His soul goes marching on...

We've talked before about Cromwell trying to ban Christmas - medieval bigotry right? Couldn't happen today, right??  Well, not exactly, but pretty close.  The Saudi Arabian authorities have banned any celebration of the New Year - no fireworks, flowers, gifts, anything like that.  Plus ça change and all that.  Way to go, Oliver!

Oh, no, no, no!

As a follow-up to yesterday's post - there is a story, I can't vouch for its truth but it's been around for a good long time - that the original Offences Against the Person Act of 1861, which made all homosexual activity between men unlawful, also did the same for women, but when the draft Act was shown to Queen Victoria, she said she would refuse to sign it unless the references to women were taken out, on the grounds that she refused to believe that women "did that sort of thing".

What a mess!

Alan Turing in the news again (see posts of 12/9/09 and 6/3/12) as a result of him being granted a royal pardon.  Very unusual - I think this is only the fourth time such a pardon has been granted in the last hundred years.  So that's it then - case closed?  Well perhaps not.  Firstly there seems to be some confusion as to whether such a pardon wipes out the original conviction or not.  I thought it did, but the general view seems to be that it does not - he remains a convicted criminal, albeit a pardoned one. And then there is the matter of all the other men who were convicted of homosexual activity back then - what about them? Is Turing being pardoned simply because of his invaluable wartime work, rather than the despicable way he was treated by the law - which of course applied to so many others. Not easy, is it?

Heed the message.

Several versions of "A Christmas Carol" on over the holidays. although unless I missed it, nobody put on the classic 1951 Alistair Sim one.  I think that you can look on Dickens' story in two ways.  The obvious one is a story of redemption - the miser Scrooge becomes the benevolent Scrooge.  But you have to remember that Dickens grew up knowing extreme hardship as a child as a result of his father being imprisoned for debt, so his stories all have an undercurrent of fury against a society where poverty was considered a matter for punishment.  For me, the pivotal line in A Christmas Carol is when the ghost of Christmas Present draws back his robes to reveal two urchins.  "This boy is ignorance" he says "This girl is want. Beware them both...but most of all, beware this boy...".  Today we have a better, more caring society, but, perhaps now more than ever, we still need to beware that boy.

R.I.P.

David Coleman - sports presenter and commentator sans pareil.  My abiding memory is of his commentary when Anne Packer won the 800 metres at the Tokyo Olympics, when he came as close to "losing it" as he ever did.  And that was his talent - he somehow always managed to encapsulate how we were all feeling. 

Waste not, want not.

I have three words for you today - bubble and squeak.

Season's greetings

However you intend to celebrate it, have a happy day.

Christmas trivia

I don't know why I've never thought of this before, but as I was putting up my Christmas tree I thought "why tree?"  I couldn't think of any particular connection between trees and Christmas, but then just the other day it came to me - it's the druids, isn't it?  To them, trees were sacred objects, and the early church, who had this habit of piggy-backing Christian ideas on to local customs, simply picked up on the idea for their own purposes.  It is said that Martin Luther was the first person to light a tree with candles and the Christmas tree tradition here really took off in the Victorian era thanks to Prince Albert. Christmas crackers by the way, seem to be a purely British (and by extension Commonwealth) thing. They originated when a London shopkeeper started selling sweets wrapped in a twist of paper back in the 19th century, and developed from that.

Naughty, naughty!

So you go down your local for a drink or two.  When you've finished, you have to pass the bar on your way out.  If you think about it, do you take your empty glass and put it on the bar as you pass? I've done that and I bet many of you have too. But a pub in France where this happened has been fined on the basis that this amounts to "undeclared labour".  Don't quite understand the logic of it, but the French authorities claim that what was going on was "an infringement of labour laws". Presumably if you hadn't done it, they would have had to employ someone to clear up your empty glasses, so you're denying someone a job, and denying the government the taxes that would flow from that.  Or perhaps it's just a case of officious bureaucracy. 

Tut, tut, M'Lud!

So judges are not allowed to have personal views - or at least not allowed to publicly express them? In a very worrying development, a respected High Court Judge has resigned after being publicly reprimanded by the Lord Chancellor (who, let's not forget, is not himself a judge, nor even a lawyer) for expressing his personal support for traditional marriage in a couple of articles in the press.  There does not seem to be any suggestion that he has allowed his personal views to affect any of his judgments in court.  So just what had he done to be found guilty of "judicial misconduct"? Apparently it was felt that his views - or at least his public expression of them - was ‘incompatible with his judicial responsibilities’.  Which, whether you agree with him or not, I feel you should find extremely worrying.

A straightforward robbery?

