At the third (sorry, fourth) stroke, it will be...

I've been trying to get my head around this leap-second business. If I've got it right, it's to bring the atomic clocks back into line with what the earth is doing. Apparently, on a very small scale, the earth is getting ever more slow in its orbit around the sun, which means that the atomic clocks are racing ahead and have to be corrected every now and again. So far, so good, but what I can't understand is that there is apparently a strong suggestion that we should ditch GMT altogether and switch to atomic time. But this would be the tail wagging the dog surely? To the extent that "real" time exists, it is measured by events in the natural world - sunrise and sunset and the passage of the seasons. If there is any discrepancy between those things and what a clock or a calendar says, then it is the clock or calendar which must give way, surely?

The perfect failure.

As one who has suffered through the years with the failings of their local football team (although the Wolves are doing OK this season, though Lord knows how) I can feel for the supporters of the American football team the Detroit Lions, who have just finished their season with the stats of Played 16, Lost 16. Detroit of course is also known as Motown, and some wag in the newspapers has suggested that it should now be known as Woetown.

Yes, but look at him!

Two scenarios - (1) I earn £30,000 a year, you earn £10,000 a year. (2) I earn £50,000 a year, you earn £20,000. Which scenario would you prefer? It may seem a silly question, but it all depends on how you look at it. You earn twice as much in scenario 2, but the disparity between our earnings is £10,000 greater. And when people talk about "the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer" it is often the disparity between rich and poor they are talking about, rather than the actual levels of wealth. It's a bit reminiscent of pay negotiations back in the 50s and 60s, when how much you were being offered seemed to be less important than how much others were earning and "maintaining the differentials". If we could concentrate more on our own situation and stop looking at what others are doing we might be more content.

Music Man / Ha ha.

Those who play musical instruments are prone to take the mickey out of those who play different instruments from their own. You've probably heard this one -

What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians?
A drummer!

But the one group which comes in for more stick than any other are viola players. There are enough jokes about violists to stretch from here to goodness knows where. Here's a few one-liners -

What's the similarity between The Beatles and the viola section of an orchestra?
Neither has played together since 1970.

How do you keep a violist from drowning?
Take your foot off their head.

How is lightning like a violist's finger?
Neither strikes in the same place twice.

How do you keep your violin from being stolen?
Put it in a viola case.

And then there's the story of a violinist in an orchestra who was intrigued by one of the viola players who, whenever he sat down to play, always opened his jacket and looked at something which appeared to be attached to his inside pocket. One hot summer, when the orchestra was rehearsing, the violist took his jacket off and hung it on the back of his chair. When they broke for drinks and the violist had left the stage, the violinist took his chance and walked over to his seat and looked inside his jacket. And there he saw a note pinned to the lining - "Viola left hand, bow right hand".

Is it the singer or the song?

Some of you have been kind enough to say nice things about this blog, and for that I thank you. But you know little or nothing about me as a person, so your comments refer solely to what I say, not who or what I am. And that is how it should be, but so often is not. Look at all the fuss about Channel 4's alternative Christmas message, simply because it was delivered by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, who apparently we are not supposed to like. But ignore who he is, and look at what he said (which you can find on Channel 4's website, among other places). What is there to take exception to? It is a gracious message fully in keeping with the Christmas festival. Wise words do not become any less wise simply because we dislike the mouth they come from.

Good King Wenceslas looked out...

...on the feast of Stephen. And that's today folks. We may call this day Boxing Day, but long before it took that name it was and still is St. Stephen's Day. Stephen's claim to fame is that he is acknowledged by the Church as the first Christian martyr, being stoned to death in around 34-35 A.D. for the blasphemy of suggesting that Jesus's teaching would eventually supplant the law of Moses. Wenceslas, by the way, was a real person - he was ruler of Bohemia from 921-935, though a Duke rather than a King.

Naughty, naughty.

So like a good boy or girl, you are going to drive to church this morning, and then come home and have a turkey dinner followed by a mince pie. Well, prepare to go to gaol! An Act of 1551 makes it illegal to go to church on Christmas Day other than on foot, an ordinance of 1588 makes it an offence to eat anything other than a goose today and in 1657 or thereabouts, Oliver Cromwell passed a law banning the eating of mince pies - and none of these laws have ever been repealed!

Nonetheless, a happy Christmas to one and all.

Christmas Eve

You might wonder why the day before some special day is often given its own name - New Year's Eve, Hallowe'en and of course, Christmas Eve. Well the answer is that back in the mists of time, the day was deemed to start at sundown rather than, as at present, midnight. So all these Eves were in fact the beginning of the following day. In many parts of Europe, Christmas Eve is celebrated even more than the day itself - it is often the day presents are exchanged and the main festive meal eaten. And why do we hang up stockings - well one theory is that this is done to catch anything which Santa might drop while climbing down the chimney!

Who pays?

I see the BBC has been fined again for misleading viewers (or in this case I think it was actually listeners) - but hang on a minute, where does the BBC get its money from? You and me, the licence payers! So we who were sinned against are footing the bill for those who sinned against us - makes no sense to me!

Music Man

With all this fuss about the song "Hallelujah" I thought I ought to do a bit of research. There seem to be plenty of versions of it, and having listened to them I have to say that the X-Factor girl Alexandra Burke's is not bad, and better than some, even if it is a bit emotionally over the top and heavily dependent on the arrangement and the backing. But I am far more attracted to the various parodies, and for me the pick of the bunch is the one you will find at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=kIMBxwKzlKs. Not only are the lyrics clever and - unlike the original - make sense, but whoever sings it has a good voice and musically, it stands up with the best of them.

Things are never straightforward.

Today is the shortest day. So as from tomorrow the time of sunrise will get earlier, and the time of sunset later, yes? Well no, actually. It's something to do with the earth being on a slant vis-a-vis the sun or something like that, but in fact the afternoons have already been pulling out - albeit only marginally - for about a week, and it will be New Year before the mornings start getting lighter. Another of those interesting(?) facts.

Sir Alan Patrick Herbert, CH (1890 – 1971)

As an addendum to yesterday's post, many of A. P. Herbert's Punch stories have been collected and published in a book under the title "Uncommon Law", and there may be those of you who remember some of them being dramatised on the BBC in the late 1960s in a series called "Misleading Cases". Although written to be funny, his stories were always founded on proper law. One of my favourites involved a collision between a car and a rowing-boat on a flooded road - the point being that the anti-collision rules of the road and the sea are the opposite of each other. On the road you keep to the left, at sea you keep to the right. So the issue was - is a flooded road still a road, or does it become subject to maritime law? The car was keeping left, while the rowing-boat was obeying the "port to port" rule, and bang! Perhaps the most amazing aspect of these stories is that apparently when they were published in other countries many of them were taken seriously and as a true representation of English law!

Bills of exchange.

I don't know whether the man who sought to pay a parking fine by writing a cheque on toilet paper ("stationery which aptly reflects my feelings towards the system...") is a fan of A. P. Herbert but it immediately brought to mind one of the many of his stories originally published in Punch magazine in the 1920s and 30s. APH was both a lawyer and a humourist who wrote funny stories about fictitious court cases. One of these was entitled "The Negotiable Cow" which involved a man who tried to pay his income tax bill by means of a cheque written on the side of a cow. The Revenue refused to accept it, and took him to court. This being an APH story of course, the Revenue lost. The judgment of the court was that "...an order to pay is an order to pay, whether it is made on the back of an envelope or on the back of a cow..." and as it was accepted that the account involved had the funds to meet it, it constituted a valid cheque. Indeed there was no argument that the man's toilet paper cheque was not equally valid, but as it was not in the standard printed form, the bank would have charged an extra £15 to process it which is why the police authority concerned refused to accept it. A cheque, of course, is not legal tender, and therefore you are never under any obligation to accept one in payment of a debt.

A bridge too...

The Millennium Bridge was built as a pedestrian bridge, and yet it was people walking across it which caused it to wobble and in a very short time to be closed. A classic example of the law of unforeseen consequences - or perhaps of consequences which should have been foreseen, but weren't?

Marks out of 10?

Considerable embarrassment has been caused to Scotland Yard by the revelation that one of their anti-terrorist advisers is himself wanted by Interpol for alleged past terrorist activities. Whether or not under these circumstances he should ever have been appointed in the first place is one question, but his suitability to remain in his post now that this is known is, I would suggest, more a matter of how well he is and has been doing the job. After all, don't forget the old adage "Set a thief to catch a thief".

The connection that isn't?

Ken Livingstone and Sir Ian Blair have both gone on record to say that in their opinion "nobody was to blame" for the death of Jean Charles de Menezes. Maybe so, maybe not, but when will we learn to accept that "responsibility" and "blame" are not the same thing? Clearly somebody (maybe more than one person) must have been responsible, in that their action - or inaction - led directly to the outcome, and perhaps if we could break this link between responsibility and blame, they might be prepared to come out into the open and 'fess up.

