choirstalls

Copyright & Public Performance - church licences, PS

2012-01-26T10:46:00.001Z

And while I’m on the subject.

Older hymn books use the convention of a double bar marking in the music to indicate line endings in the text, and that is designed to help choir persons navigate between the words and the music, which are sometimes widely separated. Now it often happens that a line ending occurs in the middle of a bar of music, so this helpful marking isn’t a real bar line at all, and as such it isn’t catered for by notation software. Sorry to be technical, but it has to be added as a graphic, and that takes time and care and prior consideration of the needs of singers.

It is a measure of the contempt that the editors of modern hymnals have for traditional church choirs that they don’t bother with such detail – indeed the editors of Complete Anglican Hymns Old And New go so far as to suggest that if choirs can’t cope with their music settings they should sing in unison.

Isn’t it time for a backlash against the twin forces of textual and musical rewritings, renewed copyrights and the implicit threat of legal action unless expensive licences are taken out?

With very few exceptions the best hymns and musical settings are long out of copyright, and (as Cathy of the Cathy Thinks blog linked below has suggested) with word processors and notation software easily available there is no reason why a church can’t create its own service sheets or even complete hymnals. with the advantage of getting back to original words, not the questionable rewritings that are now ubiquitous.

Against the cost of creating such local resources we can offset the cost of reproduction licences, and I note that in 2011 my church reprinted, under licence, the words of only two hymns. The cost of the licence that allowed us to do it? Inclusive of VAT - £162.46.

Copyright & Public Performance - church licences

2012-01-25T22:22:00.002Z

It's a pity that the editors of modern church hymnals and books of worship don't give as much attention to the quality of editing as they do to the copyright of their typography, and the intellectual property rights of their songwriters.

I have two copies of the SATB version of Complete Anglican Hymns Old and New, published by Kevin Mayhew Limited. The second version (and I am being very careful to avoid words with very precise meanings in the publishing world for the moment) contains quite a lot of corrections in the texts of hymns and in their musical notation compared with the first, but nowhere is there any acknowledgement of that fact. But it gets worse. In one hymn there's a different number of verses, and in the melody-only edition yet another. Topping up the collection of church hymnals because of wear and tear (the bindings are decidedly unstrong) means that the choir and congregation are singing from incompatible versions of the same hymn book.

To an ex-bibliographer and library cataloguer this hymnal is a nightmare, for it poses the question: when does a reprint become a new edition? The publishers evidently consider SATB version 2 to be a reprint, because it is given the same ISBN number as the first, and you have to look hard to be able to tell the two versions apart. It is, to put it mildly, a little bit naughty.

I have drawn attention to some of the most glaring mistakes in musical notation in this hymnal elsewhere in this blog, for example

http://choirstalls.blogspot.com/2008/12/orange-brick-revised.html

but now that copyright holders are becoming more aggressive in their assertion of their rights, let's just look at some of the difficulties that even those of us who want to stay on the right side of the law and not see ourselves and our fellow PCC members or our incumbent fined or banged up in chokey for the rest of their natural face.

The Music Reproduction Licence (MRL) from Church Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) allows a PCC to reproduce the in-copyright music of some hymns for use in, say, special orders of service, provided a copyright notice is given in a prescribed form. I have no problem with that. But what if that music contains glaring errors? Is resetting it in a music notation program such as Sibelius, Finale, or Noteworthy and then including it in a special booklet ("for use in acts of divine worship, including weddings and funerals" - we have to say that, so that there is no misunderstanding) a breach of copyright? If the music is actually out of copyright, no. But what if it is still in copyright? I imagine it would be no defence to say "but, your Honour, they'd put an A-flat when it should have been a G-sharp, so we just put it right."

In our churches nobody sets out with the deliberate intention to steal, but the presence of a photocopier in the church office is all too great a temptation for those ignorant of the law. In essence running off a dozen copies of a anthem from a borrowed volume from the RSCM is just as much theft as running a pirate DVD copying operation from the vicar's vestry: the only difference is scale - shoplifting v. armed robbery.

In a small rural parish the legal obligations of PCCs are fast outrunning the abilities of officers to cope, and diocese doesn't help when its officers put out circular letters suggesting that when a church buys a set of hymnals it acquires copyright in those hymnals. So to put the record straight I was to give a brief report to our Deanery Synod tomorrow, backed up by a fact-sheet giving brief details of and contact numbers for CCLI, CCL, MRL, CVL, PPL, PRS, Licensing Act 2003 permissions, Bodies of People Approvals, Grand Rights, and oh, a few other things, and what to do about them. All in one neat, brief document, using words gleaned from official publications and websites.

I sent a copy to CCLI, more out of courtesy than anything. A day before Synod I received an e-mail from CCLI saying that my fact-sheet had been referred to Upstairs, and I couldn't 'use' it until I'd been given clearance.

I think that's one for the Human Rights Court, me.

And while I'm at it, I'm going to write to the Bishops, and ask if they could please arrange for my pension to be increased to £26,000 after tax - just to poverty level, I'm not greedy. I'm on about half that, and I'm working harder and for longer hours than ever I was when I was in paid employment.

Perhaps I should write a book of worship songs...

Associations (again)

2011-12-11T20:19:00.000Z

And what connects the Military Wives with Les Misérables? I hear you ask.

Simply this -

the second phrase in Paul Mealor's song Wherever You Are is rather more than vaguely reminiscent of Eponine's aria in Les Mis - A Little Drop of Rain -

And you will keep me safe
And you will keep me close
And rain will make the flowers grow

it's note for note the same, the metre is the same, and the harmonisation is the same.

Just thought I'd mention it.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear

2011-11-19T20:20:00.001Z

From today's Daily Telegraph

"Fears over the eurozone crisis saw stock markets fall again yesterday. The FTSE 100 closed down 1.1 per cent *. French and German shares also fell.

Meanwhile, a leaked document seen by The Daily Telegraph yesterday showed ** Berlin has drawn up radical plans for an intrusive *** new European body which will be able to intervene directly in beleaguered countries.

Sir John Major, the former prime minister, warned last night that the growing integration of the eurozone nations threatens democracy in those countries. He told Al Jazeera television **** that richer euro members led by Germany and France will “insist on moving towards what we call fiscal union. By that I mean common control over budgets and fiscal deficits”."

* it didn't. It closed down 1.1 percentage points, which is a completely different matter.

** the little word 'that' would have helped. The phrase "The Daily Telegraph yesterday showed Berlin ..." requires an object. Readers have to go back and rethink before they can make sense of the sentence. This is considered rather impolite of writers.

*** 'intrusive' is sneaky, because it is a loaded word. The Telegraph, like the Guardian, is very clever at sending subliminal messages to its readers, most of whom are stuck in an ideological stasis anyway, and need regular injections of Orwellian soma lest they start thinking for themselves

**** Erm, excuse me, but why was Sir John Underpants talking to Al Jazeera (a respected and honourable news service in the Arab world) ? Is he now so far off the radar that only Al Jazeera will listen to him?

You can enjoy the Telegraph's characteristic slipperiness in its language for its own sake. It stands supreme as the paper of Tory spin, and it has many years of experience in keeping baying Tories foddered and watered by its clever use of subtly emotive language.

But all too often Telegraph writers wobble off arguments that they might have made persuasively by snapping to the party line, and by golly it shows.

The real story in all this fluff was that John Major was talking to Al Jazeera.

Does the Telegraph know something that it is only hinting at to its readers?

The breath is bated.

One's Mobile - or worse, 3's Mobile

2011-11-12T21:36:00.001Z

I was chuffed to bits when my wife bought me my first 3G phone – a Galaxy Europa from Carphone Warehouse, on the 3 network. £15 a month for unlimited Internet, 300 voice minutes, and 3,000 SMSs. It was exactly what I needed. From 18 August, when I was given it, to last week it was utterly and totally reliable. Three months trouble-free 3G - too good to be true?

Yes, it was. Last week the phone stopped working. I went onto the 3 website (three.co.uk) on the lappie, popped in my postcode, and discovered that because of 'maintenance work' there would be no signal for 6-8 hours. Well, fair enough, I thought. We’re a bit borderline round here. Perhaps 3 are boosting the signal.

Hollow laugh. Since the maintenance work a signal – any signal – is now a rare event.

A week ago the 3 map of our little neck of the woods showed just a few pale pink islands in our area (= indoor reception unreliable) in a sea of dark purple (= strong signals indoor and outdoor.) Now the whole of our area is pale pink.

3 has reduced the power of the signal to FY6 0xx to boost it elsewhere. Orange signal has also been affected, coincentally or otherwise.

I am now fed up with the circularities of troubleshooting, which take hours and hours and only get you back to where you started. As far as I am concerned 3 no longer provides a reliable service in FY6 0xx. Shame. It was good while it lasted.

The Vodafone signal, however, is excellent, as is O2.

Back to Carphone Warehouse next week. Switch me from 3 to Vodaphone or O2, please. I just want a 3G phone that actually connects to a network when I switch it on, and does it reliably. That’s what I pay for, but am not getting. 3’s packages are very good on paper, but no good at all when you can’t connect to the network for days on end.

Miles Coverdale and the Psalms

2011-10-28T22:31:00.001+01:00

An extract from the Choirstalls column in the November parish mag:

"... On Bible Sunday [23 October] we listened to readings from KJV, and to other translations; we heard one of the psalms in Miles Coverdale’s translation that were taken wholesale into the Book of Common Prayer; and a few Sundays ago the whole of Coverdale’s 23^rd Psalm was given on the service sheet for the day. Or so I thought.

It is easy to be wise after the event, and the following day, quite by chance, I came across another reference to Coverdale’s 23^rd Psalm. It seems that quite a bit of editing of Coverdale went on before his psalms reached the Book of Common Prayer, for where BCP has “thy rod and thy staff comfort me”, Coverdale had actually written “thy staffe and thy shepehoke comforte me.” What a compelling word is shepehoke, or sheephook, as we would now spell it, if it hadn’t dropped out of use a few hundred years ago, as the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary points out. It is a word whose meaning is graphically as well as orthographically clear.

But what authority did Coverdale have for using it? He had no Hebrew, and worked mainly from the Latin of the Vulgate, in which rod and staff appear as virga and baculus, both instruments of punishment rather than comfort. I suspect that Coverdale was attempting to impose meaning on a difficult passage by contrasting staff, a defence against any passing ravening wolves, perhaps, with the shepherd’s crook, used to gather strays back into the fold. But in any event, shepehoke didn’t make it into BCP, so we’re left struggling to understand what distinction the original psalmist made between rod and staff. And in the process of revision for BCP a valuable word disappeared from the English language..."

