No bed for Bacon, Brahms v Beethoven, UK’s back door, an unmanned(ish) ship, and assisted dying

9 March 2024

A friend said recently she was “sad about the state of the world.  I think I might ditch the news.”  I know exactly how she feels. 

I scrabble around each week to find some good news to help cheer everybody up but there ain’t much out there and I’m coming to the conclusion that we just have to carry on until we can’t take any more, then give up.  I’m thinking of taking out a subscription to Hello magazine so I can chuckle at the irrelevant and boring activities of people I’ve never heard of. 

I am actually cheering myself slightly at the moment by re-reading a book that makes me laugh:  No Bed for Bacon by Caryl Brahms and SJ Simon.  You probably need to know a little about Shakespeare and the times he lived in to get some of the jokes but it still makes me smile.  For instance, it explains in passing that the Elizabeth’s second best bed, which Francis Bacon wanted, was delivered to a cottage in Stratford.

There are quite a few books on my shelves waiting to be re-read (the ones I don’t want to read again go straight back to the charity shop) so I’m not sure why I picked this one, an old orange Penguin edition.  It might be because I remembered a discussion with a friend many years ago about the relative merits of Brahms and Beethoven;  she said she thought Brahms’s music was much more intellectual and I said that I thought Beethoven wrote better tunes, which just goes to show what a philistine I am.

One piece of good news this week came when the Daily Mail reported that David Neal, the UK borders inspector, reported that 10 private jets a week land at London City airport alone and let the passengers in the UK’s back door, without their having to go through any of those tedious passport checks that make life so difficult for drugs and arms smugglers, illegal immigrants, child slavers, politicians and other undesirables.  The government immediately took the obvious action and fired Neal.

But we must look on the bright side.  After the budget, Rishi Sunak praised the government’s successes in an interview on Thursday and said “we’ve got inflation down from 11% to 4%”.  I found myself squirming as I listened to this hypocrisy.  After all, wasn’t he one of the chancellors who had so dismally failed the repair the damage inflicted by George Osborne’s disastrous years of austerity and the later collapse of Trussonomics?  In fact, when the Conservatives were first elected, inflation was about 3% but saying “we’ve got inflation down from 3% to … er … 4%” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

A similarly cavalier approach to the truth was taken in the triumphant announcement that an “unmanned” ship is being tested in a Norwegian fjord.  It’s 78 metres long, is being controlled remotely by computer operators in Southampton and will only need a crew of 16 instead of 40 or 50 people.  Yes, I wondered that too.  16 crew on board = “unmanned”?  Perhaps they’re all women.

But National Insurance is going down by another two percentage points, from 8% to 6%, in April which means you’ll have to pay 25% less from next month in addition to the 20% reduction you were already given in January.  If you pay it, which the poorest and the oldest don’t …

The amount the government will receive from national insurance contributions will therefore reduce by 50% in a year and Jeremy Hunt promised to remove it entirely in due course.  What?  Where else are they going to get the money from, did you ask?  That’s being passed on to the next government to decide so if, as many people expect, Labour will win, they can take the blame for having to fill the hole Hunt has dug for them.

And look at the wonder of George Galloway who’s been elected as the Workers’ Party of Great Britain MP for Rochdale despite having supported more parties than Winston Churchill.  He seems to be on the left at the moment but he backed Nigel Farage campaigning for Brexit and voted Conservative in Scotland three years ago.

What chance does integrity have when it gets in the way of someone’s ego?

In response to another attempt to legalise assisted dying, the Ministry of Justice has reminded us that “the Government is committed to providing time to the Backbench Business Committee which gives MPs the opportunity to bring forward debates of their choice and MPs also have the option of introducing Private Members’ Bills which provide MPs with an opportunity to address public concerns and to change the law”.  Or, in plain English, no comment.

In the real world, there is increasing pressure for something do be done in England as its legislation lags behind outliers like Jersey and the Isle of Man.  It isn’t even a political matter and various surveys have shown that about 3 in every 4 people support the principle.  There are of course differing opinions about the various conditions that should be included and the extent of protection for vulnerable people but a change has been backed by an ever-increasing number of famous names including Jonathan Dimbleby, Prue Leith, Terry Pratchett, Esther Rantzen, Diana Rigg and Harriet Walter.

I rather fear a new law might be too late for many of us so I’m keeping my own inherited supply of pills (which I’m hoping haven’t lost their power in the decades since they came into the family) and I will take them if the need arises and, like my mother, die alone if the law hasn’t been changed enough to let someone hold my hand as I drift away.  My only problem is that I need to do so much tidying before I go but I naturally have an up-to-date Will and a DNR just in case.

(Ken Kesey said he wanted to die during an LSD trip.  Does anybody know if he did and, if so, was he able to communicate his feelings as he died?  “Wow man, just look at that!” perhaps?)

Good news / bad news, Wills, assisted dying and social care

31 December 2022

‘Life good in Ashby de la Zouche’ doesn’t sell papers.  ‘Attractive young woman shot dead in club’ does.

This we all know, but why?  Is it that we take ‘good’ news for granted so it’s boring?  Or do we get some sort of voyeuristic pleasure from hearing that something bad happened somewhere we weren’t? Perhaps there’s an element of “There but for the grace of God go I” (a phrase whose origin is attributed to an early 16^th century Christian preacher when he saw a bunch of condemned people being escorted to the scaffold to which he was later taken himself).

But why does the UK still edit films of killings and accidents?  We seem happy to watch films in which ‘deaths’ are shown in graphic detail, heads exploding or people bleeding slowly to death (thank you for that one Quentin Tarantino) but we know they’re actors and special effects.  In real life, film of somebody being shot or knifed in the street is always stopped just before the end so we don’t see any ‘real’ person’s death.

This might be because of a wish to spare the dead person’s family and friends from seeing the actual moment of death, but I can remember seeing a copy of Paris Match from the 1960s which included a photograph of a plane crash, showing the smoking wreckage and the roofless cabin with burnt bodies still strapped into their seats.

We all tend to say “If I die, I’d like …” while the one thing we know for certain is we are all going to die so we should say “When I die, I’d like …”, and yet we’re still curiously reticent when it comes to talking about death.

Many of us also seem to be superstitious about – or just keep putting off – writing a Will, thus risking leaving our partners and families and friends in a labyrinth of paperwork and bureaucracy at a time when they’re trying to cope with their grief.  (So if you haven’t yet written a Will, go and do it NOW and remember it’s Very Important to follow the exact rules;  solicitors and charities will often help do this free.)