And the winner is...

I wouldn't normally go within a hundred miles of "X Factor", but as the BBC insist that it is news, I was regaled on their bulletin with a snatch of the winner's performance of a song called, apparently, "Hallelu(breath)jah". As far as I could see and hear it was another case of emotion and passion being mistaken for talent. She's not rubbish by any means, but to my ear she has a pretty ordinary voice depending strongly on electronic assistance, and her delivery is nothing special. But then, what do I know? I'm sure she'll go on to make a packet, and good luck to her.

Wrong question?

So what have we learned from the de Menezes inquest? Not a great deal I fear, because the emphasis seems to have been on the wrong things. The actions of the police who actually shot Mr de Menezes have come under great scrutiny - did they shout a warning, did he move towards them etc. - but to my mind this is pretty immaterial, because whether they or he did or didn't wouldn't really have affected the outcome. The fundamental element as I see it is that at some point the intelligence (if one can call it such) changed from "We think it might be him, but we're not sure" to "It is him" and from that point on, Mr de Menezes' fate was more or less sealed. So the question is, when did that happen, how and why did it happen, and who was - or more likely were - responsible for it happening.

How many? (4)

So, to recap -

A permutation is a grouping in which order matters (i.e. ABCDE is different from BACDE etc.).

The number of possible permutations of N things is N!
The number of possible permutations of N things selected from T things is T!/(T-N)!, or putting it more simply, the first N terms of T!

A combination is a grouping where order does not matter (i.e. ABCDE, BACDE and any other arrangement of the first five letters of the alphabet are considered the same group)

The number of combinations of N things selected from T things is T!/N!(T-N)!, or putting it more simply, the first N terms of T! divided by N! (or the first T-N terms of T! divided by (T-N)! - whichever is easier).

Just as a sideline, I hope those of you who have done the football pools and written "perm any 8 from 10" or some such, will now realise that this is not a permutation at all, but a combination - all that matters is which 8 games are chosen. Order is immaterial.

Hola - buenos dias!

Many, many years ago my wife and I talked seriously about the possibility of moving to Spain - well, Majorca actually. The main attraction - apart from the climate - was the cost of living. We reckoned our money would go at least twice as far there as it would here. For various reasons, we never got any further than talking about it, but how things have changed! Now people who did take the plunge back then are finding it difficult to manage, particularly with a weak pound buying less and less euros, and many of them are having to sell up and come back. I suppose it was naive to think that the economic disparity between the two countries would remain the same, but for a time, it was a nice dream.

Connection - what connection?

A very interesting report published the other day revealed that older drivers get proportionately far more speeding tickets than young drivers. Why interesting? Well, as any insurance company will tell you, in terms of their involvement in accidents, older drivers are far far safer than young drivers. So it would seem that the much-vaunted supposed relationship between exceeding the speed limit and driving dangerously on which so much of our road traffic law is based simply doesn't exist. It would be nice to think that someone in authority will take some notice of this, but I'm not holding my breath.

My choice.

Why do we continue to bang on about assisted suicide when what we are talking about is assisted dying? Surely somebody who is coming to the end of their life is entitled - if they wish - to have some say as to the how, where and when of it? I would hope that if and when I reach that stage I will still be competent enough to make my own arrangements, but if not, blessings be upon anyone who gives me a helping hand.

What arrogance!

There are those who object to the expansion of airports, for various reasons. That's their privilege. But there's no excuse for the prats who invaded Stansted Airport and brought flights there to a halt for several hours, causing disruption and misery to who knows how many. This is another example of the "My views are so important that they over-ride your right to live your life" approach which so many pressure groups now seem to adopt as a matter of course. Apparently the name of the group involved was Plane Stupid - well, stupid is as stupid does, and what you did was stupid!

Legal question.

Ignoring the distressing and emotional aspects of the Shannon Matthews case, I would really be interested to know whether her mother was in fact charged with kidnapping her (rather than conspiracy to, or aiding and abetting kidnap). Because it seems to me at least arguable that a custodial or jointly custodial parent cannot in law kidnap their own child. As a parent you have the right to ground your child and forbid them to leave the house, or send them to their room and keep them there, and indeed generally restrict or even proscribe their movements, and as kidnapping effectively involves the exercise of these powers then I cannot see how the offence can be charged against a parent. Can anybody help?

Cart before horse?

Why, my paper asks, was Damien Green MP arrested rather than just questioned by the police? How naïve! The answer is of course that by arresting a person the police thereby get the authority to search their house and other premises - hoping of course that by so doing they will uncover evidence to justify the arrest. Shamelessly cynical, but that's the way the police work these days, and until someone is brave enough - and rich enough - to take them to court and challenge the basis of the "reasonable belief" on which they founded their decision to arrest, they will continue to do so.

Music Man

How do you like your Messiah? When I was a lad, you got together the biggest choir you could and took the whole thing in a very stately, considered way. More recently it has become the fashion to use a much smaller choral ensemble and significantly up the tempi. It says much for the genius of Handel (who apparently knocked out the whole thing in just over three weeks) that it doesn't matter how you approach it, the work speaks for itself. Me, for listening to I think I favour the more modern spare zippy approach, but for singing, there's nothing to beat the thrill of being in a really big choir and giving it some serious wellie!

How many? (3)

Let us suppose that the England football manager (or coach, as we now apparently have to call him) has chosen a squad of 15 players for a certain game, and now must pick his team from this squad. Assuming any player can play in any position, how many different teams can he come up with? This is somewhat different from what we have discussed before, because here order doesn't matter. All that matters is which 11 players are chosen - the order in which they are chosen is of no consequence. So how do we calculate this? Well, if order did matter, we know from last time that the answer would be the first 11 terms of factorial 15, that is 15x14x13x12x11x10x9x8x7x6x5 = 54,486,432,000. But let's just look at one possible team - players A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J and K. These 11 players as we know could be arranged in 11! different ways, but for the purpose of choosing a team, this is just a single grouping. The same goes for any other 11 players, so what we have to do is divide 54,486,432.000 by 11! (39,916,800) and this comes to 1,365. A non-ordered grouping is called a combination, and the formula is that the number of combinations of N things selected from T things is T!/N!(T-N)!. Here T is 15, N is 11, so T-N is 4, and that gives us 15x14x13x12x11x10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1/11x10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1x4x3x2x1 and cancelling out top and bottom leaves us with 15x14x13x12/4x3x2x1 which comes to 1,365.
We'll draw all this together next time.

Identity crisis.

Beware the Immigration and Citizenship Bill which the government intend to introduce in this Parliament. Ostensibly, it is designed, among other things, to allow the police and immigration authorities to keep a closer check on those who have come into the country from elsewhere by being given the power to require them to prove their identity on demand. But a close examination of the wording of the Bill reveals that this power is to apply to anyone who "has entered the UK", and clearly this could extend to anyone who has gone abroad - for work or on holiday - and then come back. It is to be hoped that the Bill will be amended to make it clear that it does not apply to UK citizens, but to simply assume that this power would never be used in this way would be disingenuous, given the way in which the prevention of terrorism legislation has been, and continues to be used for purposes well outside its originally intended ambit.

So it was just one of those things?

The coroner in the de Menezes inquest has ruled that the jury cannot return a verdict of "unlawful killing". This means that he is satisfied as a matter of law, that there is insufficient evidence that any crime has been committed by any individual. Whilst it is pretty clear that the shooting was the result of a tragic cock-up, not to allow the jury to consider whether that cock-up was serious enough to possibly amount to corporate manslaughter by gross negligence would seem perverse. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the decision has been taken on high that the whole thing should be treated as an unfortunate accident and the case closed. It is shameful that nobody apparently has got the guts to hold their hands up and accept at least some responsibility for the unwarranted death of this unfortunate man.

How things have changed.

My post the other day about my childhood memories of Woolworth reminded me that back then there were two High Street "cheap as chips" stores. Woolworth were considered the slightly more upmarket of the two. And the other even cheaper one? Marks & Spencer!

Coincidence?

Has anybody else noticed that the £150,000 a year threshold at which the new 45p in the £ tax rate will kick in is just comfortably above the salary of a Cabinet Minister?

Ha ha

I'm sure you've probably come across this one before, but it's well worth a repeat -

If you'd bought £1000 worth of shares in Northern Rock a year ago, they would now be worth just £4.95.

If you'd invested your £1000 in HBOS shares instead they would now be worth £16.50.

If you'd gone for XL Leisure shares, your £1000 would now have shrunk to less than £5.

On the other hand, if you had used your £1000 to by tins of lager, drunk them and taken the empty cans to an aluminium recycling plant, you would have been paid £214 for them.

So it's obvious - the best investment advice in the current climate is to drink heavily and recycle!

The wonder of....

With the imminent demise of Woolworth, many people have gone online to record their memories of this store which has played a part in just about everybody's life. For me, it's just four words - hot roasted salted peanuts. Nobody else did them, or ever has done them. They were a wonderful treat, and I've never forgotten the delight as a child of walking down the street holding the warm greasy bag and scoffing the delicious contents. Oh, the nostalgia!

