Top ten unfinished blog ideas

It is well-known that even the crappiest article with “top ten” in the headline will be ridiculously over-rated by Google, and therefore attract way more visitors than the content legitimately deserves.

To that end, here is my very own contribution to the entirely unnecessary top ten genre. Like a ruminant, I’m bringing these half-digested ideas back up from one of my many stomachs for a last chew. Too rambling for a Facebook status update, too under-developed for an entire post –here we go, my Xmas gift to you:

1. All the thrill of the escalator

Does anyone else still get a frisson of big city excitement when they go on a “down” escalator? None of the towns I lived in up until the age of 18 had any shops with a down – it was lifts or stairs only for us yokels.

Every time I ride the down escalator, part of me wants to sing “New York, New York”.

2. Now or then?

Is this London St Pancras 2011 or Berlin Templehof 1936? Fascist art is alive and well...

3, Everyone’s a critic

Has anyone here read “The Communist Manifesto”? I did recently, and I was surprised by how clear and modern Marx’s critique of capitalism is. His descriptions of the finance-driven economy are shockingly prescient of the situation we find ourselves in now.

The second half of The Communist Manifesto is also pretty funny, where Marx kick starts the favourite pastime of every leftwinger ever since and slags off every other kind of socialist who has any point of disagreement with him. Because it’s SCIENCE after all.

And does anyone here like Nietzsche? As far as I can see, his demolition of the foundations of Judaeo-Christian ethics in “Beyond Good and Evil” and “The Antichrist” is irrefutable.

The trouble is, both Marx and Nietzsche go on from their brilliantly-argued critique to erect some batshit alternative scheme on top of it – in Marx’s case, communism; in Nietzsche’s case...errr...well, I’m still not entirely sure. Something to do with “act like a Homeric Greek and don’t give a toss about what anyone else does”.

And the funny thing is, both of those two explicitly denigrate “mere critics”. Why is it so easy to knock things down and so hard to produce alternatives?

4. Don’t put your daughter on the internet Mrs Worthington

If you put a picture of your kids as your Facebook profile picture, no one is going to know if you are who they think you are.  

5. Literary heroics (a)

Thanks to Anonymous (for god’s sake people – just put in any old name when you leave a comment...) for pointing me in the direction of Xenophon. I read the whole of “Anabasis” while on jury duty.

“Anabasis” is the ancient Greek “Bravo Two Zero”. Secret mission in Iraq goes wrong, escape from behind enemy lines, fighting all the way – sound familiar? ANCIENT GREECE IS NOT BORING!

6. Literary Heroics (b)

Whoooooooooooooooooooooooooo lives in a pineapple under the sea? FRIDTJOF NANSEN!

If Xenophon is Andy McNab, Fridtjof Nansen is Bear Grylls – but without the overnight hotels. I just read “Farthest North”, relating his polar expedition of 1893 to 1896. That’s right – three years in a wooden ship on the Arctic Ocean.  

In fairness, there are times when the repetitive prose manages to not only describe the ball-aching boredom he suffered being frozen into pack ice with 13 Norwegians waiting to drift to Greenland but also to elicit it. I could only care so much about what they had for dinner EVERY DAY FOR THREE YEARS. "Took the latitude. We have drifted 12 feet north in the last week. Took a sounding. The sea is very deep. It's been night for six months. Thought I saw a polar bear, but I didn't. I am so bored."

But the unbelievable fortitude of the man – a man of action, and of science and (later) a humanitarian statesman - is just inspiring. Sure, there are plenty of British polar explorers I could have idolised. But their books were not free! Nor did any of them have quite such an impressive moustache and stare. 

7. Vests are not outerwear

It is not acceptable to wear just a vest in public in the UK if you are a man. Even if it’s hot.  Especially when it’s cold.

Also, is it wrong that when I hear the line “don we now our gay apparel” in “Deck the halls with boughs of holly” I can’t help but think of assless chaps?

8. The most revolting cocktail ever

I give you the “Scotti”.  

9. The day I quit the gym

I cancelled my gym membership – and had to work out a three month notice period @£72 a month! Outrageous. If anyone has any ideas on how I can avoid turning into Jabba the Hutt, I’d be most grateful for your input.

10. And then the abyss stared back into me

The trouble with writing a blog is that when I meet people in the real world, I don’t have anything left to say to them. In telling every interesting anecdote I have on here, and polishing and grinding down the sharp edges on the facts until it becomes a routine or a bit of schtick, I lose the will to ever mention it again. 

Rhapsodies of Bohemia - pt3

Neville Chamberlain once washed his hands of Czechoslovakia by calling it “a far-away country of which we know nothing”.

As such, I like to think that these three blog posts about my recent trip to Prague are working to prevent such appeasement of any future Hitler.

By making you not know nothing about it, and in fact know something about it.

The Czech Republic, that is.

Czech Technology

I shouldn’t really have been surprised by this (because it happened to me in France as well), but the first thing I did on getting out of the airport was to try and check my emails - and of course, I couldn’t get the internet on my phone. So I had to hold out for a WiFi network.

Naturally, I was very uneasy until I got online. God knows how anyone managed to go on holiday in the past. Or to places where they don’t have WiFi.

Anyway, pursuant to my remarks about the Czech language I was a little disconcerted when faced with the Czech keyboard. Now I know that other countries have different keyboards. But if ANYONE knows where the @ symbol is on the Czech keyboard, please let me know. In order to log in to my email, I had to Google “at symbol”.

Just another reason not to have all those silly accented letters in your alphabet taking up valuable keyboard space.

Czech culture

Ever seen this little chap? 

