More ‘magic’, billions, water companies, justice and immigration

17 May 2025

After last week’s mutterings, a friend suggested migration could be added to the list of currently inexplicable things, which made me realise I’d inadvertently been anthropocentric and ignored insects, birds, fish and mammals that migrate for thousands of miles.

The best known is probably the arctic tern which commutes some 15,000 miles between summers in Shetland and summers in Antarctica but they have the ability to sleep while flying, closing down half their brain while the other half keeps the wings moving. 

Perhaps more impressive is the monarch butterfly which migrates annually between North America and Mexico and, though less well-known, the painted lady butterfly which travels between Africa and Northern Europe.  How do they do it?  It’s been suggested that they use the earth’s magnetic field to control their journeys but this is constantly changing as the magnetic poles move so they have to allow for the effect of the deviation if they want to get to the right place.

However, what I find most impressive is the fact that monarch butterflies don’t live very long and each migration is undertaken by newly-hatched butterflies that have never done it before so the route, and the allowance for magnetic pole movements, must somehow be genetically imprinted in their brains.

What will they do when the magnetic poles swap positions, which the alignment of magnetic particles in ancient rocks has shown they do?  It’s thought the swap doesn’t happen overnight and takes a very long time so perhaps the poles just drift away from the geographical poles until they reach the other end of the earth and the North Star becomes the South Star while the Southern Cross becomes the Northern Cross.  And, of course, half-way they’ll be the Eastern Star and the Western Cross, or possibly vice versa.

Many readers may remember my continuing problem with envisaging large numbers, like anything over 10.  Well, I’ve come across another example of just how impossible it is to grasp large numbers and the differences between them.  To help me picture the difference between a million and a billion, I was told to think in seconds:  one million seconds is about 12 days while one billion seconds is about 32 years.

Aaarrrggghhh!

I hope the people with more billions in the bank than they can ever spend will, if governments are too frightened to make them pay more tax, give it away to those people and countries whose need is so much greater.  I also hope that the wind is changing.  Last week, 40% of Centrica’s shareholders voted against the board’s recommended pay plans.  Chris O’Shea, the group’s chief executive trousered £4.3m last year and, yes, he took almost twice as much the previous year but the energy crisis encouraged them to impose huge increases on their customers’ energy bills, taking many of them even further into debt, while O’Shea (and other senior managers) get away with daylight robbery.

Thames Water (the one on the verge of bankruptcy) has a new CEO, Chris Weston, who took a £195,000 bonus after only three months in post and was asked by the Defra Select Committee to justify this.  “Because I’m worth it” he replied.  Can anybody can think of any sensible justification for saying this?

The government is now planning to block the payment of huge staff bonuses from a £3bn emergency loan to Thames Water, which claims these bonuses are vital to retaining its management and that they are its most valuable asset.  Whaaat?  Aren’t these the same managers that screwed everything up in the first place and led to the company being fined millions of pounds?

Down here, South West Water is owned by the Pennon Group and has increased our bill by 30% for the next year while chief executive Susan Davy generously waived her right to bonuses in the two years to March 2024 leaving her with a paltry £860,000 in the latter year (including the deferred reinvestment of shares).  My heart fails to bleed for her.

There’s also something wrong with our justice system when a peaceful Stop Oil protestor is sent to prison for 4 years and a violent child rapist gets 18 months.

And Peter Sullivan, 68, has spent the last 38 years in prison for a murder that forensic evidence has now decided he didn’t commit.

Another interesting comment came my way this week, something I hadn’t heard before, that the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

So which side should I take on Labour’s latest plans to curb immigration?  Keir Starmer this week spoke of a need to end the “squalid experiment in open borders” in what cynics might describe as an attempt to win Reform voters.  What self-respecting Respect member would be willing to support Labour?  It’s believed Nigel Farage celebrated Starmer’s comments with a bevvy and a fag.

Others saw a connection between Starmer’s view and the ‘rivers of blood’ speech given by the Conservative racist Enoch Powell in 1968.

Next week, all state benefits will be scrapped to encourage recipients to get on their bikes and find work (thank you Norman Tebbit, another ancient Conservative politician, for that suggestion) and the Isle of Wight will be declared an independent territory with 0% taxes through which all UK ‘earnings’ over £250,000 can be channelled tax-free.