Show me the money.

Governments of both colours have a habit of coming up with good and necessary projects, but then failing to fund them properly - the Child Support Agency being a classic case in point. But another example is the Crown Prosecution Service. It is obviously right that the body which collects evidence (the police) ought not to be the body which also decides whether that evidence is sufficient to justify a charge being laid. It is clearly better that that should be the job of an independent organisation - hence the formulation of the CPS. But then you have to make sure that it has the funds to do what it is set up to do. And when you don't, you get the situation we have today, where people are being held on remand - sometimes in custody - for unconscionably long periods, because the resources are simply not there to deal with their cases expeditiously. To revert to the police making the decision would be a retrograde step, but at least it would speed things up.

How many? (2)

We saw last time that five people (or things for that matter) can be arranged in 5x4x3x2x1 = 120 different ways. Following the same logic, myself, my children and grandchildren number 10 in all, and so the number of different ways in which we can be arranged is the almost unbelievable 10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1 = 3,628,800. This procedure of multiplying a number by all the numbers less than it down to 1 is called a factorial, and is written by the number followed by an exclamation mark. Arranging things in different order in this way is called permutation, so we can say that the number of permutations of 5 things is 5! (read as "factorial 5"), that of 10 things is 10!, or in more general terms that the number of permutations of N things is N!. Now there used to be a game in a daily newspaper where you were given seven letters and invited to make as many three-letter words out of these letters that you could. One way of approaching this would be the "brute force" approach of making all the possible different 3-letter arrangements and then seeing which of them are allowable words. But just how many such arrangements are there? This in fact is just a simple variation on what we've already learned. We have three imaginary pegs where the letters can go, and any of the seven can be in position 1, any of the remaining 6 in position 2 and any of the remaining 5 in position 3. So the answer is 7x6x5 = 210. In strict mathematical terms we say that the number of permutations of N things selected from a total of T things is T!/(T-N)!. Here T is 7, N is 3, so T-N is 4, so we have 7!/4! or 7x6x5x4x3x2x1/4x3x2x1. and the 4x3x2x1 cancels out top and bottom which leaves us with 7x6x5.

More to come.

There's clever.

Given where we are in the election timetable, the Chancellor finds himself in somewhat of a win-win situation. If his gamble comes off, then there's a good chance that Labour will win the next election, and he will be there to take the benefit, whereas if it doesn't work, then it's almost certain that it will be a Conservative government which will have to pick up the pieces (again!).

Eye catching, but...

I may be thick (and probably am!) but if the shops around here are offering discounts of anywhere between 10 - 25% with no appreciable effect on the number of punters coming in to buy, it is difficult to see how reducing VAT by 2.5%, however welcome, is going to make any difference. And as essentials like food and children's clothes are VAT exempt anyway it's not going to be of any help to those at or near the breadline. More a matter of style than substance it seems to me.

Judge, jury and executioner?

Leading article in Birmingham's local Sunday paper - "A Midland terrorist suspect said to have played a “key role” in the alleged transatlantic airline bomb plot has been killed in a US missile strike in Pakistan." Note the words "suspect", "said to have" and "alleged". If indeed this man has been targeted and killed as a result of a deliberately aimed missile, then this amounts to summary execution doesn't it? And as, whatever else he may have been, he's a British citizen, what's our stance on that?

An uncomfortable thought.

Now that we're cosying up to Syria again, it seems more and more unlikely that the truth about the Lockerbie bombing will ever see the light of day. Mr al-Megrahi's appeal will doubtless be delayed and delayed until his cancer finally kills him and then a line will be drawn under the whole affair. Thus justice gives way to pragmatism. It's a nasty world out there.

Just what do they want?

I think if I were a banker, I would be very, very confused. It seems to be commonly accepted that the current crisis was in great part caused by banks lending money irresponsibly, and yet, now that banks are carefully scrutinising applications for loans and credit, and turning many down or imposing high interest charges, they are being criticised for that. So it seems it is damned if you do, damned if you don't!

How many?

Every now and again I come back to probability, which is a sort of hobby of mine. Probability maths is very much concerned with the number of different ways in which things can happen, so let's look at how we go about calculating this.
Imagine that you are a photographer, who has been engaged by a family of five (Dad, Mum and three children) to take their photograph. You turn up one afternoon, to be told that they want their photo taken on the back lawn, standing in a line, but they simply can’t agree on who should stand where. After listening to them arguing for five minutes or so, you rather rashly suggest that, if it helps, you are prepared to take as many photos as necessary to cover all the different ways in which they can stand. After all, you have a couple of 36 exposure films in your bag, and there’s a good hour and a half of daylight left - surely that should be enough? Well, let’s see -
The best way to approach this, is to imagine that there are five little stakes in the ground, numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, indicating the five possible positions for people to stand. OK then, any of the five of them can stand in position 1, so you have five ways of filling position 1. Now any of the remaining 4 can stand in position 2 - so four ways of filling position 2, but more to the point, for each of the 5 ways of filling position 1, you have 4 ways of filling position 2. So there are 5 x 4 = 20 different ways of filling the first two positions. This isn’t a particularly big number, so we can easily prove this by listing them. If D stands for Dad, M for Mum and 1, 2 and 3 represent the three children, then we can have:
DM D1 D2 D3 /MD M1 M2 M3 / 1D 1M 12 13 / 2D 2M 21 23 / 3D 3M 31 32
so there you are - 20 in all. Following the same logic, for each of these 20 arrangements, any of the remaining three members of the family can fill position 3, so that gives 20 x 3 = 60 ways of filling the first three positions, and then either of the remaining two can fill position 4, and whoever is left takes position 5. So in total then, there are 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 different ways in which they can arrange themselves - a total of 120. So in fact your two rolls of film aren’t going to be enough, and anyway you’re going to have to get a shift on to take 120 photos in an hour and a half!
But there's more, which we'll look at later.

Two out of ten - must try harder!

One of the basic elements which any good law should have is certainty. Every citizen should be able to know for sure whether they are within or without the law. The Home Secretary's proposals to make it an offence to pay for sex with a woman who is "controlled for another person's gain" fundamentally fails this test, particularly as it is proposed that this will be a "strict liability" offence, which means that it doesn't matter whether you know that the woman falls into this category or not. Like the drink-driving laws, it's another example of the government (and not just this government) wishing to ban something, but not having the political balls to do it directly, and therefore seeking to do it by creating in peoples' minds doubt and fear over whether they are breaking the law or not, and hoping that they err on the side of caution. Good intentions cannot disguise or excuse bad law, Home Secretary.

Women are from Venus...

The Principal of Cheltenham Ladies' College has made a case for more single-sex schools, stressing the point that boys and girls learn in different ways and are stimulated educationally by different things, and therefore need to be taught in separate environments. Whilst she may be right about this, in my mind a great part of what schools are all about is preparing their pupils for life in the real world, and there is a danger that any educational advantage produced by separating the sexes will be more than nullified by the disadvantage to their ability to socially interact. I speak from some experience - I went to an all-boys school, and there is no doubt in my mind that this made it far more difficult for me in my teenage years to form easy friendships with girls - I reckon in this respect I was some two or three years behind my peers who had gone to mixed-sex schools. So it is a matter of which is more important - academic success or social abilities.

Two left feet good.

It would seem that Strictly Come Dancing - which I do not watch - is seen as being in danger of becoming a joke because the viewers keep voting for someone who can't dance, but they like, at the expense of good dancers. Well, that's the way it was set up, isn't it? It's another of these "let's get the public phoning in and making us lots of money" programmes, and it seems a bit rich to start complaining because it's working the way it was intended to, but producing an unintended result. If you give power to the people, you have to accept the vagaries and possible absurdities of people power. In my book it's a silly programme anyway!

Get some glasses, ref!

Bad decisions by referees are in the news again following a sending off in the Newcastle/Wigan match at the weekend which possibly cost Wigan the points - certainly that was the view of their manager. Of course, theoretically referees cannot make bad decisions - they are the sole judges of fact, and if they say it's a penalty, or a corner, or a goal, or whatever, then that's what it is. The problem arises because what started out as just a game has become a big (and I do mean BIG) money business, and referees are making decisions on which small fortunes may depend. Not surprisingly in these circumstances, players and managers are less likely to simply accept decisions with which they disagree. What's to be done? I don't know, but maybe we have to start thinking about a different way of policing the game, certainly at the top professional level. American football, for example, uses no less than seven "referees", each with a specific area of responsibility, and perhaps we could use that as a template. Another radical idea would be to referee the game away from the pitch, using TV pictures, or perhaps have a TV referee with a radio feed to the ref on the pitch. The discussion will continue, I'm sure.

Ride, ride (and that's sort of ha,ha in Latin).

That slave you sold me the other day has died.
Really? He never did that when I had him!