If - like me - you used to watch the eerie foreign cartoons on BBC2 around teatime circa 1983, you may have a vague recollection. If not, he’s called Krtek (which means “mole”) and as far as I could tell, he is the single most popular thing in the entire Czech Republic.

Perhaps one in every three shops and market stalls in Prague stock every kind of Krtek merchandise you can imagine.

On our last day there, I was starting to think this mole was a little too popular when I spotted him on the front page of a daily newspaper.

But it turned out that his creator, Zdenek Miler, had died that day. Very sad, because in just three days I had become a Krtek fan too.

Alongside Krtek, Prague is overrun with Kafka-kitsch and the occasional Svejk – but no one comes close to the mole.

In conclusion

Elvira and I had a great time in Prague. To be fair, we would probably have had a great time anywhere without the kids, but the location definitely contributed. Prague is easy to get to, (relatively) cheap, safe, simple to navigate, beautiful and fascinating. I give it two thumbs up, and despite the piss-taking in the foregoing three posts, I am now a firm fan of the Czech people and the Czech Republic. 

But after our foreign trip it was nice to come back to the kids and to Boston and see the familiar signs of home.

The Czech is in the post – pt 2

Here’s the second instalment of my guide to Prague for people who share the exact circumstances my wife and I found ourselves in last week. For everyone else, there’s always Tripadvisor.

Czech Language

This is probably historically a highly tasteless remark, for which I apologise in advance - but Prague is basically a German city inhabited by people who speak a language that bears no resemblance to German.

Everything I saw pointed to either Vienna (if it was less than 400 years old) or that whole kind of Brothers Grimm medieval Germany thing (if older).

Anyway, as well as excellent English and German, the Czechs speak a language called “Czech”, and this is a Slavic language. As such – and again I apologise for any cultural insensitivity here – it is a lot like most other Slavic languages, from Russian, to Polish, to Serbian and so on.  For example, the Czechs say “dobra den” and the Poles say “dzien dobry”. PotAYto, PotARto – DUMPling, DIMPling.

Mercifully, the Catholics got to the Czechs before old Cyril and Methodius, and they use our Roman alphabet.

However, this is of little advantage when your find yourself confronted with repeated storms of consecutive consonants, which really do not lend themselves to English tonguing. Elvira and I struggled to ask for “Trdelnik” when we found it, and ended up rendering it like Dora the Explorer saying “turtleneck”.

And here I must insert a little linguistic rant of wider relevance. English has its faults, but it makes do perfectly well with 26 letters. If you need all those goddam accents to cover all the sounds your language makes – perhaps you need some more letters. I’m just sayin’ is all.

Anyway, I can only begin to imagine how Czechs play Scrabble. They are not, however, above a bit of Engrish.

Czech Money

The Czechs are not members of the Eurozone, which means that you can still have loads of fun wondering what the hell is going on with a currency you cannot get your head round - which in turn means that your holiday descends into a purgatory of near-constant mental arithmetic.

Their money is called the “koruna” and £1 is worth anywhere between 25 and 31 of them – which makes for very confusing “value for money” assessments when shopping.

Here’s a piece of useful advice (by my own low, low standards). Get your koruna in the Czech Republic, not in the UK. You get a much better rate (worst case, +3 more koruna to the pound) and you will not be slapped around the face for waving euros around, at least in the vicinity of the airport and Prague itself. Unless, I suppose, you are being met by Vaclav Klaus, who doesn’t like euros. But nor does he drive a taxi.

 

As well as suitcase-hostile block paving/cobblestones, the streets of Prague are lined with exchange booths, in which tourists swap their home currency for ever-fluctuating korunas.

To your left, you can see an example of Czech language, Czech money and German economic colonialism all in one place.

And that, dear readers, brings me on to a little adventure the missus and I had...

So there we were, standing outside an exchange booth trying to work out whether “we buy” means that they buy pounds off you for that many korunas or they buy that many korunas for a pound, when a man sidles up to us and starts asking if we’re interested in changing money.

Now, this chap spoke good English with that kind of accent which, to UK ears, could place him anywhere from Strasbourg to the Urals. He looked kind of Kazakh, or something else Central Asian. Anyway, he said that he’d give us 32 koruna to the pound – which was the best deal we’d seen.

My suspicions were first raised when he insisted on carrying out the transaction behind a parked car. But I wasn’t too alarmed – he’s probably just trying to dodge tax, I thought, and that is in both our interests... I wasn't going to hold that against him. 

So I say I want to change £100. He suggests £200. I say I’ve only got £100. So he whips out a bundle of notes, and counts through them at Paul Daniels speed – one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, one hundred, two hundred. He has my £100 in his hand when I realise that I have actually seen a one thousand koruna note, and the notes at the bottom of his pile are a different colour. And size. And they had “Hungarian forints” written on them.

Like a panther, I grab my money back, rebutting his protestations that they are real banknotes by declaring - I was very proud of this particular bit of wit - “I can read”. And away we go, very pleased not to have been ripped off. Later on that day, I checked the exchange rates and found that 1000 forints were going for about £2.79.

Elvira was deeply impressed by my display of shrewdness. All I can say is that the deep suspicion and cynicism about other people that condemns me to a life of perpetual isolation sometimes has its upsides.

Coming next...Czech Technology and Culture. For real, this time. 

Czech yourself before you wreck yourself – pt 1

Elvira and I have just returned from a child-free trip to Prague, capital of the glamorous Czech Republic – the veritable Switzerland of the former Soviet bloc.

And so, before I return to the subject of my recent jury service (THANKS for the complete ABSENCE of useful legal advice, by the way), I will regale you with a little bit of travel writing.

However, in inimitable ODHSNM style, this will largely consist of my impressions of various things that either did happen or that I am imagining to have happened, upon extrapolation from a more mundane reality. As such, if you are looking for a useable guide on Things to do in Prague – as ever - I suggest you go elsewhere.  