But what about dying?  We’re not all lucky enough to die in our sleep and there are some nasty diseases and conditions that kill us slowly and painfully over a long time.  If this happens to me, I’d want to be allowed to make a choice over when I die, preferably before the pain becomes so bad that palliative drugs can only reduce it by sending me to sleep.

My first blog in this series, posted on 19 August 2018, explains why I am committed to the principle that ‘assisted dying’ should be legal in the UK.  Fans of Emmerdale will also have followed Faith Dingle’s struggles with what to do when the pain of her terminal breast cancer became unbearable.  (Spoiler alert:  she died in October.)

The Netherlands already has a much more enlightened approach to letting people die in comfort and with their family;  in Switzerland, Dignitas apparently charges £10,000 and the Australian state of Victoria passed assisted dying legislation in November 2017.  Closer to home, France will hold a national debate with a view to legalising assisted dying in 2023, a Bill is moving forward in Scotland, Jersey launched the second part of its consultation in October, an Isle of Man MHK has been given leave to introduce a private members bill on assisted dying in the House of Keys in May 2023 and the Irish parliament is launching a special committee to consider the subject after a poll showed 63% of people in the Republic supported the idea.

Meanwhile, in the UK, the powers that be are miles behind and can’t even get their heads round the problems of social care.   The result is inevitably that the bulk of the support comes from privately-owned companies whose owners are more interested in getting rich than in the service they claim to offer to the UK’s 1 million dementia patients – and all the others who need care – charging their ‘customers’ an average of £75,000 to £100,000 each per year for residential care.  However, we have to remember that these owners are perfect examples of capitalist entrepreneurs worshipped by free-market Conservatives so the present government is understandably cautious about offending potential donors.

Luckily for these entrepreneurs, dementia patients tend not to know there’s anything wrong with them and can’t remember who did what to them so victims of abuse can’t testify against them.  I have a feeling it’s worse for people watching someone develop dementia, seeing the person they knew and loved slowly drifting away and dissolving, leaving only a shell.

The care homes regulating body, the Care Quality Commission, has reported that more than three times as many care homes in England were given the worst possible rating in 2022 as were in 2019.  Their latest report also showed some homes to be filthy and unhygienic, that medicines weren’t properly administered, that patients had unexplained bruising and injuries, and family visits were restricted.

In addition to delaying the dementia strategy it promised in May to deliver by the end of the year, the government has also postponed its promised funding reform to “fix social care”.

As a carer myself, I know just how exhausting it can be, both physically and emotionally.  We pay a private company some £10,000 a year for ¾ hour of help every morning and the best part of £2,000 for a week’s respite care every so often.  When our savings expire, we’ll be broke and on benefits.

In the meantime, the company’s balance sheet shows that it (i.e. the husband and wife who own it and are the only directors) increased in value by £236,000 in the year to March 2022 and by £430,000 in the previous year.  (The accounts don’t say how much extra, if anything, they paid themselves as directors.)  If the service had been provided by the government, that’s an extra £666,000 it could have used to improve and increase care services just in our small local area.  Isn’t 666 the number of the beast?

Still, this is traditionally the time we look back to last year so I’ll limit myself to the good things because I’m getting short of space.

Ummm.

Women showed that football can be interesting and players don’t have to be failed thespians.

That’s about it really so a happier new year to all of you who are starting a new year tomorrow.

PS:  A friend has criticised me for saying last week that we gave away our winter heating credits, a perfectly fair criticism of something which could be seen as an attempt to impress people rather than trying to encourage more giving.  In fact, I gave a lot of thought to this before leaving it in because I had been inspired by a real person (Joan Bakewell in case you’re interested) saying several years ago that she always gave hers away and I thought that, if she did it, then so could I.  And, if somebody read this and thought here’s somebody I know who’s doing it, maybe I could.  Nevertheless, I apologise unreservedly to anybody who found it distasteful and an attempt to brag – it’s not a competition.

Monarchies and republics

11 September 2022

The Queen died on Thursday. 

From the palace’s announcement at lunchtime that her doctors were concerned, it was obvious that her death was imminent but it was still a shock to hear the word when somebody reminded us that Prince William is now heir to the throne because his father is king.  We’ve known the queen for so long that the word ‘king’ gave me a jolt.

Charles had obviously had advance warning because he was in Scotland and able to get to Balmoral quickly so he was with her as she died which is, somehow, rather comforting.

Rumours that she only hung on for as long as she did to receive Boris Johnson’s resignation are likely to be the product of a warped mind.

She certainly hung on for the Platinum Jubilee celebrations so as not to spoil the event for everybody else, and to confirm Liz Truss as the new prime minister;  48 hours before she died, she got up and dressed and stood to welcome Truss with her usual beaming smile, despite what one doctor thought was a bruise left by a canula on the back of her hand.

The initial tributes were predictably sombre with Truss and Keir Starmer appearing to have agreed that the former would cover the boring platitudes while the latter gave a much more human and impressive eulogy.  It was then open house for other MPs to pay their own tributes.  Boris Johnson spoke very well, showing that he can actually talk without erring and umming when he’s done his homework, and Theresa May amazed everybody by making the chamber laugh with a personal anecdote of an encounter with the Queen. 

Other tributes poured in from around the world, including a touching message from Vladimir Putin in a letter whose contents were released by the Kremlin.

My mother used to say the Queen had one of those faces that made her look severe when she was actually just relaxed but she had the most wonderful smile (and laugh) and, had she not been a monarch who took her job very seriously, she’d just have been described as a nice person, which is surely the highest praise anyone can give.

A number of people writing about the Queen’s sense of fun have mentioned the American tourists taking a selfie of themselves with her protection officer, her having tea with Paddington Bear and being parachuted into the Olympic games (it was apparently her idea to greet Daniel Craig as “Mr Bond”).  My favourite story about her came from someone I knew when I worked for one of her son’s charities.  As he’d walked into the room to see the Queen, he tripped over a corgi and was mortified but the Queen said “Don’t worry, it’s his own fault for being the same colour as the carpet”.  What a graceful way of putting someone at ease.

I’ve never had any strong views about the different arguments for monarchies or republics.  I was an admirer of the Queen but the times they are a-changin’.  In the last few days, we’ve been shown ceremonies that have never been publicly seen before.  The pomp of the public parades was certainly impressive but they are for show.  Any power the monarch has is exercised behind closed doors and tends to influence the beginning or the end of parliamentary decisions, but they do have some real power.

