Get up, stand up

I have taken to standing up in my office in an attempt to hinder the inevitable disintegration of my lower back.

Here is a picture of my newly-adapted desk. Hi tech, I'm sure you'll agree.

Yes, I have a Skegness poster on my wall.

I was previously standing at the filing cabinet in the corner (not pictured - maybe next time), which had the advantage of no one being able to see whether I was in my office or not from the outside. It had the disadvantage of not allowing me to use my speakers.

Standing up in here is very weird. My eye level is about two feet above where it usually is. I am literally experiencing vertigo by standing up – because I'm so used to sitting down in this location.

Funny how my brain has imprinted its spatial picture of this room as being four feet off the ground to the point where I don't recognise it at six feet up.

Next week, I'm going to try sitting on the floor.

'King Boring

It is simply not good enough in these times that the monarchy carries on with its dreary rules on naming kings and queens.

Look at them all (up there). If they ever get a crack of the whip, Prince Charles will be King Charles the Third and Prince William will be King William the Fifth. YAWN.

Were you even aware there was a William the Fourth (1830-1837)? I think the sole evidence of his existence is in pub names.

Way back when, monarchs had much better titles than they do today – and I think that reviving some of these traditions is essential if the Royals are to have continuing relevance after we the public have forgotten about Pippa Middleton's arse.

Broadly, there are two alternatives to the tedious, backward-looking numerical sequence.

• The Viking approach – giving your monarch a (not always complimentary) nickname on the basis of some characteristic. For example, Harald Bluetooth and multiple Sven Forkbeards.
• The "the" approach – much more common throughout history, you've got [First name] the [What are they like?]. Hence, William the Conqueror, Charles the Bald, William the Silent, Pepin the Short, August the Strong, Joanna the Mad and my personal favourite (and a Viking exception to the breakdown suggested, no less) Ivar the Boneless.

A short digression on August the Strong. He was – amongst other things - King of Poland in the late 17^th and early 18^th century.

Back then, the King of Poland was "elected" – which meant in practice that it was a runners-up prize offered by other rulers to aristocratic Europeans unlikely to get to the Big Chair in their own countries.

Managing director of the IMF anyone? PARP PARP.

And "the Saxon Hercules" allegedly fathered 365 children in his time, so "the rutting chimpanzee" has a bit of catching up to do.

Anyway, back to our own unimpeachably admirable Saxe-Coburg-Gothas.

Sometimes, you have to go backwards to go forwards.

And I think that the public could really learn to love King Charles the Big-Eared or King Charles the Tedious.

Indeed, I am normally of a fairly republican frame of mind, but even I would be glad to get behind the monarchy if we were looking at King William Horseface or – better yet - King Harold Gingernuts.

In defence of super injunctions

Look out! Here comes totalitarianism. Gor blimey, those super injunctions are an affront to justice and democracy, innit?

How is it remotely acceptable that a judge, sitting in private with lawyers acting on behalf of one side of a dispute, can rule that it is a criminal offence not only to reveal certain information, but also to reveal the existence of the ban on doing so?

That kind of a restriction certainly seems like a sledgehammer relative to the nut of a footballer's desire to keep his "playing away from home" secret LOL titter. "Playing away from home"... aaaahhhh.

Indeed, I started off writing this post thinking just that – that super injunctions are a disgusting abuse of power and process.

But then I changed my mind.

A non-super injunction is intended to "hold the ring" – to prevent a publisher from releasing confidential information until the matter can be argued in full. It is inherently a temporary ban on publication. So they call 'em "interim injunctions".

Plus, Section 12 of the Human Rights Act means that a judge should only give an injunction on request if it is likely to be proven later that the information should not have been released.

Breaking an interim injunction is contempt of court, and is therefore a criminal offence. That's in addition to any civil grief the publisher might subsequently end up in for breach of confidence, libel etc etc.

