Never judge a book by its contents

Apparently the National Insane Society is campaigning to ensure that books which may have disturbing content bear a warning on the cover in case some readers may be upset. I immediately thought that this would confine to the top shelf of bookshops and libraries titles like 'The Old Curiosity Shop' (childhood death), 'Jude the Obscure' (childhood suicide, deathbed scenes), 'Slaughterhouse 5' (mass immolation), 'Anna Karenina' (at least two people in front of trains), 'Accidental Death of An Anarchist' (use of word 'death' in title) and more or less all the plays of Shakespeare, given that even in the comedies one is occasionally exposed to mild teasing and even incidences of ridicule.

But according to Radio 4 the campaign was initiated by university English students, so unless 'The Little Prince' and Kahlil Gibran's 'The Prophet' are a bit tastier than I thought, I apologise for having been a little quick off the blocks on this occasion.

I'm Dreaming of a Black Friday

I'm dreaming of a Black Friday

Just like the ones we used to know
With markets crashing
And brokers thrashing
On the ends of ropes from Kensington to Bow.

I'm dreaming of a Black Friday
Just like the ones there used to be
With grown men sobbing
And bankers bobbing
All the way from Traitors' Gate down to the sea.

I'm dreaming of a Black Friday
Just like the ones when I was there
With earnings slumping
And tycoons jumping
From thirty-eighth floor windows everywhere. .

Yes, I'm dreaming of a Black Friday
With every chainstore that I see
May their profits crumble and crack
And may all their Christmases be Black.

Dislike THIS.

Facebook is thinking of introducing a 'dislike' button.

Not, it says, so that you can register your disagreement with or dislike of what someone writes. I imagine that this is because it might cause offence: no one these days likes to be disagreed with, particularly if they're wrong, when it often swiftly escalates to become a matter of that curious notion 'the right to an opinion'. Worse - I imagine -  it could be damaging to the writer's self-esteem with all the costs of medication, litigation and, who knows, self-immolation that might follow.

No, it's so that you can AGREE with them, which I had naively taken to be one of the more obviously incontestable functions of the 'Like' button.

So, for example, if I post a picture of a rich, obese American lording it over an elephant he has bravely turned into an omelette with a Krupp field gun from a mile away, people can register their shared disgust by pressing 'Dislike'.

OK, but what if I were to criticise an odious government policy or racist pressure group? Half of you may agree with my impeccable sentiments and press 'Like'; the other half may agree with my impeccable sentiments and register their disapproval of the matter under discussion by pressing 'Dislike'.

What a load of mushy - and dislikeably confusing - rubbish!

I might know exactly what I mean by 'Like' and 'Dislike', and you - and you, and you - will each know what you each mean by them too. But the meaning stops there, thus making both actions pointless in terms of actual communication, which is what Facebook is meant to enhance not diminish.

I know, let's do away with 'Likes' and 'Dislikes' altogether. Instead, let's say what we mean, not pour open minds into empty vessels.

Corbyn has a chance.

Some early, not-very-comprehensive and not-entirely-thought-through thoughts and I may come back to revise and/or add to them, but I’d like to know what people think ...

How far Labour has hollowed itself out was clearly shown this weekend when the carcase imploded.

It is no alternative to a Conservative Party which knows the price of everything but has never in my lifetime shown it knows the value of anything - even conservatism - and has prostituted a nation before the corporate kerb-crawlers of international business.

Labour under and since Blair has lost both its heart and its core voters, most of whom despise it and from whom it runs scared. It has forgotten its founding principles - socialist principles - of solidarity, mutual obligation and duty to others that also lay behind the creation of the Welfare State. Complexity has replaced simplicity, but the principles remain sound even though the world has moved on. Sadly, Labour has been so desperate to catch up that it's forgotten them altogether.

As both ballast and compensation it filled the vacuum left by its departed socialism with a shallow, mawkish and far from progressive language of social rights as claims upon others, a barely-disguised transcription of market consumerism as social policy. Victimhood has been the only thing Labour has nationalised since the 1970s, not least in the long years of fruitless opposition. It enshrined it in a bureaucratic managerialism that turns the stomach whether you suffer under it, work in it or just rage at it from the outside. A belated effort under Blair to link "rights and responsibilities" just pointed up the poverty - no, the absence - of Labour's conception of society.

Most of Labour’s traditional and potential voters, like most people in Britain and beyond, and including many socialists, are and always have been conservative with a small ‘c’. Corbyn mustn’t ignore that. People like to live in a reasonably predictable world; they like a sense of continuity in their communities; they like to know on what terms they deal with other, and they like to have a say about how it’s done. They aren’t on the whole racist and believing all the above things doesn’t make them so. Above all, far from being mere economic units, they have a pretty honest sense of what’s fair and what isn’t.

