This could be the last thing you ever read

T-0: It’s the end of the world as we know it, and – so far – I feel fine.

I am keeping an eye out for any Pale Horses, but so far the world still seems more concerned with scatology than eschatology.

Ha ha – that means “poo, not the Last Things” and they rhyme. If any rappers are reading this, feel free to use that one.

Anyway, it looks like this whole Mayan apocalypse thing has been a big hoax, which just goes to show AGAIN that numberology, ancient prophecies and any ideas of destiny are load of old crap.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

If the world does end, you could do worse than repeat those words over in your mind as it happens.

Assuming it doesn’t, this is likely to be the final ODHSNM of 2012, so I thought I’d wrap up a few loose ends.

My Vasectomy - Epilogue

That I write a blog is one of the first things my wife, Elvira of Castille, tells people who she introduces me to.

Without fail, the next thing she tells them is that I wrote all about having a vasectomy on here – which indeed I did, all through July.

I feel it is incumbent upon me then to close this whole story off and tell you what happened next.

You will remember, I was given instructions – and little jars – to come back after three months (and again a month after that). This is because sperms can apparently survive for a very long time in the cosy environment afforded by the human bollock, and it’s only after said periods of time that you can be sure they’re all dead or trapped like a bunch of Chilean miners. 

I shan't bore or appall you with too many details, but I did receive a small insight into the mind of the psychopath on the two occasions when I set off for work carrying a small container of my own jizz to hand over to a complete and unsuspecting stranger.

And I passed the tests. Or failed them. I’m not sure which you'd say. 

Suffice to say, it worked. I "may now consider myself sterile". RESULT!

Moving House

The Sicilies moved house in September. I know I said I’d write about it, but I unwittingly dragged myself into that whole school appeals can of worms – at which point I lost the will to blog at all as I found myself confronted with a situation which required me to do more than just write the first thing that came into my head.

It seems redundant now. I can’t be bothered to write about it three months later. Sorry. Sometimes interesting things happen to me, but they don’t make it onto here (see the one sorry post I did on jury service in 2011 – that was supposed to be a whole series!).

Hell, if I wrote up everything that happened to me on here people I met in person would find me very boring indeed...

...

Errr...

That’s all folks!

So that’s it. If the world DOES end, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading these sticky by-products of my brain over the last two and a half years.

If it doesn’t, ODHSNM will be back in 2013 with MORE MORE MORE of the same old shit. 

What's another year?

T-4: I see that many other media outlets are picking up on the Mayan apocalypse pencilled in for this Friday. Well, here at ODHSNM we have been on it for the whole damn year.

“What’s another year?” quoth Johnny Logan in 1980’s Eurovision winner.

Well, Johnny, a “year” is a bloody awkward rough approximation of the duration of the earth's orbit around the sun. And a proper pain in the arse it is too.

("Another year" refers to the second or subsequent instance in a series of years. And that is what another year is.)

I am attempting to plan my evil capitalist schemes for 2013 (it’s best to be prepared, in case we’re still here) and I am faced with the following absurdities:

• A year, in the Gregorian scheme, is 365 97/400 days (5 hours, 49 minutes) – that is the time between vernal equinoxes. Hence we have leap years every four years unless....eeeurgh it’s too hard, read it yourself.
• Quite independently of years, we have weeks comprised of seven days each – five of which we work and two of which we don’t.
• You do not have a whole number of weeks in year whether it’s a normal 365 day year or a leap 366 day year. Months have between 28 and 31 days, or between 18 and 23 working days depending on where the weekends and bank holidays fall.
• This makes it very hard to project ANYTHING month on month or indeed year on year with any degree of accuracy - because you are hardly ever comparing like and like. 

Now, I realise that calendar reform has got in with a bad crowd – it immediately suggests Year Zero and Pol Pot. And I think it’s fair to say that no one really wants to be associated with that.

I recently read “The World Set Free” by HG Wells.

Now, I know what many of you are thinking.

The Ogilvy Theatre

Most of you are thinking “that’s a conference centre in Woking”.

And, yes, it is – but I am talking about the writer, after whom the conference centre is named.

Some of the rest of you are thinking “hold on... apart from all the Good science fiction stuff, wasn’t all of HG Wells’ political and social thought Bad?”

Well, old Wellsy certainly doesn't make too many bones about how much better his future utopia would be without the poor, the stupid, the uncivilised and the uncultured in it – and he is not in favour of what we in the business world would call “achieving cuts by natural wastage”.

Nevertheless, almost in passing, he suggests that the year should be split in 13 months of four weeks each – with Easter as an annual intercalary day and leap years as specified by Pope Gregory XIII.  

Gregory would have approved. Probably. 

I think this is a tremendous idea and one not necessarily dependent on any kind of genocide or mass slaughter. 

It would make us all marginally younger and it would make the whole maths of time a lot easier. 

Who will join me in my quest for a rational year?

I am Growing as a Person

There’s a great line in Neal Stephenson’s book Cryptonomicon where he says that for a certain kind of person, any statement of fact by another is an implicit challenge – coming with the unspoken epilogue “...and you didn’t know that”.

I’m afraid I don’t know the precise wording of the line or whereabouts in the book it is – I actually read it, rather than Googling for quotes. Nevertheless, for me it sums up perfectly a very widespread human trait which, until I saw it set down in print, I was aware of but not quite able to put my finger on.

I used to be one of those insecure people who always felt the need to assure interlocutors that I already knew whatever they were telling me, as if I was in some way diminished or belittled by not having known every possible piece of information anyone else might happen to know.