Czech Cuisine

I did not see a single green vegetable on offer, from street food kiosks to five-star restaurants. Come to think of it, unless you count braised red cabbage – which consists more of sugar and booze than cabbage – I don’t think I saw any vegetables at all.

In their place, you have dumplings. Dumplings big, dumplings small, dumplings smooth, lumpy or gnocchi-like – all made of flour or potato, and in Elvira’s well-chosen words all “very binding”.

I can’t fault Czech cuisine for flavour and heartiness, but I suspect that constipation may be one of the country’s biggest public health issues.

Having said that, the degree of bowel irritation I personally experienced as a result of drinking the ample strong coffee on offer more or less offset the bunging-up effect of the food.

At the hotel breakfast, I was led to wonder why the UK is so rubbish when it comes to bread. Here, I was faced with about 20 different options of variously shaped and flavoured rolls, slices and more. Fennel seed in bread, I wholeheartedly recommend. But at home, it’s “white or brown or both”. Why are the British content with damp, floppy, sliced white shite?

Another thing we in the UK seem to neglect is the admirable continental tradition of distilling alcoholic bitters – the Czech speciality being a delightful little tipple called Becherovka.

I have come to the conclusion that the “secret recipe” for Jagermeister – surely the Rod Stewart to Becherovka’s Tom Waits – must comprise one part Becherovka to one part Beecham’s Venos Expectorant for Chesty Coughs.

More to follow, when we consider Czech Technology and Czech Culture...

Nice doing justice with you

You may have been wondering what has happened to ODHSNM recently. No, I was not co-opted to serve in the governments of either Greece or Italy. Much worse, I was doing jury service.

As such, I have not only some actual real world experiences to write about, but also some opinions that are supported by evidence – as opposed to the  steady diet of blind prejudice I usually feed you.

However, I must begin with a warning and a disclaimer. I am not going to tell anyone about anything relating to the deliberations of those juries I sat on, because it is an offence under the Contempt of Court Act 1981.

I am also going to be deliberately vague about when and where I did it and what cases I was involved in. Seems that blog accounts of the details of jury service are a bit sparse, and so even though I have a better grasp of the law in this area than some, I don’t want to go out on a limb and do or say anything dodgy (working from this broadly).

So, as a preliminary – while I await the input of those of my friends and readers who know the law better than me – here are some interesting factoids about jury service:

1. At the court I attended, probably about 50 new people got called up each week. Given that the usual term for jury duty is two weeks, that meant that at any one time there were about a hundred potential jurors locked up in a special waiting room, ready to be called. There is a LOT of waiting.
2. Whenever a trial is ready to start, 15 to 20 of the people get called out – apparently at random (more on the nature of "randomness" in the criminal justice system at a later date...). You may immediately be thinking, “hold on – not 12?” Well, you’d be correct. Those people then go up to the courtroom, where an official literally shuffles cards with all their names on, and the first 12 called out go and take their places. At this point, the counsel can reject any potential jurors they don’t like the look of – so this is the point that your swastika tattoos and copies of the Daily Mail come in most handy. Those rejected or not picked, get sent back to the holding pen.
3. Anyone who is on the electoral register and aged between 18 and 70 can get called up for jury duty. If you get a letter saying you’ve been picked, you can be fined up to £1,000 if you don’t reply to it within seven days.
4. There are nine lions on the Royal coat of arms. I counted them. Many times.

More will follow, pending legal direction. 

The Dukes of Moral Hazard

After praising the Greek government for sticking to its guns on a referendum on the bailout package yesterday, I was rather surprised to find that some 15 minutes after I had published it, Papandreou had changed his mind. The ODHSNM kiss of death strikes again. 

Suddenly George had decided that “democracy” meant something a little less Athenian and bit more Burkean than he’d previously been inclined to lead the world to believe.

By that, I mean:

1. Because the parliamentary opposition supported the bailout – no doubt after having their children taken hostage by G20 agents and spirited to a bunker in Cannes – there was, in fact, total agreement in the Greek polity on the whole “selling oneself and one’s descendants into slavery” issue.
2. The general public had their chance for a say when they elected their MPs. No point whinging about it now Stavros. Just eat your grass and be quiet. 

So, well done everyone - especially Existential Doubt for his article explaining WTF brought us to this moment. That’s the crisis over.

Well, call me paranoid and a prophet of doom, but I’m glad Elvira and I decided to book our upcoming break in a non-Euro country (the Czech Republic, since you ask).

While flights might be cheaper after the Euro has collapsed, I don’t want the added hassle of bartering for food, huddling around burning pieces of furniture in an exploded basement overnight and fending off marauding barbarians during the day on top of the usual stresses of a holiday.

Yes, well done EU and G20. The banks can rest easy knowing that there’s nothing you won’t do to stop them losing a penny. Things are going so well.

While we’re at it, EU, why not finish the job properly? All the governments – step down. Let’s get a Hapsburg on the throne and change the name back to "Holy Roman Empire".

Go George Go

For what it is worth, Greek prime minister George Papandreou can count on the support of this blog in his efforts to inject a little democracy into the EU’s attempt to set an all-time record for throwing good money after bad.

As Seumas Milne says in the Guardian today:

It makes no sense. Unless it's understood that it's not the Greek economy that's being rescued, but European and US banks exposed to Greek debt.

Perhaps my economically-literate blogger friend Existential Doubt could offer some elucidation as to exactly where all this money is going and how it’s going to help?

