire. Amongst the Best Actor nominees is Gary Oldman for his brilliantly understated performance as the brilliantly understated spycatcher George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Unfortunately with a real George - Clooney - hotly tipped for the Oscar, Oldman will probably leave the Kodak Theater on February 26 empty-handed. A shame as Oscar recognition for Oldman is long overdue.

Like his South-East London contemporary Tim Roth, Oldman has built a successful commercial career in Hollywood that has rarely veered from the edge of darkness. And without too much hoopla, either.  His breakthrough as Sid Vicious in Sid And Nancy and Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears established a canon of edgy characters, from the wonderfully deranged DEA agent Stansfield in Luc Besson's Léon and the equally capricious Zorg in Besson's The Fifth Element, to Count Dracula, Sirius Black in the Harry Potter series, Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK, and the Russian baddie in Air Force One - a camped-up panto villain performance to rival Alan Rickman's Sherriff of Nottingham.

Sadly, when it comes to gongs like the Oscars, superhero franchises are rarely in the running. It becomes bread for an extinct cause to think that Oldman might be in with an Academy Award shout again next year for his third outing as trusty Gotham City cop Jim Gordon in The Dark Knight Rises, the final part of Christopher Nolan's rebooted Batman trilogy.

The Dark Knight Rises will be one of an army of superhero blockbusters due this year: assuming 2012 isn't cut short by the Four Horsemen wielding Mayan calendars we will be entertained by the return of Batman, Bond (James), Bourne (Jason - sort of) and Baggins (Bilbo). This might sound like four old prog rockers reforming for one last hurrah, but in fact they represent the sort of box office business that will have numerous residents of the 90210 zip code sizing up their next mansion.

Together with the return of Spider-Man, The Avengers, Judge Dredd and several more comic book characters brought to life, plus Ridley Scott's reacquaintance with sci-fi in Prometheus, we will not be short on fun with a capital F in 2012, even if the economic doom and gloom continues as it is.

There is a little doubt that any of these franchise additions will prove to be anything other than lucrative,  but from a creative point of view, the weight of expectation on the shoulders of those making them will be huge. None more so than Nolan.

While sniffier critics - and awards ceremonies - have been indifferent towards such popcorn fodder as comic book characters, Nolan's channelling of Bob Kane's Caped Crusader through Christian Bale in Batman Begins uncompromisingly jettisoned the frivolous levity of previous screen incarnations to create a superhero of searing darkness, lurking in ambiguous shadows between vigilante and vengeful creature of the night. The Dark Knight raised that bar even higher - the late Heath Ledger transforming The Joker from the whoopee cushion-toting popinjays of Caesar Romano and Jack Nicholson's interpretations into the greatest screen psychopath since Hannibal Lecter. It was - and still is - a film which, even after repeated screenings, takes your breath away with its portrayal of anger, madness and murderous intent unleashed.

In stopping at three Batman movies, Nolan has set an enigmatic tone for his final instalment. Little is known of the closely-guarded plot, beyond the fact that we know Batman will meet his "ultimate match" in the shape of the bludgeoning supervillain Bane, and there is a cheeky suggestion in the pre-publicity that Batman might not survive. How refreshing an act of storytelling that would be if it turns out to be the case.

Given the sheer laziness of Hollywood's current propensity to remake anything that isn't screwed down, the 'reboot' has become a clever means to continue a maturing franchise with some degree of creative merit. Christopher Nolan has been rightfully hailed for adding detail to the shadows of Batman, and the likes of Superman Returns and the forthcoming The Amazing Spider-Man do much the same to their respective characters. But for all the added weight reboots have given such franchises, they are at the end of the day no more an exercise in rebranding that Ford relaunching its Mondeo as an upscale midsize car to compete with BMW and Audi. It may be a good car, it may look nice, but it's still a Ford.

Casino Royale - which, ironically enough (and thanks to the questionable wonders of product placement) featured Daniel Craig's new James Bond briefly driving a Ford Mondeo - did something delicate but definite to the 007 franchise. The girls and gadgets were there, along with the exotic locations, but there was something else; more than just the casting a blond Bond, there was the application of an actor capable of portraying Ian Fleming's Bond, a Bond with depth and a vulnerability painfully lacking in Pierce Brosnan's cocky execution and Roger Moore's ageing frivolity.

Sean Connery has cast a long shadow over the character, not helped by Fleming revising Bond's back-story in the later novels that followed Dr. No's cinematic success and describing Bond as a half-Scottish, half-Swiss orphan. Craig hardly fits that description, being a Scouser of average height, but he has evolved Bond into a believably cold, blue-eyed assassin.

