3D crosswords and the NCP and RNXB

A very long and involved conversation on the electric telephone this evening with Sirius, the inventor of the 3D crossword. It was a curious conversation, because Sirius is nearly blind and I, am, thanks to the NCP, nearly deaf, so mostly we waved invisible copies of the Financial Times at each other and communicated in a mixture of Braille and Esperanto, in the hope that we hadn't dialled the wrong number and got the Archbishop of Canterbury by mistake (neither Sirius nor I can do Esperanto with a Welsh accent.)


It boils down to this. Sirius has persuaded a dozen or so of the leading lights, if you will forgive the double-entendre, in the crossworld world to give their services free of charge in support of his completely loony idea - 3D crosswords for blind or partially-sighted people. But the powers-that-be in the RNIB are stuck in a time-warp in a universe where the dog-star doesn't exist, so for their protection they move only in well-worn ways, the convenient and comfortable ruts that don't expect, let alone demand, deviation.


When dear Mrs Thatcher was prime minister she didn't like people to argue with her, and most especially she didn't like that cheeky cockney Ken Livingstone or Argentina or coal miners, so she decided to abolish all of them - the first by parliamentary means; the second by gunships; the third by turning the police force into paramilitaries - a device well known to writers of books about the science (!) of management (!), where it is neatly summed up as the Peterloo principle -people rise to one level above their personal level of competence, and then have to shoot somebody. I haven't written my memoirs yet - though I will, because I saw it from the inside - but I have no reason to suppose that the abolition of Ken Livingstone's GLC and the six metropolitan county councils wasn't inspired by the personal spite and vindictiveness of someone who was all ego and bombast and no substance. After all, this woman whom half-wits and other intravenous Tory diehards still hold up as the saviour of our nation only did one other thing to give her a place in the history books - she invented squirty cream from an aerosol tin. Well, whoopee. No wonder they sell the stuff by the ton in Tesco's (you may have to think about that one...)


I mention all this because it is indeed germane, pertinent and relevant to the point at issue - Sirius, who devotes all his spare time to raising money to help blind and partially-sighted people, is having problems with the RNIB, who like his idea, but only on their terms, and Sirius, who has persuaded by his charm (!) and pertinacity (!) a couple of dozen luminaries in the world of the conventional, 2D, crossword to give of their services free (when they would normally expext a fee of between £200 and £500 a puzzle) because they believe in his cause, and they believe in him, is facing an embarrassing dilemma, and one which is made worse by the fact that the people at RNIB to whom he is talking know bugger all about crosswords, and will not, or can not, budge from the rut of their own thinking.


So can I tell you a story?


Way back in 1985, when that woman prime minister was getting rid of everything in sight, someone noticed that the GLC spent something like £8,000,000 a year to support voluntary and arts organisations, and the Metropolitan county councils spent at least another million between them, and they asked the question - what is going to replace that funding? There were sudden huddled meetings between organisations as mighty as the National Council for Voluntary Organisations and its local offshoots, such as the Greater Manchester Council for Voluntary Services, and the lead politicians and officers at GLC and the Mets, and hurried amendments were tabled, and the government gave way, and said yes, we hadn't noticed that, how about a million quid - would that shut you up?


When this concession was offered during one of the Committee Stages of the legislation, the London voluntary services lot, led by a young woman who was the daughter of a bishop, for heaven's sake, wanted to do a press conference to say "thank you, dear government", until it was pointed out to her by one of us from the Mets, more understanding of Realpolitik (vide Rochau, foll. Metternich, and yes, it's all very cynical, but that, sadly, is what politics is about) than she, that we had now got the bastards on the run, and what today was one million quid by tomorrow would be two, and if we thought politically instead of touching our forelocks we could make it £9,000,000 by Third Reading.


We did. It's all there in Hansard.


There's a funny story about the Met county I worked for at the time. Somebody thought that it would be a good idea to set up a Disabled Persons Unit, and give real jobs to people with disabilities and wait and see what happened, and if that wasn't patronising I don't know what is. So our highly paid PR bloke wrote lots of press releases about what we were doing for "the disabled" and "the blind", and there were howls of outrage from the splendid people at GMCVS, and the PR bloke (huge salary) got very defensive and had to start using the word "people", which he didn't like very much.