Yesterday, I realised that I had overcome this particular weakness - finally breaking out of the sleep, homeostasis, excretion layer of the Maslow pyramid. 

I was unlocking my bike and getting ready to set off home, when someone shouted across to me that they were surprised to see me riding a scooter and that they had assumed I would be riding something bigger.

Now, this is fair comment to a degree. I do tend to dress like I riot policeman. My defences are:

1. It’s cold and body armour is pretty warm.
2. It’s usually raining and body armour is pretty waterproof (only, of course, if one wears the trousers).
3. If I come off my scooter at 30mph or Valentino Rossi comes off his Ducati at 30mph, we are both going to get pretty badly messed up unless we’re wearing protective clothing.

So anyway, this guy – who also had a scooter – starts talking to me about bikes and matters bike-related. I go along with it because, hey, we bikers have to stick together, right?

Several minutes later, I realise that this person is just regaling me with every single fact about motorbikes he has ever heard.

And many of his assertions are COMPLETELY WRONG.

I can’t remember all of them, but specifically he insisted that it was legal to ride a 250CC bike on a CBT. Which is simply untrue. I should know, because I had to retake my bloody CBT not ten days ago (you have to do it every two years unless you upgrade to a higher category licence).

By this time, I was not only wondering what it is that makes apparently normal people burst forth with incontinent logorrhea to complete strangers who have been fooled into making eye contact with them, but also fighting back an irresistible urge to argue with him.

Had I not been wearing body armour I might have been less willing to engage in conversation – let alone controversy – with an unknown, potentially knife-wielding party. The temptation to say “I don’t think that’s right” was strong...

Reader, I conquered it.

I realised that the quickest route out of the conversation was to say “really?” and go along with it, even though I knew it was incorrect – and even though it gave the impression that I did not know something.

I really am growing as a person. I wished him "the best of luck" four times before I got away, but I did eventually get away. 

Oh I found the quote:

Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an assertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the information being imparted. But your older nerd has more self-confidence, and besides, understands that frequently people need to think out loud. And highly advanced nerds will furthermore understand that uttering declarative sentences whose contents are already known to all present is part of the social process of making conversation and therefore should not be construed as aggression under any circumstances.

I Googled it.

The End is Very Nigh

Give it up for your X Factor finalists

T-11: It’s nearly upon us, apocalypse-watchers. Less than two weeks until the end of the world, according to some dead Mexican astronomers.  

It seems that after a year of nothing very apocalyptic happening, people are finally starting to get their acts together and behave like cattle in a lightning storm.

However, I must admit to you all, that since Christopher Maloney did not win The X Factor last night, my conviction that the world’s doom is imminently upon us has been seriously shaken.

All of a sudden, the arguments put forward by NASA and others against anything out of the ordinary happening next Friday seem fairly convincing.

The Mayans are all dead, and apparently they didn’t know about the extra quarter-day in the solar cycle which makes Leap Years necessary. Taking those into account would mean the world had already ended.  

XTREMISM in the shower

This is my shower gel. It is “Xtreme” shower gel.

As we all know, in the field of products the more “extreme” something is, the better it is – and if you can mis-spell “extreme” it is even more extreme, and therefore even better.

So while in the field of consumer goods extremism is a undeniably A Good Thing, it seems odd that we do not welcome it in other fields as well. Perhaps this is due to the fuddy-duddy spelling of "extreme" with a lower case "e" at the start. 

Al Qaeda, for example, could rebrand itself as Islam Xtreme to appeal more to the key 18-25 demographic. The EDL could try to break out of its C2/D/E ghetto by calling itself Xtreme Racist Halfwits.

Nevertheless, as I showered this morning, I must confess to being somewhat at a loss in seeking to discern in precisely what the xtremity of this gel consisted.

I did not get a sense of freefalling from a light aircraft. I did not feel as though I doing stunts on a BMX bike. I did not even feel as though I was pouring a can of drink into my mouth from a height of about 8 to 12 inches away to the sound of powerful rock guitar music. 

These are all recognisably xtreme sensations, but I was at a loss to detect the shower gel precipitating any of them within me.  

Then I looked at the “flavour” of the gel. As you can see, it purports to be made of – or at least to smell of – “Exhilarating Grapefruit, Amber and Cedarwood”.

I have never encountered grapefruit, amber and cedarwood in the flesh at the same time, so I can’t really say that to do so would not be exhilarating. When I have encountered them separately, however:

• The only time I have felt exhilaration in connection with a grapefruit was upon successfully dodging a thrown one.
• Amber – it is hard to think of a more inert substance than fossilized tree resin, and therefore one less likely to cause exhilaration, unless it has hidden qualities I am unaware of.
• All I know about cedarwood is that you should not stand underneath cedar trees during lightning storms. Having a tree fall to the ground around you in flames is probably quite exhilarating, but not in the sort of way one is keen to experience early each morning.

Upon calm reflection (after the exhilaration had ended), I wondered precisely what part the amber was playing in this recipe.

• Grapefruit – yes, I can smell that. It is citrusy.
• Cedarwood – errr...I am prepared to acknowledge that some wood smells and therefore that had I not the olfactory acuity of noseless dog (though I hasten to add, I do NOT smell terrible) that this may have been present in the rich bouquet offered up.
• Amber. What EXACTLY is amber supposed to smell of? The internet says that you can – theoretically – extract an oil from amber which smells (unsurprisingly) of pine. So far, so much my shower gel is making smell like a toilet bowl.