One assumes that a British republic would impose similar limitations on the powers of the president so the basic choice could perhaps be reduced to a simple question about whether one has greater faith in nepotism or elections.

In companies, nepotism has proved almost without exception a singularly inefficient way of choosing the next boss but this may be because there is competition and you know my belief that anybody who actually wants to be in a position of power is, by definition, unfit for purpose.

Now we’ve given up regicide and importing foreigners, there’s a fixed hierarchy within the royal family which determines who’s going to be the next monarch so there’s no competition, or choice.  For example, if 58,496,132 Brits all suddenly die, I’ll be king. 

This makes the system dependant on who gets born when but they’re brought up for it from when they first grimace and cover their ears as a bunch of planes thunder overhead so they know what’s expected of them, and that stability is essential.

Presidents are elected for fixed terms more or less democratically and they are part of a political process so their actions and popularity depend on the mood of the moment which is often (always?) influenced by or linked to events outside the country concerned over which neither the presidents nor their governments have any control. 

Even presidents who elect themselves for a life-term in the job rarely die in post and there can be political – and all too often violent – disturbances when they step down or are removed.  A president should have the internal and international respect – and the humility – of somebody like Nelson Mandela or the Dalai Lama, but there aren’t enough of those to go round.

The advantage of British hereditary monarchs is that they are above politics and can provide an impartial sounding board for the leader of whichever party was disliked least in a general election.

The other problem with presidents is how to choose them.  We live with a broken electoral system that allows small minorities of voters to form governments and even smaller minorities to be completely unrepresented in parliament.

As I write this, I realise I’m talking myself towards being a monarchist, but only faute de mieux.  We’ve been lucky enough to have had an incomparable monarch in E2R.  Let’s hope C3R does as well.

So why don’t we make all royals subject to the same laws and taxes as the rest of us, let them stay in power and see how it goes.

Are death and consciousness coterminous?

7 August 2022

Imagine the anguish of parents whose 12-year old son suffered catastrophic brain damage while attempting an internet ‘challenge’, whose heart and lungs and entire metabolism were being kept going by machines and, although there was no sign of activity in the brain stem, they hoped he would recover. 

Imagine the anguish of the medical teams who weigh the chances of recovery in such cases and discussed at length what was best for Archie Battersbee.

Imagine the anguish of judges who had expert medical advice that the boy was, for all practical purposes, already dead and pleas from the parents who hoped for a miracle, and had to decide whether the life support equipment could be disconnected, leaving the boy to die ‘naturally’.

After every possible appeal, Archie’s parents were told last week that his life support systems would be disconnected and he died yesterday.

I’ve written before about the blurred boundaries between life and death and when a living creature stops being alive and starts being dead, and I’ve written more recently about ‘consciousness’.  My own feeling has always been that all the atoms gathered together to form my body will disperse over time and become parts of other things (I know this is an ongoing process and ‘my’ atoms are in a constant state of flux anyway but let’s assume for simplicity that a body is a body).

Since we do associate consciousness with individuals, and therefore their bodies, we rarely consider whether consciousness can exist without a body although there does seem to be some evidence that this is possible.

An American journalist, Leslie Kean, is one of a number of people who have gathered stories that seem to indicate consciousness can continue to exist after death and she (yes, I know, but we know Americans can’t spell and anyway why shouldn’t people spell their names how they like?) spent a lot of time researching cases for when this might have happened and published her conclusions in Surviving Death (Three Rivers Press, NY, November 2017).

It’s easy to dismiss this as nonsense, wishful thinking, unscientific etc but just because nothing we’ve discovered so far can explain it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.  Dark matter / energy accounts for most of the universe and rigorously structured scientific experiments show that something is out there but nobody has yet managed to do much more than give it a name. 

The American philosopher William James said that if you want to disprove the belief that all crows are black, you only need to find one that isn’t.

One of the most intriguing cases she describes involves young children having memories of somebody else’s life.  Typically, these start when a child is about three and have gone before they are six and a friend of mine said, when her son was about four, he said he’d been killed in a car crash.  He wasn’t upset by this, he just said it and, when she later asked him about it, he couldn’t remember having said it.

One of the most famous (and contentious) cases is that of James Leininger who, from the age of 2, was fascinated by old fighter aeroplanes and had memories of a pilot who’d been killed when his plane was shot down near Iwo Jima in the second world war.  Some of the details he gave were detailed enough to allow them to be subsequently checked against official records.  The problem is that his parents are enthusiastically religious and many people have seen James’s story as ‘proof’ of reincarnation while others, less religiously inclined, have questioned the accuracy and chronology of his story and debunked the reincarnation theory.

However, more than 2,500 children have spoken of ‘memories’ of a past life and 1,400 of them have been independently verified.  The majority of these early memories are of the lives of people who have died relatively close to the child’s home and within the fairly recent past (Leininger was unusual in this) and many of them are from cultures that do accept reincarnation.

What nobody seems able to explain is why more people don’t have these memories if we have all been reincarnated;  or how some people’s consciousness can communicate anything after their body’s death.  And anyway, why should apparent ‘memories’ of somebody else’s life automatically mean they were reincarnated rather than their minds had just picked up some cosmic flotsam?

Then there are what are known, conveniently but inaccurately, as ‘after death experiences’ when somebody has been pronounced dead but has been subsequently revived by doctors.

One woman who had suffered a cardiac arrest said that she remembered rising out of her body to look down on the medical team working on it.  She said she had seen a nurse kick a sheet of paper under her bed as they worked on her and then she drifted up and outside the hospital and described in some detail a tennis shoe on an outside windowsill on the third or fourth floor that couldn’t be seen from anywhere else.  After her recovery, she described these scenes and the nurse confirmed they had kicked some paper under the bed;  they also checked the windowsills and found the shoe exactly as she described it.

Dr Janice Holden, professor emerita at the University of North Texas, summed up the problem here rather neatly:  “If consciousness can function apart from the body in a reversibly dead body, perhaps it continues to function after irreversible death” but this can’t ever be proved because of “the methodological failure of researchers to find reliable, irreversibly dead people to participate in their studies.”

One obliging 87-year old had a heart attack and died while he was undergoing an EEG for a deteriorating bleed in the brain.  Recordings of the 30 seconds before and after his heart stopped beating showed changes in brain waves, including alpha and gamma waves, whose actions are linked to memory recall.  The study suggests that neural activity continues after blood stops flowing in the brain but this is just one case, which is impossible to replicate, and there is still the difficulty of deciding an exact moment of death when different bits of the body die at different rates.