OK, there are problems even here of Minority Report-style "preventative" judicial action and the insertion of criminal penalties into what is basically civil law (a matter of the specific relationship between two parties, not something that is generally true to everyone).

But, should the press be allowed to ransack someone's reputation or jeopardise national security or whatever just to sell papers? Is there really a right to publish and be damned, or are there legitimate prior restraints on what can be made public?

Well, I've always thought that there are not. Being of a libertarian frame of mind (but not of the teabagging variety, I hasten to add), I generally believe that freedom matters more than other values.

But then you have to consider the repulsive ravenous beast that is the British press.

Imagine that we're not talking about publishing news here – something that can be ennobled with the mantle of "freedom of the press". What the press is doing in the case everyone is talking about right now is causing harm to an individual (and his family) for the amusement of others.

OK, harm to one's reputation is a fairly innocuous kind of harm. And a Premiership footballer being shown up as a serial shagger is hardly likely to lower anyone's opinion of him – because we all assume that's what they do for the rest of the week when they're not kicking a ball or doing coke.

It's all rather playground, isn't it? So let's recast this into the playground. The press is a bully who likes to pull other kids' pants down for a laugh. They do it every playtime, sometimes to the same person, sometimes to someone new – but they can relied upon to do it.

Is it ok to just let them get on with it, assuming that they will behave themselves this time, and punish them only after they've done it?

I'd say it isn't, and therefore some kind of pre-emptive warning to the effect of "if you pull little [insert name of mystery footballer here]'s pants down today, you'll be in big trouble" is legitimate.

That's what an interim injunction does. Section 12 of the HRA is there to encourage judges to bear in mind that occasionally the press is doing a genuine public service by exposing secret information (and the conduct of judges is another topic altogether) – as is the due process of law, conducted in open court, after the event, if the press decides to injunction notwithstandingpublish and be damned.

At the risk of sounding like a whingeing Goldsmith, I think there is a real difference between exposing a real scandal and revealing someone's bedroom antics – between the public interest and what some members of the public find interesting.

If we were talking about, say, the Pope having an affair, that should be published – because that would be a matter of someone not practising in private what they preach in public, and it would compromise his ability to hold that post.

But footballers are just paid to kick balls around. Like it or not, they're not there to be role models or to set a good example. They don't preach anything, so they can't be exposed as hypocrites. A public right to know everything about you is not the generic quid pro quo for being famous.

So exposing this footballer is purely being done for the sake of the public's amusement. And I'd say – reluctantly, I confess – that the distress that would be caused to him and his family is not offset by the amusement we'd all have laughing at him, being appalled by him, preening ourselves at our superiority etc.

Don't let the specifics of this case colour your view of the principles involved. Of course, the only person responsible for the footballer having something to hide – thereby putting his family at risk of this harm – is the man himself for having the affair.

Unquestionably, there is something thoroughly revolting about a rich man hiring out the criminal justice system to prevent someone from exposing his misbehaviour. His wife has a right to know, doesn't she? If she doesn't know now, well, she must be the only person in the world who doesn't.

That's the "injunction" bit. What about the "super" bit?

At first glance it seems horrendously Kafkaesque – to criminalise making a legal ruling public knowledge? How much more totalitarian can you get? See you in the Gulag comrade, I might have just condemned myself to a lifetime's hard labour without even knowing what I did wrong.

In principle, yes.

In practice, horseshit.

If an injunction is legally and ethically acceptable, en-supering it is just a logical extension – because we all know what the press would do. Indeed, even now, aren't we all having much more fun guessing around the "banned" story than to just hearing the honest, tawdry, dull truth of it?

If the press has something that is really in the public interest, they will publish it in breach of the law but probably get away with it. We're lucky to live in a country where that is the case. Just because there isn't a law banning the government from marching us all into death camps doesn't mean there is any greater likelihood of it happening than if there was.