Many have turned away from Labour because they think they are unfair; that they have forgotten, ignored or perverted the principles I mentioned above. Because of this sense of unfairness, and joyously egged on by other clarions of victim culture like The Daily Mail, many who would once have voted Labour have retreated into a nasty, defensive and sullen nationalism. Others have been seduced by small-minded organisations like UKIP or overtly racist ones like Britain First. The Scots have simply told Labour to eff off, good God!

Britain has indeed become a notoriously unfair society which the historical dominance of the Conservative Party has done so much to create. We have the biggest and most visible discrepancies in wealth of any major European nation; an often squalid public environment for which many people have ceased to care and behave accordingly; low aspiration (even after all these Tory years - think about that next time a Government spokesman laments its absence in Corbyn's programme!); spectacular social cleavages between the well-educated minority and a badly educated majority; often appalling and preventable health problems. As a people we have been long and unlovingly prepared and indoctrinated for a low-skill, low-aspiration service economy while our major European competitors still actually make things – and by God it shows.

That the nation’s outrage should therefore be directed against foreigners and other Europeans instead of our own ordure is the most obvious testament to Labour’s failure to offer real opposition.

Corbyn can at last open up a debate and set out a clearly different approach. That’s to say an approach that doesn’t require Labour first to find out what the Conservatives want to do so that it can then make a few policy tweaks and then try to sell it as something fresh and different.

He can point up the real unfairnesses:  BANG! BANG! BANG! - it won’t be hard! He can direct our attention away from a narrowly economic to a broader quality-of-life approach (one of the great illusions, as I am starting to appreciate, is that happiness necessarily begins at a certain level of income – especially if you can cook).

Anyway, here are some ideas that I think might bring people back to Labour, and that may be compatible with what Corbyn believes, or might come to believe:

• Commit to membership of the European Union: we have much more to learn from our neighbours than we like to think and much to lose if, as for too long, we refuse to do so. This is no time for hair-shirted, insular British socialist exceptionalism: that is and has been part of the problem up to now.
• Commit to remaining in NATO but not to renewing Trident: they aren’t dependent on each other and the money can be better spent on the public and wider environment, and on start-ups for groups and businesses that can carry this work forward.
• Commit to the principles behind the original welfare state, which was based on contribution not unconditional access except in clearly stated cases, and explain clearly why this is. Nothing incompatible with socialism there!
• Commit to welcoming genuine refugees at the same time as (1) working internationally to resolve the Syrian and other wars and the disputes that give rise to them and (2) having, along with European partners, a clear exit strategy: that is, for refugees’ to return home when it’s safe to do so except in clearly defined and reasonable cases.
• Make the rich pay more tax, for no better reason than that they can afford it and it is therefore FAIR.
• Nationalise the railways, for God’s sake, and do it properly. If in doubt, ask the French.
• Have a school system that isn’t afraid to value what both academic and non-academic kids can offer and achieve, even if this requires streaming and even an element of separation. Because you don’t have to be academic to be a craftsman. If in doubt, ask the Germans or the Dutch.
• Support that last one with a return to MAKING THINGS.

And at this point I must hand things over to the economists, if he has any. I certainly haven't.

Storm in a pee cup.

I can't see why urinating in a mug and then cleaning it is reason not to stand for public office.

Jerry Bance, a Conservative candidate in Canada’s forthcoming election, has had to stand down for doing just that, and everyone over there is going on and on about it. He, in return, is indulging himself in the Canadian national pastime of apologising all the time.

I wouldn’t stand for public office either, but it’s not because I’ve more than once relieved myself in non-ensuite hotel rooms’ wash basins at three in the morning when I didn’t fancy performing the bishop’s waltz down a darkened corridor with no idea into whom I might bump.

It’s because I flatter myself that I’m a reasonably honest bloke who doesn’t like to lie, dissemble and pretend to believe in things I don’t.

And I rinse out those wash basins too, which brings me to the nub of my argument: SO DID HE. Had he left it there for all to see, I think he would be justifiably disqualified on the grounds of being completely bonkers as well as disturbingly malicious. But he didn't: he did what any sane and socially adjusted person would have done and washed the mug up.

Be honest: how many people ever do THAT in your office's staff kitchen? Be even more honest: DO YOU?

