The numbered lists found both online are all too often incoherent – rather than making real connections the blogger just ranks random statements. Best of lists are not only subjective, ninety-nine percent of the time they’re not nearly subjective enough – for example, check out the many lists of ‘best opening lines of books’ and notice how all too often these are simply lists of famous ‘canonical’ books. Ditto best films or albums of all time lists. These aren’t so much what the blogger likes as what the blogger thinks their audience will recognise and they (the blogger) ought to like to demonstrate their ‘fine’ (in reality below-average and handed down from square teachers) tastes.

An economic bubble is trade in high volumes at prices that are considerably above the intrinsic value of the product or service in question. In other words an economic bubble is the exchange of products or assets at inflated prices. Some of the more notorious economic bubbles in recent years have been in assorted property markets – with crashes in the value of property occurring from 2005 onwards in various markets around the world. The US property bubble in particular – and the sub-prime mortgages tied to it – sparked the current financial crisis and could also be said to have burst the banking and financial industries bubble.

August is a slow month for news – but remember kids that’s because the news is manufactured by public relations departments and this is when they go on summer holiday in the northern hemisphere. This year we had the misfortune to have the Olympics to obliterate the more usual silly season stories. What amazes me is that much of the media claimed that even cynics were won over by The Games during and after the London Olympics. I haven’t seen any change in attitudes among the people I know who opposed the Olympics for screwing over people in east London. Likewise, while one might admire the skill of some of the athletes, for me the Olympics was still an exercise in corporate branding and patriotic bullshit.

A month or three ago the BFI’s Sight and Sound magazine asked me to contribute my top ten films of all time for their 2012 critics poll. Now the BFI has published the results of their poll listing both the top 250 films and the choices of each individual critic! You can find that here. I was pleased to see that my tastes fell completely out of line with dominant critical opinion. As far as I can make out nine of the ten films I picked were unique to me. And my bottom and final choice Videodrome appears to have been nominated by only one other of the 846 critics who contributed top ten lists.

Today someone starting a conversation about the architect Alvar Alto reminded me of a funny incident that happened in Finland back in 1995. I’d done a reading in Tampere and had gone back to Helsinki to stay for one night with the writer and musician Petteri ‘Pete’ Paksuniemi. Pete insisted I have his bed and said that he’d sleep on the sofa. So I crashed out in a very comfortable bed at maybe three in the morning. Around seven Pete’s girlfriend – who was closely related to both Alvar Alto and the composer Jean Sibelius – came home and got into bed.