The Raft Journal

Chymorvah Appeal ruling

2012-02-10T18:30:00.000Z


Allsorts disappointed with ruling

Peter and Hazel Bull of the Chymorvah Private Hotel in Marazion have lost their appeal to treat civil partnerships differently to marriage as a matter of religious belief.

Full ruling - Bull & Bull v Hall & Preddy

This means that while the Bulls cannot refuse to have civil partners sharing a double bed, exclusively gay hotel owners will rely on there being no specific cases which challenge their own blatantly discriminatory practices.

A marketing term applies here; "gay-friendly" hotels are hotels which reassure guests who happen to be gay that they are welcome. "Exclusively gay" hotels are a significant niche market which specializes in welcoming guests who are gay. They are usually run by hoteliers who are also gay. They exclude other other guests on the basis of sexual orientation and/or gender. It is not clear that this has been legal for a while now, but there has been no significant challenge to the practice, only to some of the advertising.

The popular Pride Lodge in Blackpool advertises

Pride Lodge offers '4 star' accommodation specifically for the LGBT guest and their friends. We do not masquerade as a Blackpool Gay Hotel, we are exclusive and choose not to accept bookings for families or Stag and Hen parties,

So Pride Lodge does not accept a) heterosexuals (unless perhaps you are a friend of an LGBT person) and b) married heterosexuals. It believes it can treat people in civil partnerships differently to those in marriages - precisely the opposite of what was intended in law, now clarified in the Chymorvah case.

Hamilton Hall in Bournemouth is run by John Bellamy, offering specialist retreats exclusively for men; there is an emphasis on gay men but the hotel says that it will accept bookings from heterosexual men. It wasn't him who worried about the Chymorvah's inconsistencies:

"Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end."

Bellamy apparently understood the danger and intolerance of the Chymorvah case but perhaps was poorly quoted in February last year:

"We've been campaigning for this law for years so that everyone is equal, but it could spell the end of gay-only resorts."

Well then, maybe either stop campaigning and accept that if you want to discriminate, the others will have to be allowed to as well.

Bellamy immediately went to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) for legal advice. They say they won't prosecute him - because it is alright to discriminate if you are gay but not if you hold religious beliefs - ands since they can veto these cases they can probably prevent anyone else suing him.

Hamilton Hall is also the first men only hotel in the UK to be investigated by the Equality and Human Rights Commission and be allowed to continue being a MEN ONLY HOTEL.

In a similar vein, Guyz Hotel has changed its wording which used to specify that the hotel was exclusively male and exclusively gay, so that now is by implication. Except on the nudist weekends where you can be gay or bisexual but must be male. And naked, thus bringing it with the possible exceptions.

Key West in Torquay is an entire resort which is exclusively male, gay and bi-sexual i.e. it discriminates against exclusively heterosexual men, and women. It does this by bringing itself within the definition of a private club.

At Key West Resort our ethos is to provide a safe and enjoyable environment for Gay and bisexual men. In order for us to achieve this Key West will operate as a Private Members Club. To use the facilities or to stay at the resort it is a requirement that you fit the criteria of the membership, Gay or Bisexual Male, you will be required to sign an acknowledgement (or tick the accept box when booking online) that you have read and agree to the membership rules.

A gay club can refuse to allow heterosexual married Christians in at all by calling themselves a club, but a Christian heterosexual hotelier cannot refuse to allow a pair in a civil partnership to share a double bed. Can you agree to be discriminated against? That surely does not give protection against the legislation. Maybe Chymorvah should just make it clear that it is private members club.

In the year since the original Hall & Preddy v Bull & Bull case there has been a subtle change on the websites and marketing. It is still clear which are the exclusively gay hotels but some of them have become reluctant to be identified. The case has done nothing to help them openly promote their businesses, which have had to go back to the days of people knowing which were the gay places and which not. Cliff House in Devon has been established as a gay-owned, gay-clientel hotel for forty years now, but does that mean it will refuse bookings from hetersexual couples? It is difficult to tell from its gallery which includes things such as "Gareth's Mum's Wedding".

What should have worried the EHRC was that both the comments in Pink News and a balanced piece by Nelson Jones in the New Statesman lacked sympathy with the prosecution. It is obvious to anyone who isn't a lawyer that what matters is everyone making a living and everyone getting the hotel room they want. That is best done by tolerating the inconsistency on both sides. The price for gay hotels is the very modest one of a couple of insignificant private hotels which are barely any different from the Pink House in Brighton. They just all operate slightly different exclusion criteria. Goose. Sauce. Gander.

There are female hotels too. Hitherto a smaller sector, they may appeal to gay women but the overall sense is of refined gentility which relies on nicely brought up ladies not wishing to bump in to wuff gentlemen in the corridors. The demand for this is growing. You would not worry about your daughter or your granny using these exquisite rooms; they might also appeal to ladies of very orthodox religious views. Overall there is more tolerance of this version of discrimination but the growth in the service has become controversial as business hotels begin to reserve corridors by gender - and may refuse a booking from a man if there are only 'female' rooms left.

The irony is that while the Chymorvah hotel in Marazion found itself in the middle of a fight because it refused entry to two men who happened to be civil partners, the original claimants Hall and Preddy didn't rock up to the beatiful women-only Chymorgen on the North Cornwall coast only a few miles away and demand to be let in.

Apparently they don't mind being discriminated against on the basis that they are men, but they do mind that a pair of Christians won't recognize their civil partnership as equivalent to marriage.

It is, and was, always about trying to force the public, and especially the orthodox Christians, to accept civil partnership as marriage, which is why Hall and Preddy went to Chymorvah and not Chymorgen.

Inside PR and Corporate Communications - Part 3

2012-02-05T10:00:00.000Z

Corporate Complications
A guest post by Submariner

Being respected only to the extentthat you are feared is pure Tucker, but it’s not good for the long term for aretailer. People always have a choice. If the rejection of your plans for a newstore in Little Binding is felt by half the town to be a victory for localdemocracy against the forces of oppression, you’re well on the downslope andit’s time to short the shares. The Tucker doctrine puts you on the oppositeside from your customers. In the case of the Tesco crew, they are even on thewrong side of the Blair backlash.

In business and politics alike,times are hard. In the post-bubble economy everything feels like a crisis, andin a crisis the feeling is that anything goes. It’s only human nature to wantthe comfort of a mythical deadly PR assassin on your side.

But out among the reality-basedcommunity, it is not going to help. This is no time for smoke and mirrors, notime for bluster.

The best corporate communication iswhen the audience sees the business, not the spin apparatus. If you want longterm support, take your pain when it’s due. Be frank with your employees, customers, and lenders. Guide expectations to where you think they should be,realistically. Don’t try to put an unrealistic gloss on your losses or revenuereductions.

Educate people about what you canand can’t control in the market. Your business may well be affected by snow,the electoral cycle or the Japanese tsunami, but don’t look as if you’re askingto be excused. Say what the effect has been, when it will drop out of thenumbers, and what (if anything) you’ll do differently in the future.

If customers, employees, investors or otherstakeholders feel they are being spun a line, they will not give credit evenfor actual performance and good works. What they will respond to is meaningfulmanagement action, backed up by solid facts, good listening and a sense thatthere are overlapping interests between them and the organisation doing the communicating.No-one ever won trust through intimidation, and fear paralyses better than itmotivates.

What politics and the corporateworld need more of is the anti-Malcolm. The best communicators are those whoconcentrate on gathering proper evidence, telling the truth, helping peopleinside and outside to accept and understand reality, and using their ownunderstanding of the world to help the business make the truth better overtime.

Yes, yes. I know. No-one wants tohear that now. It’s all so Pollyanna, enough to make you puke. Hand me theMalcolm mask, and the Profanisaurus. I’m off out to get a job.

Part 1 - A Tucker of your own
Part 2 - Life Imitates Art

Inside PR and Corporate Communications - Part 2

2012-02-04T07:30:00.000Z

Life Imitates Art
A guest post by Submariner

Consider. In The Thick Of It, theineffectual DoSAC head of media relations, Terri Coverley, had been recruitedfrom a popular retailer in an attempt to make government more business-like. She was out of place, atransplant, and struggled with the transition.

But more recently the flow in the real world hasbeen the other way. Political spinners have been whirring out of the Westminster mother shipand planting their seeds in the nation’s commercial boardrooms. They may comefrom Tucker’s other-worldly culture but their influence in more earthlybusinesses is now firmly cemented.

Just before Christmas, ASDA, abusiness which used to have its feet on the ground, hired Sian Jarvis, untilrecently top spin doctor at the Department of Health, to open doors ingovernment and keep the media in their place.

Later this month Abbie Sampson, exDEFRA, DfT, Gordon Brown adviser and currently Number 10's chief press officer,will become head of news at Which?

Also in February Tesco, which haslong liked to be scarier and shoutier than anyone else, will make room in itsnest for Ruth McAllister, a current Number 10 press officer.

Tesco was an early pioneer of theTucker approach. The company’s Alien Queen of Spin is Lucy Neville-Rolfe. Beforepitching up at Tesco she did the lot in the Westminster village: DEFRA, DTI, CabinetOffice, Number 10. And she has established a fully-functioning hive. McAllisterwill be jostling for elbow room with previous Number 10 veterans: news manager Tom Hoskin, Tony Blair's former private secretary David North, and Blair’s former head ofevents Victoria Gould.

Tesco plays the PR and politics gamesthe Tucker way. For them, it’s not enough to win. The other side has to lose,and lose badly. Tesco’s campaign machinery for imposing vast new ~~colonies~~ stores upon the peasantry has been brutally effective over the last 15 years,but some time over the last decade they smashed the office mugs and retired themouse-mats with “Every Little Helps” and went instead with "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair".

Yesterday - Part 1 A Tucker of your own

Tomorrow - Part 3 Corporate Complications

Inside PR and Corporate Communications - Part 1

2012-02-03T09:00:00.000Z

A Tucker of your own
A guest post by Submariner

Malcolm Tucker, the hard man ofgovernment PR in TV comedy triumph The Thick Of It, is not based on BadAl Campbell after all. At least not according to Peter Capaldi, whoplays him.

For a fictional character, Tuckerhas had a remarkable cross-over into real life, or what passes for it in theworlds of politics, the media, and senior business management.

When Capaldi visited Number 10 acouple of years ago he was amazed at how many government PR people wanted to bephotographed with him, despite the bullying, the bad language and the generalbrutality. I wasn’t amazed. Tucker is superbly written, and superbly performed.You can’t take your eyes off him: he dominates the screen. And for all hisfaults, he is funny, a relentless stream of cruel wit cutting down all barriersin his path. Who would not love to be able to do that sometimes?

What began as a gargoyle has becomea recruiting poster. Tuckermania is now more than a fad for its fans. Ininterviews Bad Al himself has been careful to align himself with Tucker’senergy, determination and ability to turn the air blue. He knows the glow ofreflected glory. But, alas, Machiavelli, alack Armando, satire can bedangerous.

For a while now, the corporateworld has been passing through the looking glass. It has been seduced by afiction. It has fallen for the whiff of testosterone, the heroic vulgarity, theaura of dangerousness, and the mythology that you can always control the mediathrough intimidation. If you’re an important CEO, you want a Tucker of yourown.

Part 2 - Life Imitates Art

Take three victims

2012-01-27T13:00:00.000Z

Over at Ambush Predator, a story is being discussed. A young father (not married) was ruled to be unable to care personally for a child and so the child was released for adoption against his wishes. He reacted violently to this and gruesomely attacked the social worker.

The case may be more complex than if first appears; consider these possible settings.

The same objective fact is settled in all cases: due to injuries, the father is personally unable to care for the child without the help of a full time nanny or nannies, which is what the Queen used when she was unable to look after her own children due to being away on state business. We aren't prepared to fund that for this man so it is argued that it is in the child's best interests to be adopted away in to a couple who can care for her personally.

Story (i) Mr Thug

Drunken lout of 20 starts scrap on journey back from nightclub, having regularly indulged in fighting. This time he receives a thumping which results in a stroke.

The stroke permanently damages his ability to communicate but not his intellectual understanding of speech or his ability to move about. This is quite common with stroke patients.

The social worker was communicating with the father and that the father understood what was being said. The man was held fully liable for the attack in court.

However, there is an inconsistency: the child was being removed because it was argued the disability made the young man an unsuitable carer, but if he was a lout he was in fact always unsuitable, regardless of whether he came off worst in a fight.

Yet we generally do not remove children from the care of louts, including those with a history of crime and making threats.   Maybe we should, but we don't. Or at least, not routinely. Should the penalty for starting a fight be the removal of a child?
....

Story (ii) Mr Innocent Victim

Young man of 20 is walking home one evening when he is set on by three youths. The youths shout "Kill Whitey" but despite their colour and the shouting testified to by horrified witnesses, the crime is not classed as racially aggravated. No other explanation is ever discovered for the random attack.

As before, the youth sustains an injury which results in a stroke and the permanent damage of his ability to communicate but not his ability to understand. The best interests of the child are thought to lie with being brought up in a much richer household by parents without disabilities.   The social services obtain a court order which sets aside the father's wishes and will exclude him from the child's life for at least the next 14 years, in the hopes that he will drop dead and stop being a bloody nuisance in the interim. Dear Dad, I never knew you. However, it is still objectively true that he cannot provide for the needs of the child without a full-time nanny - just like the Queen couldn't.

Regardless of his personal qualities and innocence, the child is removed from his life. He is then blamed for reacting violently to this and it is concluded that because of his violent reaction to a double injustice, it was right to remove the child.

Should the penalty for losing a fight you never started, be the removal of a child?
.....

Story (iii) Mr Soldier

A young man of 20 is sent to Helmand. He is a professional fighter and accepts that this involves killing people, and it may also mean he is killed. Blown up by an IED he keeps all his limbs but in falling takes a blow which causes a stroke. Naturally, he is discharged.

Following the stroke his girlfriend, whom he had intended to marry, cannot cope with his changed prospects and inability to communicate as she would like, and, having her own problems, puts the child up for adoption.

He is refused permission to be allowed to keep his own child on the grounds that he cannot meet the needs of the child without a full-time nanny, and this is neither affordable nor acceptable, even though the Sovereign whom he served did exactly that. Indeed, Cherie Booth QC employed a nanny to enable her to keep up her legal career when she was married to the PM. Miriam Clegg and Samantha Cameron have both relied on nannies, accepting they could not give full-time care to their own children. Nobody suggests that either David Cameron or Nick Clegg should give up public office or have their children taken away.

The young man reacts violently, as it is sometimes known for soldiers to do, when it strikes him there is one law for the rich and another for the Poor Bloody Infantry. Is it fair that rich people are able to nominate proxy childcare, but poor people get social workers, solicitors and judges who re-allocate their child? You can buy a lot of nanny-time for the cost of that professional crew. Both the judge and the solicitor will probably have nannies of their own.

Had he not been blown up, he would have continued to tour and be away from the child for considerable periods of time, but he would have been allowed to keep in contact with the child despite the needs of his job (this has been verified only last week in a dispute between a serving officer and his ex-wife).   In general, we do not accept that merely having a job which involves the parent being absent and therefore unable to meet the day to day needs of the child, is automatically grounds for adopting a child away. But he knew the risks and voluntarily went in to this business, as Mr Thug in story (i) did.

Should the penalty for being unlucky in a lawful fight be the removal of a child?
...

It is sometimes argued that The Best Interests of the Child (BIC) must prevail. Yet analytically it does not, since that would mean systematically reviewing the circumstances of each child in Britain and re-allocating them to richer, better educated carers until the point is reached where no child could get a better deal by moving households.   That is, optimising welfare.

There are calls to do that, but that is precisely why the European Convention on Human Rights defines the family as sacred. A particular family may be sub-optimal, but that alone is not enough reason to dissolve it. Besides, it is very difficult to define sub-optimal. I know what I think it is, but so does everyone else, and I bet we don't agree. It is impossible to avoid Godwin's law; the stricture was set up because the Nazi Family Policy thought it could stipulate the standards of family care.

If Mr Thug is a thug, that may be a reason he should be dispossessed of his children, but Wayne Bishop wasn't. The prisons are full of thugs being visited by their families. The ECHR upholds the general right to respect for family life.

What has happened in the case of Mr Bould is that the welfare of the child has been optimised allegedly because he got his head kicked in. The plea in mitigation by defender Mr Holt is reported as:

"Any issue of neglect was not intentional. It was the by-product of their disabilities".

Then again, Bould set fire to his ex-girlfriend's car, which doesn't sound like a by-product of disability but viciousness, nor does pouring boiling water over a social worker. As the baby appears to have been present, that also introduces a possible risk of scalding the child. He sounds less and less like a person capable of behaving like a responsible adult.

Against that, we are told that he social worker decided to talk to the sister, not Bould, about the last contact meeting. Given that we are told Bould finds it difficult to talk, and the social worker was already late and thereby deprived Bould of precious minutes of contact, was starting to gossip about him the moment he left the room to go to the loo respectful towards a disabled client, or was it designed to humiliate and antagonise him?

From the test cases we can see that how you call it depends not only on the interests of the child but also the circumstances in which the disability of the parent occurred. In two of these three cases it doesn't seem fair to punish a victim by having their children alienated from them. In the third case, it does seem fair, but not because of the father having been injured. Yet in practical terms, the question is always the same: can they look after a child?

Practicallity matters, but it cannot be the sum total of what matters or else the concept of respect for family life is a meaningless mantra.

Raft Pie

2012-01-15T13:01:00.000Z

Where the salt water meets the fresh water there is a line in the river. Just above that line is The Republic of Raft, not so much anchored as lazing alongside a ramshackle landing stage, dreaming of gamblers on paddle steamers and fine ladies languidly dipping white hands and long plaits in the water.

It was the thin days of January but this year the snow had only glanced the surrounding countryside. The Raft itself rarely froze in; its proximity to the salt water kept its path clear for a quick getaway. Dadder Raft insisted that if needs be, the Old Girl - by which he might have meant the either the Raft or Mammer - could sail coastal waters but her days hauling to Holland were probably over.

Mammer assured us little Rafts that she and Dadder had sailed the seven seas, but we rather doubted this as Dadder had none of the compulsory elements of a sea captain. No wooden leg, no parrot, not even a spy-glass or a turtle-neck jersey. Besides, Dadder could swim and everyone knows sailors are allergic to water, which is why they never drink it. Did you ever see a sailor drink anything but rum? Of course not.

School had begun again and we trudged down to the Board School which had its compensations at this time of year. In the corner the Board had provided a hearth big enough for a dragon to live in, surrounded by great iron railings. Our teacher, Miss Mavis, did not care for being cold so her high-seat desk had shuffled closer to the fire and she chose to conduct as many lessons as possible with us sitting in a circle on the floor next to it. The wooden floor was hard on the bum but then again, it was warm to the touch and far, far away from the incomprehensible maths cupboard which shivered far away at the back of the classroom where a disgruntled stuffed badger lived on the top shelf because nobody could think of what else to do with it. A stuffed adder, quipped Miss Mavis, might have made more sense.

The school caretaker, lumbering along in his regulation blue dungarees and carrying the symbols of his office, a broom and a bucket, came in to the classroom at break time to top up the grate. Sometimes there would be faint footprints of coal dust as if a Santa had got lost and fallen down a chimney out of time. Burton Coggles, whose dad had been down a coal mine, said that the caretaker was really Santa and this was his cover job, you could tell because if you looked in the coal dust there were tiny sparkles.

Back at the Raft, Mammer and Baba cuddled up to conserve a little warmth. We did not appreciate it, but food grew scarce in January and Mammer began to choose us over herself. Her paying work of sewing tended to drop off just after Christmas, so she caught up with repairs, but always there was the difficulty of where dinner was coming from. Or at least, coming from legally. Dadder was a marsh man, a wet bob, so in absolute terms he could never starve, not even if he ended up eating the roots of reeds - you can, they are edible - but that diet grinds the teeth to nothing. Protein is what you need, and that means a certain flexibility of attitude.

Up river was an Old Empty Water Mill which stood adjacent to Squire Bragg's farm. The mill housing, the habitable shack at the bottom and the mill pond had been in the care of the Last Daughter of the Last Miller but she had died and the Remaining Relatives had set to squabbling about the sale of it. For the moment, reasoned Dadder, it was the property of the Estate of the Last Daughter, not yet passed legally in to anyone else's hands.

He slipped down to the mill pond because it was here that a colony of carp with mouths the size of half-crowns grazed the still surface of the pond. Where there was weak sunlight slanting through the bare branches the carp would sunbathe. Here, he had laid out a net in the shallows, pegging it down but leaving the mouth slack so that it could be lifted, just a few inches, and instantly create a prison which only the most determined jumper would get over.   Dadder didn't like nets, them being too much in the nature of 'evidence' if the water bailiffs called, but this wasn't the river so they didn't have any authority, not even allowing for the fact that the pond was fed by, and flowed into, the river.

While the Last Daughter had been alive there was no trouble. She agreed that so long as they shared the catch, and it was purely for personal use, they would harvest what they needed and no more than that. There didn't seem to be any shortage of fish the size of cats, they took a pair, another grew in its place. That, after all, is the point of a carp pond. But she was gone and there are flocks of black-coated solicitors who might want to argue the finer points of testamentary law.

Besides, personal use wasn't directly what Dadder had planned. This was a variation to the bargain. His idea was to take a catch to the fishmonger who was would pay cash as the sea boats were not going out so often this month, leaving his slabs looking bare. Carp is all very well but cash is king.

The sun was well up when he slid two of the fish out of the net and into a canvas bag slung under his arm, offering a prayer for the soul of the Last Daughter, and slipped away brushing his footsteps out behind him so that you would never know that so much as a cat had been down to the water. Reluctantly he left the net laid out so as not to disturb the bed of the pond anymore than it had been, but if someone cared to look they would find it.

The reeds on the lonely riverbank whispered "fisssshhhess" as Dadder slipped by, lamenting two brothers who would now sleep with the humans.

Dadder marched past the Harbour Lights, in to the open shop with its marble slab and winked at Mr Baker the fishmonger. It was a trick of fate that the baker was called Mr Butcher, while the butcher was called Mr Grocer, but then fate has a whimsical sense of humour. Mr Baker took a peek in to the bag and held up two fingers. Dadder responded with four, and they closed at three.   The bag was emptied under the counter. Due to the sensitive nature of the fish they would not appear whole for fear of provoking queries, questions, unwelcome comments, but they would be displayed in neat fillets under no name. If asked, Mr Baker would say "wytch bream". "Wytch" being another word for "best not ask".

Stopping for a swift ale at the Harbour Lights, Dadder enquired if anyone had seen Squire Bragg and was reassuringly told that he had last been seen taking a train to the Spa, where he intended to sweat out the port and Stilton which had given him gout over Christmas. While the Squire was away his man was taking it very easy so he shouldn't be about much but was probably going to be on the dominoes team that evening. Dadder nodded his thanks, which might duly show up in the form of a few coneys liberated from under the Squire's hedges, a form of pest control for which he didn't charge the Squire and didn't trouble him with the knowledge of it, neither.

The bar shut shortly, the landlord being a great believer in late lunches for landlords, and Dadder took himself over to see Mr Grocer -who had now opened after his own lunch - where he handed over a note written in Mammer's italic script: "1lb of minced beef, please".

That was nearly all the business of the day so Dadder hurried back upriver while there was still light and pulled out the last of the potatoes from the sack in his shed and two onions. Not much to work with but in the sea-locker Mammer had a tin of tomatoes and there was a dab of butter and a drop of millk in the cool tin which nestled beside the boat.

Ahead of the return of the little Rafts, ravenous from school, Mammer fried the beef in its own fat, then the onions and tomatoes, laying them down in a pie dish. On top of that she put the mashed potatoes. The great metal pie dish was left on the top of the pot-bellied stove, keeping hot and cooking very gently.

Back in town Miss Mavis had finished reading the class an episode of "Moonfleet" had looked out of the school room window and come to the conclusion that she didn't trust the sky. It looked grey and sulky, as if ready to pick a fight with the ground. Swiftly she divided the children in to the believers and heathens, put Leonard the class Jew in to the Wendy House, and whisked the believers through The Lord's Prayer, shooing them out of the door and telling them not to dawdle but to get home before the weather closed in.

Burton Coggles remembered to knock on the Wendy House door to tell Leonard to come out, who answered as if he had been asleep and not listening at all. The Wendy House was made of hardboard with a cloth roof, and not much bigger than a kennel. Leonard increasingly looked like Alice, growing until she filled up the White Rabbit's house. This impression was inadvertently fostered by Leonard's father who believed in buying shoes with room to grow, so that Leonard trip-slapped about in footwear suitable for an apprentice clown.

Most of the children lived in the town so Miss Mavis had no concerns for them, but the Rafts had to go along the river bank and she considered them a feather-headed brood, harmless but with less wit than the ducklings on the pond.

She sighed and, regardless of the cold, she gathered her coat, scarf, hat, gloves, galoshes and umbrella - still rolled at this stage - and pointed it to emphasise the way. "Come along children, time to go home" and she marched us smartly down to the path which would become the river bank. We had to huff to keep up; she was small but she travelled like a determined little tug bringing a liner in to dock.

At the bend of the river, where the water is still salt but you can see the Raft, she stopped and pointed towards our craft with her umbrella. " Run along now, I can see smoke from the chimney and I can smell something delicious."
"Come with us, Miss"
"No dears, I need to get home before the sky makes up its mind."
We ran towards the wisp of hope.
"And anyway" she muttered to herself "there are enough mouths there to feed already".

