My so-called week

You're a weirdo, Thom Yorke

I've had some good times with Radiohead over the years, despite the fact that they have a bit of a reputation for seeing the gloomy side. But they've done me proud in numerous ways: I'll always be grateful for their company during a slew of dark nights of the soul a few years ago; I saw them live at their brilliant best in a marquee in London's Victoria Park; I can pick out not one or two but three songs from OK Computer on my guitar; and I only have to mention to my best mate that for a long time she thought the line 'I'm a weirdo' in 'Creep' was really 'I'm a widow' for us both to convulse with laughter. And wet ourselves. They even furnished me with a celebrity anecdote, after I chatted blithely, obliviously, tipsily and narcissistically away to their bass player at a party, only remembering after several hours to ask him, 'And what do you do?' He was exceptionally gracious.

So you can see it's not really in my DNA to have a pop at the Head's lead singer, Thom Yorke. But I reached tipping point this week when the cheeky little elf spoke out against the disastrous effect that rock stars' addiction to touring is having on the environment.

There comes a point when you have to take issue with all this compulsive handwringing and renouncing and abstaining and ask whether you would rather live in a world that has room for Bob Dylan's Never-Ending Tour, now in its third decade, or whether you would like to spend the rest of your life listening to Coldplay concert podcasts (Coldcasts? And would Cast's be Castcasts? Bugger. They've split up.) Incidentally, Dylan has surely stored up carbon karma; his 1975 American tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue, was conducted entirely by train, and produced a journey so memorable that Sam Shepard chronicled it in book form, giving rise to wonderful daily entries such as 'A hundred bucks' worth of Valiums are delivered to the Niagara Hilton like so much Chicken Delight.'

But then Dylan is a song-and-dance man. More to the point, he is probably not prey to the nervy and apparently almost entirely middle-class preoccupation with surplus that seems to explain much of the current vogue for self-castigation. Sure, it's a terrible idea to pump rubbish into the air until we're all choking to death and living on leaves and the planet's a dried-out husk; sure, we should all do our bit and rock stars are no exception, and Thom Yorke is a good egg, trying to help. But you also think: all well and good to forswear the jetset lifestyle after you've made your millions.

In any case, risk is a vital if sometimes unpleasant part of life, as Petr Cech and Carlo Cudicini can testify, and both Jose Mourinho and Arsene Wenger have eloquently explained to us. My own trip to hospital this week was necessitated not by a flying tackle but by a moment's inattention in a tapas bar. I stayed standing but my mum didn't, thereby ending up flat on her face and, the following day, in the newly refurbished accident and emergency department of University College Hospital, now much swankier than your average Hilton.

Bless mothers. You can't keep them down. Neither do dodgy legs interfere with their inbuilt ability to champion their offspring. So thank you very much indeed to the kind nurses and doctors at UCH, who I have no doubt are reading this column and this newspaper, since they were directed towards it so forcefully and with such gusto.

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