House prices again

Friends of mine are currently pondering what at first seems a surprising problem

Should they sell one of their properties, or hang on to it so they might be in a position to help their grandchildren on to the property ladder? Their eldest grandchild has only recently begun secondary school, so that problem is unlikely to arise for at least 10 years

A more unlikely pair of property developers you could not expect to meet. But by simply following a very ordinary path they now have assets of well into 7 figures

They had a suburban family home. While they were still very young marrieds they bought, very cheaply, a house in Wales, where they often went to walk in the mountains. It was a run down flint & stone farm house which the owners had left to move into a convenient modern house which had the advantage of mains electricity & no drafts. My friends spent all their family holidays there & gradually improved it

When their children were off their hands they decided that they would like the Welsh house to be their family home, the repository for their furniture & books & accumulated memorabilia. Big enough for the grandchildren to visit

However, dad was still working in the city & such a long commute was not feasible. But it was the very beginning of the fashion for converted flats in the inner city. Rather daringly, they decided to sell their suburban house & sink some money into what was then seen as a risky move

Well, you know the rest. Now dad is formally retired, but still very active in his field, they have reached the stage where they want to simplify their lives & would prefer to divest themselves of the responsibilities of dual home ownership, using hotels for their less frequent visits to the city

But there is really no alternative investment for the proceeds which could keep pace with the kind of house price rises we have come to expect as normal. So what seems like a fortune now might seem pathetically inadequate as a fund for helping grandchildren with house prices in 2020

So, hang on to flat, & (shudder) possibly consider the extra responsibility of becoming landlords as well?

On the other hand, if an almighty housing crash is on the cards for any time soon .....

It might seem like a nice problem to have. But when you get to our age you really do want to simplify things. Another friend recently gave up her car because she woke up one morning & thought I just dont want to be responsible for the damn thing anymore, making sure its taxed, insured, etc etc What was once seen as something which conveyed great freedom had just become a burden

Guernica

Ben Macintyre wrote a good piece about Guernica last week

It reminded of the real shock I felt when I first looked at a full colour reproduction. Just black & white? Thats not right

The point is that I first saw a black & white photo of it while I was still at school - I think in a BBC schools programme pamphlet. Of course full colour reproduction was rare in those days. We were used to interpreting a purely black & white world. Difficult to transport yourself back to that now, with so much colour all about us

But I was convinced, in my own mind, that there were at least 2 smallish blocks of bright red & yellow in Guernica. They had a powerful effect. Bit like the little girls raincoat in Spielbergs picture I suppose

Drugs

The other Saturday I was just sitting in the hallway of the library, making sure I had got everything packed in my bag before leaving, when a young lad came out to take a call on his mobile. He cant have been a day over 14. Really. This is not a policemen are getting younger moment

So I am minding my own business when I realise what he has just said. Yes, a friend of mine wants some weed, if I can get hold of some. Ive got a fiver. Then Great, Ill see you this evening then

Then yesterday, walking home about 7pm on a still gloriously sunny day, I pass a couple of twenty somethings sitting on a wall. The young man, who had one of those very carrying voices, was also talking on his mobile. Well I tried [2 local pubs] but neither of them will let me have a tab. Thing is I dont get paid till Monday

What is the world coming to, I ask myself

But then I realised he must have been talking debt, not drugs. To pay for his weekend booze binge, presumably

The thing is, when people know you were a student in the sixties, they know you must have been on drugs. But we werent. Sure, teenage drug taking was becoming a 'problem' - purple hearts, cannabis, LSD on the wilder fringes. But it was those who were in work, had a weekly wage packet, who could afford them. As far as I know, I was never even in the same room with drugs. Certainly nobody ever offered me any

I was once discussing this with someone with the same experience. She had just recently said as much at home

Whereupon daughters boyfriends hand went to his pocket. Oh - do you want some? he said

Borrow one

I dont have any particular memories of starting to learn arithmetic at school. Except for the rather grownup thing of having to put H T U & then Th H T U at the top of your sums to keep the columns straight

Except for the incomprehensible business of borrowing one in subtraction. It seems extraordinary now. But hey, it worked. Teacher ticked my answers.

I suppose it was the most efficient, if mysterious, method to use in a world mostly without calculators. Extraordinary too, now, to think of all those counting houses full of Bob Cratchits, or all those delicious tomes of mathematical tables produced by armies of human computers

And when were undergraduates first allowed to use calculators in finals? In my day we had to make do with log tables or slide rule

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Countable infinity

Do you remember the proud childhood boasts: I can count to 10 - Well I can count to 20? How you ached to be able to reach 100? And how proud parents would boast of your feat?

I actually enjoyed lying in my bed at night, silently rehearsing how far I could get. Doing it out loud would have earned a reprimand - You ought to be asleep by now - so Ive never had any faith in counting sheep as a cure for insomnia

Then came the breathtaking moment when I realised I could count as far as I liked. Even if you got to a MILLION all you had to do was start again, one million and ONE, one million and TWO ...

And if I got even further, & didnt know the name for the next number, I COULD JUST MAKE ONE UP

Wow!

Then the anticlimax. Was that what all the fuss was about?

What a swizz

Cant count

When I was pre-school age the official educational line was that parents should not attempt to teach their children the three Rs before they started school at 5 - the poor little things might be confused if the teacher used different methods

I did have a notebook & a pencil however in which I liked to do my 'writing' - imitating the weekly letter-writing rituals of the grown ups

One day my mother saw that there were recognisable numerals among the random scrawls. When she asked me who had taught me to do that, I replied that I had copied them from the clock

Or so she used to like to tell me

One of lifes mysteries

Does anybody know when & why we started to build railway stations with platforms? The first railway station, at Liverpool Rd, Manchester, did not have one

During one of the more recent bouts of Why are our railways so awful? debates I heard an expert explain that one problem was the lack of train stations in the right places to suit modern patterns of settlement & commuting

So - build some? Problem is, the inordinate expense of providing them with platforms

So, why do we have them? They never appear in those old westerns, do they? And I dont think they have them in Belgium - its certainly a long way to jump down

It remained just one of lifes minor mysteries until I unwisely mentioned it in class & was given it as that weeks assignment

No luck - though I did find a picture of the original Liverpool Rd station. No platform

And later came across a complaint about them in one of Edward Herfords diatribes. He thought they were unsafe, especially for the ladies, but did not explain why

There must be several thousands of books published about railways. And a fair number devoted specifically to railway stations. I have checked the index or riffled through a few, but have never been able to find the answer. I did find out which was purported to be the worlds longest platform, but Im afraid Ive forgotten its name

Bread & circuses Part 1

Strikes used to distress me because of the poverty of their aspirations. I am talking about 60s & 70s Britain when it seemed that a great deal of inconvenience, aggravation & even suffering could be caused for the sake of 6d. I always preferred the Italian idea, that bus drivers should strike by simply refusing to collect fares. And I never understood what a strike could do to 'save' jobs

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We study health

We study health and we deliberate upon our meats and drink and air and exercises, and we hew and we polish every stone that goes to that building, and so our health is a long and regular work.