The starting-point for what became a lengthy and still continuing journey was a Google search for Coverdale + psalms + facsimile. What I am convinced used to be there on the Web isn't there any longer. Instead, all search combinations led eventually to the same website:

http://www.studylight.org/desk/?query=ge+1&t=mcb

The Coverdale Bible is there, transcribed and digitised by some people in the Ukraine: it's riddled with transcription errors that render it virtually useless for purposes of textual comparison, but it was there that I picked up 'shepehoke'.

I'd sent a friend a draft of the article for the parish mag, and unknown to me he joined my quest for a sight of an original Coverdale Psalm 23. He has contacts in the academic libraries of the Benelux countries, and knew that the library of the University of Utrecht had an original, and, as it turned out, an e-book made from the original.

And that's where the snags started to arise. This e-book could easily be transmitted via the library network, but to set up the licensing would cost me over £600.

I have, for the moment, given up, thanked my friend for his goodwill, and asked him not to trouble himself further.

But there are nasty smells lingering. The Ukrainian digitisers claim copyright on their digitisation of Coverdale's work, although copyright is not a word that would have figured in Miles's vocabulary because it hadn't been invented.

I can understand that the libraries in which the treasures of the past are kept don't want any Tom, Dick or Shifty Sid getting their grubby mitts on precious vols and probably nicking a page or two to flog on the dodgy antiquities market, but denying access to originals in the Internet age, when facsimiles can so easily be made, smacks a little of ivory towers. Miles Coverdale wanted his translations of the psalms (let alone the Bible) to be voiced abroad, loudly, in every place where the flock foregather, to educate and illuminate the lives of people who probably couldn't read or write.

It is now far more difficult to see or hear his words as he spoke them and wrote them than it was in his lifetime.

So here is an appeal.

If you have an e-Coverdale, could you send me Psalms 23 and 121 (that's all I need)? Post a comment and I'll set up a short-lived e-mail address.

If you are a biblical scholar and understand ancient Hebrew could you explain the origins of what became virga and baculus in Latin, and then rod and staff in KJV?

Holiday Nightmares - The Cast - Part 1

2011-10-01T22:27:00.000+01:00

After nearly 12 hours on coaches on the hottest day of the year (in Britain, at any rate - I can't speak for Louisiana, Northern Territories or Botswana) I came back down to earth with a thump. I knew I was home.

The Boss had sent me for fish and chips. For 200 yards (sorry, I don't do metres unless in Europe) on the home straight, with the chippie doorway firmly in view and the shop unusually empty, I kept a beady what'sit out for people who might get there first (usually there's about 30 of them, vying and shoving). But not a one, apart from an octogenarian gent taking the evening air, inch by trudging inch, poor soul. Until he saw me, that is, and sensed a rival for First in the Queue, and with a final sprint that Seb Coe might have been proud of he made it, a big smirk of triumph spread athwart his whiskery mush.

This will strike a chord with some readers (won't it Steph?) For he, or his double, is the principal character in this week's dramatic presentation -

The E-Type Cripple

('cripple' is not a word that I would normally use. But it is the word this man used. It is therefore permissible, but only in the context of this little fable)

Objective: to attain the front seat when the human contents of two coaches merge for a trip, and all seats are up for grabs.

Strategy: finish breakfast early by demanding preferential service, on account of urgent appointment at cripple clinic; then sprint to coach in coach park; alight via offside door while driver is conducting pre-flight checks; squat on front seat; and stay put. If challenged when passengers embark, say "I are poor cripple, also I are pay £30 for this seat", thus gaining sympathy vote.

Resources: wife modelled on lines of Nora Batty, providing cover in hotel breakfast room by excessive flashing of wrinkled stockings and/or dewlaps/gaudy headband.

Qualifications: retired teacher; admirer of that woman who once got to be prime minister by a fluke in the Tory voting system; owner of flat cap or beret, stained beige mac, and clunky walking stick as character props.

next time... the Grand Master of his Lodge tells how he provided 50kg of free butties for the initiated by exploiting loopholes in security in European hotels' breakfast buffets.

Fascinating Aida (veni, vidi, bought the DVD)

2011-09-30T19:58:00.000+01:00

I must be the last person in the world to embed this wondrous video, but honest, I bought the DVD as soon as I saw it. Hilarious women do not get much better than this.

Surreal? Elio Crociani also took the two following vids of our son Robin at La Scala Milan

2011-05-22T21:53:00.000+01:00

Robin at La Scala (he does sing, honest, but whoever took the vid was more interested in Allison...)

2011-05-22T21:44:00.001+01:00

The Lad in Quartett (La Scala Milan), opera based on Les liaisons dangereuses music by Luca Francescon...

2011-05-22T21:32:00.001+01:00

Tickles

2011-04-25T19:46:00.000+01:00

seen in Ulverston

seen in Torquay

Telly news and double standards

2011-02-17T18:32:00.003Z

It would be 'too distressing' to show footage of the two horses being electrocuted in the paddock at Newbury, said the telly reporter moments ago.

Hm. Why not show the same compunction when it is film of mere human beings being kicked to death by thugs? That doesn't usually bother telly newspeople.

English as She are Spok - 2

2011-02-14T17:23:00.002Z

2011-02-14T17:21:00.001Z

...and while we're at it, could the club of broadcasters that lives in a closed little bubble stop forcing abominable mispronunciations on people in the big world outside? People who proTEST take part in PROtests. They are proTESTers, not PROtesters. So fuddled are broadcasters that some of them now talk about people PROtesting. For heaven's sake, can any of them actually read? If so, there are books called dictionaries, which usually offer advice on pronunciation and where the stresses go. They might try using them once in a while.

English as She are Spok

2011-02-07T20:16:00.001Z

A correspondent in today's Times bewails the tendency of telly people to pronounce 'sixth' as 'sikth'.

Where have you been, bewailer? 'Fifth' has been 'fith' since ever since I can remember. People who join in protests are called PRO-testers. People who export are called EX-porters. The distinction between 'less' and 'fewer' got lost in about 1949. And of the rich panoply of prepositions that English offers, only one survives in telly-speak - 'over'.

I long to see the headline - Obama Craps Himself Over Africa.

The way things are going, it's inevitable.

Women in the Church - WATCH

2011-02-07T19:26:00.005Z

The draft Measure that would allow women clergy to become bishops in the English provinces of the Church of England (in other Anglican provinces they've had women bishops for years) fell at the last hurdle in General Synod in July 2010. The House of Bishops had passed it; the House of Laity had passed it, but it was lost by a narrow vote in the House of Clergy, where a selective reading of Paul's often contradictory epistles supports a small but influential minority of conservative evangelists in their institutional chauvinism.

Sop after sop was offered to this minority, leading last July to the promise of a Code of Practice that would provide a safe house for those clergy and their congregations who 'in conscience' could not accept that the apostolic succession could ever include laying hands on the heads of people of the female gender (we never use the word 'sex' in the CofE - 'sex' is rather dirty, so we avoid it by pinching a specialised term from the jargon grammatists use, and effectively and subtly neuter women in the process. Quite how 'sex' can be omitted in arguments about the role of women eludes me, since even popes and archbishops have to have had mothers, and I only know one story about an immaculate conception. But that is by the by.)

The conservative evangelists - the conscience-clause chauvinists - immediately latched onto the Code of Practice, and argued that it amounted to a poisoned chalice. According to them, the parliamentary process doesn't allow a Code of Practice even to be drafted until its Measure has received Royal Assent, so they would be voting for a pig in a poke (scaremongering nonsense - they know very well that a code was being drawn up immediately after the votes in General Synod July last year; that they could see it and form their views; and that they would be able to debate and vote on it in 2012 before they even began to consider the primary legislation.)

So the Bishops' Council, determined not to let six years of very public infighting in the CofE count for nothing, issued an Article 8 to sound the views of dioceses (only dioceses, mind - not deaneries. Deaneries could discuss: they could even vote. Their votes might be invalid, but at least they could vote if they wanted to.)

So our deanery synod met, and was to be addressed by diocese-appointed speakers for and against.

Now the House of Clergy in our deanery synod probably know exactly what is going on, and what the stakes are, but surprise surprise! The background material that was given out to lay members as they filed into the meeting was deficient in one respect - it didn't mention anything about a certain Code of Practice, so when the speakers started putting their respective points of view few of us had a clue what they were getting so heated about. It got even more complicated when one of the anti-women speakers tried to tell us that we were not allowed to vote - that is, make out views known. It took a lay chairperson to disabuse him (and the result of the vote might suggest why this speaker was so anxious to mislead us.)

And the results of our vote at deanery synod? Clergy 6 for, 2 against. Laity 25 for, none against, 3 abstentions (including me, who abstained because of lack of proper briefing, and an instinctive reluctance to be treated as lobby fodder.)

In our parish church we've had women clergy for years. For us, they are clergy first and women second. It simply isn't something that we get worked up about. Congregations in chauvinist churches will have had very different experiences, though. How, if they have never had the opportunity to see women clergy at work, can they be said to have an informed opinion?

Bullying - which is what the far-right in the CofE engage in, as well as dirty politics - is unacceptable in any circumstances.

So I have had enough of church males assuming that because I am of the male sex, sorry gender, I am automatically a member of their exclusive club.

My wife and I have done something this evening that we should have done a long time ago - we've joined WATCH - Women in the Church. WATCH is a lot more socially inclusive than the present CofE - it welcomes men into its ranks as well as women, Its membership includes women who have risen as far as the Anglican glass ceiling allows them at present to rise - deans, theologians, moral philosophers, original thinkers - people with vision who could be running the church - if only they had had the good fortune to be born with a you-know-what dangly thing.

Every one of the women clergy in this group will at some time have been publicly humiliated by a willy dressed in a posh frilly frock who protests his conscience (and if it hasn't happened yet, it will.) If it wasn't for women clergy there wouldn't be a CofE any more to give flying bishops their moment of earthly glory in some Alice-in-Wonderland non-geographical Third Province. Just look at the stats.

You can sign up here. It costs less than 50p a week. Consider it a contribution to a very different conscience clause, and one which has overwhelming support from the pews.

http://womenandthechurch.org/join.htm

Phishing PayPal

2011-01-31T22:24:00.000Z

If you ever get anything this in your e-mail, trash it immediately - it's a phish. Reply to it, and your bank account will be emptied, just like that.