Some people who died but were resuscitated described ‘near death experiences’ when asked what they remembered from the time they were clinically dead.  A 1988 study of 344 consecutive cardiac arrests in the Netherlands, published in the Lancet in December 2001, reported that 82% had no memories but 18% (62 people) did.  The researchers contacted all surviving participants again after two and eight years and found significant differences between people who had had NDEs and those who hadn’t.  The former had no fear of death, were convinced of an afterlife and felt their lives had greater meaning, but many also suffered loneliness and depression from their inability to share the depth of their experiences with others.

Even more common are ‘end of life experiences’ which one study claimed were felt by 50-60% of people at the end of their lives, with the dying seeing visions that were never frightening and often made them cheerful and relaxed. 

Other events linked to somebody’s death that might show that consciousness doesn’t always die when the heart stops beating include relatives waking from sleep at the exact time, clocks and watches stopping, and pictures falling off the wall.  (I’ve written before about various experiences some friends and I have had which we felt was some sort of comfort offered by the person who’d died.)

There have also been psychic readings, seances and materialisations, which occasionally seem to reveal information that only the dead person could have known, such as the location of something that was lost, but these seem to me to be part of a wider field of sharing knowledge in ways that we don’t yet understand rather than as evidence that consciousness may continue after death.

If consciousness isn’t always tethered to the body and can roam free, perhaps it could somehow communicate with other consciousnesses and account for things like telepathy? (I’ll maybe come back to that someday.)

In any event, I hope that the Battersbees have some sort of experience that comforts them and helps them through their grief.

Heatwaves, politicians and badgers, Scandinavian gods and assisted dying

24 July 2022

Last week saw the end of the UK’s heat wave with record high temperatures recorded all over the country and a number of houses in London destroyed by a fast-moving grass fire.

Travel was also disrupted.  Asphalt on roads has always softened in hot weather but last week was hot enough for local councils to send out gritters full of sand to stabilise road surfaces.  We stayed at home behind closed curtains but it conjured up pictures of being able to coat the windscreen of a car following too closely behind with a fine mixture of sand and tar.  (Those of us who lack charitable feelings for drivers who follow so closely you can no longer read their numberplate in the mirror make a point of driving through puddles and it always works:  the car will slow and back right off, especially if you can find a really muddy patch.)

Railway lines used to come in short sections with a one-centimetre (½ inch) gap between them so they wouldn’t buckle when they expanded on hot days – hence the distinctive ‘diddley-dee diddley dah’ sound that trains used to make as their wheels crossed the gaps.  Nowadays, they use welded rails that are hundreds of miles (well, metres) long and travel is much quieter, but they were only designed for normal UK temperatures and last week there was a risk they could get hot enough to distort and derail trains so many services had to be cancelled or run more slowly.

With its customary dedication to impartial and unvarnished truth-telling, the Daily Mail reported on Monday that “snowflake Britain had a meltdown” on a “sunny day” and somebody called Stephen Robinson, who describes himself on LinkedIn as a “speechwriter and consultant [for] companies operating in the energy sector”, condemned the Met Office (which he described as “woke” and “alarmist”) and the BBC for becoming an “all-singing, all-dancing amen choir for the climate alarmist ‘Blob’” and saying “In Africa, real men would wear shorts and safari jackets and hydrate by ordering another few beers”. 

Its editorial view went further and said “Listening to apocalyptic climate change pundits and the BBC, you’d think Britain was about to spontaneously combust”, thereby neatly encapsulating much of the paranoia of the right wing about climate change alarmists, the socialist bias of the BBC, and those ghastly ‘woke’ people.

By Wednesday, the Daily Mail had moved on a little and was talking about “a near post-apocalyptic scene with gutted houses and burnt-out vehicles”.  Always open to new ideas the Mail, at least if their preference for long-held prejudices over facts is so suddenly exposed.

Then, on Thursday, they reported that Boris Johnson “crushed his puny critics with customary wit and eloquence in what could be his final Commons appearance as PM” after a particularly egocentric, repetitive, irrelevant and untruthful speech saying “we got Brrexit” done in the face of the known contribution of tariff barriers and the bureaucratic delays it caused to trade that have contributed to increases in the cost of living, the Ireland problem and traffic gridlocked at Dover.

When a prime minister makes their last appearance in the House of Commons, it’s customary for everyone on both sides to stand and cheer them out but Johnson has been so unrelentingly disastrous a PM that nobody on the opposition benches stood. Theresa May did, but very slowly, and didn’t clap.  I suddenly found myself warming to May for the first time ever.

Now we find ourselves waiting for paid-up members of the Conservative Party to elect our next prime minister from a list of two, their MPs having kindly reduced the list from 11 to make the choice easier for Bears of Little Brain.  I said last week that there were 175,000 of them but this week’s estimate is 160,000.  And falling?

The party is unsurprisingly cagey about the demography of its membership but educated guesses are that our next prime minister will be chosen by 4 out of every thousand people (0.38%) eligible to vote in general elections and these will be primarily male, pale and stale:  70% are men, 97% are white, almost half are over 65, and 55% live in London and the south.  (Their average age is 57 but the average age of Labour party members is 53 so perhaps the whole idea of any party membership is less attractive to younger people?)

The inews website said the choice was between “batshit and the billionaire”.

The two contenders are now trying to woo voters.  Rishi Sunak criticised Liz Truss saying you can’t fund tax cuts by borrowing although he had done precisely that to fund his “whatever it takes” approach to the Covid pandemic.

Truss herself has vowed to scrap all existing EU regulations within 16 months.  These include laws protecting employment and the environment agreed by all the EU nations and she will have to introduce new legislation to replace most of them even though the civil service has been significantly reduced in size.  Good luck with that.

She also remains committed to the mass slaughter of badgers despite a paper published in the Veterinary Record earlier this year that concluded the culling of badgers over the previous 9 years had no significant impact on bovine TB in cattle.  If new licences are issued, people who enjoy killing things will have to go back to killing peasants – sorry, pheasants – that have been bred just so their lives can be sacrificed to the worrying motivations of shooters.

One of those irritating little teasers popped up on my computer the other day when I was looking to see where my VPN had found an available processor that day because it told me it was raining;  the answer was Oslo where a forest fire advisory notice had been issued so perhaps the Scandanavian gods are more effective than ours, or maybe Thor was just having a strop. 

Whatever, the teaser’s headline was about a Bengal cat being hit by a celebrity and invited me to open a site called Daily Motion for the full story.  Yes, really.  Perhaps it specialises in today’s shittiest stories.  I didn’t open it to find out.