I was astonished when I first read those words. I had naievely thought that lifestyle was only a modern medical preoccupation

They come from Donnes Devotions. I had been looking for a copy since discovering in the late 60s that the 2 Donne quotes which everybody knows - the ones about tolling bells & islands, do not come from any of his poems. Not all that easy to find, without access to an academic library, until finally Penguin Classics came to the rescue

But in a minute a cannon batters all, overthrows all, demolishes all; a sickness unprevented for all our diligence, unsuspected for all our curiosity, nay undeserved if we consider only disorder, summons us, seizes us, possesses us, destroys us in an instant

I think it would be a very good idea if the wisdom he goes on to express, in such beautiful language, formed a compulsory part of the curriculum of every medical school. He has such insight into the fears of both doctors and patients

The end of the world as I knew it

When I was in my O level year I thought I had worked out how the end of the world would arrive

My attitude towards religion had, until then, been a thoroughly emotional one, based on a strong attachment to the language & rituals of Christianity, the music of the organ & the singing of hymns

This was beginning to change into something more questioning. Helped by a BBC schools programme which tackled the thornier issues, such as the problem of pain

It was also the time which Harold Wilson later characterised as the white hot heat of the technological revolution. The men in white coats were really on the verge of solving all the problems of the world

But that, I thought, would mean omniscience, & only God could be omniscient

I also knew that science proceeded step by tiny step, each experiment adding one more fragment to the sum total of human knowledge

So omniscience would arrive when a scientist somewhere in his lonely lab completed the experiment which added the final piece, & 'we' would finally know it all

And in that instant, before the scientist could even say eureka, we would just be subsumed into God. 'We' would no longer exist

The beauty of this idea is that we would be completely unaware of the end. I found that an oddly comforting conclusion

Now, I read in the tv listings, the Large Hadron Collider may be about to achieve just that end

Fortunately its a 50 million to 1 chance. I wonder if these scientists can also calculate the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow?

Same but different

Many white people find it startling, & difficult to accept, that in countries where people do not see many whites in their day to day lives, 'we' all look the same

But we do, we do

Though I admit to being surprised the first time it happened to me

Because she was short, dumpy & wore her fair hair up in a bun. I was a long haired brunette beanpole

I also felt seriously offended

Because she was 30 if she was a day, & I was only 21

Word search

When I was writing about mid-C20th women recently (Dont be a bluestocking) I wanted a word for love of marriage - the equivalent of philoprogenitive

There doesnt seem to be one

So I thought Id invent one. Toyed with the idea of philohymenal but it sounds a bit disgusting, certainly not euphonious. Philothalamic (homage to Donne) would be impossible

I like philogamous. It sounds quite cosy

Somebody beat me to it, though its not in the OED:


A PHILOGAMOUS FELLOW [Pseudonym] The pros and cons of the celibate system in the universities. Cambridge, Henry W. Wallis, 1871.

Sounds like a good read

Links

Amitmishra comment on another blog

Perfect Wives, Other Women By Georgina Dopico Black

The Arabian Epic By M. C. Lyons

Making eyes

You know how young(ish) mens eyes will always swivel towards a pretty girl walking along the street? How, if hes with a mate who might not have noticed, theres a surreptitious nudge with the elbow & a silent Cor! Look at that!

Provided its not accompanied by catcalls, wolf whistles or crude comments, I see no earthly point in objecting to such behaviour, still less berating them for it. Its rather sweet, really. And anyway, they grow out of it. Eventually

I have even more sympathy now. Since I reached a certain age I find that my eyes swivel too. Only in this case its towards babies & small children

With all the paranoia about paedophiles, I felt nervous in case people might notice. Tried to pass by with my eyes fixed firmly ahead

But its actually much nicer if you catch the parents eye, exchange a silent What a lovely child!

And its even nicer still if you smile

I expect the evolutionary psychologists have a plausible explanation of the survival advantages conveyed by these behaviours on our ancestral hunter gatherers as they roamed the plains

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Its a point of view

There are of course many joys & advantages to be had from looking at the world through a computer screen

But you cant spread your work out, as you can with books, papers, statistical tables across the top of a desk. Nor can you mark the relevant bits by laying the book down flat, festooned with torn off bits of paper or marked with red felt tip, or scribbles of 'Rubbish!'

Finding your way back on the computer, to what you belatedly realise was an interesting or vital page is not easy. Even if you had noted the brain boggling string of symbols which is the url, all too often it comes up Not Found, or has been edited to remove the precise point for which you are searching

At least with a laptop you can look down, you dont get a crick with your necks unaccustomed position while you stare at a vertical screen

But it is still like trying to work with one hand covering one eye, with an empty cardboard tube from a toilet roll clasped to the other, just to restrict the visual field

It really ought to be perdaughter

I wonder if Acts of Parliament still include this in their introduction:

For the avoidance of doubt, the male embraces the female

Which is such a delightful way of putting it

Or perhaps they have finally got round to doing what JS Mill moved in 1867, that man should become person

Its my money

Its my money, so why should I have to pay to take it out of a cash machine?

Because it may be your money, but its not your cash

If your money is in the bank then its just a pattern of electrons on a hard disc. A microscopic speck in a complex world wide web of debts, credits, obligations, promises

If it were your cash it would be upstairs under the mattress, or weighing down your handbag, or spoiling the line of your jacket

Cash is physical, tangible, real

Cash has to be manufactured out of real paper & metal. That costs money

It takes up space, has to be stored somewhere. Space costs

It needs security, wherever it is - vault, Group4 van, supermarket till, even in a cash machine. That costs

It needs to be physically counted, by hand, every time it changes hands. That costs too

Somebody, somewhere, is paying for it somehow

Labour is the worst pain anyone can experience

This is one which, as a good Popperian, I can refute purely from personal experience

And no, this is not an obscure joke about current politics

Mary Anne, Mary Ellen & Mary Jane

I recently tracked down, courtesy of Google, a poem that I had learned as a child. Though not without the help, as a crucial first step, of a book in the reference library, an index to verse for children

The reason I coudnt find it directly on Google was that I was misremembering a name. I was mixing it up with the Mary Jane who did not like rice pudding

This poem, by Anna Maria Pratt, is about Mary Anne, a doll whose name is given as the, mortifyingly mistaken, answer to the question What is six times nine?

A Mortifying Mistake

I studied my tables over and over
And backward and forward too
But I couldn't remember six times nine
And I didn't know what to do
'Til my sister told me to play with my doll
And not to bother my head
"If you call her 'Fifty-four' for awhile
You'll learn it by heart', she said.


So I took my favorite, Mary Anne,
Though I thought 'twas a dreadful shame
To give such a perfectly lovely child
Such a perfectly horrible name,
And I called her my little Fifty-four
A hundred times 'til I knew
The answer of six times nineAs well as the answer of two times two.


Next day, Elizabeth Wigglesworth,
Who always acted so proud
Said, "Six times nine is fifty-two,
And I nearly laughed out loud
But I wished I hadn't when teacher said,
"Now Dorothy, tell if you can."
For I thought of my doll and sakes alive!
I answered, "Mary Anne!"

One thing leads to another & I found myself remembering my grandfather

If I did or said anything foolish in his presence he would shake his head, cluck his tongue & say "Eeh! Youre a right Mary Ellen, you are"

When I was told that the headmistress of the school I was going to teach at was called Sister Mary Ellen, I thought, She can't be

But she was. I dont know if that made me more or less nervous of meeting her

Commonplace books

Ben Macintyre wrote an interesting piece about commonplace books the other day. I too have been keeping commonplace books for more years than I care to remember

I had always thought that the word commonplace must be a cuddly version of miscellaneous file - a place to keep, to hold in common, all those personally meaningful bits & pieces which otherwise resist classification

Mine used to be in a variety of notebooks & included cartoons, pictures & clippings of interesting bits of graphics from newspapers & magazines, as well as quotations, comments & musings

After my right arm went funny I moved to keeping it as a Word document - functional but not so pretty or idiosyncratic

I am working on turning this into a commonplace blog

Sometimes making a collage of pieces from the old one

Little minds are interested in the extra-ordinary; great minds in the commonplace - Elbert Hubbard

Quetelet invented the Body Mass Index

Oh no, he didnt

He merely observed that, among his samples of early C19th Belgians, weight tends to increase in proportion to the square of the height, once they were fully grown

He also failed to recognise that newer generations might be growing taller. He attributed to natural shrinkage the entire difference in height between 40 & 80 year olds

Links

A treatise on man and the development of his faculties - Google Books Result


Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874)—the average man and indices of obesity - Garabed Eknoyan

Pomp & cavalcades

"Its even better in London," one aide confides. "Marble Arch with no waiting - just imagine it"

Tony Blair aide, as reported by Ian Rankin in The Times, 27 April 2007

Doesnt that sum up all you need to know about them?