No reputable bank or financial institution ever asks for sensitive information in an e-mail, because e-mails are not secure.

Read this, and be web-wise:

http://www.spamlaws.com/paypal-scam.html

Egypt

2011-01-15T22:19:00.002Z

After the outrages in Alexandria at Christmas, it was Muslims who put themselves up as human shields so that Coptic Christians could attend Midnight Mass. There are not enough words to thank our Islamic brothers and sisters in Egypt for their bravery and their compassion. By their deeds there is hope for us all yet.

Tele-bloody-coms - just give us your wallet

2010-12-20T22:44:00.001Z

The chap from BT was most beguiling. The package was irresistible, and we'd been specially chosen as loyal customers. Free broadband, free phone calls, help with the mortgage and use of a private Lear jet whenever we wanted. All we had to do was switch my broadband from Talk-talk to BT. 'Tell them you want a Big Mac code', said the nice Geordie. 'Get them to send it to your mobile. I''ll ring you back at 4:30.'

I wonder whether anybody from Oftel has ever donned disguise and tried to get a Big Mac code out of Talk-talk. They would be horrified. Talk-talk's response to a polite request for the code is a threat to cut you off instantly from your mobile and your broadband (illegal), followed by a sweetener - "oh - your loyalty compels us to offer you free calls for life and the free use of a Jumbo jet."

It is absolutely impossible, even for a reasonably intelligent punter who just wants to keep costs of landline and mobile phone calls and internet use down to a level which his pension can accommodate comfortably, to choose between fish and cheese, because like is never compared to like.

Even last month's itemised bill from Talk-talk was unintelligible. I've no doubt the sums charged were correct, but the headings under which they were grouped were utterly meaningless to someone who doesn't speak fonejarg.

I had the Talk-talk bill yesterday for the mobile calls I made trying to make contact with them to request a Big Mac code. It was over £8, waiting for a reply, and this is the dirty side of telecoms - the invisible charges.

Oftel is failing in its job. Telecoms is now utterly obfuscatory to ordinary mortals.

I still haven't made a decision. Since Talk-talk took over Tiscali the broadband service has tightened up, and TT warn you when to expect a day or so of mild disruption, but they bully you with implied threats if you say you are thinking of migrating. BT owns the infrastructure and doesn't like intruders, and is marginally more persuasive, but it tries too hard when it's going for the kill, and doesn't like taking no for an answer, so it makes nuisance calls to people who've been on the telephone preference scheme for yonks.

And we, the people who fund the big players, are treated with contempt if we protest at their doorstep salesmanship.

That Thatcher woman, doyenne of the car-boot market-place, has a hell of a lot to answer for.

Rochdale Liberals & Oldham East & Saddleworth

2010-12-17T21:47:00.001Z

I'm sorry for Phil Woolas, who has lost his seat in Oldham East & Saddleworth, but there's a background that never gets into the press.

Red and blue have always respected each other's political differences in Rochdale and in this new ungainly parliamentary constituency, to the extent that they had gentlemen's (and gentlewomen's) agreements not to queer each other's pitch at local or national elections when they went out on the knocker. Neither party wanted to be involved in unseemly brawls in the street or on the doorstep. Members of both main parties conducted themselves with dignity and with mutual respect.

That made them ripe for exploitation by the yellow brigade, whose strategists are recruited from St Trinian's and the Bash Street Kids, judging by their behaviour at the hustings (fundamentally juvenile). It was the yellow brigade who dreamed up the bright idea of doing their last leaflet drop just before midnight on pre-election day, turning on all the security lights in sleeping households and causing every dog to bark, or shadowing other parties' door- knockers in the hope of engineering a punch-up.

The difficulty the two main parties have in this constituency is that there isn't just one yellow peril to contend with, but two - one hungry for power by adopting Conservative policies, the other by adopting Labour policies, and they squabble amongst themselves like children in the school playground. Power at any price - that is the unspoken slogan of the Liberal Party, and that is why they can't risk having a serious manifesto of their own: just opportunistic fluff to allow them to move either way when a chance arises.

Ugh.

Human Rights Legislation & Alice in Wonderland

2010-12-17T20:57:00.000Z

Isn't it fitting that it's in pantomime season that an illegal immigrant with a string of motoring offences gets protected by European human rights legislation despite having killed a 12-year-old child with the vehicle he was driving illegally?

This legislation is binding on our judicial system, but it is proving to be bad law because it is not balanced by a Human Obligations principle, which could take into account the circumstances in which somebody sought protection for their human rights. Bad law creates injustice and compounds the injury suffered by victims of crime. Human rights are not absolutes - they are relatives, which go hand in hand, as all rights do, with duties and obligations.

People who engage in criminal activity surrender their right to be treated equally with their victims or with the rest of society, and until legislators builds this principle of Human Obligations into Human Rights law we will continue to live in an Alice in Wonderland world of topsy-turvy.

Le Grand Air-Miles A$$hole

2010-11-27T23:20:00.003Z

I've never tried it, but people say that you can get your revenge on the pillock who races up and down the street at 70mph at midnight in his souped-up Citroen 205 by blogging his activities and putting his car reg in as a tag so that other people can find it via Google and heap contumely upon him (and then find themselves up before the European Court of Inverted Human Rights, probably.)

I wish I could do the same for the occupant of seat 13C on Swiss flight LX394 out of Zurich at 12:10pm today, 27 November 2010.

I hate flying, but I love flying Swiss because the the flight attendants are always so gentle and soothing, and I feel as though this is what Heaven must be like, and they give me confidence because I know that they don't want to get there prematurely any more than I do or the pilot does. Why, once we had a lady driver, and the male co-pilot was careful not to tell us until after the (perfect) landing.

Passengers pile in. Settle themselves. The usual sort of fatalistic fingers-crossed calm descends as the driver revs up and things start roaring and rattling.

Then rises imperiously from his seat Mr Frequent Traveller Air Miles A££hole and addresses very pleasant young Swiss flight attendant who is closing the baggage lockers. "Bloody hell, I'm on a Fokker. You there, girl, go and ask the Captain how old it is. 30 at least. Amazed it's still flying. " (this is during taxiing. Passengers glance anxiously at each other. Some cross themselves, this being Switzerland.)

While flight attendants mime their safety instructions to the Tannoy, A$$hole switches on mobile device, plugs in earphones and becomes deaf to the not only the world, but the word. He does eventually switch off his Important Person Blackberry, but only at the last possible nanosecond, and passengers are now frantically writing their last wills and testaments.

Flight attendants doing last-minute checks before take-off. A$$hole intercepts one. "Don't you have today's FT on this flight, dear?"

Passengers and flight attendants are now so cowed by this Important Person (travelling Economy, note) that he also manages to get himself fed and coffee'd twice, once on the up-round and then again on the down-round, while the rest of us were starving.

13D and E having long since fled to vacant seats (about 3 and 5 seconds respectively after encountering him, actually) we were the only people in range. Stuffing himself with his second snack he impertinently inquired: 'Been on holiday, then?'

We both turned away and muttered to each other in French (we had been able to brush up our colloquial French at the Piaf concert that Fabienne Jost had given the night before in the Stadttheater Bern.)

Swiss must know who he is - he is frequent-flier Mr Air Miles A$$hole. Dear Swiss, can't you ban him? He undoes everything you do to put your passengers at ease. Can't you put him on something wooden with one dodgy prop and an outside lavvy next time he books with you, tell him he's going first-class, then open the scuppers and drop him in the sea about 100 miles off Reykjavik?

It was only after we'd landed at Manchester that my dear wife pointed out that we'd been on row 13. With him. Mr Total Tosser Know-it-All Air Miles A$$hole.

M'sieur - how interesting it was to cross your path. As we say in English: Vous etes, m'sieur, vainqueur complet. And I can't even be bothered to flatter you with the necessary diacritics.

Just 450 words

2010-11-03T23:28:00.000Z

Bernard Levin did it, TS Eliot did it a lot in Finnegan’s Wake, and no doubt there are other writers who have written an entire column or even book in a single sentence, but I shouldn’t think it’s easy - you have to have at your disposal an armoury of weapons such as parentheses (like these, within which you can waffle on about anything you fancy); or subordinate clauses, which have nothing whatsoever to do with Santa and Christmas but are rather a way of breaking sentences up into related or opposed sense-groups; or very long lists, catalogues, inventories and enumerations of things or words, such as the massive pile-ups of adjectives that Levin used to build pace and tension (and I do miss Bernard’s lively animadversions on anything or everything that got under his skin, though you have to read his books now because he passed on in 2004); and there are others, all helping to constitute what is generally though indefinably called ‘style’, as though style was something that could be pinned down like a butterfly and taken apart to see how it worked, which of course it can’t be because in the process something gets killed, and what gets killed is something so intrinsic to the form and substance that the exercise is pointless, although I have to say that many literary critics (such as F R Leavis or I A Richards) took no notice and carried on regardless, adding little to the literary canon but paving the way for these dreadful postmodernists, most of ’em French (and we all know how French people enjoy a bit of philosophising over a carafe of rouge and one of those long loaves that can do you such a nasty injury if it pokes you in the eye, though even the baguette is nothing like as hazardous as the croissant, which must be the messiest item of food every invented, scattering as it does more than its own body-weight in crumbs all over your tablecloth, lap, floor, carpet, and dog) and pretty well incomprehensible to people with only one brain; people like Foucault and Derrida, and one or two non-French people like Skinner and Chomsky, all of whom I blame for the fact that all Eng Lit classes teach nowadays is how to find the sub-text so as to work out what Charles Dickens had for his breakfast on Fridays in 1860 or whether Emily Bronte ever had a boy-friend, and if you think postmodernists are a waste of space as far as Eng Lit is concerned just see what they’ve done to music, which is all repetitive plink and plonk nowadays – and so I’m not even going to try.

Scammers, Scumbags, and Scunthorpe (nice place, actually. Possibly.)

2010-10-29T20:16:00.007+01:00

I see the free-holiday con-merchants have crept out from under their stone again, and are now operating from an accommodation address in Blackpool, phoning you up at tea-time to offer you unmissable deals and free hollies, which turn out to be 20 minutes Sunday shopping in Scunthorpe if you will just spend fifty million quid on a timeshare apartment in eg Afghanistan to qualify.