A EuroMillions jackpot of £195m has been won by a ticket bought in the UK.  Does anybody else think the maximum prize should be £1m, enough to change all normal people’s lives?  It would also increase punters’ chances of winning by 200 times and allow almost 200 tickets to win £1m.  Mind you, I know people whose life would be changed beyond recognition by ‘only’ £10,000 so why don’t they give a prize of £10,000 to each of almost 20,000 people?

But I have to end on a sad note.  Graham Mansfield cut his wife Dyanne’s throat while she was sitting in a chair in their garden and said he’d do it again to give her peace.  They’d been married for more than 40 years when they discovered she had terminal (stage 4) lung cancer that had spread to her lymph nodes and she asked him to help her end her life when the pain became too much to bear.

He then took an overdose of pills himself and tried to cut his own throat and wrists but woke 12 hours later and rang 999, saying he’d killed his wife.  When paramedics arrived, he begged them to let him die.

The police said they had to charge him with murder because she hadn’t signed the suicide note and there was no independent evidence she had agreed to it.  (As the law currently stands, it’s legal to go to Dignitas to end your life in Switzerland but nobody’s allowed to help you so, even if you’re unable to do it yourself, anybody who helps you buy a ticket will be breaking the law.)

A cancer specialist estimated Dyanne would only have survived between one and four weeks more.

In court last week, the jury found him guilty of manslaughter but not guilty of murder and the judge imposed a two-year suspended sentence saying the killing was “an act of love, of compassion, to end her suffering”.

Mansfield has said he’d learnt that, if you ever do something like this, you should make sure you video your agreement.

The general reaction of people commenting on websites shows a large majority in favour of changing the law to allow assisted dying in the UK.  Even the BMA supports this but politicians are scared of losing votes … 

Dear Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss, please amend this law as soon as possible.

70 years of H Gracious M – what next?

5 June 2022

Thursday saw this year’s greatest fancy dress parade (with the possible exception of North Korean marchpasts) as hundreds of soldiers rode on horseback past their “colour” so the survivors would recognise what flag to gather under after the battle was over.  It took hours.  By the end of it, an enemy would have had the lot of them.  Perhaps it goes back to Plantagenet days when the king was the one with a bunch of greenery (plant à genet) stuck in his cap.

I found myself wondering why some of them carried modern guns with a bayonet on the end.   If you’re selecting historical weapons, surely bows and arrows would have been more decorative, and much more effective if you’re more than a bayonet’s length from the person you’re trying to kill.

But the rain held off and the whole event was brightly coloured – ceremonial pomp is probably one of the few things that Britain still does well.  A lot of people turned out to wave flags and watch as much of it as they could see while millions more watched it on television.  To cap it all, the queen appeared on the balcony at Buckingham Palace to watch the fly-past and appeared to enjoy the spectacle, inspiring thoughts like “she’s a game old girl” and “not bad for 96”.

The fly-past itself was the only bit I actually watched and I’m sure the queen turned to Charles and said “That’s lovely” as the Lancaster (or was it a Wellington) flew over.  I thought it was a pity that none of the 1950s V-bombers (from memory, the Valiant, the Victor and the Vulcan) were fit enough to join the flypast but I have to admit I enjoyed the planes that flew in the 70 formation.  I also wondered idly what would happen if one of them crashed into the palace courtyard before exploding just under the balcony. 

Justin Welby, the Canterbury Archbish, had tested positive for covid and couldn’t lead the service in St Pauls and I’ve been cheered by how many other people have commented on Prince Andrew’s own fortuitous and entirely coincidental positive covid test that prevented him from appearing anywhere and saved everyone a lot of embarrassment – unless a plane had crashed in the courtyard and exploded.  King Andrew?  Doesn’t bear thinking about.

The respect in which he’s held can be judged from a song called ‘Prince Andrew is a Nonce’ by a group called the Kunts that hurtled up the charts last week.  Its words include “The grand old Duke of York, he said he didn’t sweat / So why’d he pay 12 million quid to a girl he’d never met?”

When Harry and Meghan appeared, they got more cheers than jeers, unlike Boris and Carrie Johnson who managed to inspire the exact opposite. 

Welby had earlier made a plea for society to be more “open and forgiving” which is a commendable sentiment except possibly when applied to Prince Andrew who is, he said, “seeking to make amends”.  I know from very painful personal experience that it’s only possible to forgive someone if they have admitted and accepted responsibility for their mistakes and apologised, and there isn’t much sign of that so far from Andrew (or even, after several decades, in my case).

In some ways, it was a sad day because it was almost certainly the last time we’ll see a similar celebration.  The next big event will probably be King Charles III’s coronation, whose enjoyment will be tempered by mourning for the queen’s death.  (I wonder if Charles will change his name when he becomes king?  After all, the prince known previously as David became King Edward VIII and his brother Bertie became King George VI.  At one time, there was a rumour Charles would choose to be King George VII but there’s now another George further down the line.  Perhaps he should choose a contemporary name.  Dwayne should do it – King Dwayne I.)

In real life, the survivors of couples who’ve been together a long time often die shortly after their lifelong partner;  the Duke of Edinburgh only died last year and his widow is already showing signs of ageing for the first time while she’s increasingly letting Charles take over her official duties.  I wonder if she’ll see the year out?  Weekly meetings with the prime minister we’v got at the moment?  Hmmm.

A bigger question has again been widely aired as the celebrations have been analysed:  the future of the monarchy.  Many of us think that the queen has done an amazing job throughout the last 70 years, scarcely missing a step, and she deserves our admiration.  But admiring an individual’s tenacity isn’t the same as supporting the monarchy.

I’ve never really had any strong feelings one way or the other – and I suspect many people share my apathy – but I wonder how things will change when the queen dies and Charles (or Dwayne) becomes king. The monarchy certainly costs the UK a lot of money but it also brings in a lot of new foreign money, especially for the fancy dress parades and other ceremonials.  However, it still has to overcome its legacy of supporting slavery and the genocide and theft involved in building the ‘empire’, and its inability to limit the racism its governments have consistently applied and enforced, even to the present day.

On the other hand, republicanism would require the election of a president and the wholesale reform of the constitution, and parliament.  This could allow positive changes such as proportional representation to be made if the reform was carried out by people with no vested interest in the outcome but look at the crippling system that, despite the best intentions of its creators, disempowers American presidents.  And just imagine us having presidents like Blair, Brown, Cameron, May and Johnson. 