The NHS is a burden on us

On Womans Hour this week a woman told of how she had been told, in terms, by an NHS doctor, that she would be a burden on the NHS because she was classified as clinically obese

Smokers like me are a burden too

And people who injure themselves or others through the sheer stupidity of their driving

And all those sportsmen who injure themselves in pursuit of their allegedly healthy activities

And mothers of IVF twins

And people who live on lettuce & lemon juice

And people who demand fabulously expensive drugs to eke out their miserable existence for another few months

In fact the opposite is true

The NHS, by gobbling up going on 10% of our gross income, is a burden on us

And brings out the nosy, carping, interfering, censorious, misanthropic busybody in us all

Related post: Not so funny anymore

First impressions

I used to think Gary Slapper was well named - bit of a media tart, as the unkind label has it

But I have changed my opinion, especially since I started reading him in The Times

He had a very nice piece on the Attorney General this week. Containing a phrase which is headed for my commonplace book

"when political power has tried to jostle justice"

Cloning is an environmental procedure

Cloning is an environmental procedure, concerned with nurture, not nature

True, its aim is genetic: to control as completely as possible the genetic makeup of the resulting life form

But putting the genetic material together is (relatively) the easy bit

The trick is to put it into an environment which enables development to start & then proceed to viability

Related post: Genes & process

Tall cranes

Miracles of modern engineering. Things of beauty. And power. And awe. Rock solid, perfectly balanced. Seemingly pared down to use the minimum of material. As delicate as the tracery on any medieval rose window.

Im very glad Im not the one who has to get the sums right to make sure they stay upright

There are plenty gracing the Manchester skyline right now

During the second great hurricane to hit England in recent years - '90 or '91 - I was working in an office on the 17th floor. The winds began really to pick up around mid-day & I observed the operator of a crane on the adjacent building site begin to make his cautious descent

I dont know why he was up there in the first place - the winds had been forecast. No Michael Fish moment there

I soon had to leave my office. I had been trying not to look, but my eyes kept being pulled towards the window. Like watching a car crash in slow motion

But he did make it down safely

It depends on how you look at it

The answer to Wittgensteins supplementary question about the sun is, as always, another question

What would it have looked like if it had felt as if the earth were spinning on its axis?

He wasnt always sitting glowering in his box

Am I imagining this?

Or was Gordon Brown a coruscating performer in the House of Commons in the 1980s?

A formidable debater

Feared by Conservative (junior) ministers

And very funny

Post mortem scandals

I am supposed to react with shocked horror to the idea that organs or tissues may have, for research purposes, sometimes been removed from dead bodies without the relatives (or indeed the corpses) permission

I am also supposed to understand why, in some cases, such parts have been retrieved from the laboratory & given a 'decent burial'

Why then would it be thought peculiar of me to ask that significant parts of my body, which were surgically removed over 20 years ago, be reunited & disposed of together with the rest of me when I die?

Does anyone want to join with me in a campaign to fight for my human right to decide whether the NHS should callously have decided to chuck my bits into the incinerator or pickled them in glass jars to be gawped at by generations of medical students?

An apple a day

Do Marks & Spencer put apple juice in all their drinks?

I first noticed this when I tried their vanilla & maple smoothie. I had acquired a particular taste for vanilla flavoured milky drinks when it was my favourite among the supercharged nutritional drinks I was given in hospital last year. The first taste of the M&S version made me splutter - rather than a slightly sweet creaminess I got distinctly sour. Examination of the label revealed that apple juice was an unexpected ingredient. I have since acquired the taste however

This week I suddenly noticed that the diet version of their lemon & lime fizzy water costs 15p less than the full strength version, which seems rather a lot for the difference between the price of sugar & saccharine. I normally avoid, on principle, anything which carries the rubric diet, or lite, or (ugh) lo-fat but I was intrigued enough to compare labels

Apart from the fact that the diet version tells you the country of origin of the lemons & limes, there are only 2 real differences between the 2 versions. The artificial sweetener is the same. So the price differential is down to the use of bog-standard carbonated water rather than mineral water, & the addition of apple juice to the full strength version

Tangled knots

We in the western world all have complicated connections - even the old fashioned Janet & John nuclear family

Dad goes out to work, but his employment depends on an intricate network of economic activity & on his ability to negotiate [with] those networks

Mum stays at home, washes, cooks, cleans & looks after the children. But even that depends upon intricate systems of water, electricity & food supply, shops, schools & transport

Some connections are remote - the oil for electricity generation, aluminium for the kettle or car &, increasingly, the food supply chain - fresh green beans from Zambia rather than just copper, dried cocoa or coffee beans

And these links are ever changing, some in ways of which we are not particularly conscious - we neither know nor care much where our electricity is coming from. Some changes impinge & require us to make decisions; for example, should I abandon Sainsburys & start to shop at that new Tescos which is nearer to home? And before that, should I have abandoned the corner shop & the local butcher?

Sometimes these links get horribly tangled up, so knotted as to disrupt the communications between them. Then we need to sort them out - either by carefully tracing & unpicking the individual threads or, more drastically, by chopping off the strands on either side & throwing the knot away

Iraq has become one such horrible tangle for our governments & way of life, involving religion, Israel, oil, weapons, democracy & the dispersion of population & refugees

It is not however possible to predict what we will be left with when we have disentangled the knot, however carefully we try to proceed. Which threads will be left still joined together? Which links will be severed? And which still knotted?

Flummery

"Tony wants" - the 2 most potent words in Whitehall, according to that most perceptive of commentators, Professor Peter Hennessy, only a few short years ago

Not any more, I suspect

But it distresses me - genuinely - that some members of this administration still do not seem to have grasped that there is a real, though subtle, difference between Tony & Prime Minister. Between Gordon & Chancellor of the Exchequer. And between David or John or whoever it is this month & Home Secretary

An Act of Parliament says that "the Home Secretary shall or may or must ....

And that means every Home Secretary to come, in perpetuity, until Parliament decides otherwise

Whether they are called John, or David, Tarquin, Mohamed, Mary Jane or Cruella

I can manage by myself, thank you

Sources close to one small local bus company tell me that they are owed thousands of pounds by the council to pay for free travel by the over 60s, which has been so enthusiastically taken up

Many people now use theirs to travel to hospital appointments. Gives them back a bit of dignity & independence, not having to rely on someone else to drive them (surprising numbers of clinic appointments come with an instruction not to drive oneself). Another benefit is, presumably, less pressure on scarce hospital parking spaces

Pas devant les vieillardes

People should be careful what they say on their mobiles when on the train. You never know who might be listening

Even that mad old bat sitting opposite might have been around since databases were invented. She might even be familiar with the particular database you are discussing. The one on which you are working as a consultant to a Government agency

Are YOUR ears burning?

Childrens antennae

Why are young children both especially sensitive to social trends & such difficult creatures to con?

