State benefits here, AI and swearing there, stupidity everywhere

1 November 2025

Without doubt, the most shocking of recent excitements is a new insight I gained into the Britain’s state benefits system. A neuro-divergent friend, a single-parent with two small children, struggles to survive on Universal Credit and Child Benefit. The older child was recently diagnosed as needing a SEND plan and the school counsellor said they should apply for Disability Living Allowance.

When the DWP heard about this application they immediately cancelled the next Universal Credit payment because they hadn’t been told about a change in circumstances. People claim benefits because they can’t live without them so letting a Jobsworth remove a benefit because of a technical breach of their bureaucracy leaving the claimant Sweet Fair Angela to pay their rent and heating bills and buy food for the next month seems … petty (the kindest word I can think of)

What can anyone say about a bunch of civil servants (paid by you and me) who enforce such an ineffably stupid and cruel response?

I wonder how ‘changes in circumstances’ are defined? For example, should a parent report that a child will no longer drink Ribena but will now drink Dr Pepper? If this should be reported, we can all overwhelm the bastards with trivialities.

Perhaps I’ll google it and see how changes in circumstances are defined.

I read recently that Google’s AI programming has some sort of swearing restrictions and will anticipate questions rather than offer the results of a wider search. If you ask “What is AI?”, you’ll get an AI-generated selection of links; if you ask “What the fuck is AI?”, you get a quite different selection. (Of course I tried it.)

Apparently, you can also circumvent those irritating chatbots by repeating “I want to talk to a human”, or say something is an emergency, but I haven’t yet tried this.

In other news, Plaid Cymru won an election for a traditionally Labour seat in Wales; Labour and Conservatives were humiliated and Reform was disappointed.

Further east, Andrew Windsor, the piss-artist formerly known as Prince, was stripped of all his titles while others just worried about digital ID cards. Why do people get so exercised about having them? We already have photo ID driving licences and passports, I have an iris scan on a computer somewhere in America, my mother’s ‘maiden name’ was shown in ‘Who’s Who’ until I deleted it some 20 years ago, and Sainsburys know where I live.

I also wonder how many people give honest answers to ‘security questions’ about things like my favourite football team and the name of my first pet (both ‘hydrangea’ if you’re interested).

However, with the incomparable brilliance of governments generally, it seems a trial run will introduce a smartphone-based veteran card available to 1.8 million people. “Veteran”? Does that mean those of us who are a generation behind technology, haven’t even got smartphones and are more likely to be suffering from dementia? I have already had to accost passing strangers at 11 pm on dark nights to offer to repay them in cash if they’ll use their smartphone to pay for my parking because the car park company’s payment machine doesn’t accept cash or cards or jokes from Christmas crackers.

More worrying still are the results by research by Cardiff University into how viewers’ preferred news media influence their beliefs about what is happening in the world. For example, they discovered that 84% of GB News viewers believed net migration into the UK is still increasing, compared with 71% of ITV viewers, 62 % of BBC viewers and 51% of Channel 4 viewers. It’s interesting that, in all these cases, more than half these viewers still believe net migration has increased although, in fact, while net migration did rise between 2020 and 2023, it has since been falling. But who lets facts stand in the way of a good story?

Incidentally, can anyone think of any other political party leader apart from Nigel Farage who is allowed to front their own series on a television news channel? I’ve tried watching some of his (and other) GB News shows but my hearing no longer lets me separate individual voices when two people are shouting over each other and I get more pleasure from reading a good book anyway.

In the Middle East, the word ‘ceasefire’ is gaining a new meaning. Because Hamas hadn’t returned the remains of all their hostages and an Israeli soldier was killed in a skirmish between Israeli troops and Palestinian militants, Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a raid on Gaza that killed at least 104 people, 35 of them children, and wounded many more. The situation was further complicated by Hamas’s return of the remains of a hostage who Israeli forces had claimed to have recovered two years ago.

And there was I thinking “ceasefire” meant that firing would cease.

More evidence of stupidity came from the covid inquiry when Boris Johnson denied claims that his government had failed to prepare for school closures, saying he thought it would be “amazing” if the Department for Education hadn’t done this. Chuck Brodsky once sang about George W Bush: “Orders come down right from the top / to punish the guy who pushes the mop”.

So here’s another example of stupidity at the bottom of the food chain in our nearest town: last week, a woman pushing a buggy, was being followed by a somewhat older child who, unbeknownst to her, dropped a sweet wrapper. Suddenly, a “Littering Enforcement Officer” loomed out of the shadows and fined the mother £120, payable NOW or they’d call the police. These people have the power to fine people from £75 to £150, so what costs £75 if a sweet wrapper costs £120 – an unexpected sneeze?

Thus did the Jobsworth make a parent responsible for a crime they didn’t even know had been committed. Surely this will allow: “Good evening, sir, I’m a police officer. You may have thought your 9-year-old was in their bedroom but they’ve just been caught setting fire to the Council offices so you’re under arrest for arson.”