Money has to be continually poured into Greece so Greece can give it to the financiers, who will stop lending money to governments that spend vastly more than they collect in taxes if they ever lose out, resulting in the collapse of social democratic welfare statist civilisation as we know it - which is only possible when states borrow huge amounts of cash with no idea about how to pay it back from financiers. That about right?

So, am I being naive or missing some obvious point if I can't help but see this as simply delaying the inevitable and impoverishing yourself in the process?

As Kenny Rogers would say:

You've got to know when to hold 'em - and know when to fold 'em.

Anyway, that's enough economics. Here's some politics.

Papandreou offers the Greek people a referendum on whether they want to return to the kind of economic and political colonisation by foreign powers that they spent most of last 500 years trying to shake off, and suddenly, he’s an irresponsible, weak lunatic because - god forbid! - if they are given a say in the matter, the people might decide that they would rather that the banks lose some money than be reduced to eating grass to survive for the next 50 years.

You can question the democratic credentials of a prime minister of Greece whose father was prime minister of Greece and whose grandfather was also...errr...prime minister of Greece. But he seems to have remembered that democratic politicians are there, when it comes to a moment like this, to serve the interests of their people first rather than international capital. 

This Treaty marks a new stage in the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, in which decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen.

That’s Article A of the Treaty of Rome, which led to the creation of the European Union. I wonder what went wrong...

Remember, remember what actually happened

The demand that x, y or z "should be banned" is regularly heard these days – generally directed at things or ways of behaving that the demander personally doesn't like.

No matter how liberal, libertarian or laissez-faire an individual is most of the time, pick on something they subjectively object to and you can generally rely on the fascist within to surface and call for the coercive power of the state to be thrown behind the removal of other people's freedoms to do, be or have something they disapprove of.

So it is not without some trepidation and discomfort that I ask "why in god's name doesn't the government ban the public sale of fireworks?"

From now until around early December, every night is Bonfire Night for someone. As soon as it gets dark until around 11pm, someone somewhere within earshot of your house is going to be setting off small incendiary bombs for their own amusement without regard to the welfare of you, your kids, your pets, farm animals etc etc.

No doubt some of them will be maimed or killed – as they are every year – and a load of buildings will be burned down, either by stupidity or intentional malice or the combination of both that appears to be the hallmark of 21st century Britain.

It seems crazy to me that, when pretty much every other way of behaving anti-socially or self-destructively is on the Nanny State's agenda for eradication, the selling of explosives to children and drunks for use in their own homes is not higher up the list.

At the moment though, it's not just fireworks that are dragging out the whole Bonfire Night misery over an ever-growing stretch of the year. Disaffected middle class people the world over seem to have adopted the image of Guy Fawkes from the film V for Vendetta as in some way symbolic of their tiresome festival/holiday/protests against capitalism.

Never mind that every V mask purchased profits Time Warner (Dow Jones – TWX; current market capitalisation - around $35 billion; preferred economic system – capitalism). Guy Fawkes is a pretty crap symbol of anti-authoritarianism.

When he tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament and King James I in 1605, Fawkes and his pals were emphatically NOT doing it in the name of democracy, freedom, socialism, organic wind farms or anything else that our protesting friends would believe in.

He was, in fact, trying to kill a Protestant king in order to put a Catholic monarch on the throne. I've got nothing against Catholics TODAY, but the experience of sectarian strife under the last two explicitly Catholic British monarchs – Mary and James II – suggests this would have led to the destruction of any nascent democratic stirrings in a torrent of blood and burning heretics.

That's not to say, of course, that the Protestant royals of the time were any less inclined towards violent repression on religious grounds. The main problem, I reckon, was perhaps more that back then rulers felt that political power implied a right to slaughter not only anyone who didn't DO what they wanted them to do, but also didn't THINK what they wanted them to think.

Nevertheless, I think if you look at the history of Protestant countries and Catholic countries in Europe from the 1600s onwards, it seems reasonable to conclude that the former ended up rather more liberal and democratic a lot more quickly than the latter. That's just what happened in history, innit?

Anyway - in the same way that pseudo radicals are content to forget that dear old Che Guevara ordered the execution of civilians because he looks good on a T shirt, only someone who didn't really have a clue what Guy Fawkes was trying to achieve would adopt him as a democratic icon. 

Discovery? It's what I do for a living really...

I am still using Spotify's free service, in spite of all their efforts to make it so unbearable that everyone who does gives up and starts paying.

Recent "innovations" of this sort that they have introduced include taking away any indication anywhere of how much listening time you've got left – meaning that it could cut out at any moment.

However, by far the most caustic of the irritants applied has been the spiralling number of adverts played. Not that I mind adverts in general – I'm quite happy to listen to them in exchange for free music.

Indeed, the number of adverts played is only mitigated by the fact that they are surely some of the WORST ADVERTS EVER, which I cannot imagine would ever persuade a listener to do anything other than boycott all the products and services of that brand in perpetuity out of sheer embarrassment.

But right now, there is one advert which is absolutely killing me with laughter every time it comes on – and lest you are not fellow Spotify Don't-Give-A-Shit-About-You-Lot-Anymore users, I have transcribed it for your enjoyment.

Imagine this in the voice of a condescending Radio Four grand-dame:

Discovery? It's what I do for a living really. Silicon chips, dark matter, the Higgs Boson. 

But recently, I made another discovery: punctuality, legroom, a crisp glass of Chanteloup-Touraine. 

All from £49 with Lufthansa. Now that's a wonder of the universe!

Pardon me, I have just vomited all over myself. Oh, where to begin...

Well, how about this? Whoever you are supposed to be: NO ONE has discovered the Higgs Boson.

Moreover, it's unlikely that – were evidence for its actual existence beyond inference from the Standard Model to be found – that someone working in the field of electronics (where you "discovered" the silicon chip) would be the one to find it.