I became especially aware of this soon after the marriage of Charles, Prince of Wales, to Diana. At that time I was myself fairly cynical about royalty & astonished by the excitement generated by the wedding among young 20 or 30 something adults; I expected that the excitement would die down soon after the big day

I knew that something special was going on when I saw a tv news report of Dianas 'introduction' to the people of Wales; commentators were astonished by the crowd reactions to the Princess, who should have been dutifully walking a couple of paces behind her husband - was indeed doing so - but who was attracting far the greater clamour & attention, not least from small children who might have been bewildered but who were clearly experiencing magic

We all know what happened over the ensuing years

The next time I remember noticing this phenomenon - apart from a few short lived fads - was at the time of the Beckham wedding. This much derided event I saw only in a smudgy Daily Mirror front page photo when I went into the newsagents; my own reaction was that, rather than something grown up & vulgar, this was just children playing dressing up, clattering round in mummys high heels, hilariously made up, wrapped in a mish mash of floaty scarves, organdie dresses & feather boas

A few days later I was astonished to witness two 10 year old boys searching the WH Smith shelves of womens interest magazines for a copy of whichever celebrity magazine was carrying the official wedding photos. I bet that that was the first & last time in their lives they went to buy anything like that. But something was going on, as has been clearly proved by Beckhams later career trajectory. The man is special

Teletubbies were greeted by various howls of adult protest, just around the time that my next door neighbours had their first child. The first conversations I ever consciously heard floating over the garden fence with him were repetitions of 'eh oh' - before he was even a year old I think. I thought this must have been his - very gentle - mothers way of warning him of danger, of telling him 'no' or of expressing sympathy when he fell over. It was some months before I realised that this had become an almost universal magic toddler language

A later example was Im a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here - the series with the pneumatic Jordan & ex-royal correspondent Jenny Bond. This astonished many with the size of audience it attracted - I certainly did not see it myself. But just walking along the street one day I overheard a very earnest 5-year old boy in conversation with an older woman who, I would guess from the tone was an acquaintance or neighbour he had just run into; he was explaining, very solemnly, that he liked both Kerry & Jenny but hoped that Kerry would win

All these examples are in one sense trivial, examples of dumbing down, but at the same time important examples of our modern culture. Children are very good at just ignoring adult preoccupations, very good at getting engrossed in their own obsessions - skipping is what you have to do this week, bowling hoops the next, then spinning tops. So does the absorption, the attraction to the magic of adult popular culture really tell us anything about, signal the real importance of, otherwise trivial social trends?

10/04/07 Page 1 of 2

Another number next to zero

Behind my rather confused ramblings about clothes sizes lay a memory of an intriguing story about the number next to zero.

I saw this in one of Ted Porters books - in a footnote, as far as I remember, so obviously added at a late stage. It said that an English High Court judge was to decide the question of how a computer should, or could, recognise when it had reached the number next to 0.

Greatly intrigued by this. My first ever stand-up shouting row with my husband was about the nature of zero. He said it didnt exist, was just a limit which could never be reached. I said you could pass through it if you travelled along the number line, ergo it must exist.

So I actually researched the outcome of the case. Disappointingly, it never happened. The small company which was hoping to bring the action had failed & so had no money for legal fees

The number next to zero

I was in TKMAX the other day, in the vain hope that I might find a nice warm cardigan suitable for wearing in this warm weather we are having. Fellow sufferers from Reynauds disease will understand this problem. I was even hoping I might find something knitted in acrylic. Fat chance. But thats a rant for another day.

While there I noticed a very nice pair of trousers. As I was picking them off the rail I simultaneously noticed that they were size 8, but that they also looked as if they would fit me. Although my eye is pretty reliable in this respect, I checked by holding them up against me, paying particular attention to the waistline.

It might have been a bit of a squeeze, but only a bit.

And that is ridiculous.

I have always been slim, if not actually thin, & I certainly have no problem with my appetite. I have no truck with modern eating fads & have never been on a diet in my life.

In the 1950s it was quite usual for clothes to be home made. The ground floor of John Lewis in Oxford Street, & of most other department stores, was given over almost completely to bolts of cloth, paper patterns, sewing machines & haberdashery (lovely word).

I made all my own clothes from the age of 14 onwards so I really am sure that I was a size 14.
Misses, that is, in the world of paper patterns. Womens sizes were designed for the fuller, deeper figure.

A size 14 was designed to fit 34-24-36 (or possibly 34-26-36). That is bust, waist, hips, in inches. We used to think it was very odd of the Americans to designate that same size as a 12 - were they trying to delude themselves that they were thinner than English girls?

I have stayed the much same size ever since, albeit with a thicker waist. The clothes in the shops have got larger.

But if I have magically reduced to a size 8, that at least half explains the mystery of size 0.

The thin blue (or red or green or orange) line

Politics is the art of treading the line between Is & Ought. Between the way things are & the way we would like them to be.

All Utopias end up as repressive regimes. How do you deal with those who cannot or will not agree with your vision of the Good Society?

Ah! Vee haf vays! (cultural reference to the caricature German in war films of the 1940s & 1950s)

Genes & process

A person is a process, not a fixed object. Thinking that you can change a human being by changing their DNA is like thinking that you can reorganise a library just by changing the catalogue

Or - to put it another way - thinking that you can fully describe a human being by transcribing their genome is like thinking you can fully describe a phone system with a telephone directory. It’s the connections between phones & the contents of the messages between them which are important. And just when you think you are getting to grips with the system, someone invents the mobile phone & increases the complexity manyfold

How much time do we have?

Police investigations, HSE investigations, public enquiries, court cases, criminal trials -

All take aeons to investigate events which took perhaps only moments in real time

Why should this be so? Just the difference between looking from the outside & looking from the inside? Looking backwards rather than forwards - ex post rather than ex ante? The need to look at an event from many different angles, even from 360°? Or - which amounts to the same thing - the need to take account of many peoples views & weigh the primacy of eg victims family versus society or established law?

What does the length of enquiry v time of incident tell us about time in the philosophical sense?

Football crowds

Martin Samuel wrote an interesting piece about English football supporters in the Times the other day. Coincidentally I was just exploring the possibilities of Google Docs as a home for stuff backed up on floppies from my expired laptop. So I thought, why not see if the Blog transfer bit works for me. And it does.

Why are some football crowds so scary & others not?

With the spread of car ownership I dont think too many fans travel by train these days, but in the 70s & 80s this was a real problem. I remember travelling to London from Leeds with a crowd of Sunderland supporters going to the Cup Final - very unpleasant.

Then there was the Alcohol on Trains Act. On 2 successive Saturdays I saw elderly frail people collapse in queues at Euston - not because of any violence but because we were kept waiting, standing in line, for a long time until a policeman was available to check the crowds for signs of bottles & cans

In 1986 I travelled to Manchester on August Bank Holiday Monday, leaving a very rainy Notting Hill Carnival in the afternoon & arriving at Manchester Piccadilly station around 7pm. It was like something out one of those scary angst ridden modern alienation films - deserted except for a few policemen with barking Alsatians. There had been a football match, though the fans had either left or not arrived yet

Later, when hooliganism had receded as a problem, I travelled in to Manchester one sunny Sunday noon. As I walked down to Piccadilly Gardens I could see a large crowd of obvious football supporters spilling all over the pavement outside the large pub there

It seemed too far to walk all the way round the other 3 sides of the square & there were no signs of trouble - the crowd was noisy but there was no swaying or movement - so I decided that there would be no problem in just threading my way through the crowd. The moment I got in there I had one of those moments - I think I may just have made an awful mistake - no real reason, just the testosterone & the feeling This could go off at any moment.

