Up the Wolves - well, down actually.

Oh dear, my poor Wolverhampton Wanderers.  You may remember that last season they were relegated from the Premiership, and now, twelve months on, they face almost certain relegation from the Championship.  So what's gone wrong?  I have no magic answer, but what has been obvious to me since the sacking of Mick McCarthy as manager is a lack of any coherent plan - we've been meandering about staggering from one crisis to another.  There are calls for the owner, and/or the chief executive and/or the manager to quit but to my mind that would simply be continuing the pattern - yet another crisis.  We're in for some tough times no matter what, but what we really need is a period of stability - that and some decent players!!

Know your place!

Governments are there to decide policy and to pass laws - if they can - to give effect to that policy.  Other than by those means, they have no authority to tell us how to behave.  MPs and ministers are of course entitled to their opinions and they are equally entitled to express them, but we in our turn are entitled to ignore them. Why am I making this point?  Because there is an increasing tendency recently for government ministers to seem to think that they speak from some sort of moral high ground and that they have the right to dictate our behaviour.  It is now being seriously suggested for instance that on the grounds of "fairness" people have a moral responsibility to pay more tax than they legally need to, and the Work and Pensions Secretary is suggesting that "well-off" pensioners should pay back benefits they do not need, like winter fuel allowances, free bus passes and TV licences.  On your bike, says I - if you want to change the law to produce those results, then do it - if you can.  Other than that, speak to the hand!

Devious.

A report has found that some schools send "problem" children home for the day when they know they are being Ofsted inspected.  Oh you really have to be cleverer than that!  A few years ago there was some puzzlement when a local school announced a day trip to Alton Towers, I think it was.  The puzzlement was that those picked to go on the trip were perceived to be the least deserving of a treat -  disruptive kids and "thickos" mainly, but all became clear when the Ofsted inspectors turned up on the day of the trip!

Not you again??!

Understandable perhaps that Liverpool F C should feel that the ten-match ban on Luis Suarez for biting an opponent was too severe, but the manager's statement that "the punishment has been against the man rather than the incident" sort of misses the point doesn't it?  When deciding a sentence the past history of the wrongdoer is always a factor - a serial offender is always going to be treated differently to a first offender.  And Suarez has "previous" - quite a lot actually - so his sentence doesn't just reflect what he did so much as the fact that he keeps doing stuff like it, and it is right that it should.

Right on!!

How encouraging to see that the two films which dominated the search for "The Most Romantic Film Of All Time" were "Brief Encounter" and "Casablanca".  Makes you think that perhaps all is not lost.  The most interesting thing is that here are two films which defied the Hollywood convention of having a happy ending - in neither does the "hero" get the girl.  And perhaps it's this that makes them so memorable. Both are films where you come away thinking "yes, that was the right way to end it".

Personal

This being the seventh anniversary of the death of my wife, I thought I'd share with you a quote I came across a month or so back, and which may provide some comfort to those of you who are grieving over the loss of a loved one.  Didn't make a note of it at the time, but it went something like "the burden doesn't get any lighter, but the legs do get stronger".  And I can vouch for the fact that this is true, so hang on in there and take it day by day.

School's out!!

Michael Gove (Education Secretary) seems to be a name cropping up more and more in the news lately.  His current preoccupation is that school hours should be longer and holidays shorter.  He makes the point - quite correctly - that the present school holiday schedule has its origins in the days when we were basically an agricultural society and children were an important part of the manpower needed to get the harvest in - hence the 6-week late-July to early-September holiday.  But really the question is whether that is sufficient reason to change things.  As a grandparent who has grandchildren duties during term time, can I say how much I look forward to six weeks off in the summer?

Whoops!

I'm sure wherever you live you, like me, are plagued with potholes in the roads and probably, again like me, you curse the local council every time you hit one and jar your back and worry about what it is doing to your car's suspension.  Well Kent County Council are fighting back - they shouldn't be blamed for potholes they say, it's all the fault of the Romans and the French.  Yes really!  Roman roads were built for marching on, not driving on, and as such they were made to be soft and gentle on the feet rather than solid and rigid.  And the asphalt we tend to use comes from France where it is designed to be used on their roads which are more often founded on solid rock.  Put the two together and over here the rigid asphalt can't cope with the shifting substrata of the roads, and there you are - potholes. Nice try folks, but no cigar!

