One of the joys of summer

I opened the back door this morning - & rushed over to make sure that the dustbin lid was secure. We are in week two of the non-recyclable rubbish collection cycle, & I thought that yesterday’s hot sunshine must have hastened the process of rot & decay.


But no – it’s just muck-spreading time again.

We are going to have a few more pongy days before it’s over.

Links
Muck Spreading Derbyshire

Muck spreading controls will cause stink – farmers

Slurry and muck spreading under the new Nitrate Directive rules

Hair again

On Midweek this week Pauline Black spoke of her experience of being a mixed race child adopted by a white couple in 1950s Britain.

Hair problems got a particular mention.

When you stop to consider the question, the importance of the role played by hair colour & texture in our contemporary classifications of whether someone is white or black or some other non-white category is startling.

It must have been sometime in the 1990s that I became acutely aware of this. Fashionable young men (such as David Beckham) wore what I think was called a No2 cut – a very close shave.

Suddenly Manchester seemed full of young 20- or 30-somethings, suits with unstructured jackets, open necked shirt, hair which revealed nothing but its colour, no texture.

And I realised that I often could not determine, for example, whether he were (to put it in shorthand) African or Indian – not in any sense that really matters, just in the casual way that one, sometimes, thinks West Indian, African, Chinese, French, Scandinavian, American ...

Except of course that sometimes it really does matter, especially when other stereotypes & prejudices come into play, or even a conviction that we can be divided into distinct groups according to our race.

Sometime around then the BBC were trailing a programme about the human race (I forget what it was called) with a film of hundreds of people of all ages & races, naked. I even forget whether the point of this was to illustrate our infinite variety or our sameness. But it would be startling - & very instructive – to see the same film with all the participants given a No2 cut, just to emphasise how much we tend to base so many judgements on just this one characteristic.

Links
Midweek

Pauline Black

Black by Design: A 2-Tone Memoir

Related posts
The significance of curls

Women, hair & politics

Counting cars

Standing at the bus stop yesterday I found myself idly wondering if bright red is the most popular colour for cars these days. It certainly seems that way, but perhaps scarlet is just more attention seeking.

I decided to do a quick, unscientific survey.

What really astonished me was that in next to no time at all I had counted 100 cars passing (in all directions); I did check my watchwhen I got to 90, so I know that the last 10 passed in only 15 seconds.

And this in what we regard as a fairly quiet village, not on a main A road, at a relatively quiet mid-day, peaceful compared with school run time. I think if I had ventured a guess in advance I should probably have said about 10 a minute.

That reminded me of my very first solo ‘project’ as someone who was supposed to be an economist – advising on the level of tolls to set on a road.

I wasn’t starting from scratch – a report had already been produced by consultants with detailed estimates, but the revenues would not even have made a visible dent in the interest which would be payable on the soft loan granted at overseas aid rates, so I was asked to find a way to up the figures, with less than a week to do it.

At first I thought to redo the traffic estimates based on a gravity model of the population at both ends of the road, rather than the data on existing levels of travel (which, until the road was built, was by river or air). But population figures turned out to be unavailable.

It seemed completely hopeless until I noticed that the annual traffic levels quoted in the study translated into something ridiculous in terms of the number of cars per day using the road – I cannot now remember what it was but I would believe you if you told me it was no more than 10 a day.

So, with nothing much more than a wet finger to the wind & some plausibility checks based on population, car ownership & bus travel in parts of the country where there were roads already, I came up with something a little larger.

The first year estimates were not bad, but I prefer to draw a veil over what happened in subsequent years. But I did learn the important lesson that sometimes decisions have to be made at speed, in conditions of great uncertainty.

Oh – my unscientific survey showed that fewer than 10% of cars are red.

Peak health

An odd little news item on local radio this morning about the state of public health locally – we are among the better areas apparently, according to an organisation whose name I did not catch.

What was startling about it though was the claim that our men live to be 88-point-something, the women 82-point-something.

Perhaps someone just made a mistake somewhere, misread a figure, & really, like everywhere else, women outnumber men in the oldest age groups.

But this is one of those statistics I prefer not to check up on – I just like the idea that we are very unusual indeed. That there really is something in them thar hills.

Related post
The price of long life & happiness

Some physical activity is better than none

“People have been put off exercise by the cult of jogging & need to realise that moderate exertion, such as gardening & walking can be just as healthy” Britain’s chief medical officers have claimed.

Well. Go to the top of our stairs.

There’s a lot of bumf to go with this – a 58-page report from the chief medical officers, 5 fact sheets & 4 technical reports, all available via the UK physical activity guidelines on the Department of Health website.