But the upshot was that once a gang of people had been appointed, all of them people, mark you, though some of them couldn't see or hear very well, or had very short arms and legs, work had to be found for them to do, so a Director had to be appointed (huge salary), and one of the first tasks that this gang of highly intelligent people was given was to collaborate on converting all the council's PR material into Braille. Including the leaflet on How to Pass Your Driving Test.


The people (with disabilities, remember) who were given this task probably tried to keep the irony - and stupidity - to themselves, while rolling round the floor in helpless mirth, and the buzz-word they used to tease us "normal" 'erberts with was: "Do I take sugar?"


That mob of unruly, funny, disrespectful and outrageous original thinkers eventually disbanded themselves, before they were sacked, like the rest of us (and a few thousand coal-miners), but every time I see and hear Thomas Quasthoff sing I weep for those of us who are conventionally normal, and read the Daily Mail, and try to live somebody else's life instead of our own. Because we're OK, aren't we? We're not like them. We're normal, us.


































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This Dawkins doth protest too much, methinks

Now I am not a great reader of the Sunday Newspapers, partly because I quite like forests, and partly because I have better things to do on a Sunday than immerse myself in half a ton of newsprint with a vapidity index of 99%-plus and lots of pictures of bare ladies. But a front-page article in yesterday's Sunday Times did catch my eye (you can read some of the article here), and some ancient memory clicked in my head, and it led to the following ponder.

Years and years ago, when I was a chubby young fellow, I did what all nicely brought-up chubby young fellows did at the age of seven or thereabouts, and joined what was called in those far-off days the Wolf Cubs, and in due course graduated to the Boy Scouts, in a troop presided over by the very same man who was our only choir tenor, the one who refused to sing anything in Latin, even though his name was Rex.

I can't say my days in the Boy Scouts were very happy. Meetings seemed to consist mainly of incantations, rough (though manly) games, and frequent use of the word "bottom."

In fact, when I became possibly the first person ever to be expelled in disgrace from the Scouting movement...what? Didn't you know? Well, it was all to do with a pair of trousers. The troop I was a member of for my spiritual and moral wellbeing was at summer camp in a field by the Ashby-de-la-Zouch railway line, along which, as I, an expert 12-year-old train-spotter knew, the first train passed each day at about 9am. So it seemed natural that a few of us should plot to steal the 15-year-old gangmaster's trousers from his tent at midnight and hoist them up on the yellow signal only 50 yards from our camp, knowing that when the signal dropped them back to earth he would be the first to break out in healthy boyish mirth, slap us all on the back, and utter words such as "o my aching sides" and "ho ho ho", and "nice one."

I can't remember who was brave enough to clamber up the ladder to pin the pants on the signal, but someone was, and it wasn't me.

Next morning we waited, bursting with mirth, for the distant hoot of the 9-o'clock train, and we held our breath. The pants were hanging on the signal blade, wafting gently in the morning breeze. And then, to our great sigh of satisfaction, the signal moved. But it went up, not down. It was a minor matter that we had overlooked. The pants went up with it, and stayed there.

I hadn't realised that the owner of the trousers was quite so big, or so lacking in the necessary boyish sense of humour, until he knocked me over, sat on my tummy, and proceeded to hit me in the face a lot with his big fists, while Rex looked on and said "o let the boys get it out of their system."

And who get expelled from the Boy Scouts? Yes, I did. (It had taken years of planning, but finally I'd managed it!)

So (and now we're getting to the point, at long last) it was with long-delayed delight that I read yesterday that somebody is setting up summer camps for 8-to-17-year-olds that are an alternative to the sort of camp that I endured in my post-we'll dob-dob-dob days, and I thought, whoopee, this geezer gets my vote any day.

But then I read on. The reason the bloke who's setting one up this year in England is doing it is that he's an atheist, and he doesn't like young people being taught about God. He thinks that eight-year-olds should be made to hunt for unicorns (on the grounds that they don't exist, either) (though he says he's totally against indoctrinating youngsters. He wants to introduce them to, ahem, rational thought, instead.)

Now all the eight-year-olds I know love stories, and the exercise of their imaginations, but they're not really equipped yet for advanced metaphysics or the sort of rational thinking this bloke has in mind. In time they will be, for they will ask questions of their own, and they will learn, and they will make choices, and we all hope their choices will be informed choices, but at the age of eight they want to do fun things, and naughty things, like read books by banned authors such as Enid Blyton.