And an old story to cheer people up.  The King of Sweden once visited Sir Paul Nurse, a Nobel Prize winner who holds 50 honorary degrees and is former President of the Royal Society and Chief Executive and Director of the Francis Crick Institute.  On the royal arrival, the receptionist rang Nurse’s office and said “Gentleman here, he’s … er … watcher say yer king of, mate?”

Censored media, George Clooney, Tom Lehrer, Donald Trump and Hargreaves Lansdown

29 March 2025

Last year, for the first time, neither the Washington Post nor the LA Times published an editorial supporting one of the candidates in the presidential elections.  The break with tradition was caused by their billionaire owners, Jeff Bezos and Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong respectively, who instructed their teams to abandon the editorial independence they’d demonstrated for many elections by not publishing an editorial endorsement of the one of the candidates.  Even after the election, the latter asked the newspaper’s editorial board in December to “take a break” from writing about Donald Trump.

This seems very unfair to those of us who want to hear independent views which are untainted by the prejudices of plutocrat owners.  It’s even less fair to those who read and watch only reports that support their own prejudices and then believe everything they’re told by them (yes, fans of [redacted], I’m talking about you).

In the UK, all the national newspapers except the Guardian are owned by very rich individuals or groups of investors such as hedge funds and, apart from the BBC, the major radio and TV broadcasters are similarly controlled.  The BBC built its reputation for impartiality over the decades and gained worldwide respect through its BBC World Service (introduced in 1932) and a survey in September 2024 showed that two out of three viewers still rely on BBC One for news reports.

But the BBC’s share of the market is falling as the world political scene is drifting to the far right and people are now seeking less balanced media that tell them what they want to hear.

This is encouraged by the shameless agendas of people with axes to grind and a lot of money or political clout, who influence their media for their own purposes.  I wonder if, taking a completely random example, Bezos wouldn’t have spiked a pre-election editorial on the presidential candidates if he thought it was going to say how wonderful a president Donald Trump would be this time?

The actor and Democrat activist George Clooney said recently in an interview on the US TV news programme 60 Minutes that the battle between the press and the government is a “fight for the ages” and referred to both the Washington Post and the LA Times.

Trump, as thin-skinned as ever, immediately responded by Tweeting (Xing?) that Clooney is a “fake movie actor” who “never came close to making a great movie”.  Trump obviously hasn’t seen “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” but he probably disapproves of the Coen Brothers anyway.

“What does Clooney know about anything?” the fake TV ‘personality’ continued. “Clooney should get out of politics and go back to television.  Movies never really worked for him!!!”

In the 1950s, Tom Lehrer was a maths teacher at various American colleges, including Harvard, who interrupted the day job to write and perform satirical songs such as “I Got It From Agnes”, “The Old Dope Peddler” and “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”.

His musical career was comparatively brief and he’s been quoted as saying he went back to maths because “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize.”  His songs remain acute (and very funny) in a world where the American President unwittingly parodies himself every time he opens his mouth.

Trump’s latest blunder is to excuse his administration’s embarrassing security breach after a journalist from Atlantic magazine was accidentally invited to a Signal meeting discussing specific operational details of plans to bomb Yemen, including details of US bombings, drone launches, targeting information of the assault, timings for the attack, descriptions of weather conditions and the specific weapons to be used to kill a “target terrorist”.

When questioned about the leak, Trump said: “It wasn’t classified information,” and it was “the only glitch in two months” both of which claims were palpably incorrect.

In just two months, Trump has already antagonised the only two countries that share land borders with America.  One curious result of this is that Canadians now need a passport to visit a library which was deliberately built to straddle the border between Stanstead, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont, as a symbol of cooperation and friendship between the two countries.  However, the entrance is in Vermont so Canadian readers have to take ID to walk down the side of the building into America to reach the door.  It’s a library for heavens’ sakes.  (“Anything to declare?” / “Just a book, look, Das Kapital.” / “Up against the wall, Canuck.”)

(In the south, rumour has it that groups of Mexicans have been chanting “tear down the wall”, and Roger Waters will be doing a gig in Juarez before leading a conga dance across the bridge into El Paso.)