We have to deal with realities and not hypothetical possibilities. The press can't be trusted to differentiate between what matters and what doesn't. Nor can the public. And I should know, because I am sadly part of both - I love to write and to read this kind of thing. That doesn't mean it's right and it certainly doesn't mean it's noble to expose it just because someone wants to conceal it.

The problem with super injunctions, I think, is not the principle, but – once again – the practice.

If I was up to the same thing as the unnamed footballer (which, Elvira, I am not!), I could not afford to protect myself and the Sicilys from the media mincer - something quite different to and not necessarily part and parcel of my family's right to know.

If the press decided to accuse me of robbing my employers by spending time writing blogs when I should be working...errr...I can't afford to defend myself.

The problem is not the law or the judges. It is the inequality of access to justice that put legal redress for harm or threats of harm beyond the reach of the majority.

Apologies for length...

Summer has set in with its usual severity

There's only one thing worse than an otherwise-healthy person complaining about back pain, and that's an otherwise-healthy person complaining about hay fever as well.

For me, the joy that the passing of winter and the onset of spring bring is short lived.

Much like the people of Leeds, who take the first glimpse of the sun a trumpet call ordering them to go out wearing as little as possible – within days of the annual six months of guaranteed gloom coming to an end, every plant in the UK is belching out its filthy spores.

And every year, I forget this fact during the winter and long for the days when the only time I spend outdoors (going to and from work) will not be conducted under cover of darkness.

As soon as they arrive, I am incapacitated by a host of respiratory problems that would put an inbred bulldog with the flu to shame.  

Apparently 12 million people in this country suffer from hay fever, and conventional wisdom seems to be that this figure is constantly rising. Certainly, year after year more of my friends and family who had never experienced hay fever before say that they've got it now.

Maybe that's just to shut me up and rebuff my demands for sympathy. I don't know.

I've had it since I was about seven years old when a friend and I hacked a rotten tree stump to pieces (that was how children entertained themselves in early 1980s Suffolk – incredible, innit?). My eyes blew up to the size and colour of tennis balls, I was rushed to hospital, issued with eye drops and nasal spray and I haven't looked back.

So I know what I'm talking about.

For once.

Still, predictable as its appearance is, hay fever never ceases to surprise me with its innovations.

In the last couple of years, I have started to come out in a rash on my legs if I walk through long grass in shorts. At this rate, by the time I'm 50, I won't be able to think about plants without my throat caving in and suffocating me from anaphylactic shock.

I realise that my previous excursions into palaeobiology have been somewhat controversial, but surely the only threats posed to our primitive ancestors from the vegetable kingdom were:

• Trees falling on them
• Falling out of trees
• Things and people falling out of trees onto them
• Assault by hostile plant-based life forms from other planets (eg triffids, pod people, Audrey 2 etc)

Grass, flowers and shrubs, then, have always been justly regarded as Mostly Harmless.

Unless - as the underlying implication in most commentary on the matter seems to be - people are just getting more feeble over time, it is reasonable to assume that people have suffered with hay fever throughout history.

However, the only instance I can find (from five minutes of Googling, which is what passes for research here at ODHSNM) of hay fever playing any significant role in historical events is as follows.

In 1925, Werner Heisenberg had a really bad bout and he went to Heligoland by the sea to recover.

Getting away from quantum pain-in-the-arse Niels Bohr for a few weeks gave him the opportunity to write "Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen" – which set the foundations for matrix mechanics and gave us the Uncertainty Principle. Which is something to do with science.

That's it. And he could have been planning on going on holiday anyway.

So, this is by way of an appeal. Let's uncover the hidden history of allergies and prove that we're not just modern weaklings. I want to know that Henry V sneezed his way through Agincourt; that Christopher Columbus came out in a nasty rash within hours of setting foot in the Americas; and that Julius Caesar didn't see Brutus coming because he was rubbing his itching eyes like a crazy person.    

Any takers? Meanwhile, here's the...