Maybe it is not contributing to the perfume? Perhaps I am supposed to be exfoliating with the preserved exoskeletons of prehistoric mosquitoes encased in the amber?

So, intrigued, I checked the ingredients to see what the amber is bringing to the party.

This is in English, you may be surprised to discover. What will probably not surprise you is to learn that this substance contains neither grapefruit, nor amber, nor cedarwood.

The question then remains: did they come up with the name first and try, subsequently, to make something that smelled of that? So what exactly was the amber adding? 

Or did they instead make the smell and then try to describe it? In which case, who smelled the amber?

I am going to ask the Avon lady next time I see her. 

The Kettle Kapacity Konundrum

“Life. Oh life. Oh liiiife. Oh life. Doo-doo-doo-doo.”

So sang Des’ree in her 1998 number 8 chart hit, “Life”.

I often think about those words when I consider the fundamental contingency and futility of our existence on this earth.

Just now, a kettle has reminded me of Des'ree's words of power. 

Why oh why do all kettles measure their capacity in terms of dainty little teacups?

Does anyone under the age of 70 routinely drink out of a small teacup? No! EVERYONE drinks out of a mug!

Why, Mr Tefal, Mr Rowenta, Mr Morphy Richards, do you use an obsolete unit of measurement, forcing me to do multiplications and divisions in my head in order to work out how much water I need to boil?

It drives me to despair, as I drink my afternoon half-mug of tea. 

But then when the darkness looks insurmountable, I remind myself of the profound message of hope provided by 5ive in their 1999 chart topper, “Keep on Movin’”:

“Sometimes I think that life has no meaning, but I know things will be alright in the end.”

The Best Barber in the World

It may come as a surprise to you to discover that the best barber in the world is situated in Greengates, Bradford.

And yet here is the proof: BEST BARBER IN THE WORLD.

This, I should point out, is at least the second version of this sign that has been displayed on this shop. The first version was just a banner – as you can see, the owner has decided to go for something a little more permanent.

Clearly, this was one of those “president for life” elections, after which all future polls were abolished - after all, if he really is the best, why vote again?

Having spent that much on the sign, I don’t think he plans on putting his record before the public again any time soon.

I drive past this shop most days, but it was not until this weekend just gone that I put my head into the hands of the best barber in the world.

He was alright – he met my five criteria admirably. £7 for a cut, parking outside (none of those pictured are my car, psychopathic readers!) and plenty of Daily Stars to read while I waited.

It is not, however, the boldness of his claim that impresses me most, but rather the carefully hedged wording.

Was he voted the best barber in the world by his customers, whom he describing as loyal?

Or was it only the loyal customers who voted him best barber in the world – with the sign a coded rebuke to those disloyal customers who voted for someone else?

On Anger

HULK SUBLIMATE!

People often think I am unemotional, but in this they are mistaken. I am in fact a very emotional person, whose complex and varied inner states express themselves outwardly only in limited forms.  

That is to say, no matter what is happening to me and how I feel, I express myself more or less uniformly somewhere on the spectrum between boredom and rage.

In the same way that a power station turns coal into heat, which turns water into steam, which turns the rotation of a turbine into electricity (or something like that), so my constitution reliably metastasises every stimulus into one or another form of annoyance.

This is an exaggeration of course (you IDIOT) but it contains an element of truth. To have a furious side is quite restrictive, given that it is socially unacceptable EVER to be angry.

Generally, I get around this by the trusty old British standby of irony. You may have noticed this strategy in play on this very blog – I rant and rave, sneer scathingly, belittle and threaten others, but I don’t mean it.

Or do I?

I used to love irony. It felt so clever saying one thing and meaning another. Now I just want to say what I mean – but it’s practically impossible. People would think I was mad. Not because the things I want to say are mad (well, not all of them) but because there are things you just don’t say directly.

Like – oh, I don’t know...for example – that one thinks that another is an idiot, upon whom one has spent quite enough time already trying to explain simple things.

Having always to say this indirectly and in a way that doesn’t upset the other actually makes me even angrier.
 

Do you ever just want to get a sledgehammer and smash everything around you like the Hulk?

I do. Quite often.

And the fact that I can’t do that – because (i) everything around me belongs to me and I’d have to replace it, (ii) I’d get fired from my job, (iii) other people would be upset and/or (iv) the law – is quite irritating.

Can you perhaps see my problem?

What are people in our civilised society supposed to do with all the pent-up rage and aggression that our civilised society causes in them?

Play squash, get ulcers and have strokes?

Calm down dear

Everything around us is arranged to maximise annoyance value and minimise opportunities for legitimately releasing the pressure.

 Just phone up your gas supplier – it’s not the person on the end of the phone’s fault. You can’t get angry with them.

THIS IS NOT A COINCIDENCE!

The insincere pre-recorded apology for your train being late?

THIS IS NOT A COINCIDENCE!

By the way, none of the above is true. I’m being ironic.

LOL. 

Waiting...

A few days ago, I spent eight hours waiting.

I was waiting for the words of a wise man – a very busy wise man, who walked past me and glanced at me several times during that eight long long hours.

Eventually, the wise man came to me, poked me, muttered a few trite words – which I could have told him some eight hours earlier – and sent me on my way.

Can you guess where I was?

An NHS hospital ward of course. Long story, but basically some stitches I had got a week earlier fell out, so I went to A&E.

Always a depressing experience among the sick and the lame, this was only brightened by the presence of a terrified researcher from the Discovery Channel asking the various inmates if they were there by virtue of an “amusing mishap” and if so, whether they wished to be featured on a programme called “Bizarre ER”.