Trump’s latest economic triumphs include the imposition of tariffs rising to 25% on imported cars and a trade war with China. 

What a good job he’s got Elon Musk’s social graces to help smooth his way forward.

Over here, research by the financial services company Hargreaves Lansdown (which obviously has a vested interest in the results) has shown that people should increase their ‘rainy day funds’ to cover three to six months’ essential expenditure as April price increases hit them, and said six months’ emergency savings should average £12,669.

What sort of world does Hargreaves Lansdown live in?  How many of us have this much set aside to cover price increases, household emergencies etc?  Have people on state benefits got any savings or have they already spent it on food?  I know a single parent with two small children who can’t even manage on universal credit and child allowances, and probably doesn’t even know what savings are.  This is just one family who I happen to know;  how many hundreds of thousands of other families I don’t know are similarly over-stretched?

(Remember Hargreaves Lansdown?  They pushed Neil Woodford’s funds at investors until his luck ran out and then they suddenly went completely silent – no apologies or anything.  More than 8,000 people whose money was lost by Woodford are now backing a legal claim against Hargreaves Lansdown which could total £200m.)

It may never happen / It already did

1 March 2025

On being challenged this week over having previously called Volodymyr Zelenskyy “a dictator”, Donald Trump said “Did I say that? I can’t believe I said that.”  Then, yesterday, the self-acclaimed dealmaker failed to bully Zelenskyy into signing a deal in an unedifying performance that left me greatly relieved and (still) rooting for Ukraine; which just goes to prove either that one swallow doth not a summer make or that a successful comedian makes a better president than a failed nepo baby.

In 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger identified a psychological condition that leads some people to overestimate their abilities.  Now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, it isn’t related to intelligence but it deals with somebody’s ability to judge their competence in a particular area.  People of low ability in a particular field tend to think they’re more skilled than they actually are, which leads to overconfidence and consequential errors of judgement in the field. 

On Wednesday, Volker Türk, the UN head of human rights presented a report on the human rights situation in Gaza, the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem saying “Nothing justifies the appalling manner in which Israel has conducted its military operations in Gaza, which consistently breached international law” and that “Hamas has indiscriminately fired projectiles into Israeli territory – amounting to war crimes.”  So they’re both horrid, which is no surprise but little consolation to the many innocents on both sides who have lost families, friends and homes.

Medics and general healthcare workers are protected under International Law but hundreds of them who were working in Gaza have been captured by Israel.  Some have now been released under the ceasefire agreement but at least 160 are still being held prisoner and some of Gaza’s most senior doctors who were released have said they were tortured, beaten and humiliated in Israeli prisons.  In exchange, Hamas is returning hostages it took during its surprise attack on Israel that started this latest episode of the war between them;  some of them are even still alive.

Further south, with a touch of west, it’s estimated that, so far this year, about 7,000 people have been killed in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, including hundreds of women who were raped and burnt, when M23, a Rwandan rebel group, freed male prisoners from the Congolese city of Goma.  Despite the decades-old conflict, Rwanda continues to deny any official links with M23 or any interest in land to the south of Goma in the DRC which (quite coincidentally) has rich mineral deposits.

This is, of course, the same Rwanda that the last government believed would be a good place to send migrants who had risked their lives crossing the Channel to reach safety in the UK.  In 2022, a UK court accepted comments from a Foreign Office adviser who had said “Political opposition is not tolerated [in Rwanda] and arbitrary detention, torture and even killings are accepted methods of enforcing control.” 

When asked about this, Priti Patel who was Home Secretary at the time, replied “You are referring to comments made from officials in a different government department but of course it is the Home Office who has led the economic development migration partnership which is our resettlement partnership to Rwanda.  Rwanda is a safe country and all our work with the government of Rwanda shows that.”

Patel resigned later that year.

According to a recent report from MPs on the Public Accounts Committee, HS2 is “a casebook example of how not to run a major project” and it is “unacceptable that, over a decade into the programme, we still do not know what it will cost, what the final scope will be, when it will finally be completed or what benefits it will deliver”.  Did it really take a bunch of MPs to discover this?

