Oh, the nostalgia...

So the AA is to introduce patrolmen on bicycles? Plus ça change, and all that - I remember when all AA patrols were by men on motorcycles with side-cars, and if you came across one and you were sporting an AA radiator badge, you would get a smart salute! Those were the days!!

Justice works both ways.

The recent House of Lords decision effectively banning the use of witnesses giving evidence anonymously is clearly right, however inconvenient to the police and prosecutors. If the threat of intimidation or violence dissuades a potential witness from giving evidence that is a matter which must be directly addressed by the police and prosecution, not circumvented by a basic denial of fundamental common law principles. The whole concept is based on two unproven assumptions - that the defendant is guilty and will otherwise escape conviction, and that the witness is telling the truth. Our legal system denies both those assumptions - it presumes the defendant is not guilty until and unless the contrary is proved, and it allows the defendant the fundamental right to challenge the witness's evidence, which clearly is substantially compromised by not knowing who the witness is. I fear this Government - as it is wont to do - will produce some ill-thought-out and knee-jerk legislation, which will simply compound the problem. They should be looking at ways of creating an environment in which witnesses feel able to give evidence, rather than denying the defendant's rights.

Flag waving.

With Andy Murray - at the time of writing - still in Wimbledon, there have been a fair few flags of St. Andrew visible in the crowds. A commentator who perhaps should have known better, referred to one such as "the saltire", and that's a name commonly used by the Scots. But a saltire is just a type of heraldic design - simply a diagonal cross, so the Scottish flag is a saltire, but as that design is also used by other countries and states, it has no particular right to call itself the saltire, although it's true that it's almost certainly the oldest flag of that type.

Oh wow - I didn't see that coming!

I've posted before about surveys which seem to be set up to do nothing but prove the obvious, but equally amazing is how decisions can be taken without regard for the equally obvious consequences. The finding that the decision a few years back to withdraw anonymity from sperm donors has resulted in a significant decrease in such donors is being greeted with surprise - but really folks, what did you expect? Makes you wonder about the intelligence of some of our decision-makers, doesn't it?

Oh no, not again!

Depressing to see signs that the big unions are starting to talk in the same way as they did in the 70's - prepared to hold the country to ransom to get a preferential deal for their members, and sod everybody else. Problem is that the Government is so weak at the moment, and as I understand it, the Labour Party is in such desperate need of funds, that the danger is they may be inclined to give way to them. Hope I'm wrong...

Ha ha.

Couple of quotes about old age which I found particularly amusing -

He's so old that when he orders a three-minute egg, they ask for the money up front.
Milton Berle.

When I was a boy the Dead Sea was only sick.
George Burns

Frankenstein food?

One thing that you learn as you go through life is that there are two sides to every coin - nothing is all good or all bad. Surprisingly, this is a lesson which seems to escape many people. They just concentrate on the good and ignore the bad or vice versa. GM foods seem to me to be one such area - there are clearly enormous benefits to be gained from using that technology, but equally there are detrimental, or potentially detrimental consequences to be considered. To simply look at the one side and ignore the other benefits nobody. What is needed is an unemotional assessment of the pluses and minuses, and an acceptance of the fact that whichever way the decision goes, the views of those who oppose it are valid and must be addressed.

Poo.

I've mentioned before that I've problems with dogs doing their business on my front lawn, leaving me to deal with it, so I was interested when I saw a story of a scheme in Mansfield to address the problem of dog owners who fail to clean up after their pets. But apparently their solution is to "shame" owners by spraying the dog-mess pink. Am I missing something? Just what is this supposed to achieve? If the owner is still around, then the obvious answer is to confront them directly, and if they are not, then how will they be shamed? Don't get it.

... is icummin in.

The last sentence in yesterday's post raises the interesting (some might say vexatious) question of precisely when does summer start and finish. June 24th - known as Midsummer Day - is one of the Quarter Days which were important markers back in feudal times (they were when you had to pay your dues to your landlord), but also harks back to the Celtic tradition that summer starts on May 1st (hence the May Day celebrations) and therefore midsummer falls somewhere around the middle to end of June. The astronomical answer is that summer is the period between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox (June 20th to September 20th this year). And then the Met Office will tell you that summer consists of the whole of the months of June, July and August. So take your pick, but I wish someone would tell the weather that it's summer!