One of the great benefits of the internet age is that scams like this are so easily spotted, because they are publicised on the web by ordinary people who don’t like being made fools of. So get their ‘company’ name and/or phone number when they ring you, make an excuse to keep them hanging on, and Google what information you have, plus the keyword SCAM. It is surprising how many con-artists fail to take obvious precautions, like blocking their phone number. Scammers might be cunning, but they are also as thick as any other purse-snatcher
or dark-alley mugger.

This particular scam is well-documented (Google 01253206449 and you’ll see what I mean), and that is fine for us net-wise savvies. We leave the phone dangling for 48 hours and let them pick up the bill, or we ask a friend in Auckland, NZ, to send them a very large parcel of housebricks by air freight, without a stamp on.

But I reserve my real anger, fury, rage and calumny against Scammers Anonymous because of Granny Oldbotham and Great-Uncle Wilf, who wouldn’t know a computer from a coprolite (which when abused it closely resembles), and who only had the electric telephone put in at all because the family wanted them to feel safe. It’s grans and grandads and other elderly people who are most likely to be suckered by these predators, this new generation of cowboy builders in cyberspace with a BT line. And yes, BT, you have a lot to answer for, ethically if not legally, and so do the banks who allow known crooks to have bulging accounts with them, 'banking' and 'ethics' being nouns which have never yet been known to occur together in the same chapter or paragraph, let alone sentence, the love of money being what it is biblically reported to be.)

I thought I was net-wise, but I still got conned out of nearly £200 nearly two years ago by a fake internet trader. Appalling as it might seem, and despite everything that trading standards departments know about him, he was still operating, or he was until a couple of days ago, at

www.computerwebstore.co.uk

(which mercifully is now offline, it seems)

and he must have made millions of pounds by now out of suckers like me. But he’s a Liverpool crook, well known to police and trading standards, so rather than tangle with him and find our house burned down in the middle of the night with us in it, we backed off, to my eternal shame. So he could still be operating under a new name, and you could be ordering that new telly at an absurdly low price off him at this very minute. Bye-bye wallet.

There are reptiles out there, disguised as humans. Just watch it when they offer you a bite out of their apple. That's when the problems started.

Direct Action Plan, File Ref aab/112/x/22.7 Annex 12.3

2010-10-28T16:58:00.002+01:00

There’s been a lot of grumbling in our little bit of Over Wyre lately, and we’re not used to grumbling, but really! No sooner have the Yanks who wanted to inject 50bn tonnes of gas at high pressure under our houses pulled out than another lot of anxiety-inducing erberts muscle in. I mean, you can’t relax for a minute. I haven’t dared put my slippers on since 1965.

I don’t usually go in for conspiracy theories, despite having the largest collection of X-Files DVDs outside MI5 and the CIA, but I am beginning to get just the teeniest bit neurotic, and I am noticing the sulphurous whiff of a Cunning Plan.

My suspicions were first aroused when Wyre BC gave permission for a derelict building to be erected on what used to be a rather nice bowling green by the side of the historic Bourne Arms. Then this morning the massive concrete plinth that had just been put up by the side of the mobile phone shop (whey-hey, we’ve got a mobile phone shop in Knotty End!) wasn’t there. Spirited away in the middle of the night by Persons Unknown. Derelict building still there, though. But nice new plinth to commemorate the Battle of Britain conspicuously not there no more, our Ada.

It’s all because we’re Over the River, and not really part of civilisation as it is understood in Big Brash Blackpool or Poulton-le-Fylde-Under-P. It is all designed to drive us out, so as to declare Knotty End a Site of No Scientific Or Any Other Interest Whatsoever, and then do what councils always do with derelict land – flog it to a manufacturer of land mines or turn it into a giant municipal pig farm or landfill site.

Well, chums, the people who live round here have been here for generations. They all have ancestors who survived on one Morecambe Bay shrimp a year, and gave the left-overs to the people in the hut next door, and they’re as tough as old boots, and they last even longer. And one didn’t do one’s stint in planning departments for nothing, neither did one take on Mrs T and her government without learning a thing or two about dirty dancing, so here’s slopping the slurry - the Action Plan, absolutely guaranteed to win funding from the NWDA, because it’s called an Action Plan.

First thing, we declare UDI and lay tons of chewing gum along Shard Bridge. Really really sticky chewing gum. That closes the border. We then write a letter to Lancaster City Council that starts “Dear Daddy.” I have read up on local government law in back issues of the Gazette (not you, Sir, the legal one) and that’s considered to be the proper way to address a potential adoptive parent, just take my word for it.

We then get in touch with the people who nicked all the lead off the roof of St Oswald’s last year, and tip them off about the derelict luxury-flat Oedipus complex by the jetty, and go 50/50 on the proceeds, which we offer to Lancaster as a b , oops, I mean as a generous gift with no strings attached.

Result? Well, absolutely nothing, probably. But isn’t it nice to rattle your cage a bit, just for the fun of it? If it makes enough noise somebody might hear.

Spam, Spam, no thank you, Ma'am

2010-10-20T20:54:00.001+01:00

In the last week alone well-meaning 'friends' have seized more than 50MB of my hard disk with viruses that they have unwittingly passed on. These viruses were uninvited. They weren't the sort that would wipe your C: drive clean or empty your bank account, true, but they behave like viruses because they take up bandwidth, thus clogging up the Internet and slowing it down, and they proliferate exponentially at the speed of light.

The villains are most girlie net-virgins who just reely reely have to pass on to their entire address book the latest bit of round-robin feel-good or feel-guilty drivel that tickled them.

I've tried everything. I've done polite replies asking them not to include me in the list of recipients for the latest version of frog in a blender or why immigrants are bleeding the country dry. I've tried suggesting to them that some of this stuff actually breaks the law because it tends to incite racial hatred. I've tried subtlety - saying 'oh gosh! How amusing! I really must pass your hilarious antisemitic joke and 10MB of jpgs on to some of my Jewish friends.' Nothing works.

There are two last resorts. The obvious one is to block them so that I will never receive anything from them again, but this way lies social fragmentation and no Christmas cards, ever. And nobody would ever speak to anybody else ever again. The other is to send them a bill. What we need is a net-clamping agency. £100 to unlock your e-mail account for abuse of the privilege of free speech, and don't do it again.

Meanwhile, I will once again spend a couple of hours cleaning out all the uninvited hi-res jpgs from the dark corners of the hard disk, where they lurk. What I can't do is clean out of the heads of the people who send this sad stuff to me their opinion of me - they think I think the same way as them.

And I rather hope that I don't.

Pope Benedict and the telly

2010-09-18T22:56:00.000+01:00

I had been thinking how well the Beeb had been covering Pope Benedict's pastoral and state visit. They used to do these things so well in the Dimbleby days of hushed and respectful - and infrequent - interjections by people who knew what they were talking about, and the coverage from Westminster Abbey yesterday was Auntie at her best.

A pity, then, that the joyous singing of the Rutter Blessing at the end of the Hyde Park celebrations this evening was completely obliterated by chattering voice-overs. It must have been the work experience team. Back to hacks' primary school, please.

Fatuous equivalents

2010-09-01T19:09:00.000+01:00

They're at it again, the TV news boneheads, with their fatuous comparisons. Last night it was the 60cm shaft that is to be drilled to provide an escape route for the trapped miners in Chile.

I would have thought that 60cm was a pretty precise figure, but that's because I'm a word person, and TV types can only think in pictures, so 60cm was explained as 'about the size of bicycle wheel', in case you were innumerate or completely brain dead and also only capable of thinking in pictures.

Now my memory is that bicycle wheels come in all shapes and sizes (think penny-farthing), even, but not exclusively, 60cm. So that visual equivalent was about as useful as a chocolate fireguard.

Then blow me, in the same programme the same twits did a montage of a load of London buses to illustrate some impressive measurement or other of the A380 Airbus. Excuse me, pimple-heads, but buses is buses and planes is planes, Wales is Wales and Wembley Stadium is Wembley Stadium. If you really can't get your head round dimensions such as 80ft (the height of an A380) do you honestly think you are safe behind the wheel of a car?

search box added

2010-07-25T20:41:00.004+01:00

I hope my reader notices that I've now added a Search facility to the blog, and, egad! - it worked instantly (in XP, anyway. Not in Windows 7, though. Buck up, chaps!)

Last night I remembered mentioning one Mary Jackson ages ago, and because I hadn't tagged her by name it took well over an hour of scrolling through Older Posts to find the one I wanted, with the link.

I do have trouble with all these new-fangled inventions like the electric telephone or moving pictures, because I was always a slow learner, even in infant school (they didn't let me move up to junior school until I was 23, and married).

But, dear reader - don't think the Search bar is for your benefit, 'cos it ain't. It's for my one remaining brain cell, Horace. He needs every bit of help he can get.

But back to the reason for adding the search bar - Mary Jackson. She is an English writer of great wit and acumen who contributes to a learned literary journal, the New English Review -

http://www.newenglishreview.org/

(find her in the author archives button, pour yourself a large glass of something white and possibly Californian, settle back, and prepare to enjoy!)

and I say that Mary Jackson is an English writer because this particular New English Review is actually an American lustrous organ, emanating from Nashville, Tennessee, whence you don't expect emanations of this quality (revenge, Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux, is sweet!).

It seems that I've been unconsciously saving up Mary Jackson pieces for 14 months, and when I finally found the link again I had a wonderful wallow last night.

Mary Jackson weaves words like spells. She is also deliciously rude. Her particular gift is to turn your life-held preconceptions and prejudices on their heads. Read her on Samuel Becket or Jeanette Winterson, or on practically anyone or anything else that she turns her attention to, but be ready to get your grey cells all shook up.

Reluctant Organists - 2

2010-07-21T21:10:00.004+01:00

(this article appeared in the August 2010 edition of the parish magazine)

I might have mentioned last month the rocks and sharp stones that bestrew the path of the Reluctant Organist, but I didn’t know the half of it then.

It was when I raised with the Treasurer, I thought quite politely, the matter of the customary Fee for services above and beyond the call of duty, that I was transfixed by a gimlet eye and informed in acid tones that the Fee for a Reluctant Organist was exactly the same, to the penny, as the fine for failing to sing in the choir. In vain did I protest that I had hummed as well as strummed. It cut no absolutely no ice.

I was particularly peeved because on Whit Sunday I had become the latest innocent victim of a cunning plan hatched by French organ composers to restore national pride after Agincourt.