For the privilege of learning how to prove a negative ("There is no God") youngsters at this summer camp, or rather their parents, because it is far more likely that the parents, rather than the children, are completely bonkers, will pay £500. There are only 24 places, and the first of these camps is now fully booked up. That sounds to me like £12,000 in the kitty (or around £6,000 after Richard Dawkins's generous discounts.) And, unless these putative humanist philosophers stuff themselves silly on gargantuan midnight feasts involving caviar and decent champers, someone is going to make a fat profit.

£12,000 or even £6,000 is an awful lot of money to spend on proving an unprovable point, but it must be very good for the Dawkins bank account.

Every Sunday, every Shabat, Jews, Muslims and Christians gather their young people together to teach them the Ten Commandments and good and wise ways of living, and the life-enhancing art of prayer, which puts that part of your mind which is irrational in touch which something that is beyond reason - Jehovah, or God, or Allah, the all-knowing, all-powerful, being, thing or force which existed before the physical universe came into being, which always was, always is, and always will be. You know the sort of stuff. And the children - or their parents - don't have to pay a penny.

I do hope the Richard Dawkins summer camps work - but work in mysterious ways. And I hope they are not going to be denounccd from every pulpit, because that would add fuel to the fire of these "rational" people's sense of grievance. Like Richard Dawkin's book, they are good money-earners, these camps. And unlike genuine humanist philosophy, which seeks to derive moral principles as absolutes but without positing the existence of a God, a perfectly legitimate branch of philosophy that is respected by people of other faiths and philosophies, Dawkins's brand of atheism is tabloid ranting with headline-grabbing stunts.

And I just feel sorry for the children, who, stuffed full of the precepts of the Dawkins's rational thought brigade, will never know the thrill of hanging someone's trousers on a railway signal in the name of the Lord.

That was to be The End, but I've just seen a comment on the Sunday Times article, which is worth Sharing With You, particularly as we, well I, have been banging on about rational thought. This comment says it all (and I reproduce it literally) -

Am i an athiest because i believe that evolution has occured? not sure - prefer to call myself an evolutionist.

I am however a sceptic about much within the Christian Bible-God made us in his image! - why did he wait so long? - has he himself evolved since Tyranosaurus et. al. roamed the Earth?

Caveat emptor - 3

Just to keep you in the picture -

Had the old lug'oles (or rug'ores) syringed yesterday (yes, a Sunday) at the NCP's, sorry, the NHS's Walk-In-Get-Carried-Out-On-a-Stretcher Centre, which, incidentally, is soon to move to new premises, presumably because too many patients found out where they were.

Well, when I say I had them syringed, I mean I had them a bit syringed, and the upshot was that I was stone deaf when I came out and had to watch Kingdom with subtitles switched on, and it was still the same when I woke up this morning.

Luckily, a modicum of hearing had returned by early afternoon, when a very nice lady from Lancashire Trading Standards phoned to say that they would very much like to act on my behalf in re oneself v. computerwebsnore, an online non-retailer of whom I might have written previously and who owe me £117.56 or thereabouts - a sum which, if rendered in appropriately sized banknotes, would cover the playing area at Wembley Stadium, or, if rendered in very large coin, Wales.

To be on the safe side, I am thinking of applying for a correspondence course in signing, so that I can understand what people wave at me, and I am also thinking of applying for citizenship in a country with a rather better health service than ours, and politicians who are rather less grasping of the incidental expenses of power (Zimbabwe springs to mind), and crooks who just pick your pocket instead of pretending to be part of the Wonderful World of Retailing by Electrons.

Meanwhile, back in the real, sane, rational world...

The Big VHF Radio Switch-Off, 2015

OK, so I got the date wrong, already. It's to be in 2015, not 2012, but does it matter?

If you don't know what I'm talking about, read Libby Purves's piece in today's Times about the big radio switch-off.

Libby Purves is, wonderfully, starting to sound like Bernard Levin, that much-loved Mozartian, oenophile and ranter of a bygone age, though so far she hasn't managed to cram 400 pejorative adjectives into a single phrase, nor write a 2,000-word column in a single sentence, like what he did.