Anyway, given that Bance is a politician, I’d have thought there’s a good chance that his opponents might more honestly (if not more politically profitably) pin one of the above failings on him - lying, dissembling and so on - and thus do him in good and proper.

But no: in North America cheap personal attacks are the way to go, and this is common to both left and right.

Over here we are starting to heave ourselves out of our own, er, bog of irrelevance in these matters, sexual indiscretion. But we’re fast replacing it with a form of character-assassination made worse because it omits those aspects of character that really do need to be examined and neglects common, unspectacular decencies like telling the truth and washing up after yourself.

And be careful, all you up there on the moral high-ground: what goes around comes around.

The Examined Life, 6

“Sir.”

“Yes, Eusebio?”

“Churchill was a dog, wasn’t he?”

“I imagine some of the less reputable among the Germans may once have held that opinion, but I have to say it’s not one many share; in fact ...”

“But he was a dog, Sir, wasn’t he! Tell him, Sir!”

“Tell whom, Eusebio?”

“Him! He’s shtoopid, he is!”

“Why, pray?”

“He thinks he was a MAN!”

On National Stereotypes

National stereotypes are great fun if deployed only in fun, and try as I might I can't shift them. For example, as I was walking around the centre of Troyes early yesterday morning I came across a little scruffy old guy shuffling along in shabby clothes, wearing what looked like old-style NHS specs, with a few teeth missing and a distant, ill-focused but nonetheless intense look on his face.

If I'd been in Britain I'd have assumed he was an alcoholic. As it was France, I assumed he was a philosopher. Thus are histories made, told and digested.

Talk properly, Peston!

A small consolation to the Greeks in their troubles must surely be that, unlike the British, they don't have to listen to the BBC's Economics Editor Robert Peston talking about them all the time.

Just hearing the man on the radio makes me seasick. The yawning pauses; the vocal gurnings; the yelp as another vowel is stretched drumskin tight on the rack of his ambition; the sudden barked expostulation that wakes the cat.

The Ralph-and-Hughie of it all.

Or like a nun on a funfair death ride. That awful realisation, as the momentum of a Pestonian sentence slows to the pace of a haemorrhoidal snail, that it will soon plunge to its - and possibly my - death in a bucket of breathless blether!

Why, the man defies the very gravity of the situations he describes!

Peston really does seem to think that he is another Peter Snow. But Evan Davis already occupies that berth. The others have the advantage that they are genuinely and lovably a bit bonkers. But Peston hasn't even so much as a speech impediment. He is a man who is visibly and above all audibly trying to be eccentric, and in both senses trying too hard.

It's a front. 

If anyone is to spend night and day standing outside their parliament while the fount of western civilisation dries up for good and all, I think that the Greek people need - if perhaps they don't fully deserve - a little better right now, don't you?

And don't look at me like that.
JUST TALK PROPERLY, MAN.

The Examined Life, 5

Me: Right! Just 12 minutes and 33 seconds have elapsed and call me a doctor but we have the register completed and I've even squeezed in one of my turns as a result. Staying in that groove, last lesson we were learning about the revolution of 1917 and how it changed the whole of the 20th century. Who can tell me in which country it took place? Hands up and don't ...

“Pakistan!”

No. Pakistan didn't exist in 1917. And you know the rule: put your hand up and don’t  shout out.

“Berlin!”

NO. Berlin’s a city not a country. And PUT YOUR HAND UP AND DO NOT SHOUT OUT.

“Hitler!”

PUT. YOUR. HAND. UP. AND. DO. NOT. SHOUT. OUT! And no, Hitler isn't a country either, though he seemed to think he was.

"Germany! Islamabad!"

SEE ME AFTER. Yes, Flatulence, you have your hand up!

“Pakistan.”

No, Flatulence: we’ve done that one already.

“OOOH OOOH OOOH AARGH AARGH Sir Sir SIR!”

Ah, well met Cappadoccio! You're clearly in pain but at least you've managed to get your hand up! Now is it just an ambulance you're after OR ARE YOU ABOUT TO ANSWER MY FUCKING* QUESTION?

“Can I go to the toilet?”

NO. Try again, Cappadoccio.

“Islamabad!”

Go to the toilet, Cappadoccio. Now let’s all calm down and F.O.C.U.S.: WHERE WAS THE REVOLUTION OF 1917? LOOK. AT. THE. SCREEN. AND. TELL. ME. WHAT R-U-S-S-I-A SPELLS. It's the 6-letter word concluding the sentence which starts, "The Revolution of 1917 happened in ..." Ah, Vladimir! Here comes a trusty Cossack to rescue this stricken Tsar!

“Poland?”