Finally, it would be a tragedy akin to the neglect suffered by Tesla thanks to Edison if – after such an illustrious career – you were reduced to travelling by budget airline, whatever kind of mini-bottles of wine they serve.

I'm afraid that I will never now be able to travel on a Lufthansa flight. Because if I got sat next to someone who said "Discovery? It's what I do for a living really..." to me I'm afraid I would have to murder them. 

Kids say the funniest things

Yesterday morning, Roger Jr burst into our bedroom declaring that he had done a "rumpy wee". On further inspection this turned out to be his own peculiar expression for "explosive diarrhoea".

I've been struggling since then to work out the thinking that led him to this description. Rest assured, I have never used the words "rump" or "rumpy" around him – with the exception of reference to the fruitily-named Humpy Rumpy the hippopotamus from "The Enormous Crocodile".

Quite why he would then associate the two, I can't imagine. He probably meant "lumpy" – which, on reflection, is rather too graphic and unpleasant an image with which to continue.

Even when he's using real words, Roger Jr can be a little hard to understand. That is because he is functionally bilingual, speaking conventional English at home and speaking the broadest of Bradford dialects when he is at nursery.

He will often tell me that something is "ray-ur-leh, ray-ur-leh big", for example. And when I ask him to repeat it, he'll say "really, really big". So he knows that there are two ways of saying the same thing (NB exposition of the size of things is one of Roger Jr's favourite conversational themes).  

Having moved around a lot when I was growing up, I don't really have an accent. Or rather, I have bits of various accents – and like Roger Jr and Tony Blair, I switch to the most appropriate one depending on the people to whom I am currently speaking.

My wife Elvira, by contrast, spent her entire childhood in Boston – but somehow managed to avoid developing an accent that makes her sound like a brain-damaged farmhand who has received in incomplete course of speech therapy.

That's a joke of course. The Boston accent is a splendid thing, a unique cross between Norfolk and East Yorkshire, between north and south. It's a gem, hidden in the depths of the Fens, overlooked by the outside world and thus allowed to carry its local heritage into the present.

And let's not forget, sometimes there are big advantages to be had in allowing people to think you are not as intelligent as you are.

I suppose it's pretty silly, imagining that some accents sound thicker than others. And by the time Roger Jr is an adult, god alone knows what "normal" English speech will sound like.

Anyway, here's a picture of Roger Jr on the potty – just to guarantee that however he sounds, he will definitely hate me when we do get there.

Fortunately, on this occasion there was no rumpiness. 

Goats and penguins

So, I just read an hilarious article by Marina Hyde in the Guardian, which suggested that – amongst other things - the role of England football captain was "marginally less important than that of a regimental goat".

I like goats. They have a lot of personality (for ungulates), but they seem unfairly to be tarred with the "Satanic" brush – dating back at least as far as the New Testament:

"When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left." 

Meaning that all goats go to hell – presumably because they're stubborn and wilful rather than good little followers. Well, I'd rather see a goat standing on a roof than watch a flock of sheep herded into a pen any day of the week – and if that puts me among the Damned, so be it.

The great thing about the internet is that it gives you a guidebook for when your mind is wandering. So, having sniggered at the comparison of John Terry to a regimental goat my capricious (GOAT LIKE) brain asked itself where the tradition of goats in the military came from. And Google and Wikipedia, like over-indulgent parents who cannot deny anything no matter how stupid or inappropriate to their little darlings, duly led me here to William Windsor the goat, lance corporal in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers.

You MUST read the article because it's utterly hysterical – the story of the goat's demotion being just one highlight.

The previous William Windsor was demoted to fusilier in 2006 after being court-martialled on charges of "unacceptable behaviour", "lack of decorum" and "disobeying a direct order" at the Queen's 80^th birthday celebrations in 2006.

That meant that the rank and file no longer had to stand to attention when he walked past. He was subsequently reinstated after three months, regaining his membership of the corporals' mess - much to the chagrin, no doubt, of the various humans who had been seeking promotion. 

The latest William Windsor the goat (appointed 2009) is still in training, and only has the rank of fusilier. As part of his package, he gets two cigarettes a day to eat – although he is too young as yet for his ration of Guinness.

But if you thought that was tapping gently at the window of insanity, you have presumably never heard of Colonel-in-Chief Sir Nils Olav of the Norwegian Kings Guard. Who is a penguin, resident at Edinburgh Zoo.

In 2008, accompanied by 130 members of his guard, King Harald V of Norway went to the zoo to knight the Antarctic seabird, whom he described as:

"In every way qualified to receive the honour and dignity of knighthood".

Of course he is your majesty. And have you remembered to take your special tablets today?

Safety first!

Here's a picture I recently took out of a car window on the M25.

It is a Honda Accord - maybe a Civic, I don't know - in the back of a Luton van coming up to the Dartford crossing (southbound).

As you can see, it is securely fastened in place by a piece of rope holding the tailgate up.

No doubt the thoughtful driver also put the handbrake on to make doubly sure that nothing could possibly go wrong with this little arrangement.

Feel free to rip this picture off and stick "Epic Fail" across it if you so wish.

Unrelatedly, I feel it is only right and proper that I provide you with material evidence to back up all this "moustache big talk" I've been engaging in recently. Well here it is:

A constructive use of time – learning German, pt 4

Time for another instalment in this extremely unpopular series!

Not only does it document ever-more desperate attempts to justify to an uncaring universe my lack of progress in achieving a personal goal, but – even worse – but this time I have also managed to force in yet another black and white photograph of a man with a big moustache.

As if you don't already know, this particular old moustachioed man is none other than Mark Twain – the inventor of Huckleberry Hound and writer of Martin Lawrence's career-high hit "Black Knight".

