If s/he said it, it must be true??

If I go into a police station and make an allegation - of historic sexual abuse or anything else - should I be believed? Not automatically, no!  I should be listened to, and what I say should be noted but at this stage my allegations are just that.  The police should then investigate what I have told them and look for evidence which either supports my claims or contradicts them.  But this idea that anyone who comes forward with allegations of historic sexual abuse must be assumed to be telling the truth is just plain wrong.  It isn't a question of belief or non-belief - it's a question of evidence, or the lack of it.  Policemen are human and will have their own prejudices and form their own conclusions, but if they're doing their job properly they should keep these to themselves and carry out an unbiased investigation.

Farewell to...

...New Tricks.  As it was apparently the last ever, I watched it last Monday.  Bit like going to see an old friend on his death-bed. I hardly recognised him and we hadn't got much to say to each other. And I felt really down.  So many good memories and so many regrets.  Sad...

Papaya!

Believe it or not, there is a village in Cornwall called Minions.  Too good an opportunity to miss, eh? Universal Studios, who produced the film of that name paid to have the roadsign announcing that you were entering the village redone so that it featured some of the Minions characters and had the village's name spelled out in the font used to advertise the film.  The council have now taken it down and replaced it with the old standard sign, maintaining that it was only ever meant to be temporary. Some of the villagers - particularly those reliant on visitors - are demanding its reinstatement.  Given that Cornwall relies so heavily on tourism, I would have though this was a no-brainer, but the council have quoted (surprise, surprise) health and safety issues caused by motorists stopping to have their pictures taken by the sign.  I would have thought that a compromise would be to erect the sign somewhere else in the village where it would not be a hazard, and people could still come and see it and have their pictures taken.  Will commonsense prevail?

Will they accept a bus pass?

Prostitution is a risky and potentially dangerous business these days, so ten out of ten for ingenuity to a group of ladies who conduct their business in a motorhome which tours around in the Manchester area.  Keeps them dry and warm and relatively safe - everyone's a winner?

I was on holiday, for heaven's sake!

Unless you are teetotal, I imagine most of you, when on holiday like to have a few drinks- probably more than you would have had at home.  I certainly do.  So it comes as a shock to find that some travel insurance policies are starting to appear with clauses that state that if the insured is drunk at the time of the incident giving rise to a claim, they will not pay out.  Of course the problem is - define drunk.  It's obviously aimed at the Magaluf types who get paralytic and then fall over and hurt themselves, but it could just as easily catch out the holiday maker who's had a few glasses of wine and has a completely unrelated accident.  Just to compound the problem, these clauses about drink most often appear in the "small print" so you can be blissfully unaware of them until your claim is refused.  If insurance companies are going to do this sort of thing, then they should be required to highlight it so that any prospective client who accepts the policy does so in the full knowledge that such a restriction applies.

Mixed message?

Rather strange to hear Jeremy Corbyn say in his speech to the Labour Party's Conference that "you don't have to take what you're given", because under a government run by him, that's exactly what you would have to do. A Corbyn government would be all about control, nationalisation, five-year plans and the like. Socialism is based on the principle that the government decides what's what, and the public has no choice but to go along with it.  Indeed, choice is somewhat of a dirty word as far as socialism is concerned - decisions should be made on the basis of what is deemed to be best for society as a whole, rather than on individual preferences.  I wonder if he appreciated the irony?

Pick a card, any card...

Take a pack of cards and shuffle it.  Just an ordinary, everyday activity, and yet you've probably just made history.  The particular arrangement of cards you've ended up with has almost certainly never been seen before.  What am I on about? Well refer back to my posts under the title "How many?" in November and  December 2008 and you will I hope see that the number of ways a pack of cards can end up after a random shuffle is 52! - that is, factorial 52.  Now that's an enormous number
 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 to be exact.  And this is far, far greater than the number of seconds since the earth came into being, so you can see why every shuffle can be considered unique.  In fact, it's not quite as simple as that, because the way most people shuffle cards (the riffle shuffle) is not really random, but will still produce at least 4,503,599,627,370,496 different results and doing it more than once, as most of us do, will quickly produce a number greater than the age of the earth. So like I say, you've almost certainly made history.

Back to British Rail?

Difficult to understand how anyone old enough - as Jeremy Corbyn is - to remember when the railways were nationalised, would want to go back to that system.  Not that privatisation has been an unqualified success, but it's certainly an improvement, if only marginally, on what went before. The problem with nationalisation is that when you take something into public ownership so that theoretically it belongs to all of us, the reality is that everybody leaves worrying about the running of it to everybody else (or more accurately, to the government, who have usually more pressing things on their mind) with the result that nothing much gets done and whatever it is just bumbles along in the most inefficient way - at least with privatisation, there are shareholders with a vested financial interest to kick up a fuss if things are not going well.

A nice place to live.

There's a lovely little curiosity not far from where I live - the village of Bournville. Yes, I'm sure you associate the name with Cadbury's chocolate, and you're right. Back in the late 1800s, George Cadbury, one of two brothers running the chocolate factory founded by his father was so appalled by the slum conditions many of his workers were living in in Birmingham that he decided to build houses for them in the countryside outside the city, and Bournville was born.  So it is a "model" village - planned from the word go and as such has developed a very closed community feel. There is a Village Trust which exercises quite close control over what residents can and can't do.  You won't see TV aerials there for instance - they're banned.  I remember many years ago visiting relatives of my wife who lived there, and asking what the strange black box next to their television was, to be told that it was their cable connection to the village's one and only aerial.  Cable TV years before the expression became commonplace!  I often wonder how these days they cope with the question of satellite dishes.  The other big thing is that, as the Cadbury family were Quakers, there are no pubs, and indeed the sale of alcohol is banned within the village.  There have been several attempts to change this, but it appears that those who live there rather like the fact that they're different and want to keep it that way. They can, of course, buy their booze outside the village and drink it at home.

Gotcha??

How do the police get away with flouting the law?  Seems incredible, doesn't it? What's brought this on? Well Humberside police have started using handheld speed cameras concealed in tractors and horseboxes and such on a particular stretch of road where there have been a lot of accidents involving motorcycles..  The Department of Transport say that "vehicles from which mobile speed cameras are deployed should be liveried and clearly identifiable as an enforcement vehicle."  You can argue that what the police are doing is in the interests of road safety, but what about the DoT regulations?  And here's the catch - the police maintain that what the Department put out are merely "guidelines" which they are at liberty to ignore if they wish.  Of course we've been down this line before, more than once in fact - what should be the purpose of enforcement cameras, to catch those breaking the law, or by advertising their presence, prevent them doing so?  Answers on a postcard - to Humberside police.