This week, the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association reported that, in January, sales of new Tesla cars in Europe were 45% lower than the same month last year, dropping from 18,161 last year to 9,945 this year.

Tesla is now keen to discover why this happened.  It’s known that, after the initial excitement, Teslas earned a poor reputation for reliability and many more manufacturers have introduced electric models to compete with them but analysts are now trying to discover whether Elon Musk’s lurch to the political right might be putting people off buying his cars. 

They also need to remember that the early adopters have already bought the things and many of us who like the principle of electric vehicles are waiting for more advanced technology that won’t leave piles of dead batteries full of toxic waste in ten years’ time.  Some of us also suffer range anxiety if we have family and friends at the other end of the country. 

Every time I file my own electricity meter readings, I’m treated to a piece of fascinating but trivial information by QI Elves and yesterday it was “The Sun rotates around its axis every 26 days but, because it’s made of gas, different bits rotate at different speeds.”  This worried me.  If different bits rotate at different speeds, which bit do you choose to measure the speed of its rotation?

While talking about the sky, I assume you were all stargazing yesterday evening when seven planets lined up in a ‘planetary parade’ (which means they appear in a straight line when we look at them from here), a rare sort of super-syzygy that won’t happen again till 2040.

Some worrying news this week came from Luton where a 19-year-old has admitted murdering his mother and two younger siblings and other offences including the possession of a kitchen knife in a public place.  Since this last one is obviously a criminal offence, I’m now feeling very nervous about popping into Lakeland to replace an old kitchen knife.

But, distracted by something else, I did find one interesting piece of information this week:  Kristian Matsson, a Swedish singer-songwriter who performs under the stage name ‘The Tallest Man on Earth’, measures 1.7m (5’7”) from end to end.

Parking machines, new houses, Trump brings peace to the world

15 February 2025

It’s no secret that car-parking companies, estate agents and ‘independent’ financial advisers appear at the bottom of my rankings of trustworthiness in business and they can be depended on only to confirm that ethics used to be somewhere between Thuffolk and Middlethex.

My latest adventure came courtesy of Apcoa, which runs the car parks for our local hospital.

If, like me, you have separate reading and driving glasses and, unsurprisingly, happen to be wearing your driving glasses when you want to go home, you can’t read small print so, when you’re trying to use one of Apcoa’s camera-linked machines to pay for your parking, you are – technical term coming up – buggered.

It first wanted me to enter my car’s registration number using my normal-sized finger on its microscopic keys. This took four attempts.  Then it showed my entry time, which I assumed the system had picked up from the camera that recorded when I entered the car park, so I pressed OK and, because I also assumed it also knew what the time was, I again pressed OK when it asked for my exit time.  It didn’t accept cash so I showed it my credit card. Nothing happened and the increasingly impatient person behind me leaned over and said there was nothing to pay.

I thought this strange because I’d been there an hour and I retailed my puzzlement about this to some friends I was visiting later that day and they said aha, the machine lies about your arrival time so you’re supposed to type your entry time into the machine.  If you can remember it, they added.  Oh bum, I said.

No problem, they said, you can pay within 24 hours with the app on your phone, which is pretty groovy if you have a smartphone.

Luckily, these friends are clever and generous and have smartphones so they did it on one of theirs and I now owe them £1.90.

Why do I suspect Apcoa of intentionally making it as difficult as possible by not linking the clock in their camera to their payment machine?  Answer:  it’s a scam which lets them later charge you £180 for failure to pay for parking and claim a bonus of £178 for doing Sweet Fair Angela, and the rich get richer …

Even the Labour government, which should have less sympathy with the rich, is fettered not just by the financial mess it inherited from 14 years of Conservative misrule but by its own stupidity in saying it wouldn’t raise taxes.  It’s not even got an inspirational leader in Keir Starmer – a one-man charisma-free zone – and his greatest asset is the leader of the opposition, Kemi Badenoch, who blames him for policies that her own party introduced while they were in power, giving him a straight shot at an undefended goal. 

But they have made a small step in the right direction with their reduction of the discount to council tenants who buy their houses from the council.  Until November, tenants outside London could get a maximum discount of the lower of 70% or £102,400;  the maximum they can now get is £38,000, even in the poorer London boroughs and other less poverished areas of the south-east.