Doctor, Doctor, when I wake up I'm all dizzy, and then after half an hour I'm OK.
Well then, wait half an hour before waking up!

Is that woman your wife?
I'm a eunuch, I can't have a wife.
Oh, so she's your daughter?


Those are three jokes from what is perhaps the oldest joke-book in the world, dating back to the 4th century (find out more at http://www.yudu.com/oldestjokebook). Nothing new under the sun, you see.

Damned if they do, and...

Who'd be a social worker? What happened to Baby P is shocking beyond belief, but to what extent can the local social services be held responsible? If you stop to think about it, social services can never be proved to be right, they can only ever be proved to be wrong. They may say "If we hadn't intervened, such and such would probably have happened to this child", but the key word there is "probably". No-one can ever be certain what would have happened. On the other hand, if they fail to intervene and something bad happens, then it's there for all to see. It really is a no-win situation, and whilst it is possible, probable even, that they made mistakes, this rush to lay the blame solely at social services' door is both unjust and unfair.

Eat your pudding.

Scientists have come up with the recipe for the perfect Yorkshire Pudding, but what caught my eye was that they have also suggested going back to the traditional way of serving it - as a separate course before the meat course. The original idea of the Yorkshire was a thrift thing - by first filling the family up with the pudding smothered in gravy, the canny Yorkshire housewife could get away with giving them less meat. And certainly a freshly made Yorkshire and gravy is a scrumptious thing in its own right. Thank goodness the EU haven't got hold of it and decreed that to be called such it must be made in Yorkshire - though, thinking about it, it's probably just a matter of time...

Spam, spam...

Do you get spam e-mail? I'm sure you do - we all do. My mail provider makes a pretty good job of filtering it out, but quite a bit still gets through. I of course just delete it - and I've often wondered why, when just about everybody must do the same, those who send out these messages bother. Well, now I have the answer - it seems that if they only get one person out of 12.5 million responding that's enough to make them a profit! So I'm afraid spam will continue.

Go on, have another...

I drink - quite a lot actually, certainly far more than the advertised "safe" limits. And yet, I don't get drunk. I was trying to think back to the last time I did get drunk, and I think it was at an office party some thirty years ago. And that got me thinking - is it the peer pressure of drinking in groups that is the main cause of binge drinking and alcohol-fueled bad behaviour? Left to our own devices, would most of us drink within our limits, and know when to stop? Not sure whether this helps the current debate about drink-related anti-social behaviour, but just a thought.

At the going down of the sun...

My grandad survived the First World War.
Many of his mates didn't.
We will remember them.

Book Post

(see post dated 18/11/06)

Here are my latest ten -

Kathy Reichs - Break No Bones - 8
James Rollins - Sand Storm - 6.5
Manda Scott - No Good Deed - 6
David Hewson - The Promised Land - 7
Scott Frost - Never Fear - 8
Matthew Reilly - The Six Sacred Stones - 8
Barry Eisler - Choke Point - 8.5
M. J. Trow - Maxwell's Inspection - 7
Robert B. Parker - Spare Change - 9
Michael Connelly - The Overlook -8

Oh, and by the way....

I've been down this line before, but the fact that everybody is emphasising the fact the Obama is the first black American president just seems to me to prove how racist we all still are. Why couldn't we just have seen him as a young candidate with an engaging personality and a refreshingly different message. I bet you don't know the colour of his eyes, or whether he's right or left-handed? No neither do I, because it has no bearing on his fitness for the job. The fact that the colour of his skin seems to be a factor, shows that we still have a long way to go before we can claim to be non-racist. And then of course, we have Lewis Hamilton, the first black Formula 1 champion...

No certainties any more.

Well the theory always used to be that when interest rates went down, the stockmarket went up, and vice versa. This was the logic behind splitting your money between saving accounts and investments. So interest rates have come down 1.5%, and what's happened? The stockmarket has nose-dived! Help!!

Up in the clouds.

The latest techno-buzzword is cloud computing - what the hell's all that about then? Well if you work in a reasonable size office, you're probably already familiar with the basic idea. You have a computer on your desk, yes? Well chances are, you don't - what you have is a monitor and a keyboard, which is connected to a big computer somewhere else in the building. All the programs you use, and all the stuff you produce are stored on this big computer, and what you and everybody else has on their desk is just a "dumb terminal" which you all use to access the big computer. OK, now think of that basic set-up on a huge scale. My computer here in my house, and everybody else's, become just dumb terminals accessing a mega-huge computer somewhere else - up in the clouds, as it were. You don't have to worry about buying software - it's all on the big computer. You don't have to worry about storing and backing up data - it's all on the big computer. You just access it (and doubtless pay for it) as needed. Well, that's the idea. Will it work? Well, probably in due course, but be prepared for some hiccups along the way!

Seen from another angle.

I've been exchanging e-mails with a friend in America concerning the presidential election. As she is a black lady, I was not surprised when she told me she'd be voting for Obama - I assumed it was very much a case of a black voter voting for the black candidate. But when I put this to her, she said "No, it's not so much that - in fact I've been pretty undecided up til now. But the way I look at it, whoever gets elected, there's a small but significant chance that they won't see out their four years - in McCain's case it's his health, and in Obama's case I reckon there are plenty of nutters out there already planning his assassination. And if this were to happen, who would I rather see stepping into the presidential shoes - Biden or Palin? And when you look at it that way, it's a no-brainer, isn't it?". Interesting....

Penny for the guy.

If you stop to think about it - which I bet you never do - Guy Fawkes Night is about as non-PC as you can get. It's all about burning Catholics after all. In these days when we have to tread so carefully for fear of upsetting some ethnic or religious group or other, how ever does it survive? I often wonder how Catholics feel about it - or is it that they too have long since forgotten the significance?

Formula 1 - 2008

Hamilton - well, hooray, he finally did it, just. I have to say I didn't find him as convincing this season as last - perhaps what happened then has been preying on his mind. Now that he is rid of that particular monkey, it will be interesting to see how he approaches next season.
Massa - I really feel for him as I did for Lewis last year. To lose by a single point in the last race must be hard to take. He impressed me with the good grace and dignity with which he accepted it - unlike, shamefully, some of his supporters. His day will surely come - indeed, had Ferrari thrown their weight behind him from the beginning of the season rather than initially favouring Raikkonen, we might have had a different result.
Raikkonen - somehow didn't really seem to have his heart in it this year - certainly there were races where he appeared to be just going through the motions. The fact that, even so, he finished third shows he remains a force to be reckoned with.
Kubica - where did he come from? The surprise package of the season. Fell off a bit in the last half of the year, but with Heidfeld also finishing sixth, BMW are clearly on the way up.
Alonso - his results in the last few races prove what a top-class driver he is. Unfortunately some of the comments he has made during the same period show what a rather nasty, spiteful character he can be. Time to grow up I feel, Fernando.

Save the cheerleader...

I'm hooked on "Heroes" but beginning to wish I wasn't. The first series was good, as was the second, although it didn't seem to appeal to some people, but the third is in danger of becoming just plain silly. The basic strength of the programme has been that, however off-the-wall the story-line might be, the characters retained a certain stability and honesty. You knew where you were with them. But in this series, all that's gone to pot, and characters are doing things completely - well, out of character. It's become a bit like doing the lottery - I have to do it for fear of missing something vital, but can think of better things to be doing.

Hallowe'en

This is, of course, a contraction of "All Hallows' Eve", and refers to the following day - November 1st - which is All Saints' Day, or as it was called in earlier times, All Hallows. But where does the association with ghosties and ghoulies come from? Well the Celts used to celebrate - if that's the appropriate word - the end of October as the dividing point between the warmth of summer and the cold of winter, and they believed that the spirits of the dead could fall through the crack between the two, as it were, and for a short time enter the real world. To keep them at bay, they would light fires and throw the bones of sacrificed animals on them - bonfire was originally bonefire! Trick or treat may be a recent American invention, but it has its origins in the medieval custom of "souling" whereby young people would go from house to house offering to say prayers for the dead in return for money or specially baked sweet "soul-cakes". Go on, ask me another!

Getting to the bottom of it.

Apparently the younger generation for the most part don't understand what all the fuss is about concerning the antics of Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross - they see it as simply an example of their brand of "edgy" humour, to which they relate. Well let's be clear - the point here is simply that that 'phone call was made. However you slice it, the idea of calling up an unsuspecting elderly gentleman and bragging about having had sex with his grand-daughter is totally unacceptable, and the fact that there may be people out there who genuinely find it funny is completely immaterial. This isn't about humour, edgy or otherwise, it's about standards of behaviour, and if there are people who don't understand that, then perhaps they need to take a cold hard look at themselves. All the emphasis has been on Brand, Ross and the BBC, whereas the real victim here is Andrew Sachs, and to a lesser extent perhaps, his grand-daughter. Let's cut the crap - the essential wrongdoing here was the making of the 'phone call.

Get it sorted!