Again in the 90s there have been many European matches in Manchester. It has been noticeable that the fans of the continental teams do not walk round in such large groups & do not, for some reason, exude such threat. The nearest I saw to that was when an Israeli team were playing United & there were lots of very excited & noisy young men in the centre of town, but for some reason no local fans felt compelled to gather & menace Come on if youre hard enough

In 2003 there was a European Cup Final in Manchester between 2 Italian teams. The city was absolutely packed. It helped that the weather was fine & sunny but not too hot. I would not have gone if I had realised the match was on. But it turned out to be a lovely day. Building on the experience of the Commonwealth Games the whole atmosphere was welcoming - there were lots of signs directing people how to get to the ground, entertainment was laid on in all the big public spaces, fans were lining up to have their photo taken with policemen in helmets, all the shops (incl M&S) were selling Italian newspapers … a wonderful carnival spirit. My only complaint was that there was almost nowhere to sit & rest my back for a few moments

British football fans seem to think that they are not causing any trouble so long as they are not actually fighting or attacking one another. They seem to think that walking around in large groups, making lots of noise, shouting at women, making no attempt to make room for other people on the pavement, showing off unnecessary amounts of bare skin, beer gut & man boobs & getting drunk, simply constitutes good fun. And, despite their claims to the contrary, Scottish fans are no better than English

Postscript: I was in Manchester again last Tuesday. I soon realised that a match must be coming soon, because there were small groups of fans wandering around. But they seemed somehow subdued & I assumed that the match must not be taking place until Wednesday. When I saw yellow jacketed police on guard in St Peters Square, & then 3 tactical support units parked in Piccadilly Gardens, I realised that somehow we had slipped back towards the old days, in the minds of the authorities at least.

The media response to the astonishing score line also seems to me unusually subdued - as if the commentators dont quite know what to make of it. Lets hope we can recover a happier spirit soon

The afternoon nap

When I was a girl the taking of an afternoon nap was normal practice for many women, at least for those who were housewives. Not surprising really, when you consider the sheer amount of physical labour involved  in housework. And an essential element of the routine for many was to awaken refreshed & change into some non-work clothes for the rest of the day & evening

It was also common practice for children to take a formal afternoon nap at school. Infant schools (ages 5&6) were generally completely separate from junior schools (ages 7-11). At my infant school we were each issued with a rush mat on which we had to lie quietly on the floor after school dinner; often you did actually go to sleep. I think that children who went home for dinner (does anyone do that these days?) were expected to rest at home before returning to school

The space between the words

Meaning is contained in the space between the words. As much, if not more than, in the words themselves

If I cut a circular (w)hole in the centre of a square sheet of paper, is the circle the hole, or is it the piece of paper I have cut away?

If the hole is the circle, then the circle is defined by the paper which surrounds it.

If both the hole & the cutaway piece of paper are a circle, then the circle is defined equally by itself & by its surroundings

The average man

The average (arithmetic mean) reached its modern central position in statistics via two distinct paths.

One came via astronomy, when its practitioners realised that the best estimate of any measured astronomical quantity was given by the average of all available measurements. This had the added advantage that they didnt have to argue any more about whose measurements were best.

In this sense the average represents the true value of what we are trying to measure.

The social statisticians of the C19th were more interested in the variability of the human condition. But how do you measure variability?

It seems obvious that you need a fixed point from which to measure the individual differences. And it turns out that all sorts of useful mathematical results follow if you choose the average as that fixed point.

Nobody suggests that the average man represents some kind of truth, that a man ought to be 1.75m with a BMI of 22.5, an IQ of 100 & earnings of £25,000 a year.

Medicine however can seem confused about this. Does scientific medicine involve assuming that averages represent truth - the gold standard of treatment? Or, if not, how do the standards of science apply to those pesky & infinitely variable things called patients?

The Sumerians would have been dissatisfied with an explanation that smoking caused the death of a patient from lung cancer. OK, so smoking causes lung cancer, but why him, why now?

Just because Aristotle claimed that no systematic knowledge of them is possible, does that mean doctors are condemned to treat individuals forever as mere exemplars of a class?

Will you still keep me?

There is currently much emphasis on the need to save to provide finance for old age.

This is premised on a naïve confusion between finance (or money) & real resources: you cant eat, live in, or wear, money, though in a steady state system the accumulated promises which are represented by banknotes or other financial instruments gives you command over these real resources.

Because, especially because, money does not equal real resources, there are myriad ways in which these promises can be reneged upon - for example the young, the workers, the salaried & employed can consent to runaway inflation. In the end the old, the infirm, the dependent, must trust the able bodied to support them, whether this is directly, through the family, or indirectly through the state or through a charitable organisation.

Tracing, or mapping, on whom these obligations fall, provides one method of defining whether a society is a democracy or something else

Not so funny anymore

Old joke: Whats the difference between God & a doctor?

God doesnt think hes a doctor

But now we are darn near tithing our gross income to the NHS, the medical profession has taken on the mantle of a church as well. And a very Presbyterian one at that.

Bad health is all our fault, for we are all sinners. If we lived properly, according to the rules of this religion, we would not be such a burden.

But hang on. Does that mean we wouldnt need doctors anymore?

Anyway, as Donne said It adds to the affliction that relapses are (and for the most part justly) judged to be self-inflicted

The Nth deadly sin

Not too long ago it would have been a compliment to be called a woman of discriminating taste.

Now discrimination is a sin.

And only men can be discriminating - against women

We women do not discriminate against men, we are far too nice

Are all bastards men?

I know some people think that all men are bastards.

But does anyone use bastard as a term of abuse for a woman?

Both boys & girls could be bastards in the legal sense. But I guess that, under a system of primogeniture, bastardy is worse for a boy child than it is for a girl

How the British state stopped supporting marriage

We are used to hearing proposals for adjustments to the system of income tax which would allegedly encourage more people to marry or to stay married. Any such effects would of course be marginal, at best.

But in one astonishing decade the British Parliament removed much of the legislation which reinforced whatever social or personal motivations there might be for conventional marriage.

I think Larkin was wrong. Sexual intercourse began in 1967, when intimate relations began to be legislatively decoupled from marriage.

Consider the following:

1967 Abortion Act

1967 Sexual Offences Act

1969 Family Law Reform Act - removed legal difficulties for illegitimate children; marriage at 18 possible without parental consent

1973 Report of the Population Panel - free contraceptive advice & prescriptions as of right, regardless of marital status

1973 Matrimonial Causes Act - easier divorce

1973 Guardianship Act - mother shared guardianship rights of legitimate children

1974 Finer Report on One Parent Families - improved income support

1975 Sex Discrimination Act

What with the recent headline divorce settlements, one does begin to wonder whats in it for a man

Link

Annus Mirabilis by Philip Larkin (read by Philip Larkin)

Dont be a bluestocking

I have been pondering why women born in the 1930s & 1940s should have been so unusually keen on early marriage. (Till death us do part?)

Undoubtedly one factor would have been the fear of getting left on the shelf (dreadful phrase). Their generation would have been all too familiar with the twin phenomena of elderly maiden aunts & spinster schoolteachers. Stalwarts, every one of them.

There were so many spinsters because the natural shortage of men of marriageable age (relative to women) had been multiplied many times by the carnage of World War I. The mothers of daughters born in the 30s & 40s were thus particularly fearful that their daughters might not be quick enough off the mark & so might be condemned to spinsterhood & childlessness.

There might also have been a feeling that World War II had had the same effect on the male/female ratio as had WWI. Not so, & not least because of the grisly fact that bombing civilians causes just as many female casualties.