There was naturally a massive surge in applications to buy last November before the old scheme ended but that’ll work its way through the system.

It was of course Maggie Thatcher who proudly introduced the ‘right to buy’ to increase her popularity with the voters without actually realising the two basic problems it introduced:  many buyers wouldn’t live in them but would rent them out at more than councils had been charging, and it reduced the stock of council housing. 

Both these problems still exist so Labour has also promised to build 1.5m new homes in the next five years, with a target of 40% of developments defined as “affordable” (i.e. smaller), and has allocated £850m for this. 

There are also plans for more new towns and they have already prepared a longlist of possible sites, from which up to 12 will be selected.  Most are thought likely to be extensions to existing built-up areas including, here in the south west, Exeter and Taunton.

Choosing one example to put this in perspective, there already is a new town to the east of Exeter, Cranbrook, where some 2,400 homes have been built in the last 12 years (with another 1,100 to follow), helping to increase East Devon’s population by 14%.  Unfortunately, the government that oversaw this growth didn’t provide a proportional increase in the real value of funding for public services like the police and health services.  Nor does it seem the new government is about to make good the cuts they inherited.

Cranbrook’s planners talked about improved infrastructure and amenities but didn’t notice the M5 which runs between Cranbrook and Exeter.  Or rather, they did, but decided a new pedestrian and cycle bridge over the motorway would provide enough additional capacity for local commuters because Cranbrookians could walk or cycle to work in Exeter;  it is only about 7 miles after all, which any reasonably fit person can comfortably walk in a couple of hours. 

To be fair, they did build a new station on the Exeter-Waterloo line, which runs one train every hour in each direction, a new bus service runs from the new town into Exeter, and an existing route has been diverted through the town.  And, if you want to drive, there’s always the A30, perfectly good road, with traffic jams of 30-40 minutes in rush-hours even before the next 1,100 houses are built.

But let’s end on a happy note:  Donald Trump has assured us that he and Vladimir Putin can together end the Russian invasion of Ukraine overnight.  Next week, the EU and Canada will be reassuring us that they can together remove Trump’s threat to hold special military exercises in Canada.

And, even better, more than 200,000 Danes have responded to Trump’s offer to buy Greenland (which belongs to Denmark) by signing a petition saying “You know what Denmark needs? More sunshine, palm trees, and roller skates … Let’s buy California from Donald Trump!”  It’s headed “Måke Califørnia Great Ægain”.

Biological curiosities, non-existent books and another joke

21 December 2024

What’s the heaviest living thing on earth?

What’s one of the largest living things on earth.

What’s the oldest living thing on earth?

That’s right – it’s a tree in Utah.

Of all the places I might have learned this, I wouldn’t have included in the top ten the picture that my computer displays when I turn it on. It reminded of Gustav Klimt’s lovely paintings of birch forests so I googled it to get its details to add to my list of places to go before I die (or after if I’m given the choice).

The tree’s in Fishlake National Forest in Utah about 9,000’ above sea level and looks to the uneducated eye like a huge grove of an estimated 47,000 quaking aspen trees that cover more than 100 acres.

Its white trunks and the leaves that turn bright yellow in the autumn are dazzling but the most fascinating thing is that the tree itself is underground and what we see above ground are just shoots. It’s therefore impossible to tell its age by counting the rings in any of the individual ‘trees’ because they die back and burn down in forest fires and new growth starts from the underground root system (a bit like the bindweed and nettles writ large). It’s been estimated – for no discernible reason – to weigh over 6,000 tons.

The ’Trembling Giant’ or ‘Pando’ is not the only tree that can reproduce by cloning but it’s thought to be the only tree that reproduces solely by cloning, possibly because it was off sick the week trees were taught about propagating by seeds.

It’s considered a single organism because all the ‘trees’ are clones sharing a single root system and are genetically identical.

This particular tree is believed to be between 9,000 and 18,000 years. Earlier estimates had suggested it might be 80,000 years old but they were amended downwards to avoid having to explain how it survived various ice ages. It is now threatened by browsing wildlife and steps are being taken by conservationists to protect 84 acres of the tree under the “Pando Protection Plan”.