After the preposterous CGI effects that blighted the later Brosnan movies, plot returned with Casino Royale and while its sequel Quantum of Solace was not universally popular, it at least continued a story-driven arc about the Quantum organization (itself a post-modern reboot of SPECTRE) and the loss and betrayal of Vesper Lynd. QoS baffled in equal measure as it delighted which, frankly, is the sign of good film-making. If you can continue a franchise by giving the punters what they want while bending things ever so slightly in a different direction, you're doing the right thing.

Filming on Skyfall, the 23rd Bond movie, finally began last November and while its plot has also been kept largely under wraps (the Fleming books now long exhausted of theatrical potential) the fact that 007 is returning at all is an escape from calamity that Bond himself would have been proud of. When the closing credits of Quantum of Solace issued the traditional prediction that "JAMES BOND WILL RETURN", no-one quite knew when, as MGM's finances were not enjoying the rudest of health.

Thus, the project known only as 'Bond 23' (until Internet chatter started turned the title Skyfall into the worst kept secret in the film world) looked like it was never going to get off the ground, potentially ending  Bond's run at 22 'official' films. However, 2012 is a significant year in the Bond timeline, and indeed in the history of cinema. In October, the film world will celebrate the 50th anniversary of a film containing two of the greatest onscreen moments ever. The movie is Dr. No and the first of these moments involves just five words - Connery uttering "My name's Bond, James Bond", and the second is the emergence of Ursula Andress from the Caribbean singing. The song, in case you'd forgotten and was only concentrating on her legendary white bikini, was Underneath The Mango Tree.

With Dr. No's 50th anniversary coming up, it was almost inconceivable there wouldn't be a new Bond movie to acknowledge it. And so, on November 3, the media was assembled at London's lavish Corinthia Hotel to hear step-brother and sister producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, declare Skyfall the 23rd Bond movie - and that money would not be an issue.

"[The budget] in the same range as the last film," explained Wilson. "We really haven’t had to change anything in the script to get what we want. In fact we keep on adding." Broccoli was even more direct on the budget issue: "Does it look like we're cutting back?" she joked, as she pointed to the principles of the movie sat alongside her - Craig returning as Bond, Judi Dench again as M and Javier Bardem as the as-yet undefined villain. Albert Finney will also appear in a role rumoured to that of a Whitehall mandarin. As for the story, that is being kept strictly under wraps, although the blogosphere has been noisy with rumours of M's past catching up with her as the core of Skyfall's plot.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of Skyfall so far has been the choice of Sam Mendes as its director. An Oscar-winner, no doubt, his reputation is steeped in being a very theatre-minded, 'actor's director', rather than an automatic choice for the film world's longest-running action franchise.

Certainly we can expect a more 'actorly’ Bond movie in Skyfall, but with forebears like Terence Young, Guy Hamilton, Lewis Gilbert and John Glen, Mendes will be expected to maintain the franchise's sharp style and wry humour without descending into a downbeat melancholy yawn. With Skyfall's so-far unexplained title just a little too close to "awful", Mendes will not want to tempt critics and headline writers taking up such a God-given gift.

That the Daniel Craig-era James Bond has been deeper and a little more pragmatic may owe something to Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne. Craig's Casino Royale was preceded by the first two Jason Bourne movies, in which Matt Damon presented a spy for the post-9/11 world: darker, brooding and well versed in the realities of a troubled world, with his own government the source of much of the trouble.

This summer sees the release of a fourth film adaptation of Ludlum's novels, The Bourne Legacy, but one crucially lacking its title character. Another movie shrouded in plot secrecy, we know that Matt Damon won't be appearing (he allegedly declined to do another Bourne unless director Paul Greengrass was on board). Instead, Tony Gilroy - who wrote the first three Bourne screenplays - is directing Jeremy Renner as key character Aaron Cross. Renner's star has risen considerably following his outstanding performance in The Hurt Locker, and his turn in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol demonstrated how adept at the action genre he is.

What's not known is where Jason Bourne will fit into the story at all (sci-fi fans will recall that the BBC's wobbly-sets-and-orange-squash-bottles-for-guns series Blake's 7 managed to survive quite happily without the titular protagonist, Blake, so I suppose it's not a prerequisite). What is known is that Renner will be joined by the always bankable Edward Norton plus the new Mrs. Daniel Craig - Rachel Weisz, together with Joan Allen as the sympathetic Pam Landy, and Scott Glenn and David Straithairn as the stressed out CIA bosses who will no doubt spend much of the film saying "People - we have a situation...", which they spent most of the previous three Bournes doing a lot.