I don’t think she found anybody whose symptoms or circumstances were funny, or who wanted the world to perceive them as such.

Had I simply been battered in a drunken brawl, I would have been stitched back up and sent on my way – but because this was a “post operative complication” I was sent upstairs to the surgery ward after about an hour.

And that was when my ordeal really began.

I arrived at 12.45pm – I left at around 9pm. In that time, I was continually assured that the “senior doctor” would be there any moment and that without his say-so, nobody could do anything. In that time I was given (i) two cups of coffee and (ii) a sandwich, at 7.30pm when I went and told the nurses I thought I was going to pass out.

I am convinced I left that hospital in a much worse state of health than I arrived in. I was certainly in a much worse mood.

Now, I could take this opportunity to blast the NHS, but why bother? I don’t want a better NHS – I just want to never have to use it again. It would be nice if doctors treated patients like human beings rather than infected gobbets of blood-flecked mucus and hair they have found smeared on a door handle, but I guess you have to pay cash for that.

No, dear friends – it is the waiting I want to talk about.

I hate waiting anyway. I value my time and I value other people’s time, so I always try to minimise the time anyone spends waiting for me, and I like that courtesy to be reciprocated. I take being kept waiting (unnecessarily) by someone as an explicit statement that they believe their time is more valuable than mine – and I take that as an insult.

But if you know that what you are waiting for is not going to turn up for, say, 30 minutes, an hour, eight hours – then that is a different matter. You can do something with that time. You know what is going on and you are in possession of yourself.

It is the imminent anticipation of something being always about to happen right now, that makes waiting unbearable. You daren’t do anything else, in case you miss it or – god forbid – keep them waiting for you.

Waiting is boring, and being bored is an affront to life. We have only so much time in this life. To waste it by choice is stupid, but at least it’s your own decision. To have it wasted by others is an offence.

That eight hours I spent in a dingy little cubicle being ignored has taught me the value of time and the evil of boredom.

It’s the Final Countdown

Have you seen this god?

T-55: Not long to go now, eh apocalypse watchers?

Less than eight weeks to go until the end of the world/the dawning of a new age of spiritual enlightenment/the Strictly Come Dancing final, depending on your point of view.

For my own part, I have to say that the portents have been a little disappointing to say the least. Jimmy Savile obviously came as a surprise, but apart from that the last few months have been pretty slim on Book of Revelation-type stuff. 

I am starting to wonder if this is all not a big joke. Has anyone else seen anything suggesting the impending end of days? Let's try to keep it light-hearted though. 

How to Win School Appeals - Part 3

I have to tell you, a part of me wishes I had never started writing this series of posts – as the growing gaps between instalments perhaps suggests.

Firstly, it’s really hard to condense everything I took from our experience into nuggets of wisdom without rambling on and on. This is actually the third time I have completely rewritten this piece now in an attempt to make it shorter.

I was thinking about just letting myself go to town and turning this into an eBook. For those of you not familiar with the term, that is a scam in online marketing whereby you hand over your contact details in exchange for a PDF which chucks together a load of stuff you could have found on the internet for yourself.

Secondly, there is the rather more serious point that I don’t really know how to win school appeals.

As I mentioned earlier in the series, we still don’t actually know on what grounds we won. And so any/all of the recommendations I make may be complete balls.

So, with that disclaimer still ringing in your ears, let’s finish this damn thing off so I can get back to writing about the mad shit thatcomes into my head when I’m driving to work without the pressure of real-world-responsibility to disturb me.

Is it legal?

Everything you will get from the council will seem very scary and legalistic. They will tell you that you can only possibly win if there has been some kind of maladministration or cock-up in the process.

So all your arguments about why little Timmy should go to this school rather than that school don’t count. It’s all about the correct application of the Admissions Policy.

I have no doubt that a fair proportion of people are put off from appealing just by the sight of the height of this bar.

Then there is the prospect of the appeal tribunal itself. Oooh – scary. You have to go and represent yourself in front of a panel whose decisions are legally binding, going up against someone (from the admissions authority) who presumably does this for a living.

Well, let me tell you that in our experience, you should not be put off by any of this.

The appeals panels are made up of members of the local “great and good” – not legally trained people and not education experts. As such, while the letter of the law says that they can only grant appeals on the basis of misapplication of the criteria, I am absolutely convinced that you can get them on your side by coming across as (i) intelligent, (ii) educated and (iii) genuinely concerned about your child’s welfare – all of which will put you at an advantage over the council’s rep.

Far from being experts, we found the person from the council to be poorly briefed and basically going in with the same argument for everyone.

Please note, that is NOT the case for faith schools and other places that do their own admissions – where you find yourself (excruciatingly) accusing of misadministration the very headmaster whose school you are trying to get into.

I do not doubt for a moment that the good impression Elvira and I produced in the panel (she cried! I read out long notes!) helped.

And remember, there’s the admissions authority can’t appeal against the panel’s decision – so you need to do whatever it takes, whether it’s admissible or not!

Listen to gossip

We found out – from local gossip – that someone who got a place via the waiting list lied about their address. We kicked up a huge stink about it before the hearing and in it. The council, naturally, had done nothing beforehand and this did not impress the panel.

If you had believed that this was a purely legal proceeding, it wouldn’t matter what went on in other people’s cases as to whether your own was justified or not, would it? Well, see above.

Get your ear to the ground and pester the council about everything you hear. By law, they have to have answered all your questions 48 hours before the hearing. Chances are they will be too disorganised to do that, and you have your way in.