I have enormous sympathy for Debbie Purdy, who is seeking assurances that if she goes to Switzerland for an "assisted suicide" and her husband travels with her that he will not be prosecuted for aiding and abetting her act. The problem arises because of the nonsense created by the Suicide Act 1961, which stated that suicide was no longer a crime, but that assisting someone to commit suicide was - so now it is illegal to help someone do something which they are legally entitled to do. Work that one out if you can! In any other area of the law, it is perfectly proper for you to delegate someone else to act for you where you wish to do something legal but are incapable of acting yourself - if their actions are queried, the only question would be whether or not they were carrying out your clearly and voluntarily expressed intentions. Here Debbie Purdy could not have made her wishes more clear. The courts have said it is a matter for Parliament, but somebody needs to sort it out. It is indefensible that people facing this sort of desperate situation should have this further worry heaped upon them.

The Lazy Cook.

It's getting towards the time of year for mulled wine - and it's really dead simple to do. Rule number one, buy cheap plonk - it's a waste of money to use anything decent. So, all you need is a bottle of house red and a piece of muslin - an old hanky will do. Into the muslin/hanky put a teaspoon each of ground cloves, ground ginger, ground cinnamon and two of brown sugar and tie up tightly. Pour the wine into a saucepan - preferably non-metallic - and add your spice parcel and a couple of bay leaves. Heat up gently - do NOT allow to boil! - and there you are. Prost, as they would say après-ski.

Where does the buck stop?

The Brand/Ross/Sachs business was puerile and distasteful in the extreme. But my understanding is that this was a pre-recorded programme, which means that someone else took the ultimate decision to broadcast it. They, whoever they may be, bear their share of the blame.

There's a plum in my salad!

Scientists have developed a genetically modified tomato which tests on mice suggest can provide a significant degree of protection from cancer. How long it will be before it is available to the general public - indeed whether it ever will be available - will not only depend upon further testing, but also on whether it can get approval from what is a very rigorous EU inspection procedure. And there's a further problem - the genetic modification means that the tomato is purple. Will this make any difference? There seems to be some evidence that purple is an acceptable colour for fruit, but is not a popular colour for vegetables (purple carrots have not been a great success). And most people would classify a tomato as a vegetable, even though it is actually a fruit. So we'll have to wait and see!

It's the silly season...

Why should something which has gone on for eighty years without any problem suddenly become unacceptable? This is what has happened in Newbridge, a small town in Wales, where the organisers of the annual Remembrance Day parade have been told by the local council that they must change its traditional route. The reason given? I'm sure you've already guessed - elfnsafety! And apparently it's not just Newbridge. Pity we didn't have Health and Safety inspectors in 1914 - nobody would have been allowed to leave their trench. Now that would have been worthwhile!

Down, down, down.

Have had to watch the value of my investments drop dramatically over the past week or so. When I was coming up to retirement we had a talk by a very good financial adviser, and one of the things he said which has stuck with me was "As far as investments in stocks and shares are concerned, you've not made a profit until you take it, and equally you've not made a loss until you accept it. If you can possibly avoid it, never turn a paper loss into a real one". So I keep muttering to myself - it's just a paper loss, it's just a paper loss....

Ha ha.

This comes from a chat group, courtesy of someone calling themself LP -

Gordon Brown was visiting a primary school and he visited one of the classes. They were in the middle of a discussion related to words and their meanings. The teacher asked the Prime Minister if he would like to lead the discussion on the word “tragedy”.
So the illustrious leader asked the class for an example of a “tragedy”.
One little boy stood up and offered: “If my best friend, who lives on a farm, is playing in the field & a tractor runs over him and kills him, that would be a ‘tragedy’”.
“No,” said Brown, “that would be an accident.”
A little girl raised her hand: “If a school bus carrying fifty children drove over a cliff, killing everyone inside, that would be a Tragedy.”
“I’m afraid not,” explained the Prime Minister, “that’s what we would call a great loss.”
The room went silent. No other children volunteered. Gordon searched the room.
“Isn’t there someone here who can give me an example of Tragedy?”
Finally, at the back of the room, a small boy raised his hand…In a quiet voice he said: “If the Air plane carrying you and Mrs Brown was struck by a “friendly fire” missile and blown to smithereens, that would be a tragedy.”
“Fantastic!” exclaimed Gordon Brown. “That’s right. And can you tell me why that would be tragedy?”
“Well,” says the boy “it has to be a tragedy, because it certainly wouldn’t be a great loss and it probably wouldn’t be an accident either!”

Shame on us.

It's one thing to be evicted from your house for failing to pay the mortgage - it's quite another to be evicted from your country because somebody else wants to use it as an air-base. And yet that's exactly what happened to the inhabitants of Diego Garcia and the other islands of the Chagos archipelago back in the 60s. Since when they and their descendants have been fighting for the right to return. And now the House of Lords has ruled against them. Not exactly our finest hour, I feel.

Two plus two is...er...

I like this idea of Google's of not letting you send e-mails late at night or at weekends without testing you to see whether you are compos mentis by requiring you to work out a few maths sums first. Of course, if you're stone cold sober but arithmetically challenged, you're in trouble.

What's in a name - again.

When I was little, pikelets for Sunday tea was a weekly treat. We used to buy them loose from the local baker - they were thick and round with holes all over the surface, and you toasted them (in front of the fire back in those days) and smothered them with butter and sometimes honey. So just when did they become crumpets? That's what they're called in all the supermarkets these days. Ask for pikelets and you're met with a blank stare. To my generation, "crumpet" has a completely different meaning!

I've got a six-er.

It's the conker season - except that you rarely seem to see kids playing conkers these days. Is it a health and safety thing? I certainly seem to remember some schools a few years back banning conkers in the playground because of such concerns. But I think it more likely that it just doesn't fit with today's video game generation - it's gone the same way as marbles. You can't stop progress.

Get your juicy apples - they're lovely!

It's difficult to understand all this fuss about market traders being prosecuted, or threatened with prosecution, for selling fruit and veg in imperial pounds and ounces rather than grams and kilos. The fact is that there is nothing to stop you selling in imperial measures provided that you have the equipment to also measure out in metric units. So it's just a matter of getting an extra set of metric weights for your scales. Provided you can meet a request for a kilo of potatoes, say, then you are complying with the law. I can only assume that these "metric martyrs" as they are being called are just being rather unnecessarily silly - or that some Trading Standards officers don't know the law!

Lions led by donkeys.

"Thank God! We lived through it! The Great War: 1914-1917". One of the most quoted lines from that wonderful, wonderful final episode of "Blackadder Goes Forth". But it does bring to mind the question of just what were the dates of the First World War. It's traditionally given as 1914-1918, but dotted here and there throughout the country you will see war memorials inscribed 1914-1919. So what's going on? Well, the fighting stopped at the famous eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, but that was only a cease-fire, or armistice. The countries involved remained officially at war until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919. Not that it matters a toss to the thousands who were slaughtered - make sure you buy a poppy.

When in Rome...

Absolutely no sympathy with this British couple who have been jailed for three months in Dubai for having sex on the beach (and isn't that a cocktail?). Even if, as they claim, they were just kissing and cuddling, they know that that is against the law in that part of the world, as is being drunk, which they both were. If you deliberately do something you know is illegal in the country you happen to be in, you must take the consequences.

Spooky!!

I wonder if J.M. Barrie could see into the future - here's an uncanny quote from "Peter Pan", written over a hundred years ago -

"Mr. Darling used to boast to Wendy that her mother not only loved him but respected him. He was one of those deep ones who know about stocks and shares. Of course no one really knows, but he quite seemed to know, and he often said stocks were up and shares were down in a way that would have made any woman respect him."

The eye of the beholder?

A survey, as reported by the BBC, has found that Birmingham's Bullring has been voted "Britain's ugliest building". Does make you wonder just who was surveyed, and whether they've ever been anywhere near Birmingham, because if they had, they would know that the Bullring is an area, and not a building! Maybe they are actually referring to Selfridges, which is certainly a striking building not to everybody's taste, but this is just small part of the Bullring. I wouldn't however disagree with the Central Library being put in second place. It is certainly a very stark, blocky building which Prince Charles once famously described as looking more like a place for burning books than storing them. It is due for demolition when the library eventually moves to its new location, and I think few Brummies will mourn its passing.

Ah! the little darling...

The Good Pub Guide has reported a dramatic increase in complaints about badly behaved children in pubs ruining it for other patrons. Partly this is due to a deliberate effort on behalf of pubs to make themselves more family-friendly and attract more parents with children, but of course the main problem lies with parents who are oblivious to their children's behaviour, and let them run riot. Strangely. I've noticed round where I live a growing tendency for pubs to shut down in-house ball parks which they previously had and where kids could go to let off steam, and this certainly doesn't help matters, but really this all goes back to the "progressive" thinking of the late 60s and early 70s, when it was considered that any attempt to stifle your child's behaviour was bad, and that you should allow them to do whatever they wanted. Those children have now grown up and treat their children just the same in turn. As ye sow, so shall ye reap!

