My Lidl Pony

I have never eaten horse meat, but then I have shopped at Tesco, so maybe I have. Twitter had a mare of a day withstanding all the puns following the news that an Irish and Yorkshire based plant had unknowingly processed beefburgers containing pork and horse meat. Tesco jumped fences to apologise, but other UK supermarkets were also part of the circus: Lidl, Aldi, Iceland. The burgers aren't harmful. Deceit is the issue here. There is also a cultural aspect to this story - you can buy horse meat quite freely on the continent - and this has always ruffled Britain's eurosceptic feathers.

The free Metro newspaper went with the headline, "Horses for main courses". The journalist Simon Hoggart told this joke: "I was in the Tesco caff for lunch and the waitress asked if I wanted anything on my burger. So I said, 'Sure, a fiver each way.'" My favourite was a text from my housemate. "What do you want for tea tonight? We could have those burgers I got from Tesco the other day but I checked the sell-by date AND THEY'RE OFF!"


It was with a groaning sense of inevitability we greeted the news of the demise of HMV. I went into the Leeds store recently and the atmosphere of imminent closure was depressingly palpable. They had resorted to selling Leeds United football shirts and One Direction coffee mugs. Their Rock and Pop CD section, usually the company's bread and butter, was buried in a backroom upstairs. An ugly scene.

A friend of mine commented on the irony of a high street chain - nay, a "British institution" - which caused the steady decline of smaller independent record stores being usurped by the overwhelming empowerment of the internet. But I missed out on the quirky record stores you find in High Fidelity. We didn't really have that in Swindon, but we did have a HMV.

Not only was it a prime spot for social gatherings, but as a bored kid you could easily waste hours in there - rifling through the CD racks and movie posters, reading CD sleeves or listening to the latest singles. I knew every inch of that store. I bought my first CD single there (Seal's Kiss from a Rose).

I remember trying to buy Boom Boom Boom by The Outhere Brothers on cassette single, only to be refused by an intimidating assistant who had clearly heard the record and knew, at 10 years old, that I wasn't quite ready for that level of trash talk. I bought all my favourite boyhood punk albums there: Operation Ivy, The Sex Pistols, Green Day. When I was very young, I would rate other towns by the size and scale of their HMV stores. "Shall we go to Oxford today?" Mum might ask. "Yeah, their HMV is massive!"

I'm pining over a misspent youth as much as I am another failed high street chain. HMV remains a crucial chapter in the formative years of most people my age, which is why this closure hurts more than Our Price and Virgin Megastore put together. Now that music is no longer something you pick up, hold, read, save your pennies to buy or lend to a friend, the need for vast retail space is utterly redundant. Streaming software like Spotify is affordable, expansive and convenient. But where's the romance? With HMV's closure, those days are now well and truly mincemeat.

The Savile Report

A year before his death, I interviewed Jimmy Savile as part of my editorial duties at the Leeds Guide. In 2009 he was a popular celebrity, a knight of the realm, the eccentric philanthropist with access to everywhere from the nation's top charities to the BBC to Downing Street.

His house overlooked Roundhay Park here in Leeds, and he could often be spotted jogging around its green surrounds or messing with the meals at his favourite local restaurants. He had just secured a new undergraduate training scheme to help junior doctors and nurses with their medical research, and I wrote a congratulatory, if slightly sardonic first-person appraisal.

Savile had been vocally supportive of our magazine since its inception. We had access to his mobile phone number and he was an obvious, if perhaps lazy, target for us to gather local celebrity comment. I initially left a voicemail asking him to call the office, which he did. I was away on lunch so he left a message with my colleague: "Tell him it's Robert De Niro, he owes me money."

It was a rocky interview. I remember his impatience at the fluidity of the questioning, his attempts to steer and control the interview. But he eventually thawed and spoke with nostalgia of "inventing DJ-ing" at the Leeds Mecca - or at least the notion of using two turntables - his phobia of technology and his thoughts on death. With his "pop pals" Elvis, John Lennon and Michael Jackson dead, there would be "one hell of a band in heaven."

If heaven exists it would now seem incongruous to find Jimmy Savile in it. Following the release of the Savile Inquiry, Deborah Orr in the Guardian described him an "evil genius". He controlled his eccentric public image as an affront to mask five decades of calculated sex crimes - abuse at 14 hospitals, over 450 allegations, 34 confirmed rapes and victims as young as 13.

In hindsight, we played directly into his hands - another ploy for his mass media manipulation. When Savile died his gold casket lay in state for the general public to pay their respects. Even in death he had the last laugh.

Like all bullies, Savile's cruelty was underpinned by intimidation on all levels, from the authorities investigating to the victims themselves. Many questions still need to be asked of those who saw the abuses take place and did nothing. The danger, says Orr, is that the Savile case will be seen as "entirely exceptional". The fallout from Savile should surely be that the voices of the abused are not ignored. Police failed to prosecute Savile during his lifetime despite a litany of allegations. It may take time to restore the confidence of victims of such abuse, but the Saville reports are a prime starting point.