There is much work to be done however before people start to sit up or, preferably, stand up at least & take notice, for "Guidelines themselves do not change behaviour: we do not expect many people to read this report and immediately change their lifestyle ... There now needs to be careful and planned translation of these guidelines into appropriate messages for the public, which relate to different life situations."

Link
Start active, stay active: a report on physical activity from the four home countries' Chief Medical Officers

Related post
Exercise v Exertion

These two imposters

I have just finished transcribing my first commonplace book into computer-readable format – well not quite all of it. Many of the poems are now easily available on line, so they just get links – I wonder if those will outlive my handwritten versions or become useless because of technological changes.

The following two entries are almost the last in the book & both come from the late lamented Listener magazine.

The third famous son of Totnes was the remarkable Charles Babbage, who invented the first mechanical computer, in 1822, but not in Totnes.

He invented a lot of things: the first speedometer, for instance; the first cow-catcher.

However, like all inventors, he was never satisfied with his inventions & he died a bitter & resentful man, leaving behind the completed drawings for a computer he called the analytical engine, capable of working to 50 decimal places.

Babbage’s bust is in Totnes museum, staring hard at something just above the horizon: the 51st place of decimals perhaps?

It seems a piffling thing to die bitter & resentful about …

Derek Robinson: Toytown-upon-Dart. The Listener 8 Sept 1977 p300

I once met a civil servant on a long train journey who said that ever since seeing Hutton make 364 at the Oval & weep because he had failed to make a run for every day of the year, he had been aware of the drawbacks of ambition. So he had tried to lead his life like a timeless Test Match moving towards an inevitable draw.

Like the batsman who sits padded up all day, waiting to go in, only to be bowled by the first ball he faces, he had drifted from day to day, relishing his aimlessness & looking for fulfilment in a life well wasted. ‘And’, he added bitterly, ‘I have been constantly dogged by success!’

John Stevenson: TV column. The Listener 8 December 1977

I can see why these contrasting attitudes to ambition amused me, with their references to computers, cricket & mathematical obsession & a nice paradox about ambition.

Googling for any information about either author brought me the news that there is now an online archive for The Listener; Derek Robinson, who I think I remember as a regular broadcaster, may be the novelist of that name; & John Stevenson might be the one who is now a tv scriptwriter, for Coronation Street among others.

Links
Listener historical archive

BBC launches online archive of the Listener magazine

Totnes Elizabethan House Museum: Charles Babbage

Derek Robinson (novelist)

John Stevenson

Related post
Self preservation

Why NOW is a class issue

I heard Steve Hewlett (who is in great demand as a sane & sensible expert on the media just now) say that there are an awful lot of people trying to perch on the moral pinnacle just now.

Some of them will fall off.

And think this through – if not NewsCorp & NewsInternational, then who?

One tenth of all households in this country still took the News of the World, many of them lifelong readers. They probably won’t switch to another paper.

What will be the effect on small newsagents? Often these are the only legal businesses in some of the tougher areas.

I do worry about how this might end, with so many people who have always felt distaste for ‘the Murdoch empire‘ taking the revelations about the behaviour of some journalists & managers on the News of the World as proof that they were right all along. I suppose they think that we would all be in a much better place now if he had lost his original British takeover battle to his then rival – one Robert Maxwell.

I even find myself – once again – in a position of feeling as if I should support someone I neither like nor agree with – Rebekah Brooks – just because she is a woman. Perhaps she did do something wrong, but the level of sheer outright misogyny in the comments being made about her. The sisters cannot carp & moan about the lack of women at the top if they then fail to challenge this kind of thing instead of thinking dark thoughts about why a media mogul should want to demonstrate such public support for the only woman ever to have edited the largest circulation newspaper.

As to the supposed massive outcry from the public – well I detect no signs of it out & around. Twitter & Mumsnet are hardly representative of the general population, particularly not those who have a Sky subscription & used to pay for their own copy of the News of the World.
Of course they want the phone hackers punished, but right now there is a feeling that, as with bankers, it will be the ordinary people who will pay the price.

Soccer pay

Sunday afternoon tidying up – came across a newspaper clipping about the earnings of last years England World Cup soccer squad (declared weekly club wage only) which I had set aside for analysis.

Together the 23players were earning at a rate of £99 million a year. Individual annual earnings ranged from £1.04m (Robert Green of West Ham) to £8.32m a year for John Terry of Chelsea. So the top player earns 8 times more than the lowest in this elite group. Positively egalitarian, compared with a BBC which now wishes to limit the pay of executives to a multiple of no more than 20 times the organisation's median salary earner

Interestingly the distribution looks normal-ish & the median of £4.16m is only just below the arithmetic mean of £4.3m

Related post
Is a professor worth more than a footballer?