But she, like Bernard Levin, wields the English language as though it were an sword, putting down the mighty from their what's-it's, and piling contumely upon those who most richly deserve it.

Libby Purves and Bernard Levin use, or used, the English language like Congreve, Pope, and Shakespeare to belittle the bumptious and prick the balloons of persiflage of the pompous, and we need them , we need them: writers with the genius to use the expressive powers of English to its utmost for the purposes of ridicule; writers whose sense of its rhythms, its assonances, and its poetical possibilities provides them with the wherewithal to take the piss out of prats.

Caveat emptor - 2

Out of the blue this morning - a reply from computerwebstore.co.uk, which reads as follows:

Hello we have temporarily ran out of stock of this item they are due in shortly. Is it ok to ship

when they arrive?

Er - no. I think not. DVD recorders might have been replaced by something else by the time it arrives. I'm still waiting for that crystal set from Woolies.

Money back, please.

Incidentally, I see that analogue radio is to cease by 2012. That is interesting. We do have a DAB, and we get a wonderful signal in the bathroom if one of us stands bare-footed in a half-full washbasin and holds the set out of the window. Getting the rest of the hi-hi in there is going to make it a bit crowded, though.

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And on the lug'oles front - a complete brick wall at the "health" centre (though I suspect that a certain stroke consultant might have been a little, shall we say, peeved at having a patient referred to him who obviously just needed his ears syringed.)

So, having lost a month, I have started all over again, this time at the walk-in centre. Lug'oles get syringed at 1820 hours next Sunday (male triage nurse rather less than helpful. "Have you plepare with orive oir?" "Yes, but I can't use it - it sets like lock, sorry, rock, and makes me go stone deaf." "Make appointment. Plepare rug'ores with orive oir. Send in next Engrish idiot.")

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I feel like one of those women who become invisible the moment they go to the bar to order a drink ("what do you mean, pillock, one of? We all do.") And I realise that it's all to do with my age. Whatever Descartes might have said, he was a twit. I think, too, but I'm 65, so I'm invisible. I have ceased to exist. I am not. Je ne suis pas. The postperson brings me no letters. Nobody answers my e-mails, especially not online retailers. And when women get to be sixty, there's a double whammy, because they automatically become members of the Past-It Club, where they're doubly invisible, by virtue of their sex, and now their age.

The NHS, certainly round here, doesn't like old people. They're a drain on resources, they mumble, and sometimes they smell. The NHS exists for young, healthy people, who don't smoke, don't drink, and go everywhere on a bicycle. These young healthy people free up vast sums of money to fund advertising campaigns, inflated salaries for petty tyrants and bullies and bureaucrats, and large (and very unhealthy) motor-cars for NHS people, who don't of course have to queue up for two weeks for the privilege of parking at £20 a minute while they're in the middle of a heart attack, like old people.

Do you remember when those of us who travelled on trains used to be called "passengers", and then suddenly we became "customers"? The accountants had taken over. And inevitably they took over the NHS, too, and fired all the matrons and brought in Managers.

There's an old joke I was reminded of this week by a clergyman (and it was old when he first heard it. But thank you all the same, John).

A man is in hospital, doomed unless he can have a heart transplant. Then in rushes a jubilant surgeon, who says "George, you're in luck! Two have just come in - one from an Olympic gold-medal cyclist and the other from an accountant. Which would you like?"

"I'll have the accountant's", says George, without a moment's hesitation.

The surgeon is amazed. "You'd choose the accountant's over the gold-medal cyclist's? How come?"

"Easy", says George. "It won't have been used much."

Caveat emptor

Two gripes tonight, both about outfits who are very glad to take your money but none too keen to give you anything in return, and they are, respectively, an online retailer called computerwebstore (do have a look - especially at their customer-care guarantees and other promises) and the NHS.

Let's take the easy one first, the online retailer.

On 22 May I ordered a replacement DVD recorder for a cheap one that had suddenly decided to initialise (ie wipe) everything it had ever recorded when I tried to play it back. I knew what I wanted (one with Freeview), but no shop locally had it in stock, and I was getting a bit desperate so I ordered one online from www.computerwebstore.co.uk, who were very happy to take my £117, with the promise of delivery within three days. Well, it was Bank Holiday (Pentecost, actually, and if I'd had any sense I'd have pondered the "-cost" element), so I thought I'd give them a few more days.