Even California’s bristlecone pine, Methuselah, is only 4,847 years old according to tree-ring data, counted from a core drilled out of its trunk. Instead of feeling sorry for the tree, perhaps we should thank it for its contribution to dendrochronology.

In the UK, efforts by conservationists have dramatically increased the number of Duke of Burgundy butterflies (which look rather like fritillaries but aren’t) and the Purple Emperor butterfly. The best way to see the latter is apparently to stand in an oak wood watching a pile of fresh poo, though I have found that standing quietly staring at a pile of poo attracts some strange glances. Other conservation efforts have planted nearly 400,000 willows on higher ground where they support insects, birds and mammals.

There’s more good news in the imagination that’s gone into a display of imaginary books at the Grolier Club in New York City, where they will remain on show until 15 February 2025. Here you can see books that either existed and disappeared, such as Dylan Thomas’s abandoned (and lost) manuscript Llaregub* or never really existed, such as the Book of the Bene Gesserit housed in libraries of Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Other exhibits include Sylvia Plath’s unpublished manuscript Double Exposure which her mother and her husband (Ted Hughes, later Poet Laureate) fought over until it seems to have disappeared in 1970, The Poems of Sappho, Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Won and Byron’s Memoir, which was destroyed by his wife in what some call the greatest crime in literary history. Also, I’m delighted to say, it includes Rules & Traffic Regulations That May Not Be Bent or Broken, a driver’s handbook mentioned in Norman Juster’s excellent book The Phantom Tollbooth, and Nymphs and Their Ways, spotted by Lucy on Mr Tumnus’s shelf in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

The exhibition claims to be sponsored the Mountweazel Foundation in Faraway Hills, New York (look up ‘mountweazel’ to get the significance of this).

One can imagine visitors to the exhibition looking at the titles of the books on display and dreaming of opening and reading them.

It’s a well-known fact that adults whose index finger is shorter than their ring finger were exposed to greater amounts of testosterone when they were in the womb, and this leads to differences in how our brains function as adults.

Boys and girls are both exposed to testosterone in the womb and everyone has different levels of male and female sex hormones: both men and women can have more or less testosterone and women who had more in utero need less as adults.

Men and women with shorter index fingers are, on average, better at solving spatial tasks involving directional sense and have better physical and athletic abilities, but they are more likely to have ADHD and Tourette’s Syndrome. Those with longer index fingers tend to have better verbal memories.

This of course explains why I’m good at map reading but not so good at wotchermercallit.

So let’s break for a quick joke, originally in the TV series South Park and quoted last week by Marina Hyde in The Guardian, which involved some gnomes devising a business plan:

1. Collect underpants.
2. ?
3. Make a profit.

Readers who don’t see anything funny in that are just more mature than I am and should move on to the more serious revelation that Eric Coates’s composition called ‘By the Sleepy Lagoon’, which is used as the signature tune to Desert Island Discs, was inspired not by a tropical island but by Bognor Regis.

And finally, here’s a challenge for that quiet spell just after you’ve eaten slightly too much: which bird has the greatest wingspan?

Those who, like me, suggested the Condor can join me at the bottom of the class – the answer is actually the Wandering Albatross.

* I had to explain the significance of this to my sons when they came across a country called ‘Llamedos’ in one of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books.