Anyway, back in the 1870s and 1880s, old Twainy was a kind of globe-trotting Michael Palin figure and at one point he wrote a book called "A Tramp Abroad" about a rather half-hearted attempt to walk across Germany, Switzerland and the top bit of Italy. Yes, I got it for free on my Kindle off of the internet. 

The book is quite amusing and has lots of pictures in it (download the version with illustrations!) – consisting as it does in large part of the narrator declaring that he will do various excitingly German things - fight a duel, climb an Alp etc – and then worming his way out of actually doing it.

Appendix D of the book, however, is entitled "The Awful German Language" and in this, Twain elaborates on some of the enormous difficulties he had in learning it.  

Bits of it are hilarious and so, in the true spirit of the internet, I repeat extracts from it here for your amusement – on the understanding that I am doing something of real value (ie not ripping it off) in "curating" other people's work as my own.

"Personal pronouns and adjectives are a fruitful nuisance in this language, and should have been left out. For instance, the same sound, sie, means you, and it means she, and it means her, and it means it, and it means they, and it means them.

"Think of the ragged poverty of a language which has to make one word do the work of six -- and a poor little weak thing of only three letters at that. But mainly, think of the exasperation of never knowing which of these meanings the speaker is trying to convey. 

"This explains why, whenever a person says sie to me, I generally try to kill him, if a stranger."

HA HA – true dat, Mark Twain!

Later, he goes to town on the whole noun-gender thing, which I have mercifully as yet avoided by using the Michel Thomas teaching method – which largely omits nouns altogether.

"In the German it is true that by some oversight of the inventor of the language, a Woman is a female; but a Wife is not -- which is unfortunate. A Wife, here, has no sex; she is neuter; so, according to the grammar, a fish is he, his scales are she, but a fishwife is neither.

"To describe a wife as sexless may be called under-description; that is bad enough, but over-description is surely worse.

"A German speaks of an Englishman as the Engländer; to change the sex, he adds inn, and that stands for Englishwoman -- Engländerinn. That seems descriptive enough, but still it is not exact enough for a German; so he precedes the word with that article which indicates that the creature to follow is feminine, and writes it down thus: "die Engländerinn," -- which means 'the she-Englishwoman.' 

"I consider that that person is over-described."

Then, pointing out the seemingly endless possible meanings of the words "Schlag" and "Zug" and the meaningless but ubiquitous word "also":

"Now, the foreigner, equipped with these three noble words, is master of the situation. Let him talk right along, fearlessly; let him pour his indifferent German forth, and when he lacks for a word, let him heave a Schlag into the vacuum; all the chances are that it fits it like a plug, but if it doesn't let him promptly heave a Zug after it; the two together can hardly fail to bung the hole; but if, by a miracle, they should fail, let him simply say also! and this will give him a moment's chance to think of the needful word.

"In Germany, when you load your conversational gun it is always best to throw in a Schlag or two and a Zug or two, because it doesn't make any difference how much the rest of the charge may scatter, you are bound to bag something with them. Then you blandly say also, and load up again. Nothing gives such an air of grace and elegance and unconstraint to a German or an English conversation as to scatter it full of 'Also's' or 'You knows'."

This is all very good advice as far as I can see. 

Adventures in moustachismo

It was not an idle threat. I really have grown a handlebar moustache – albeit a fairly discrete one, which I can just about go around in public unremarked on when it's unwaxed and downward pointing.

Here are some of my reflections on it:

1. Moustache wax, when applied without the aid of a mirror, does have the appearance of semi-dried-in mucus. No one likes a careless sneezer.

2. Victorian men must have drunk exclusively using straws, because it is impossible to drink – say – a pint without absorbing a lot of beer into the moustache through capillary action. I have been unable to find pictorial confirmation of this (on Google), and therefore assume there is a conspiracy to suppress this information.  

3. I can now quite easily pass myself off as Belgian. If I have a dog in a coat with me, the disguise is impenetrable.

4. Trimming a large moustache is hard work, particularly if you are not 100% ambidextrous. Careless topiary results in a disagreeable asymmetry. Failure to trim leads quickly to the sort of regrettable display depicted above.

5. Women – specifically but not limited to my wife – are generally not appreciative of the delights of the moustache. 

I can't handle the truth

So, Blogger has a new interface which includes something resembling a child's version of Google Analytics.

Oh, I know I said I was never going to talk about SEO on here, but this is too interesting – by which I mean disheartening – to ignore.

Turns out round about one third of the traffic that has EVER come here has come in from people looking for pictures of Peppa Pig.

Back in March, I wrote a post about said pig, which was well-received and even got randomly linked to from a site promoting "real breast feeding" or something.

Ever since, I have been thinking that if I really want to give up work and write this nonsense for a living, I was going to have to sit and analyse a lot more episodes of Peppa Pig and think of something amusing to say about them. I've got quite a long way with this project so far and – even in the light of this setback - may well return to it in future.

Anyway, the goddam new interface has shown me (from a list of top URLs for incoming traffic) that it's not my ingenious interpretation of the Mummy Rabbit/Miss Rabbit dichotomy that has drawn in the readers. No, it's the fact that Google Images indexed the bloody picture.

So...LOOK! IT'S GEORGE! DINE-SAW!!!!!! LOOK AT MEEEEEEE!!!!!!

Rotten boroughs for everyone

Electoral reform may be dead, MPs' expenses may be buried, but a good old fashioned boundary change can still send our political class wee-wee-weeing all the way home.

Behold the astonishing words of "one senior Tory" who is perhaps unaware that the Guardian is something that gets published to the outside world:

"We are not happy about this...There are MPs who gave up a lot to come here and now it looks like they face real fights."