Actually, now that Britain’s reputation has been so reduced internationally, it probably wouldn’t make any difference if a president did suddenly have stupid ideas like deciding to reintroduce outdated and illogical measurement systems that the last few generations were never taught and older generations have forgotten.  Perhaps presidential candidates could be required to take tests to measure their intellectual capacity and mental stability and may the gods forbid the election of a politician as president.  And perhaps candidates should also be required to demonstrate their lifelong lack of any involvement in party politics.  Or the military. 

The biggest problem is that anyone interested in becoming president is, by definition, unsuitable.

Somebody suggested Sir David Attenborough would make a good president but, apart from his age, he gave up running BBC2 because he didn’t like the job and wanted to return to nature.  So what about Dr Charlotte Uhlenbroek?  She shares Attenborough’s interest in nature and is younger and much better looking.

Guns, diluting standards, Elizabeth line and typos

29 May 2022

19 young children and two primary school teachers have been shot dead, and three more young children orphaned when the husband of one of the dead teachers had a heart attack two days later.

The murderer was a teenager who wasn’t old enough to buy alcohol but had legally bought and registered two automatic weapons, practised by shooting his grandmother.

This was at Uvalde’s Robb elementary school in south west Texas, 10 days after another teenager had killed 11 people at a supermarket in Buffalo NY.

The school itself is said to have established and practised safety responses – locking the door, turning the lights out, hiding under desks and everybody staying very quiet – but this wasn’t enough.

Gun violence is of course endemic in America and, while a small majority of people believe gun laws should be tightened, the National Rifle Association spent almost $5m last year trying to convince people they are already too restrictive.  It’s also, of course, complicated by the lack of any federal law which restricts everyone, so states make their own laws.

In the UK, a murderer shot a lot of children at a primary school in Dunblane in 1996.  In 1997, the successive Conservative and Labour governments under John Major and Tony Blair passed a law banning the private ownership of handguns despite active opposition from the gun lobby and many on the political right (including one Boris Johnson) who argued that owning guns wasn’t the problem, even though the one thing that all such killers have in common is they own a gun.

Since then, gun crime in Britain has fallen significantly, fatal shootings are mercifully rare and these have almost all been individually targeted rather than mass murders.

International comparisons also show that the more households that have guns, the more gun-related deaths there are, and records of shootings in America show that having a gun in the house actually makes it more likely that a member of the household will be killed by one.

The laws vary widely between different American states, from Massachusetts where gun ownership is fairly tightly controlled (by American standards) to Texas where there are few controls.   Many who support gun ownership quote the Second Amendment to the US Constitution but others argue that these people either haven’t actually read the amendment or failed to understand its purpose and that the ‘founding fathers’ of the United States would be horrified to see how their intentions are being misinterpreted.

Just as worrying is the lack of any control on the sale of ammunition.  In a recent documentary, a British journalist asked one dealer how much ammunition he could buy.  The answer was “How much money have you got?”

I wonder how many gun owners are male and how many female.  My own prejudices make me feel that you’re more likely to see a man with a big penis-substitute in a holster than a woman with a Saturday night special in her handbag, but I could be entirely wrong.

The trouble is that the problem has been linked – probably by the NRA – with politics so, broadly speaking, Democrats want more gun control while Republicans want more guns.  The gun lobby thinks the answer is more guns, and teachers should be armed so that, if a gunman (I’m sticking with the sexism) enters their classroom, the children can watch a real-life shooting match in which real people get hurt and killed.

Their argument is that guns aren’t dangerous, it’s people with guns that are dangerous but ignores the fact that the country has conspicuously failed to educate gun owners so far.

Other suggestions include

• incorporating the NRA’s safety rules in federal law
• banning automatic weapons and extended magazines
• perhaps even allowing only guns that fire just one bullet before they need to be reloaded
• limiting gun permits to hunters
• increasing the minimum age for gun ownership to 21
• more background checks, including mental health histories
• requiring a gun permit when selling ammunition and only selling cartridges for the gun in the permit
• limiting the amount of ammunition that can be sold to any one person
• requiring owners to be insured and responsible for all damage caused by a gun registered in their name
• rewriting the second amendment to make it clear that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State” is the prime reason for “the right to keep and bear Arms”.

Jacinda Ardern gave Harvard’s annual commencement address this week and was given a standing ovation after describing how New Zealand had tightened gun laws after the 2019 shootings in the Christchurch mosque.

Let’s hope Americans have the courage to make changes.  

The UK can do it: Boris Johnson rewrote the rules on Friday to remove the duty of ministers to resign after breaching the code of conduct and deleted the words “honesty”, “integrity”, “transparency” and “accountability” from the foreword, thereby exempting ministers from four of the seven (Nolan) principles of public life (adopted in 1995).  All this in an attempt to save the skin of a congenital liar who probably can’t even spell integrity and who believes being open about and accountable for one’s actions are for lesser people from cheaper schools.

The good news is that, after five months of pressure from the Labour party to introduce windfall taxes on serendipitous profits, the chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, has finally accepted they are necessary and done a U-turn, though actually he’s not imposing ‘windfall taxes’, he’s imposing a “temporary targeted energy profits levy” which is, of course, quite different.

Anything to divert attention from the details in Sue Gray’s report on ‘partygate’.

And, in another amazing coincidence, this week saw Johnson claiming credit for the opening of nearly all of the short central section of London’s Elizabeth line which was described by one commentator as being “true to the finest traditions of British infrastructure … years over deadline and billions above budget”.

I can remember Crossrail’s route being discussed in the early 1990s and, after years of negotiations, building work officially started in 2009.  While this was shortly after Johnson had been elected mayor of London, claiming credit for it seems to be rather less than truthful – good job he’s no longer required to be honest.

The only real success in the story is that some 3m tonnes of soil dug out from under London was taken to Wallasea Island on the Essex coast, creating a new wetland sanctuary for birds.

Back in the days of typesetters and hot lead, the Guardian contained so many typographical errors that Private Eye always referred to it as the Grauniad but the editors always took it in good spirit and apologised when necessary.  A columnist in yesterday’s paper repeated what she described as “the greatest correction of all time”:

“A caption in Guardian Weekend, page 102, November 13, read ‘Binch of crappy travel mags’.  That should, of course, have been ‘bunch’.  But more to the point, it should not have been there at all.  It was a dummy which we failed to replace with the real caption.  It was not meant to be a comment on perfectly good travel brochures.  Apologies.”