Oddly, we only heard from the council about the complaint after the appeal decision had been published. It’s almost as if they wanted to make it go away...

Do your homework

Tedious I know, but you need to get totally familiar with the admissions policies you are dealing with. You need to get the official word on, for example, the distance of your home to your preferred school – and check it yourself. Friends of ours successfully challenged an incorrect measurement and got a place before even going to appeal.

You have a right to know where on the waiting list you are, but the council will try to pretend that you don’t. Their rationale for that is that some people can’t appreciate that their position can change in relation to developments in others’ cases. Bollocks to that. Don’t let them get away with it.

Get everything written down and give it in as late as possible. The panel will read it, chances are the council won’t and will make themselves look stupid and lazy at the hearing.

That’s it. I wish you all the best of luck if you’re appealing. It has opened my eyes to how local bureaucracy really works and how people can overcome its dead hand with a bit of reading, writing and ruthlessness. 

Isle of Sodor Railways loses franchise

"Eccentric" Hatt

PRESS RELEASE

Department for Transport, 12/10/12

Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin will announce this morning that the Isle of Sodor Railway Company’s franchise for operating passenger and freight services will be not be renewed and will come to an end next April.

Mr McLoughlin cited Isle of Sodor Railways’ appalling record on punctuality and safety – derailments on the network total 255 for the last year alone – as the decisive reasons for rejecting the bid put in by eccentric chairman, Sir Topham Hatt, better known to the public as “The Fat Controller”.

Many critics have laid the blame for the company’s performance on Sir Topham’s “Very Useful Engine” artificial intelligence system, which allows locomotives to make their own route planning and other decisions – frequently in competition with one another.

The Secretary of State also pointed to extensive financial irregularities within Isle of Sodor Railways, which is incorporated in the neighbouring tax haven, the Isle of Man.

Concerns have frequently been raised about the amount of rolling stock and track maintained by Isle of Sodor, which is vastly out of proportion to the needs of an island no more than five miles in length.

Mr McLoughlin will later today hand the franchise to the US-based Consortium For Putting in an Offer for Running Sodor’s Railways – SodOff.

Chuggington: Safety concerns

One of the lead backers of SodOff is the Arizona city of Chuggington. Commentators have noted that Chuggington’s record on accidents is just as bad as Isle of Sodor’s.

Confronted with these concerns, the Secretary of State said in a statement: “They offered shit loads more money.”

Asked for a comment, senior partner at transport engineering consultancy Pig, Rabbit and Cat, Ian “Daddy” Pig said: “Oh. I didn’t expect that to happen”, before jumping up and down in a muddy puddle.

NOTES FOR EDITORS

• Sir Topham Hatt is the brother of rogue investment banker Sir Stetson “Cowboy” Hatt, the former chief executive of RBS, who has not been missing since 2009. Sir Stetson was last seen leaving Claridges and getting on board Bertie the Bus with 15 teenage Lithuanian prostitutes.
• Sir Topham first developed the “Very Useful Engine” system in the late 1930s. He spent much of the previous decade in Italy observing how Mussolini made trains run on time. That period is widely believed to be the source of the ardent anti-communism which inspired his desire to run a railway without workers. His feelings about the labour movement led Sir Topham to become a dedicated supporter of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, and he was interned for much of the Second World War on Zingzilla Island.

Missing banker Thomas Goldstein

• Although Isle of Sodor Railways maintains that “Very Useful Engine” is a closely-guarded software secret, allegations that trains are animated with the souls of dead business partners of Hatt, revived by unspeakable necromantic rites, have continually depressed share prices. Longstanding acquaintances of the Hatt family have claimed to see uncanny similarities between certain company assets and the renowned German financiers, Thomas and Percy Goldstein, who vanished in 1936.
• Spokesman for SodOff, Tinkie Winkie the Teletubbie commented on the DfT’s decision: “Tinkie Winkie bag!”. The FTSE100 and Dow Jones both immediately rose by 100 points. 

Contact DfT press office for further information.

Why Bother to Fight School Appeals?

I feel that I should explain why I am writing about school appeals in such seemingly endless detail.

As a parent, you get very used to feeling (if not being) completely responsible for your child’s progress through life. You’re the one who puts them into bed at night. You’re the one who stops them drowning in their own dinner.

All of a sudden - with the allocation of a school place - your total responsibility is wrested away from you and “The System” decrees from upon its impersonal, dizzy heights what is going to become of this person who you have made every decision for, whose interests have been your guiding principle since before they were born.

Of course parents imagine out a life for their kids – and of course that involves going to a good school, getting a good education and being successful. I’m sure it must happen, but I almost cannot comprehend parents being indifferent about the school their child goes to, considering how much of their (the child's) subsequent life they are going to spend there, in the company of and under the influence of people other than themselves.

When The System declares, “Sorry, we can’t all get what we want – so you’ll have to just make the best of it” and you imagine the potentialities of your child being wasted or going unrealised simply because you COULD NOT BE ARSED to challenge The System, then you HAVE TO fight it.

It would be nicer and more just if this didn’t matter. Of course I’d like to see all schools as good as one another, so that nobody has to “win” and nobody has to “lose” – we’re talking about 4 and 5 year old children for god’s sake.

I don’t blame local authorities for having admissions policies that they stick to in order to distribute a scarce resource among an excessive number of valid claimants.

I would perhaps point out that it is often THE SAME local authorities that allow the development of more and more new homes - raking in the council tax from increased population - without providing for a corresponding increase in infrastructure like primary schools anywhere near the new developments they profit from.