When we got to the Raft, we turned to wave to say we were alright. Standing on the raised bank she was outlined against the sky, the wind tugging at the hem of her coat. The pink grey dusk had changed her clothes to the dark bronze of a statue and she rested on her furled umbrella like the knight guarding a tomb in the church. Her hat stood like a heavy circlet on her head. The line of angry cloud in the heavens held back - or seemed to - while she stood between us and the fated rain.

Miss Mavis looked back towards the Raft, hearing with relief the distant clink of spoons on enamel plates. On the air was a faint aroma of cocoa telling a story of a voyage from the far Americkees to Holland, but where it came from she could not fathom.

Happy New Year 2012

2012-01-01T00:34:00.000Z

Mr Raft is the most long-suffering of men and since I wanted a fire to celebrate the New Year, he went out in the middle of the night to built me one. I enjoyed it with a shot of the sloe gin I bottled last year.

Happy New Year

Boxing Day Hunt 2011

2011-12-27T00:09:00.000Z

Certain subjects instantly provoke a strong emotional response and hunting with dogs is one of them.

A regular measure now of the support of the the public for hunting is the annual Boxing Day Meet whereby hunters put on a free show on a slow news day. The Countryside Alliance has gradually coordinated this in to a carnival event. Masters are expected to make sure that the best riders are neatly dressed outside a suitable pub, the dogs under control, and everybody gets to take photos. This is about saying to the public "We hunt and we are part of the landscape" and crucially "So are you."

Over to Bedale then, where the fair weather this morning brought a large field of riders and viewers. The main photographic event was outside the pub with the riders posing with stirrup cups, but just down by the church in a larger field were all the other riders and a crowd well on its way to a couple of hundred.

The dogs were cheekier than expected; one of them rushed in to the CoOp as if realising there was a handy supply of sausages, another lazy dog wriggled under a parked car and settled down for a snooze, hoping not to be seen while the others made the running. When the pack set off a small wire haired terrier strained on its leash and whimpered pitifully to go with them, called by the ancient sense which even a chihuahua has, that deep in their DNA is still the string which connects them to a wolf.

Although the hunting with dogs ban is a nuisance, wasting police time and obliging people to perform legal dances, it hasn't had quite the effect which was feared. In fact, what with hunt ball tickets selling fast, carol services, calendars of very well-stacked young ladies, sweat shirts, support events and the general opening of social channels, the idea of hunting has never been more popular. It has thrown off some of its snottier and exclusive airs and has stepped in to a functional niche which used to be occupied by the Church of England.

Whether people mean to get on a horse is as irrelevant as whether they mean to drive an F1 car. They don't care if someone else does, it is the excuse for the meetings. Hunting is cheap until you saddle up; you can do all the hanging around for a few pounds and that includes having a drink. Or, if you are feeling skint, bring a flask of tea.

For women, hunting has one huge advantage in that it is one of the few sports where a broad beam is regarded as acceptable. Since the riders are under no obligation to be stick insects, nobody else has to either. Hurrah, I'd like cream on that apple pie, thank you.

No doubt it will horrify the old guard and those who don't much care for the riff raff, but the Countryside Alliance has helped the hunts re-position the sport as a socially binding and inclusive activity. The editorial slant of magazines such as The Field reflect this; articles which would be more at home in Country Living have crept in to justify the cover-price to an audience which, realistically, is not going to buy a gun, a horse or a sporting estate. But they might buy wellies or sportswear such as Dubarry.

The pressure is gearing up, then, to get MPs to repeal the ban. So far, according to the Telegraph, the government has indicated that it doesn't want to talk about this subject, and you can see why. It's not a deal-breaker from a Conservative point of view. If you mean to vote for Cameron, this issue won't prevent that. However, it might alienate some floating voters, particularly urban women who are a crucial swing group for all parties. There are disputes about how widely supported the ban is, but if legislation were simply a numbers game, then perhaps we'd be out of the EU and have the death penalty restored by next month.

Unhelpfully, a group of Conservatives - Conservatives Against Fox Hunting - have formed themselves in to a classic circular firing squad and are about to disrupt the current delicate balance by slagging-off their own voters. Turkeys may not vote for Christmas but they definitely campaign for it. Their 'about' page says:

The Hunting Act 2004 is not about class issues, town versus country, civil liberties or banning rural customs or traditions.

Yes it is. If it hadn't been, they'd have banned fishing, and even Labour wasn't quite that stupid.

For some reason, CAFH keep quoting Brian May of Queen as if being married to an ex-EastEnders actress and current Strictly contestant makes the science drop-out and popular banjo-plunker an authority on environmental conservation.

What matters is that people who live and work in the countryside - rather than invest in chunks of it from the sale of catchpenny choons - are not cruel, do not deserve to be insulted that way, and thoroughly understand what they are doing - unlike CAFH.

The Kingdom of Raft

2011-12-25T08:58:00.001Z

Where the salt water meets the sweet water there is a ramshackle landing stage against which leans an extraordinary craft which could, allegedly, go to sea. Not that anybody should be fool enough to try for the vessel is overgrown with cabins and chimneys, festooned with nets. An empty paddling pool is tethered to it, like a lilly pad in the stream, and on it sit the ducks, quacking insolently at the frustrated cat who lies on a tin roof chittering impotently. The ducks never fall for that old trick. The boat - for there is a boat under there - spreads herself against the bank and the landing stage like an old woman bathing her feet in the river, her skirts spread out and dipping in the water. This is the Raft, the current berth of the Raft family.

A Small Kingdom

Dadder Raft, being a scholar of maritime law, insisted that since time immemorial the land between the highwater mark and low water mark belonged to no one. The legal authority for this was cited as Miss Elizabeth the librarian at the harbour branch library. Since she worked for the council this was regarded as a definitive opinion.

Nana Raft (Mammer as she was then), when challenged to verify the opinion, said the librarian was an expert cable knitter and anyone who could read one of those seafaring patterns obviously knew what they were talking about.

Dadder had always fancied a country seat and reckoned that this gave him the means to acquire one in a certain sense. The river also had high and low water marks and, crucially, one crook in the river's bow was dug as an over-flow for the highest of tides. Most of the year it would not be used but just once or twice it filled with water. Unlike the sea shore, this was only flooded for a few days a year. He argued that this piece of land belonged to him as much as it did to anyone else. A tiny estate which was so prone to flooding that it vanished twice a year appealed to his sense of continuity. He said farmers on the Nile had sorted this out thousands of years earlier.

Squire Bragg who owned the adjoining farm land could probably have challenged this but as he would have had to pay the costs and neither of them fancied arguing with the water bailiffs who maintained they owned the river, yes, and the fish therein, he didn't bother. They agreed to differ so long as Dadder would keep the footpath clear and save Squire Bragg the burden. The bailiffs also reached an accommodation on the matter and Dadder was furnished with a rod licence; what for I know not. He was a tickling man.

Dadder therefore established his HQ which was part bothy, part elderberry bush, on the elbow of the river below the built-up bank. The footpath ran along the top of the bank so only people who really wanted to would make it down in to his Shangri-La. The soaring canes of the elderberry were lashed in to order, their leaves pointing outwards as far as possible. A seat was wedged between the stems, a very long seat that he could even lie down on. Beneath this was a long box with a few tools in it, dragged out when necessary for work. They were not over-worn.

When the foliage was pulled over you would not know there was someone in there at all, except if you heard him snoring or arguing a case with himself, invariably winning. A nearby willow wept silver tears at his eloquence. A rowan stood tall and measured his justice in its blood-red pannicles; it balanced perfectly. Summer passed into autumn and Dadder forsook his flowing realm for his leaning-place at the bar of the Harbour Lights.

It suddenly occurred to him that with the leaves falling he shouldn't leave the toolbox lying where anyone might find it. On an unseasonably warm afternoon with the sun beginning to slant long in the sky, he went back to the bothy only to find he had a squatter.

Madjy Fidjy

A sandy short-haired terrier gave a yip as Dadder came towards the bothy. The elderberries which had temporarily given it a roof of purple tiles had gone, stripped off by the birds. A pair of smallish cuban-heeled boots wriggled out towards him, followed by a pastry of petticoats, none too clean, and eventually a small torso topped by a grey head wearing a stout hat shaped like cottage loaf.

The terrier rushed back until it was just in front of the petticoats and announced that it would have anyone, do you hear me, anyone, who wanted to make a fight of it.

Dadder was wondering how to approach the delicate matter of trespass when the woman stuck out her none-too clean hand and said: "Madjy Fidjy, house sitting at your service".
"I don't need no house sitting, Madam" replied Dadder, noticing that she didn't seem to be offering service so much as taking it.
"You do. Someone nearly had your tools away. I stopped them".

This may or may not have been true, but Dadder was in no position to argue about it. "What brings you to my property, Madam?"
"Property, is it. Well, my pilgrimage takes me along the road to Walsingham and I'm resting a while. Here, have a cockleshell." She reached in to her apron pocket and handed Dadder a shell as it it were a ticket. "I ain't got much but I'm not bound for charity. How much do you charge?"
"Charge for what?"
"For the roof, man."
Dadder went blank for a moment at the novelty of being offered money. Besides he had no idea what the going rate was for a night in a bush. He looked at the booted bundle of rags in front of him. "No charge, so long as your dawg stops trespassers. I don't want people moving in".

Dadder went back to the Harbour Lights, an absentee landlord. He didn't expect to see much of Squire Bragg or the water bailiff this side of next spring so he couldn't see there was much difference if he or his agent - or steward as he thought of her - stood guard on the property. She had her camp fire, her cooking pot, her shelter and her dog. Once, when the high tides were expected, he went down and warned her to leave in case the elbow filled up. That night Madjy Fidjy visited the raft and they had a State Banquet on board with dancing on the path. She read the fortunes of the Raft children, and they were all going to marry handsome princes. Even the boys. Mammer Raft told them not to mention this to the Vicar.

Madjy looked at Dadder's almanac which contained the tide tables, the moon phases and the great calendar which even gave the names of the future winners at Newmarket races. She looked serious and made counting movements on her fingers, muttering to herself.

It was the early morning of Christmas Eve when Mammer Raft told Dadder to check on Madjy, see if she wanted to come to Christmas Dinner. She had already stuffed duck feathers in to a pillow and the paddling pool floating in the river looked less full than it had earlier in the year. A wooden decoy sat there now, persuading migrating featherheads to come down for a free feed.

Dadder got up in the dark and trudged along the bank, hoping to run into Madjy at breakfast. The white marker stones of chalk ran along the bank like glimmering bubbles. As he got to the bothy he realised that no dog was barking. He scrambled towards the silent willow wands. No boots, no smoke, no smell or sound of habitation. Not even a wisp of condensed breath escaping between the branches. He thrust his head in to the bush, fearing to see a stiff figure like the marble effigies on the tombs in the church.

There was nothing. The space was as empty as the cockleshell which had stayed in his pocket. Dadder watched the silver sun rise in its new position. It conveniently rose between the banks as they pointed north, as if somebody had built them perfectly to cup the rose crown which poured pale blood on the surface of the greysilk river.

Only, his wooden castle was not quite empty. On his throne of old plank there was a heavy earthen-ware jar with a gut lid stretched over it, tied with brown twine. An old bit of card poked out from under it and a childish hand had written in pencil stub:

Rowon Jeli
Zuger, viniger, creb aples, rowen joose
Thenk kew, gorn to Welsinam for the Birth.

Dadder carried the rowan jelly, the colour of the rising sun, back to the raft and gave it to Mammer.

A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Man Overboard - Tallbloke and AGW

2011-12-21T11:53:00.001Z

The police have been dragged in to the Climate Debacle and have begun to confiscate computers at the behest of the US much to the delight of the University of East Anglia, who can't win their faulty argument any more than the Vatican could when it huffily excommunicated Galileo. The disgraced academics want to know who leaked/acquired the emails which showed them massaging data, suppressing dissent and obstructing FoI compliance.

A spokesman for the University of East Anglia said: "We are pleased to hear that the police are continuing to actively pursue the case following the release last month of a second tranche of hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit. We hope this will result in the arrest of those responsible for the theft of the emails and for distorting the debate on the globally important issue of climate change." (Guardian 15 Dec 2011)

So no sense, then, that disagreeing with a deceitful propaganda exercise is not a criminal offence, despite the availability of the School of Law on campus to explain the niceties.

What matters is that it is in the public interest that the emails emerged purporting to show that the academics at UEA and other places had been cheating to shore up their preferred theory. But it was possible the CRU had a good explanation or that the emails had been misrepresented. They have always maintained those are their emails which were supposed to be private, not that is is a set of hoax documents. It was possible the CRU had a good explanation for what they appeared to suggest. I settled down to wait for a way to tell whether these emails were private or, more sinisterly, secret.

The intimidation of Tallbloke by the state apparatus decides it for me: the whole AGW must be a fairy story and there may very well be a nasty plot afoot to protect somebody's financial interests in continuing that lie.

Tallbloke himself has been remarkably kind to the police and told the Guardian:

"I am happy to assist the police with their inquiries because I haven't been hiding anything important like some people have. I assisted them with their inquiries, which involved voluntarily answering some questions regarding computer use etc."

He generously over-looked the fact that they turned up with a warrant and didn't need to ask for his cooperation or permission, although they could have had either. He has stuck to the point: what have UEA been hiding?

If getting the science right was what mattered, UEA would have sacked half of its climatocracy pretending to be academics in order to protect the reputation of the university and to avoid all UEA degrees, even the law, medical and humanities ones - becoming a global laughing stock. The Climate Research Unit is not the only outfit in that very large campus where, let us not forget, it is shortly going to cost over £50k all-in to get a student through a basic degree in geography or what ever. For that, parents will expect a brand which doesn't cause potential employers to fall over laughing.

Let's be clear: this is not for being wrong - scientists are allowed to be wrong if they say 'Hang on, that doesn't look right, are you getting the same results we did'? It's for refusing to hand over the base data which, apparently, did exist but was left in Phil Jones' jeans and his mum put them in the washing machine. They should be sacked for the cover-up, not the incompetence.

Lord Monckton thinks that if you want to play the criminal law card, the thing to do is to follow the money and ask if there is fraud involved in perpetuating an AGW lie in order to receive money and influence. He wants the police to investigate not just what UEA might have done - which is an issue for robust academic debate - but why, because if it was to enrich themselves by deception, that is definitely within the scope of the criminal law.

UEA issued a load of reports last year, claiming they were independent and they ain't dun nuffink. Here is the index.

I know what I think and decided it the moment the Inquisition rang Tallbloke's doorbell.

Truancy

2011-12-14T15:30:00.004Z

The Guardian helpfully highlighted the current rates of prosecution of parents for allowing children to truant from school.

A total of 11,757 parents were prosecuted for failing to ensure their child's attendance at school.

Just over 9,000 were convicted, and nearly two-thirds of those were fined.

The highest fine imposed last year was £850, the longest jail sentence was 90 days.

7% of the school population persistently missed school in autumn 2010 and spring 2011.

It is important to clarify the terms here: education is compulsory, school is not. However, the wording around this subject is ambiguous and it is too easily assumed by even informed writers and Education Secretary Michael Gove that school itself is compulsory. As Education Otherwise constantly remind us, it is not.

It is the moral responsibility of the parent to secure an education for the child but the legal right is couched in terms of the right of the child to receive an education. Historically, it was understood from the beginning of publicly funded universal education that if the state tried to make attendance compulsory it would run in to huge resistance, particularly from non-conformist religious groups. The only sensible thing was to make it free and insist that nobody could be kept from an education. Even then, not everyone across the society had a high regard for education for its own sake.

There could be good grounds, then, for prosecuting a parent who is either negligent or obstructive, for example, a parent who refuses to let a girl learn to read, but the cases which seem to be picked up in the papers often involve parents who don't seem to be very good candidates for prosecution.

Here, for example, is Amanda Summers, benefits claimant of Burton. Her 14 year old daughter managed to get to school for about two days out of five. She was very often sent by cab, but wandered off in the afternoon, which is a separate registration period.

Ms Summers was handed a fixed penalty notice by the Education Welfare Officers which would have meant taking benefits money intended to keep her children and paying it back to the council. What was the point of that? All it does is penalize other children in the family for the indolence of the 14 year old. It isn't Ms Summers who keeps walking out of school. What exactly is Ms Summers supposed to do at that point? What is the school supposed to do? Neither of them have any legal right, as far as I can tell, to lock the girl in the classroom. While an EWO is a dab hand at demanding money, they don't appear to be around at lunchtimes in order to escort sulky missy to lunch and back to her class room.

Ms Summers didn't pay the fixed penalty notice, so Staffordshire County Council prosecuted her in the magistrate's court which will do wonders for her employability if an enhanced CRB check is done, just in case there is some outside chance of Ms Summers getting work as a care assistant or similar. So that's her chances of a job gone for a Burton.

Presiding magistrate Christine Warburton said: “She is causing you stress and costing you financially. This financial burden will only increase unless she attends school.”

Summers was fined £35, reduced from £50 for her early admission of failure to ensure a child attended school. She was also ordered to pay £50 in costs and a £15 victim surcharge. A total of £100, which is going to do even more wonders for her family at Christmas.

What presiding magistrate Christine Warburton failed to explain in her infinite wisdom, was what exactly is Ms Summers supposed to do? This is a 14 year old girl. Hell's teeth, have you ever tried shifting one of those if they don't want to move? Dynamite would weep.

Ms Summers isn't allowed to thrash her, can't chain her up or refuse her food. About the most she is allowed to do is either talk to her or refuse to talk to her, neither of which seem terribly effective. Maybe bribery would work. Or perhaps she could have a big blow-up row which would result in the police being called and all the younger Summers being taken in to care while young Ms Summers concentrates on getting pregnant by the nearest yob, then it will be the council's problem to find her a flat and people will stop talking about this tedious school business.

Amanda Summers could, perhaps, chuck her out on the street in order to prevent her causing any more financial damage to the family. She could ring the social services and say 'Here, you collect her, I'm not having anything more to do with her. If you are so clever, how come half your in-care children run away? Still, have it your own way - if you think you can get her to stay in school, good luck with that pal. Only, I bet they don't prosecute you for failing to do the impossible.'

Alternatively, instead of paying the wages and public sector pensions of a bunch of EWOs and lawyers to go gadding about the magistrate's court, make them do something useful and go to Ms Summer's house and teach the girl in her bedroom, if that's what it takes. If you really believe it is about education and not the compulsion by the state. Or we could think about funding more boarding school places, which has been known to work in the past. The MP David Lammy is blunt in that he believes this saved him from the fate which befell some of his cohort. You can fund a fair number of places if you spend it on school places rather than job-creation schemes for lawyers.

Researchers claim there is a steady rate of 7%-10% of education refusniks. The thing to do is to research the age at which the behaviour sets in. Despite evidence that there may be truancy at primary schools, I will bet you it is around age 14, an age hitherto accepted by most societies as being capable of holding down entry-level jobs. I don't believe passing any amount of legislation will change that. Unfortunately, it is also true that there are fewer and fewer of those jobs available.

Our best chance - and one which is being taken in small instances in some schools - is to recognize that for a number of students, school attendance after the age of 14 is not going to happen in a meaningful intellectual sense, not even if we nailed their feet to the classroom floor. We have been flogging that horse for about a hundred years; it is time to admit that it is dead.

What might just work is that between the ages of 11-14, they may be persuaded that it is in their interests to do just enough readin', writin' and 'rithmetic so that they can go in to a pre-arranged apprenticeship which will see them mostly out of school, except for day attendance.

It's a tall order considering the declining number of jobs - and firms - which are willing to take on fourteen year olds. The jobs are going to be of a fixed nature; it will be care work, catering, customer service, warehouse, ground work, cleaning, maintenance, beauty, fashion, animal care, maybe even some manufacturing if there is any left in the country.

The CRB system means that people in general don't want to work with minors - it is just too complex and fraught with the danger of malicious accusations - but there was a time when we weren't so paranoid so it must be possible to think this through again.

The alternative is to continue to sling Amanda Summers and others like her in to jail, which will only cost us a fortune in prison costs and foster care and still won't achieve the only thing which matters: getting Ms Summers Junior an appropriate education, in school or otherwise.

Fiery Monster

2011-12-08T13:00:00.007Z

Kicking about on a delayed train at sunrise were a group of young passengers making urgent phone calls, trying to set up a rendezvous, unsure of where they were supposed to be working that day. What kind of a job is it where you don't even know where you are supposed to be?

As we drew in to a station there was a rip in time and we went past a steam train, its throat glowing like a waking dragon and the steam and smoke blowing out of its lungs, a glittering tail of dining coaches decked out in tinsel and sparkling glass.

The young people jumped up, calling "Hurrah, there she is" and "Everybody ready to work, let's go". Then they rushed across the platform to their train which had been held for them as they are the waiting staff on a time machine.

Forget being an air hostess - is there any more glamorous or romantic work than crewing on a time-warp?

A Golden Age of Live Theatre

2011-11-28T11:30:00.000Z

Hat tip: The Jolly Lion

We are living in a golden age of live theatre. For the price of a dvd you can see an entire company produce magic in front of your very eyes. They are doing it in village halls, school halls, regional theatres , stately homes, cricket pavilions and pub courtyards. The Internet has helped enormously; the tiniest venues still rely on local papers and selling tickets through local shops, but any theatre which has an on-line booking system is immediately in a better position to fill the seats.

One of the reasons I don't bother with TV soaps is that it is painfully obvious that many of our so-called professionals are nothing of the sort. They could no more deliver a line than I can sing opera and the clunky direction gives them the fluidity of a call centre slave in India trying to scam you. Pause....click...Good evening Mam, am I speakin' to Mrs Raft? No, sorry, you are not.

You will experience more in a single evening spent watching a local company, which will show performances ranging from the competent to the breath-taking, than you will in a month of Shouty Cockerneys. There's something for everyone; companies are refusing to stick to the tried-and-tested popular productions and tackling new works written by company members. Obviously, that's going to be a mixed bag; there is always an element of lucky dip about a new work but who knows, one might see a little slice of theatre history being made. You hadda be there.

Beloved of all is a farce: these work best where the audience can see the actors sweating to bring the staging to the correct point to make the joke. Farce is the theatre magic where you have to see most of what the conjurer is doing because the audience is in cahoots with the company. The ignorant character, the one who is going to get the surprise, is on the stage, which reverses the traditional expectation that it is the audience who will receive the revelation when a secret escapes. Doing it on telly is cheating; we all know they can cut away and come back tomorrow - where's the panic in that?

Down in Paignton the Bijou Theatre Company is performing a pre-Christmas farce of impeccable pedigree "The Happiest Days of your Life" by John Dighton, which hinges around school inspections, disapproving parents and people's careers hanging by a thread. That should bring a groan of recognition to the throats of teachers everywhere, but it is still very funny (unlike real life).

Previewed by The Jolly Lion - who is in it - the production is at the Palace Theatre, Paignton and runs from
Wednesday 30th November - Saturday 3rd December 2011 - 7.30pm
Tickets cost £11 but concessions are available
Telephone Palace Theatre Box Office on
01803 665800

Train Stupid - Please Phone First

2011-11-22T13:10:00.011Z

British Transport Police have issued a report and photos of the crash caused when farmer John Henry Watkyn James could not be bothered to ring the signal box as required - using the phone supplied for the very purpose - nor to drive his tractor's trailer properly over the line.

Had he done so, the accident would not have happened. Rex Features have collated the photos.

Sergeant Steve Dawkins, officer in charge at BTP Swansea, said:

“The trailer was made of plate steel but due to the speed of the train and the force of impact, the trailer’s debris was spread over a large area.

“It is astounding that no one was seriously injured or killed in this incident. James’ actions not only put rail staff and passengers’ lives at risk but also caused extensive damage to the train, which could easily have resulted in derailment.

“Crossings are designed to keep people safe – and, when used correctly, that is exactly what they do.

Mr James pleaded guilty to a charge of endangering users of the railway but has been unwisely maundering on about 'bad luck', which suggests he was in the habit of doing this and regards it as jolly unfair that he has been held responsible this time.

Arriva Trains has given him an enormous bill for the damage to the train and the consequent loss. He thinks £167k is over-stating it. No, it's very modest and doesn't reflect all the consequent loss for people whose journeys were then disrupted. Whether his professional insurance - if he has any - will cover it is not stated.

He has no idea of how lucky he has been that the damage has been purely economic, that he isn't in prison, and that the court saw fit to give him only a suspended sentence and 200 hours worth of voluntary work.

The court appeared to accept his cock-and-bull story about the second gate swinging shut, trapping the trailer on the line, which sounds plausible until you see the video. Rather more likely is that he opened the first gate, drove over, knowingly parking the trailer on the line, then got out to open the second gate. This version of events is given in some accounts.

The words "delivering hay" do not properly convey the solidity of three circular bales of the stuff at that speed of impact.

H/T Ambush Predator

Basket Case

2011-11-20T23:00:00.008Z

To Cambridge for Basket Case , the new rom com by Nick Fisher. A kitchen-sink comedy of middle class folk. Guy and Miranda are divorced, not on very good terms and now the family dog is ill. Miranda feels obliged to call Guy to let him know. It is, after all, Guy's dog.

The audience was unsettled to find that studded between the jokes Nick Fisher had left his trade-mark needle-sharp observations. Fisher has a wicked ear for the cadences of the John Lewis catalogue classes - to whom he sells cookery books - and Liz Ashcroft, the designer, realizes their vision on the stage. Yes, we all laughed but there is an unnerving thread of criticism. For example, Fisher allows the characters to use bad language and graphic sexual imagery. The audience came out muttering about it being "close to the knuckle" but it's not so much the f-word which bothers them but the way the conflicted children - whom we never meet - have turned out.