And the week’s other major event was Bob Dylan’s 81^st birthday.  Never let anyone tell you that excessive use of drugs will shorten your life.

Wealth distribution, the rich and the poor, borrowing, kindness and nominative determinism

23 January 2022

One of America’s more stupid politicians suggested during the Trump shut-down in 2018 that, if people really think they’re suffering from not being paid for a month, they could always put it on a credit card or borrow enough money for food.  What better illustration of the difference between the worlds of the rich who have black AmEx (Centurion) cards and don’t understand how you can max out a credit card, and the poor who already have. 

Payday loans can accrue interest at around 1250%.  This compares with the 0.35% you can get for your savings – though you could get as little as 0.01% or, if you tie your money up for a year or two, as much as 1.5%.

If you could get 1250% on your savings, every £1,000 you save would be worth £2,250 at the end of a year instead of £1,035 you get at the moment.

So who on earth would borrow money at these rates?  Obviously they are people with no other way to get money so they can buy food and keep warm.

Their lack of money can be due to a whole range of causes, from bad luck, inadequate state support or ineligibility (or Home Office delays in deciding if you are eligible) to life events such as bereavement and health problems to expensive addictions, from drugs like tobacco and alcohol to the illegal ones, and gambling. 

Some people seem to believe they’ve chosen to be poor because they haven’t got on their bicycles and found work so it’s their choice whether to buy food or keep warm;  or that they spend what they do have on luxuries like tobacco (and I know from experience that tobacco can give a great deal of pleasure and isn’t always just ‘a luxury’) so it’s a poor sense of priorities rather than actually not having enough money. 

This is both ill-informed and wrong and tends to reveal the speaker’s own financial position, rather like people who think food banks are wonderful things, thereby completely missing the point that, in an ideal society where nobody was poor, you wouldn’t need food banks.

Debt is a deep, dark hole with slippery sides.

I was brought up at a time when the only ‘acceptable’ debt was a mortgage and, if you couldn’t afford something, you saved until you could, or you did without.  My children have huge student loan debts which they seem to accept is fair but I worry that their generation is growing up thinking it’s ‘normal’ to have debts and many young people just can’t afford to go to university at all.

With the conversion of so many colleges to universities in the 1980s, pressure from families, schools and peers to go to university increased, and people who didn’t began to feel like lesser mortals.  I’ve never understood why people with really useful practical skills are considered less ‘intelligent’ than people with a degree in TV box-set studies from the University of Luton.  I know who’d I rather rewired our house.

These social problems were compounded by the schisms that appeared in the 1980s when the gap between rich and poor started to widen and society become more and more fractured as management pay increased to levels that even the greediest of managers in 1980 could never have imagined.

A small and unscientific, but credible research project in America showed that one of the main problems is that rich people are constitutionally unable to grasp how deep is the divide between them and poor people.  An assistant professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (whose fees are more than $100,000 a year) asked her students how much they thought an average American makes in a year.  A quarter of them thought it was more than $100,000 while one of them suggested $800,000.  According to the Social Security Administration, the actual figure was $53,838 last year.  The family income of an average Penn student is $195,500.

Capitalism would, of course, expect companies to be x times more efficient and profitable if managers are now paid x times more than their predecessors but this clearly isn’t the case in practice.  Also, research into how satisfied people are with their remuneration showed clearly that the amount people got was almost irrelevant because people judged the adequacy of their pay against that of people they perceived as peers;  hence the vicious upwards spiral in pay at the top of companies.

I have a suspicion this is a man thing – bet I can piss higher up the wall than you – but haven’t found any research to support this (the pay spiral, not the pissing).

To an extent, this has always been the case and Dorothy Parker (1893 to 1967) once said “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”

We are now in a position which ensures that poorer people pay a much higher proportion of their income in taxes than do the rich.  VAT is particularly responsible for this imbalance but UK taxpayers getting £200,000 a year pay the same rate of income tax as those getting £10m.

Last week, 102 of the world’s millionaires and billionaires, including Disney heiress Abigail Disney, called for governments round the world to increase the taxes they pay in order to help pay for the pandemic response and tackle between rich and poor.  Calling themselves “patriotic millionaires”, they called for “permanent wealth taxes on the richest to help reduce extreme inequality and raise revenue for sustained, long-term increases in public services like healthcare”.

This sounds like a really sensible proposal and should be accepted with grace because it’s made by those who can think straight.  However, it’s unlikely to be introduced because the people who set tax rates tend to be wealthy themselves.  Our Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is the single greatest influence on how much UK tax the rich and the poor have to pay, used to be a banker and married money (his wife is reportedly richer than the Queen).

It also misses an important point.  Implicitly, these 102 people realise they have more money than they need and many millions of poor people are suffering because they are keeping the money that could change their lives in piggy banks in tax havens that only the rich can afford.  If they’ve got too much, why don’t they just give it away now and just keep enough to live on? 

More giving might just help make the world a kinder place.  It doesn’t have to be money:  saying a kind word (or not saying an unkind word) or helping neighbours with shopping or gardening or lifts to the shops, hospitals or whatever else would make their life a little bit easier is enough.

My own problems are smaller.  Even though it’s two years since we changed to an automatic car, I’m still baffled by the gear lever and a friend confirmed last week it would baffle her too, which made me feel a lot better.  The gear lever has two basic ‘drive’ positions, one for normal driving and one for reversing.  You push forward for one and pull back for the other.  Guess whether you push the lever forward to move forward and back to move back, or vice versa … 

I thought I’d try the new online word-game ‘Wordle’.  It sounds fun if you have a couple of minutes to spare but it wanted me to log in through Facebook or something else so I gave up.  It does however resemble the old Mastermind game which involved finding what order your opponent had put some brightly coloured pegs in at their end of the board.  One Christmas, I played ‘psychic Mastermind’ with my brother and my first line was exactly right several times and very close rather more times.  Yes, of course it could have been coincidence, like when I was showing someone I could throw 1 to 6 on a dice, in order, with no false throws on the way.  I then threw the number they chose until I suddenly felt my link with the dice had disappeared, like a connection being clicked off in my mind, and my throws were random from then on,  Another coincidence of course, but still a bit weird.

More weird stuff last week as Boris Johnson’s reign lurches to an end:  Grant Shapps, one of his ministers, announced that ‘banal’ announcements on trains are to be stopped.  That’s just the sort of incisive decision-making our public transport systems need.  Actually, I used to love the announcements that said, just after the train had pulled out of the station, “The next stop will be …” which meant that, if wanted to get off before then, you were buggered.