Unfortunately, the world is not ideal and it has to be dealt with in its current, imperfect form.

If EVERYONE appealed against The System, then The System might have to take a look at making itself a little less unjust, for the sake of an easier life. It’s only the silent acquiescence of the majority who don’t bother that lets them get away with it.

I’m not going to pretend that what we did had any kind of faux revolutionary wider goal like that behind it, but I throw that out there (along with the foregoing) as a pre-emptive strike against anyone who thinks we were selfish to do it. And also fuck you.

So that covers why we appealed and why I want to write about it. It was a bloody significant event in our lives and I still feel triumphant that we got the right and JUST outcome by persistence.

Sadly, thousands of parents are going to go through the same thing next year, and the next year.

When it was happening to us, I wanted to read a “human” explanation or account of it as well as all the legal (and quasi-legal) stuff I came across that could demystify and contextualise it all – and I could not find anything.

When you see that only 16% of appeals succeed, that it’s a legally binding adversarial tribunal and you see the rates that lawyers charge – and the success rates they lay claim to – it can be really intimidating. You want to argue your case on grounds of love, but love is inadmissible in court.

If I can help anyone win their appeal – or just go in there feeling more confident to face down a system that stacks the dead weight of the bureaucracy against the isolated individual – then I will have accomplished what I set out to.

If it doesn't help anyone... well, have some kitttens to redeem the time you wasted here.

How to Win School Appeals – Part 2

So, let’s suppose that having applied to your local schools back in January, now it’s April and you’ve just opened the fatal letter saying that you didn’t qualify for the ones you wanted and instead your child has been given a place at Shithole Primary, Murder Street, Craphill.

What do you do from here?

Before I go any further, I should give a few disclaimers:

1. I am only talking about reception class size admissions appeals here – these are probably the hardest to win and the ones that you are most likely to have to fight.
2. We live in Bradford and my entire experience is based on that city’s schools and education department. Every education authority will have slightly different procedures, so not everything I say will be universally applicable.
3. When we did win our appeal, we were not actually given the reasons why in detail. I went to two appeals, and I lost one and I won one. So am I going to throw everything I learned or was told or suspect at you. Some of it may be completely irrelevant – but some of it must be true.
4. I can see that this is going to take more than two parts to finish – so more wisdom will follow in later posts.

So where do you go from here?

Armalite and ballot box strategy

Well, there is nothing to be gained from refusing to accept the place at Shithole Primary. If you don’t accept it and then you don’t get a place anywhere preferable, your child ends up without a school place at all – and the last thing you want by now is then kicking around the house for another year or getting allocated a last minute place somewhere even worse.

Plus, if you take the place, you look like a good meek little subject who is playing the game by the rules. I was asked whether we had taken up the place and/or otherwise been to and engaged with the unwanted school in both the appeals I went to, so this must be important.

Secondly, put your child’s name down on the waiting lists for all the schools you would prefer. Some people mistakenly think that going on the waiting list and appealing in some way cancel each other out – they don’t.

Chances are, a few kids will drop out or otherwise not take up places they have been offered before the appeals come around – and you might get one of these. They are awarded on the same terms as the original admissions decisions are made, so if you only just missed out on a place on distance there’s a good chance you will get one down this route.

Plus, going on the waiting list puts your case back into the admissions authority’s hands, giving them more time to make a mistake which you can exploit later.

I can’t stress the importance of going on the waiting list enough. It gives you a reason to be on the phone to them all the time collecting information.

Open up as many fronts as you can. Remember, you care a lot and the council doesn’t have to care that much. You only have to get lucky once – they have to get lucky every time.

What you are dealing with

99% of the time, the reason you will have been rejected is down to our friend the School Standards and Framework Act 1998. That is, because there were 30 kids (or a multiple thereof) who met the admissions criteria “more than” you.

This law on class sizes is a trump card in the admissions authority’s hands – however, it is not the Ace of trumps. If it was, the only hope you’d have would be to take a challenge to the European Court of Human Rights and even if you won, your kids would be 18+ by the time you got the primary school place.

No, the class size law is round about a seven of trumps. It woops most other arguments – even ones that seem world-beating from an ordinary human point of view - but it can be defeated.

What you have to prove is that:

1. The admissions authority (usually the council, but if you’re dealing with a church school for example, it could be the governors) made mistakes in applying the admissions policy.
2. If they hadn’t made those mistakes, then on correct application of the policy, your child would have got a place.

Sadly, it’s not enough to show that the council cocked up – which is usually simple enough. Just deal with them for long enough and they’ll do something wrong: hence I recommend that you contact them regularly, ask lots of questions and sooner or later you’ll get some work experience kid who has no idea what they’re talking about misinforming you about something or other. That’s why going on the waiting list actually helps with your appeal.

For that reason, you should note down every communication you have with the local authority for time and date and try to get the name of the person you are talking to. As far as I can remember, they never volunteered this information, which seems significant.

And don’t expect them to call you back when they say they will. Be prepared to chase everything yourself.

Stay tuned for the next instalment – in which I will talk about the power of paperwork and of gossip

Top five things I look for in a barber

I am a simple man with simple hair. This is all I need from the person who cuts it:

1. No appointment necessary
2. No queuing
3. Under a tenner
4. Comfortable with long silences
5. Doesn’t smell bad

The place I went to in Leeds city centre yesterday fulfilled all these conditions. Plus, he had a jar of product on the counter called “Cholesterol”.

Coming soon: the promised second part of "How to Win School Appeals"...