And so girls growing up in the 1950s especially would have been bombarded with advice & warnings. Dont be a bluestocking, they would say, men dont like clever women. No one will want you if youre too clever

Postscript: Virginia Nicholsons Singled Out, being read as R4 Book of the Week 20 August 2007, explores the lives of post WW1 spinsters

Till death us do part?

When I was a child it was not unusual to see small ads in the local paper: I, John Smith, of 25 Acacia Avenue, hereby declare that I am no longer responsible for debts incurred by my wife Mary Smith.

The belief that a husband was responsible for his wifes debts was one of the reasons why a married woman found it extremely difficult to get access to credit of any kind without her husbands explicit written consent - even if she had a good job & a steady income of her own. Even if they were separated.

The Sex Discrimination Act outlawed discrimination on the grounds of marital status as well as gender. These days most people assume that was to protect people who were not in a conventional marriage, but just the opposite was true. Discrimination against women per se could all too easily be excused on the grounds of these complications of the marriage contract.

How odd then that the Act was passed just as marriage, especially for young women, was going right out of favour. In 1972 getting on for half (44.3%) of girls aged between 16 & 20 were married. Ten years later that figure had dropped to less than 1 in 3 (29.3%). It is now less than 4%. Indeed we would probably be more shocked now by the idea of a 16-year old getting married than we would be by her having an abortion.

It is really fascinating to look back at the history of C20th marriages. Teenage marriages were relatively uncommon in the 1920s, but girls who were children during or just after World War II took to it with gusto - those born in 1951 held the record. Of course many of them 'had to'. The government even used to make official estimates of the number of brides who were pregnant when they walked up the aisle (still does)

And lots of other things happened around then which made marriage less attractive. Abortion & easier divorce, obviously. More acceptance of the idea that higher education for girls was a Good Thing, not simply a waste of money because 'they will just get married anyway'. And, last but by no means least, free contraceptives for all, married or unmarried, on the NHS.

Or did all these things happen because women had discovered that youthful marriage was not, after all, such a good idea?

Radio footprints

What is the carbon footprint of digital radio compared with good old AM/FM? Would a switch to digital offset my new resolution to switch off the tv completely rather than leave it on standby?

Number of acres per journey to work

How many acres would the average journey to work by car take if all the petrol came from ethanol from renewable resources? What would this do to the price of food?

House prices (2)

In 1966 the prospective mortgage holder would almost certainly have been male & married. It would be unlikely that his wife was in paid employment, or intend to stay employed once the children came along. But even if she did, it would be unusual for her earnings to be taken into account in assessing how much money the Building Society would lend.

Feminism has probably had unexpected, & unintended, consequences for house prices.

For one thing, it became more common for 2 people getting together to each be owner occupiers in their own right. In the rising markets of the 70s & 80s the sale of 2 single person properties would provide a healthy deposit for a marital home.

And the pressure to take wives earnings into account - even if only at a multiple of 1 or 1.5 compared with the more usual 3 for the 'main earner', only further increasd the amount they could afford to pay for a home.

These effects were multiplied by the fact that like tends to mate with like. (Do I have to repeat that a tendency allows plenty of room for exceptions while still producing very real effects?). So high earner marries high earner. This just skews the distribution of house prices even further, making the long tail of high priced homes longer, & leaving over half the population unable to afford even the average (arithmetic mean) price - even on two incomes

House prices

I recently needed to consult The Spectator for 1966. As always, I got distracted by a story other than the one I was looking for.

There had been a press hoo-ha over the fact that the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea had recently granted a mortgage in the princely sum of £20,000 to one Nigel Lawson. Yes, that one, Chancellor of the Exchequer, father of Nigella, but then recently appointed editor of the magazine.

As a contribution to the discussion the Building Societies Association pointed out that they were doing a very good job. In 1965 their members had lent about £1billion to about 1/2 million homebuyers. Average £2,000!

Yes, I know. I too can remember when you could do a show in the West End, dine at the finest restaurant, decent bottle of wine, taxi home & still have change from half-a-crown.

But 1966 was the year I graduated & the comparison I find most intriguing is with salaries. It had just become possible for a good honours graduate to earn a starting salary of £1,030 a year as a teacher- the magic 1k ceiling had been smashed. So the average mortgage was just 2x that salary

Of course few new graduates could aspire to that. For one thing no building society would grant you a mortgage unless you had demonstrated financial stability by saving with them for some time, & you would also need a hefty deposit of 25%

Dont know how house prices compare with starting salaries for teachers now, & I sympathise with those who cant get on the property ladder. But I have never myself thought that high levels of owner occupation are a Good Thing. Not so much a property owning democracy, more the mark of a peasant society, each family tied to its own little piece of land, with a mortgage the equivalent of the rapacious landowner who owns the real power

Loneliness

"Loneliness is not longing for company. Its longing for kind"

Interestingly thats a quote from The Womens Room, not my favourite book

But an intersting gloss on the golden oldie, theres nothing as lonely as being trapped in a bad marriage

Brothers under the skin?

Intrigued by the brother-in-law quote thing, I actually made an attempt to confirm my recollection about the 1960s English political novel which used it.

Found the Edelman books in Manchester Central Library. Skimmed them only - both seem turgid now. Almost certainly, neither is the one I was thinking about. The Minister is all about The Winds of Change, but deeply serious. The Prime Ministers Daughter centres, intriguingly, round an honours scandal concerning a newspaper proprietor, & press harassment of the PMs vulnerable daughter. Plus ca change, indeed.

Thought to leave it at that - one doesnt want to get too obsessed about trivia. But then another name dragged itself out of the fog of memory. David Walder, another 1960s novelist MP

How many novelists sit in the House of Commons today? **

It sounds more Walders style perhaps. But no local library - not even Manchester- seems to have any copies of the books, so that is definitely that.

But at least the dates show that Martin Luther King used the quote before either novelist (Oxford Dictionary Quotations has it 10 September 1962, in NY Journal-American). Wonder if either of them pinched it from him? Or if it was just a common saying at the time?

And - think very hard about this - why does an American commentator (Drew Weston) writing in the 21st century think that this was a shrewd political move on Kings part, but an English novelist of the 1960s could see in it the potential ruin of a political career?

**At least two. Ann Widdecombe & Iain Duncan Smith!

Complected

One of the things I miss now that we can usually not refer to the colour of someones skin, except in political terms, is the loss of great numbers of words to describe someones complexion.

When I was a child police appeals for wanted men always included a fairly complete description of the complexion. Ruddy, pale, florid, purple, pasty, swarthy, olive.

You immediately knew a woman was good if she was described as having a peaches & cream complexion. Tanned or leathery was a bit too independent & able to take care of herself for many tastes.

Langston Hughes could be very lyrical about the characters in his novels with their honey, mustard, milky coffee, ebony or caramel skins

Of course such words smuggled all sorts of hierarchical or moral judgements. Unspoken approval for brown-skin girl. Red, black, high yaller?

Not to mention all those wheaten prospective brides in Indian marriage adverts

l'affaire Patrick Mercer

This latest racism hoo-ha put me in mind of a 1960s political novel by Maurice Edelman, probably The Minister. Set at the time of Macmillans Wind of Change in Africa. A rising Conservative star puts a block on his career by remarking to a fellow dinner-guest: 'I said I wanted the African to be my brother, not my brother in law.'

Too clever by half!

