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.