All the performances are competent - which is no less than you'd expect - and Nigel Havers is allowed to give throat to the frustrations of the successful white male. Because he is expected to put bums on seats, Havers has to soften the character slightly, which is a pity because Fisher has written it with the capacity to be a glittering monster instead of chap who gets things muddled.

It's a hard call for director Robin Lefevre; make this play as hard-hitting as it could be and it would be up there with the flinty social realism gang and the critics would love it. Unfortunately, the audience would hate it and throw boots at the stage; they like the John Lewis adverts and aren't paying good money to see themselves reflected unflatteringly.

Besides, Nick Fisher is no stranger to middle-England fatwahs and doesn't want another one - he once wrote a sex education guide for teenagers which nearly got him lynched. So a compromise is reached; you can read it as a light comedy or much more if you care to look at the references, such a Miranda being surrounded by thirty grand's-worth of kitchen in which she bakes two quid's worth of muffins and even then doesn't have the blueberries or pecans to make the cakes properly. Beautiful set dressing btw - right down to this-year's must-have, fluted, jug-handled mixing bowl.

Guy's costume is the one formulated by Paul Weller a million years ago and worn by Jeremy Clarkson ever since; denims and suit jacket with tassel loafers. He also delivers trade-mark motor-mouth tirades. Yes, Guy is popular and successful but if I were Jeremy Clarkson I'd be squirming in my seat; of course it isn't Clarkson, but as a portrait of a man skidding towards being old enough to be a grandad whilst having made a lot of money but arsed-up in key areas of life.....well, any resemblance is purely coincidental.

Although old smoothie-chops is there to provide male glamour, the one we've all really come to see is Graham Seed, late of Lower Loxley Hall in the county of Borsetshire. Wisely, Fisher doesn't move Seed, playing Martin the vet, too far from the audience's expectations and puts in a couple of pointed in-jokes. Fresh from being the nicest man in the world to be pushed off a stately home roof, he's now the nicest vet in the world who has to deal with the tantrums of the clients while being obviously much more attuned to the patients.

Although we are explicitly supposed to see Martin as in love with Miranda from a distance, this line isn't picked up and Martin is left with a hint of sexual ambiguity, an awkwardness. Because the play doesn't have much in the way of a plot - it's more of a character study - the supporting characters are there for contrast and to elaborate themes rather than do anything which twists the story round. He is therefore entrusted with illuminating what Fisher really wanted to portray; the enduring relationship of people and animals.

It turns out that there was a reason why Seed was able to make a clottish toff a favourite character for thirty years; He Can Act. Here he slides down the social scale a little, cautiously knocking some of the patrician accent off his most famous role but he's absolutely serious that there will be a vet on that stage. Seed's show reel gives a respectable selection from a certain type of character actor but it can't show what has happened to him in the past year; there is the potential for greater depth and conviction just waiting for a role.

Seed could play Richard III now and project all that rage, frustration and attraction which the historical character undoubtedly had - along with the ruthless determination to wear a crown. As the 2-i-c to Edward IV, Richard had spent a lifetime playing second fiddle to his brother, fighting wars on his behalf, administering the country and doing Edward's dirty work. Did anyone seriously expect him to do all that then hand it on to his brother's whelps, acting as the trustee for their estate? C'mon.

Let's hope someone gives Seed the chance to tackle the classical roles and get his name up there with Jacobi - they were both in I Claudius two thousand years ago - and the heavyweight actors of his generation.

In the meantime, catch the remainder of the run at:

Monday 21 – Saturday 26 November
CARDIFF New Theatre
Box Office 029 2087 8889
www.newtheatrecardiff.co.uk

Monday 28 November – Saturday 3 December
CHICHESTER Festival Theatre
Box Office 01243 781312
www.cft.org.uk

TeleVision for the Environment - information

2011-11-17T22:00:00.005Z

Biased BBC are looking at tve - Television for the Environment - which has removed its website.

This looks iffy, as if it or the BBC is trying to hide something but may be due to the fact that tve says in its annual report that it was looking for a new website provider as it wasn't satisfied with the old one. It could just be a coincidence. The issue is live due to it becoming apparent that some BBC output was produced free by the interest group and handed direct to the Corporation.

There is much to be said for the arguments put forward by Television for the Environment but if these are going out under the BBC brand name we need to know that the programmes have been produced by a campaigning film-maker, not presented as if it were neutrally investigated. Looking at the programme output - some of which I've seen in passing - the standards are high and the programmes were interesting.

I don't mind partisan features - I just want it shown clearly in both the opening and closing credits that the BBC is getting the material at negligible cost and that it has a particular viewpoint. After all, tobacco companies might want air-time on an equal basis if they pay for their own material.

tve is a collective name for:
Television for the Environment
and
Television Trust for the Environment.

Television for the Environment is a company limited by guarantee, registered in England and Wales, registered office:
21 Elizabeth Street, London SW1W 9RP,
company number 1811236
and a registered charity number 326585.

Television Trust for the Environment is a registered charity number 326539.

(My formatting).

There are three key pieces of information available now:

The company number, 1811236 can be used via the WebCHeck service at Companies House to get basic information and an index of the filings available for £1 each.

Because the search is dynamic, copy the company number 1811236 and go to the front page, then click on WebCHeck and put it in to the search box. (Can't be linked direct as it will time-out). This will bring up the basic information.

Clicking on the 'order information' box will take you to an index of the filings which can be ordered for £1 per document. Since the tve project began in 1984 there are many records to be bought but helpfully, some of the names involved are available on the order screen. I haven't looked at the commercial accounts.

The purpose of the registered charity number 326585, Television for the Environment lists in its summary of 20 September 2011 :

4. To enhance and develop the capacity to make an impact via the WorldWide Web

Which is going to be difficult without a website. It's a modest outfit with 10 employees and funding of £1.4, which doesn't go far these days. They've managed to produce a great deal of broadcast material for that, which makes you wonder why the BBC is so expensive. (OK, hanging around for months to get the fabulous footage for The Frozen Planet is worth it - I don't mind spending my licence fee on that).

The overview page for the charity Television for the Environment is here and if you click on the options on the left side-bar you can go through the information - including the accounts - in both summary and detail. This is a free search. The annual report summarizes the material it has produced in the year.

Turning then to the second charity, The Television Trust for the Environment, 326539, it is more or less the same again but potentially its costs outstrip its income, which can't go on for very long if there is no new source of income.

These sets of accounts are small compared to many international special interest groups, but it isn't clear why one film maker can describe themselves as a charity when others may not be allowed to. That's a secondary issue.

The primary issue here is that the BBC gave air-time to its favoured groups without warning the audience and without extending that possibility to organizations whose views the BBC does not endorse.

Remembrance Sunday 2011

2011-11-13T17:14:00.006Z

We do not remember for Their sake alone
Although that would be enough.

Forgetfulness is the opiate justified for the immediately suffering
But not for us.

Remembrance is for our own sake.

Armistice 2011

2011-11-11T10:11:00.012Z

This year I was privileged to visit the churchyard of St Just in Roseland, Cornwall.

The churchyard is famous for its graves on a steep hill where the church lies in the cup of the surrounding paths in a sub-tropical garden with a tidal pool at the bottom. The sea coming and going and the exotic planting make the spot simultaneously unearthly but eccentrically English.

The high tide coincided with sunrise, so I was there to watch the church emerge from darkness. Because the natural form of the bay is a deep amphitheatre, the light produces extraordinary effects such as the church tower not having a top but carrying on up to heaven.

Looking around the graves there were several elegant War Grave headstones, particularly fine black ones which take a sharp cut and don't easily wear away. It was pleasing to find that volunteers have been photographing them and indexing them.

There are several searches one can do. This one was for war graves in St Just in Roseland.
Clicking on any of the returned names goes to a photograph of the individual gravestone with details which are known about the person.

Dick Turpin's Last Ride

2011-11-06T01:30:00.001Z

A story that has been 306 years in the making.

No true blogger can resist this illumination of myth creation, that of the Dandy Highwayman. The writer (Daniel O'Brien) brings together three real figures to debate their approaches to Dick Turpin.

The three are contemporary historian Thomas Kyll, who was at the York assizes when Turpin was sentenced, the 18th century catch-penny biographer Richard Bayes who either knows rather a lot or is making it up, and the romantic novelist William Harrison Ainsworth who came along in the 19th century and filleted out the saleable story of the fabulous ride from London to York.

The beef which Kyll and Bayes have with imagineer Ainsworth is that his fiction is so good that it has swamped the real story and, moreover, his commercial success was based on leaving out the crucial relevant facts about Turpin: he was a thug with no redeeming features whatsoever, and there was no heroic ride.

When I told Nana Raft I was going to see a story about Dick Turpin, she said
"We've seen Black Bess's grave".
"Nana, I hate to tell you this, but there wasn't really a Black Bess"
"No? So you tell me what's down the hole, then - it's a huge gravestone" in that tone of voice when people use when they've got a knock-down argument. Ainsworth is correct - people want Black Bess to exist.

The disputants then re-animate Turpin to show the story from each viewpoint and to argue about the details and what this means for posterity. Is Ainsworth right when he says that Turpin paid for his crime at the end of a rope and that the story is an entirely separate issue? He is, after all, a romantic novelist, although he has certain views about his source material.

Director Abigail Anderson skilfully handles Jack Lord's performance as Turpin as he has to swing between graphic nastiness and the romantic highwayman of the story. Perhaps best of all, they invoke the real Turpin, the butcher-turned-thief who was not dramatic at all.

Richard Pepper as Kyll strikes the most sympathetic note with conscientious bloggers; that need to get the facts down at the time as far as possible, knowing that somebody else is going to spin them later. Julian Harries as Ainsworth portrays literary glamour, Morgan Philpott as Bayes is the everyman, the rough sort, and credibly claims to know what he is talking about. He is closer to either a tabloid journalist or someone who has had help with writing a memoir. Ainsworth speculates that there may be an explanation for how he got his information, and it's not the official explanation Bayes offers. Astute writing, that is, considering the current questions in the papers. How else do people suppose stories are verified if not by bending the law round corners?

All the performances are absorbing. However, if you are going to appear on a stage with the stunningly beautiful Loren O'Dair, who plays her fiddle, dances, sings, is an acrobat and portrays a mythical horse, then you have to accept that she's going to run away with the show.

The cast of five canter the story through a scaffold set, playing multiple parts and instruments, punctuating the story with music drawn by Pat Whymark from English folk songs - no, it's alright, not the ear-achy nasal ones - proper songs which are complex and melodious. The skill in the stage craft keeps the story moving; there are no disconcerting blackouts. The scenes are conjured by acting, minimal props and subtle lighting which helps keep the accounts separated.

There's just time to catch performances at Ipswich and Eastbourne.

Book: Dick Turpin - The myth of the English Highwayman
James Sharp, Profile Books, 2004
ISBN 1 861197 418 3

Update 1 Jan 2012: An old story turned up in a search about e-fits. York Castle Museum used descriptions issued at the time by the Government and the London Gazette to create a modern e-fit of Turpin.

Church News

2011-11-03T09:14:00.014Z

David Cameron, the Prime Minister who doesn't have a parliamentary majority with his own party, thinks that Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, speaks for the whole country.

Rowan Williams doesn't even speak for the whole Anglican communion in England, let alone the world. Please don't mention the g-word.

Mr Raft nails it:

"He isn't even the best drummer in the Beatles."

*************

Factbox

Church of England Accounts 2010

The Church Commissioners manage an investment fund of
£5.3 billion, held mainly in property and shares.

They have particular responsibility for generating a return sufficient to pay the pensions of the clergy. From page 7:-

"In addition, the banks, burnt by the very crisis they themselves caused, have restricted their lending."

No sense there of any understanding that at no time did the church suggest that people should not be borrowing money; indeed, they are very happy to process credit card payments at their gift shops and the shopping centres they invest in.

"The Church Commissioners' commercial property portfolio consists of a diverse range of Retail (including High Street, Shopping Centre and Warehouse Parks), Industrial, and Office properties, located throughout the UK and is currently valued at £321 million.

Notable investments in the portfolio include the MetroCentre, Europe's largest (and recently voted Britain's Best) shopping centre. The Centre is managed by Capital Shopping Centres but the Commissioners receive 10% of the net rents."

The congregation will rise and sing hymn number 666

Trafalgar Pudding

2011-10-22T09:30:00.003+01:00

Captain Haddock bids us raise a glass to Freedom and the Men who fought for it at the Battle of Trafalgar- and won - on 21 October 1805.

I wonder what the cook did on the night before the battle. The fire will have to be doused. Do you reserve some food for the battle but use the rest of the stores as far as possible? If men might see only one more sunrise there's no point denying them what comfort there is. On the other hand, what if you win? People would want something to keep them going on the way home.

One thing I am clear about. The youngest crew member, Thomas Twitchett aged 12 - the same age at which Nelson went to sea - should not have faced battle without a sweet to eat, even if it meant stealing somebody else's treacle. This is the night to remind the purser that we do not bind the mouth of the beast which treads the corn.

The general pudding was duff, which might have meant anything from a boiled rich pudding with dried fruits, suet, spices and treacle, to a dough of stale biscuit with currants to disguise the insects.

On land, then, an interpretation of plum duff which cheats by using buttermilk which they certainly wouldn't have had for more than a day or two out of port, and a controllable oven, but cooking in a basin of water to simulate a steamed pudding sitting on the great iron range on the galley.

This plum duff uses plums because they are English - the finest cooking plum being Kea plums which grow along the Fal estuary in Cornwall - and dates in remembrance of Nelson's earlier 1798 victory at the Battle of the Nile. History is full of dates. The date palm is properly called Phoenix Dactylifera - the Phoenix tree which bears fruits like little fingers. I prefer to believe this is a reference to the Immortal Egyptian Fire Bird rather than any of the other explanations for how the Phoenix name was chosen for these palms.

****

You will need a large pudding basin or two smaller ones to speed up the cooking time . The pudding rises so don't fill them much more than half-way.

2oz dried plums, chopped. Kea plums already made in to jam would also work and produce a sweeter pudding rather than the sherbet-sharp finish.
2oz dates, stoned and chopped. These are Halawi dates so do your own puns.
Soak the fruits together in a good gill of rum and the juice of half a lemon.
Add about a teaspoon full of mixed spice to taste. I'm using nutmeg and cinnamon.
A"good gill" is as much rum as suffices to wet and swell the fruit. When the fruit - but not the cook - has soaked up the liquor, continue:

Butter a large pudding basin well and cover the bottom with a layer of the fruit mix, reserving the most of it. Put the liquor in the bottom to make a syrup, if there is any.

Cream together 2oz butter and 2 oz sugar.
On the ship this would be salted butter and possibly treacle, but I'm using unsalted butter and plain granulated sugar.
Add 1 egg, beat in well, and stir in 4oz of self-raising flour. Many recipies use half-flour and half-breadcrumbs so this is a way to use up crusts.
Add buttermilk until the mix is soft like a sponge and almost ready to drop off the spoon. Use plain yoghurt if you can't lay your hands on butter milk. This helps to raise the pudding.
Stir in the reserved fruit - it may loosen the mixture slightly, so don't go mad with the buttermilk. You can always add a drop more.

Spoon the mixture on top of the fruit already in the basin. Put a cover of foil on it to stop the top getting wet.

Place the basin in a bigger pan of hot water - a deep baking tin, for example - so that the water rises half-way up the basin. Set the pair in a medium-hot oven, about gas mark 6, although you could simmer it on the hob if you prefer.

Keep the water topped up for two hours, then check if the pudding is done by taking off the foil carefully and sliding a knife it to see if it comes out clean. If it needs longer, and perhaps to dry out, then take the foil off.

Of course, if you are spreading this over two smaller pudding basins it will set faster, best check after an hour.

When a knife comes out clean, run a knife round the sides of the pudding, wait about five minutes for it to be less likely to split, turn out without burning your fingers, and serve.

On land we can use custard or cream but unless someone had managed to hide Daisy the milk cow aboard as well as Henny Penny who laid the egg, you will have to improvise with a dressing of butter, rum and sugar. The pudding is rich because of the butter and buttermilk so it is not essential to put anything else on.

Plum and Date Rum Duff

Note: if you used a lot of rum it may not all convert in the cooking. Therefore be aware that it might not be suitable for a modern 12 year old, or if driving or operating machinery.

All Seeing Eye invites anyone in Gibraltar to the Trafalgar Cemetery at 12 noon on Sunday 23 October, where there will be an act of remembrance. The Immortal Memory

Those in the East of England might like to visit Nelson's birthplace, Burnham Thorpe, which is still substantially as Nelson saw it.

English Ethnic Dress (1)

2011-10-17T23:40:00.002+01:00

This is English Fancy Dress rather than ethnic dress but it is based on real clothes. It is the coming thing for the age of austerity, combining craft and practicality. The male dress is interesting because it allows a display of individuality we haven't seen for many years.

Elements: boots, cord or plain trousers tied at the knee with twine. There's a terrible fear in all English male dress of attacks via the knees: adders, eels, mice, the devil, ferrets (never sure if the string is to keep them out or in) so trousers have to be bound there. Straw looks good; string if not. Not that horrible bright pink plastic twine - the green or brown hairy hemp is fine.

Shirts are of small checks, preferably smudgy ones where the colours are barely differentiated. Bright, high-contrast checks are not the thing. Neckerchief is optional but very useful so most men will have them. You cannot really beat the cotton, red and white spotted neckerchief and they are so useful that there should be spare ones in the pockets of the capacious jacket.

The jacket is not tailored in the sense of fitting. It's tailored in the sense that it might fit somebody and will come and find that person. It will be made of good wool of the tweedy variety and here the customizing comes in. Strips of fabric and maybe feathers are lightly sewn on in rows to create padded contours and crests which emphasize movement and protect the jacket if you have to shove something with your shoulder, perhaps a car or a gate. It isn't necessary to cover the entire jacket although some people like to. Pads can be replaced if they get oily.

The hat is either a tweedy trilby or some favour canvas and leather versions of stockman hats. The trilby is neat, can easily be re-dressed with new feathers and blends in. The overall look should be owlish, not like a peacock. A flat hat, if worn, should not get over-large or it looks like it escaped from Top Of The Pops in 1973.

Accessories are whatever you think best in your pockets, plus a broom. This is not so much for sweeping as beating time like the tap dancers in Stomp do.

The Lincolnshire Poacher look is practical without being reminiscent of hospital scrubs or pyjamas, and suggests one has been up since sunrise conducting delicate business which one is not at liberty to discuss.

Female ethnic dress will be discussed later.

Apple Day 2011

2011-10-14T19:00:00.001+01:00

There are events all over the country this month for Apple Day. The festival is a modern marketing creation but it has been well-attended as there are few things more beautiful than orchards. The loveliest tree of all is the golden pear, the quince, which reigns like a queen over the other trees, decked in magnificence.

Magic quince tree, Corpus Christi, Oxford

A little quince is good for flavouring but they take a lot of processing. It is much easier to eat apples and you can make many more things with them. Plus, you get cider from apples and that's what I'm hoping to be testing on Saturday. If I'm lucky with the weather I'll be wandering around in an absurd haze of bonhomie with a pie in one hand and a beaker of hot spiced cider punch in the other, laughing at the wolf winter which is loping towards us. If I'm not lucky with the weather I shall do just the same but pull the hood of my mac over the cider punch so the rain doesn't get in it.

Toffee Apple Cake.

Heat the oven to medium-hot, about gas mark 5
Have 2 x 1lb loaf tins or your choice of bakeware handy. I use the paper liners but I understand that silicon bakeware is very popular these days.

Fruit compote:
4 smallish apples, cored and sliced and cubed
A lemon, squeezed, to stop them oxidising
About 2 good tablespoons of honey
Cinnamon - some, how much you like, if you like like it. I'm having at least two good teaspoonsful.
Cook briefly together to soften them, leave to cool. The cubes of apple should now be covered in a syrup like toffee so don't burn them or they'll taste bitter. The need to cool down or they'll coagulate the cake mixture when they go in.

Cake batter of:
8oz self-raising flour
4oz unsalted butter or margarine
2 eggs
2 oz sugar, brown if you have it but any is fine.
A little milk if the batter is too stiff, but it probably won't be when you add the fruit.

Mix up the batter using any protocol you like, including the one where you separate the eggs, whip up the whites, then fold them in to the rest of the mixture later. This is a lot of mucking about but it does give puffier results. However, I'm doing sugar and butter, then eggs, then flour. The batter is stiff, more like a scone, but it will soften as you put the apple in. It is easier to do this by pouring the cool syrup in first.

Stir the apples in to the cake mixture which will be like rich cream - not hard but not runny - and cook in a medium-hot oven, around gas mark 5. If you are using two loaf tins this will take about 50 mins, longer if you use a deep tin, less if you are wise and spread the mixture in a wider tin. At any rate, cook until a knife-blade slides out cleanly and not covered in raw cake mix. The oven needs to be hot to get the reaction going and puff up the cake, but it can burn the top. Turn the oven down and leave it longer if it is a problem getting the centres to set. This happens with cakes using fresh fruit.

Cool on wire rack. The cake should not be over-sweet. Fresh fruit cakes count as health food if the council sends a spy round to 'test' your buns. You need to eat them quicker than other cakes because they only have a limited shelf life of a few days. This should not be a problem.

Aha! Found some spare cream. Yes, this all works.

If you enjoyed the apples, save the pips from the cores and shove them in the ground somewhere. Who knows, but one day there may be tree. All the instructions are in there.

A note on honey: this cake used rapeflower honey. Be aware that rapeflower honey is bland which makes it adaptable for cooking but that - in my opinion - it lacks the depth of flavour you might like in a table honey.

Cluck cluck CL*CK

2011-10-14T10:15:00.002+01:00

That's what the noise was about.

Sinister plot.....

2011-10-12T19:40:00.001+01:00

....discovered in supermarket.

Harvest Home 2011

2011-10-09T21:40:00.001+01:00

The moon nearest the Autumn equinox (around September 23) is known as the Harvest Moon, but that was back on 12 September. The coming moon on October 11 is known as the Hunter's Moon although it can be called the Harvest Moon if the moon phase falls closest to the equinox in a given year.

It didn't this year but never mind; the harvest comes in from August onwards and is still going on, so this was a good weekend for a Harvest festival. Given the burst of hot days last week it worked out well. Besides, the children have been back at school for just over a month so they've had time to do projects on Where Our Food Comes From.

The modern consumer parade of seasonal food doesn't catch what we know is the deeper psychological truth; there isn't going to be any food made for months. People want, profoundly, to store life against the depths of the winter, near the solstice, when we will need captive sunshine. Maybe there should be more tinned food in the displays, or more exhibitions of salting, drying and preserving in sugar. It is one thing to produce food, quite another to be able to shift it forward, each jar a tiny time capsule.

The bees do it best with their immortal honey and beautiful wax but they are in great danger and nobody knows quite why their numbers are dropping and colonies are crashing. The British Beekeeper's Association asks that in the meantime, please could everyone put in bee-friendly plants, especially for May and June where the bees need all the help they can get.

Plants I've found are robust and take hardly any looking-after are foxgloves, hollyhocks, lavender and thyme. They might need a trim when the bees are finished with them but otherwise they just get on with it. As the hollyhock flowers tend to drop off and lay around on the path it's best to plant them at the back of the border where you don't have to sweep them up.

The Anglo-Saxons had a charm for bees and St Benedict had a Catholic prayer for them. As we are largely dependent on the bees for pollination or there won't be a next harvest, it is urgent to discover what is causing the colonies to collapse. A prayer on the side never does any harm, though. Other practical advice from the British Bee Keepers Association.

Desserts - Michel Roux

2011-10-06T09:02:00.004+01:00

Inland to Toppings Bookshop in Ely for the book launch of Michel Roux's latest work, Desserts.

A gust of oestrogen knocked me over as I walked in to the hall they were using for the event. You can keep your interfering hyper-active bully-boys with their pukka pasta. If you want to see a babe-magnet in operation and grown women going giggly - and I'm talking about from 18 year olds to 80 year olds - Michel is your exemplar.

He doesn't appear immediately as there is a lunch first. Substantial quiches, salads, wine or elderflower presse are balanced on knees while people pre-buy books and browse through a selection of his other titles. Roux has a regular editorial team, including his wife who does the proof reading, and they are all credited. He produces books with the same values with which he cooks - just as he wouldn't ask someone to eat food he wouldn't eat himself, so the book has to satisfy him as an object, as a work in its own right. Later he emphasizes that he knows every page number for every recipe - it's his book, his name is on the cover.

Eventually Mr Topping - who has been toting boxes for days now and is nearly melting in the lunchtime sunshine - stands up and begins to tell of his joy at hearing someone say the bookshop was 'just like the one in Notting Hill'. Ha! That means he is equivalent to Hugh Grant. However, the bookshop in Notting Hill has just closed, as have dozens of others.

Toppings in Bath and Ely has bucked that trend by adding value as a retailer. They hold a book club each month and well-organized events where the authors are expected to turn up and perform. They also offer you fresh tea or coffee - for free - and don't mind browsers, so it's rare that you get out of there without something you didn't know you wanted. The lunch is to develop a trading relationship with the customers, so for £15 you get lunch, a literary cabaret, and a signed copy of the book.

Then comes the treat. The ladies come in with trays of desserts made by Michel's very own hand. On each white plate is a slice of chocolate raspberry roulade (roule marquis, page 168) and a shot-glass sized fig and honey pannacotta (page 76). There is cat-like purr of five dozen women simultaneously licking vanilla ambrosia and forgetting there is a world outside.

The audience is now as pliable as a sheet of soaked gelatin and the star comes out of his kitchen to great applause.