French composers of organ music, you see, have a mischievous streak, and they are never happier than when they are teasing the reluctant organist by starting a piece off innocuously enough on Page One in some easy key like F, with a nice tune and only the flute stop out, then introducing more and more sneaky sharps and flats after the first page turn, until suddenly, just as you’ve arrived at a really fast passage in six sharps and 11/16, you are expected to have enough free hands to pull out 19 more stops on the swell and 12 on the great while holding a nine-note chord with your feet, and the new ‘registration’ (as we organists call a particular combination of knobs and buttons) occupies half a page of extremely small print. In French.

It is not surprising that ladies make good organists, because reading an organ score must be very much like reading a knitting pattern. If you can translate K2, yfwd., sl.1, K2tog, psso, yfwd., K5, yfwd., sl1, K2tog. psso., yfwd., K1 into dexterous digital activity while simultaneously concentrating on daytime television then reading an organ score, even one by a French composer, must be an absolute doddle. And it is worth noting that in a random sample of French organists, such as Olivier Messiaen (anag: “vile ear emission”) and Marie-Claire Alain (“a miracle alien air”), fully half are women.

The reason that there is so much French organ music is, of course, that French orchestras, like French farmers and French ferry operators, are always on strike, and churches and cathedrals there have learned the hard way to play safe. Indeed, the great French composer Camille Saint-Saëns (“calm is an essential”) got so exasperated that he wrote a symphony for Organ and Orchestra that still packs the concert halls because he cunningly fixed things so that nobody notices if the orchestra do not actually turn up.

But on one thing all Reluctant Organists agree – that the last word should come from their patron saint, perhaps the finest of all English-speaking women organists, the New Zealand-born Gillian Weir –

“I are willing.”

Caveat emptor - 5

2010-07-20T22:15:00.001+01:00

It does seem an awfully long time ago, but it's only, and exactly, a year since I last went mutton and cost the Notional Health Service a shedful of kiwi.

http://choirstalls.blogspot.com/2009/07/caveat-emptor-4.html

So - but only to bring the story up to date:

Same thing happened last week. Mutton in the left toby.

Wiser this time, avoided the local health centre (or Lucrative Puncture Clinic) and phoned the walk-in centre in Blackpool. That was 9:00am.

By 11:00am full hearing in afflicted doodle had been restored by a very competent nurse.

Thank you so much, Colette. Please accept this huge bouquet of red cyber-roses and a big 'ug.

Reluctant Organists - 1

2010-07-18T20:55:00.002+01:00

(this article appeared in the July issue of the parish magazine.)

I don’t trust Church Organs. Unlike the Church Piano, which has long been domesticated, the organ is a feral creature, apt to assert itself in unpredictable and possibly life-threatening ways. The Church Piano comes equipped with a single keyboard, and makes only three sounds – plonk on the left, plink on the right, and a sort of muffled plunk in the middle (where it gets the most wear.) The Church Organ comes with a bewildering array of keyboards, five in some instances such as Cathedrals, where the poor organist must need either a couple of assistants or at least a stepladder to use the one at the top.

The piano has two pedals – the left one and the right one, and is easy to remember which pedal does which job. The left one is the clutch, the right one the accelerator, I think, or it might be the other way round (pianos do not need a brake pedal, because they do not move about much or they go out of tune.)

The organ, in contrast, has dozens of pedals, whose function is not quite the same as the function of the pedals on the Church Piano, as every Reluctant Organist knows to his (or her) cost after stepping on one by mistake in a quiet bit of the service.

But it isn’t the pedals on the Church Organ that cause most trouble for the Reluctant Organist, who can always tie his or her ankles to the legs of the organ stool so there is no risk of an accident – and it isn’t even the keyboards in their manifold multiplicity. It is all those knobs and buttons and things. I’ve managed to work out that the one that says START turns the organ on, and the one that says STOP turns it off so you can hear what the Vicar is saying, and I’ve found the light switches, because they look like light switches, but as for the rest I confess that I am completely baffled. The knobs, which you can pull out or push in, are supposed to change the sound that the organ emits, and to help you, they have labels on them, like Flute, or Trumpet, or Oboe, or Salicet, whatever that is (it sounds to me suspiciously like something you buy discreetly at the chemist’s.) The problem is that if you pull one out either nothing happens or the organ just carries on sounding like an organ. The trick is to pull them out in different combinations, I am told, and to help the Reluctant Organist at St Oswald’s there are five presets. Well, I have tried the five presets, and in ascending order they sound like this: 1) very very quiet indeed; 2) very quiet indeed; 3) jolly quiet; 4) pretty quiet; and 5) absolutely deafening.

So I thought I’d look up ‘organ stops’ on the Internet, and apart from two returns which said ‘and thank heaven for that’ all I got was an advertisement for a DIY quadruple-bypass kit.

Anxiously, with a looming service to play for, I phoned a friend. “Ah!”, he said. “Presets start you off, but then you have to twiddle a bit.”

So I started twiddling a bit. And bingo! He was absolutely right. I was thrilled. When I found a combination that worked I wrote it down in a little notebook so that I could reproduce it. I did it for all seven hymns and both voluntaries, and sat back, satisfied, then took the rest of Saturday off, confident that Sunday would be fine.

Well, evidently somebody changes the combinations daily for security reasons, which is why you were blasted out of your seats by Veni Creator Spiritus, and why Shine Jesus Shine sounded as though it was being played somewhere across the river by a kazoo band with mutes on, so it’s back to the drawing board.

I’ve got two more services to play for in August. But I’m not sure I’ll have got the hang of the thing even by then, so it could well be back to the piano. Must remember, though, to work out which pedal does what. Oh, and book an oil change.

Hosepipe ban? Batten down the hatches...

2010-07-18T20:25:00.001+01:00

Usually it rains just after I've washed the car. All I have to do is creep up on the old Nissan with a foaming bucket and the neighbours groan and whip the garden furniture into the garage double-quick. Every six months that car gets washed, whether it needs it or not.

But it wasn't me this time, honest. After weeks of glorious weather, the local water board announced a hosepipe ban last week, since when it's been chucking it down, and I'm getting very suspicious about any outfit with 'United' in its name.

I was going to write one of those pieces that has my reader splitting his sides with mirth, but blow me! I've been beaten to it.

http://www.blackpoolgazette.co.uk/jacqui-morley/Look-at-it-this-way.6411470.jp

I read it and uttered a hollow laugh. We've got a garden like that, too. It's so wet that all we can grow is rice. From the plum trees at the very top of the garden, which you need a wet suit to reach in August and September when the fruit is ripe, to the house there's a fall of about two metres (more than six feet, grandad), and boy, does water move downhill or doesn't it?

This was our local Victoria Plum Falls in September two years ago - rather more water coming downhill all at once than our 10cm main drain (4", pops) can cope with. We wouldn't mind so much if it was the sea that had breached the sea wall, or the river that had burst its banks, but for heaven's sake, this was just rain.

Hosepipe ban? Pshaw. The next time it rains I'll ask United to get round here pretty sharpish with a portable reservoir. Fill it no time, we could.

Scams and Very Honourable Companies Indeed

2010-07-16T20:40:00.000+01:00

Gosh! We won £23,500 today! Brill! We can get the central heating fixed, repair the leaky roof in the sun-room, and pay someone to sort out the noisy valve in the cistern that wakes everybody in the street up at 5am and because of which we are now permanently constipated.

And it's all thanks to a nice man called Friedrich Müller, who runs his philanthropic enterprise from an accommodation address in Belgium, at the premises of AMA, an advertising company who specialise in the gentle art of giving away shed-loads of money. N't.

But if you too have received this wonderful promise-of-a-guaranteed-prize, don't phone the plumber just yet. Fill in the claim form by all means, to be sure of your £23,500, but don't be surprised when you receive a discount voucher for £1.50 which you can trade in with a company called Vital Beauty against a £32 bottle of cod-liver oil. Just write them a letter pointing out their mistake.

Scammers are parasites. They operate just within the law so that they can carry on conning people - usually elderly and vulnerable people - but we can't call successful scammers devious, cheating, rapacious crooks when they do operate within the law. Just. It would be libellous. And to call them evil, scheming scum who want to cheat your grannie out of her life savings would be very wrong indeed- because many of the companies that use game-show techniques to sell goods from little catalogues operate wholly and entirely within the law. Just. So I am sure that Vital Beauty is a bona-fide trading company, just the same as Swiss Home Shopping (a sister company) is, and the Office of Fair Trading is of like mind. They drew attention to some trivial little matter about the size of the wording in the bit about the promise-of-a-guaranteed-prize, and Vital Beauty responded immediately (Google Vital Beauty and see that it is indeed a company with a considerable reputation.)

So I am convinced. I shall return the forms and book that plumber. The cheque should be with me in a few days.

Less honourable companies may deserve to be made to run their businesses from a small room in Strangeways, but if the OFT say that Mr Mueller's empire is entirely above board, who am I, a mere OAP, to doubt it?

Cough up, Herr Mueller. I am sure your £32 bottle of cod-liver oil is worth every penny. And with your kind promise of £23,500 I can now afford it.

Irresponsible journalism

2010-07-16T19:43:00.002+01:00

You’re sitting there about to have your tea, and having survived the public self-humiliation of a load of brain-dead would-bes whipped on by a fantasy S/M madame, you keep the little telly on for the relative sanity of the informative 6 o’clock – news? News it isn’t. Every night it is the same tired old formula. It is red-top tabloid telly at its worst - sex, crime, scandal, Europe-cut-off-by-fog xenophobia, celebs and bloody football.

In this household football is regarded as being just about as interesting as string, yet a fixed percentage of 6 o’clock programmes’ air-time just has to be devoted to it, whether or not anything has actually happened in this game for little boys with nothing better to do which telly has turned into a multinational industry, so we have to endure gobfuls of padding and gobbledygook from lounge lizards who haven’t shaved for three weeks and who obviously don’t own a tie between them.

And the troubles in Northern Ireland have erupted again, as they will continue to do while tribes think it is perfectly normal to taunt each other in provocative fancy dress parades. Northern Ireland’s troubles have produced many wonderful, brave women, but it is still a mediaeval, male-dominated society where fathers give their little boys guns and tell them to go out to play and women are supposed to know their play-ass (and where even vowels get tortured to death.)

And that is about the only positive thing I can think of to justify the colossal social cost of football – that it ritualises tribalism, puts bromide in its tea, and acts as a safety valve.

..ooOOoo..