Music Man

The Ivor Novello Awards are given for contemporary popular music, so you would scarcely expect to find the name of Dmitri Shostakovich featuring - he was a serious composer who died nearly 40 years ago.  Yet he is nominated in the Best Contemporary Song category as co-composer of a little ditty called "Ill Manors"performed by the rapper Plan B.  So what's going on?  Well the song uses a snatch of his 7th Symphony as an ostinato (repetitive) backing for the rap.  The 7th Symphony is known as the "Leningrad" and was written around the time of the WWII siege of that city, and, whatever Shostakovich might or might not have intended, has become irrevocably associated with the suffering of the citizens of that city at that time.  What would he have thought about the current situation? Difficult to say, because he himself was a bit of an enigma - during his working life he presented himself as a good, straight-down-the-line Soviet, but in what are said to be his memoirs (published after his death by someone else) the claim is that he was strongly against the regime, and that his music contained all sorts of hidden anti-Soviet messages.  So who knows?

You couldn't make it up!

A nice one to add to our collection comes from Essex where (puzzlingly) three or four houses were built many years ago behind land belonging to the local authority, so that the only access to the properties was over this council land.  There has been no problem up until now because the council leased the land back to the residents, but now - presumably as a result of the council's need to find what money they can in today's straightened times - the council has put the land up for sale by auction, and the residents have been outbid by some unknown buyer.  Which means of course that now the residents have to commit potential trespass in order to access their properties.  The council seem to be washing their hands of the whole business, so the residents now just have to hope that the new owner of the land is reasonable and they can come to some acceptable accommodation with whoever it is.  Another fine mess, as Oliver Hardy might say.

No place like home.

Iran suffered a major earthquake the other day - clearly the women of the area must have been doing something very naughty.  What - you don't know?  A senior cleric in the country has said that women who wear revealing clothing and act promiscuously "...lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes".  So now you know.  Another unbelievable story from the same part of the world concerns three men from the United Arab Emirates who were visiting  Saudi Arabia and have been deported back to the UAE on the grounds that they were "too handsome" and a risk to local women who might "fall" for them.  Aren't you sometimes glad you live in this country, for all its faults?

Can't get 11 across...

Good news is that if you want to keep your brain ticking over as you get older, the best way it seems is by doing mental exercises like crosswords and sudoku.  Good news (for me) because I do these pretty well every day.  Not, you understand, that I always complete them - but as I understand it, that's not the point.  To paraphrase the Olympic ideal, it's not the succeeding but the taking part that matters.  What I am finding as I get older is that I suffer from "brain freeze" more often than I used to - that's when you know you know a word, or the answer to something but just can't bring it to mind.  A sort of extreme example of "it's on the tip of my tongue".  On a quiz programme the other day was a list of books and the question was - who wrote them.  And I'd read them - all of them - and I knew the authors.  But could I bring a single name to mind??  Frustrating isn't the word!

Compare and contrast?

Well, I didn't need to be particularly prophetic when I suggested this time last year that we might well be talking about the Bahrain Grand Prix again.  I really think consideration should be given as to whether it should be taken off the calendar, as it is likely to cause controversy year after year.  Ironically this year the question of whether it should be run comes at the same time as the question is being raised of whether the London marathon should take place in view of what has happened in Boston.  Of course there is no comparison in the arguments - in Bahrain the issue is one of the oppression of free speech, whereas in London it is the assertion of our freedoms in the face of those who would try to deny them to us.

Timothy 5:18

So is the labourer worthy of his hire?  We've been down this road before, but it's come up again because Vince Cable has apparently criticised the One Direction boy band over their reputed earnings of £25m between them last year.  Of course. as the grandfather of three girls, I know that it is a definite no-no to say a word against the "fab five", and Cable has back-pedalled furiously saying that he misunderstood what he was being asked, but the question he posed remains valid - given the austerity in which most people find themselves these days, is it acceptable that some individuals are receiving what by comparison seem obscene amounts of money for doing what appears to be not-a-lot?  And the answer is as it always was - if you have a particular skill which is in demand - be it making music (I use the word loosely), playing football or investment banking, then your remuneration will be determined by the market - you will receive what people are prepared to pay you. There is nothing to be gained by comparing what you get paid with what they get paid - apart from making yourself envious!