Time has been kind to Michel Roux. It's been more than kind; he is a Frenchman with a big nose and he's 70 so it isn't fair that he looks better now than he did twenty four years ago when he and his older brother Albert bickered their way across the nation's TV screens to challenge the worthy approaches of the kitchen divas such as Delia Smith. Michel remains slim and obviously active, no stoop, tanned, with white teeth and blue eyes. Even his hair has swept itself back in to a chic silver bardic mane which he certainly didn't have in 1988. I have the picture here - in those days he had to make do with an ordinary mousey fuzz of a barnett.

Being French he feels there is an obligation to show Italian men how It Is Done. There has to be a quality of casual effortless grace which leaves the Italians looking over-polished and fussy. "'Ow to understand a woman?" he shrugs Gallically, and the Italians would seethe because they know he does. The Brits nod sagely, interpreting it as a shared take-my-wife joke. There, right there, you have Europe on a plate.

There are barely a handful of men at the launch, which is strange when you consider how Roux's work is either neutral or masculine, grounded in the professional kitchen and the concepts of aristocratic food, not peasant pottage. It can't only be women who manage to get away from the office or the home at lunchtime.

Michel opens with a cautionary tale. He had hoped to show the signature fruit meringues he is proud of but they turn out to be very sensitive to air humidity and the quality of the oven. He waves one, explaining how disappointed he was with the texture and uneven quality. The encouraging moral is: even Michel Roux has disasters. None the less, he urges us to give plum meringue, page 150, a whirl. "Plums are cheap, you must dry them well, meringues are cheap if you have just made something with egg yokes".

Considering his name is linked with expensive food and he's obviously not short of a bob or two being domiciled now in Switzerland, it is surprising how many times he refers to the cost of food. It is preying on his mind - but then, being born in 1941 and growing up in the austerity years after the war with an unreliable father, he must have experienced what it means to be worried about food and its price. Perhaps that's why he cares so much about every mouthful; the ghost haunting him is not bad food, but no food.

He advises not starting with the book, but to go to a market, find what's cheap, then go back and look up a way to cook it. There's nothing special about that advice but it cuts through the marketing nonsense about wandering round a supermarket with the recipe their celebrity chef has suggested which just so happens to require five of their premium pre-packed ingredients.

The advice goes on. An omelette takes between 1 minute and 90 seconds. He advises scrambled eggs with a scoop of cream, Albert says two scoops. If you use milk the eggs will be a little wet but that may be the best way for you, if you don't want to use cream. Do not mix spices in desserts - stick to only one - two if you must - to avoid confusing the flavour. Fresh fish is a live food and very good for you. Meat is already very dead and if you cook it wrong, it can be twice as dead. A Christmas pudding is a wonderful thing and he believes that his own are the best in the world. (Although it doesn't appear to have made it in to this book). Don't use more than about six ingredients in a dish, unless you have a special reason - it is too much, too confusing. A cook must have a glass of wine while working, or at least water if you are not a wine drinker. Despite this being a book about desserts and therefore not without calories, the use of fruit and a reduced quantity of sugar and fat has been recommended . The trend is for lighter desserts, he says.

There is a lively exchange of views about the storage of eggs resulting in Michel being exasperated about too-low storage temperatures and the lack of larders in the modern house due to the EU. It's not clear to me precisely how they are responsible for that but sometimes his French accent is still hard to understand, even after all these years. "I'm in favour of the common market" he said, echoing so many people over the years "but not this EU".

Neither I nor any other lady there cares tuppence about understanding every word - he can read out the phone book as far as we are concerned, and it will still sound like ginger creme brulee (page 75), but it brings an interesting thought about the book. Roux writes in French because he says it is still quicker for him. The translator, Sally Somers, then puts this in to crystal-clear English, but in doing so it is impossible to avoid rinsing out some of the warmth and poetry of his Franglais phrasing.

One day he should write a book with the French on one page and the translation opposite, perhaps a considered guide to shopping and stocking a kitchen without over-spending or wastage, but getting value for money. If that's where good cookery starts, it is time he addressed the subject directly in his own signature grammar.

Second prize....

2011-09-04T11:48:00.004+01:00

Alistair Darling has his book out: One Thousand and One Nights, the steamy tales told by an intelligent but unlucky courtesan who found herself married to an irascible knife-throwing sultan in the days of the Scottish Raj.

It features the laugh-a-minute bawdy escapade "It Started in America" and the x-rated erotic thriller "The Thief, The Prime Minister, His Lover and Their Banker".

Despite flirting with literary agent Eddie Bell at Bell Lomax Moreto n the entrancing minx with intense eye-brows over-came his reluctance to kiss'n'tell, and signed to Maggie McKernan at her own outfit, the McKernan Agency, who acted with Capel & Land to take the book to publisher Atlantic (Toby Mundy).

The book was originally going to be called "My old job and how I expect to get paid twice" but McKernan is thought to have suggested that something sexier would go better in the run-up-to-Christmas market. Possibly something with cats on the cover, such as a white Persian being stroked by a podgy male hand.

Do not miss Alistair performing live the Dance of the Seven Veils, various venues all round the country. You would not belieeeve the tattoos.

Galliano, Galliano, Galliano let me go-oh-oh-oh

2011-06-23T18:30:00.004+01:00

John Galliano is a gifted designer of frocks who, if we had any commercial sense, would be doing business here - like he once was - and helping to make us rich, rather than having to go to Paris to get the world recognition he deserves and generating all the money for LVMH. He'd be living in a small castle in the Cotswolds, have an atelier in Kensington and a factory in East Anglia which would put Paris couture to shame.

Instead, after years of boiling his brain to meet the cut-throat promotions schedule of international fashion houses and the rip-off merchants of mass fashion, including the vampires on all the magazines who rely on him to generate their images and having not a thousandth part of his talent, Galliano hit the bottle and began to mouth-off at gawpers in bars and, allegedly, physically attacked at least one woman. (This charge does not appear to have been pressed).

Where were the friends, the entourage, hangers-on who are supposed to at least pay court to the gifted? What was he doing huddled alone in the corner of a bar, trying to make a home of it? No law against that and where better than Paris for an artist to have a drink and collect the vibe of the streets as it comes up to inform haute couture. Even so, a designer with that much potential wealth creation in his knobbly skull should have had a permanent walker if Dior had cared about its talent. Leaving it to the chauffeur to call a lawyer wasn't the close protection he needed.

Obviously the artistically driven can be difficult to love even when they are sober - and that's putting it mildly - but somebody should have been there to scoop him in to a clinic. John, love, let's go home, let's have another drink, don't talk to them, the taxi is here. It's just another blood-sucker who wants to sell a story about you, lalalala, yes, that's right, let's have a sing-song.

That Dior had to dismiss him after the fracas was inevitable for brand-protection. If you are flogging expensive perfume, cosmetics and diffusion ranges, you really cannot have people who get in to fights with the potential customers. As Simon Doonan points out:

Without the passionate and genuine support of style-obsessed Dior-loving Jewesses, Galliano might be stitching frocks for City Girl Jennifer.

What Galliano said was racially offensive and the judges will be ruling on precisely where those statements stand in French law. But in the general sense, millions of offensive things are said every day. In some mouths it matters, but in Galliano's irrelevant gob it was only significant in that it betrayed that the wicked old idea is still blowing round the French fashion industry. Like we didn't know. People like John don't sit around crafting insults; they copy them from their mates. You might as well blame a weather-cock for the wind.

He could as easily have told the unwelcome strangers to get lost but the half-Spic Gibraltarian from Sarf Lunnon (so not even a proper Cockerney, the mischling) had been in France for so long he forgot he wasn't French, just like he temporarily forgot he was gay and where the iconography of the pink triangle comes from.

What he was aiming for was offensively hip with a hint of Parisian Fuque-vous , a la Sex Pistols 1976, which he might have remembered from when he was a teenager. This is difficult to pull-off when sober, which is probably why it is usually only attempted by the bladdered. They are normally protected by incoherence. Sadly, Galliano had not quite reached that level of inebriation so it was still possible to make out what he was saying.

Note that the video provided via the Sun (who must have paid a pretty penny for it) is not of the incident which the court is ruling on, but an earlier ear-bashing he gave to an Italian pair of women. If it is his usual behaviour, he used English but in a cod French accent, following the convention set by Croft and Perry in 'Allo 'Allo. That's how drenched he got; his mouth spoke English and his brain heard French. Good Moaning.

Ask yourself: if you meet a drunk, do you insist on asking them questions and video it, or do you go away to get on with something more rewarding. I suppose it depends on if you think the poor bastard is good for a bob or two, or if you can sell the pictures.

In the bar-room squabble at issue in court, Galliano acted as if he owned the bar. The bar owner, in deference to a good customer, asked the other customer to change seats, just leave the pissed Brit alone. The customer declined - althought she also didn't own the bar - and instead engaged in a 45 minute slanging-match which ended with Geraldine Bloch being told she had "low-end thighs" (ouch) and her manfriend Philippe Virgitti offering to re-arrange Galliano's head with a bar-stool. Charming, the lot of 'em.

This week they are having another go at humiliating Galliano in court. Bloch wants want one symbolic Euro and an apology printed in the world's leading fashion titles (presumably saying that her derriere is second only to Pippa Middleton's) , while Virgitti, having been all matey earlier on, has now decided that his feelings are so terribly hurt that only money, lots of it, can assuage his flustered honour. A third person is also claiming to have been hurt, but this may be a more complex charge and possibly out of time due to limitations on delay for bringing a complaint. They've already had him sacked and made him grovel. He already apologised, weeks ago. Here, luv, have a Euro from me. Mind you don't spend it all at once, there are Greeks desperate for that much money.

A de-toxed Galliano presented himself to court to show respect rather than sending a sick-note via his lawyer, but wisely determined not to speak French (surely he must have picked up a few words by now) and used an interpreter to make sure that what ever he said this time, it wouldn't upset any one. Vogue is covering the trial, although you'd think they'd take better fashion notes than he was "dressed conservatively". The best trial coverage to date comes via the Daily Beast on Powerwall.

Obviously, there's a great deal of crow pie to be eaten. Never mind the dodgier statements; the French prosecutor has suggested that in France it is a crime amounting to assault to criticise the size of a woman's thighs and the condition of her hair. A damn serious offence, if you ask me. This could be the greater problem for Galliano because the citizens of Planet Fashion don't really care or understand about race or religion but they mind very much indeed if they are accused of having a big fat bum.

For proof of this, look at Cecil Beaton. David Noh recounts that Beaton was being a frightful lovey in 1938 and thought he was pulling off a wizard jape when he included in a sketch in microscopic writing:

"Mr. R. Andrew's ball at the El Morocco brought out all the damned kikes in town."

The editor warned him to remove it, but he threw a hissy fit and somehow it made it in to print, in to the pages of Vogue. But Beaton had enemies and they made sure that journalist Walter Winchell was tipped-off to examine the illustration with a magnifying glass. In the resulting row Beaton was forced to resign. Explanations for his behaviour don't really stack up and he doesn't appear to have made the obvious defence that this merely held up a mirror to what people, fashionistas, were saying when they got together. Despite his public school and Cambridge background, he was gifted artistically rather than intellectually and failed to see that a fashion mag can never risk portraying its customers in anything other than a pool of golden light.

Despite the lull Beaton's career went in to, he emerged triumphant later when he produced the costumes for "My Fair Lady". Beaton collected a CBE in 1956, was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 1960 and was knighted in 1972. He didn't get those by calling the gentry a bunch of lardy old trout, which would definitely have seen him skinned. He survived his publishing faux pas because it was only about politics, dahlink.

Politically Galliano can recover if he stays away from subjects he doesn't comprehend and off substances which overwhelm him. He already has a CBE and is a member of the Legion of Honour, so if he stacks up 20 years more of solid job creation over here, he could end up as Sir John of Streatham. Artistically, it may be harder to find his way back to the effortless distillations which mark out his creations at their very best, but I hope he'll try. The reports of his closing collections were sympathetic - there was nothing wrong with the quality of his artistic vision. I hope he sends me a ticket for his show.

Update 28 June: Vogue have published the account of a witness who is claims to have seen the whole argument unfold. Felicitas Michel's telling of it does not involve anti-semitic opinions. The French court allowed the video in evidence which refers to separate event and is NOT the subject of the complaint.

Some commenters on the fashion blogs have pointed out that the rant tape was not saleable or perhaps even useable under French law, which currently takes a wider view of privacy than English law does (or did until recently). The complaint to the police made it possible for News International to risk publishing the video clip.

....

Update 10 September 2011

John Galliano appeared in court in Paris, which imposed a suspended sentence of a fine of £5,300 on a conviction for "casting public insults based on origin, religious affiliation or ethnicity". This establishes that the bar-room exchange was in what has now been defined as a public place for these purposes.

Galliano was also ordered to pay a symbolic 1 Euro compensation to his victims. Make of that what you will under French law. In English terms it means the judges accept the complaints and that the State has made its case, and mean him to apologise, but don't think much of the complainants. Note, however, that this was precisely what one of the complainants asked for.

The court rejected Galliano's denial that he had said any such thing , although other witnesses backed his version of events.

The Sun - on behalf of News International which paid out for the video of a previous beasting where a pissed Galliano was goaded in to forgetting that he wasn't French and wasn't an edgy intellectual - said, in its print editorial:

"So much for France's pious grandstanding as the champion of decency and human rights"

Les Rosbifs never miss a chance to rag the Frogs, but if that doesn't make you laugh you must have had your funny bone surgically removed.

Plastic pots, plastic education

2011-06-21T21:54:00.008+01:00

Clearing out the back of a locker I came across these grotty plastic pots and had a Proustian moment. They came from the days of cookery lessons, or 'food technology' as it was more properly called because it wasn't anything as honest or useful as cooking but it wanted to get itself up as on a par with the technologists (wood work, metal work, chemistry) who in turn wanted to get themselves up with the physics and maths department.

With only one period and a class full of giddy teenagers, the food technology teacher resorted to sending letters which pleaded with the parents to send ingredients weighed out. These would be lightly combined and, if time permitted, heated in some fashion. Sometimes a raw assembly would come back. An uncooked pastry twist is not improved for sloshing about on the bus home.

The constraints made the ingredients very limited. I had no idea you could get an entire curriculum out of wheat, fat and sugar. Fruit was sometimes mentioned and if the teacher was feeling flamboyant, a request would come back for an egg or some milk in a little jar. Once they even asked for garlic, the mad impetuous fools. It meant mashing bottled garlic paste in to butter to make garlic bread. The bread came back - a shop-bought baguette - having had garlic butter surgically introduced. We still had to do the heating, though.

I should have protested when I saw the 'design sheets' for a pizza topping, solemnly planning where to stick the sausage circles on the pre-baked pizza bases. I should have demonstrated. A braver person would have said "If you can't teach something useful, let's sack you and buy some more maths hours or maybe a teacher prepared to do spelling tests and explain punctuation".

But I'm not brave. Besides I just felt so damn sorry for the teacher. It's always the fluffy ones who end up teaching this subject and they have that trembling tearful look of someone who means well but who, for their pains, has been lumbered with all the worst pastoral work. Armed with only a couple of sandwich tins they are supposed to be able to effect profound motivational change. It's not going to happen, is it? Even Jamie Oliver found that trick was harder than he imagined.

So I supervised the measuring-out of ingredients, chaffing that this too was something schools used to teach. Despite my whinging the results must have been alright. At any rate, the greedy beggars ate all the good stuff on the bus home.

Burglar Wayne Bishop and the benefits system

2011-05-29T18:30:00.000+01:00

One of the first acts of the Conservative government was to curtail the child benefit to certain parents who could be described as middle class on the basis of their "family income", a term which should be meaningless since taxation is personal. Child benefit was intended to be a universal benefit which attached not to families or any class, but to the child themselves, usually via the mother but can be via the father or other carer.

If you are a middle-class (approximately; the term is not about money but a set of values) parent you are unlikely to be swayed by the level of benefit available to have more than two children, although some of them do where family income permits the levels of care to be maintained. Where family income is low the package of benefits including housing and free school meals creates an incentive to continue to have children since each child represents an increase in family income which is proportionately larger than it would be in the better-off household.

Thus it makes sense for Wayne Bishop, petty thief of Southchurch Drive, Clifton, Nottingham, to have as many children as he can and hand the bill to the taxpayer. His children represent a form of wealth to him in a way they do not to better-off families where there are economic penalties for increasing the number of children. Or it could be that Wayne Bishop is an irresistible stud-muffin, but in light of the photos of him, I'm betting that the benefits are a better explanation for his inability to master a condom.

Wayne Bishop is the Nottingham burglar who has just cost us the legal aid and the cost of hearing the case to have a short prison sentence overturned on the pretext that he is the sole carer for his five children. Another example of how useful children are.

Bishop's QC, Ian Wise, head of the public law team at Doughty Street Chambers assured members of the judiciary that the issue of the length of the sentence and its effect on the children mattered on the basis that Bishop was the children's sole or main carer. Was he? Did they check? One commenter says :

"there mother picks them up everyday the only time ive ever seen this bloke at school was once. its common knowledge to asll the parents and teachers in the school were these kids liv"

The court was given to understand that care was being split between Bishop's sister, who already has care of seven children, and his ex-partner who is the only one said to have a full-time relationship with paid work. If she does, let's subsidize her with a proper nanny - two if that's what it takes as her work is said to be on shifts and at night - because she's the only one setting any kind of example. It will cost the same as paying Wayne but the children will have a reliable carer.

Perhaps the police or local authority or benefits agencies will use their powers to investigate whether statements made in court were mistaken or unchecked.

However, the question is would the welfare of the children have mattered less in law if he'd had only, say, two children? Should a middle-class fraudster who normally lives with his wife be obliged to stay in chokey as he doesn't have the same childcare duties? Indeed, should the number of children be taken in to consideration before the CPS bring charges? Apparently, under this interpretation of the Human Rights Act, it does. Some commenters have pointed out that when women are sentenced, the effect on their children is automatically considered.

In case anyone thinks this is unfair to a hard-working single parent, Wayne doesn't do the single parent thing of trying to juggle a job and childcare as he already explained that he took to burglary because he couldn't manage on benefits. He can't drive a getaway van either and ended up trapping himself in a dead-end street. A metaphor for his life: the benefits trap means that he's unlikely to be able to work his way out of dependency, especially now his criminal record probably makes him unemployable.

Let's have a look at the 33 year-old's career in crime, which This Is Nottingham has helpfully indexed.

In November 2008 Wayne Bishop, then living at Stotfield Road, Bilborough, threatened the headmistress Dora Wood of the Portland School. Bishop had sent his infant child to school wearing a gold bracelet, which as any parent will know is not permitted and is always clearly stated in the school rules of which all parents are aware. There are two simple reasons for that; there is a chance the bracelet will get caught on something while playing with the result that the child is injured and everyone gets in to a world of legal trouble, and valuable items have a habit of getting lost which leads to teachers having to control distraught children who shouldn't have been bringing jewellery in the first place.

The Headmistress, Mrs Dora Wood, confiscated the bracelet and called the parent in to explain the situation and hand it back.

Most parents have nothing but sympathy for a head teacher who is only trying to get on with teaching but this is undermined by our laws on religious and cultural expression which leads the likes of Wayne Bishop to wonder why we have double standards which permit some children to wear bracelets but not others.

However, rather than making a robust political point and risk being threatened with racially-aggravated something or other, Wayne threatened to do the Headmistress over, yelling:

"I'm not sticking to the rules. My son's not sticking to the rules."

This is a howling with which I have nothing but sympathy because schools have indulged in rule-making and propaganda about things, particularly in sex education and religion, which are properly the business of the parent, not the state. However, in this case Ms Wood was right and Bishop was wrong. Comments below the original story suggest that other parents were not happy with Ms Wood's headship either, but the majority agree that Bishop was wrong to threaten her and the property of everyone else in the car park.

The police were called and after pleading guilty to using threatening words and behaviour (up to 1/3 discount on sentence) District Judge Morris Cooper gave Bishop a community sentence of one year with supervision by the probation service and 100 hours of unpaid work plus he was to pay £50 in compensation to Ms Wood. As Bishop's income is from benefits it is difficult to see how he could pay the compensation without directly depriving the children and if he's looking after five of them plus four step children - who live separately with his current wife - it is similarly difficult to see how he would complete 100 hours of labour. I wonder if either of them ever happened?

The story goes quiet until September 2010, when Bishop - by now living in Brooksby Lane - attempted to rob a local club and made a pig's ear of it, ending up in a car chase which was dangerous as it clipped a police car and ran a red light. He faced charges of burglary and dangerous driving, pleaded guilty and admitted dangerous driving, thereby going for his usual strategy of getting a discounted sentence which would, presumably have been halved in practice if he behaved himself inside. So he would have faced a sentence of between four and eight months, which sounds about right, provided, of course, you aren't the victim of the burglary. He was locked up on April 11 and leave to appeal was granted by Mrs Justice Gloster on 24 May, six weeks later. The appeal itself followed within days.

However, one report states that by then Bishop already had previous convictions for offences of theft and driving while disqualified.

To summarize, the offences which are known about are: threatening behaviour, theft, driving while disqualified, dangerous driving, burglary. Another commenter claims but does not substantiate:

"not worth it mate, his "family life" is much better with out him in it im tellin ya n plus hes bin prison more than 5 times so a waste of bein a dad to him cos he'l end up inside agen"

Tracey York, the mother of the children and Bishop's ex-partner says that he has three previous jail terms, but doesn't state what they were for. That would make four in total, not five, but the point is he is not reliably available for childcare.

Richard Posner, a partner at Nottingham law firm Bhatia Best, was on Wayne Bishop's legal team and insisted

"This is not about a criminal's human rights – the children are the primary focus"

In which case it should not have been in the Court of Appeal on a criminal challenge. It should have been in the family courts deciding if Bishop is capable of meeting the needs of the children under normal conditions, since he keeps committing crimes and getting locked up. However, Nottingham has a great many problems and Wayne Bishop is only one of them.

In June 2010 the head of social services had to ask other agencies to deal with issues relating to cleanliness or nutrition, but if there was a concern about child protection, his staff would respond. So if children are being bashed-up or sexually assaulted, the department will act but if the problem is neglect, the casual indifference to squalor, discipline, education or diet, then those old devils will be left to do their awful work until children are old enough to get pregnant and demand council flats of their own, which won't be long.

It's time to ask mature questions, to refuse to be cowed by shouts of "nasty party", to see if the benefits system is helping families or creating perverse incentives which disadvantage the very children it was supposed to help.

.....

Names

Offender: Wayne Bishop
Solicitor: Richard Posner, Bhatia Best
Barrister: Ian Wise QC, Doughty Street Chambers
Court of Appeal judges: Mr Justice Maddison and Mr Justice Sweeney

Liberation Day

2011-05-09T09:55:00.006+01:00

Today is Liberation Day on Jersey. Thousands will attend an outdoor service in Liberation Square, commemorating the release of the Channel Islands from the Occupation in 1945.

The subject of the Occupation is still a raw one because the Channel Islands are a mirror for Britain. They are what would have happened to us. To get an idea of the scale of the invasion there is a trail which is best visited but the download gives an idea of the magnitude of the event.

The most important site is the complex known as The Jersey War Tunnels - the underground hospital Hohlgangsanlage 8. It is one of the most important war museums in Europe, although it is comparatively small. Allow a full day to walk through the long corridors which are set up to chronologically document how the war affected a small island.

The Channel Islands were also a laboratory for Goebbels who took keen personal interest in how the invasion was handled as it formed part of his PR strategy for his German audience. He arranged for photos to be taken which allowed the folks back home to imagine that this was the Isle of Wight - something even the invading soldiers were sometimes confused about - and suggested that far from resisting, the inhabitants had all but welcomed them with open arms. The sore point being, that some - a very few it should be grimly noted - did welcome them with open arms and legs. The Germans were good-looking and appeared to have cash.

Anyone stranded on the Island at that point would have thought the Reich had triumphed and there was nothing for sensible people to do but knuckle under and be enfolded in to the new empire, inch by inch. There was nothing left but a thread of hope and small acts of resistance, such as hiding"V" lapel pins made out of Victorian sixpences. Each act was met with increasing ferocity and repression. Albert Bedane decided to hide a Jewish woman and a number of other people; his thinking was that if he was to die, he might as well make it for a large risk.

The Islanders hung on despite the risks, the deaths, the deportations. On May 8 1945 the starving fag-end of the Reich finally accepted they had run out of arms, men and money. On May 9 the formal surrender locally was done on HMS Bulldog in St Peter Port, Guernsey.

Happy Liberation Day, Channel Islands.

St George's Day parade (delayed date)

2011-05-01T18:00:00.007+01:00

"This is no thaw" muttered the dwarf "This is Spring"

"Hold your tongue" growled the witch.

"George died centuries ago. He has no power today."

Every google tells a story

2011-04-30T14:01:00.007+01:00

Click in the box for proof

Google says I'm not the first person to wonder if Pippa is spoken for. From the automatically offered search terms it looks like Harry and six million others may have already enquired:

pippa middleton
pippa middleton dress
pippa middleton arse
pippa middleton boyfriend I'm Feeling Lucky »

Royal Wedding

2011-04-29T07:35:00.004+01:00

A wedding hat

Nana Raft loves a wedding, especially a Royal one. She has spoken and thus it is decreed we will be hanging out the flags because, if you look round at the Family Windsor, this could be the last big Royal wedding for a long time. There is the Diamond Jubilee next year.

Baba Raft has kindly agreed to do the catering, so it's all round to her gaff for the nuptials. She puts on a magnificent spread does Baba, which is far better than leaving it to me.