And don’t stop me in full rant, because another thing that is sickening is the air-time that these wretched programmes devote to sentimental stories about ‘our boys’ killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is a brutal fact, but if your son or daughter joins the army there is a distinct possibility that they could be killed. The risk of being killed is part of the job. If your offspring were not willing to take that risk they could have found themselves a nice, safe job in a supermarket or a library or doorstep selling the stupor-inducing joys of Sky TV. But they didn’t. They volunteered to do a job that they thought could make the world a better place. The really sad thing about war is that so many altruistic genes never have a chance to reproduce because of an accidental bullet or an enveloping wave of mustard gas. And what are we left with?

Losing a child is awful. I do know. What bereft parents need at times of great shock and grief is comfort from loving friends and family – an enfolding arm of genuine human compassion, not some minor telly celeb reading a script written by a semi-literate who has never heard of the subjunctive and wouldn’t recognise it if it bit them on their media studies PhD.

What bereaved parents and families do not need is the vicarious tears that these abject reporters – no, not reporters, ‘presenters’ of scripted current-affairs human-interest magazine shows – invite us to shed. They are crocodile tears, and they do us all a disservice. They invite us to be participants in the sort of sloppy sentimentalism that surrounded the death – in an all-too-ordinary tragic car accident – of somebody who was probably originally a normal, happy, even if rather privileged young woman until she got pushed into an unhappy marriage. We allow our press to build Disney figures out of people so that we can rejoice when they don’t live up to cartoon perfection, and it is this same social cancer which throws up people – and, God help us, voters – who think that a psychopath like Raoul Moats is a folk hero.

It must have been blindingly obvious to the editors of these programmes from Day 1 that soldiers were going to be killed in the Middle East, just as they were killed in Northern Ireland, and just as they were killed in Ypres or on the Somme or the beaches of Dunquerque, and that by committing themselves to covering the first deaths in detail they had hung a millstone round their necks. When does the air-time run out? 500 deaths? 1,000? In the Battle of the Somme 20,000 British soldiers died in one day. Difficult to fit the reely reely exciting football news in that day, hey?

..ooOOOoo..

Uncontrolled social networking and low standards of journalism encourage us to live in fantasy worlds. Older people may have the wisdom to resist it, but for a new generation of children this cartoon, Facebook world is more real than boring old school and boring old parents. It isn’t only the pervert in the shabby raincoat at the school gates that parents should be worried about. It is also the sort of brainwashing that children are being subjected to by forces that parents have no control over. We live in a society in which ignorance and stupidity are regarded as virtues: a society in which newspaper editors can run campaigns against paedophiles and not care very much if their bumpkin readers bash up paediatricians by mistake. Well, it sells newspapers to people who never learned to think.

The next time you are tempted to lay a £2 bunch of flowers at the roadside where a life was extinguished ask yourself what you think you are doing. It is a gesture as cheap as it is contemptible. It says ‘O look how hearing about this death has affected me’. It says: ‘O watch me beating my breast in woe.’

The vicious me-ist ideology of a grocer’s daughter from Grantham led you to believe that you were the centre of the universe. But ask yourself how this little death of someone you'd never even met, let alone known, has really affected you. Did it make you cry? Oh poor you.

It would be such a great comfort to the bereaved, knowing that.

A Bonfire of the Inanities - please!

2010-07-02T23:02:00.002+01:00

Imagine the scene. You arrive early to make sure of a parking space. You go into the foyer, mingle, show your tickets, and buy a programme (for Sweeney Todd, actually.) Then you enter the auditorium. It is dimly lit. It is full of theatrical smoke representing fog. The curtains are open ready for the prologue, so the first set is ready, though on stage time is standing still, just waiting. You are shown to your seats by somebody who appears to be in costume and in role, and you are momentarily confused - am I late? Has the show started?

The idea of getting rid of the first big barrier between players and audience - the proscenium arch (itself a relatively modern invention) - goes back at least to the 1960s, when rival telly adopted the proscenium arch (which it still hasn't learned to let go of). Apron stages, theatre-in-the-round became popular because they were theatrical devices to draw audiences into the drama, instead of just spectating it. And the curtain - that big symbolic barrier - went at the same time.

Theatre is all about engaging an audience's attention, and preparing them for that suspension of disbelief which is at the centre of that magical world.

And directors are very good at their job. They know that audiences have learned all the old tricks, so they find new ones, which is why the best of them rise to the eminence of theatres like The Swan in Stratford-on-Avon. Michael Bogdanov's production of Howard Brenton's new translation of Faust in 1995 threw out the fixed, eye-level stage as the common factor in all theatre until then. He used the space above the floor as well, so actors worked from platforms suspended from ropes. and even from trapezes, so that the idea of 'set' itself was no longer a certainty to hold onto.

The production of Sweeney I went to wasn't at the Swan, however. It was in our village hall. But what it had in common with the Faust was the genius of a director who knows exactly what she or he is doing, has a very precise vision of what is going to take place on the night, and, crucially, knows how to achieve it.

If this sounds like a eulogy, it is very far from it, for the vision of directors has now been brought to nothing. They can get rid of the proscenium, they can get rid of the curtain, but there's one thing they can't get rid of - silly, intrusive bureaucracy, and the 'ealth an' safety message that has to be read out to audiences before every show in case somebody in the theatre is totally illiterate or has just been smuggled into the country from Bolokistan and doesn't understand green or EXIT.

I had the job of introducing an evening of song by two choirs last week, and momentary madness took hold of me, and somehow the 'ealth an' safety announcement got sung (to an Anglican chant). It seemed to go down rather well with an audience which by now has got rather piddled off having its intelligence insulted every time it goes into a Big Room.

And - I haven't been arrested yet! So I am now working on a four-part version of the same announcement for unaccompanied choir, and a friend is setting it for female vocalist and small jazz combo. Versions for comb-and-paper and full symphony orchestra will be available soon. The 'ealth an' safety announcement is so important, to a bureaucrat, that it really ought to be the star of the show.

But then, as the Romans used to say: "ars longa - vita brevis" - fat arse, short life.

And quite right too.

PS If you ever meet a bureaucrat, please give him or her a copy of Bleak House. It has some rather long words in it which they will love, even though they won't know what they mean.

Music for the Papal Visit, 19 September 2010 - Archdiocese of Birmingham

2010-06-01T20:41:00.000+01:00

The Archdiocese of Birmingham has now announced the music for the Mass that will be celebrated when Pope Benedict arrives at Coventry Airport on 19 September this year (actually it's been announced twice - the first time it was the grisly sentimental God-pop that topped the list. The second announcement was more sensible.)

What is so noticeable about the line-up isn't there's so much pap, but so much that is worthy to be performed during the Mass.

Here's the list. Dodgy stuff is italicised

Gathering in Prayer and as Pope Benedict vests for Mass

Hymn – Church of God, elect and glorious – Seddon

Motet – Cantate Domino – Monteverdi

Hymn – Christ be our light – Bernadette Farrell

Entrance Procession

Praise to the Holiest – John Henry Newman – R R Terry arr. Andrew Wright

Veneration of altar

Sacerdos et Pontifex – plainsong

Penitential Rite

Kyrie – Orbis Factor – plainsong

Glory to God – Mass of Blessed John Henry Newman – James MacMillan

Liturgy of the Word

Responsorial Psalm – Paul Wellicome/Gelineau

Gospel Acclamation – Salisbury Alleluia – Christopher Walker

The Creed – Credo III – plainsong

Liturgy of the Eucharist

Offertory Procession – Hymn – Firmly I believe – John Henry Newman

Motet – Beati quorum via – Stanford

The Eucharistic Prayer

Sanctus & Mystery of Faith- Mass of Blessed John Henry Newman – James MacMillan

Communion Rite

Agnus Dei – Mass of Blessed John Henry Newman – James MacMillan

Communion procession

Hymn – Blest are the pure in heart – Keble

Motet – O quam gloriosum – William Byrd

Hymn – Be still for the presence of the Lord – David Evans

Motet – Ave verum – Edward Elgar

Chant – Surrexit Christus – Jaques Berthier/Taizé

Distribution of earplugs (Damian Thompson's naughty interpolation, not mine!)

Hymn – Make me a channel of your peace – Sebastian Temple

Conclusion

Hymn – For all the saints – W Howe/Vaughan Williams

Te Deum in C – Franz Joseph Haydn.

Wanted - doorstep preference scheme

2010-05-06T20:35:00.002+01:00

I am beginning to have some sympathy with my ancestors, who were wont to dissuade besiegers of their castle by the simple expedient of pouring vats of boiling oil over them (the Investment Preference Scheme, I believe it was known as.)

Ever since the invention of the electric telephone and the doorbell, not a mealtime goes by without the intrusion of some touting pedlar into the privacy and the sanctity of your stronghold.

And their colossal impertinence is only matched by their aggression when you do not meekly submit.

The latest invasion, heralded by clamour of doorbell and simultaneous hammering on the front door, enough to waken the dead, interrupted our evening meal yesterday. A representative of Sky (a television company, I am told) offered to upgrade our installation and stuck his foot in to jam the door.

Well, we don't have Sky, thank you, and we don't want Sky, having no interest whatsoever in paying out a fortune for programmes that we would never watch, and after this we have vowed that Sky will enter this house over our dead bodies, but he couldn't believe it. "Then who do you get your broadband and your telephone from?", he asked incredulously, as my dinner cooled upon the plate.

"That is absolutely none of your bloody business", I'm afraid I replied, with all the pent-up anger of one who has against his will been turned into a consumer by the economic philosophy of a grocer's daughter from Grantham. He gave me a filthy look, as though my reluctance to hand over my wallet to him was all my fault.

It's a bit difficult in a bungalow, 'cos you haven't got the height, but I'm sure a few of us neighbours can get together and work something out.

So does anybody know where we can get, say, 100 gallons of crude or a ton of pitch at a knockdown price, a very large Baby Burco, and a second-hand trebuchet?

asthma

2010-03-24T20:56:00.001Z

Today, according to news reports, five people who worked at a school in Stockport have been suspended in connection with the death of an 11-year-old schoolboy who suffered from asthma.

The inquest verdict this week was shocking enough, but do you know when this child died so tragically? It was in December 2007, not, as you might have thought, last week.

And only now is the press sitting up and taking notice, and only now, and only because of the publicity, is the LEA doing something about it, and you could, if you wanted to, try to imagine what the boy's parents have suffered over the past two years.

But the question that remains unanswered is this: why were people suspended within days of the inquest's verdict being announced and not within days of the boy's death over two years ago?