Ding dong...

As a follow-up to yesterday's post. I rather think Mrs Thatcher would be pleased that there are those who are openly celebrating her death.  OK so some of what's going on is puerile and crass bad manners, but at least it shows she made an impact. Better to be hated than ignored, perhaps?

Where do you stand?

So - while I was away, the obvious big story was the death of Margaret Thatcher, and the description of her which kept cropping up was "divisive".  Well she sure divided our house.  My wife never forgave her for - as she saw it - destroying the industrial West Midlands as the manufacturing heartland (or at least one of them) of the country, and you can certainly still drive round here, particularly in the West Bromwich-Dudley-Wolverhampton area and see whole tracts of wasteland where there were once thriving factory estates.  Me?  I  perhaps took a rather more pragmatic approach of being thankful that we at last had a government who were prepared to take on the powerful unions who, in my book at least, were far more responsible for the decline in local industry by making unreasonable wage demands which priced our goods out of the market.  There is so much that one could say, but I think that it is at least arguable that Thatcher was the product of a situation of economic decline rather than the cause of it.

Back with you.

Nice week away although the weather could have been kinder - perishing cold for the most part.  And Seabass did us no favours - came in 13th I think it was.  Ah well - you win some and you lose some - and that goes for holiday weather as much as for bets on the gee-gees.

Taraa!

Off for the traditional family Easter holiday - the Gower this year.  Just time before I go to give you my crazy system pick for today's Grand National.  So get your money on Seabass - or maybe not?

Safe as....??

I have a friend with family in Cyprus who now face losing a significant slice of their hard-earned savings as part of the bail-out "deal" arranged between their government and the EU.  Strictly speaking they won't lose this money - what will happen is that it will be converted into shares in the bank where their money is. Problem is that these shares will be worthless and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future.  So apart from feeling sorry for them, should I be concerned? What does worry me is that a precedent has been created - up until now it seems to have been accepted that any pain caused by a country being in financial difficulties should be shared by everybody - i.e. dealt with by raising taxes and/or cutting services and such-like.  But here for the first time a specific group of people are being hit much harder than everybody else, and it's difficult to see how they could be in any way considered specially responsible for the mess Cyprus finds itself in. So, a worrying precedent.

Doesn't do what it says on the tin?

So the Government are proposing a second toll motorway?  It may well create jobs and possibly help the country's overall economic situation, but if the experience of the M6 Toll is anything to go by, it will not in any significant way act as a relief road taking traffic off the M4 motorway which it is to be built next to.  See my post of 13/1/06 for the reasons why this is so.  The charge on the M6 Toll by the way is now £5.50 for a car.

Join the dots - what dots??

It's depressing to have to say - here we go again.  Sunderland have appointed Paulo Di Canio as their new manager - presumably on the basis of his footballing credentials.  We can argue about whether or not his credentials warrant the confidence the club have put in him, but what is it that the media want to talk about?  His politics!  The fact that several years ago he described himself as a Fascist.  So what's the connection?  Unless he intends to have the team goose-step onto the pitch to the strains of the Horst Wessel-Lied, there just isn't one.  Get a life, folks!

Levelling the playing-field?

Somewhat ironic that Lord Carey (ex-Archbishop of Canterbury) should complain of Christians feeling "persecuted", when throughout the centuries, the past masters of persecution have been the Christian (and other) churches.  I think in great part the current complaints of religious leaders about "secularisation" is down to their irritation that they no longer wield the unquestioning authority which they have been used to.

The six storage lockers of Henry VIII?

I'm quite taken with a couple of American TV programmes shown over here - Storage Wars and Pawn Stars.  Both are concerned with people looking to find (Storage Wars) or buy (Pawn Stars) something of value, and thereby make a killing - sort of Antiques Roadshow crossed with Ocean's Eleven.  Good entertainment, but what I can't understand is that - over here - they are shown on the History Channel.  Just what have these programmes got to do with history??