“FRANCE!”
“ISLAMABAD!”
"KARACHI!"
"HENRY KISSINGER!"
"Sir, what are those things on your arms?"

PUT. YOUR. HAND. UP. AND. DO. NOT. etc. etc.


* I made that last word up.

Dead Man Walking

You know how it is: you're a bit hard up and so you sign up with one of those casting and extras agencies that promises regular well-paid work in exotic locations around the globe and then you sit around for months and don't hear a thing so in the end you decide it's a complete waste of time so you're going to de-register the next morning and you even have a couple of bevvies to celebrate and then you wake up with a bit of a bear on you only to find your first ever email from the bastards and it starts "Based on the information you gave us when creating your profile we've found a job that matches your skill set and for which you may wish to apply" and you think well OK now what the hell and you scroll down and it's for an effing CORPSE and you think well I certainly feel like one and that's at least a good start so you click on the link and they tell you you have to pay a £120 annual fee to even look at it and I don't know why I bother with anything any more I really don't.

The Dinosaurs are Dead

The new Jurassic Park movie will involve a 'genetically manipulated dinosaur that goes wrong'. As if 'real' dinosaurs weren't interesting enough!

This is another example of expectation inflation: the self-fulfilling assumption that people have such short and impatient attention spans that even the marvellous is not enough, and the recognition that if there's money to be made from the fact, then that's quite OK.

And I hadn't even seen an Ankylosaurus yet.

The Examined Life 4, or “It ain't what they call you, it's what you answer to.”

Here is my latest report from the front.

Parents are now not only giving their children ridiculous names (Chardonnay, DuBonnay, Chlamydia etc.) BUT THEY ARE SPELLING THEM WRONGLY TOO. Here is a typical scene: registration. Such is the nomenclaturial nightmare of this once simple activity that with a new class I always ask kids to correct me if I get their names wrong.

Me: “Antweaune.”

Antweaune: “Yes Sir.”

“Brooklyn.”

“Yes Sir.”

“Peckham.”

“Yes Sir.”

“Vladivar.”

“Absent Sir.”

“Thank you, Grosseteste. LaShagga.”

“Yeah.”

“Try again, LaShagga.”

“I said yeah.”

“And I said try again please, LaShagga, or by Christ I will employ this Argentinian bullwhip to deliver the most almighty thrashing you have ever had in your life.” *

[Rolling eyes extravagantly] “...... Yes SIR.”

“Liela.”

“It’s pronounced ‘Leila’, Sir.”

“Ah, I do apologise. I must have a word with the office at break: they’ve spelt it L-I-E-L-A.”

“That IS how it’s spelt, Sir.”

“ ... ah ... I, I ... I see. Er, right, er ... Hydroceffalus.”

“Yes Sir.”
"Vettriano."

I could go on.
But I weaun't.

  * I made the last bit up.

·  

The Examined Life 3: Bring back Fat Books

Yesterday I was astonished to discover that GCSE English Literature pupils at a prestigious local grammar school don't study Hardy, Dickens, Eliot, Austen, Lawrence, any of the Brontës, Thackeray or ...

... in short, they don't read any English novel fatter than my little finger. Their set book (sic: just the one) is 'I'm the King of the Castle' by Susan Hill, 224 pages, published in 1971. I haven't read it, but I have read Hill's 'The Woman in Black' which in my opinion is mediocre, in no way subtle, with a thin character (appropriately thinly played by Daniel Radcliffe in the recent film) and not even that scary.

I went to a London comprehensive in the 1970s and we read both 'Far from the Madding Crowd' and 'Great Expectations'. 

We may not all have enjoyed the experience, and not all of us who did may have liked it all of the time, but we at least put our little toes in the water and now many of us can swim.

Reading literature is a bit like swimming: it's better to be introduced to it than to discover it by accident.

Coming over here, taking our jobs!

The CBI, discussing employment policy and immigration within the EU on Radio 4's Today: "Britain needs our Polish and eastern European engineers."

Forget the immigration question for a moment and ask what we in Britain were doing during the decades when these nations were languishing behind the Iron Curtain and we weren't. How did we educate our kids? To do what?

How do we educate them now, and to do what?

Poll in the Dark

After the UK election several commentators have made a good point: the pre-election polls were wrong that Labour and the Tories were neck and neck, but parties' campaigns and voters' responses were based on and compounded the error.

This was a fine example of a means of measuring something becoming confused with and thus distorting the thing being measured.

Firstly, we should ban the publication of speculative pre-election polls for an agreed period before the vote.