This call may be recorded....

If you're into computers, and particularly computer programming, you've probably heard of the Turing test. Alan Turing was one of the geniuses at Bletchley Park during the war, and he later laid down a test for artificial intelligence (AI). If, he said, you were carrying out a text-based conversation with (unknown to you) a computer in another room, and you couldn't tell that it wasn't human, then that computer (or more precisely, its program) would pass his test for AI. Apparently there is an annual competition to see whether any computer program can pass the test. As yet, the answer would seem to be "getting close but no", but one expert confidently predicted that the Turing test would be passed within the next two or three years. He saw this as leading, among other things, to computers taking over from humans in call-centres. You mean, that hasn't already happened - that really is a human being I'm talking to and getting no sense out of?

Pick a card....

Here's a simple card trick which requires no skill and will be good enough to keep your kids guessing. Take a pack of cards and give it a good shuffle. Then fan it out on the table face down and invite your mark to pick any card they choose, and look at it. Gather up the rest of the cards and square them up. Now tell your mark to cut the pack wherever they like, put their card on top of the cut pile, and put the rest of the pack back on top. So as they have cut the pack, there is no way you could know where their card is, right? You now turn the pack over and fan it out face up and unhesitatingly pick out the card they chose. So how's it done? Well, when you shuffle the pack, make sure that you see and note the bottom card. After your mark cuts the pack, puts their card in and places the rest of the pack on top, their card will end up being the card immediately underneath the bottom card which you have memorised. When the pack is turned over and fanned out face up, just look for the card which is to the right - as you look at it - of the bottom card, and that will be their card. Simple but effective.

Ha ha.

Lots of good one-liners going around about the current financial crisis. Here are three I particularly liked -

What's the definition of optimism?
An investment banker ironing five shirts on a Sunday evening.

New question for geography students -
What's the capital of Iceland?
Answer - About £3.50.

What's the difference between an investment banker and a pigeon?
The pigeon can still make a deposit on a new BMW.

The Lazy Cook

Have you ever tried shallow-frying oven chips? I'm sure they're very bad for you weight-watching-wise, but they crisp up really nicely. while the insides remain soft and fluffy. Yum!!

USA, USA....

I have a view on the American presidential election - I imagine most of you do too. But is this a suitable topic for a blog which claims to be about current affairs in this country? I've touched on this before - in the world as it is today, what happens in other countries, and in particular the United States has a direct effect on us, so our current affairs are inextricably wrapped up with theirs. So yes, I think it is something which I can legitimately talk about - indeed, I think there is a powerful, if ultimately doomed argument that other countries should have some sort of say in the election. So what is my view? Well, in common I suspect with many Americans, I know what I don't want rather than what I do, and what I don't want is more of the same. I want to get away from the last eight years where America has played the role of the evangelical playground bully, with the approach of "I know what's right, and if you don't do as I say, I'll thump you". I have to say I have reservations about both candidates - and indeed also those who were eliminated earlier - but of the two on offer, only Obama seems to accept the need for a change of direction. Whether, if elected, he will be able to - or be allowed to - follow through on his promises is debatable, but if I had any say in the matter, I know where my vote would be going. And if only a small proportion of what has been reported about Sarah Palin is true, then the thought of her getting her hands anywhere near the levers of power is really, really scary.

Reality.

In vox-pop interviews there have been lots of negative comments about the Government's plan to cope with the present financial crisis. "Why should we bail out those who created the problem in the first place?", "Cutting interest rates will discouraging saving at the very moment when we need people to save", "The banks get government money to help them, but there's no help for my small business", "The government will take preferential shares in the banks to the detriment of ordinary shareholders", and so on and so on. All very valid points, but what we need to realise is that this is very much a case of the lesser of two evils. Yes, this is going to be unfair in many respects, and many people are going to get hurt as a direct result, but if nothing were done, many, many more people would be hurt and to a far greater extent. There is no magic solution, only a least-worst one.

Hidden messages.

I long ago learned that you shouldn't take on face value anything said by anyone in authority - you always need to look for the subtext, that is to say what they really mean. Shop keepers at a village somewhere in Warwickshire are up in arms at the council's proposals to introduce local car parking charges, which they say will hit their trade. The council's response is that it will "benefit the local economy". That is code for "will bring in more money for us (the council) and if it has a negative effect on you shopkeepers, tough!". And then we have the Chancellor saying that the Government will do "whatever is necessary" to maintain economic stability in the face of the present crisis. To me that's code for "we really haven't a clue, but we'll do our best to deal with circumstances as they arise", and whilst that may be the reality in these current unprecedented times, I have to say it doesn't fill me with confidence.

Way to go!

You've got to give Selfridge's ten out of ten for trying to make the best of a bad job by developing and selling a new chocolate treat called - you've guessed it - Credit Crunch!!

A fitting outcome.

So Cardinal Newman had the last laugh after all - when they came to dig up his bones (see last Friday's post), there weren't any! His body had quite literally turned to dust, and so what's left of him will remain where it is, as he always wanted. Maybe there is a God, after all.

Wow!

Mandelson back in government - an inspired decision by the Prime Minister or an act of desperation? Bit of both I think. On the one hand, it pretty well whips the carpet from under those who were plotting to depose him, at least in the short term, but on the other, just look at the man's track record - good chance he won't last twelve months. A big gamble, whichever way you look at it.

Stop meddling.

Rape law raises its head again - at least indirectly. The offence is committed by having sex with a female without her consent - but the law considers that a girl under the age of 16 is legally incapable of giving her consent. Hence the offence of having sex with an under-age girl, sometimes referred to as statutory rape. But it should be noted that the girl in such a situation has committed no offence. The Scottish parliament is considering legislation which, where both parties are under 16, would make them both guilty and subject to punishment. This is being done in the spirit of anti-discrimination. At present in such cases the boy can be charged, but the girl cannot. Provided that the act was factually, as opposed to legally consensual, I cannot see what is to be gained by criminalising either of them. This is an area where the law is best kept at arm's length.

All or nothing.

While he was alive, Cardinal Newman specified - and not just once - that when he died he wished to be buried next to his life-long friend Father Ambrose St John at Rednal in Worcestershire, and so it was. Now however the Catholic Church is in the process of canonising him, and to this end intend to exhume his remains and take them to Birmingham Oratory where he will lie in state and eventually be re-buried there. So why are his express wishes being over-ridden? It seems the Church are uncomfortable with his life-long association with another man. It would appear that there cannot be even the slightest suggestion that a saint just possibly might have been gay - not that there is any evidence that he was. Smacks a bit of air-brushing inconvenient people out of photographs, doesn't it? If he is worthy of veneration, then this is because of who and what he was - it makes no sense to cherry-pick the bits you like and pretend the rest doesn't exist.

You saved my life - thanks, now bog off!

Glad to see the Gurkhas won their case (see post 17/9/08), but pretty shameful that they had to take the matter to court in the first place. When somebody has been prepared to put their life on the line for us, they surely deserve all we can give them. In this respect, the Iraqi interpreters also spring to mind.

A stitch in time...

Tragic story of a man who tried to stop a street fight, and as a result was himself badly beaten up and later died. But what caught my eye on reading the story was the fact that this happened at a particular spot which the police said was notorious for drinking in the street and drunken behaviour. So the question is - if the police were aware of this, what action had they taken to stop it? We've had this discussion before, but surely a major part of the police's job is to stop criminal and anti-social behaviour happening, and not just catching people after the event. If they had taken pre-emptive action this tragedy may not have occurred.

Yes, but no, but yes.....

Difficult to understand the reasoning behind a Catholic school in Manchester's decision not to allow its girl pupils to be vaccinated against the virus which can cause cervical cancer on the school premises. They can, of course, simply go down to their GP and be vaccinated there. The danger is that many of them perhaps won't bother, and therefore put themselves more at risk of the disease. If the school, as it insists, has no moral objection to the vaccine, then why not allow it to be given on the school premises where clearly the take-up is likely to be greatly increased. Smacks of Pontius Pilate washing his hands, doesn't it?

A politician who talks sense??

Does anybody else think that the one politician who really deserves being listened to is Vince Cable? I'd never heard of him before he became the LibDem's stand-in leader following the resignation of Ming Campbell, but his parliamentary performances during that interregnum certainly caught my attention, and his pronouncements since on the growing economic mess we now find ourselves in have convinced me that he, and perhaps he alone, has some sort of handle on it. I don't know if Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling talk to him, but if they don't, they should - if anybody's got the answer, it's probably him.

Really really worried of the West Midlands.

Cripes! First it was the Halifax, now it's Bradford & Bingley, and I've got money there as well. I'm not sure how much more of this my nerves can take. This is basically an American problem but they seem to be taking their time and playing politics with trying to sort it out. This is the downside of globalisation - decisions taken by other countries in which we have no say can affect us massively.