Hilarious innit? Absorb it - I'm coming back to it. 

Broadly, the plans would see the number of MPs cut from 650 to 600 – although the Sicilys' own region would see just four go. Disappointing, I'd been hoping to see more ex-MPs on the scrapheap.

With our house on the market, I am delighted that we're looking at being shifted from hopelessly down-market Bradford East to aspirational Guiseley and Yeadon. We'll be whacking up the price accordingly.

So we might be happy, but Conservatives are not – apparently because the sinecures that they "gave up a lot" for might not be quite as guaranteed a route to a fat lifetime at the public teat after all.What a thoroughly disgusting attitude. If you're happy to share your arse-witted opinion, "senior Tory", why don't you share your name with us as well?

Nor are Labour happy though. Before he considerately deigned to examine the plans in advance of responding formally, Ed Miliband said:

"We have serious concerns about the government's decision to change the boundaries, which we believe was an act of gerrymandering by the Conservative party."

Boo hoo. Life just isn't fair, is it?

While most 19th century cartoons are generally made even less funny by knowing what the words say, I'm going to help you out with the preposterously small text in the picture above. 

Fat man says: "Here they are all good votes - ready to vote for my coach horse if I order them. Give me the money and I'll secure you the seat."

Rich man: "Well here's the cash. As for the votes, I'll leave them to you."

HA HA HA. See those peasants in the background? Politicians think that's you, that is. 

Things we did on our holidays - pt 2

Why can't air travel be more like rail travel?

By that, I don't mean "please double the prices, delay more aircraft and cram them so full of standing passengers that you can hardly breathe, let alone move, and god help you all if there's an accident".   

No. What I mean is, why is it beyond the wit of man to make air travel a walk-on affair?

Obviously, there are a few good security reasons that slow things down unavoidably. Then on top of those, there are the ludicrous post 9/11 overcompensations introduced for the sake of being seen to do something, regardless of any actual effect on security.

You know what I'm talking about. On going through Leeds/Bradford airport on our holiday:

1. Three-year-old Roger Junior was frisked down and made to take his shoes off, because he was the nth passenger through the security scanner. I was not subjected to any kind of search. Now, while Roger Jr can be a handful, I'm fairly sure it's beyond his capabilities to hijack or bring down a passenger jet.
2. We had to hand over some unopened cartons of juice – presumably to be destroyed in a secure environment where there would be no danger of hazardous spillage.

All of which begs the question why it's perfectly acceptable to carry anything you like onto a train without being checked. Many a train I have been on has seen the passengers all shut in and unable to get away for longer than a lot of long haul flights...

OK, you've also got to allow some time from bags being handed over to get them onto the plane. And clearly separating all the bags that obviously belong to the same family and making sure they go into different compartments of the hold - so as to ensure the maximum gap between the first and last piece coming out on the luggage carousel - doesn't just happen by itself. It requires careful planning as well as a powerful throwing arm.

So that's two sets of quasi-legitimate reasons.

I suppose part of this is our own fault. Check in usually opens around two hours before departure for European flights – but they close 40 minutes or so beforehand. Guess which timescale I have worked on EVERY SINGLE TIME I've been on an aeroplane? Correct. We always get there for the opening of check in, guaranteeing ourselves:

1. As many queuing experiences as can be crammed into a day.
2. Maximum waiting time – relieved only by the opportunity to buy things we did not feel the need to pack when considering what to take with us or which we were not allowed to bring through security.  

As long as you've got seats reserved, it doesn't matter when you check in, does it? How I wish I could be one of those people whose names are announced over the tannoy, warning them that the plane is waiting for them.

But I can't. I am too English, too middle class and – let's just admit it – still too in awe of the fact of air travel to treat it casually.

Airlines and airports want you to still believe that air travel today is like air travel in the 1950s. It's luxurious! It's exclusive! Cabin crew are there to feed you grapes and champagne, not to hard sell you wilted sandwiches and high street perfume at astronomical prices! Fly on a plane and be part of the jet set, queue for 20 minutes every time you want a piss and then get dumped on a wind-blasted airstrip miles from your final destination! I don't know about you, but I fall for it every time. 

Things we did on our holidays – pt 1

Roger Jr, Elvira and I went swimming in the Mediterranean Sea earlier last week – having survived our flight into terror, which in turn followed our airport wait into terror.

However Tancred refused to enter the water, which was perhaps unsurprising given the difficulties he has in remaining on his feet in the face of moderate air currents, let alone those offered up by the sea. He would be repeatedly led to the water's edge, apparently fascinated by the spectacle of the waves – only to turn away in horror as the creeping waters approached within six inches or so of his feet.

It was our last day in Plascassier, near Grasse, near Nice, in France. And it was a delightful end to a very pleasant week – marred only by:

1. Tancred spurting blood out of his eyebrow after falling face first (do one year olds fall any other way?) into the handle on a chest;
2. Roger Jr being staggeringly obnoxious around 90 per cent of the time that he was awake;
3. Receiving mosquito bites of such virulence that at one point I thought I had inadvertently broken my ankle.

I have for many years now been a little ambivalent about swimming. When I was a boy, I was really good at it. But much like the life cycle of the toad sees it go from fully aquatic tadpole to ungainly, crawling leathery blob, I too have become less of a swimmer and more of a puddle lurking fly gobbler as the years have passed. That's a METAPHOR, by the way.   

While Elvira swims effortlessly, I always seem to exert myself twice as much to cover half the distance. I put this down to being insufficiently buoyant, lacking a pair of front airbags (an excuse it is becoming ever harder to avail myself of).