Secondly, people in public-, private- and independent sector organisations, and especially those which annually rip up and replace last year's "robust" and "objective" measurement tools, should regularly ask themselves whether they are making the same kinds of self-perpetuating mistakes. If they think they are, they should say so.

Many people tend not to, you see.

SCAM ALERT!

Major companies are scamming their employees in order to cut their salaries, bonuses and other benefits as follows.

When you visit, say, a car dealership or a phone company, the person who has served you will often say something like, "If you receive an online survey asking you to rate my performance out of 10, please try to give me 9 or 10."

What sounds like impertinence is the expression of a legitimate fear.

Here's how it works:

• The company sends the survey to all the customers Billy has served over a given period, asking them to rank his service from 1 to 10.
• If you reply and rate Billy at below 9 there are consequences for him. The lower the number, the worse they will be.
• If you are fantastically enthusiastic about Billy's service and give him - as many inexplicably do these days - an 11 to emphasise the fact, his score will actually be 1. This is because the company's computer doesn't recognise numbers above 10 so it records only the first digit.
• If you don't reply - and the company knows full well that only a small proportion of those receiving surveys at distance ever do - this is taken as a negative response, also with negative consequences for Billy because he's measured against the number of surveys sent out not the number sent back.
• His employer also knows that if Billy does well but you're unhappy with the company's performance, you'll be tempted to give him a lower score however good his service. In other words Billy will pay for his employer's failings.

I therefore recommend that, unless an employee actually punches you in the face, you always reply to any online survey about their service, and you always give top marks for service received, even if you don't think it fully merits it.

You may also want to use the opportunity to complain to the company as part of your reply.

Does this ring a bell?

It's not only bureaucracies and politicians who warp language and meaning - and, in the end, people; who, living beyond the reach of human agency, are constitutionally impervious to acknowledging let alone acting upon the bleedin' obvious. Here's the text of a complaint I sent to a major phone corporation today.

Dear Orange UK,

This isn't a complaint about the employee below, who acted within obvious constraints, but against your Company.

I’m a long-standing Orange customer. I lost my mobile recently and ordered a new one, paying £9.98 for a next-day delivery. I gave my email and landline details but received no confirmation of the order by either.

The phone didn’t arrive and no note was left. I waited a few more days. After over a week and several phone calls to Orange at my expense, I spoke to Ms Xxxxx at the Xxxxxxx office today. She said the phone had been returned to you. I asked why Orange hadn’t let me know either that it couldn’t be delivered or that you now had it. She put me on hold, spoke to her manager and said he would refund the delivery fee while I could collect the phone from my nearest Orange shop.

We returned to the matter of the non-delivery. Ms Xxxxx said that Orange policy is that your delivery company always sends customers a text with the approximate delivery time. This is an automated system and there are no other ways of doing it.

I said that this seems odd: if I had a phone the firm could text, I wouldn't have ordered a replacement for it. Therefore it was futile for them to try to contact me. That's why I gave Orange alternative contact details in the first place.

Ms Xxxxx observed that it was unfortunate that I didn’t have a means of contact by text.

I didn’t think that Ms Xxxxx had quite understood my point, so I rephrased it: I didn’t have a means of contact by text because the only phone to which a text could have been sent was the one that Orange were trying to deliver to me.

I then asked whether the policy of texting delivery times to people who can’t receive them would be looked into and, if she couldn't do this herself, whether there was there anyone else I could talk to. Ms Xxxxx consulted her manager and then repeated the fact that it was a pity I didn't have a phone on which I could be texted.

She seemed unable or unwilling to acknowledge the problem or pass the matter upwards, so I asked to speak with her manager. She said he was unavailable. I noted that he'd been available twice in the last few minutes, but could I have his name so I could ring him later? Ms Xxxxx seemed unwilling to give a name, so I asked whether it was company policy not to allow her to. She appeared not to want to answer yes or no: again I had a strong impression that she was constrained, perhaps by the fact that, as phone conversations are monitored, she'd be in trouble if she departed from the company line (whatever that is: I remain no wiser).

In the end I lost patience, hence this complaint, which I stress is against you, Orange, and not her.

As long as (1) the £9.98 is credited and (2) I’m also credited 10 days’ payment against my mobile account because of the delay, I won’t seek further compensation for my long phone calls, wasted time or lost business unless you are kind enough to offer it.

But I would like you to give serious thought to the texting issue as this is central to the problem and, as a policy, may well affect others too. Please reply swiftly, candidly, and don't fob me off. If I've misunderstood anything, I’ll appreciate the correction.

Yours etc. ...