Who benefits?

So a Government report has finally confirmed what has been obvious to the rest of us for decades - that the benefit structure is such that for many claimants they are better off on benefit than they would be if they were in work. The original concept of the Welfare State was to provide a safety net against poverty, but the reality is that the rates of benefit are such that it can provide an attractive alternative for many to working for a living. You can't really blame somebody for not fancying going out to work when they will be at best no more than a few quid a week better off, and probably by the time they've taken into account the cost of travel and work clothes and such, worse off. That it has taken the Government so long to accept the obvious is really scandalous - now what are they going to do about it?

When I am King, dilly, dilly...

It is rumoured that Gordon Brown is considering plans to abolish the Act of Settlement. This is the Act passed in 1701 which restricts succession to the throne to Protestants, and which forbids the monarch from marrying a Roman Catholic. It is interesting to note that it does not prevent the monarch from marrying anyone of any other religion - or indeed of no religion. Also, although it refers to it, the Act is not responsible for the idea that male children are to take precedence over female - the so-called doctrine of primogeniture - this is a common-law concept which goes way, way back. The Act certainly would appear to have little relevance today - it was passed under very different circumstances and for reasons which were seen as important at the time. One major difficulty is that it could mean that a Roman Catholic monarch would become head of the Church of England, which would be a nonsense. So it's a tricky matter, and as there is no immediate prospect of the provisions of the Act causing any problem, I reckon it will go on the back burner.

ADHD.

In my young day, we didn't have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder - we had bad behaviour, and it was for parents and teachers to deal with it. In these PC days, when you can no longer give a misbehaving child a clip round the ear, or even rebuke them in any meaningful way, it has to be given a posh name, and treated with drugs - which of course don't treat the underlying cause, but merely mask the symptoms. Can't help feeling that the old ways were best.

Get some glasses, ref.!!

The "goal that wasn't" in the Watford-Reading match at the weekend has reignited calls for video assistance to be available in football matches. I think the basic argument in favour is overwhelming, but the difficulty is deciding just how it should be used. The two basic approaches are to go the way of rugby and cricket, where the officials call for assistance from an appointed video referee/umpire when they are unsure, and the tennis (and American football) approach where a certain number of challenges are allowed to be made - presumably in football this would be by the manager or maybe the captain. Either way you have to have regard for not disrupting the flow of the game. So I think in play you would have to restrict it to specific matters such as - has the ball crossed a line or not, who was the last person to touch the ball before it went out of play, or did a foul take place inside or outside the penalty area and things like that. I do however think there is a case for later review of foul play and yellow and red card incidents, with the facility for withdrawing or imposing these retrospectively in the light of video evidence. It's a difficult area, but the present situation where TV viewers are able to see what the referee can't is untenable.

Good walk spoiled?

There's an old saying that football is a game for gentlemen played by hooligans, and rugby is a game for hooligans played by gentlemen - or something like that. But what about golf? Have been watching the Ryder Cup, and was less than impressed by the antics of some of the players. I've always seen golf - which for a time I played, very very badly - as a gentle game where sportsmanship was crucial. After all, in a casual friendly game there's ample opportunity for cheating - improving your lie, miscounting your strokes and so on - and you have to play on the basis that nobody is doing that sort of thing or seeking in any other way to take an unfair advantage. The same principles surely apply at all levels of the game, and what I saw came perilously close on occasion to crossing that line.

Puzzled.

I'm struggling to understand this short-selling business. As far as I can see, it goes like this - if shares in the XYZ company are trading at £10, and Mr. B thinks this price will fall, he can go to Mr. A, who hold shares in XYZ and borrow 100 shares say, from him. He then sells these shares at £10 each, and so gets £1000. If he's right and the price falls to say £8, he then buys 100 XYZ shares for £800 and gives them back to Mr. A together with a small fee for his trouble. He of course has made the best part of £200 profit. Now my problem is this - why on earth would Mr. A play this game - OK he gets his shares back, but they are now worth less than when he lent them, and surely he knows Mr. B's game and that this will be the likely outcome. Why would anyone deliberately damage their own share holdings in this way? Have I missed something?

Wrong end of the stick?

So J K Rowling has donated £1m to the Labour Party - nobody's business but her own, but I do take issue with her reasons (or one of them) for so doing. She pointed to David Cameron's stated intention to re-introduce tax perks for married couples, which she sees as discriminatory towards single mothers, of which she was one. I think she misses the point. There is plenty of evidence that, as far as society is concerned, marriage is A Good Thing. Married couples are healthier and wealthier than their non-married counterparts - it's not clear why this is so, but it is a statistical fact that it is. Children born in wedlock (and isn't that a deliciously old-fashioned expression?) are far more likely to steer clear of anti-social behaviour and a life of crime, far more likely to get a job and contribute to society rather than be a drain on it, and far more likely to look after their parents and relatives in old age rather than leave that responsibility to the state. And then they are far more likely to get married themselves, and so perpetuate these benefits. Given this is so, it is perfectly proper for Government to use whatever tools it has - taxation being the main one - to encourage people to get married. This has nowt to do with single parents - it doesn't really have anything to do with marriage per se, it is simply encouraging behaviour which will benefit us all.

Put a sock in it.

Here's a good one - contractors employed to paint a set of railings on the front at Blackpool came across a sock tied to said railings. So what did they do - they painted the sock! Of course, it has been suggested that this might be a piece of Damien Hirst-Tracey Emin-type modern art!

Worried of the West Midlands.

So my Northern Rock post of - spookily - almost exactly a year ago has now come back to bite me. This time it's the Halifax, and I do have money there. So what am I doing? I'm just sitting here twitching, and hoping that this takeover by Lloyds/TSB sorts everything out. I don't really understand just what's going on, and that makes me feel very uncomfortable. I tend to use the FTSE 100 index as my economic indicator, and that keeps bouncing about, but in general is falling, so that's no comfort. I can't help feeling that there are people out there making money out of my (and others') discomfort, and that makes me angry, so I've got lots of emotions whizzing about at the moment - none of them good!

Respect.

The post about Newcastle United and their problems brought to mind the name of Steve Bull, who is held in enormously high regard by Wolves fans, not just for his exploits on the field, but for the fact that when he was at the top of his game he consistently passed up opportunities for transfer to other bigger clubs, where he would doubtless have made much more money, maintaining that his loyalty was to the Wolves. When you look at the selfish and greedy way so many of the modern players behave, he fully deserves his reputation.

Shame on us.

Pretty shabby the way we are treating many Gurkha soldiers who have fought for this country and now wish to make their home here. Mind you, you have to wonder why anybody would want to come and live here at the moment! What with the weather and the credit crunch, Britain hasn't got much going for it, has it?

Toon Army

The goings-on at Newcastle are, I have no doubt, worrying for the fans but very interesting for those of us looking in from the outside. It seems to embody a struggle to maintain the connection of the club to its locality - the main complaint against the owner seems to be that he and the Director of Football he appointed are Londoners. It's certainly true that there aren't too many of the top clubs which have this connection these days, and indeed many of them are going to great lengths to widen their fan base as far as possible. There's a fair chance for example that a majority of Man U fans couldn't find Manchester on the map! Whether you can really maintain this insular approach to running a club with pretensions to being in the top flight is problematical, and it has been suggested that the club's greatest liability is in fact their fans and their demand that the management of the club must stay in local hands. Keegan's walked away (again!) and Shearer doesn't want it, so where do they go from there. Football isn't what it was, and that's a shame, but it's a reality we all have to accept.

Here's the bus...

There are calls for the introduction of American-style yellow school buses for all secondary school pupils. Now that so many children no longer automatically go to their nearest secondary school, it does seem a sensible move, though as far as I can see it is the provision of buses rather than their colour and style that matters. I've certainly been glad of the existence of a school bus for one of my grandchildren - I posted before about the difficulty I was going to have with my grandchildren all at different schools in different directions, and fortunately a school bus service has come to my aid. Of course it costs, and this is going to be the main factor as to whether the idea of school buses for all actually takes off or not - it's already expensive to send your child to secondary school these days, what with uniform, school meals, school trips and so on, and this is going to be just one more expense - £2 a day has been suggested (presumably per child), which isn't exactly small change. We shall see.

Word chains

This is a game we sometimes play on car journeys and such. You start with a random word and then come up with successive words (or acceptable phrases) which each have some association with the preceding word. The object is to make a chain of at least five words and, without repeating any other word, end up with the same word as you started with. It's a useful game because you can play it anyway you want - either to come up with the shortest chain, or to see how long you can keep it going. Here's what I think is a neat example of a short chain we came up with the other day whilst hanging around waiting for a dental appointment. Our starting word was "sun".
Sun
Newspaper
Fish and chips
Takeaway
Chinese
Olympics
Rings
Saturn
Solar system
Sun
The chinese-olympics link was challenged, but was allowed to stand as a current association rather than a permanent one. Strangely, no one challenged the newspaper - fish and chips link, although that is really dated!