Secondly, I am hopelessly susceptible to water-borne complaints of every kind. If my left ear lets in more water than it is exposed to in – say – a shower, I go deaf in it for as long as it takes for a foul-smelling lump of dark brown wax to work its way out. Just like in Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan.

As such, I only get my head under the water – and given my "eccentric centre of gravity", this is a necessity if I am not to be overtaken by people who are swimming for reasons of physical therapy – if I have ear plugs in.

Plus, I need goggles. Because when I went swimming at Centre Parcs in May, I got a sty on my eye which is still not properly healed.

Oh, and I got athletes foot from the floor at the gym a couple of years ago. Which is kind of related.

Basically, going into water exposes your delicate openings  to other people's filth. And so if a swimming pool full of chlorine dedicated to killing off that sort of shit is risky, going into a "natural" environment that lacks the benefits of disinfectants is positively a matter of taking one's life into one's own hands.  

It was thus with trepidation that I approached going into the Med.

Indeed, the last time I went full-bodily into the sea, I had fallen out of a canoe some six feet from the shore of Hayling Island, while Elvira and our canoeist friends conversed in a leisurely manner on the beach, oblivious of the fact that I had vanished in waters of some two feet of depth. Fortunately, my two star BCU training came back to me in an instant and I expertly disentangled myself from the stricken vessel and staggered gasping up the beach gabbling about how I had cheated certain death before anyone had even noticed I was gone.

Plus, swimming pools – for all their faults – rarely play host to fish. Be they living or be they dead, I have a lingering irrational fear of touching them. But of that more another time...suffice to say, when I put on Roger Jr's goggles, it turned out we were not alone down there.

I know what you're thinking: the sea at Cannes beach can hardly be considered a natural environment, consisting as much of yacht oil, Ambre Solaire and human urine as sea water.

And given the Mediterranean's well-deserved reputation for stinking of drain and being freezing cold (rarely mentioned, I find, in the Baedeker), it was pleasantly warm and odour-free.

Indeed and in conclusion, we had a lovely day out at the seaside – and I have yet to manifest any symptoms of my inevitable bout of amoebic dysentery.

Toddlers on a plane

So we're off on holiday tomorrow to France - which means, sadly no ODHSNM next week. If you're missing it that badly, read some of the stuff from 2010, when I only had one reader and that was my mother.

As much as I'm looking forward to the holiday, I can't help but think that in roughly 24 hours' time I will be declaring – as per Samuel L Jackson:

"I have had it with these motherlovin' children on this motherlovin' plane"

Or words of marginally more severe profanity to that effect.

So, is it extra Calpol? Or whisky? For me, obviously. Advice on airborne child-wrangling gladly received!

Who do you think? The Libyans!

So, goodbye then Colonel Gaddaffi, you crazy old bastard.

It may not have all been over by April at a cost of a few hundred quid, and it may have required a little more force from NATO than was strictly mandated by the UN, but what is it they say?...ah, yes...the ends justify the means.

That's the moral authority and military hegemony of the West re-established then. No longer can it be said that democratic states will tolerate tyrants; even ones who pose no harm to anyone anymore except their own citizens; even ones who make themselves useful from time to time.

Let that be a warning to all you other dictators out there. You hear that? That's the Clash of Civilisations in the distance! Put a foot wrong and BANG, we will mess you up real bad. Are you listening Hu Jintao? No, I didn't think so.

Anyway, now the brave people of Libya can elect a modern, secular, centre-left (or even centre-right! It really is up to you!) liberal democratic government of their own - just like the people of Egypt did earlier in the year.

Hooray for democracy.

By which I mean "fingers crossed, but not getting my hopes up for democracy".

In the meantime, remember the good old days?

PS – The image above is a John Yates classic.

Adopt a peasant

Have you ever fancied owning a poor person? Well, now you can – if you live in Hull, Blackpool or Westminster.

If this pilot scheme goes well, middle class people all over the country could adopt their own family of peasants or a clan of urban lumpenproles. I for one think it would be simply lovely!

The theory is that people with jobs "mentor" a jobless household to get them into work, according to the "social entrepreneur" behind it, Emma Harrison. I find it hard to imagine what a "social entrepreneur" does, unless it means making money out of social programmes – which, with £300 million of government contracts under her belt, Ms Harrison looks highly adept at doing.

I can't help but think this is ridiculously patronising in every way.

Is the grateful serf supposed to view his employed mentor with such admiration that the very force of the example set by seeing a real-life working person makes them stop being a feckless skiver on the spot?

Or is the middle class role model just supposed to fill in forms for their unemployed protégée, in nice, legible handwriting, using long words, spelled correctly – like a Job Centre Cyrano de Bergerac?

I'm intrigued to know what special understanding of "how to find and keep a job when you have no skills or experience" the middle classes of Hull, Bristol and Westminster are presumed to have.

I have a sneaking suspicion that someone like me coming into your home and telling you that - for example – you might find getting a job easier, oh I don't know, if you learn to read or stop drinking Special Brew in the morning is unlikely to go down any better than it does coming from the government.

Coming soon – "voluntary" workhouses funded by wealthy philanthropists and the all rest of the Victorian era! You won't be laughing at my moustache soon...

One year of ODHSNM

ODHSNM is one today. That means it's started to crawl around and it has increasingly strong opinions on what it will or won't do (and especially, eat).

However, it still lacks effective bladder or bowel control, and has to be prevented at all costs from getting to the stairs.

Yes, my blog is no longer a baby. It is now a toddler (much like my actual toddler, Tancred, who is also one year old). No longer can I put it down somewhere and expect it to still be there when I get back.

I find it quite remarkable that I've kept writing this up for this long. Here's to the speedy passage of the next 17 years, and to ODHSNM finally leaving home!