The Examined Life (2)

Me: “Right Sir, you’ve been asked to write some lyrics for an inspirational song, we’re half an hour in but there’s not much on your ideas sheet. In fact, unless your pen runs on lemon juice I’d say there’s nothing at all! Can I help?”

Him: “I dunno what to put.”

"Is there anything that inspires or excites or really interests you?"

"No."

“Well don’t worry. Think of ... think of somewhere you’ve been. Or somewhere you’d like to go, even if you've only seen a picture of it. Something you saw or did once that’s special to you."

.....

“Maybe something you want to achieve one day? Or something you think is only a dream but might just come true if you give it a push...”

“Uh?”

“Tell you what, think about this: behind you and me — sitting here, right now — are thousands and thousands of years of human history. You know, cavemen and Romans and Saxons and William the Conqueror and Henry’s six wives and two World Wars and the rest of it. And ahead of us are ... well we just don’t know because it hasn’t happened. But I’ll tell you this: all those great people and events are long gone. But here WE are: right on top of the wave of all that history, rolling in with the future ahead, and not Alfred the Great or Napoleon Bonaparte or Winston Churchill with a word to say about what happens next. But we’re lucky: we’re riding that wave, so maybe we can have a say ...”

....

“So think of something that means a lot to you. Anything!”

"Uh?"

"Anything you like! There are no right or wrong answers to this one!"

“Is it alright if I write a song about a computer game?”

“Er ........ yes ........ Yes, OK.”

The Examined Life (1)

Me: “OK, so you’ve learnt a lot of things about Indian geography today and over the past few lessons, and you’ve all done really well. Now I’d like you to show me what you know. I want you to imagine that you’re at the end of a long holiday in India. Draw a giant postcard in your exercise books and write on it what you know about the country. So, for example, where you’ve been, what sights you’ve seen, the wildlife, the weather, the people and how they live, what they eat, what they wear, how they get around and so on. Write as much as you can and if you need help just put your hand up. Any questions?”

Pupil 1: “Who do we address it to, Sir?”

“Anyone you like: your family, your friends, even yourself if you want.”

Pupil 2: “Why would I address it to myself?”

“Fair point! Someone else, then.”

Pupil 1: “So my parents?”

“Yes, why not.”

Pupil 3: “Can I address it to my Granny?”

“Yes. Anyone you like!”

Pupil 3: “I don’t know her address.”
“Your parents, then. Right, everyone, let's get going!”

Pupil 1: “Does it have to be our parents?”

“NO. Now please get on with it.”

Pupil 4: “Do we have to put a stamp on it?”

“You can DRAW a stamp if you want, but can I just emphasise to everyone that the point of this task is to show what you’ve learnt about India: the postcard is just an idea to make it more interesting.”

Pupil 5: “So can we just write it without drawing the postcard, Sir?”

“Yes.”

Pupil 4: “Do we draw an English stamp or an Indian stamp?”

“Well, since you are supposed to be in India, an Indian one, I should imagine.”

Pupil: 4: “But I don’t know what an Indian stamp looks like.”

“Then just draw a little square with a ... with an elephant on it or something. RIGHT, CAN I HAVE THE WHOLE CLASS’S ATTENTION FOR JUST A MOMENT? DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE DESIGN OF THE POSTCARD OR THE STAMP OR THE ADDRESS YOU ARE GOING TO BE SENDING IT TO. THE REASON WE ARE DRAWING A POSTCARD IS SO THAT YOU CAN SHOW WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT INDIA FROM THE LESSONS YOU HAVE HAD. IT IS NOT, REPEAT NOT, TO WORRY ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE. IS THAT CLEAR?”

The Class: “Yes Sir.”

Pupil 6: “Like this, Sir?”

“Yes, that’s a beautiful postcard, really nice, but you don’t need to colour it in. YOU JUST NEED TO WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT INDIA. NO, THAT’S THE ADDRESS SIDE: WRITE ON THE LEFT!”

Pupil 7: “Who do I send it to?”

“Old Mother Hubbard who lives in the Cupboard.”

Pupil 2: “I thought you said it was supposed to be addressed to our parents.”

“I DON’T CARE WHO IT’S ADDRESSED TO! OLD MOTHER HUBBARD, THE LITTLE OLD LADY WHO LIVES IN A SHOE, HENRY KISSINGER OR VINEGAR JOE STASSINOPOULOS: I JUST DON’T CARE. WHAT I DO CARE ABOUT IS THAT YOU GIVE SOME INDICATION THAT YOU HAVE A BASIC GRASP OF THE PHYSICAL AND HUMAN GEOGRAPHY OF THE INDIAN SUBCONTINENT AND I WILL KEEP THE WHOLE CLASS BEHIND UNTIL KINGDOM COME IF YOU ALL DO NOT DO SO. IS THAT CLEAR?"