Speaking about legs

Legs have been obsessing me lately, as I have been trying to check whether it is really true that most of the increased height of today’s young people is in the legs.

My unsystematic sampling & observation suggests that indeed it is. In fact it has really been quite startling to recognise that there is relatively little variation in the length of the torso of someone of my own or slightly older generation who is well under 5ft 6 inches in height compared with today’s’ young things.

But they do have legs which are very very short compared to those of their children & grandchildren.

My other impression, which I should love to see verified by proper measurement, is that most of the extra length is in the thigh, rather than the calf.

Vernon Scannell expressed so well the wonder at the variousness of things which share the name of leg in his poem from The Winter Man

Legs

Of well-fed babies activate
Digestive juices, yet I’m no cannibal.
It is my metaphysical teeth that wait
Impatiently to prove those goodies edible.
The pink or creamy bonelessness, as soft
As dough or mashed potato, does not show
A hint of how each pair of limbs will grow.

Schoolboys’ are badged with scabs and starred with scars,
Their sisters’, in white ankle-socks, possess
No calves as yet. They will, and when they do
Another kind of hunger will distress
Quite painfully, but pleasurably too.
Those lovely double stalks of girls give me
So much delight: the brown expensive ones,
Like fine twin creatures of rare pedigree,
Seem independent of their owners, so
Much themselves are they. Even the plain
Or downright ugly, the veined and cruelly blotched
That look like marble badly stained, I’ve watched
With pity and revulsion, yet something more -
A wonder at the variousness of things
Which share a name: the podgy oatmeal knees
Beneath the kilt, the muscled double weapons above boots,
Eloquence of dancers’, suffering of chars’,
The wiry goatish, the long and smooth as milk -
The joy when these embrace like arms and cling!
O human legs, whose strangenesses I sing,
You more than please, though pleasure you have brought me,
And there are often times when you transport me.

Vernon Scannell



Related post
Buprestogenesis

All the news that's fit

I am genuinely finding it difficult to understand just what it is that has happened in the saga of the News of the World this week.

True, the news that the voicemail of a murdered girl had been accessed by a newspaper marked some kind of turning point, but I genuinely do not get any sense of continuing outrage – not one single comment overheard on the bus, no neighbours or friends asking What do you think of this then? We always knew that reporters could be devious, unfeeling so & so’s.

But it does seem to have acted, in the way that the last grain of sand can cause the pile to collapse, by suddenly freeing the politicians from their fear of the tabloid press. Not all by itself, f course, the clues that the newspapers have lost their hold have been there for all to see, not least in falling circulations.

Tthe power now lies with the new & newer media.

Which is why the News of the World had to be sacrificed.

My feeling is that ordinary reaction to that is sympathy for the workers to have had to pay the price with their jobs.

It does not mean that a great moral crisis in my or your private life will not continue to be a matter for gossip in yours

Quality television

The number of American homes with a television has fallen. Partly because people could not afford – or chose not – to switch over to digital (a warning here for the proposed switch of UK radio) & partly because more people now watch on a variety of online devices.

With this goes an acceptance of lower quality of image. The advantages including a wider range of archive or amateur offerings on sites such as YouTube, webcams & phone cameras, & being able to watch while on the move.

Just like the acceptance of lower quality sound in music – one in the eye for cd & engineers who think quality comes first, before content if necessary

Related post
Sound quality

Just stand there doing something

The newsagents seemed to be carrying an unusually large stock of unsold papers when I went in there at about 2.30 pm, so perhaps the reaction to the 'phone hacking scandal' will produce widespread collateral damage. or perhaps it is just one of those days.

I am very glad that I am not one of those, in government, ‘the Murdoch empire’, civil service, judiciary or any other organisation which has to try to keep a cool head while the British public goes through what seems to be a periodical fit of morality, soaked in sentiment.

Of course the fuss is about something real, a very real discontent, but it is trying to identify quite what that is which is the problem, then trying to find the correct line of action which will magically calm things down sooner rather than later without making everything worse.

A lot of this is about class – would it be a good thing if this incident ends by leaving us with a journalist profession whose members are drawn entirely from the highly educated classes, with no taste for getting involved in anything lower class except in the manner of a visiting colonial potentate, condescension masquerading as concern.

Two interesting, if minor points. Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International, still seems shy of appearing in public to put her side of the story.

And just last week I heard Kelvin McKenzie (former editor of The Sun) in a radio discussion on an unrelated topic. I thought I must have misheard the introductions – but no, it is just that he has reverted to his public school accent.

Wet

A quite good variation on my most favourite crossword clue (from Times #24,892):

What can produce solution, finishing with much ado, symbolically (5)

Related post
Water cracker

Denizen

For me the word denizen has always been associated with low life, gambling dens, slums … I guess that must just reflect its usage in the kind of ‘literature’ I enjoyed in my youth. Definitely a word to avoid using about anybody unless you wished to offend.