Sun arise...

Most people (and I have to admit that before I looked into this, I was one of them) think that the summer solstice and the longest day refer to the same thing. But no - the longest day (and the name sort of gives it away, doesn't it?) is the date on the calendar when there is the greatest time difference between sunrise and sunset - and that, here in the UK is today, June 21st. The summer solstice on the other hand is a precise moment in time when the sun is at its most northerly point relative to the earth, and this can be anytime from late on the 20th (as it is this year) to early on the 22nd. And then, just to really confuse the issue, Midsummer Day is on June 24th!

Le crunch

You have to feel sorry for the generation who have grown up knowing nothing but the good times - low prices, easy credit - and who are now feeling the pinch. Those of us a little longer in the tooth have seen this sort of thing - and worse - before, and have the strategies to help deal with it. Cut your coat to suit your cloth - decide what your priorities are, and how you can meet them for minimum cost. Look for alternatives to branded goods - supermarkets' own stuff is often just as good for a fraction of the cost. Learn to cook - can result in significant savings. Consider brewing your own beer or wine - ditto. Go to jumble sales, car boots and charity shops - you'd be surprised what you can pick up. Turn off lights when you leave a room. Heat one room rather than the whole house, and so on. Just common sense really, but if you've never had to think that way...

You're fired!

I'm hobby-horse riding again! Have you seen the story of the Muslim girl who was turned down for a job in a hairdressing salon, in part at least because she wore a headscarf which she was not prepared to take off. The owner of the salon pointed out that it was an integral part of the job of anyone who worked for her to show off their hair as an advert to customers. So she didn't get the job, and took the case to an employment tribunal, alleging religious discrimination. In a rather rambling judgment the tribunal awarded the girl £4,000 for "hurt feelings". So presumably a football club would be guilty of discrimination if it failed to take on a one-legged player, or an orchestra if it denied employment to someone who couldn't play an instrument? How daft can this get? I've said it before - employers should be free to choose the candidate who they consider best for the job, and it should be nobody's business but theirs.

English as she is writ.

George Bernard Shaw was a life-long proponent of spelling reform. One of his party tricks for pointing out the absurdities of English spelling was to take a piece of paper and write on it GHOTI. He would then invite anyone to work out the common English word this spelled. When they'd all given up, he would announce that it spelled "fish". The "gh" was to be pronounced "f" as in "cough", the "o" pronounced "i" as in "women" and the "ti" pronounced "sh" as in "nation". So there you have it - ghoti spells fish!

Ha ha.

This man kept a centipede as a pet - weird, I know, but he loved that centipede and decided one night that he'd invite it out for a drink. So he went up to the centipede's little box and said "Fancy coming down the pub ?", but got no reply. So he raised his voice a bit and said "Do you fancy coming down the pub for a beer?", but still got no reply. So he put his face close to the box and shouted "I SAID DO YOU WANT TO COME OUT FOR A DRINK?". And the centipede said "No need to shout - I heard you the first time. Give me a minute - I'm just putting my shoes on".

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules...

The problem with rules is that they are.... well, rules. Very often you can see the basic sense behind them, but those enforcing them are given - or feel they have - no discretion which they can exercise, and then the rule becomes silly, or draconian, or whatever. This was brought to mind by the story last month of the lady who found a stray cat. She made all the obvious moves to find the owner, but with no success, so she had a few posters printed out and went round attaching them to lamp-posts. Pretty sensible, and very kind-hearted, you would think. But all it got her was a visit from a council official, warning her that you needed council permission to put posters up on lamp-posts, and that as she had failed to make the proper application she had to take them down or face a fine. Now you can see that the council would wish to retain control over fly-posting, and that therefore the basis of the rule is sensible and sound, but clearly this was a case where discretion - or one might even say common sense - could and should have been exercised. They could, for example, have simply looked the other way, or given her retrospective permission - but no, it's a RULE and that's an end of it. All very sad and pathetic, isn't it?

How much??