Every so often, I come across examples of nominative determinism, my all-time favourites being Dorothy Kitchen who ran a tea room in Hertfordshire and David Bright who ran a cleaning company in London, but this week’s example came close:  the first Brit to catch the new strain of bird flu was Alan Gosling.

Remembering, kindness, lessons from Christianity, and other happy things

26 December 2021

This is a season of remembrance, when we think about things that are lost to us, especially people:  parents, siblings, friends, animals and, perhaps worst of all, children.  People we knew and loved, people we knew and didn’t love, and strangers who died of starvation, or as collateral damage in arguments between megalomaniacs they didn’t even know.

In a way, feeling sad for their loss is a way of honouring and giving a purpose to their lives.  There are things in my life I wish my mother could see but she’d be coming up to 104 now and wouldn’t thank me;  then again, there are other things in my life I’m glad she didn’t have to live through.  Nevertheless, I am happy to remember her as she was and feel glad to have known her.

Remembering people who died unnecessarily is more difficult and I find myself trying to find ways in which we can stop more people dying.  It’s glib, but thought-provoking, to think about the slogan from the 1960s “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came”.

I talk a lot about kindness and I mentioned volunteering last week but we can also give money to charities that work in fields we support.  I have a slight feeling that anybody whose income is over a certain figure should be required to give money to charities and, the more you earn, the greater the percentage you should give.

My tax return for last year shows that, because my income was enough to cover my needs, I gave 5% of my income to charities.  I’ve no idea if this is the ‘right’ level but it works for me.

This also, of course, links with my belief that there should be a maximum permitted remuneration and that no surplus payments, whether they’re given as salary, bonuses and other perks, or dividends.  Back in October, some housebuilders the government by saying that the extra costs of making buildings safe after the Grenfell disaster will mean they won’t be able to build as many ‘affordable’ homes.  It appears that this was said with a straight face, either because they assumed we were too stupid to spot the flaws in their argument, or because they were.

What they actually meant was they can’t afford to increase profits and keep paying management and shareholders more each year and pay for shoddy work they did in the past, and they couldn’t possibly reduce these payments and build smaller houses so, obviously, it’s the houses that go.

This is the time of the year when Christians remember the birth of Jesus.  Whether or not you believe he was the son of God, he taught us all some valuable lessons:  he’s on record as saying love your neighbour (i.e.  be kind to people) and for chucking traders out the temple (i.e.  capitalism and religion don’t mix).  But let’s also remember that his father Joseph earned his living as a carpenter so we must contrast his beliefs that individuals who earn their living from their own businesses are not the same as large capitalists who think being rich and being kind to people are mutually exclusive.

He also told the parable of the (presumably) Jewish man who had been mugged and was lying injured at the side of the road, though one hopes he was actually on the hard shoulder.  Jews and Samaritans traditionally despised each other and various Jews passed him by but a Samaritan stopped and helped him, putting racial prejudice to one side and helping him as another human being.  If only such kindness to people could override all racial and religious stereotypes which aren’t worth the paper they’re not written on and everybody could see sons and daughters of other people rather than enemies, all over the world.

This thought was voiced by Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, just before Christmas when he said of the Covid vaccine “… get boosted, get vaccinated. It’s how we love our neighbour …”, and later echoed by Boris Johnson who unapologetically plagiarised the archbishop’s words and congratulated people who are getting vaccinated “not just for themselves, for ourselves, but for friends and family and everyone we meet … That, after all, is the teaching of Jesus Christ, whose birth is at the heart of this enormous festival – that we should love our neighbours as we love ourselves”.

The omicron Covid variant actually seems to be milder and causes 40% fewer hospital admissions but it is very much more infectious so many more people are being infected and there’s no relief in sight for the NHS.  (Incidentally, why has ‘Oh mickron’ suddenly become ‘Ommy kron’?  Should we now start talking about alpha and Ommyger?)

(And, while I’m being pedantic, why does the word ‘probably’ seem to have been replaced by ‘likely’?)

Elsewhere, another missed opportunity for Labour:  an 82-year old Jewish woman who regularly attends her local synagogue, Diana Neslen, is being investigated by the Labour party for anti-semitism for having been critical of Israel and Zionism, including a 2017 tweet in which she said “the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavour and I am an anti-racist Jew”.  Good on yer, Ms Neslen, I’m with you.

And some happy things to encourage us into the new year:

• ministers have promised to “reset the dial” on women’s health to eradicate prejudices about the menopause and hymenoplasty (surely a form of FGM?) and to boost awareness of other taboos
• a deaf person, Rose Ayling-Ellis, won Strictly Come Dancing
• a teenager, Emma Raducanu, who pulled out of this year’s Wimbledon tournament because she felt the pressure was getting to her (a very brave thing to do in itself), went on to win the US Open and became the BBC Sports Personality of the Year
• Netflix is adapting a book about a blind girl whose part is to be played by an actor who really is blind, Aria Mia Lobreti
• a hitherto unknown episode of Morecambe and Wise was shown yesterday (isn’t Eric Morecambe’s body language brilliant!)
• Britain’s northernmost inhabited island, Unst, is to host a British spaceport
• police arriving at the scene of a road accident in Florida found two (unhurt) teenagers in an SUV lying on its side with the snouts of two 6’ alligators sticking out of the rear window;  the alligators were released without charge
• in 1927, William Long opened a chocolate shop in Keswick called Friars, which is still owned by the same family, and makes wonderful coffee cream chocolates.  In its latest publicity, they say “We are immensely proud of our heritage. Our rose and violet creams are the same ones that William sold on that first day”.  (All together now:  “aren’t they a bit stale by now?”)

And finally, proof from Australia that some people are still thoughtful and kind and that practical jokes can sometimes be silly and funny and hurt no-one;  how often ‘silly’ and ‘funny’ go together for people who missed out on self-importance …

Nick Doherty from Mackay in Queensland was away from home and texted a friend who lived next door, Carl Stanojevic, asking him to take his bins out.  Stanojevic duly took a bin out and gave it a tour of Mackay, past the duckpond to a massage parlour via sites like a supermarket and a restaurant, even stopping to talk to passers-by and to let the bin make a phone call.  At each place, Stanojevic took a photograph of the bin and made up an album which he sent to Doherty to prove he’d completed his task.  Doherty was blown away by the joke but is apparently now worried to put it out in case it wanders off again.

Don’t we need more people like this all over the world to show there is still love and kindness and fun and happiness in the world and we can all share them.