Pupil 8: “Sir, he took my ruler.”

Life is Elsewhere (2)

Further to my post of 3rd April, what joke is this?

It's another "UK General Election party leaders' debate", in which, this time, 

• the two governing parties don't take part;
• those who do have only 268 (41%) of the 649 contestable Westminster seats;
• thanks to the British electoral system, only one can form a government;
• only two are UK-wide parties (one of which has only one MP and will be lucky to get even one more);
• four of the five participants have a combined total of 12 MPs (one of them thanks to defections from other parties);
• the nationalist parties of Scotland (the SNP), Wales (Plaid Cymru) and England (the absurd, absurdly-named UK Independence Party) take part while the Northern Irish parties don't although one of them has more MPs than four of the five parties who are present.

It's a folly, a pretence. But like many great pretences it is honoured by precedent, saturated with time, money and expertise, engraved in minds through its promotion and packaging, and ringed-fenced by individual and corporate reputations.

Yet, far from being a conspiracy, none of those involved, from the parties themselves right down to the BBC audience, seems to possess the mental vocabulary let alone the means to step outside and see it for what it is.

Will voters?

No Representation without Taxation!

Two things strike me about the Conservatives' (unfunded) pledge to "take those on the minimum wage out of tax altogether", a phrase parroted without evidence of scrutiny by the BBC and its appalling Economics Editor Robert Peston, a man who just doesn't seem to understand that there only ever was and only ever will be one Peter Snow. I fear that the realisation - and it will come one day - may kill him.

1. It's a deceit and a sham. These people are not being taken out of tax: they're being taken out of Income Tax, which, however inadequately levied and wastefully spent, is redistributive in that you pay more if you have a higher income and less if you don't. They'll continue to pay National Insurance as well as taxes like VAT which are less fair because everyone pays at the same rate regardless of income or wealth.

2. It makes tax sound inherently undesirable when it isn't. American revolutionaries rightly demanded that there should be "no taxation without representation" (a formula I hope survives although many modern Americans seem only to know the first two words of it). Tax - fairly levied, wisely spent - is actually a fine thing. It makes possible many other fine things that, were they lost, even the British might take to the streets to restore. Tax is a symbol, but far more than a symbol, of inclusion and social mutuality; it's a contribution to the well from which any community draws.

In fact, the Conservatives' professed desire to "take people out of tax" encourages the something-for-nothing mentality that they tell us they abhor. Lying to us about it is even worse. 

Here's an idea: don't vote for them!

Richie Benaud: G'night.

Farewell Richie Benaud, the greatest voice of the greatest game: Test Cricket.

Throughout my childhood, whether playing with mates against the garages with the TV booming inside or deep in the living room with curtains drawn all summer's day long, Richie Benaud was alpha and omega, umpire and arbiter, philosopher, preacher, policeman and, for all we knew, web-footed cocklewoman too.

From May to September each year we paid tribute by adopting Benaud's accent and nightly willed that tomorrow it would fall to him to announce when one team or the other - we didn't care which - would reach the magical, the, the ... Benaudian scoreline of 22 for 2: a phrase once heard - and I only did so once - never to be forgotten.

Nor, I hope and am sure, will he ever be.

Most memorable for me was Benaud's verdict on one of the most disgraceful moments in sport when, with New Zealand needing a 6 to tie, the Australian Trevor Chappell was instructed - within the rules but with utter disregard for the dignity of cricket - to bowl the last delivery of the match underarm and along the floor.

Here's the clip. In true Benaud style - politely authoritative but with forthright finality - it's even more withering than the accompanying subtitles for his Australian viewers.

And that "G'night" - what a sign-off!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvGHC7REkdM

Driven Mad

While Jeremy Clarkson's recent ill health means he continues to recuperate at his luxury Black Sea dacha in the Crimea, where the Central Committee of the BBC has kindly provided him with qualified use of a top-of-the-range Moskvich 1500SL plus chauffeuse (see photo), Derek Seeds​ has started a valuable debate - well actually a series of foul-mouthed rants - on Facebook about the state of modern driving in Britain to which I have felt both compelled, and indeed privileged, to contribute.

Subjects have already included lane discipline on motorways, drivers who don't put their lights on in dense fog and my own tentative contribution about the many mentally asymmetric drivers who indicate wrongly, when at all, on roundabouts. Readers able to override parental controls will already be familiar with both my and Derek's less than poetic paeans to tailgaters. Please, please do also send in more examples of bad driving that you have witnessed or experienced, whether or not you survived them.