With all due respect to Republicans, I do not share their reservations. The English dearly love a lord and so, as it happens, do the Poles. The Polish car wash has decked itself out in flags and, touchingly, the English flag, bless them, for it is our Saint's parade on Sunday.

If the Poles can put on a show, so can I.

Besides, it is a chance to wear a wedding hat I bought some time ago. The hat is super-light, whipped up out of netting, just the thing for watching telly in (New Look, dahlink). It is unfortunately similar to a lavender lampshade but it was a bargain. I've even got a heather-pink tweed jacket and dress which will go well with it.

Possibly I shall have to wear it with pink Crocs if there is a lot of trotting from the nibbles to the telly; it's important to get the right functional footwear for these formal occasions. I will also get out the diamante necklace, although diamonds are not really 'before lunch' jewels. But then, they aren't diamonds. Maybe I'll go with the Majorica pearls - they are much more Kate than Di.

Best Wishes to William and Catherine.

Kung Fu Fighting - subjective and objective

2011-04-28T07:10:00.001+01:00

The Mail carries the serious case of a pub singer who now has a recorded arrest for a racially aggravated public order offence. The arrest will show up on an enhanced CRB check if he wishes to work with children; for example, becoming a music teacher or a volunteer. It could damage his chances of being employed by other holiday operators. No charges have been brought as the police have snottily accepted that "There was not enough evidence to prove a criminal offence had been committed". For Simon Ledger an arrest is not much less serious than a conviction and amounts to oppression where the process is the punishment, regardless of any finding of guilt.

Ledger, a seasoned popular entertainer, said he hadn't done anything except sing the the 37-year old pop song, Kung Fu Fighting - as he regularly does. It's older than he is. Ledger was playing the song when two tourists walked past the Driftwood beach bar in Sandown. This is the Driftwood website and Simon's is the first video on the left, "Duelling Organs".

One of the guests - a young man - objected loudly, abusively, giving him hand signals and shouting that they were wankers. The BBC implied that the tourist then claimed to have been subjected to racist abuse in return and subsequently complained to the police. However, Ledger claimed that the complaint is about the song, not anything else. As he has been an entertainer for over a decade - nearly two according to friends - it would be surprising to find him getting in to a slanging-match with a heckler who didn't care much for his choice of music.

After the 5.30 set the Hampshire police (presumably the Sandown team) traced Ledger to a local Chinese restaurant - which must have taken some doing rather than identifying him and visiting him at home in Shanklin - arresting him at 10pm. A spokesperson for Hampshire police said:

"a 32-year-old man of Chinese origin had claimed he was subjected to racial abuse.
He added: ‘If a victim believes that an alleged crime is racially aggravated, the police will treat it seriously. Investigations into this incident are continuing.’
The spokesman said a 34-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of causing harassment, alarm or distress under section 4a of the Public Order Act 1986"

It is now apparent the police arrested Ledger on the basis that a Chinese person didn't like the song a white man was playing. let's have a look at s.4A to see what it says, edited for the clauses which apply here:

4A Intentional harassment, alarm or distress.

(1) A person is guilty of an offence if, with intent to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress, he—

(a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or

(b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,

thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress.

(3) It is a defence for the accused to prove—

(b) that his conduct was reasonable.

(4) A constable may arrest without warrant anyone he reasonably suspects is committing an offence under this section.

6 Mental element: miscellaneous.

(3) A person is guilty of an offence under section 4 only if he intends his words or behaviour, or the writing, sign or other visible representation, to be threatening, abusive or insulting, or is aware that it may be threatening, abusive or insulting.

From the top: it was obvious that there was no intention (4A1) to cause offence because it is objectively impossible to cause offence by singing a 37 year old song which generally praises the cats for being as fast as lighting with expert timing. Whether it is about a fight or a martial arts display, it acknowledges the innate superiority of oriental technique over Yardie hack and slash thuggery. Or it might just be a damn good disco tune. Here's a live performance to a German audience, which accounts for them looking baffled:

If Simon Ledger had wanted to cause offence - which he didn't- he chose the wrong song to start with. You can't commit this offence by accident; you have to have the intention to abuse or insult or be aware of the potential to cause it. There might have been an intention to amuse, but that's not a crime. The CPS advice makes this clear in their own stumbling language:

Section 4A .... is intended for the more directed and persistent type of behaviour required to prove the elements of intent and causation.

In this case, it isn't even possible to accidentally cause offence. No reasonable onlooker could regard the words or actions as abusive or insulting in the context of a beach bar. This isn't an abusive or insulting song and it is incapable of causing harassment, alarm or distress in normal play. (1a). Perhaps if it was on a continuous loop it would become distressing.

However, the viewer claims he was caused (1b) harassment, alarm or distress. How was he caused it? There is no causative link between the song and his reaction. He may have experienced harassment alarm or distress, but that's only because he appears to have completely misunderstood the song. Any causation is in his own mind, nowhere else. This is completely subjective. That cannot be the yardstick for a criminal offence - although the police keep misunderstanding this - because people subjectively believe all sorts of things which are not objectively true.

The song is internationally famous for having topped both the US Billboard and UK Singles charts in 1974. As a result, the story of the arrest has been picked up around the world. Singing the song was reasonable. (3b). This is a complete defence. If Hampshire police are so bothered about it, perhaps they should raise an international arrest warrant and go after Carl Douglas, who now runs a publishing company in Germany. They can take in to consideration his follow-up "Dance the Kung Fu".

Given the above, the police did not have reasonable suspicion (4A4) for an arrest. All they had was the inexplicable reaction of somebody who was 'of Chinese origin'. So what? There is no shortage of upset people of every hue. Last week I met a person who was sincerely convinced that their enemy was harassing them by going down the street and switching the D-lock on their bicycle to an identical one for which they didn't have the key. This is not grounds for arresting an ex-lover. It's grounds for checking that the keys and locks are properly matched and that the medication is not over-due. There is not automatically a crime, no mattter how upset the complainant is.

The mental element of intention is so important that it is repeated at 6(3). To be guilty the accused person must have intended offence, or at a minimum been aware of the ability of a song to be insulting. This song in the context of a beach bar is not distressing to anyone except those who are allegic to disco.

This would be funny but for three things:

1) Simon Ledger now has a file which could be used against him in the future.

2) The police do not appear to understand that 'taking a complaint seriously' may not automatically mean 'arrest somebody'. They first have to establish that there was an offence at all, and the playing of Kung Fu Fighting cannot objectively be one in the context of a beach bar, no matter how subjectively the complainant - who has not been named, unlike Simon Ledger - feels it is. The CCTV footage which they could have examined before jumping in with their size 9s, shows the complainant was the one abusing and insulting Simon Ledger. I doubt the police will be arresting the complainant, though.

3) The only person here who has been a victim of harassment is Mr Ledger. The going rate for false arrest compensation is about £4k plus costs, plus a grovelling apology from the Chief Constable about "lessons learned". Ledger could argue that the arrest itself was racially aggravated since the police thought it was alright to arrest a white man in order to placate someone of a different ethnicity According to the Mail, their police sources kept insisting there was 'more to it'. No there wasn't. That was character assassination in order to try to support the police officers' outrageous behaviour.

Chief Constable of Hampshire Constabulary Alex Marshall can be thankful that somebody has stopped the stupid case running. Ledger should take advice on claiming for false arrest as the lemon-mouthed "not enough evidence to show an offence has been committed" does not amount to an apology and a public acknowledgment that playing a song cannot be grounds for arrest merely because somebody who is not a white caucasian has complained about it. It leaves the tainted idea that Ledger may have done something criminal but that they just can't prove it. He did no such thing. It also fails to acknowledge the distress which the police have caused him since Sunday night.

Let's have a Spartacus Action down on the beach. Put on an outdoor production of The Mikado and see if Hampshire Plod would like to arrest an entire amateur operatic society for dressing up Chinese-style, and don't forget to arrest Aladdin when he next does panto during the turkey'n'tinsel season. I've got a little list...

Woodstore

2011-04-26T07:51:00.006+01:00

A woodstore several days ago.

I keep a lookout for these now and note the rising popularity of wood burners. In a stand of sensible, although superior, new-build houses a small woodstore was provided as a standard next to the dustbin.

This was a grander one cut in to a hill in woodland - presumably contributing the fuel - so it had a bluebell wood just above it.

Bronte Burghers

2011-03-21T07:30:00.004Z

To Haworth in West Yorkshire, now known as Bronte Country. The village has done well out of the brilliant but unlucky Bronte babes, selling cream teas and souvenirs to hundreds of thousands of dutiful pilgrims who trudge up and down the viciously cobbled hill on which they lived.

Mobility of the old folk in Haworth is kept up by a death penalty for anybody who can't manage the incline; it's no place for hip replacements and a wheelchair released at the top would hit the bottom doing 120 mph. Most places would put in a funicular railway and be done with it, but in Howarth every inch is a potential gold mine and so it is lined with gastropubs, holiday cottages, cheesemongers, toyshops and galleries. The tourist centre coyly gives the views at the top of the hill which flattens out in to a charming space fronting the church; it doesn't mention the ski-slope just beyond the Post Office. Photos are misleading; it is steeper than it looks.

The Brontes would always have been awkward, clever girls, following the footsteps of their impoverished but cultured Oirish father, but if that was not enough trouble, Haworth brought the strangeness out in them as even they struggled to portray themselves as ordinary genteel women.

It cannot help but do that; Haworth is a place which hums with Gothick presentments, where the everyday objects are caught in slanting light and for a moment look suspicious, as if they have been caught out having secret conversations with each other just beyond the range of human hearing.

A large hat with flowers will suddenly seem to have faces nestling in the petals, a cat walking along a wall seems stripey, then when you look again, it is plain. The Fleece pub has beer garden, but that is at the top of the fire escape above the roof and is built out over a precipitous drop, or what would be a drop if it wasn't filled with lean-to sheds snuggling against a cliff-face. If you could slip through the treads - which you can't, it is perfectly safe - you would crash through umpteen layers of glass in to the hidden crevasse.

Loitering by Spooks at 22 Main Street - Specialist Bookshop for Psychic Phenomena supplies - a vortex of strangeness is there, right on the stone slab by the side window. There is nothing whatever strange about a shop selling psychic accoutrements, books on Dowsing, Clairvoyance, Healing, Reincarnation, Alternative Medicine, Astrology, Local History, Tarot Cards, Crystals, Essential Oils, Incenses, Runes, Pendulums, Celtic and Mythical Pendants. Those are everywhere

What is strange is the planning application. There is a plan to change the ground floor in to an adult entertainment shop and the basement in to booths for private lap dancing. Maybe it's nominative determinism seeping through the stone. The sign on the wall says Purvs Corner and the shop stands on the junction with Butt Lane.

This is West Yorkshire, no more than a longish bus ride outside Bradford. It is moorland. It's not the fleshpots of York or the Dales with their undulating hips and ice cream parlours. It's not even Whitby with its unique approach to diversity. It's Haworth, dammit, where a lady changes her sheepskin mittens for crochet fingerless gloves indoors. The one place where going about in a burkha is considered foolhardy exposure to the weather, unless you can get it on over a hat and coat.

Who exactly is going to patronize this place? The stag party organizers Red Seven may have a point if sloping up and down the street, visiting good pubs and having great food is your thing. No shortage of those. However, as they say:

Boat party, Bobsleigh, Bungee jumping, City break, Clay pigeon shooting, Coasteering, Day at the races, Drive a supercar, Fishing, Fly a MiG jet fighter in Moscow, Football trip, Go-karting, Golf, Horse riding , Horse racing, Indoor skydiving, Kayaking or canoeing, Off roading, Paintballing, Powerboating, Quad bikes, Rally driving, Rock climbing, Skiing or snowboarding, Skydiving, Surfing, Tank driving, White water rafting and Zorbing (or Sphering). Not all of these are available in Haworth so you may want to consider other locations

The plan seems to be that stag parties will drift about the pubs before their booking in to the club. Are there enough stag parties to warrant this optimism? Despite the international visitors and the good value which Haworth offers them, you won't find "raunchy" on a list of the ten qualities people commonly associate with the town. If you are looking for raunch it's best to start in Leeds.

Haworth does a fair line in repressed passion, though. If unattached it is a good place to look for a certain kind of woman i.e. an available one, but a stag party is unlikely to want to settle down for a night of passionate readings no matter how much significant eye contact is involved.

The planning application closed on 20th March and we shall see what happens. The vortex by the paranormal bookshop giggled and determined that the Clerk to the Council be called Gordon Bashami-Ghoulis.

Update: A controversial Radio 3 dramatisation of Wuthering Heights is being aired. It has gone all DH Lawrence and has Cathy and Heathcliff swearing at each other.

Sir David Attenborough

2011-03-03T08:08:00.007Z

Polynesia,
who also worked with the other brother, Richard Attenborough CBE.

"Madagascar" is a masterpiece. I've been falling asleep in front of Sir David Attenborough masterpieces for as long as I can remember.

It's not boredom; it's that fruity-calm-hushed voice and the complex coloured pictures. No matter how fascinating the material, after about ten minutes the shutters slide down and that's it until the closing credits.

It's not just me. Over his 50 years in broadcasting, thousands of animals have conked-out in Sir David's presence. He puts the 'fluence on them, a Dr Dolittle whose main way of talking to the animals is "You are getting very sleepy. Your paws are heavy, your ears are floppy, your whiskers are drooping, you are just going to rest your eyes for a moment".

He had to stop talking for the famous gorilla sequence or else they'd have had nothing but a troupe of slumped and snoring primates, nestled like farting carpets on the forest floor. It was a close thing; you can see them yawning.

When Sir David was following a chimpanzee hunting yo, the pan troglodytes, being brighter than gorillas, were all screaming "Run for your life, guys, it's that sleepy man. Next thing you know he'll have us carrying his camera gear and nobody has ever got him to pay a performer yet. "

Luckily, in line with the rules about stage hypnosis, his voice changes its pattern in his closing words of any script. It tends to rise to a question, probably a very good one, but unfortunately at that moment I'm in no condition to understand it let alone answer it. Electricity supply controllers say they stand-by for the surge in demand as the nation staggers blearily to its feet and puts the kettle on.

I reckon Sir David is in the pay of international beverage merchants and what he really says is: "You are getting thirsty. You will remember nothing but in five seconds you will rise and make the tea. Three Two ONE".

Product placement of coffee machines now allowed? Pah, amateurs.

Sheilas' Wheels - an ECJ ruling

2011-03-01T12:59:00.010Z

The European Court of Justice is the EU court in Luxembourg, the one set up to rule on the interpretation of treaties. It is the court which in the early 1960s made it crystal clear that it was the final arbiter of a new legal order, which we now know as the European Union.

Member states couldn't ignore its rulings and neither could citizens. The potential for the court to rule on all areas of life was implicit in the Treaty of Rome but anyone who pointed this out was dismissed as a swivel-eyed conspiraloon. Gradually, the effective areas of law were extended.

Today, if you want to sell your house, you have to pay to fill in a form - an Energy Performance Certificate - about light bulbs and insulation, not because the buyer gives a hoot as they are interested in location and space, but because an EU regulation says Something Must Be Done, and Britain is a member of the EU and has agreed to abide by laws generated by the European legislation, and the EPC rule is buried down in the fine print of a directive.

The process of challenging the rule itself if so Byzantine that nobody has even tried it in this instance. It would cost a fortune, drive them mad and they'd probably lose, as Mrs Thatcher found out in the Factortame case. I reckon that case helped push her over the edge; she certainly became less anchored in political reality than she had been around then.

The short version is: if it is a ruling of the ECJ, or if you'd lose at the ECJ if you went there, then we have to abide by it for as long as we remain a member state of the European Union.

Today the ECJ has confirmed the opinion of Advocate General Juliane Kokutt that being male or female cannot be used as a factor when calculating motor insurance prices, over-riding derogations (the law being temporarily disapplied) from earlier arguments. The opinion recognized that it is an actuarial fact that the sex of a driver changes the profile of the risk. The ruling says firms can't take that actuarial fact in to consideration when setting price relative to risk from the end of December 2012. Previous derogations no longer hold as a matter of social policy.

The social policy is being set by a court which isn't even our own Supreme Court. Besides, we have a legislature for setting social policy. This would once have been called 'usurping the authority of parliament'. Possibly our own court would have to give the same ruling because of the Equalities Act 2010, but we don't know because it didn't happen here. Our own judges were not given the chance to interpret our own laws, nor our electors to pass an opinion on whether we wanted this act repealed or not.

Because of how the ECJ's website works, you have to go to an index and click on the correct case:

C-236/09

Opinion

2010-09-30

Association Belge des Consommateurs Test-Achats and Others

Social policy

for the preliminary opinion which gives the fact and the legal reasoning.

The Court's confirmation of this opinion is published at:

C-236/09

Judgment

2011-03-01

Association Belge des Consommateurs Test-Achats and Others

Social policy

Many people hold that the original basis of offering prices was sexist. This is to misunderstand the statistical nature of betting, which is all insurance is; the laying-off of risk with someone prepared to aggregate those risks over big numbers for a fee.

The rates were never based on beliefs about driver competence related to gender. It was a matter of counting the claims. Over big numbers men tend to have more accidents and those accidents are more expensive. Over big numbers women tend to have fewer accidents and cheaper ones. There's no secret about it; young men are the highest risk.

As Damon Runyon put it: The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.

In Britain the publicity has focused on the insurance brand "Sheilas' Wheels.” There are other brands, but this is the best known one to pitch itself specifically to females. It isn't Australian and it isn't a company. Rather, it’s a line of insurance wrappers developed since 2005 from esure.

Men can take out policies with Sheilas' Wheels, and if they do the price will be based on a calculation of their statistical risks. It has spent five years attracting female customers and is a brand-leader. It has no problems with the ruling. As far as they are concerned, it is free publicity.

As the customer-base is overwhelmingly female they may be able to lay off some of the risks of the male customers after 2012 against the lower claims of the female customers, at least until the number of male customers rises and they can no longer offer preferential rates compared to the wider market.

From the end of 2012 the company can truthfully say it is unable to offer lower prices reflecting risk related to the sex of the person in front of them. Instead, they will then have to charge women the same price that they would to males which just happens to be more expensive.

You didn't really think any prices were going to come down, did you?

If you want prices to come down, there is a way.....

updates:
a useful index h/t City Unslicker
Gonna Get Along Without EU Now Concerned citizens plan a rally, indoors.

Jolyon Tuck - an apology

2011-02-25T17:16:00.005Z

Torbay Duty Solicitor Jolyon Tuck has taken the trouble to write to ask for a correction to the original article which was queried his professional work in the case of Rodney Knowles.

Modesty forbids Tuck from saying it, but he had a difficult client.

Knowles is now in prison and received a fair trial on separate serious sexual charges. He has been convicted on secure grounds. Good.

Jolyon writes:

"I have been aware of this article for a few months. It is only now that the Crown Court case is complete and you have taken the opportunity to conclude the story that I would ask that you revisit the original piece.

Neither of your assertions that this is poor defence work or it being a calculated bet that a criminal record wouldn't matter to Mr Knowles are correct.

I am tickled by the suggestion that I rolled my client over nicely, but would be prefer you not to make such misguided comments.

My role in cases of this nature is to advise on the law, the strengths and weaknesses of the prosecution case and balance that with my client's own instructions. During that consultation, the client will also receive advice on possible sentence both before and after trial.

Ultimately, I work for my client, act on their instructions, and they are under no obligation to take my advice. I have had people take my advice and I have had people ignore my advice, but I have not yet rolled a client over.

Your note that I should be dealing with motoring offences because of my field of work on our website is a slight misrepresentation. It states that I deal with Criminal Litigation and Motoring Offences. Having said that, I have made arrangements for my profile to be updated to address your concerns.

I am surprised that you criticise the Duty Solicitor qualification. All of the defence solicitors that appear regularly in the Torbay and Teignbridge courts are duty qualified and there should be no slur attached to the work we do under the Duty Scheme.

Any qualified solicitor is allowed to give advice on criminal law and represent clients in court on a private basis. To act as a Duty Solicitor you must complete two further qualifications.

Without public funding through the duty scheme and availability of Legal Aid, it is a sad truth that many going through the courts in would receive no legal advice at all."

If you need a solicitor in Torquay, Tuck is your man at WBW solicitors.

However, Tuck's quoted line in court that the law on knives is clear is still not the case. If it was clear, then the police wouldn't have had to issue clarification, which still isn't clear and never will be, because the law attempts to criminalize the carrying of common objects - such as a bread knife in a caravan, definitely a fixed blade, definitely longer than 3 in - and then decides to whether it fancies applying the law or not, depending not on demonstrated intent but on the grounds of whether the police have something else going on.

A bad law, which shouldn't have been passed in the first place because it was hysterical PR rather than effective legislation, is a doily of exceptions. Those exceptions cause resentment because a mohel may have to explain their surgical tools and be excused, whereas a pagan may end up having a court argue about whether an athame is or is not a ritual object and whether paganism is a religion. By then it will be too late; the pagan will now have a record of arrest and charge (or maybe a caution) and this will show on CRB checks.

Mr Tuck is concerned however, that duty solicitors do not command public confidence.

I've no doubt the ones in Torbay are wonderful and completely reliable. However, this is not the case nationally. There is a reason for that, and it doesn't lie in the qualifications of the duty solicitors. There are two main problems; the speed of change in legislation and the increasing politicisation of the criminal law.

The speed of change in legislation puts the duty solicitor ever more on the back foot before they are called to the station. Is the law what the police claim? For example, the case of the stupid old fantasist, Mr Roger Day, both the police and the CPS were convinced that Day had a case to answer. Day had worn an impossible collection of medals at a Remembrance parade. They assured the bench that this was a crime, and the bench duly castigated Day, confiscating property and fining him, which automatically created a criminal record such that he wouldn't be able to pass a CRB check.

The only snag was, the legislation had been repealed two weeks before the "offence" via a commencement order which brought a new act in to force act, automatically discontinuing the old one. It simply wasn't a criminal offence (or at any rate, not the one he was charged with) no matter how much other folk may have been offended.

When Day's solicitor - who may have been appointed later rather than as the duty solicitor - realized this he marched smartly back to court and the bench admitted the whole case was in error. It was too late for Day by then; he had been dragged through court and the papers do not record the striking out of the conviction.

It is a repeated gripe that duty solicitors are too ready to advise clients to accept cautions, failing to recognize that under the CRB and ISA systems - which are being revised but will take a while - a caution is of no practical difference to a conviction with an admission of guilt when it comes to applying for jobs or doing voluntary work which require an enhanced CRB check, and most of them do.

It was criticized in the Beefeater case where Yeoman Warder Bob Brown accepted a caution on what was claimed was legal advice, failing to realize that this would be used in the subsequent employment law case. (See Brown's own comment, I don't know what has happened to the IPCC complaint).

Even more serious is the way the law has been used as a political tool. Indeed, the men's groups claim that the Beefeater case was profoundly political and what should have been a matter of internal company discipline was elevated to criminal harassment on little or no evidence, and none that would stand up in court if it had gone there. Since one warder was immediately reinstated, and Mark Sanders-Crooks was paid a significant out-of-court settlement to withdraw his employment tribunal case and now works with a medevac service, they may have a point.

With the increasing politicisation of what will and will not be accorded criminal status, duty solicitors trying to advise on the criminal law are barking up the only tree they can, but it's still the wrong tree. The client has been arrested for show-trial purposes. The object of the exercise is the intimidation of the audience by the ritual humiliation of the defendant. In the end, it matters little if the defendant wins or loses; the main thing was to have caused as much inconvenience as possible for them.

One example of this is the Paul Chambers Twitter Joke Trial. Blogger Jack of Kent - David Allen Green - is acting for Chambers and has blogged this extensively. JoK became involved after an initial guilty plea seemed wrong to him in law on specific application, and wrong in general as the law was being used in a way which was - we hope - never intended by the legislators. JoK's first task was to achieve a change of plea.

It could be argued that the initial advice to plead guilty was sound as that would have minimized the time spent in court and confined the damage to a criminal record plus what ever other penalty was imposed. Chambers' conviction still stands. He's been sacked and he's probably unemployable in the general professional run of jobs - e.g. teaching - even if he manages to shift the conviction in subsequent rounds of litigation. So he's no better off than he was at the start, and maybe a bit worse.

However, another way to look at it is that when the agents of the state have their kicking-boots on, that's the most important time for the duty solicitor to warn the client that rolling up in to a ball may not save them much grief.

"WBW Solicitors strongly recommends that you do not agree to be interviewed by the police, whatever the nature of the investigation, without first speaking to a member of our team and, as the Criminal Defence Service funds our attendance at the police station, you do not have to worry about the cost of our advice and assistance at that stage"

Earthly Remains

2011-02-16T10:20:00.005Z

Anna Raccoon is looking in to the business of earthly remains after cremation; specifically what happens to metallic parts.

A check through the terms and conditions of the city crematorium for Silicon Fen showed they were fully aware of this. If you wish, they can deal with it or you can collect the recovered metals yourself, so long as you pick them up within two weeks. Fair enough.

There are other instructions:

The coffin must only contain the body of the deceased

And nobody else under normal conditions, capice?

All the shrouds and/or clothing must be of natural fibres e.g cotton, wool, silk etc.

If modom does not know the difference between an acrylic ManU strip and a Fair Trade long-staple cotton tee, our fashionistas will check the fibre content for her.

Shoes or any material manufactured from PVC should not be included.

Lil'ole farm bois will have to take off their gumboots. Crocs likewise.

NO GLASS, BATTERIES or MOBILE PHONES.

Where he's going, there isn't any coverage.

Careers Advice for Would-be Dictators Part 2

2011-02-14T13:30:00.002Z

Dictatoring is a job which falls in to two distinct phases: getting the job and keeping the job. They require separate skills. Yesterday: Getting the job. Today, part two

Keeping the job.