Education - the last dying gasp

2010-03-24T19:32:00.001Z

I've moaned often enough about educational entropy (you remember - each generation of teachers knowing a little less than the last), but I made a mistake. I thought teachers still taught subjects (though why I should have thought that I don't know - the contrary evidence is blatant and ubiquitous.) Some may try to, but the odds are stacked against them. Education is no longer the province of teachers but of loonies, and I was going to say 'MPs AND loony bureaucrats' but loonies does a very good job of of embracing the lot of 'em. Unlike teachers, loonies have a lot of time on their hands, and there's nothing they like more than appearing to be busy doing something in case someone notices that they're getting paid for twiddling their thumbs. So when the latest crackpot notion comes down from the amateur social reformers in Parliament all the loonies in Whitehall, quangos and town halls creak into action to generate their latest batch of ukases. That they are boring yet another hole below the waterline of a sinking ship doesn't seem to bother them.

The recent government review of the primary curriculum brought calls to reduce subject content in favour of personal and emotional development. The Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers tells teachers not to be “dinosaurs” about their subjects because they can “deliver an enormous array of other outcomes”.

Instead of teaching about a world outside “me”, the hollowing out of subjects requires teachers with expertise in “nurturing”, “engaging”, “mentoring” and “facilitating” a long list of formal targets for emotional attributes, dispositions and attitudes.

Turning these into “personal and social skills” requires teachers to plan emotional and social objectives before subject ones. They must negotiate with a growing array of para-professionals, such as pupil support officers and mentors. A history teacher has had to change his discipline strategies because a mentor thought they were not appropriate. A colleague in an FE college says that students walk out of difficult lessons to see their “anger management counsellor”. Children become adept at playing off teachers against these emotional supporters.

And no, those last three paragraphs are not me ranting. They are taken from an article in yesterday's Times by Kathryn Ecclestone, Professor of Education and Social Inclusion at the University of Birmingham and co-author of The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education.

The full text is here:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article7071764.ece

PS

If you want to read a lot more guff about the new primary curriculum, have a look at

http://curriculum.qcda.gov.uk/new-primary-curriculum/

It's all in very simple language, with only a few grammatical howlers, and if you're a teacher with reading difficulties, don't worry, there's a very nice series of moving pictures in which a nice man tells you what to do.

Olive Ate the Cavalry at Knotty End

2010-03-08T23:53:00.008Z

(this article will probably not be appearing in the April issue of the parish magazine)

When the Boss worked as a senior medical receptionist the word ‘fraught’ cropped up frequently in the sort of anecdotes you tell at dinner parties, because she was once asked how to spell it by a novice at the job.

”F,R,A,U,G,H,T”, the Boss explained, helpfully. There was a frown and much biting of pencil. “It don’t look right”, said the novice, after a few minutes’ judicious thought. “I mean fraught, as in ‘sore fraught’, like what this lady on the phone are got.”

And fraught is what Bring-and-Sing events are. When you invite all and sundry there is always the possibility of alligators, and tonight’s do (Sat 6 March) was no exception. It started off innocuously enough, with a rehearsal belt-through of Mr Maunder’s timeless Victorian masterpiece of church schmaltz, Olivet to Calvary, but at a very early stage rioting nearly broke out. A visiting lady of imposing presence, who was obviously far more knowledgeable about music and singing than any of the rest of us, complained to the soprano in front of her that she was too tall to see over, and when said soprano obliging moved behind her the complaints continued – now she was singing too loudly. The only possible riposte in such circumstances is of course to draw up the shoulders haughtily, peer through the lorgnette, and say, in the frostiest voice one can manage: “Madam. It is not I that am singing too loudly, but you that are singing not loudly enough”, but who thinks of withering ripostes in the face of such breathtaking rudeness unless they be Winston Churchill or George Bernard Shaw? (or even Mae West or Dorothy Parker?)

But not content with reducing the voice of one of the few really competent sopranos in the assembled multitude to a sod-you-then whisper, this lady then turned her imperious attention to another soprano in front of her, who she considered was paying insufficient attention to what the conductor was saying, and prodded her in the back with the sharp corner of her music score, a lèse-majesté unthinkable in civilised circles such as pertain at our church, where we don’t even poke curates in the small of the back with sharp instruments, let alone Canons, even when said Canons are in mufti and only there because they love the joy of singing in good company. This grande-dame of inappropriate behaviour didn’t know how lucky she was to emerge with her hair-do intact, considering that Sop 1 in this anecdote could easily wrestle a carthorse to the ground while simultaneously doing the washing-up, the ironing and helping her daughter with her homework, not even drawing breath the whiles, and Sop 2, after 35 years as a missionary in Africa, is regarded as definitely off-limits and off-menu by even the hungriest of lions and crocodiles in that far-off land, for they have seen what she can be like when she gets even the teeniest bit annoyed (a 40-minute sermon at the very least on faith, hope, charity, and not going round eating people up willy-nilly.)

The little-known Adams’s Law of Ego ( E ∝ 1/C ) states that ego is always in inverse proportion to competence, the living proof of which is that the world is stuffed to suffocation with bureaucrats and committees. Them as do, do. Them as don’t do form committees to tell them as do do how to do, even though they haven’t the faintest clue themselves about how to do what the people who do do do, and you try saying that three times quickly without losing the companionship of your teeth.

Incidentally (and to bring this month’s sprawling column to a close) - did you know that Herod the Great had at least ten wives (though not necessarily all at the same time), and that the first of them was called Doris? I didn’t. Isn’t it interesting?

Oh all right then. Be like that.

No yoghurt again at the Co-op? - 2

2010-02-20T17:58:00.007Z

A friend with more political savvy than I (she has lived here all her life, and always applies the principle of Occam's Razor to any village goss) says it is obvious. Spanish fisherman have infiltrated themselves into the crew of every boat that leaves Fleetwood, she says, and they are spiriting great crans of the silvery stuff back home at the dead of night. But, homesick in the long months away from la casita, and anxious for news of the señoras and señoritas they have left behind in that land where hidalgos eat a lot of big fat sausagey things and slurp wholesome red wine at two pesetas (€0.000000001) a litre and then start getting naughty ideas, they thought they could slink over the river to buy their foreign newspapers and keep tabs on things without anybody noticing.

Ha!

If we act together as a community we can flush them out. I suggest that a deputation of tough-looking gentlemen from the village assemble at the head of the jetty at 16:55 one evening when the wind in the north, and saunter down to the river saying in very loud voices "Gosh, Jeremy! It must be nearly five in the afternoon." (It sounds much better in Spanish, if everyone can manage it.)

If that doesn't work, we could next improvise provocative limericks about, for example, Lope de Vega or Federico García Lorca, and, in the last resort, make pointed observations about the probable sexual proclivities of professional football-punters from popular Spanish clubs ("Sociedades Españolas de Futbol y Otras Actividades Interesantes, Nudgio-Nudgio"), not to mention those of bullfighters (I mean, have you seen the way they stick their bottoms out? Oo, ducky!)

Hordes of fishermen will eventually emerge on the opposite bank to find out what all the noise is about. Ignore the ones in dirty blue T-shirts with half an inch of roll-up in their mouths and speaking a funny language. They are from Fleetwood. Look for the bods from the bodegas - huge waxed moustaches, voluminous pleated cravats, thigh-boots with floppy overhangs at the top, and funny looking hats. If they are not from Pilling, despite all this circumstantial evidence, then they are definitely Spanish.

One just hopes the Co-op manages to flog them those three copies of El País before we send them packing. One is, after all, a card-carrying member of this worthy Society, and one must at all times keep a watchful eye on the divi.

No yoghurt again at the Co-op?

2010-02-16T18:19:00.001Z

Bad news for the village (pop. 5314 at the last Census.) The local Co-op has had a visit from the (wait for it, and listen in reverential silence) Area Manager and the staff are all of a flutter. The Spar across the road is rubbing its little hands with glee, because the last time the Swat Team from HQ turned up at the Co-op Spar’s business increased dramatically, and it’s taken the Co-op, whose staff are local and very knowledgeable indeed about the sort of stuff villagers buy, a couple of years to woo customers back by stocking such exotic luxuries as plain yoghurt and Marigolds, in blatant defiance of Regulations.

I’m not quite sure where the Swat team emanates from, but I noticed in the Co-op today not one but three copies of El País, which as we all know is a newspaper published in Spain.

Buenas tardes, amigos.

Trinity Hospice, etc - 2

2010-02-12T19:54:00.000Z

The BBC's 6:30 NW regional news programme did a nice whitewash job just now on behalf of the trustees and management of Trinity, with a lots of visuals to grab your emotions, but with a very telling parting shot - 'the pictures, bought last year, have already appreciated in value.' Hm. You could almost hear the 'so there.' Well, if you're going to speculate with other people's money, I suppose 'art' is a slightly safer bet than the horses, but it is still a rather slippery argument which treats 'cost' and 'value' as though they meant the same thing.

The point, surely, is that there are legitimate concerns about whether the hospice has acted ethically, for it has evidently not acted wisely, and there is certainly some evidence of hypocrisy in its defensive statements. The 'chapel', for instance is 'non-religious', presumably as a sop to appease people of other faiths and those of no faith, but the artist is a Christian; the pictures were unveiled by the Dean of Blackburn Cathedral, which houses more of the same artist's work; and the hospice maintains a chaplaincy. It really cannot have it both ways.

You can see more of Penny Warden's paintings on her website, and read about her method of working there. It is quite astonishingly interesting.

More in the next post.

Trinity Hospice, Bispham, Engines, and Predestinate Grooves

2010-02-11T15:35:00.003Z

You think, when you attend a fund-raising do for a hospice, that your contribution is going to be spent on equipment and essential nursing care. We certainly thought so last Saturday when the do we were at raised £583 for Trinity Hospice in Bispham, Blackpool, where some of our friends have spent their last days.

What we didn't know was that two days earlier the hospice's trustees and management had unveiled seven pictures commissioned for the trifling sum of £50,000 to brighten up the chapel (a chapel they describe as 'non-religious', which itself makes you raise your eyebrows a bit, for there ain't no such thing as a non-religious chapel.)

See today's Blackpool Gazette, and see also the Hospice's website for small pictures of the paintings.

The Gazette report notes that the artist spent a year working on this commission. Even if she wasn't working on anything else, fifty grand isn't a bad return for a year's work, and I bet she's glad she switched professions when she came out of theological college and opted for the evidently far more lucrative job of painting in preference to parsoning, and for Heaven's sake, I hope no NSMs find out what she's getting or they'll be taking up the speculative brush as well.