How to Win School Appeals – part 1

It's a minefield...

Roger Jr has been at school for 7 days now at our first choice primary school. Getting him there, however, has been a battle – which only now do I feel philosophical enough to tell the tale of and make light of.

It all started back in November 2011, when we got a bundle of forms from the local authority asking us to declare our five choices of primary schools for Roger Jr to go to.

Fast-forward two months, and a couple of nights before the deadline, we took a look at them and jotted down (i) the local school which all the other kids up our road went to and (ii) a handful of others.

You may well say that not doing piles of research, bribing councillors and vicars and taking long-lens photographs of headmistresses in compromising positions was the first place we went wrong. You may be right – but what reason did we have to doubt that Roger Jr would get into the same school as all the other children who lived up the same road and therefore at more or less exactly the same distance from the school?

Before I continue, let me explain a couple of things. This may not be how it is everywhere else – and for that reason, I would recommend that you read the paperwork you get sent thoroughly and often – but in Bradford straight-line distance from door of dwelling to door of school is the main determinant of priority for admission. Kids in care and siblings of kids already at the school get first dibs (and to the latter, we will return in due course), but then the school’s favour beams outward like a light and blesses the first cohort of nippers it touches.

Cohort? Yes, we have enrolled Roger Jr in a Roman Legionary school. Discipline first, eh?

No, what I mean is that – thanks to Tony Blair – primary schools have to take in reception kids in batches of 30. The School Standards and Framework Act 1998 says that in the first two years of school, the ratio of pupils to teacher must not exceed 30:1. This – as a parent appealing against an admissions authority decision – is your primary enemy.

Already, you can perhaps see that this is an area best not left to chance.

Anyway, back to our story. Time passes and soon it’s April. We get a letter through from the council and it says that Roger Jr has not been offered a place at any of the five schools we applied for. Instead, he has been given one at a school we have never heard of, in a place best characterised as “a demilitarised zone”.

You see, when you are told that as a parent you have a “choice” of schools, this is not what you are being given at all. You are being asked for preferences so that, in the unlikely event of your child being eligible for admission to more than one of those schools, the council has a tie-breaker. That is all your views count for here.

You see, it turns out that there had been a glut of births in Roger Jr’s school year. And as such, the blessed light emitted by our school of choice (or preference) was guttering like a candle in an airtight room, reducing its circumference from over 0.6 miles to a mere 0.45 miles.

That is, there were so many kids of school age apparently living closer to that school than us (and we will return to that “apparently” later on) that we didn’t qualify - for our number one choice or indeed for any of the five we had named.

And so, because we didn’t live close enough to the school 0.6 miles away, Roger Jr was to be shipped off to a school some 2.5 miles away – a triumph of bureaucratic logic.

It looked alright, but not right for us

Now, I don’t wish to slag off the school Roger Jr was given a place at too much. They’re doing the best they can given their location. And they seem to have nice facilities – schools that have been in special measures often do. They had very nice, big playing fields around the school, although I suspect that large areas were probably heavily mined to deter burglary. The staff seemed pleasant enough, and the head was very good about it when we told her that we intended to fight tooth and nail to ensure that our son didn’t go to her school.

So we appealed.

Now, friends and readers of a socialistic bent may disapprove of our having done this.

If every middle class parent whose kids get sent to a “bad” school exploits their special powers of pushiness (a little middle class secret – you get sent on a course where they teach you all that stuff as soon as you start paying 40% tax), then only poor kids will go to the bad schools and rich kids to good schools.

And that, they will tell you (in a bit of reasoning whose rather disturbing premises they are rarely keen to examine more closely) guarantees that bad schools stay bad and good schools stay good.

Well, let me take on my detractors. You are, of course, entitled to your opinions. However, unless you have children of your own, in this case they are worth precisely NOTHING SO SHUT UP.

Not only do I challenge any parent to admit that they are prepared to accept an inferior start in life because of their political views – I also accuse them of mistreating their children. I see no difference between that and, say, forcing your four-year-old to be a vegan because of your views.  

Sorry, but all abstract positions about what is right or just for everyone go out of the window when it’s your own children involved.

Ask me if my preference is for a fair society or for my kids to get on - I don’t have to research my answer to that.

Coming up in Part 2! I might actually explain “how to win school appeals”!

Inside the Fortress of Solitude

The main thing I will miss when we move to our new house is having a loft.

Casa Sicily is built on three stories – with a bedroom, bathroom and small “store” on the top floor inside the roof. This, it seems, is a fairly common trick developers use these days to build bigger, more expensive houses on a smaller “footprint” of land.

As we prepare to move next month, I have been spending a bit of time in the loft digging through strata of junk like a geologist of our lives. The deeper I go, the older the stuff I find and (in general) the less Elvira or I remember ever having owned it. I confidently expect to find a fully-preserved dinosaur skeleton right at the back.

Or if not a dinosaur then a rat.

I never mentioned the rat on here, did I?

No, too bloody right I didn’t. I was trying to sell a house – I’m not a complete idiot.

Last winter, we got a rat. How did we know it was a rat and not a mouse? Well, considering their respective body sizes, no mouse could have survived pooing out what we discovered in the loft.

And unfortunately also in the kitchen, where it chewed through the top of a cupboard to nibble on the contents of the fruitbowl and boxes of breakfast cereal.

So we got the council ratcatcher in, who left little boxes of poison around, which the rat studiously ignored to continue on his merry destructive way. Every so often we’d hear him scuttling about in the ceiling.