Storms, satnav, Devon lanes, Kai Lung, criminals in America and the UK

30 November 2024
We’ve just had a very English storm – ‘Bert’. Well, I mean, can you imagine ‘Bert O’Leary’? Bert Macdonald? Bert ap Idris? Roll on Conall.
Just before it arrived, we were rewarded with a couple of inches of snow, the first we’ve had here for many years. It was very beautiful for an hour or two until Bert came along and rained all over it.
Along with Herefordshire, Devon has more roads than any other English county, most of them single-track, covered in mud from farm vehicles and heading in no obvious direction, preferring to double-back on themselves rather than actually go anywhere. They aren’t improved by the local council failing to fill potholes until too many drivers have claimed back the cost of repairs to vehicles damaged by them, but the views would be wonderful were it not for the 3m high banks that line them.
I travelled most of them quite recently while arguing with the satnav that’s always so infuriatingly calm even when it hasn’t got the foggiest idea what it’s talking about.
“Turn right in 300 yards.”
“Turn right now.”
This would have taken me past a large red sign saying ‘Road Ahead Closed’ so I went straight on.
There was a long, sulky silence, followed by “Turn right now” into a street between two houses, so narrow that the wing mirrors almost scraped the sides, followed by a right-angle bend into a dead-end and silence from the satnav (though I thought I heard a snigger).
Back on the road I’d just left, it came alive again and treated me to a scenic tour of an unfinished housing estate with no way out, followed by going back to the road I’d just left and onto a narrow country lane with grass in the middle. This went directly sunwards, which meant I was heading south, while the place I was trying to reach was to the north.
At an unexpected junction with no guidance from you-know-who, there was a sign saying “Road Closed on 28th November for 1 Day”. Since it was the 26th, I continued along it. Two miles down the lane, I did a 17-point turn watched by some BT Open Reach workers having a tea-break in a van that they’d used to block the road. We didn’t exchange opinions about calendars.
At this point, I’ll reassure anxious readers that I did make my appointment by the skin of my teeth – thank you for worrying – but, if you’re going from here to a medical appointment, avoid Cullompton. Go via Egypt (you choose – any one of the three in England). Or Pity Me.
This week, we’ve had flooded fields and roads, a combination of which meant I had to abort one cross-country route, go back to my starting point and take the main road but, being a nasty, vindictive person, I did experience a certain schadenfreude on seeing a large, over-confident SUV abandoned in the middle of a long, deep puddle. I’ve heard that a car will float on just 18” of water; I’ve never felt the need to try it myself but I’m not an SUV driver.
My enjoyment of this wasn’t diluted even when the flu that I thought I had turned out to be my first encounter with covid. I had wondered a couple of nights earlier if I was OK when I was so feverish I was walking like a drunk, swaying, bumping into furniture, and ending up just taking off my slippers before falling into bed to sleep for 12 hours. Then a friend I’d met recently told me a few days later that he had it so I bought a test kit.
It made me think of what I always thought was an old Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times” but a little research has showed its provenance to be unclear and with no convincing roots in Chinese culture. It’s been likened to the many aphorisms in Ernest Bramah’s ‘Kai Lung’ books and is certainly in the spirit of his wry humour but I haven’t been able to find a specific reference to this quotation in his works. Bramah (1868-1942) was a reclusive writer with a wide variety of interests and was subsequently acknowledged by other more famous authors as the inspiration for some of their ideas.
Wikipedia quotes a typical example of his Kai Lung writing (taken from ‘Kai Lung’s Golden Hours’): “Kai Lung rose guardedly to his feet, with many gestures of polite assurance and having bowed several times to indicate his pacific nature, he stood in an attitude of deferential admiration. At this display the elder and less attractive of the maidens fled, uttering loud and continuous cries of apprehension to conceal the direction of her flight.”
Less delicately put was the announcement that special counsel prosecutors in America have dismissed two federal cases against Donald Trump, one over his transferring classified documents to his private property, the other over his abortive attempts to discredit the 2020 election. The reason given is that a justice department policy doesn’t allow criminal action against a sitting president and he’s delayed the actions for so long they can’t be completed before he takes over. Still, his civil conviction for rape and his boast that he could grope anyone he likes remain on his record.
Another way to avoid criminal charges is to die. The UK police have recently said they believe the late Mohamed Fayed (he added the ‘Al’ himself in 1974 when he moved to Britain because he thought it made him sound more important) might have raped and abused well over 100 women in his last 40 years, with his youngest victim thought to have been 13. Five other people are now being investigated for helping him get away with it.
I sometimes hope there is an afterlife and that there’s a special place reserved with Prometheus for people like him and Trump and Jimmy Savile, except the eagle would eat their dangly bits every day rather than their liver. Actually, perhaps the eagle could then have their livers for pudding.

Books, films and cheese

2 November 2024

This time next week we might know who will be America’s next president so I’m going to avoid politics and keep taking the Valium.

Books would be good. 