Speed, matricides, Anora and hearing problems

8 March 2025

Imagine a car travelling at a legal 60 mph on a straight country road and an identical car, also travelling at 60 mph, coming towards it and they collide head-on. The effect on each car will be like driving into a brick wall at 120 mph, their speed relative to the other car.

Now imagine you’re standing beside the road where they collide. If we ignore the small variation caused by the angle between your line of sight and each car’s direction of travel, you will see both cars travelling at 60 mph relative to you.

Now imagine you’re in a helicopter travelling at exactly 40 mph at right-angles to the road and you pass over the place where they crash at exactly the moment they do. As you approach the road, the speed of each car relative to you will change even though their speed and yours remain constant relative to the road.

Now imagine your helicopter is approaching the point of impact at an angle of less than 90^o, or approaching in a regular curve round a central point 1 mile from the point of impact. Now calculate the speed at which each car is moving relative to you.

At this point, I have to tell you I failed my A Level maths quite impressively so I don’t even know how to start calculating the relative speeds of the cars and the helicopter but there are two important things to remember: (a) the speed at which anything is travelling can only be measured against an external point, which might help explain Einstein’s idea that nothing can travel faster the light and (b) if you’re driving, it’s not just the speed shown on your speedometer that decides how bad a crash will be.

Another horrifying number that really needs some sort of comparison to give it a context is that, of 2,000 women killed by men from 2009 to 2021, 170 of them were killed by their sons or grandsons, 70% of whom had mental health problems. The research was carried out by Prof Rachel Condry and Dr Caroline Miles, from Oxford and Manchester universities, in collaboration with the Femicide Census, and is to be published shortly so the full report may give a perspective by comparing the figures with the number of men killed by their sons or grandsons in the same period, or equivalent numbers from other countries or different time periods.

It was glad to hear that the film ‘Anora‘ won several Oscars, because I’d seen and enjoyed it – none of the ‘villains’ was actually that villainous, Anora herself was believably naïve and some of the scenes had me laughing out loud. What I didn’t notice was that the F-word is apparently used 479 times, an average of almost 30 times a minute over the 140 minutes of the film, or once every two seconds, which is a new record. Just imagine it: “What do you do for a living?” / “I count the number of F-words in movies.” / “Are they good films?” / “I don’t know, I’m counting the effing effs.”

Mind you, with my hearing as bad as it is, I struggle to understand the ‘normal’ dialogue so I probably missed the swearing.

There was an interesting article this week by Rachael Groessler, a writer who lives in Brisbane who first noticed hearing problems when she found she could no longer eavesdrop on people at neighbouring tables (which was also one of my favourite hobbies). Groessler suffers from a specific and rare form of deafness but I have had similar problems for many years as I’ve gotten older: in crowded rooms and bars where a lot of different conversations are going on, I find it very difficult to separate the voice of the person I’m talking to from the background noise.

Curiously, the consonants go first while the vowels remain, giving rise to some surreal mishearings. When I turned the radio on in the car last week, I landed in the middle of a programme about Roman gods which didn’t make much sense until I realised they were talking about Venus, not a Penis.

When I realised I was going deaf, I did of course get (free) NHS hearing aids. These improved some things but not the full spectrum and the top three keys on the piano still made only a clicking sound and produced no audible note. An added complication of hearing loss is that, if your ears are different, you misjudge the direction a sound is coming from, which is particularly annoying if you’re trying to find the bird with that unusual call.

Then of course, one’s nearest and dearest sees an advertisement and suggests you look at the miraculous hearing aids offered by people who’ve graduated from used-car sales training and are tremendously keen to get their commission. So I went to a private shop and they convinced me their hearing aids would do everything the NHS ones did but much better, and all for only £3,000 because they have a special discount on this week (you know the spiel).

What they failed to mention is that their hearing aids are just one step ahead of the NHS ones and the NHS will catch up quite quickly. I gave them a year or so to improve my life and, after failing to notice any real difference, I had a long fight with Boots to get 50% of my money back. To be fair, you can pay for prettier ones that are less obvious from outside if you care about people seeing them, but I don’t.

Talking of what one hears, I read that Timothée Chalamet spent a long time working with a professional harmonica coach so, when he played Bob Dylan in the film ‘A Complete Unknown’, he could make it sound exactly like someone has accidentally trodden on the cat.

Failing memories, words and swearing

5 November 2022

Losing a word when I was in my 30s wasn’t a big deal, I’d just stop and say “you know … what’s the word? … begins with a P”. And, some hours later, I’d be ironing a shirt and I’d say “pernicious, that was it”.

As I’ve grown older and stopped ironing shirts and still lose words, I inevitably wonder if this is the beginning of the end and am comforted only by the facts that I’ve always done it and I’m still learning new words (we have a new friend who also likes words so we swap exciting discoveries, my latest being bruxism which luckily isn’t something I suffer from).

I’ve always loved words and regular readers will have noticed that I occasionally make up words because I think they sound a bit different from the obvious one. For example, I recently made up the word ‘coronated’ for fun because it was so obviously wrong. At least, I thought I’d made it up but, a few weeks later, one of the weekend newspaper pedants complained that it was being used quite widely by people who should have known the word ‘crowned’.