Ronnie Biggs  - villain or lovable rogue?  That's the question being asked around the internet following his death the other day.  Not too many of us around now who have clear memories of the "Great Train Robbery", but as one who does, here's my take. He was a villain - simple as that and a pretty small-time one as well. What propelled him into the limelight was not the robbery, but the sentence which the court handed out.  Thirty years - and the probability was that he would have been made to serve the majority of that sentence if not all of it. Rather like the Steven Ward story the other day, there was a general feeling that this was the Establishment taking its revenge rather than any pretence of a proportional punishment, so when he made his escape from Wormwood Scrubs, there was a tendency to think "Go on, my son" and the legend was born.  So his notoriety was more down to society than down to him, although he then certainly made the most of it.

The afternoon is for dozing...

I'm a morning person - that's not to say that I'm terribly productive ante meridiem but more that what doesn't get done in the morning generally doesn't get done at all.   But it appears that I'm in good company - Mozart, Beethoven, Balzac and Dickens were also morning workers it appears.  And there is some (admittedly iffy) research purporting to show that morning people are more successful.  Mind you, these are for the most part people who get up early - around 5.00 most of them.  Now I drag myself out of bed at 6.30 because I have family commitments which require it, but given the chance, I sleep in until more like 8.30-9.00.  So I'm more of a late-morning person. 

Two sides to every coin...

One of the main arguments of those opposing GM crops is that their seeds might contaminate nearby fields with possibly harmful results.  To meet this argument, GM producers have come up with "suicide" or "terminator" seeds, which are designed to be planted, grow, crop and then die off without producing any further seeds.  Good idea?  Well, no, it would seem, because this of course would mean that farmers would be forced to buy new seed every year from the GM producers. So you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't!

Home and away.

So the Ashes have gone back down under.  Let's not be mealy-mouthed - we have been comprehensively outplayed, and the Aussies deserve praise for the way they have pulled themselves together since the summer.  And that's perhaps the one crumb of comfort for England - if you take the year as a whole, the score so far is three-all!

R.I.P.

Joan Fontaine - my first screen sweetheart.

Listen carefully...

Quickly now - who ran the first four-minute mile?  It's a trick question - the immediate reaction is to say Roger Bannister, and he was certainly the first person to run a sub four minute mile, but that wasn't the question.  The first person credited with running a mile in exactly four minutes is Derek Ibbotson in a race in 1958 - and he didn't even win, he came fourth!

Nature v nurture.

A debate that's been going on since - well, forever.  To what extent is what you are the result of being born that way (nature) or to what extent is it down to your upbringing (nurture)?  Well a recent study has suggested that as far as academic success is concerned, nature is more important than nurture.  I don't quite understand the methodology used, but it has something to do with studying the exam results of identical and non-identical twins, and appears to show that genetic factors are twice as important in determining how well you do as environmental factors.  This of course is not what you would expect - the general perceived wisdom is that children with "caring" parents who take an interest in and help them with their schoolwork will do better than those whose parents do not.  The results of this study do to a degree support Boris Johnson's comments about IQ which were the subject of a recent post.

Music Man

Did you know that the well-known Nokia ringtone is actually a snatch of a guitar piece by Francisco Tarrega called Gran Vals?  And if you listen to the last movement of Clementi's sonatina in G, Op 36 No 5 (which I studied at school) you will hear the tune of "A groovy kind of love", the Wine/Bayer Sager hit.

Can't have it both ways!

So it's happened - I posted about it back in July, and now it has come to pass.  The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (note the word Independent) has awarded MPs an 11% pay rise. And this at a time when most workers are suffering and have suffered a pay freeze over several years. This has really put MPs and Ministers on the spot - unless they abolish the IPSA, they cannot stop the pay-rise happening, nor can they refuse it - if they don't want it, all they can do is give it away.  But why create an independent body to set your pay if you are then going to effectively ignore what they come up with?  Sort of defeats the object surely? Perhaps IPSA have done nobody any favours by saying that the rise will not come into effect until after the next election - effectively ensuring that it will become an election issue, with candidates rivalling one another to use it to their advantage. When MPs used to set their own pay, they were seen as feathering their own nests, and now that they have handed the job over to an independent body they are faced with what is bound to be an unpopular result.  What a mess!

Words.

The title I gave to yesterday's post reminded me of something else.  Back in the dim and distant, there were no rules about how you spelled words.  I'm sure you know the story that Shakespeare spelled his own name in several different ways throughout his life.  So... Bethlehem has not always been spelled that way.  One of the other common medieval spellings was "Bethlem" and this was the spelling used when a hospital of that name was founded in the 13th century.  Although originally just a hospital for the sick, it quickly started to specialise in the treatment (if that's the right word) of the mentally ill.  There was little that could be done for them back then, other than to just lock them up and keep them away from the general population.  Those living nearby, or who visited, would have to put up with the constant screams and cries of the unfortunates kept there.  So Bethlem became a byword for uproar and confusion, and over the years morphed into "bedlam" - the word we have today.  Now, isn't that interesting?  Yes it is - be quiet!

On the road to Bethlehem...