There's no getting away from it; there is always an element of performance, a willingness to go on the stage when other people won't. It is sometimes said that this is a product of the media age meaning 'as recently as the 20th century'. Not so. The performance element has always been there. Elizabeth I realized that she had to appear at Tilbury even though it meant some risk to herself. There's no suggestion she used a body-double. Which ever version of the speech was delivered, the main thing is she was there, attempting to say what the forces needed to hear.

The duff speaker who will go on stage trumps the good speaker who hides. You cannot do this job if you aren't prepared to go out and hoof it to the best of your ability. You don't have to be a world-class actor; the benchmark is Delia Smith.

Perhaps the public ought not be so enamoured of performers, but they are, so there's no point in railing against it. Resign yourself to presentation lessons; you, the irresistible force, have just run up against the immovable object of public expectations.

Once you've got the speaking thing nailed there are six things which have to have their bumps felt and, yes, they are all trying to kill you. It goes with the territory.

* Power apparatus: that's the armed forces, the secret police and the civilian police
* The judiciary and the bloody lawyers
* The economy
* Furriners
* Parliament or equivalent council
Lastly, depending on your regime
* Turbulent priests

The modern dictator will usually keep a pet council for the look of it. Like any pet you want it fed properly and brushed but it is is the pet and you are the master, so it can get do tricks when told or it will be put in the naughty cell and have its privileges removed.

Likewise, the flippin' judges and lawyers are necessary for "resolving" civilian disputes but they are reptillian in nature and don't respond to training the way the mammalian councils do. The best thing to do with them is to keep them very cold as they are more docile when chilled, i.e. don't keep pumping public money at them. Warm one up only when you need it.

Think of them as Gremlins which, as you know, must never be fed after midnight or allowed to get wet.

A key mistake with managing the judiciary is to give it the idea that it can rule on your decisions. The first rule you need to establish is

"This is not justiciable because it isn't for you to question me, the duly appointed dictator. Back in your tank."

Let the judiciary do the bottom-sifting job they are supposed to do; making public tutting noises about crime. They can encourage your civilian police force stay in line and not taking kick-backs, although they seem myopic about spotting corruption if it wears a white coat or a blue uniform.

The civilian police force is important because they will keep things profitable. It is vital that they are kept from corruption if at all possible because they tend to attack the economically active part of your dictatorship on account of that's where the money is.

Even Vladimir Putin is fed up with the levels of corruption.

The economically active part of your economy is a mix of people who work and those who finance it. Now, the police will have to hamper some forms of work, usually prostitution and drug dealing, and you will have to take a view on whether you want them to do that or if you want them to regulate and control both those activities. Drug dealing and prostitution are going to happen whatever you do, so you'll just have to decide whether to get involved or not. Dictators need not pay any heed to what anyone else says; that's the point of being a dictator. Ultimately what you will be judged by is if you allow these things to become a nuisance.

The turbulent priests are bound to give you an ear-bashing on this point, though. They are also a useful method of social control so you will probably have to put up with their twittering; they are a flock of bird-brained screaming peacocks. Think of them as the intermediate stage of feather boas, hats and pillows. Watch out for the occasional ostrich. Big buggers, can break your arm with a blow of their beak, but even they can be turned in to fans for strippers.

A word on Furriners. It is impossible to give hard rules about this because, as the lawyers say, so much is fact-sensitive. In general Furriners or their friends will have annoyingly large amounts of money which obviously should be yours, so the first aim is to get that money. This means you may have to be nice to them but an effective dictator knows how to be strategically nice as well as ruthlessly unpleasant. It is unnecessarily restrictive to confine yourself to one or other behaviour; just work out where you want to be and then do what is necessary to get there.

The effective dictator follows the rules laid down by St Geldorf: just give us the fockin' money, although not necessarily in those words. Later there can be a settling of scores. Purely as a rule of thumb, if you have to shoot furriners, try to make it the poor ones. Avoid over-using your armed forces. They are a sentimental lot; their loyalty can be relied on until the day they suddenly turn on you.

Which brings us to the secret police. These are your score-settlers and no dictator manages without them. This means they are very nearly your equals and can be a source of opposition. However, they are by nature 2ic otherwise you'd already be floating face-down.

Think of the secret services as a pitbull terrier. Not too bright, very agressive, with some behaviour problems due to a tendency to perceive attack even when there isn't one, but one heck of a killing machine when under proper control. Your job, like any responsible dog worker, is to keep the animal lean and to heel. The dog will thank you for it.

Yesterday: Careers Advice for Would-be Dictators, Part 1, Getting the Job

Careers Advice for Would-Be Dictators part 1

2011-02-13T10:00:00.002Z

Catherine the Great. She married in to the ruling family and then the CEO, her husband, suddenly died of someone.
...............

Dictatoring is a job which falls in to two distinct phases: getting the job and keeping the job. They require separate skills.

Today, part 1, Getting the Job

Getting the job depends very much on chance.

Politics, economics, outside events, the behaviour of your opponents, mad bastards on your own side; all these change what we careers advisors call 'the environment'. Many of the world's dictators talk as if they could control these, but that is just their ego talking. An ego the size of Basingstoke is the minimum character requirement for a dictator.

Cuddle-up to power while young, but do be careful not to over-identify with any single source of it. Power-sources such as the military or political parties have an unpredictable habit of self-destructing. People will accuse you of not being clubbable; true, but you also won't find yourself with your career over before it even starts.

At this early point in the dictator's career it is more like being the 2nd-in-charge officer on a complex ship on a choppy sea with a mardi crew and half the stores gone. Even that is a simple job in comparison because at least at sea there is only a limited number of people to contend with, unless the pirates show up.

Several notable dictators claim to have been marked out for greatness from childhood but this is wishful thinking. Had they been recognized young, they'd have been drowned in the bath. Instead, in their larval phase they resemble the weedy specky nerdy type with a grasp of detail which makes them valuable to their elders, and so invited to the big table to do the donkey work.

It's only later that the dictator separates himself - and it nearly always is himself although there are such things as women dictators - from the pack.

That is the first career hurdle for a dictator; looking just useful enough to stay alive but not becoming the natural slave-brain, the one which does all the work but doesn't get credited. At some point you may have to choose: do I want to achieve my aims from this position, or do I want to be Leader?

If you are dictator material this won't even be a question for you. Rather, you'll be worried about recruiting your own reliable seconder and finding all the ways you can be in pole-position when the current leader (or nearest approximation) falls out of the window having decided on a breath of fresh air. Windows are terribly dangerous, architecturally. Almost as bad as lamp posts. That's why the streets are often dark in dictatorships.

In general, dictators don't see being 2ic as tolerable for long, let alone negotiable. It's not something which is open to dialogue. You might as well offer vegetables to a toddler, and for much the same reason; toddlers don't like vegetables and they do like control.

"And I'm President of the United States, and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli!"

Howled George Bush Snr. to the delight of US Teletubbies as one of the most powerful men on Earth got a right cob on, thus illustrating that wiser, better men often don't find themselves in office.

The first quality of a dictator, then, is a certain impervious disregard for rationality, proportionality, or any of the considerations which paralyse brighter mortals. Being terribly clever is not the most important thing. Make the clever-cloggs your 2ic but keep a very sharp eye on them. Don't want them getting ideas about doing your job.

The second quality of a dictator is luck, because with those tendencies there's a fair chance you are going to kill yourself accidentally, and quite young. But then so will your competitor dictators, which is why there aren't that many of them.

The third quality is unlimited energy. This allows you to outpace any enemies who, although not direct competitors, would like to see you out of it. While they are sleeping you will be building networks.

That checklist again:

Ego the size of a market town (minimum)
Not thick but far from clever
Obstinate
Lucky
Energetic

Lastly, you will need the spooky ability to recruit a core of the right sort (i.e. useful) followers early on, when you do not yet have the power to dispense patronage. Even those who are themselves acting as your patrons must think themselves privileged at that point.

This used to be much simper in the days of the aristocracy, using the hereditary principle to attract support. That is rarely allowed now. We have had several effective dictators this way, but unfortunately it also brings out a crop of noxious half-wits. Then again, so does democracy and the secret vote-rigging of the EU. Each claim legitimacy to do the job badly. Why can't they just base their claim to keep their job on the basis of competence?

Still, we don't do hereditary succession any more, except if your name is Bush. Or Benn.

Tomorrow: part II, Doing the Job

The Martyrdom of St Barnabas & Carol Hill

2011-02-08T18:30:00.006Z

St Barnabas has a claim to be the natural saint of the bloggosphere and whistleblowers. He was tortured then stoned, or perhaps burned, to death for talking to the public.

The blogger Fr. Mark White notes that Barnabas may have been as prolific as St Paul, but St Paul was the one who got the attention and whose work survived and made it in to the official list. The MSM, if you like. St Barnabas' work seems to have mostly vanished and he has to make do with the credits others give him.

He's remembered in many churches, though. For instance, at Great Tey in Essex there is a church dedicated to him.

You might think that a vicar of a church invoking such a virtuous man would have an instinctive reaction when faced with someone telling an unwelcome truth. They would rise up and defend the them, especially if it concerned a child.

In June 2009, seven-year-old Chloe David was involved in a case of bullying at the Great Tey Voluntary Controlled CoE primary school, the one associated with St Barnabas Church and its vicar the Reverend John Richardson.

Chloe was tied to a fence with a skipping rope and lashed by four boys. Now, children play rough but this is exceptional. It is sufficiently serious that it may be an S&M act-out, which means you have to record it in full and make sure social services know in case they want to launch further enquiries as to where this game originated.

The dinner-time supervisor Carol Hill found Chloe. Mrs Hill is a first aider and has a duty to the child and her parents which, if ever there is a choice, takes precedence to her duty to the school. She wrote in the school record:

"Chloe has been tied up and then hit with a skipping rope – red marks on right leg and right wrist".

Hill reported it to her employers and left them to do their job.

The notice sent to the parents by Headmistress Deborah Crabb reads:

"She was hurt on the right leg and right wrist with a skipping rope"
"Chloe was hurt by some other children so to reassure you they had all missed part of their lunchtime today and their parents have been informed."

This is not quite the same thing. 'Hurt' implies playground accident. We've all had those. This was deliberately inflicted injury by a coordinated group. It also neglects to mention the bondage.

At tribunal, Crabb explained the boys insisted they were playing "Guards and Prisoners". So she was always fully aware that this was a coordinated playing-out of a fantasy by four boys whipping a small girl. In no sense could it be interpreted as an accident.

When Carol Hill, who also volunteered at the Beavers, bumped in to Chloe's mother, it transpired that Mrs David didn't appreciate how potentially serious the incident had been, nor the sexual connotations involved, nor that it had been in the nature of an attack.

Chloe's father demanded a copy of the original report and furiously withdrew the children from school, citing that the Crabb had attempted to cover up potentially serious abuse and so couldn't be trusted to deal with real abuse by adults if that ever occurred.

It was further suggested Crabb had acted in this way because one of the children who had been involved in the attack was the son of a governor. What else would she cover up? This is how child abuse continues to happen, everybody making excuses for it and closing ranks to protect their buddies instead of the victim.

In response, the school sacked Carol Hill, claiming that she had broken the child's confidentiality by talking to the parents. Unless Hill had some reason to suspect the parents were the dangerous ones, she had an obligation to speak to them if she believed them to have been misinformed, which trumps her obligation to the school.

She's there to protect children, not to save Crabb's face, or the face of another governor whose child was involved in the victimization. Child protection trumps employment law.

The school also claimed that Carol Hill had no right to go to the papers over their attempt to mislead the parents, and that she did so as a matter of personal antipathy to Crabb. So what?

Crabb tried to lie to the parents and untrustworthy governors colluded with her in that. It is a matter of public interest that a head deliberately misled parents and then tried to plead confidentiality in this betrayal of child protection. At no time could it have been in Chloe's interest to lie to her parents. But it was in the interests of some of the other children and the school.

On that sacking panel were three people from the C of E school’s governing body: John Wickes, Cathy Rayner and the local vicar, Rev John Richardson.

Unfortunately, eighteen months later, that which is glaringly obvious to anyone who isn't an employment lawyer also escaped the Employment Tribunal in Bury St Edmunds, another place where a martyr wasted his blood and is probably wondering if it was worth it.

Carol Hill has an inconclusive ruling which seems to say that technically, they could have sacked her for not keeping schtum about potential child abuse, even though every bit of child protection advice says she must speak out, not keep secrets. It's just they followed the wrong procedure for doing it. Yeah, right, a complete accident and not an example of grown professionals deliberately flouting employment law and child protection protocols.

Anybody with a lick'o'sense would rather Carol Hill looked after their children than this poisonous gang. It follows, of course, that Mrs Hill is the one who might be banned from volunteering with the Beavers and could end up with the social services arguing she can't have access to her own grandchildren.

She is the test case for the vetting and banning list. The school will have to notify what ever the Independent Safeguarding Authority becomes that she was sacked for gross misconduct, or would have been if they hadn't got the procedure wrong. (There is still some argument over what the heck it means).

But the whole point is that if she had a choice at all, she made the correct one in putting her duty to the child ahead of her duty to the employer. Rev Richardson should remember that; his duty to God is ahead of his duty to the Church.

As Carol Hill appears not to want to take it to Appeal, that is the end of this case. However, the political ramifications will carry on because now it looks like any employee who discovers wrong doing, especially abuse against children being covered up, is unable to go to the police without it being gross misconduct. The culpability ought to be in keeping quiet, not in talking.

Come on Michael Gove and Eric Pickles, get yer fingers out. This wants sorting. We can't have a big society if people like Mrs Hill aren't allowed to volunteer and exercise their role in child protection. Even Ed Balls - even Ed Balls - knew this case was rotten and wrote to the school to say so.

There is a way, via the admirable Anna Raccoon, to register support for Carol Hill and to wish her well and give her a pat on the back. Send her the equivalent of a box of chocs, more if you can afford it.

Update: Anna is still accepting donations to pass on to Carol Hill.

That's not a knife - epilogue

2011-02-04T00:33:00.005Z

Back in August 2010 the post That's not a knife....THAT'S a knife discussed the case of Rodney Knowles who had been arrested in February 2010 for having a knife in his car. He had pleaded guilty to that in April, but complained bitterly to the press, who took up the story.

The result was that the next month, May, the police found themselves having to explain to holiday makers that an offence would depend on whether there was or was not a good purpose for having the knife of the limited permitted dimensions.

They maintained, however, that they were right to make the arrest and that as Mr Knowles had pleaded guilty to the bare offence, no further details had come out in court. Mr Knowles' own representative, Jolyon Tuck said in exasperation:

"I can say quite safely Mr Knowles has no comment to make."

In July Knowles was charged with serious sexual offences which allegedly took place many years earlier. They included grooming, rape, sexual assault and threats which meant the victims dared not complain.

This week the trial was finally concluded and Knowles was convicted of eight counts of rape, 15 counts of indecency with a child and seven indecent assaults. The threats against the victims had been so effective that they had not been able to go to the police for decades. Knowles pleaded not guilty and maintains the accusations were fabrications. Knowles will serve at least 10 years in prison before he is eligible to ask about parole.

There is a difficulty with what are termed 'historic abuse' cases in that time really does put a question mark over testimony, so it might thought that this is a case of a disabled old man being victimized.

That's not what the whisper-wall says, although you don't have to believe it. It says that Knowles was a wrong'un who used his disability to either make people think he was a victim or to make himself immune from complaints.

Recommendation: Save your sympathy on this one.

Press reports of the conviction

The Herald

The Express

Update: 25/2/11 h/t Jolly Lion in the comments

My living hell at hands of violent and bullying father

Update: 25/2/11 Jolyon Tuck - an apology

Marriage a la mode - all the fun of the law

2011-02-02T11:45:00.001Z

The first effects of the Bull ruling are being felt. Hotels which provide exclusively gay male accommodation, thus distinguishing themselves in the market, have had their business model damaged. This is what the Guyz Hotel "Gay Men Only" said last week.

The screen-grab is fuzzy, but it is from Guyz Hotel index (not the booking terms and conditions) and it says [my emphasis]:

Guyz Hotel has been run as a gay hotel for the past 24 years, and is one of the most popular and longest established gay hotels in Blackpool, catering for gay couples, singles and groups who want a gay environment with quality accommodation. Previously voted 3rd best gay hotel in UK!!

This could mean that it happens to be run with the preferences of gay patrons in mind. That is being 'gay friendly'. This is not the same as saying: "this is exclusively for gay people". It continued:

Guyz is a GENUINE Gay Hotel. That means it is a hotel owned and run BY gay people FOR gay people but beware there are some straight owned ‘Pink Pound’ friendly Hotels locally that display the pride flag trying to cash in on gay money, and it isn’t until you check in that you discover they may be mixed, or even have STAG & HEN parties staying.!!!

No doubt about it then. They won't accept heterosexuals and they won't accept lesbians. They discriminate on gender and sexual orientation; a guest has to fulfill both conditions to be admitted.

If you are specifically looking for a Gay Hotel be sure to ask if it is exclusively gay when booking to avoid possible disappointment

Ordinarily I wouldn't bother about a hotel choosing to run itself for gay men and failing to provide any objective and reasonable justification for doing so. There are a great number of hotels, so even if this one was discriminatory towards me and/or Mr Raft, it wouldn't matter unless a fair percentage of hotels refuse to serve us. In the meantime, Gabrielle's says I can't take Mr Raft in there either, not even if we are both gay.

Still, if that's the price of establishing a profitable business then I can live with it because I'd rather see people rich and happy than poor and miserable. The explicit sexism and heterophobia just doesn't make all that much difference to customer over entire hospitality sector, but it makes a heck of a difference to the hotelier at the modest end of the market where there are large numbers of similar hotels and only limited ways of distinguishing a service.

The EHRC dances round this by summarizing that sometimes it is possible to provide services on a discriminatory basis but that all differences in treatment must have an objective and reasonable justification. (See full guide). Can Mr Raft be refused entry to The Pink House hotel in Brighton objectively (because he's a man) and reasonably so? I doubt it.

For as long as the Bulls down in Cornwall have been tangling themselves up in knots over who can sleep in a double bed, the Guyz Hotel has been trading on an explicit separatist ethic. They cheerfully took up a registration as 'gay men exclusively' through a trade association, BAGS. (To use that link, do a search on the criteria "exclusively gay guests", meaning the website provider and the hotel both believe it is legal and intend to discriminate on sexual orientation.)

However, public money was spent by the Equality and Human Rights Commission on bringing a private civil case to test the implementation of a regulation in a statutory instrument which followed quietly behind the primary legislation.

John Wadham of the EHRC is crystal clear on this: if you are in a commercial relationship then you can't discriminate on grounds of sexual orientation and civil partnership is marriage for the purposes of claims under this statutory instrument.

That Regulation again:

Statutory Instruments 2007 No. 1263 EQUALITY
The Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2007
Made 17th April 2007 Coming into force 30th April 2007

There are explanatory notes at the bottom of the made version and an explanatory memorandum attached, which sets out the intentions of the act and is much easier to read before going on to the Act, although what is intended is not the same as what happens when the technical game of legal ping-pong starts.

5.11 The Regulations will impact positively on people in the lesbian, gay and bisexual community by providing a route to redress against discrimination. However, it will also have a positive impact on members of the heterosexual community, as they too can seek redress for discrimination where, for example, they are refused access to a pub because they are not gay.

So the intention of the Act was that public-access places such as the Guyz Hotel could be sued under this regulation for refusing to accept a heterosexual guest and that their ability to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation would be removed from them. If they continue to advertise on that basis they are either discriminating unlawfully or advertising in a misleading fashion.

Perhaps somebody rang John Wadham (Helpline: 0845 604 6610) and asked about wording on the website because this week Guyz Hotel have hurriedly changed their welcome page which now reads:

Is this enough to keep them on the right side of the law? Regulation 10 states:

Discriminatory advertisements

10.—(1) It is unlawful to publish, or to cause to be published, an advertisement which indicates (expressly or impliedly) an intention by any person to discriminate unlawfully.

There are exceptions and exclusions to this but the general commercial guideline holds, so can any hotel being run for profit hold itself out as a gay establishment? To test that, would a hotel be able to advertise itself as a straight establishment? We haven't had the test case yet and the interesting thing here is that there is only one body which can bring it :

3) Proceedings in respect of a contravention of this regulation may be brought only—

(a) by the Commission,

which probably means that no matter how offended the Christian Institutes are by adverts for gay hotels, they cannot do anything about it, especially if the EHRC have told the hotel that they are in the clear. However, John Wadham and the EHRC might possibly bring one against a hotel which says:

Dire Straitz Hotel has been run as a heterosexual hotel for the past 24 years and is one of the most popular and longest established straight hotel in Llangrebub, catering for heterosexual couples, singles, and people who want a heterosexual environment. Situated close by Llangrebub's new heterosexual piazza, Dire Straitz Hotel is a short walk along the promenade from Llangrebub's tea rooms, ball room and chapel. Your hosts Mr and Mrs Jones would like to welcome all guests, old and new, and assure you of clean quality accommodation and service.

Although Mr and Mrs Jones say they welcome all guests, the wording could be interpreted as showing an intention to unlawfully discriminate on grounds of sexual orientation or simply be discriminatory in presentation.

Personally, I'd rather see the Chymorvah hotel and the dozens of gay hotels such as Guyz or Pride Lodge or Chaps open and doing their respective businesses. The more they are profitable, the less likely the proprietors are to wind up on benefits.

Note that the hotels forbore to go round shutting each other down, presumably because both the LGBT operators and the Bulls can count shillings; it's better for both of them to tut at each other but keep taking the money. It's hard to get guests and the best thing to do is to build up a regular clientele to smooth-out the seasonal demand and offer the national chains some competition.

It is guests who should be deciding if there is enough business to support an exclusively gay hotel; not the John Wadham and the EHRC as to whether they can run and advertise such an establishment. But if the EHRC is going to do this, it must do it equally across the economy.

The EHRC has a staff of 80 lawyers; the commission itself has a budget of £70 million. (I'm assuming the Times added up the numbers in the Report and Accounts, but I haven't checked)

When is it going to oblige the Acqua Sauna to open women-only sessions at a time which is suitable for that market i.e. they can't wiggle round it by doing only 4.30am on a Wednesday morning once a month, regardless of whether there is any take-up of the day passes?

Alternatively, scrap the EHRC, save £70 million, and leave Acqua Sauna, the Chymorvah hotel, and Guyz alone to get on with making a living.

Holocaust Memorial 2011

2011-01-27T22:00:00.005Z

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Cold but not bitter, the Holocaust Memorial in the Abbey Garden was quietly organized with the planting of snowdrops. Pearly lanterns against the grey earth.

A few flakes of snow fell but the air was still; they whirled down and vanished. The gardeners, earth-born in gillets and knitted hats, stood looking much like any workmen from the last fifteen hundred years, waiting while the frozen children sang the song they had rehearsed.

The children's reedy voices fluted up thorugh the bare branches, the ringing of their chime bars created an elegant minimalist memorial, bright as silver, fragile as peace.

Marriage a la mode - popcorn

2011-01-19T22:17:00.007Z

I don't think much of the Christian Institute; it takes unsophisticated people like Peter and Hazelmary Bull and makes meejah capital out of them. Had they read the post Marriage a la Mode - gay and the comments there under, they would have known:

Civil Partnerships are marriage in all but name. In some people's eyes you aren't married but they probably won't accept that you are civilly partnered anyway. The law simply has no traction over that. So What? Nothing follows from this, except if they try to deny you rights to which you are legally entitled, in which case you can take legal action.

It was thought that the argument would come over whether orthodox churches could be compelled to perform gay marriages, but this is unlikely due to primary legislation defining marriage as involving a man and a woman. I also said in the comments that:

I await with a bag of popcorn the clashing arguments of freedom of religious expression and the primacy of civil rights law.

Turns out the the challenge had in fact begun in 2008 in the small Chymorvah Private Hotel in Cornwall and followed the 2006 Equality Act and, crucially, secondary legislation in The Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2007.

The hoteliers, Mr Peter and Hazelmary Bull do not regard civil partnerships as marriage - because it isn't in law or Scripture - and wish to provide hospitality in accordance with their Christian beliefs. They want unmarried couples in separate rooms. Since 1 May 2007 the law has required people in civil partnerships to be treated the same way as married couples in the provision of goods and services.

(I've linked to the Netlawman version because it is the easier layout to read.)

Note that this is secondary legislation, Statutory Instrument No. 1263 of 2007 . The SI was subject to the affirmative procedure, which is supposed to provide more scrutiny than just a nod if nobody shouts. For a description of the procedure, see page 5 of this briefing.

In practice only a dedicated tracker would be able to keep up with the process. Fortunately for Stonewall, it receives some hefty donations to help it do just that. See page 15 of the Stonewall 2009 Report and Accounts for a list of major donors, including:

Equality and Human Rights Commission £96,904
(this was the body which supported the case)
Greater London Authority £12,000
Scottish Government - Voluntary Action Fund £190,921
Welsh Assembly Government £109,996.
Stonewall's (charity no. 1101255) total income 2009 £3,843,063

Do please click on page 15; only four are picked out for illustration. In comparision, the Christian Institute (charity no.1004774) , who advised the Bulls, received donations and grants totaling £1,620,874 in a similar accounting period, but does not list the donors so it is not possible to see if there is a symmetry of receipts from public bodies. The overview suggests not, that the donations are from private individuals, but without the breakdown it is not possible to say for sure.