(There is actually one word which is filed in an ambitiously inaccessible part of my mind: ‘eponymous’. Obviously I know the word but it’s surprising how often I can’t think of it when I want it.)

My own pet peeves at the moment are the increasing use of ‘likely’ instead of ‘probable’ and using the wrong preposition, as do people who say they’re bored OF something.

But. (There has to be a ‘but’ and not just one that leads to a rant about starting sentences with conjunctions.) I love the English language’s willingness to incorporate new words, to extend the meanings of old words and to distort ‘proper’ grammatical constructions for effect

For example, I like “Never an hour goes by without I think of her” because it’s less predictable than “Never an hour goes by without my thinking of her”.

I’m also quite tolerant of spelling mistakes, especially in emails when one’s typing speed overtakes the need for textbook language (and emails get less editing than these mutterings). Indeed, spelling can be irrelevant:

“Aoccdrnig to a rsceearh pjrocet at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it denos’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat lteerts are in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a ttaol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.”

I asked a friend who is a specialist in ageing if people with larger vocabularies were less likely or slower to suffer from age-related dementia but she said she didn’t think it worked like that.

Scientists at Cambridge’s Department of Clinical Neurosciences have discovered that it may be possible to spot signs of dementia as early as nine years before patients it is diagnosed. Their project collected background information from different tests, including problem solving, memory, remembering lists of numbers, reaction times and grip strength, as well as data on weight loss and gain and on the number of falls experienced. Subjects were then assessed again after five and nine years.

The results showed that the people who remained healthy had done better in the tests than those who went on to develop Alzheimer’s who were also more likely to have had a fall in the previous 12 months.

As someone who shops from a list and will forget to get anything not on the list, however important it is, I wonder if I’m heading that way. My problem is compounded when I can remember I’ve got three things to do but can only remember two of them.

However, I take comfort from Professor Bruno Dubois, Director of the Institute of Memory and Alzheimer’s Disease (IMMA) at La Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, who has said that “if you’re aware of having memory problems, you don’t have Alzheimer’s; if you have a memory illness or Alzheimer’s, you won’t be aware of your shortcomings”. If you’re OK, the information is still stored somewhere there, it’s the system that searches for it that’s just slowing down or taking a tea-break.

Here are three tests:

1. Find the C in the table below:

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOCOOOOOOOOOOO

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

2. Find the 6 in the table below:

99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999

96999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999

99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999

3. Now find the N in the table below:

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMNMM

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

There, that was easy wasn’t it! If you too found the three odd ones quickly without using your finger, you probably don’t have anything to worry about.

I’ve always managed to go upstairs and wonder what I came up for so I stopped worrying about this and will only start worrying again if I can’t remember where the stairs are.

A 20-year research project carried out by Dr Robbie Love at Aston University into the use of ‘bad’ language, and how it relates to the user’s age shows some interesting changes in the prevalence of certain words in conversation. For example, the word ‘bloody’ is much less common than it used to be while the words ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ (and their various derivatives) are much more widely used.

The former word is thought to have been printed without asterisks for the first time in 1960 (in what had, until the previous year, been called the Manchester Guardian) in a report on the result of the obscenity trial of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ and was broadcast for the first time in a live TV debate in 1965 when theatre critic Kenneth Tynan was reported to have said “I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word ‘fuck’ would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden.”

A new paper published by Elsevier BV contains encouraging news for those of us who swear quite a lot. It claims “Swearing produces effects that are not observed with other forms of language use” and “It generates a range of distinctive outcomes: physiological, cognitive, emotional, pain-relieving, interactional and rhetorical.” These include “emotional force and arousal; increased attention and memory; heightened autonomic activity, such as heart rate and skin conductance; hypoalgesia (pain relief); increased strength and stamina; and a range of distinctive interpersonal, relational and rhetorical outcomes.” Experiments showed that subjects who swore could keep their hands in a bucket of ice for longer than those who didn’t, and chanting a swearword improved muscle strength during physical exercise. (Go down a treat at the gym, that would.)

The increasing popularity of ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ possibly contrasts with the decline of ‘bloody’ because both are more versatile and easily combined with other words to produce powerful new words and phrases, such as ‘clusterfuck’ and ‘gobshite’, but even in their unadorned forms they can ease the discomfort when one has hit one’s thumb with a hammer, or dropped something messy.

There are (arguably predictable) demographic divides in the use of swearwords: women tend to swear less than men and older people tend to swear less than younger people but, although I can’t help change the image of women, I’ll continue to disprove the ageing theory.

The context is also important. A constant stream of swearwords just becomes meaningless while a carefully placed swearword can add something to what is being said, but some people are (or have been conditioned to be) seriously shocked by ‘bad language’ so we need to edit our ‘ruder’ pearls of wisdom in their presence.

Since I assume anybody who’s read this far isn’t too bothered by swearing, let’s all reassure ourselves that we can delay the onset of dementia if we say “Oh fuck it” every so often.

(And don’t forget to keep your fingers crossed for democracy in America’s mid-term elections this week.)