One out, all out?

The fire in the Channel Tunnel was a serious incident and clearly has put that tunnel out of commission for some time. But if memory serves, wasn't the Chunnel built with two tunnels to deal with precisely this sort of event? So why have all services been suspended? Why isn't the other tunnel open for business? What's the point of building in redundancy if you don't make use of it?

Money talks - loudly!

"We hate Setanta" was apparently the chant at the recent England football internationals - this of course a reference to the fact that the Setanta pay TV channel was the only one showing the matches. Bit unfair, I think - Setanta has every right to try and boost its membership by whatever means it chooses, and buying the exclusive rights to certain England matches may well do that. If you want to hate anybody, then direct your ire at the FA, who made this deal with Setanta knowing that by so doing it would be denying a large proportion of England fans the opportunity of watching the match on TV. Market forces ruled apparently, or to put it another way - greed won.

So I'm not going to die - boo, hiss!

I'm not quite sure whether this comes under the "you couldn't make it up" heading, but it is pretty unbelievable. A year ago, a man was told he had terminal cancer and had only months to live. Believing this, he gave away his life savings to family and friends. Now, a year later, he has been told he hasn't got cancer after all. You might think he would be over the moon, but instead he intends to sue the NHS for damages, claiming that as a result of their incorrect diagnosis he is now broke. The immediate question which springs to mind of course is - where are the family and friends to whom he gave the money? Surely in the first instance it is for them to come to the rescue?

Water water everywhere.

You can understand the anger of people who have just about got their lives together after last year's floods, only now to be flooded out again. Not surprisingly they are asking why 12 months on, nothing has been done. It seems as though local and central government took the view that last year's weather was a "one-off" and wouldn't happen again, at least for some time. Whether they will now take flood defence more seriously remains to be seen, but for the sake of those affected, it is to be hoped so.

Waist of thyme?

Every now and then somebody makes a plea for simplifying spelling - this time it's a University professor who maintains that the time spent on teaching children how to spell could be better used. And there is no doubt that a significant amount of school time does have to be devoted to spelling, and that if we had a "one letter one sound" system, as some other languages do, we could free up that time. There are however two problems. The first is that so many English words come from other languages - mainly Latin and Greek - and their spelling reflects this and is important in order to understand what they mean. The second is that words are pronounced differently in different parts of the country, and a common agreement on spelling is the only way people from different regions can efficiently communicate with each other. Is it bath or barth, is it howse or hice for example? It's a historical millstone, but I'm afraid spelling is important and needs to be learned.

Me, myself and I.

I'm constantly amazed at the arrogance of some people who seem to believe that they are entitled to act as they want, with no regard for what effect it might have on other people. There was a case in point while I was away on holiday of some protester who climbed on a motorway gantry, with the result that the motorway had to be shut until he could be brought down. So hundreds, may be thousands of people had their journeys disrupted just because of the selfish actions of one man. And now we have this advertising stunt where the makers of a computer game arranged for a petrol station to give away free petrol. Needless to say, this created traffic chaos and once again disrupted rush-hour traffic with massive inconvenience to those affected. It must be wonderful to have such belief in your own self-importance!

Ha ha.

Boy comes home from school one day and says "Dad, I've got a part in the school play".
"That's great" says his father, "what's your character?"
"I play a man who's been married for twenty years" replies the boy.
"Never mind" says his father, "perhaps you'll get a speaking part next time"!

A plague on both your houses.

As regards what is going on in the Caucasus, it seems that you either have to support Georgia or Russia. As far as I am concerned, they have both behaved disgracefully and, in international terms, irresponsibly. I think our government, rather than siding with one or the other should be diplomatically banging their heads together and telling them to sort themselves out. And the US isn't helping....

Quo vadis?

My eldest grandson is just starting his last year at school. Next summer he will take his A-levels, and then...? He knows what subjects he enjoys, and what subjects he is good at, but translating that into a career plan is quite another matter. I was surprised and concerned when I asked him what his careers adviser at school had to say, to be told that there wasn't really any such person. Apparently as a group they get occasional very general careers advice - which really amounts to no more than common sense - but there is no real attempt to provide information or advice on a personal level tailored to the needs of individual students. And then coincidentally, there was an article in my paper the other day quoting a survey which found that some two-thirds of teachers considered that getting their students good exam results was their job, and that preparing them for life after school was "not central to their remit". Regular readers of this blog (are there any?) will know that I have little time for targets, but it seems to me that if you want to measure the worth of a school, then rather than what percentage of pupils get how many of what GCSEs or A levels, a better indicator would be what percentage of pupils go on to get a worth-while job. Of course, like any target, it would be subject to manipulation, but perhaps it would concentrate schools' minds on just why they are doing what they are doing, and on liaising with employers so as to to turn out employable youngsters with some idea of where they are going.

I am here - or am I?

You may or may not have heard of Gary McKinnon. He is, in his own words, a "bumbling computer nerd" who managed with embarrassing ease to hack into the computer systems of NASA and the Pentagon. He did all this from his flat in London. He has never denied doing what he did, or that it was illegal, but always maintained that his purpose was not to damage these computer networks, but merely to carry out research into UFOs and his belief that the Americans were concealing access to alien technology. The question is, where did he commit his crime? Logic would suggest that he did it here, in this country, sitting at his computer in London. The Crown Prosecution Service however, for whatever reason, have not brought charges against him. So that should be that, shouldn't it? Well, apparently not so. The US have determined that - although he has never set foot there - he has committed a crime in the US, and have instigated extradition proceedings. He has unsuccessfully appealed against these to the courts here and to the European Court, and it looks likely that he will indeed be sent to America to face charges there. So...? Well, quite apart from the very real possibility that the American courts will seek to "make an example" of him, it raises the very vexatious question of just where a "computer offence" is committed. Given that most of us these days are connected to the internet, and accessing sites in other countries as a matter of course, this is something which badly needs sorting out, and I don't think this case helps at all.

Well said.

All credit to Helen Mirren for coming out with some very sensible comments about so-called date rape. Is it too much to hope that, coming from a high-profile woman, some notice will be taken of them? I fear not, because the usual suspects have already lined up to belittle and criticise her remarks. None-the-less, thank you, Dame Helen, for saying what needed to be said.

Carry on, Henry.

Henry VIII had six wives - right? Everybody knows that - and most people know the mantra "divorced-beheaded-died-divorced-beheaded-survived". But did he? It all depends on how you define a wife. He certainly went through six ceremonies of marriage, but four of those marriages were annulled (OK, a couple of them were annulled by Henry himself by virtue of his self-declared position as head of the Church of England, and are therefore not accepted as such by the Catholic Church) but whoever and whatever, in law an annulled marriage has never in fact taken place, so you can make a good case for Henry only having had two wives - Jane Seymour and Katherine Parr. Another of those interesting facts...

Bat and ball.

Americans will tell you that baseball is a native American game invented by one Abner Doubleday in 1839. Tosh - utter tosh and they know it! There is plenty of documentary evidence that baseball originated in England in the mid-1700s. Another myth however is that baseball is a derivative of rounders (if you really want to annoy an American, tell them that their national game is essentially a game for girls!). However more modern research suggests that it is more likely that rounders emerged as a derivative of baseball rather than the other way round. Or indeed that both games originated independently - we tend to forget in today's information age that back then things could be going on in the next village of which you could be completely unaware. Any road up, baseball was definitely introduced to the Americas by settlers from over here.

To everything there is a season...

Can't believe it's September tomorrow - what the hell happened to the summer? I seem to remember we had a decent week or two in May I think it was, but that was it. The rest has been pretty dismal. Of course, there's always the chance of an Indian summer, but time is fast running out, the nights are pulling in, and the leaves will be falling before we know it. I know there are people who love autumn, but for me it just means winter is round the corner, and I can't find anything to cheer about in that. Roll on next spring!

The greatest? (2)

In our search for an alternative Greatest Olympian, you could argue that the closest any single event comes to the Olympic ideal of citius, altius, fortius is the decathlon for men, and the heptathlon for women, so a good case could be made for people like Daley Thompson, Roman Šebrle or Carolina Kluft. Then again, being top of your chosen sport over a long period might well be seen as a measure of greatness, and that brings Steve Redgrave into play - gold at five successive Olympics, although once again the point needs to be made that these were team rather than individual achievements. But my choice would be Emil Zatopek, if only for his refreshing "let's have a go and see what happens" approach. At the 1952 Olympics he was entered for the 5km and 10km races, both of which he duly won. But then, on a whim as it were, he decided to run in the marathon, never having run one before. There's a story that at about half distance, he turned to those he was running with, and asked "are we going fast enough?". Anyway, he won in what was then an Olympic record time. He must be the only person who for at least a short time had the marathon record of - Run 1, Won 1. For me, the fact that he was prepared to put his considerable reputation on the line for fun, as it were, makes him my personal Greatest Olympian.