And finally, prepare your gluteus maximus for a return journey to Peter Jackson's imagination of Middle Earth. For the first three Christmases of the new millennium, the backsides of filmgoers the world over were put to the ultimate test by Jackson's epic eleven-hour, three-part interpretation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings. This Christmas, competing multiplexes will be no doubt playing up the enhanced comfort of their seating for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the first half of Jackson's two-part adaptation of Tolkien's prequel to Lord Of The Rings. It finds members of that trilogy's cast (including Sir Ian Mackellen, Andy Serkis and Sir Christopher Lee) joining up again, along with TV's latest Dr. Watson, Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins, along with his Sherlock Holmes, Benedict Cumberbatch, whose sounds like a hobbit to begin with.

With the first part due on December 14, and the second, The Hobbit: There and Back Again, to open on December 13 next year, it's clear that Jackson has no intention of giving us an abbreviated version of Tolkien's entertaining novel, which was written in 1937 as a children's story. In fact I doubt there's a child known to mankind able to sit through six new hours of Tolkien mythology, but for us adults it will make a pleasant revival of a challenging but entertaining Christmas outing.

As with all custodians of major film franchises, Jackson knows the ticket-buying public will have high expectations for The Hobbit. After all, the Lord Of The Rings trilogy turned over almost $3 billion worldwide. Furthermore, the third chapter - Return of the King - demonstrated that populist, fantasy adventure franchises can be critically acclaimed, winning all eleven Academy Award categories in which it was nominated, including Best Picture – and that was the first time such a film had ever won the prize.

Welcome to the five-ring circus

I'm in shock. Really. According to my Letts 2012 Diary - in which I have dutifully filled in all the Personal Details, updated the birthdays and anniversaries, and made careful note of religious holidays around the world - we are already more than two-thirds of the way through January.

This bombshell means we're closer to February, and with February a short month, we're almost into March and therefore getting ready for Easter. Which is in April. Based on this logic, then, it has taken me almost a third of the way through the year to commit fingertips to keyboard for the first What Would David Bowie Do? outing of 2012.

Here in France, however, it is still technically "the New Year": my indigenous colleagues continue to plant kisses on each other as if the clock got stuck at a minute past midnight on New Year's Day, and this will, apparently, continue until the very end of the month. Actually, there is a strong likelihood that it will continue long into February as the kissing becomes part of the national coping mechanism for France getting downgraded to AA+. I'm still not entirely sure what that means, but I suspect it means everyone here now can claim to be part of an exotic blood group.

As if France wasn't suffering enough, passengers on the Eurostar rail service between Paris and London are currently being invited to visit the buffet carriage where they can purchase badges commemorating the fact Eurostar is an "official partner" of the 2012 Olympic. The games, if you're not aware, will be taking place in London. Paris had offered its services but were turned down on the grounds that, with the streets paved with dog poo, the marathon might prove too risky for the athletes' welfare.

To compound the insensitivity, at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel on the French side, Eurostar trains pass under a large sign reminding, mainly, the driver and a few illegal immigrants wandering along the track that, in the famous declaration of Jacques Rogge, "The IOC has the honour of announcing the Games of the 30th Olympiad in 2012 will be in...[pauses for dramatic effect] - London."

I am, of course, proud for my home city, but you have to feel a little sorry for the French having it rubbed in like this. It reminds me of the late, great Bill Hicks, who observed in a typically acerbic routine: "If The Second Coming ever does happen will Jesus want to be confronted by people wearing crucifixes? It would be a bit like going up to Jackie Onassis with a rifle pendant". Perhaps the only way to worsen the insensitivity is by screening Henry V with French subtitles on giant screens in Paris shortly before the opening ceremony, while offering out 'How was Agincourt for you?' T-shirts.

France may, however, have the last laugh after all: not wishing to put a complete downer on the Games already, my advice to anyone hoping to watch the event is, I'm afraid, do so from the comfort of your own home.

It will be an unmitigated disaster. Should you be mad enough to consider flying to London, and have been booked on a flight by a sadistic travel agent who thinks Heathrow Airport would make the ideal gateway to your Olympic experience, you will face a nightmare.

Your plane - one of only 36 takeoffs and landings to be allowed each hour in order to reduce Heathrow air traffic by 20% in order to handle the 500,000 visitors expected in London for the games (yep, I couldn't work out that logic either) - will have spent the final hour of its journey (and fuel supply) circling over the Kent or Hertfordshire countryside, waiting for air traffic control to let your pilot land on the airport's single active landing runway.

Once you have landed you will probably wait until the first medals are being presented before your luggage arrives. This is because the second thing Heathrow fails miserably at - after allowing passenger airplanes to take off and land - is repatriating passengers and their luggage with anything approaching recognition that the regular passenger, once landed, might wish to subsequently go somewhere.