Funnily enough, when I Googled that quote just now it came up, precisely the opposite way round, attributed to Martin Luther King

Why the 4x4 is todays third child

When the Club of Rome produced its famous report in the early 1970s, the one which used a computer model to warn that the world would run out of all its mineral resources within 400 years, it reinforced the existing worry that the worlds population growth was outstripping our ability to produce enough food

ZPG was the aim of all right thinking moral folk who cared about the future of their grandchildren. So obviously it was morally wrong to do more than simply reproduce yourselves in your coupledom. TWO WILL DO

The Guardian Womens page carried agonised letters from women who knew what was right but still felt broody

And I remembered a (for the time) rather risque joke told to us by the teacher who introduced us to the theories of Malthus during the United Nations Freedom From Hunger Campaign

A husband could not understand his wifes extreme reluctance, not to say terror, at the idea of adding to their family of 2 healthy, happy children. Eventually he persuaded her to own up that her fears were caused by the fact that she had heard that Every third baby in the world is Chinese

Pinning the blame for global warming on to the Chelsea Tractor is every bit as prejudiced & wrong headed as that joke

The boy with two heads

When it comes to apostrophes I am with GBS - dont use em.

Not because I dont know the rules. I remember very well being taught them in primary school, aged either 8 or 9. The teacher was called Mr Price.

The examples used were The boys heads & The boys books.

I dont suppose I used these precise terms to myself at the time, but I decided then & there that if I ever wanted to convey the news that here was a boy with more than one head, I WOULD NOT DO IT WITH AN APOSTROPHE .

I confess to feeling some confusion over the plural boys books. I now realise that this is because of indeterminacy, in the mathematical sense. How to distinguish between the following?

• Each boy has exactly one book
• Each boy has one or more books
• Each boy has more than one book
• library, boys, for the use of

If you have to deploy something other than an apostrophe to make such distinctions, why bother at all?

Same or different? (3)

Back to our binary classifications again.

It is only human to view one side as good, the other bad. Or at least to consider one as more desirable than the other. So tall is better than short, thin is better than - ughh! - fat

In our mythical celestial population of 1 milllion souls, most will be a fairly even mixture of good & bad, desirable & undesirable

One poor schmuck will however be all bad - possessed of not one redeeming feature

At the other end of the scale one god-like creature will be possessed of entirely good, desirable attributes

And yet, as with everybody else, they will share each of their features with half of the population

Related posts

Different or the same? (2)
Are we all different or are we all the same?

Different or the same? (2)

Going back to our binary categorisation of humans. Suppose by some celestial coincidence we picked the dividing line between tall & short exactly on the median height of the population. So exactly half are tall & half short. Same for weight, intelligence, sporting ability etc etc

And suppose by another celestial coincidence we have found a population of 1million people*, each of whom fits, exactly, one of our categories. We have 1,000,000 people each of whom is unique.

Only one who is tall + fat+ intelligent + a sporting rabbit+.......

Only one who is short + fat + intelligent +a sportstar.............

And so on.

But each person will share each single characteristic with half of the population


*OK, really I mean 1,048,576. Just keeping it elegantly simple

Related posts

Same or different? (3)
Are we all different or are we all the same?

Are we all different or are we all the same?

Choose 20 human attributes or characteristics. Height, weight, sporting ability, intelligence .... whatever.

Classify everybody on each characteristic, but on a simple binary scale. So each person is either short or tall, fat or thin .... whatever. Arbitrary I know, but bear with me.

Even with this level of crudity & arbitrariness there are enough categories to assign each of 1 million people to their own unique group of 1

2 possible categories of height x 2 categories of weight x 2 categories of intelligence x 2 categories of musical ability ...... 2 to the power of 20 = 1,048,576 categories in all

Related posts

Same or different? (3)
Different or the same? (2)

The bakery

My paternal great grandparents ran a bakery & shop. I have happy memories of visits. Custard slices or Viennese whirls as a treat. Nobody could understand why I didnt like iced buns.

The flour sacks were kept in a loft above the shop. A cat lived up there to control the rats. I never saw him downstairs, but you could sometimes see him sitting curled up at the edge of the open trapdoor. He was enormouse.

When I was about 10 I ws allowed to help serve in the shop on Saturdays. I remember the humiliation the first time I tried to make change, & being loudly instructed by Great Aunt Betty that you dont have to do the subtraction, you just go '1 penny makes 2 shillings then sixpence makes half a crown' or whatever.

I rememberd this years later when I was trying to teach the laws of algebra to a maths remedial class. My explanation of the associative law was met by loud squeals from one little girl. I had just transformed her life by teaching her how to make change. She had felt that her ambition to work in an upmarket department stiore was destined to be forever thwarted by her total inability to do subtractions in her head.

Death in childhood

1 in 10,000. That's the chance of dying in this country for a child aged 5-9.

Which must, of course, only increase the sense of shock, grief, guilt and, for parents, isolation, if it happens. This is what fuels paranoid parenthood: Please dont let me be the one who fails.

One of my great-grandmothers was proud to be able to say 'I have had 11 & reared 8' - meaning that only 3 of her children (born mostly in the 1890s) had died. She was a real martinet - that achievment made her word law. She herself lived to over 90 & died when I was about 5. I have one very vivid memory of her walking across a room, ramrod straight in her green overall apron. She was still active in the family bakery.

It makes me shiver now to think what those experiences must have been like. A childs death is no less painful because less rare - think of Darwins devastation at the death of his 10-year old daughter.

Postscript

And I realise Im not just fretting about the 1 million to 1 accident or abduction but also how indefensibly negligent I could appear. After the McCanns all paernts scent witch-hunt in the air

Janice Turner: The Times 19 May 2007

What is life?

A sexually transmitted disease

With a 100% mortality rate

It is strange how we, in this country anyway, increasingly talk as if death were optional. As if the alternative to dying of lung cancer from smoking were not dying at all. Tests of the value of new medical procedures measure mortality & newspapers talk about numbers of deaths prevented rather than numbers of deaths postponed

But look at the mortality figures & you will see that the death of anyone under 50 has indeed become a pretty rare event. And therefore news

This explains why, on at least 2 occasions last year Radio 5 Live carried, as items of national headline news, the deaths of children which did not involve murder, paedophilia or abduction. One child choked to death on a piece of apple, the other drowned in a river on a family day out

The death rate for children under a year old now runs at about 1 in 200. If you survive your first year your chance of dying wont be so high again until your late 50s

Oh no! Not that man again

I really am determined that this is the last time I will write about Tony Blair. Now we know he is a racist, root, branch & core

I heard him explain, in that exasperated tone of his, that these recent shootings have just been affecting "a particualr small community" & that he "doesnt agree that these have anything to say about the state of British society today"

Its "them", you know, a "community", "ethnics". Not us

Why not just say "Oh well. They're black. What else do you expect?"

I prescribe a course of reading ER Braithwaite to understand how this "lack of role models" has a lot to say about the state of British society

The enemy

Wouldnt it be nice if we really could save time?

Its a slow Wednesday today. Not much I really HAVE to do. Ill just put a couple of hours in the bank for next Monday, when things will be really hectic

When we talk about the length of a journey, are we talking about the time taken or the distance covered? Or are we indifferent, taking these to be freely interchangeable?

Transport schemes are usually appraised by reference to how much time the new motorway etc will save. Some of the knottier conceptual problems of this approach might in fact disappear if the appraisal concentrated on the extra distance gained

I heard somewhere that man has, over his entire history, spent about the same overall, constant proportion of his time in travelling. I wonder if this is true for women too? The latest UK figures show that the average woman travels only 3/4 as far as the average man (6,300 v 8,200 miles a year). But does she spend less time doing this, or does she just travel more slowly?