After ten days, when nothing whatsover had happened, despite my having sent a polite e-mail asking if there was a problem, I contacted Lancashire's Trading Standards people, who turned out to be the Office of Fair Trading in disguise, and they read me a resume of the Distance Selling Regulations, 2000, but they were obviously bored by the whole business, and I could hear them thinking "Oh, God, here's another bloody sucker".

Funnily enough, a couple of days after that, I actually received a nearly literate e-mail from someone at computerwebsnore saying "sorry for the delay - it will be with you tomorrow."

Well, that's a fortnight ago now. For a week we made sure that one of us would be at home all day to receive our £117-worth of goods, but it was a complete waste of time. No DVD recorder. Big hole, size £117, in bank account.

The saga continues (I cancelled the order this morning, four weeks after the money left my account) but I have a horrible feeling that I have been rooked out of 25% of my monthly state pension, and the OFT thinks it's all my own fault.

So, if you are ever minded to spring a few bob on a sure loser in the Grand National, don't waste your money - send it to another Liverpool outfit instead, www.computerwebstore.co.uk (please make a note of the name.) You might even be lucky.

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While all this hassle was going on, and without benefit even of recordable telly (though why I bother to spend good gin-money on a DVD recorder when I could get a whole year of the programmes I watch on one floppy disk, I don't know), I suddenly started falling over a lot, and vertical lines (such as in a crossword, the construction of which augments to a small extent my meagre private and state pensions) started to get kinks. I put it down to a cluster of migraines I'd had a couple of months ago, but it was so disconcerting to my wife that she booked me into our local, ahem, "health" centre, and thither I staggered my wobbly and reluctant way - wobbly, because I could hardly keep my balance, and reluctant, because given a choice between visiting our local health centre and having the last rites administered, rational people would plump for the latter. "Doctor", I said. "I've had it before. I need my ears syringed. But I am bothered about the residual visual disturbance following the last cluster of migraines."

Well, I am sure that he is a very good doctor, because he said "stick plenty of olive oil down your lug'oles for a couple of weeks, then trog off to the walk-in clinic." (Which is in Blackpool.) But to be on the safe side he referred me to a jolly pleasant consultant at the Old Vic, a specialist in strokes (which cheered me up no end, as you can imagine) who tested just about everything in sight, including the battery on my mobile phone, and concluded that a) my blood pressure was a bit up (I'd had to park about 14 miles away, and, if you have been closely following this narrative, you will know that I was having difficulty keeping upright for walking purposes, so I wasn't all that surprised that the old BP was having a bad day of it, too) and b) I needed my ears syringed (and he also said stop putting olive oil down your lug'oles - it just fills the gaps, sets like rock, and makes you go deaf.)

Please don't utter a hollow laugh at this point if you attend the same health centre, however tempted you might be.

The consultant said he would write to my doctor, with a copy of the letter to me. I waited, in a wobbly manner, for that letter for a fortnight, in between times managing to do my normal, and some abnormal, church duties, digging the garden and falling over a lot. Then today I discovered that although I hadn't had the consultant's letter, the doctor had. I hadn't realised that it was up to me to ask - I would have thought it was the "health" centre's job to tell me. They are obviously so busy being rude to elderly ladies that they don't have enough time for paperwork.

So, dear brethren, I do hope you see the connection between these two apparently unconnected items. I know I do, me.

I'm wobbling off to the "health" centre on Monday, to hear the verdict. If I survive that experience I might even have had my ears syringed by Christmas. 2012.

Pomes on R3

I have always thought that the best poets are the ones who achieve fame posthumously, and preferably a couple of centuries posthumously, and after weeks amd weeks of having self-indulgent, formless twaddle forced on us by the people who make decisions about what we are going to listen to on Radio 3, I was just about to hand in my radio licence and ask for a refund when I heard a pome this morning that set me off chuckling, and then admiring. You'll have to do a Listen Again (you have seven days...), but this poem is worth hearing - it's about words, and cliches, and it is most beautifully crafted, and the woman who wrote it is a voice to listen out for.

And (22/6/09) you missed it, didn't you?

An over-regulated state?