Heathrow is at pains to point out that it is backing Britain, or something like that. In a glossy 28-page brochure, Normand Boivin, the airport's Chief Operating Officer, says that "80 per cent of all Games visitors are expected to pass through Heathrow – including athletes, officials, Marketing Partners [note the capital letters...] and media, as well as spectators – the airport will be their first experience of London and the UK before the Games."

Oh dear. This is the very same airport which, in December 2010, had to cancel 4000 flights because it was underprepared for snow and couldn't cope with the backlogs or the volume of grounded passengers. Now, I know that even with the climate being as mad as it is, snow is highly unlikely in July, but the fact that the self-styled Gateway To Britain was unprepared for weather which shouldn't exactly be a shock in December doesn't bode well for the influx of half a million people in the space of a few weeks.

But let's imagine that all goes well, and the sixth and temporary terminal they are planning to build (I'm assuming this will be nothing more than a group of Portakabins), does manage to process all the athletes, managers, sponsors, corporate types, regular punters and their luggage (which will also include a total of 800 firearms belonging to 530 atheltes of both the Olympics and Paralympics), the next challenge will be traveling across London.

Heathrow Airport, for the uninitiated, was built to the west side of London. Britain, it should be pointed out, experiences a prevailing south-westerly wind, which means that Heathrow-bound aircraft usually land into the wind, requiring them to fly across a city of eight million people before touching down. Always something to think about when you're wondering about the rules of physics and the laws of average.

Getting from Heathrow in the west to Stratford, where the main Olympic events will take place, in the east is normally a voyage of endurance that would have made Captain Scott turn back.

This is because you have a limited number of transport choices: a taxi, which will cost you more than the Greek national debt; the Piccadilly Line of the London Underground, which will cost you more than the Greek national debt as well as your blood pressure; or the Heathrow Express, which which will cost you more than the Greek national debt, will only take you to Paddington, and then you will need to choose either a taxi or the London Underground to complete your journey

And then there's the hotels. I rarely have reason to stay in London hotels but when I have done so, I've found them to be appallingly bad - overpriced, poorly serviced and staffed by people who give the distinct impression that you are interrupting their day by asking for things.

Sure, there are staggeringly luxurious hotels in London, but the hotels you and I would stay in (i.e. those which aren't predominantly populated by semi-resident Russian mobsters and Middle Eastern arms dealers) mostly fail to understand the concept of service, 21st Century communications technology, or that a minibar should comprise of more than just a kettle, powdered milk and a solitary shortbread biscuit. Compared with the consistently high standards of comfort and service you get in Germany or even basic chain hotels in America, the British hotel experience is lousy.

Don't expect any improvement just for the Olympics. What you can expect is the loss of your children's inheritance: apparently, hotel prices in London will rocket by 400% during the games. This phenomena is commonplace in Las Vegas during major events like CES, the annual consumer electronics show. Several years ago, for the duration of CES I stayed at the sumptuous Bellagio Hotel (you know, the one with the amazing fountains which George Clooney knocked off in Ocean's 11). For the first two nights of CES, I was charged $318 a night, by the third night it had fallen to $240 and by the fourth and fifth nights I was paying just $130. Same hotel, same room, same me. And they said the Mafia was no longer operating in Las Vegas...

Once you're in London, you're going to have to get about. Taxi drivers I've spoken to all seem to be of the opinion that it would be better for them to go on holiday en masse during the Olympics than trying to get through traffic - even with fare-paying passengers on board. The consensus is that it simply won't be worth the hassle. So don't expect to find any taxis.

The Underground won't be any better: London's Tube trains are year-round sweat-boxes of a severity beaten only by the punishment received by Alec Guinness in The Bridge On The River Kwai. Coupled with chronic overcrowding, the inevitable strike by Bob Crow and his cronies, and your journey from inn keeper's hearth to trackside at the Olympic Stadium will be nothing short of torturous ardor.

Basically you'd be best off at home with your feet up watching several hundred honed athletes doing all the hard work. They've spent the last four years training so you won't have to lift anything more than another cold one. Yes, I'm sure it would be nice to be in the fabulous new stadium, juggling your eyes to watch the 4x400mm relay simultaneously with the high jump, the javelin and a mustachioed North Korean woman heaving a lead weight across the infield.

With everyone, surely, now owning a sharp-as-a-button High Definition TV, there really will only be one way to watch the 30th Olympiad and close-ups of sinews being stretched to their limits, Usain Bolt completing another unfeasible world record, or the somewhat preposterous notion that beach volleyball played in the middle of east London is authentic. It won't be, but it'll be a lot more entertaining than getting to the stadium.