So I was surprised to come across two recent examples of utmost respectability. One was simply an alternative to citizen. The OED confirms this usage, & even tells me that denizen has (had?) a place in the law of Great Britain, meaning an alien admitted to citizenship by royal letters patent, but incapable of inheriting, or holding any public office.

The other came in a report of the discovery of a gold mine denizen – in this case a worm. The OED covers this meaning too: An inhabitant, indweller, occupant (of a place, region, etc.). Used of persons, animals, and plants: chiefly poetic or rhetorical.

But Halicephalobus mephisto lives 9,000 feet below the surface of the earth, so low life of a kind, after all.

Link
Investigators discover gold mine denizen

Image courtesy of University Ghent, Belgium

Added July 8:
Kai von Fintel, a professor of linguistics at MIT & a newcomer to Language Log introduced himself as ‘a part-time denizen of the academic Dark Side, as Associate Dean of MIT's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.’

The sound of one’s own voice

I have just read Ruth Rendell’s The Monster in the Box, a Wexford novel whose elegiac nostalgia leads me to think that it may perhaps be the last.

It was published in 2009, but seems to have been written several years earlier – even a computer expert is still using cd’s & floppy disks, & there is reference to a proposed smoking ban in pubs.

Wexford is once again grappling with problems of racism & multiculturalism, though not as excruciatingly as in Simisola.

I found the book readable, especially the reminiscences about how things used to be during Wexford’s youth in the 50s & 60s.

In particular, it was extraordinary to be reminded that there was once a time when most people had never heard the sound of their own voice, other than by hearing themselves from the inside as they talked.

For years Wexford had thought that he spoke the Queens English, pure BBC, & then he had heard a recording made of his own voice & been disillusioned to find he had a Sussex accent.

Wexford probably never had elocution lessons – few boys did; but parents, mothers in particular, were quite likely to want their daughters to know how to speak like a lady. I was one of those; from the age of five my Saturday mornings were, in part, devoted to learning to enunciate properly.

But it was years before I heard, in my teens, a recording of my own voice; the increasing availability & affordability of reel-to-reel tape recorders & those booths where you could make a recording on thin plastic made it something of a commonplace for people to talk of the shock of hearing their own voice for the first time.

In these days of voicemail, if nothing else, I wonder if there is anybody who has not become familiar with the sound of their own voice, long before they reach their teens.

Infection

A nice anagram from Times Crossword #24,890 – new to me at least.

What’s not nice if spreading? (9)

Related post

Keeping the flu at bay

Trivial sums

An interesting snippet from The Times’s trumpeting of the success of its new unfree web editions, to which the iPad app has been a major contributor.

Most buyers of an iPad earn more than £100,000 a year.

The same article says that 25 million iPads have already been sold worldwide.

Maybe Conservatives think that all of them live in Britain. Patrick Mercer, speaking about the decision to stop paying military musicians a fee when they play at sporting events & other non-military occasions, described as ‘trivial sums’ the amounts involved - usually £50 to £180 per player.

To be fair to Colonel Mercer he probably meant that the total sums involved are just mean cheese-paring cuts in the military budget, but at a time when Sainsbury’s are offering advice on how to feed a family of four for a week for only £50 (drinks & puddings extra) statements like that are in danger of reinforcing the idea that these politicians just have no idea of what life is really like for ordinary hard working people

B****** bubbles

Another reason for being very irritated by bubble packs of pain killers – you cannot open them one handed because they are not easy to hold between the knees.

Related post
Saving us from ourselves

For a five year old

For a five year old

A snail is climbing up the window-sill
into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see, and I explain
that it would be unkind to leave it there:
It might crawl to the floor; we must take care
that no one squashes it. You understand,
and carry it outside, with careful had,
to eat a daffodil.

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
four closest relatives, and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to may another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
and we are kind to snails.

Fleur Adcock

Pension mystery

No proper blogging at the moment – not in the mood since having an argument with a piece of uneven pavement on Thursday evening – the pavement won.

I have just popped into the library to download a copy of the Hutton Interim Report on pension reform to take home. Then I will try to get to the bottom of an astonishing piece of intelligence in Ian King’s Business Commentary in Thursday’s Times which is being cited as support for the fairness argument about public sector pensions:

The average private sector worker currently retires with a pension pot of just £30,000


This definitely counts as an ‘interesting figure’ in my book, especially if it is an arithmetic mean which includes the pension pots of the likes of senior bankers. If it does, then the median pension for a private sector worker must be based on a pension pot of no better than £20,000.

Link
Independent Public Service Pensions Commission