I’ve always needed books and still find it difficult to pass a charity shop without going in to have a look through their books, rarely leaving them empty-handed.  This is not to say that I’m a serious reader, revelling in the artistry of Greek philosophy* or Victorian poetry or learned treatises on … whatever people write learned treatises on … but I‘m always comforted, when I say how much I enjoy relaxing with a Reacher book, how many people say they too enjoy them.

I feel the same about books as Joyce Grenfell did about radio plays:  the pictures are much better than those in TV and film adaptations of them.

My last purchase was a Robert Galbraith novel I hadn’t read and it wasn’t till I got it home I realised what I’d done:  the damn thing has 1,000 pages and weighs one and a quarter kilos so it’s difficult to hold up in bed as Morpheus is creeping up on me.  (I’ve tried and don’t like Kindles – it’s not the same as rupturing yourself with a real book.)

In one place I worked, the head librarian and I were once lunching together in the staff restaurant and, when I asked her what books she read for pleasure, she said “I like big books”.  I couldn’t resist gently taking the mickey back then but where is she now when I need her to read one to me?

I enjoyed the earlier Cormoran Strike books and love the tensions in his relationship with Robin Ellacott (did you know Cormoran was a legendary Cornish giant?).  The author seems, as she did with Harry Potter, to be gaining confidence as the series develops.  The first Harry Potter was an average Young Adult size book while the last in the series was massive, and even included a joke about boys’ fixations on the size of their wands and how many feathers they had while Hermione scornfully pointed out it was much more important what they did with them.

My reaction to the early Harry Potter books was that they were no better than Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence (which my children also loved) or Alan Garner’s many books but she did develop the Harry Potter series well and – spoiler alert – it all came out right in the end.

Being suspicious of the recommendations of other readers whom I don’t know (and of literature prize winners who I tend to find pretentious), I put off reading Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club for a long time but finally gave in and read it.  Reader, I loved it!.  It’s written about a bunch of retired people amusing themselves investigating old, unsolved crimes and tripping over new ones.  I’ve since read the two follow-ups and am waiting for the next one to heave into view.  Osman writes with a downbeat, deadpan sense of humour that can make me chuckle out loud.

Something else that made me laugh last week was the film Anora (yes, I went to the cinema, alone!).  It’s about a sex worker who meets the immature son of a Russian oligarch and marries him, whereupon Mummy and Daddy send in their local representatives to sort things out, then fly over themselves to extricate him from the marriage.  That basically is the plot but the scenes in the sex club are handled very sensitively and make the men look stupid while some of the later scenes had the whole audience laughing.  I was still smiling as I remembered a couple of the lines several days later.

I’ve always been interested in films and my earliest ambition was to be a film censor so I could watch all the new films that came out for free but I’ve been restricted in recent years to keeping a note of films I want to see and recording them when they appear on TV.

I will even sometimes watch a film simply because it was made in an interesting way, like Victoria, a film that was reportedly made in one take, or Run Lola Run which presents the same story three times, each slightly different, or The Blair Witch Project, which wasn’t actually the first film using ‘found footage’, but was the first that popularised it.

I rarely watch horror films because I don’t see the point in spending a couple of hours while somebody is trying to frighten me but the Blair Witch technique was interesting, even if I did spend most of the time thinking that, if I’d been the witch, I’d have appeared for the first time in 40 years just to chuck these irritating teenagers out of my woods and send them back home to their breakfasts of waffles and maple syrup.

Naturally, I also watch anything by the Coen Brothers or Pedro Almodóvar even though not all their films are worth the effort.

I also list books I want to read and have occasionally worked my way through the list when I’m in one of the better-stocked charity bookshops (there’s a very good one in Topsham – and yes, thank you, I know about the Oxfam online bookshop).

Another cheerful note is the report last week that a 63-year old man has been arrested and questioned about the theft of 22 tonnes of cheese from Neal’s Yard Dairy.  The good news is that Neal’s Yard still paid Westcombe Dairy in Somerset, and the producers, Hafod and Pitchfork, for the lost cheese (valued at some £300,000) because they knew they could bear the loss more easily than the smaller companies.  Isn’t it heart-warming to hear of honourable capitalists who are willing to go beyond the letter of a contract.

*          I have read Aesop’s Fables and Ovid’s Metamorphoses but I’m not convinced they qualify as philosophy.