In Switzerland just about every significant change in the law has to go to a referendum of the people, and, since people are generally resistant to change, nothing much changes in Switzerland, which, since 1848, has been just about the most stable democracy in the world, not to mention the richest. The Swiss Parliament building, in Bern, is tiny compared to the Palace of Westminster, and the Swiss civil service comprises basically two girls, a typewriter and a tin of biscuits. And the country seems to rub along pretty well. There are, of course, government departments, such as the Department of Defence, Civil Protection and Sport, which I think is marvellous ("today haf we invaded been? Nein? Gut! Zen let us ze football play"), but they're probably looked after by the two girls in between coffee breaks.

And then look at us. We are also a bicameral state. We have 635 MPs, a colossal Upper Chamber and a vast civil service. This enormous machine can only function if the government generates enough new legislation and new regulations to keep the civil service busy, and, of course, itself busy, otherwise people would start asking questions, wouldn't they? (I know I would.) But how much of it is really necessary for good governance? Not much, I think. Ask any teacher - a worthwhile profession, teaching, you might think - how much time is spent actually teaching, and how much looking up the rule book. Or ask a social worker. Both professions lament the falling standards of new entrants, and is it any surprise? Who worth her or his salt would want to work in these over-regulated and undervalued professions if there was any alternative? Governments that interfere in social affairs sow the seeds of discontent, and reap the harvest. Left to themselves, societies are quite good at self-regulation. But once nanny is in charge of every little detail of life, people are too ready to hand over responsibility to nanny and a breed of victims is created.

Have you ever worked in a small company that grew bigger, and in the process of growing found it necessary to have an Admin Department, and a Personnel (oops!, sorry, Human Resources) Department, which then took over the company? Bureaucracies are self-sustaining - they need people to count the paper-clips and check the clock-cards. Their skills are eminently transferable (after all, if you can count baked beans in the newspaper industry you do the same in the nuclear power industry), and there is enormous competition for the top jobs, which drives the salaries up into the stratosphere. Yet what bureaucrat has ever added anything, even a millionth of a gram, to human happiness?

I mention all this because I found out today, too late, that I could have gone to a neighbouring town to be Put on Film with a Short Sentence in support of our local council's drive to eliminate hostility towards minority groups from our fair borough. And at that I issue a hollow laugh.

Now, even allowing for the fact that the idea that a local authority, which is at bottom the sort of outfit that invented the camel, could ever change anything at all that would be of even moderate use to mankind, is ridiculous, I allow myself this hollow laugh, because round here some minorities understand the system very well indeed, thank you, and attempt to exploit it to their own advantage.

Let us take for example our local Community Safety Partnership, a body which, though completely lacking in teeth, is empowered to intervene when there is potential racial tension, or sex-orientation tension, or neighbour tension. Now the Partnership is not a court, but an initial part of a process of which mediation is the first possible stage, and all it takes is for a victim of racial intimidation, or homophobic [what a ridiculous word - "fear of the same"] intimidation, or any other form of bullying, as for example between neighbours, to complain, and the wheels are set in motion.

It was to the Partnership that I was "invited" last year, together with two other families, because a neighbour had complained that we had victimised him because he was gay, and as you can imagine it was a very anxious time for all of us (one young wife with four children was reduced to taking sedatives after being verbally abused in the street by the complainant and his partner on at least two occasions, and having the complainant's car aimed at her -as it was also at me), and I had had to suffer 24-hour TV and CD noise at full blast while his house was empty, or being hosed in the back garden or having my washing watered by hosepipe when he thought no-one could see him, and all in all, it was a very unpleasant two years, during which time most of us lost at least a stone in weight. And it was all because I had objected to his plans to build a 50-metre, nine-room extension to his semi-detached 2-bed bungalow.

When I talked to friends about this neighbour problem it was like turning an iceberg upside - down - so many of them had had, or were having, nightmares of their own. This is the undetected and unprotected state of affairs in society today - not the obvious bullies who win elections for the BNP, but the ones that live next door to you and make your life a misery in secretive and nasty ways.

And it is precisely these people who walk around with smug expressions on their faces, because they are protected, and we, the real victims of bullying and oppression, aren't.

There is a Commandment, I seem to remember, about not giving false witness. But, even in the 21st century, there is no redress for victims of false witness, and there is something very seriously wrong here if a body which is set up to eliminate prejudice and intimidation is utterly powerless when there is a glaring example of it.