Eventually, we got rid of him by pure dumb luck – the ratcatcher pointed out some holes in the exterior of the house whereby it appeared to have been getting in. I poured a load of gravel down one of them, and we never heard it again. Thankfully, it seems I trapped it outside rather than inside.

We did have a mouse die up there once. It liquefied and seeped through Roger Jr’s bedroom ceiling. I scraped it off while standing on my head then painted over it. 

But as I now clear out the loft, digging my way through the “rat shit era” back to happier times, I come to feel a great sadness that our new house won’t have such a manly fortress of solitude above it.

Yes, while the other Sicilies have all stuck their heads up into the loft (Elvira, I should point out, refers to it as a “false roof” – which gives makes it seem much more secretive than it really is), I am the only one who has ever made the desperate scramble from the top of the ladder through the hatch. It is my domain.

In practice, that means there are areas of intense orderliness alongside – and frequently beneath – regions of chaos. It is as good a map of my brain as you are likely to find without actually vivisecting me.

However, what I will miss most is the incredible physical workout a trip into the loft provides.

1. During the summer, it is insanely hot. Sauna hot – and the atmosphere of fibreglass and wood dust stirred up by moving anything is wonderfully exfoliating.
2. While you are up there, getting around involves some of the most demanding Pilates-style gymnastics I have ever had to perform. Diagonal wooden beams, unboarded floors, water pipes and two – yes two – TV aerials force one to manoeuvre with the deliberation, care and prehensile feet of a Slow Loris. Otherwise, you end up taking a heavy blow to the head or spine or impaling yourself in a location where nobody else can get to you.
3. Taking all this into consideration, attempting to extract heavy boxes and other articles between these obstacles without falling through the ceiling – and then to lower them down onto the landing without flattening the inevitable toddler mucking around with the ladder below – is a feat that never fails to reduce me to a state of total physical exhaustion.

Yes, I will miss the loft. But I will have a garage instead...

Fifty Shades of Beige

When I was a boy, every other weekend – or so it felt – my family would spend a rainy Sunday afternoon wandering around a carpet showroom.

To this day, a row of majestic, towering rolled-up offcuts has the power to overawe me; the heady perfume of formaldehyde to set my hippocampus jangling; the electrostatically-charged atmosphere generated by opposingly-polarised artificial fibres to ... well, you get the picture.

The thing about childhood memories is that as soon as you start bringing them up in front of other people who were actually there, you generally discover that they were completely false.

So whether we actually went to Kingsbury Carpets quite as often as it felt we went or not, carpets en masse send me right back to the state of a bored child chasing my brother up and down the aisles, hiding in between vast swathes of Axminster ... and off I go again.

We, the Sicilies, are still in the midst of buying our new house. We are waiting for it to be finished and hope to move in next month.

A word of advice – when considering the choice between a new build and a used/second hand/pre-owned house (delete to taste), bear in mind that for all their upsides, new builds generally don’t come with floor coverings. So unless you like the feel of bare concrete underfoot – perhaps you are going for “Gaza Strip” decor? – you are going to have to invest in carpet.

A lot of carpet.

In our case, as it turns out, several thousand pounds-worth of carpet.

Now, as a pedant of the first order, I have always had trouble using the suffix “-worth” as a synonym for “cost” or “priced at”. That seems to me to be at best a lazy and at worst sinister conflation of the ideas of value and price. I’ve bought carpet (and vinyl – itself apparently an upmarket synonym for “lino” these days) that cost thousands of pounds, but as to whether it was “worth” it, only time will tell.

And let me tell you, carpet: I am going to be subjecting you to some pretty exacting standards when I think about the other things I could have done with that money.

Back when I was a boy, the carpet warehouse seemed a veritable kaleidoscope of colour and texture. Indeed, in history, carpets were status symbols and ways for rulers to display their magnificence.  

And yet in our shrunken world, we are reduced to the choice between the titular fifty shades of beige. Yes, I bet you were expecting more sex and less carpet when you saw that headline, weren't you?

How can anyone reasonably choose between carpets that look and feel identical? When you can see two indistinguishable carpets “worth” £8 per square metre and £30 per square metre?

OK, I can just about grasp the difference between wool and synthetics, between pile lengths, between looped and ... um... the other kind. But how can anyone choose between so many options that are so similar?

The man in the carpet shop explained to Elvira and I that, in these economically depressed times, manufacturers have to play safe. If they produce anything too out of the ordinary, they risk being stuck with a load of stock they can’t shift and thence going out of business. And that competitive pressure actually drives them all to reduce choice and produce endless tiny variants of the same few basic designs.

An interesting lesson in unfettered competition leading to market failure, don’t you think? If I want a purple carpet with green stripes in it, I SIMPLY CAN’T GET ONE BECAUSE NOBODY MAKES THEM.

And underlay! Don’t talk to me about underlay! “The silent killer” it should be called, because as soon as you think you have a vague idea how much carpeting a room is going to cost – ah! – don’t forget that you need underlay, which itself can cost as much as the carpet. Bloody underlay.

So after a painstaking selection process (more painstaking on Elvira’s part, I should add – my role was largely restricted to saying “yes, THAT one”) we duly settled upon our limestone 521s, our 7B minks and 1866 soft biscuits.

In the bathroom though we went KERRRAYZEEE though: we’re getting “liquorice and bubblegum” striped lino. Studies from prisons show that if we lock tantrumming kids in the bathroom with that on the floor, they’ll calm down in no time. Or have a seizure. The results were inconclusive. 

Alexander Thorpe: the smuggest-looking man in carpeting