Years ago, during the Thatcher recession of the 1980s, there was a youth unemployment scheme called YOPS which paid participants a flat £23 a week. As someone charged with making comparisons of the relative earnings of males & females I was shocked to find that the difference in earnings appeared even among these 16 year-olds. But how? Turned out the the only extra you could claim was for essential travel to work. So girls either worked closer to home or were more likely to get free lifts. Or boys were more likely to make false claims

10 things to do with old newspapers

In my youth we never used simply to throw newspapers into the bin. Nor did we 'recycle' them. Newsprint was a valuable commodity for which we had many alternative re-uses

1 Childbirth The most extraordinary was during labour. One well known baby book recommended that you keep old newspapers handy in case you went into labour unexpectedly before help was at hand. Newsprint would provide a good temporary undersheet to keep the mess off your bedsheets or flooring. It had the great advantage of being sterile. I wonder if this is still true. Did it have something to do with the lead in the ink, I wonder? The mind boggles

2 Loo paper. Cut into squares, make a hole in the top left hand corners, loop through a piece of string & hang on a handy nail. Actually the Radio Times or another magazine was better, because less absorbent. A bit different to how we think today

3 Fish & chips

4 Firelighting. Tear a sheet of newpaper into quarters. Roll each piece diagonally as tightly as you can. Keep in a jar beside the fire or gas cooker & use as an alternative to matches. Fold whole sheets of newspaper into tight cubes tu use as an alternative to small logs for the fire. Scrumple up pieces of newspaper to use as kindling for the fire

5 Wrap up your rubbish. No black bin bags in those days. Wrap wet, dirty or smelly rubbish in layers of newsprint before placing in the bin

6 Temporary floor mats. Especially useful as doormats for wet shoes or temporary covering for just-mopped floors. Dont use on light coloured lino - the newsprint rubs off on the floor

7 Drying shoes. Stuff wet shoes with scrumpled newspaper. This will absorb the moisture & help the shoes keep their shape. It is also a good idea to scrumple some newspaper into the bottom of your wellies while they are not being worn - stops creepy crawlies from getting in & hiding in the toes

8 Apples. Wrap each apple carefully in a piece of newspaper for winter storage. For best results store on slatted wooden shelves. Or pack carefully into cardboard boxes. Store in a cool place

9 Cleaning windows. Glass will really sparkle if polished off (after washing) with scrumpled newspaper

10 Childrens artwork. Paintings can look very good on newsprint - think Cubist. As can potato prints. Or fold a sheet of paper into 4. Cut little holes along the creases & wavy edges along the free sides. Unfold - a doily! make papier mache bowls or dolls heads

*********

These days of course we have better things to do with our newspapers, once read. We leave them once a fortnight outside the house in a blue plastic bag. nice men come with a big lorry, empty the bags & carry the newspaper away. They pack all the newspapers onto a big ship & carry them half way round the world. This is a good & virtuous thing to do. We call it recycling

And virtue is rewarded. The richest woman in China earned her money by knowing what to do with all these old newpapers once they got there

Take me to your leader

Am I the only person to feel outraged by Tony Blairs recent tv interview in which he said it had been an honour to lead 'them' - ie the British people?


What an arrogant, condescending & patronising tone. Them is always what you say when you want to put them over there, in a different category from Us


It also displays an alarming failure to understand the difference between government, country, parliament & people


The Prime Minister leads the government, in the sense that he is primus inter pares. To do so he needs the confidence & support of Parliament, the elected representatives of the people, who delegate to him the responsibilty for running the executive branch of Government. If he needs new laws to be able to carry out these duties he must ask Parliament to pass them. If he needs money, he must ask Parliament to Vote it for him


He is not the Leader of the House of Commons


It is up to his Party to decide if he is their leader or not


The People have no say in any of this, in the strict sense that they do not vote for him. They vote for their local MP. They may believe that there is a link - vote party x whose leader is y - but that is the most that can be said. And even then there is absolutely no sense in which the voters agree to a game of follow my leader

The true nature & purpose of political power

The most capital advantage an enlightened people can enjoy, is the liberty of discussing every subject which can fall within the compass of the human mind … To render the magistrate a judge of truth, & engage his authority in the suppression of opinions, shows an inattention to the nature & design of political society. When a nation forms a government, it is not wisdom but power which they place in the hand of the magistrate; from whence it follows his concern is only with those objects which power can operate on … administration of justice, … protection of property & the defence of every member of the community from violence & outrage fall naturally within the province of the civil ruler, for these may all be accomplished by power; but an attempt to distinguish truth from error, & to countenance one out of many opinions to the prejudice of another, is to apply power in a manner mischievous & absurd

Robert Hall: Works 10ed 1850

Barry Richards

I only ever saw one Barry Richards innings live. It was a Sunday match at the Oval, nothing very much depending on it

I was sitting near the old scoreboard at the pavilion end. The wicket was well over towards the other side of the ground. A long way away, in other words. Nevertheless there were several balls which came speeding right down to where we were sitting, racing along the ground, to jump the boundary rope then bounce back off the wall. And all seemingly hit without any great power at all

He got his hundred. Point made, job done. So he then wafted one & made his way back to the Pavillion for a well earned rest

War is magical - ?

I have not been quite able to make up my mind about the writer Lewis Mumford. At times he seems like a bit of a charlatan, or the Ancient Mariner with his glittering eye. And yet I have put lots of quotes from him in my commonplace book. Whatever else, he wrote beautifully



The following (from The City in History) needs no comment

If anything were needed to make the magical origins of war
plausible it is the fact that war, even when it is disguised by seemingly hard
headed economic demands, uniformly turns into a religious performance; nothing
less than a wholesale ritual sacrifice

Clive Lloyd

The first Test Match that I ever saw live was at Bourda in 1968. That, rather than revolution, was what excited me most that year

My excitement was intense. We had to get to the ground early to secure a seat. The weather was gorgeous

My first shock was the wicket. It looked like a sheet of glass shining under the sun. Up until that moment I had truly thought - without ever really thinking about it - that cricket fields were green all over

But up till then my only experiences of watching first class cricket were via grainy 425 line black & white tv or Pathe newsreels at the cinema


So many memories of that match. But the most enduring was & is Clive Lloyd

Funnily enough I cant remember him batting in that match

What I do remember is his fielding in the covers. With his long reach & lithe form, he made me think of a panther. He didnt seem to even have to move much from the spot, just pounced

In truth, I didnt know very much about cricket then. I understood 4s & 6s & fast bowlers running in, but that was it. Didnt even usually know where the ball had gone to without the camera to guide me. But watching Clive Lloyd made me really understand for the first time that there really was a lot more to this game, a lot that would provide hours of absorbing entertainment. Even a tussle between Lance Gibbs & Geoffrey Boycott

Of course that was before Clives knees went. In later years I came to think of him more as Paddington Bear, with his hat & glasses & rather shambling gait when walking to the wicket

And what a batsman. I shall certainly never forget his innings at the World Cup Final in 1975

A dream in marble

I returned to the Taj at night & saw it illuminated, first by a bright moon & then by some garish fireworks. I felt that if I were to write for years it would be of no avail - & so I departed - Taj-haunted - carrying off a new thought which can never perish

William Russell: My Diary in India in the Year 1858-59

et = square root (-1)

Once upon a time there were some sums which we could not do. No matter how hard we tried, we could not work them out

The reason was because in order to find the answer we had to get the square root of -1. But there is no such number in our world. It is indeed a very strange thing that we can have minus numbers, but not one of them has a square root

One day however a visitor came from another world. His name was i

He stayed with us while we did our sums, sitting in the place where the square root of -1 should go. And something magic happened. We could keep on going till we got an answer to our sum, an answer which was a perfectly ordinary number from our own real world

So then i could go home