The explanatory note to the SI (linked below) insists that a reliable consultation procedure was carried out and that there was widespread public support for the measure, and that it reflects such exemptions as where justified. The SI is algebraic to read, full of As and Bs and IFs, so the explanatory note to the instrument is an important aid to understanding

Explanatory note from the UK legislation database:

7.14 The Regulations will make clear that married persons and civil partners are in materially the same position for the purposes of the regulations. This would remove a possible obstacle to civil partners bringing a discrimination claim on grounds of sexual orientation against a provider of goods and services who denied them access to a benefit or service that was being offered to a married person in a similar situation.

Or as it says in the explanatory notes to the made version:

Regulation 3(4) provides that for the purpose of the provisions defining whether discrimination has taken place, when comparing the treatment of two people, the fact that one is a civil partner and the other is married is not a material difference in the circumstances.

When the Christian Institute approached the senior citizen hoteliers Peter and Hazelmary Bull to help with with the case which had been brought against them by Martyn Hall and his civil partner Steven Preddy it became part of the Institute's continuing campaign to show that Christians face discrimination in the practice of their religion.

Sensible advice would have been to warn Mr and Mrs Bull, that in the Statutory Instrument which came in to force in April 2007 was a clause which required civil partnership to be treated as marriage, that they were very likely to lose because they didn't come within any of the exemptions, and if they were told to pay the costs as well as compensation, they could think of a big number and double it.

Had the Bulls backed down and offered compensation they would have been exposed to only a fraction of the expense and strain, and could probably have spun the lower publicity in to increased bookings. The Christian Institute could have explained the current law to the Bulls and not used them as cause celebres. Obviously a client's wishes must take precedence but it is the lawyer's job, even if working for free, to warn the client when they are on a hiding to nothing under the current regime. Let's hope the Christian Institute are picking up the costs for the Bulls.

Let's have a look at that S.I, courtesy of Netlawman. Here's the relevant point edited to bring out the structure:

(4) For the purposes of paragraphs (1) and (3),
the fact that one of the persons (whether or not B) is a civil partner
while the other is married
shall not be treated as a material difference
in the relevant circumstances.

The legal intention is clear: a civil partnership is not a material difference to marriage for the purposes of justifying different treatment. So don't try it, because it won't work.

One of the remarks made by the Judge Andrew Rutherford at Bristol County Court was that if the claimants, Hall and Preddy, had 'set up' the Bulls or were part of a sting operation, then damages would be curtailed. Strange to note, then, that the on-line booking form for Chymorvah makes the Bull's religious views reasonably clear:

Here at Chymorvah we have few rules, but please note that as Christians we have a deep regard for marriage (being the union of one man to one woman for life to the exclusion of all others).

Therefore, although we extend to all a warm welcome to our home, our double bedded accommodation is not available to unmarried couples – Thank you

Whether the Bulls were prepared to let them have the twin-bedded room, Trigge, is not recorded. Interestingly, this is a change from the wording which was earlier alleged to have been "we prefer to let double accommodation to heterosexual married couples only" says the Daily Mail, which suggests the wording was changed after a letter from Stonewall. One wonders how likely it is that Hall and Preddy were unaware of other legal challenges, or that they didn't read the hotel's website? They maintain they did not see it.

What the name and the wording suggests, however, is that the Bulls thought of themselves as running a home where they allowed people to stay overnight, as opposed to a hotel where they happened to be operators who also owned the building and lived there . They had mis-read the situation. Their freehold makes no difference to the legal position.

There is a very limited exemption under s.6 for someone taking in a close family member or similar in to their homes, but s.4.2(b) makes it clear:

Paragraph (1) applies, in particular, to— ...accommodation in a hotel, boarding house or similar establishment,

John Wadham of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission has been crowing that this is a landmark decision. Pish. It is a county court judge reading and correctly applying an SI which contained measures which mean that if push comes to shove, civil law trumps religious protocols in the booking of hotel rooms which are not part of religious organizations, and that goes for whoever is running the business, however small.

In general, the proposition that the secular law (both civil and criminal) should prevail over religious views has wide support. This is not so difficult to understand in the public sphere. Ms Ladele (a previous Christian Institute case) was a registrar and her job was to register civil partnerships, not have an opinion on whether this was morally defensible. Supermarket staff cannot refuse to handle goods on the basis that the items are forbidden in their religion. There are limits however. For example, the law recognizes the right of medics to refuse to take part in an abortion. It recognizes that for reasons of religious belief, pre-stunning before the slaughter of animals may not be enforced even though much secular opinion thinks it should be.

Despite the views of Judge Andrew Rutherford, Mr and Mrs Bull have a great deal of support in the country as it is by no means clear to people with better things to do than grovel around in the pocket-lint of discrimination legislation, why a pair of small business owners should be forced to facilitate sodomy in their own homes against their religion but are prohibited from allowing a paying guest to smoke indoors when they may have no objection to it.

Domesday Ambridge

2011-01-14T15:00:00.004Z

The Gospel Oak in Winter by Ms Caroline Bone
Words on the funeral of Nigel Pargetter of Lower Loxley

Over at the Archers the words continue to fly over the execution of Nigel Pargetter. Vanessa Whitburn, late of Brookside, claims that the wider audience loved it. She believes she is a far-sighted dramatist bringing cutting-edge realism to an old format.

The commentariat - whom Whitburn believes are unrepresentative of the five million audience as a whole - say they aren't listening and don't want that story line. If they wanted realistic drama, they'd open a book or go to the theatre or perhaps pick a DVD. They are a literate audience, not dependent on Whitburn for their high culture. Also, they've got enough trouble with real grief and 'ishoos' and don't need to feed vampirishly off fictional grief, thank you very much.

They regard Whitburn to be much less technically adept as a dramatist than she thinks herself. They don't believe a farmer who has been stuck in a ditch and nearly died, had a tree he was felling fall on a farm worker killing him, and had his cousin squashed by a tractor, would go up on an icy roof in the middle of the night for a poxy banner. There is another Archer who is stupid enough to do it, but he's bone idle and would have left the banner up there until it was current again. They also plain don't like her, regarding anyone who dismisses an actor by phone after almost thirty years collaboration as demonstrating supremely bad manners and encapsulating everything which is wrong with the Archers, the BBC and indeed, the country.

Whitburn was acting within the law; the Archers actors are not on employee contracts but are freelancers and the recording schedule jigs around their other paying work. Still, it was both callous and cowardly, a personal failing, to do that over the phone when the charming Graham Seed deserved at the very least a visit. As many listeners expect bad news about their own jobs in the coming months, they identified with a man pleading for his character to be spared.

Like the failure of the BBC to realize quickly enough why the Jonathan Ross episode was such a danger to them, Whitburn continues to think this was Seed's fault for not being in her office when she wanted to sack him. How dare the audience complain, who do they think they are, the people who pay her wages? In Whitburn's Ambridge, Seed is only a bloke so he doesn't matter and he hasn't got any special cards such as being black or gay or lefty. He should think himself lucky he got a phone call; he could have found out when he opened the script.

The Archers is Middle England's 15-minute coffee-time treat during the day or perhaps their Sunday soak instead of going to church. They are part of the congregation of Ambridge which was extended by William Smethurst when he edited the show from 1978-1991. It is a very broad congregation indeed which stretches from people who put up wallpaper border strips half-way down the wall in imitation of aristocratic dado rails, to people who inherit good furniture.

Smethurst used his background as a journalist to introduce a feeling of 'all human life is here' in to the story lines, although in fact they were there from the start. Drastic measures had been taken to keep the show on air; the BBC had tried to discontinue it in 1972 in an early showing of spite towards the middle-class audience which had dwindled, despite a 20 year relationship with the village created by Godfrey Baseley in 1950.

Smethurst credited the radio boss Jock Gallagher with defiance at the time, a preparedness to do what would keep the show on the road, although he didn't always think much of the story lines which emerged. He joined as a script writer in 1974 and took over the editor/producer's chair in 1978.

Yes, Smethurst spiced-up but the dish but it was still a recognizable product of English literature in a rural setting. The Aga Saga is a regular best-seller, the product for people who would like a country house at Burnham Market but manage with booking a short break in a holiday cottage or, at minimum, lavender bath salts and a face-pack during the omnibus edition, looking forward to a Sunday lunch done in their new Conran chicken-brick. It's traditional, darling. He positioned it for Middle England and proved there was a regular mass audience for an everyday story of country folk, refining and re-tuning the 1950 classic recipe for the 1980s listener, astutely trading on its own nostalgia.

Smethurst has also been credited with injecting humour in to the story, aligning it with comedies of modern manners.

The approach was typified in Smethurst's 1981 book "Ambridge, An English Village Through The Ages". It was a history as written by local people and a history lecturer - all named characters in the show - and contains an early reference to the Reverend A.S. Pargetter who collected and listed the Borsetshire dialect in the 1850s. His son, Edmund Pargetter, extended the volume in to the better known Borsetshire Dialect for publication by the English Dialect Society in 1869.

"Undoubtedly the most famous work on dialect lexis is Joseph Wright's six-volume English Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905) which remains an essential text for all students of the subject. This pioneering work drew on the collections of the English Dialect Society, set up to gather its data and disbanded in 1896 when it saw its task to having been completed. Decades before Joseph Wright, the English gentleman-scholar Alexander Ellis began to investigate regional pronunciation, no mean feat prior to the invention of the International Phonetic Alphabet and sound recording." Says Clive Upton, professor of modern English language, University of Leeds, substantiating that Smethurst was spot-on with his research, making the fictional Pargetters do what the real Alexander Ellis did.

There are caches of the publications of the English Dialect Society in university libraries. I like to think that at least one of them really is by a Pargetter. Smethurst played a perfect hand of fakes which the English adore, smuggling real history in to fictional accounts.

In 1984 the copy of "Ambridge" which I have here, was presented to Martin Roberts, a pupil at Sandown High School on the Isle of Wight, for winning the Thomas Cup for Physics and Maths. There is no way to know for sure - unless Martin Roberts is out there and able to confirm this - but it is a strange book to give to a teenager unless he was a fan of The Archers and was already a conspirator.

The book is beautifully edited, pitch-perfect for a middlin' audience with a sweet-tooth for accessible history. It presages the current popular history shows such as The Edwardian Farm in collecting the reminisences of Doris and Dan Archer, formalizing the back-story of the village.

In a dizzy display of references, even the backstory has a backstory. The Visit Worcester site milks the connections for all it is worth, as it contains some of the locations Godfrey Baseley had in mind when he wrote the original. Go to the Bull at Inkberrow and complete the circle by looking at Archers memorabilia.

Smethurst kept up the fun with the Archers Official Companion, followed by a cookery book, and then Dan Archer's own memoir. Other spin-off publications fostered audience affection and involvement which helped protect the BBC when serious questions were raised over the BBC's future in the 1980s. Smethurst left the programme in 1991, having been begged to save a TV soap. Vanessa Whitburn took over.

The difference could be summed up as 'pomposity'. Smethurst was not above jazzing up the story, but his game was building a show and hanging on to it, not lecturing the audience. Whitburn was reported by the reputable commentator Gillian Reynolds to have enjoyed working for Smethurst but said "of course the programme was a lot frothier and lighter and less substantial in those days".

Smethurst had a book to sell by 1996 "The Archers: The True Story" and was not impressed by Whitburn's handling of the vehicle. He disapproved of what he called Whitburn's "urbanisation, feminist propaganda and political correctness"

That's the nub of it; Smethurst writes stories you might want to read which build on a tradition of engaging characters and emotions, plausible plotting and properly researched factual backgrounds. Whitburn is writing a story of contemporary issues which claim to be in a rural setting but her agenda is already a period-piece of hectoring social finger-wagging, frozen in the dying days of Spare Rib magazine and Brookside itself, the decline of which Wiki summarizes thus:

"The Gordons were considered miscast and generally unlikeable; furthermore, the abrupt death of Alan in the 2002 siege aftermath, followed shortly after by Debbie dying in a car crash, gave the remaining family a depressive on-screen presence as their children dealt with becoming orphans."

Whitburn's Ratner moment - named for when Gerald Ratner blew up his own company by insulting the intelligence of his customers - came on the Today programme the morning after the 60th Anniversary edition. Two things became startlingly clear; the character was dead, not injured - the cliff hanger had not resolved that - and the real life actor had been prepared to carry on in the role for as long as he was able, so the storyline didn't emerge from him wanting to leave the show. The audience united in rage rather than grief that they had lost the one character they really liked and enjoyed hearing.

Everyone holds their breath for the RAJAR listening numbers, as if hundreds of cogent dramatic analyses from the core audience were not warning enough; this programme has jumped the shark.

Or perhaps it was pushed.

Gate

2011-01-09T11:40:00.000Z

One autumn the wind blew so hard that it pushed the garden gate, which opens in to the back lane, over its rebate, sticking it fast. We were trapped.

Aieee! Trapped!

I checked the chocolate biscuit supply and reckoned that so long as you didn't mind a walk, we could manage with just the front door and go along the main road.

The back gate was dodgy all winter, a constant menace as to whether, having let us out, it would let us back in.

Eventually, the weather turned and it was possible to take the gate off and repair it. While Mr Raft sawed and sanded and chamfered and drilled and glued and screwed, I made the tea.

Standing with a mug of tea and admiring his exemplary handiwork, I looked at the other end of the garden where the bushes grow.

That gate, the other gate, the secret gate, was working the whole time.

The destruction of Ambridge

2011-01-04T09:31:00.017Z

There are several places I would cheerfully see blown to kingdom come and they are Albert Square, Weatherfield, Emmerdale, and now the village of Ambridge. Leaving aside the first three - because I don't watch their pox-souled inhabitants tear lumps of each other and pretend they in any way reflect the state of the nation or amount to drama - I was an occasional visitor to Ambridge.

Ambridge had the greatest capacity to reflect real-life events in fictional characters to see how things would play out in real-time, using radio in a way that TV cannot match. Like news, satire, magazines and blogs, Ambridge could anticipate events and react to them, sometimes changing the scripts at short notice if the show was overtaken by reality.

Often criticised - rightly - for crude pro-Labour politicking, the series nevertheless managed to examine serious issues such as what happens when tenant farmers go in to debt, how do conservative congregations feel about lady vicars, coping with dementia, planning applications and other personal things such as teenagers taking up with dopey boyfriends or rivalries over pie-making.

They had to use the dramatic convention that people kept talking to each other long after real-world people would have said "That's it, I'm never speaking to you again" and somebody would probably have strangled Linda Snell by now, but you have to give radio dramatists a break; if they don't have people talking they haven't got a show at all.

When long-time inhabitant Phil Archer died, it was because his actor, Norman Painting, died. Many people felt that they were listening to the end of an era in the fictional funeral because his voice had been a welcome presence in their lives. Painting was lucky; perhaps because he was no political threat, he was allowed to live out his radio life as Phil Archer to the conclusion which many people reach where they die of natural causes after a long, blameless life and are loved by their friends and family. It does happen.

Inconveniently for Vanessa Whitburn, the producer, Painting died in late 2009 and so Phil Archer had to depart four months later in February 2010. Ideally, he should have gone in to deep-freeze and been given a ceremonial cremation on Lakey Hill for the 60th anniversary, and hang the rules about open-air incineration. It would have been a controversial story line because it involves conspiratorial villagers, a conflict of laws and opinion, and a possible prosecution of Jill Archer. The cremation could have been disguised as a New Year's bonfire party with the vicar dithering over whether this was or was not in accordance with Phil's Christian beliefs. A defiant Jill could have been arrested and carted off to Borchester nick, with an unaware-Usha suddenly finding herself defending both Jill and her own husband. "We didn't tell you, Usha, because we didn't want to compromise you. This way, you genuinely had no idea Phil was on the pyre".

Instead, the talentless Vanessa Whitburn decided to bump-off Nigel Pargetter merely by pushing him off the roof. The monumental stupidity of slaughtering one of the handful of people in Ambridge who aren't gargoyles, was laced with malice. He had to die because he was old guard conservative despite his hippie ways, because he was a portrait of a certain kind of Englishman, and it had to be in a pointless way, nothing heroic about it, because in Ambridge it is forbidden to say anything good about a gent. All conservative viewpoints are to be put in the mouths of the most dented and discredited characters, such as Shula and Brian Aldridge.

The audience are not happy. They go to Ambridge to hear Nigel, not to bury him. The loss of yet another male character, especially a fundamentally decent one, is another reason to stay away as Ambridge gradually turns in to Tenko. Besides, we are on the brink of months of real-life misery. Fictional grief is surplus to requirements; there's plenty of real grief to go round.

It isn't the first time Whitburn has fouled-up. The 2006 Ruth Archer extra-marital affair was so hopelessly out of character and such an unwelcome development that the audience switched off. It was even lampooned by the late Humphrey Littleton on "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue" as the traditional way of celebrating the 15,000th edition. The writers hastily patched up the episode and put it in the Never Mention This Again box. There are some things the audience is not prepared to hear, even if you managed to write it convincingly.

But then, from the BBC's point of view the killing of Nigel Pargetter it isn't a foul-up; it's what they most enjoy - the symbolic killing of England.

Update: audience reaction

Desktop Meme

2010-12-31T22:30:00.005Z

Having been tagged by JuliaM I must cheat; I'm travelling in search of England - always - and am camped out on a kitchen table. It looks minimalist and organized, which is a lie. I have therefore included my handbag, which is the back-office. Over the years the bag has got bigger, like my waist. Hmm.

While the rest of the world is wondering about Julian Assange's sex-life and his chances of surviving the fury of half the political world, I just want to know: how does he live out of a suitcase? What is in his wash bag, or does he rely on stocking up on mini-shampoos and disposable razors when someone pays his hotel bill? How many socks and underpants does he carry, what does he use in the way of notebooks and pens and novels - and don't tell me paper is redundant, it obviously isn't, you've only got to look at the meme pictures.

I have stared at the pages of the Rohan catalogue until the images fade. I still can't see how putting packing packs inside suitcases helps, although I have used cheap laundry nets to separate underwear etc, just to stop things tieing themselves in knots when I'm not looking. My favourite part of LOTR is where Galadriel gives the Fellowship of the Ring miraculous travelling cloaks which weigh nothing, wash-up a treat, are warm and waterproof but have superior wicking ability, have protective colouring and roll up to the size of a hanky. I've got a space blanket - the silvered plastic membrane - but it's not the same thing. Looking like a giant oven-ready chicken fillet is going to attract orcs.

I'm not a hiking traveller; I'm the sort of traveller who wears Cuban-heeled shoes and a jaunty hat. My natural habitat is at a tea-table, next to a log fire, looking through the window at the marvellous landscape full of booted fools. I do not approve of stamping all over the landscape, rubbing holes in it. That's my version of conservation and I'm sticking to it.

The leaflet is from Daleside Bungalow, Masham, North Yorkshire. I haven't stayed there - I just scooped up the information. Masham is a town blessed with magical water which is converted in to mysterious beer at the Black Sheep Brewery. There is also the Theakston bewery and some disagreement which we need not go in to. Bygones.

On the corner of Masham market square, huddled next to the church, is the Suncatcher Cafe. In contrast to the frilly tea rooms and restaurants, the Suncatcher is a memory of hippie holidays. The open log fire is hung about with beads, silk bags, masks and modern paintings you may wish to own rather than run screaming from. The coffee and food is good, the music is cool.

Masham distills a working vision of England. It has hardly any national retailers and still has locally run butchers, bakers, greengrocers and general grocery/deli stores. A bigger range of locally-produced goods is available than is normally the case - and it is local rather than just badged products, which are the cuckoos in retailing. They look like local produce but many of them come from the same factory in Leek, Staffordshire. The market square is used for parking when the market is not on; it is paid for by an honesty-box.

It's important not to get carried away with a romantic idea of honest yeomen dancing round a Maypole, tra-la, because mains water, electricity, and emergency services don't happen by magic. They happen because we have put vast energy in to massive engineering projects, then do our best to make that technology invisible. It is far too easy to become confused between the theatre-set and reality. Let the safe treated water stop and we soon see how keen folks really are to go back to the days of a strip-wash in a bowl of tepid pond water and no heat until you've made up the fire.

Having said that, if the world is going to become a difficult place in 2011, there are few places better than Masham to ride it out. Maybe Leyburn or Thirsk, if you want more shops.

I tag The All-Seeing Eye. Happy New Year.

Rock 'n' Stroll

2010-12-21T21:05:00.011Z

Over in Ishmalia, Mr Smith is musing on the meaning of furniture; its significance beyond the functional which often turns out to be the least of its jobs.

This piece, however, is all about function. It is a rocking shoe box. You keep your gear in it - brushes, polishes, cloth, special magic things for making shoes fit, spare shoe liners - hence no more lost shoe-care frenzy.

Before you go out you step on it, one foot then the other, and give the show a quick once-over. The rocking action immediately demonstrates its superiority over fixed shoe-boxes; it adjusts easily to your stance. It is light but strong. Best not to use it on a highly-polished floor, though, as there is a chance of it skidding away.

The box has the air of a successful woodwork project by somebody - look, it's obviously a male manufacturer, it just is - who wanted to learn how to cut, join and fit wood. It is the next project on from making a simple rocking crib; it has two hinged lids which shut snugly. It is the way it shuts properly, has not warped or split, even after many years of being stepped on, which suggests that it was done with pride. The person wanted to make a really useful thing while learning the craft, and they did.

I don't know who it was made for or what happened to them, but I do know who it was made by because their neat pencil name is still in there. M. Chamberlain.

It's possible "Mike" - that's how I think of him - was a 4th former when he made it, but the number might just be a note to himself for some other purpose, such as assembly order or project number.

Woodwork projects are often given away, usually to mothers, but it is possible M Chamberlain kept his box and used it for his professional footwear. The neatly folded cloths, the sets of shoe laces, one tube of sports white and the parade gloss which were already living in there were huffy when I introduced suede-cleaning blocks, a nu-buck cleaning spray and gel footpads.

Now, after finding it in a charity shop, it is back where it belongs, where it ought to be and where it deserves to be, sitting in front of a mirror so that it can supervise that all-important wardrobe check before facing the paparazzi : Have You Cleaned Your Shoes?

Thank you, M Chamberlain.

Solstice

2010-12-21T01:08:00.004Z

The solstice will be on Tuesday 21 December at 23:38.

If the sky remains clear it may be possible to see an eclipse of the moon from Britain. Just in case it clouds over, I took the picture on the early hours of the 21st.

"The eclipse runs for three and a half hours, from 0633 GMT to 1001 GMT, although the stage of total eclipse -- when the Moon heads into the "umbra" cast by the Earth -- lasts from 0741 to 0853 GMT."

Normally sounds wash around here; water, planes, distant traffic, trains, the wind tells a tale it has carried for a while. Once I heard it singing in Russian.

Tonight there were no flights, no cars or lorries moving, no sounds from the rails and the wind is holding its breath. The moonlight was so bright everything was casting sharp moon shadows and the silver trees were full of fairytale forms.

It is about minus 12 degrees Celsius and even sound is frozen.

Vote H'uh, What ever is it good for?

2010-12-13T13:53:00.011Z

FTB has returned to his excellent blog to muse on what has happened to the country since the election and wonders why he has found it so difficult to address urgent matters which need public illumination.

"it might be that I am still in shock that so many people voted for the Labour Party at the General Election in May."

The following observation will not cheer him up.

In the constituency of South East Cambridgeshire the election was unusual in that it wasn't possible to vote Labour at all as the candidate, John Cowan, had the Labour whip withdrawn just before the election. By then the slips had been printed so although his name went forward and was tagged "Labour", he wasn't really.

It might have been more honest to put a black line through the word "Labour" but they don't allow officers to tamper with the voting papers. If he had carried the vote, he would would have been the duly elected.

In practice, in that constituency, Labour fielded an outsider because they were never going to win it anyway. It turned out, however, the candidate was not just an outsider but a liability with whom they did not wish to be associated and about whom they had already been warned.

Asked for quote so close to the election, the Labour party spokesperson said they hoped people would vote Labour. This was despite the fact that they obviously couldn't because there was no Labour candidate on offer.

Still 4,380 citizens either didn't know this or ignored the short statement at the polling station. The results were:

Conservative James Paice 27,629
Liberal Democrat Jonathan Chatfield 21,683
Labour John Cowan 4,380

The numbers would not have swung it for the Lib Dem chaser but if a Labour voter is going to move, it is not going to be all the way to the other end of the political spectrum (not that that is very far these days) but to an intermediate "stop the Tories" point i.e. the Lib Dems. Some of them must have made that move because the Lib Dem vote increased by about 6%, although we cannot know if the vote came from people who had moved from the Conservatives to the Lib Dems either.

The mystery remains: why didn't the Labour vote collapse to about 500 people, in line with the other independent?

Some of it will be down to ignorance and a determination not to read any papers, blogs, listen to the radio or tv, read any election material frantically shoved through the door by the hopeful Lib Dems, or even to bother reading the notice at the polling station, which I'm told was displayed on the desk where the slips were given out.

Perhaps those voters came down determined to register a preference for Labour, despite the fact that our parliamentary system requires you to vote for an individual and exercise your judgment on the basis of what you think of them personally. It is in fact impossible to "hold your nose and vote Anything" because the Anything party does not stand. All you have are individuals and you either like the cut of their jib or you don't.

It is possible that some of those votes were postal and may have been entered before the row broke out, but after all this there is still the ritualistic core vote. They vote Labour because they do and no amount of facts - such as there being no Labour candidate - will shake the belief that it is the right thing to do.

If they are prepared to vote for a non-existent Labour candidate, it is logical to vote for an existing one - even Phil Woolas - as that at least represents an improvement over an imaginary candidate. Arguably.