Postscript: I was going to call this article "Summertime and the living is sneezy" but Google returns 54,500 results for this particular pun. 

Don't die - stand up!

Take a look at this excellent "infographic" – if that word does not make you vomit. It's terrifying, and in the light of my own back troubles, I may well start working standing up at my filing cabinet.

Aurela Gaçe for Eurovision victory

Apparently, the UK's Eurovision entry – former second-tier boyband Blue – will do a naked photoshoot for the Daily Star if they win Saturday's competition.

There are a couple of small flaws in this strategy for victory.

Firstly, the Daily Star is read almost exclusively by white van men and prisoners, who are characteristically neither likely to be Eurovision fans nor to wish to see pictures of naked men in their 30s.

Secondly, unless ABC figures are wildly off, the Daily Star is little read in the 44 OTHER EBU member states, whose citizens are the only ones actually entitled to vote for the British entry.

No matter how popular the reformed Blue might in the UK – I use the word "reformed" in the same sense as food packaging companies use it to refer to their cheaper meat products – and no matter how tantalising the prospect of seeing pictures of them holding a Union Flag across their collective naughty bits in a newspaper for people who can't understand the long words they use in The Sun, we can't vote for them.

Still, no matter what you think about Blue, they are considerably less pathetic than Ireland's entry.

Presumably operating on the Father Ted principle (Ireland having no money at all left with which to put on next year's debacle), Ireland has put forward subnormal teenage fantasists Jedward.

As a slight aside, the only thing that was ever funny about these two has been sacrificed in calling them "Jedward" – that is, the way they introduced themselves by saying "I'm John; and I'm Edward; and together we are John and Edward".

Hopefully, they will be eliminated in Thursday's "semi final" (for anyone who has not watched Eurovision for a few years, this is a new process by which they eliminate the shit songs from small or poor countries, so that only the best go through to compete against the shit songs from large or rich countries).

So, buoyed up by my triumphant efforts at encouraging everyone to vote for AV, I urge all ODHSNM readers to vote for Albania's Aurela Gaçe (pictured) – not just because the song is bonkers in true Eurovision style, but also because there is an eagle in the video, and eagles are AWESOME.

Plus if Albania wins, Terry Wogan will probably have a stroke.

Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley

May 14^th is Eurovision time! And while we wait for all the election and referendum results to come in from May 5^th's contests, let's consider a different competition decided by a manifestly unfair voting system in which the only guarantee is that Britain will come out as the loser.

The UK pretends to not take Eurovision seriously, but in fact I would say that it takes it far more seriously than the rest of Eurovision-land.

I can't imagine that many other nations are outraged year in, year out by their failure to win – despite entering bollocks like Scooch, Daz Sampson and Jemini. The latter, lest we forget, were totally out of tune on the night and wholeheartedly deserved their nul points.

The British mistakenly believe that pop music created in the UK is inherently superior to anything produced on the continent – indeed, that pop music from elsewhere in Europe is inherently ridiculous.

Not only is it ridiculous, but the silly foreigners are completely unaware of their ridiculousness. So while we are simply being ironic when our entries are rubbish (because we don't care if we win, because the whole thing is a fix anyway), they have no idea how stupid they look.

Really? Was Lordi's winning 2006 entry from Finland delivered entirely without a tongue in cheek? Was Dana International 's 1998 transsexual hit "Diva" a seriously considered attempt to represent Israel to the world?

For god's sake – Terry Wogan spent most of his career taking the piss out of silly foreigners' Eurovision entries, and then huffed and puffed his way out of the commentary job complaining that they had the temerity to vote for one another instead of us. Leaving us, might I add, with Graham Norton.

While there may indeed be an element of truth in the idea that other countries don't vote for the British entry for non-musical reasons, I think it's less likely that it's about the government's support for war in Iraq than it is because they – like everyone – love to see someone who's over competitive shown right up.