When I first heard about the current fuel tanker drivers' strike, and that they were still on the same basic wage as in 1992 or something like that, my sympathies were with them. Until, that is that I learned that that basic wage was £32,000 p.a. All I can say is if they were earning that in 1992 they were being vastly overpaid for the job, and are still doing quite nicely, thank you. We all think that we're worth more than we're paid, but when you look at what other HGV drivers get - including those carrying dangerous cargo, and you look at the pay of other people doing dangerous jobs (how many of them would fancy being shot at in Afghanistan for less money?) then I think they should shut up and count their blessings.

A put-up job?

Can't quite see what David Davis hopes to achieve by his resignation as an MP. If he feels so passionately about the 42 day business and civil liberties generally, he surely could have achieved more by staying where he was - you can do much more damage if you're working inside the system, rather than on the outside. As it is a badly kept secret that he and David Cameron don't get on well together, my cynical side wonders if this is simply a cunning way of getting him out of government and onto the back benches without the embarrassment of having him officially resign from the cabinet.

Crazy!

The offside rule - which I have posted about before - is in danger of becoming a farce. First we have this nonsense about active and non-active players, which allows a goal to be scored even though one or more of the attacking side are in offside positions, provided they are judged to be non-active. But exactly what does that mean? Just because they are not involved in the move does not mean that they can be discounted. There have been several occasions where a goal has been scored from distance when one of the attacking side has been standing offside between the shooter and the goalkeeper and possibly obstructing his view and certainly potentially distracting him. OK so maybe he wouldn't have saved the shot anyway, but that's not really the point, is it? And now we have the even more ludicrous situation where as a defender you can apparently play an attacker onside, even though you are lying injured behind the goal-line! I think FIFA need to get a grip!

Where's yo bin? - Round the back, where's yourn?

We may have to start a new series of posts to cope with the increasing number of stories about rubbish bins and refuse collection. The latest is the news that Mid-Sussex District Council has been carrying out an "audit" of what people are putting in their bins. Although they say that this is purely a fact-finding exercise and that the anonymity of the owners of the bins is preserved, it is being seen as the thin end of the wedge. Certainly there was, and to a certain extent still is some resistance to recycling around here because we have to put our recycle stuff out in an open box for all the world to see, and while this doesn't concern me overmuch, some people object to others being able to see what newspaper they read, and how much of what they drink, for example. What price privacy?

The apostrophe (2)

In a previous post I mentioned the so-called "Greengrocer's apostrophe" (which could equally be written Greengrocers' apostrophe). It is perhaps unfair to single out greengrocers, although maybe because of all the hand-written notices they have to do, they have more opportunity to fall into the trap than others, but this is the error of putting an apostrophe before a plural "s" - as in a pound of apple's, a box of toy's, a row of house's and so on. The general rule is that apostrophes should never be used to indicate plurality - not even for abbreviations, so it should be CDs, not CD's for example. However, I would plead for a possible exception for individual letters and numbers - I would tend to write "Mind your P's and Q's" rather than "Ps and Qs", and certainly "how many r's are there in embarrass?" would to my eye look very peculiar without the apostrophe. Mind you, at the other extreme, there are those who would argue that the apostrophe is for the most part unnecessary - if I wrote Im sure youll understand me, I'm sure you'll understand me, if you get my drift. Certainly George Bernard Shaw was one of those who would have done away with it, as he would have done away with much of the peculiarities of English spelling and writing. There's a story about GBS which I'll save for another time.

Wham bam...

For want of anything better, last Sunday found me watching the men's final in what was billed as the French Open Tennis Tournament - except this wasn't proper tennis - where was the grass? The full name of the game is lawn tennis for heaven's sake! This bastardisation of playing on clay or other non-grass surfaces tears the heart out of the game - there's no finesse, it just becomes a slugfest. Roll on Wimbledon, and let's see the game as it is meant to be played, with artistry and flair.

Book Post

(see post dated 18/11/06)

My latest ten -

Mike Ripley - Angel's Share - 8
Alexander McCall Smith - The Full Cupboard of Life - 8
Phillip Margolin - The Associate - 8
Boris Starling - Vodka - 5
Robert B. Parker - Dream Girl - 9
John Harvey - Ash & Bone - 8
Patricia Cornwell - The Front - 6
John Gardner - Troubled Midnight - 7
Meg Gardiner - Mission Canyon - 8
Val McDermid - The Grave Tattoo - 9

Need for speed.