Don't you just love these health and safety stories?  Town in Wales is doing a Nativity pageant, involving a young girl playing Mary riding along on a donkey. Aaah, bless!  But wait - the council have decreed that this cannot go ahead unless the girl wears a crash helmet!

You're not online...!!??

As a sort of follow-up to yesterday's post, I am also concerned about the way people who do not have a computer and a printer, or are not connected to the internet, are increasingly being seriously disadvantaged as a result.  They will mostly be people of my generation. which makes it worse, because they may well be those who can ill-afford the cost of kitting themselves out for the online digital age, and learning the new and completely foreign (to them) skills which they will need to cope.  It's a problem which will pretty well disappear as my generation dies out, but for the moment it remains a problem. and nobody seems to be doing anything to address it.  Just remember us oldies!

It's in the post...

The tax disc is to disappear apparently.  I'm not sure that this is such good news. Government (not just the current one) has a pretty lamentable track record when it come to computerised databases, so whereas at the moment, if you are challenged about whether or not you have paid your road tax, you can point to your tax disc as proof that you have, what will happen in the future?  Suppose "computer says no"?  

He's behind you!

Haven't been to a pantomime for yonks - not since the kids were little.  I remember trying to explain pantomime to an American lady that I used to correspond with, and finding it very difficult.  You know the sort of thing - the principal boy is played by a girl, and the Dame is a man in drag, and so on.  But it appears that this is becoming rarer - more and more productions are casting a male principal boy, and doing without a Dame altogether.  It has been suggested that children are becoming more politically correct, but I can't help feeling that the magic is being destroyed.

Lies, damned lies, and...

If you have a statistic that you don't like, there are two approaches to improving matters.  The first - and most obvious - is to take steps to make things better.  The other - more subtle and cynical - is to redefine whatever it is that the statistic is measuring.  The Government have taken this latter approach over "fuel poverty" - a new Act will define it in such a way that some 800,000 people who currently fall into that category, will no longer do so.  Nothing will change except the statistic, which will simply look better!

R.I.P.

Nelson Mandela - the world is somehow smaller today.

Read all about it...

The Daily Express has changed its daily theme from Diana, Princess of Wales (see post dated 8/3/07) to the weather.  It regularly runs front page stories of how we can expect things like heatwaves. hurricanes and floods - always extreme of course. They're sort of "man bites dog" stories.  The latest is that we're in for three months of extremely cold weather and "one of the worst [winters] in history".  So what's the reality?  The Met Office will tell you that forecasting the weather with any degree of accuracy is only possible for 3-5 days in advance, and they would hesitate to even forecast "trends" for more than the next 30 days.  So what are they saying? December will probably be "fairly normal" and for winter as a whole, temperatures are more likely to be below-average than above-average.  So don't get your knickers in a twist!

Steven Ward

He was the "other man" in the Profumo scandal of the early 1960s (see post of 11/3/06).  I well remember at the time that the general feeling - certainly among my family and acquaintances - was that he had been "hung out to dry" by the Establishment of the day, who needed someone to be held responsible for what had happened, and more generally for what was perceived as a widespread breakdown in public morality (this was of course the start of the "swinging sixties").  So Ward, who had introduced Profumo to Christine Keeler was charged with living on immoral earnings, and seeing which way the wind was blowing, chose to take his own life before he could be convicted.  There are moves afoot to have him pardoned, but as with Alan Turing (see post of 6/3/12) the problem is that we are using modern attitudes and views to criticise past decisions.  Thing is - where do you stop?  What about those who were burned at the stake as witches?

The missing link?

So we (humans) are the result of a long-ago mating between a pig and a chimpanzee!  This is the theory put forward by an American geneticist, who says it is the only way of explaining why, although we are clearly of the primate family, we differ fundamentaly from the apes.  So - I'm a cross between a pig and a monkey? Seems very appropriate somehow.

There's always been us and them.

Boris  Johnson - Mayor of London - has fallen into the trap of stating a self-evident truth, but doing so in a (maybe deliberately) insensitive and provocative way.  The subject is intelligence - or more precisely IQ.  He made the obvious point that for the most part, those with a low IQ will struggle to get on, and that inequality is and always has been a fact of life, and envy and greed are (admittedly unpleasant) drivers of the economy.  Could perhaps have put it better, Boris, but the logic is inescapable.

I'll have a pack with the eyeball on please.

Plain packaging for cigarettes - what do you think?  The point is, what seems to be being suggested will not be plain packaging at all, it will have gruesome images on portraying what smoking might do to your health.  And I've a feeling that, as far as kids are concerned, this might prove counter-productive.  You can just hear them, can't you - "Wow, look at this - gross or what?" "No, that's tame - look at THIS one!"  And so on.  It will be a badge of honour to come up with the most shocking picture, and they'll be traded like old fashioned cigarette cards.  Genuine plain packaging would be far more sensible in my opinion.