The "Can't Do" Culture

2010-12-02T21:15:00.010Z

MPs famously bought goods from the John Lewis list for the same reason the rest of the Waitrose-classes do; they are supposed to make the whole business of buying homewares very simple. You - or we- pay them, they deliver and set up.

Hoping to experience what life is like in the Nomenklatura, I purchased a washing machine and paid the fees accordingly. Could I have got the machine cheaper by going through the warehouses? Yes, and saved at least £84, but the point about John Lewis is they are supposed to make life like their adverts.

The store offered me a delivery 'slot' of 7 hours, somewhere between 7am and 2pm. Fortunately, I don't have anything else to do but wait for deliveries - it's not like I've got a life or anything - and, anyway, the weather is a reasonable excuse for delay.

At just before 12pm - note, five hours in to the delivery 'slot' - they called and so when they arrived the door was open, the old machine had been drained (as far as possible) and disconnected, ready to go. The space was clear and clean, all the little valves were turned off.

The new machine was brought in, unpacked, the hot-fill pipe capped off with a brass screw-cap (it's all cold fill now) and the cold-fill hose offered up to the opening in the side of the sink unit. Due to an anti-flood device on the hose, the hole was approximately 3mm too small and need to be relieved .

"We can't do that, we aren't qualified" said the man. Things went very bad from there on.

It inspires utter contempt when a grown man says he can't file the edge of a hole in chipboard. It's not cabinet making. It's not even woodwork. It doesn't matter that strictly speaking, it's not their job. I could not hold myself out as a man, allegedly the possessor of a gentleman's plumbing, if I were unable to slightly enlarge a hole in a material which is only one-up from cardboard.

I would not expect to seduce women if I could not do even that. Heck, I would not expect to seduce men if I could not do even that. I would expect even the dogs and sheep to run away laughing, spurning my sexual advances when they found out I could not ease a hole in chipboard in a non-visible part of a kitchen.

We aren't talking about 3ml all the way round or making a hole from scratch; we are talking about nibbling at a couple of points on an existing hole so the anti-flood device - roughly the size of large matchbox on the end of the cold-fill hose - goes through.

"We can't do that" repeated the mis-named installer, sticking rigidly to the John Lewis liability line.

Thoroughly bad-tempered words were had with the customer service moppet at John Lewis, who asked if I didn't have somebody who could help me make holes in chipboard? I told her that as I had been waiting for five hours, if they had said they needed a 7.5mm hole, I'd have nibbled it out ready with a junior hacksaw.

We were talking, I repeat, about removing a couple of millimetres of chipboard on the edge of an existing hole. You could probably do it with determination and steak-knife. A century of feminism and 130 years of public education for all, and somehow it strikes an otherwise capable young woman as inconceivable that a mere female could slightly enlarge a hole in chipboard for herself if given due warning of the necessity of access. No, she must perforce throw herself on the mercy of her saw-bearing male relatives.

Miss Customer Service has probably passed all the customer communication courses but still failed to predict that "Haven't you got anyone who can help you?" is a) beside the point and b) tantamount to calling the customer an ugly old bag who can't get a man. This is unlikely to elicit a warm response, especially if true. We aren't here to argue about how well-connected I am to a tribe of obliging hole-enlargers; that is irrelevant. JLP charged a premium for the machine plus an installation fee then, faced with a few millimetres of awkward chipboard with photocopies of wood on top, gave up and ran off for an early lunch, looking for an excuse to not do their job but still get paid.

I then proposed to enlarge the hole myself and wanted to know when they were sending the installers back.
"They've gone to the next job now" said the woman.
"No they haven't. They are having a shufty fag as they've got some spare time now and I can see them over the road".

The young woman then made an offer she obviously thought was supposed to have me grovelling "Well, provided you can do it Right Now, we'll send them back".

I got the saw from the tool box and set about the nibbling. Thirty seconds later the installer appeared at the front door and asked when I'd be finished. I said - and I accept this was inflammatory - "Between 12 and 2" and told him to wait in the van until I called him. For some reason, JLP does not seem to like waiting for the customer, although of course, it's alright if you wait five hours for them. He very well knew it was about a ten minute job. He was scheduled to run a test wash - to make sure nothing was leaking - so all that stuff about having to go immediately was utter bollocks. He was skiving and was narked about being caught out.

"Well, if that's your attitude, I won't try to help you"

At this point I just stared and said "Help?"

Did this man think was doing me a favour, that he had not in fact been paid the agreed price to install a machine but was here as a voluntary washing machine installer. How he was helping? Helping would have been to whip out a Stanley knife such as they use on the van to slit the packaging (not that he thought to bring in a pair of scissors to cut the polythene) and set to relieving the hole that few millimeters, possibly whilst saying 'This is not really my job, but if you don't tell anyone, I won't'.

Or, if feeling very worried about the company line and possible liabilities, then he could have said 'Look, can you cut out that bit quickly? Only I'm not insured. I'll have a sandwich as it is snap time, then do the installation'. A brave man would have done the former, even a lawyer would offered to do the second.

This was waiting for the customer to sort it out and then trying to act like the big man for finally, finally condescending to do one's job, but only under perfect conditions. This is the Can't Do Culture.

I've known fey gay hairdressers to have more guts. 'Pass me the Big Rasp, Julian, the one we normally use for your toenails, I just have to adjust this access port'.

You wouldn't get a Pole talking cobblers about it not being his job; he'd punch a hole with his bare fist and then shrug: 'You want hole bigger, I make hole bigger. In Poland we have hardwood kitchen, not chipboard, not since Soviets.'

You wouldn't get an Afghan tribesman taking nonsense from a kitchen fitment. Admittedly their standard answer is to shoot the hole bigger with a Kalashnikov and then wonder why the cold water is spraying everywhere, but they would hold their manhood cheap if intimidated and defeated by 3mm of compressed sawdust.

Since I refused to give his ego a blow-job and be abjectly grateful for being allowed a few minutes of his valuable time, the installer flounced off. I'm not really sorry; I didn't trust him to do the job at all.

This is the job being done. I nibbed out the unwanted material, cutting it in little triangles. Following the installation instructions I completed the job (the transportation bolts had already been removed but I found I could have managed it as they give you a special spanner) then called a grown-up plumber who stopped by to check I'd done it correctly. It is three connections, four if you count screwing the cap on to the redundant hot water valve. Anyone can plug in the electricity. Screwing in the cold valve is fiddly, but no worse than a bottle-top. Connecting the waste hose is just pushing a hose on to a tapered pipe so that it fits snuggly. A spirit level helps tell if the feet need to be adjusted. You can tell when it is working properly; the clothes get washed and the floor does not flood.

The most difficult part turns out to be the sheer handling of the weight and tomorrow I will get glides to help move the machine in to its housing.

Climate of Fear

2010-11-19T15:25:00.008Z

Kitchen Cabinet review of threats

1) The climate is going to collapse if I drive over to see my mum, so I'd better stay indoors and eat turnips for the rest of my life, except when going out to pay tax.

2) Terrorism. We'd better not say by whom, or how this particular source is a competitor ideology got up in the garments of a religion. Even though it has been documented for the last thirty years at least.

3) Banking Crisis. There's no money and there won't be for at least the next 150 years. That's not a threat - it has already happened.

4) Health scares. Did you know fat is contagious?

So pfft to any measly threat of invasion. Don't I realize that eco-famine, unpredictable violence and the Dreaded Lurgi, plus the country being flat-broke, are going to get me long before the police can suicide me for being insufficiently obsequious or out after curfew without offering them a blow-job?

I was going to suggest knitting something for comfort, but having looked at my last attempt, another suggestion might be better.

One thing restores a sense of control over the immediate threatening chaos. Soup. That is why witches make it in a cauldron. The cauldron represents the world so if you've got control over the cauldron, that's one tiny model of the world back in working order.

However, a freezing river fog has descended and if anybody thinks I'm mucking about trying to light twigs in air as wet as a haddock's handbag, they are very much mistaken. Soup will be indoors and a level of abstraction will be used to liken ordinary pans to ritual vessels.

Vegetable soup is the simplest, according to what you have laying around. I happened to have a butternut squash, four small onions and a lonely cooking apple.

The easiest way is to roast everything before it goes in the soup as this intensifies the flavour. Cut the squash in half, scoop out the seeds, then lay it flat-side down in a little oil on a roasting tray. Surround with roughly-chopped onions. Roast for about 15 minutes on a high heat; remove the onions to the soup cauldron before they frazzle. Check how cooked the squash is. The chances are it will need another ten minutes, turned over on to its round side. Add the peeled apple slices at his point. Apple roasts very quickly.

When the squash and the apple are done, scoop out the soft flesh and add them to the onions, along with any oil which might be hanging around in the roasting pan. To turn them in to soup all that is needed is water, seasonings and spices to your satisfaction. You might want to add vegetable stock, depending on your tastes. (I like it).

Now, as squash can be fibrous it is preferable to liquidize the soup with a stick blender. This matters less with starchy vegetables such as carrots and potatoes which will settle for being mashed. If you use a stick blender it is important to add cold water to the veg because hot soup .... well, I'm sure some clever-clogs already worked out how hot liquid affects plastic-sleeve blenders.

You now also have a pile of squash seeds. You can have a go at planting them next spring or roast them as a snack. Wash them and pat them dry, turn them in oil and roast on a high heat for 15 minutes until about half have popped. They aren't too bad, but I can't see them challenging other snack foods. Too husky.

The purpose of the soup ritual is to provide a breathing space against the onslaught of the times. Perhaps it is an illusion, but often it seems that something, or somebody, is trying to scare us out of our wits in order to gain our acquiescence to any number of repressive measures.

Yasmin Ahlbi-Back: Our most precious possession

2010-11-15T09:24:00.011Z

I was at a Hollywood party with my very good friend Kate Winslet and was expounding the finer points of how to deliver a line from Hardy with the suitable regional accent.

I explained that it is all about imagining one has a mouthful of bumpkin, like a country pumpkin, and all the doors and windows are open so it is a bit chilly.

"Oooh Arrh Mr Frodo" like that, as if the nipples are standing up, which is what we thespians call the finer points.

This is what a famous professor of linguistics told me, although I already knew it because this was how I did it when I was a drama student, but I turned down the place at RADA in favour of becoming the only non-white columnist in the whole of the British Empire. It is very lucky for everyone I did this as otherwise William Paxton would have wasted his time inventing greenhouses to throw stones in and movable Twitterer.

Unfortunately, like many silly white women who can't keep a husband, Kate has let herself go. I've given her diet tips, a copy of my exercise DVD and some of my tamarind gravy which makes an excellent facial toner. But I've warned my son - he's a barrister you know - against painted Jezebels, even Kate's.

Speaking of barristers I've decided not to mention the subject of gay barristers such as Gareth Compton and stoning any more,

Reluctantly, I have instructed my police force not to take matters any further but a rather thick officer said 'Well, m'arm, that's for the CPS to decide whether there is a realistic prospect of a conviction under section 127 (1a) of the Communications Act 2003' as apparently it is not up to me at all! This is ridiculous. We'll have people complaining about being arrested for no reason except being a Tory next, as if that wasn't reason enough.

What a disappointment that the youth of today are unable to stand up to wicked dictators like I was when I bravely ran away from Uganda. Fortunately we respect freedom of speech over at my column, which is why the editor has decided twice now to delete all the comments as their support for me was embarrassingly overwhelming.

Remembrance

2010-11-14T17:33:00.004Z

The price they paid was very great.

But then look how beautiful their children are.

It is time now that only those who served or are serving can lay wreaths on our behalf. I’d rather be represented by them. For some years there was a justification that the politicians themselves had taken some measure of risk, but that no longer applies.

No more grandstanding for pols; they get to stand at the back quietly while better men and women step forward.

Yazzer Ahlbi-Back - A memoir part 1

2010-11-12T10:45:00.009Z

1972. Standing on the grass airstrip of my farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong hills, my honest native bearer, Moma Akawimbe, knelt with the tears rolling down her good-natured black face. "Massa don't go" she begged, terrified that she would be left without my secret recipe for Spicy Ackee dumplin's.

Alas, I had to leave as I had received a proposal of marriage from the Heir to the Throne and had to tell him personally that it could never be. He was too white, too male, too everything for me to seriously consider it.

He would just have to get over my musky dusky beauty and satisfy himself with some pale neurotic shicksa (so my Jewish best friends told me). But he could never forget me.

Alas, my true love Vincent Cable was, unbeknownst to me, in the arms of my arch-rival, the twinkle-toed Olympia Rebelo. Her with her nursing qualification and PhD in Music (she played the bassoon and it was rumoured all round Kenya that she could hold her breath for three minutes) she had the insubstantial attractions which shallow white men are often overly-impressed by.

Once he saw my advanced qualifications in literature and lapped my coconut dhals I was confident there would be no more talk of all this foxtrotting and the military two-step. But first, I had to fulfil my destiny to become The Only Non-White Columnist in Britain.

And except for all the others, dear reader, I did.

Down at the old Bullen Bush: Sloe Gin

2010-11-08T12:00:00.006Z

This is a bullen bush. You have only a few days left to find one - usually on the edge of a park or wasteland - and harvest the berries. They've had all the sun they are going to get and now have the maximum sweetness a sloe achieves, which isn't very much. The frosts should have encouraged the interior cells to burst, which is quicker than mucking about with a fork. When the berries are perfectly ripe they will slide off the branch between the wicked thorns, which saves having to pick out their little stalks. As the wind has combed the leaves off the bushes now it is easier to see where the knife-thorns are.

Take care when gathering the them; blackthorn is notorious for spikes which easily turn septic. It is not a suitable job for children. Always promise the bush that you'll plant a few of its cherries in a new hedge and wash hands very carefully when you get back. I'm surprised it isn't more widely used as a security plant as it is graceful and doesn't go dropping dead every five minutes. When the leaves are off it is easy to see its Gothic architecture and it would be a simple matter to prune it in to shape. The dry twigs are said to burn with a bright smokeless fire.

Wash the berries, discard any remaining stalks or leaves, and either freeze them in 8-ounce portions or get ready with a lotta bottles. 8oz is approximately the volume of 40cl. It is the interstices between the berries which determines the amount of sugar you can cram in. This is chosen purely because the bottles I'm using happen to be 70cl.

For the next trick you will require two 70cl gin bottles; one full, one empty, and a calibrated jug as this recipe works by volume. As you are going to add berries and sugar the most basic safe supermarket spirit is suitable. A funnel will help enormously with getting the sugar in to the bottles; use a paper cone if someone has run off with yours.

Having either set about the berries with a fork or open-frozen them to burst the cells, post 40cl or 8oz of berries in to the empty bottle, pour over 35cl of gin and top up with sugar, then replace the caps carefully to be quite sure they don't dribble. Visit the bottles every few days to give them a shake and help the sugar dissolve. They'll be ready for the New Year party or can be laid down for a year.

As I had a pair of 75cl jars I made a thicker syrup and buried a cinnamon stick in. This will be suitable as base for other recipes where a fruity spiced syrup is required e.g. punches, pudding sauces, or to sweeten oil and vinegar dressings. The proportions here are 40cl berries, 35cl gin, one cinnamon stick and a great deal of sugar to fill up the space. Some people like other flavourings such as cloves.

The berries should steep until the New Year, but they can be tested at Christmas. It is best used, in my opinion, as a spritzer base as the berries and the sugar are a sure recipe for a terrible headache if drunk to excess. Sloe gin can be laid down for a year and many authorities think it should be, while others think the best thing to do is ignore the sloes and use damsons or make blackberry vodka instead. Maximum keeping time is 3 years.

Approximate proportions:
A shade more than half the volume of the bottle should be filled with berries, then covered by a more precise half-bottle of gin. The amount of sugar is determined by the displaced space between the berries and is roughly one-third of the total volume.

For anyone who has not handled the berries before: do not attempt to eat them as they have a gravelly stone. No matter what you might have heard they are not suitable for eating. Yes, I have done the experiments. If the gin comes out very thick, sieve it through a tea-strainer. If it comes out fairly thin, consider running it through a coffee filter paper to clarify it. The sugar may look like a lot, but it is the sugar which draws out the sloe flavouring in to the gin.

This preparation uses very little time beyond the collecting of the berries, and that counts as exercise. It produces sloe gin at roughly two-thirds the cost of a commerical bottle.

Pillars of.....

2010-10-17T10:08:00.007+01:00

For anyone who has not already watched Channel 4's The Pillars of the Earth, may I respectfully suggest they don't bother. You can't get the two hours of your life back (ten in total for the series) and when you die you'll still be kicking yourself that you wasted them on this futile exercise. I know I will.

Have a sleep, read the original Ken Follett novel which earned its popularity (unlike his wife's expenses claims), acquaint yourself with the Bible or go for a creep round a real church - evensong if you can find one - and you'll have one less thing to reproach yourself with on judgment day.

Perhaps it is evidence of the chilling of legitimate criticism that the mainstream reviews suggest a slightly over-blown adaptation of a historical novel. Or maybe they didn't watch it and just skimmed the press-release which came with the freebie. What they should have been gurgling with their chins on the deck, is that it is a turkey which is only of use to monster collectors; the projects where somebody should have torched the lot rather than carry on.

When lead character Tom Builder (Rufus Sewell) is chucked over the battlements in an early skirmish he should have pretended to be really hurt; he's an actor, why didn't he try that? Or the pyrotechnicians should have done a more thorough job, burning not just the required set but letting it all get out of hand (clearing the area of personnel first, though).

Instead, it is a giant pile-up of a dramatic disaster for which no one person can be held entirely responsible, although the director SergioMimica-Gezzan has some explaining to do.

You can see how the accident happened, though. The producers, Starz, took $40 million (or was it £40m?) and hoped to repeat an earlier sword and sandals success: "Spartacus". It would also have the satisfying feeling of bopping HBO on the nose, as they think they are so cool after the acclaim given to "Rome".

Starz looked for a winning historical property and The Pillars of the Earth is undoubtedly that; 14 million copies sold says so. It's got a plot in the classic style, intertwining the highest and lowest in the society even if that relies on implausible coincidences. It has sex, violence, political skulduggery, romance, and Follett's own commercial instinct that if he wanted to know more about cathedrals were built, so would everyone else.

Starz were not mean with the sets either. If you want to set fire to a church, go ahead. To this they added a willingness to hire Britain's best-loved character actors, and Donald Sutherland doing a Dumbledore for lovers of craggy old Oirish men with beards. Gandalf? Pah.

OK, so the original author is in the clear. Follett handed them a working intellectual property. John Pielmeier then sculpted out the screenplay.

There's a convention with historical adaptations set anywhere between the Romans leaving Britain and Anne Boleyn; they are allowed wooden dialogue because it emphasizes the fairy-tale quality of the period. It's a balancing act well known to any amateur re-creationist. You have to stay in character and accept that the character can only have access to the knowledge and concerns of its own time. So long as you do that, the character will be convincing. If you import modern idioms or concerns the illusion will usually break down, unless the writer, director and actor have exceptional talents. Hmm.

Rufus Sewell did the best he could with what he was handed; the job of convincing us he was a cathedral builder, but the only real spark of grief was in him bemoaning his uselessness. He clearly knows nothing about building. For a start, he offered to begin work immediately. That's against law and nature with builders, that is. To be really convincing he shouldn't have turned up until episode 3, stayed for a brief scene, then announced he'd forgotten something and would be back in a jiffy, thereafter to appear in episode 5 at the earliest.

Sarah Parish took a spirited run and recreated a lustful mummy role of the sort we used to give to Stephanie Beacham. Parish (playing Regan Hamleigh) was required to do a great deal of the exposition as it is well known that all the male leads must be dolts. That being the case, the only other sensible character to have supported would be Queen Maud, but she doesn't.

Huffily referring to "Rome" the director got Parish to deliver as many scenes as possible while being humped. Except that in "Rome", they understood that this was to show the intertwining of politics and sex. Here, it was so that later they can re-cut it as an advert for crack-repairers. Verily, that ceiling needeth re-painting.

As for Ian McShane, we can only hope they flagellated him for real as that's what he deserves for this pantomime baddie. The role calls for someone who can portray a psychotic priest on the make; they have to be Lovejoy on the surface and a horny little devil underneath. What we got was a tetchy old quean and a hint of s/m, as if the entire film wasn't a form of audience abuse, especially that shot of what appeared to be a naked McShane trying to cram his ample frame in to a cilice. Better get the blacksmith to put a few more links in; that one has shrunk in the wash.

A special raspberry, then, for the casting directors Zsolt Csutak and Priscilla John who got the roles the wrong way round.

Sewell has already shown he can combine charm and ruthlessness when he played Count Adhemar in The Knight's Tale. He has his limits and one of them is pretending to be ordinary. Put him in as the charming manipulative priest who will turn over a kingdom to get to a bishopric and you have half of the motor of the story.

Despite knocking on a bit, McShane has the rumpled and obsessive look of someone who might have been a builder, albeit one of the flashier types. That's handy, because in this story that is exactly what the builder is: flashy and well on the way to architect. Promises you everyfink on parchment, but wait until you try to worship in it. There would have to be some massaging of the story to show why he was advanced in years but had young children, but that was far from unusual in the context of the 12th century with its mortality rates for women in childbirth.

The debacle was summed up close to the end of the second hour when the renegade nun Ellen (Natalia Worner) is accused of being a witch. Instead of saying a few words at her trial she jumps up on a long table, marches down it, squats, lifts her skirt and pisses just in front of the horrified Waleran (Ian McShane). Now, I don't know if you've ever tried this but there is a great risk of slipping off. However, I think the risk was worth it and I'm almost sure they faked the wee, but they probably didn't have to.

Then she stabbed him with a concealed knife and McShane tried to act surprised, but I don't think he was - and not only because he's read the script.

Here, have some Lovejoy to take the nasty smell away.

La Bamba Le Monde

2010-10-14T10:59:00.008+01:00

Over at the Pub Curmudgeon's they are compiling the Ultimate Pub Jukebox.

Graphic courtesy of Mark Wadsworth

I've proposed Richie Valens "La Bamba" because it is a universal song with the power to lift the mood. Everyone knows it even though they don't know the words.

This clip is the proof. It is of a La Bamba festival in Japan at the Saitama Super Arena.

The Saitama Super Arena is gorgeous engineering, worth a visit just for its improbable self.

The gigantic structure, weighing 15,000 tons and 41.5m high, moves a distance of 70 meters horizontally, a taking with it with approx. 9,000 seats and numerous facilities to transform the Main Arena into a Stadium accommodating up to 37,000

The innards glide about and re-arrange themselves in the manner of a tethered space ship.

Classic Cars for Low Carbon Day

2010-10-10T16:27:00.016+01:00

Butties gone, apple crumble and custard next

Drove to King's Lynn for Saturday's Anglia Car Auctions Classic Car event. They don't let you bid unless you've registered at the office, so there's no danger of finding you've accidentally bought a monster whilst scratching your nose. Hundreds of people come for the spectacle or seeking after that dream on wheels they've always wanted to own. Maybe they will find it; such things exist and here is the proof.

This is not the sale where you buy the sensible work-a-day vehicles for hauling paint or animal feed or ladders or grannies; this is not where you buy a wife. This is where you buy a mistress. The crowd is 95% male. The clothes are Clarkson, but proper bloke jeans and leather bomber jackets. As this is an Event, not just a sale, the jeans and shirts are clean.

There are one or two golfing jumpers with plump wives on their arms; in the Mormon fashion these are men come to buy a second wife and they want the approval of the first wife. A fat lot of good it would be to have the missus at odds with the other missus.

It's £4 on the door to get in, for which you get a catalogue and full access to the cars. Unlike a museum where you aren't allowed to touch the display, here you can open everything and even get in if you wipe your shoes.

The gates open at 10am so there is plenty of time to have early lunch in the cafe, although it is a crush before the auction starts. Then have a good look round the offerings, making notes of the lots you are particularly interested in. Everybody looks very serious; as thoughtful as a farmer leaning on a fence and figuring the price of cattle at a county show.

The fascinating - it means hopelessly expensive and will take all your time - projects are the ones which have been discovered hidden in the back of barns or old buildings. One day a 1954 Sunbeam Talbot 90 Drophead Coupe was parked in a dry but very dusty garage, possibly because it needed some repairs.

Going by the condition of the cars which have been found after twenty years in store, this one might have been parked around 1970 after 16 years on the road. This is not just a car sale; this is industrial archaeology. (For a full picture, see the first link. The car is the first item on the catalogue).

Eventually it is time for the sale proper, so everyone makes their way to the great sheds where the cars will be driven through - it's generally a bad sign if they can't even make that short journey - and either dealt of held in front on the auctioneers dais.

There is a sign on the door showing we are in Kansas:

There is a tang of religion in the air which is full of the incense of hydrocarbons. The auctioneer leads the ceremony from his pulpit and everyone has their catalogue out, marking the price or bids for the cars they would have liked for themselves. A few cars are withdrawn either because they fail at the door or because they never make the reserve price at the block.

Then auctioneer treats them all the same with his manic chant, the glory of which is to make it sound like he is running on a wheel when everyone can see that he's just a man standing with a microphone. From the floor and at his elbow there are phone bids coming in from people who are giving instructions from home.

The car of the show was the surprise star; lot 96, a 1974 Citroen Pallas mechanically sound and exceptionally restored by a body shop specialist. Delta blue with a black leather interior.

The detailing of the original design shows that when the French think about Futurism they are touched by genius. The white stripe down the side, for example, is not merely a visual motif. It is a ridged rubber scuff-strip which fits in to chrome holders and can be renewed to protect the car.

This car looks like a space ship and is as fresh as the day it came off the drawing board. In the end there was only one bidder for it, who got it at the reserve price of £20,000.