Here's an interesting fact (or not!) courtesy of correspondence in my paper. The title of "The World's Fastest Man" traditionally goes to the holder of the world 100m record. At present this is the Jamaican Usain Bolt, whose time of 9.72 seconds equates to a speed of just over 23 mph. But the world 200m record - currently held by the American Michael Johnson, is 19.32 seconds, which works out at 0.15 mph faster! Of course, these are average speeds - it has been pointed out that the question of which man attained the higher instantaneous speed is a different matter, and may well come down in favour of the 100m runner. So there!

I want to stay / I want to go...

I don't know Cristiano Ronaldo personally, and he may in truth be a nice bloke, but he certainly comes over as rather arrogant and somewhat two-faced. And if half of what is being reported in the papers about his machinations regarding a possible move to Real Madrid are true, then that simply reinforces that view. Whatever happened to loyalty? Manchester United turned him from a flashy but very average player into a genuine world-class one, and you would think he would want to repay them by staying. It's not as though he's poorly paid there. And then, thinking of Real Madrid, there's that old saying about it being better to be a big fish in a small pond...

Good on yer!

Hats off to Aston Villa, and more particularly to Randy Lerner, their American owner, for passing up a potential multi-million pound sponsorship deal in order to use their shirts to publicise a local children's hospice. How unexpected, how generous, how fitting.

The apostrophe.

Apparently, one of the most misused and misunderstood punctuation marks is the apostrophe. Don't know why - it's pretty straight-forward. The apostrophe has two uses - to indicate that some letters are missing, and, in the apostrophe-s usage, to indicate possession. Words like can't, don't, they're, are all examples of the first usage. The apostrophe indicates where the missing letter is. It can of course be more than one letter - "I'll think about it", for example, where the apostrophe indicates the omission of "wi". And then pedants like me will write 'phone, rather than phone - the apostrophe indicating the missing "tele". Possession is indicated by apostrophe-s, so Mary's book, the child's toy, Dragon's Den and so on. Just one exception and one problem - the exception is "it's / its" - with the apostrophe it is a contraction of "it is" and without, it means "belonging to it" - so no apostrophe even though it's possessive. You just need to learn that one. And then the problem - what do you do if the name of the possessor already ends in "s"? The book belonging to James, for example, or the office of the boss, or a school for boys? The convention (and it seems to be no more than that) is that you follow the pronunciation - if, when spoken, you add an extra "siss" syllable, then you write it as s-apostrophe-s, otherwise its s-apostrophe. So it's James's book, the boss's office, but a boys' school. Simple isn't it - or perhaps not, as so many people seem to get it wrong. Perhaps I'll come back to this later, and have a look at what has become known as the "Greengrocer's apostrophe".

Clothing alert!

It seems a long time since we've had a "you couldn't make it up" story, but here's a good one. A man was prevented from boarding a plane at Heathrow because he was wearing a T-shirt with a drawing of a cartoon character holding a gun on it. He had to change into another top before he was allowed through security. BAA are "investigating what happened" - there seems to be some confusion as to whether the original T-shirt was perceived as a security threat, or whether it was a matter that it might cause upset or offense to other passengers. Can I suggest they also investigate the possibility that their security staff need their heads examined?

Disgraceful!

As I always understood it, the deal was that you paid your National Insurance stamp (and I remember when it was a stamp) and this entitled you to treatment under the NHS. There was no opting out - you were in the scheme whether you liked it or not. So on what basis then are we now being told that if we pay privately for medication which the NHS are not prepared to supply, we thereupon lose our right to NHS treatment? This is shocking, shabby and a blatant breach of contract. Write to your MP, or e-mail him/her a copy of this post. This is something which must not be allowed to continue.

Like buses...

I've just had my fifth charity bag in two weeks. Why on earth don't these people talk to each other? It must be three months since the last charity bag, and then five come along all together. Of course, this means that anything I've got goes in the first bag, and the rest get nothing, whereas if they spaced themselves out more, they all might get something. Just needs a little thought!

Doh!

"Children will learn by downloading information directly into their brains within 30 years, an education expert has predicted". Of course, this won't be much use to those - and their number, certainly round here, seems to increase year on year - who haven't got a brain in the first place!