However, as a number of Canadians also report similar deviations over there, and they are a very long way away (a simple fact wherever on Earth you live, so this clearly involves us all), it's clearly time to widen the debate; that is, to discover whether this is an Anglo-Saxon problem or just, as usual, Europe's fault. So I'm also calling all foreigners - by which I mean those few who UKIP concede don't already live in Britain - to contribute your thoughts about the state of driving where you are. Do you too have problems? If so, are they like ours or different? Can you also blame them, without censure, on eastern European benefits cheats and health tourists? 

Readers are of course advised to brief themselves on the burning issues already raised by referring to Derek's and my Facebook pages. But here, to give you a flavour of the quality of the debate so far, is another habit that's become very popular within the dickhead community and is - quite literally - driving me mad. Mad, I say.

It's the one where there's a part-filter lane at traffic lights. On green you can go straight ahead, turn right if traffic allows, or wait for the filter arrow light if it doesn't. There's a junction near me where I need to go straight ahead to get home, the left lane is always chokker and there's always heavy oncoming traffic. Good sense says that if the car ahead in the filter lane doesn't signal right I should follow it, but if it signals then I should keep left to avoid possible delay.

Now I've been counting, and nine out of ten cars these days go into the right lane, stop at the lights without signalling, wait for the forward green light and ONLY THEN signal, meaning that the poor deluded fools who trusted that their fellow motorists know what they are doing either have to wait or incur the road rage of drivers in the left lane who think they're just trying to push in.

DEATH - however lingering, however many innocent family members and relatives are herded into the net of retribution, tied to a post against a wall and shot: first the knees, then, after a couple of days to think about it, the rest of them - IS TOO GOOD FOR THESE PEOPLE.

You know, that kind of thing.

Life is Elsewhere (1)

Last night's 7-way party leaders' election debate was dispiriting. Little was said beyond the predictable gobbets. Now it's the task of those involved - namely the political parties, pollsters, pundits and the media - to fabricate a significance and momentum it didn't deserve.

Firstly, it was inevitably superficial and personality-focused. These are the last things we need. The number of participants meant that only four subjects were discussed; and anyway ours is not a presidential system. The election should be about policies, not what one man or woman will do for us. If we understood this better we'd be less cynical and leaders would make fewer bullshit promises.

Secondly it was bogus, not least the ruse of getting members of the public to ask the questions and the fake, mawkish presumption of the leaders in addressing questioners by their first names.

Thirdly it was fudged. In order not to offend anyone there was a false appearance of equality between the parties. This was clear from the fact that Leanne Wood's plug was solely towards the Welsh electorate. And so it should have been, because Plaid Cymru have no candidates let alone influence elsewhere, but it made what was supposed to be a debate about a UK election look daft. And why, assuming the stage was big enough for four more, weren't the Ulster parties there? Or for that matter the BNP, which polled twice as many votes as the Greens and more than half the votes of UKIP in 2010?

Perhaps worst of all, it was illusory. Thanks to our first-past-the-post voting system, only the Conservatives or Labour can return enough MPs to provide a UK prime minister. So the logic of having this kind of beauty contest is that only Cameron and Miliband should debate. Of the UK-wide parties, the Liberals or even, God forbid, UKIP, might well win 20+ per cent of the vote, but they will get disproportionately few seats. The best they can do is to hold the balance of power, but that's not what the debate was about. For the Greens it will be even worse.

So while there's a case based on popular support for getting everyone on stage, it's irrelevant and even deceitful if the system can't translate that support into seats and power. People say that the old two (or three) party system is dead. No it isn't: and it won't be so long as huge numbers of us continue to waste our votes on no-hopers in seats they can never win.

The trouble is, in the 2011 referendum 68% of us voted against even a mild reform of the system. The subject is therefore ruled out of public discussion. Yet the debate was structured not only as if it hasn't been, but as if a system like the one we rejected were in place. A very British fudge!

And now spittle-flecked pollsters and sleep-deprived pundits are crawling over the debate with their little league tables showing who was the 'victor', which will, in consequence, be required to mean something - whether it does or not. (Apparently it was Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP; which indicates what, exactly?) Yet from pretence will grow the reality of significance. Already, between the breathless contributions of party motormouths, the BBC is trying to have it both ways, hurling barrages of high-tech statistics at us while reassuring us that they don't tell us very much. Well exactly.

Until then, I do suspect that life is elsewhere.