The hospice has, I fear, landed itself with a PR disaster, because the reaction of the populist press was so obviously predictable, and the meeja has been handed a story on a plate (someone has already spotted the the ad on the Trinity website for a vacancy in the servants' quarters, at only a bit over £6 an hour.)

Only a few hours after the Gazette hit the streets there was a huge chorus of disapproval on the website, where comment is invited from readers, some of whom are even able to spell their own pseudonyms, and only a few defenders. I waded through page after page of comments, and agreed with almost all of them, as one does when one does not wish to cause offence. Then by chance I heard a bloke on a TV quiz show say, just as I was about to turn the wretched thing off, 'Once I've med up me mind, I never go back on it. 'Er were th'weakest link', and that, and the quality so far of the comment on the Gazette website, brought to mind Maurice Evan Hare's apt metaphor, this after all being Blackpool:

There once was a man who said, ‘Damn!

It is born upon me that I am

An engine that moves

In predestinate grooves -

I’m not even a bus, I’m a tram.'

Ah well. I am sure we get the press we deserve.

Boring music - 3

2010-02-07T19:34:00.000Z

There were technical problems on R3 a couple of mornings ago (Rob Cowan had a puncture on his way to work, perhaps?), and it was wonderful. Somebody with a deep gravelly voice introduced some Bach, and then let Bach get on with it, without being interrupted by trails or the insipid e-mails people issue when stuck in traffic jams. It was a shame when 'normal' service was resumed, and we were back with Interactive Radio Three, ba-boom, Shazam.

What utter, utter crap the Third Programme has become.

And talking of utter crap, thank you to a few sane people who worked out my e-mail address and said 'thanks for the Schubert piece - it really is terrible, isn't it?'

Yes, it is.

Next time: more horrors from the 'it's classical, therefore it must be good' ethos - VW's sickly 'Serenade to Music', with a review by none other than St Cecilia herself.

Boring music- 2

2010-01-29T22:52:00.001Z

I have been taken to task for omitting to mention the composer of the piece which languishes below. Mea culpa. I was busy with the sick bag.

No, it isn't Michael Nyman. No, it isn't John Adams nor Philip Glass, nor Gorecki, nor yet even Vangelis.

It is actually Schubert, on this showing the unacknowledged Father of Minimalism - his Notturno, from the Piano Trio D897.

And forgive me, but I think it is bilge. It is the sort of stuff which gives music a bad name. Nothing happens. There is no development, no progression, and no argument. There is just a silly little irritating motif which repeats over an ever more florid succession of piano arpeggios. It is, in short, wallpaper for the ears.

The only good thing you can say about it is that it would better than gas if you were having a tooth out. But only just.

Boring music

2010-01-28T20:03:00.002Z

The DJs on Radio 3 first thing in the morning are starting to sound suspiciously like Classic FM apprentices. Perhaps they think nobody is listening to the little snippets of music that they sneak in while they nip off for a coffee between pre-recorded trails for future programmes by people with very odd regional accents indeed, but the old Classic FM training is evident, as is the secret Playlist 100 that they all seem to work to before 10am. If you have never heard Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending, or that dreadful thing he wrote for 16 soloists whose title I am too embarrassed to try to remember, just tune in to Radio 3 any morning before 10am, and in any single week you will hear them both so often that you'll be heartily sick of them by about Tuesday.

But this movement has them all in raptures at the moment. The first time I heard it I was shocked into disbelief. It sounds like the worst kind of film music imaginable, or something by one of these minimalist composers who leaves the laptop to get on with the job while he nips our for a restorative skinny latte and a pastrami on rye.

This stuff is so empty that if I met Marshall Macluhan in the chippy tomorrow I am sure we could have a very interesting conversation about The Media and the messages.

But make up your own mind. Is this stuff really worth four minutes of the rest of your life?

Midsomer Murd.....argh, splat

2010-01-27T22:47:00.003Z

We like living in Knotty End. We have no intention of upping sticks and moving to any of the Midsomer parishes, where average life expectancy is, according to reliable statistics from eminently trustworthy government sources, about 13.7 seconds, so we just keep tabs on the place from afar, by means of the Electric Television.

And tonight's Midsomer was a cracker. Stiffs all over the place, as usual, and an increasingly asthmatic Barnaby still rushing around and raising his eyebrows interrogatively at every other member of the cast (the director doesn't tell him whodunnit, you know - you can tell by the look of surprise on his face when a 15-year-old PWC slips him the vital last piece of the jigsaw. It keeps him on his toes.)

Barnaby really should watch more telly. It was obvious who The Creeper was in the first reel (as we used to say in the days of celluloid), but we mustn't let that spoil the fun. Plot is irrelevant in a Midsomer episode, for Midsomer has become a soap, and like the best soaps it is much better watched with your eyes closed, so you can concentrate on lines like "rough as a bag o' scratchin's" (courtesy Corrers), or, tonight, "The cat has a phobia. She won't use the cat-flap" (mouthed by the Chief Constable's wife under relentless cross-examination.)

The script-writers for the Midsomer soap are really getting into their stride. They have realised that Barnaby will never progress in the police service until something is done about his daughter Cully, named after a 16th kitchen-cleaning servant and a failure at everything she tries, except perhaps getting stuck down potholes, and who has now disappeared, thank the Lord, but next in line will have to be the dimwit he married who, on the evidence of tonight's drama, has difficulty knowing which way up to hold her fork at dinner. And when your husband is mixing with the nobs, the least you can do is learn how to balance a pea on the back of your fork in case you are ever required to deal with one of your Chief Constable's balls.

Kate McGarrigle, d 18 January 2010

2010-01-25T16:09:00.001Z

The Knott End Folly

2010-01-18T15:29:00.007Z

Early in 2007 plans were approved for what Wyre Borough Council’s planning officer described as an ‘iconic development’ of 34 flats, oops, sorry, apartments, and offices on a site previously the bowling green belonging to the Bourne Arms, at the point where the River Wyre meets Morecambe Bay in Knott End-on-Sea.

Now Wyre BC lives in Poulton, on the other side of the river, so it knew it wouldn’t have to look at this 'iconic development' every day as Knott End residents would, and it therefore had no qualms about approving a plan which nobody at all in Knott End wanted and which the local town council had strongly opposed. It thought, with that superior wisdom which falleth from heaven on all planners and planning committee members on the day they qualify or get elected, that the 'iconic' three or four-storey structure – which would have towered above the historic Bourne Arms next door as well as new bungalows across the road – would look very nice indeed from Fleetwood over the river and persuade coachloads of Glaswegian bargain-hunters to buy another bag of chips while goggling at it, thus bringing in much-needed revenue.

And in due course the bowling green went and building began...

In a couple of months the builders went out of business, having failed to notice in time that their contractual obligation to strengthen and maintain their bit of the sea wall was going to cost them an arm and about fifty-seven legs.

Somebody else (it is rumoured) took over – and went bust in their turn, and nothing has happened now for well over a year.

It’s grey and drizzling this morning, so I thought I’d just stroll round and see if this 'iconic development' is still there.

Unfortunately it is.

Virus hoaxes and round robins

2010-01-16T21:02:00.000Z

There are two types of e-mail I will not accept any more, and people (sadly, mostly silly women) who send them to me are going to have their e-mail addresses blocked, because these wretched e-mails are just as pernicious time-wasters as the phone-call pillocks who ring you from somewhere far away to tell you you have won a minor planet in Alpha Centauri if you change your telephone service supplier.

The first is the virus hoax. Computer babies believe them, and pass them on to their entire address book in a panic. These hoaxes always say that your entire C: drive is going to be wiped if you open an e-mail with such-and-such a name. Good friendships have been lost this way. Write back politely to people who pass on this rubbish, explain why it's rubbish, and persuade them to send your note back up the chain. Tell them to Google a couple of keywords before passing on a panic, for it could save a lot of friendships.

The second is the jokey stuff, or the save-the-earth stuff, or the premature babies stuff. These girly messages which tug at your heartstrings and say "pass on to everyone in your address book" are as bad as viruses because they proliferate exponentially, wasting bandwidth, clogging up the Internet and costing people time and money. Passing them on will also lose you friends (and get you blocked), because your sentimental attachment to a cause could be a cause that is somebody else's shibboleth, and people don't like you to assume that they think like you you do when privately they think you're a complete twat.

So next time you are persuaded to pass on a "tell all your friends" message, ask yourself "will I have any friends left if I do?" - and don't do it.

And get Net-wise. Talk, for example, to a child.

Day of the Triffids

2009-12-28T22:31:00.005Z

Dunno where they got all the extras from. The St Neots Second XI Darts League Knitting Circle, at a guess. Choreography of crowd scenes straight out of The Muppets.

Those of us whose childhood was chilled by John Wyndham's Kraken and the one with the blond kids with glassy eyes, not to mention Nigel Kneale's Quatermasses in black and white, the ones with the wobbly cardboard sets, are completely baffled by tonight's genetic modification of the Triffids book. It was obviously made for the X-Box, X-Factor generation for plot is completely subservient to action and SFX.

It must have cost a fortune to make, but, like Wicker Man, it's going to become a cult classic of pure ham and misjudgement.

Can't wait to see the concluding part tomorrow - of Hamlet on Ice - the Musical.

The O Antiphons

2009-12-17T19:10:00.004Z

If we were having Vespers this evening, we would be saying or singing the first of the seven O Antiphons, O Sapientia, just before the Magnificat, today being 17 December, the first day within the octave of Christmas. Tomorrow it's O Adonai. The texts are of twofold importance - the opening of each antiphon is a title for the Messiah, and all are taken from the prophecies of Isaiah. The hymn O come, O come, Emmanuel is a poetic expression of the antiphons.

The sequence was cunningly arranged by the Benedictines, so that the first letter of the second word of each, taken in reverse order, spells out 'Ero cras' (tomorrow I will come).

Where the bee sucks

2009-12-12T19:02:00.006Z

Now I do have to reverse the uninformed opinions of 30 years or so, and say unequivocally that if Gordon Sumner happens to be passing through Knotty End (especially if Mrs Sumner is with him) there is a chilled bottle of Moët waiting (we've had it years - hope it hasn't gorn orf), a prawn curry with all the trimmings, and an unreserved apology for once calling him a 'bloody pop singer.'

Gordon is contemptuous of humiliation-TV (specifically, the X-Factor), and the appalling state of musical education for youngsters in the UK, where expectations of what children can actually do are so cringeingly low. Egad - we are of like mind!

Tell you what, Gordon - I'll buy another copy of your Dowland CD to replace the one I broke by accidentally stamping it to death, and I promise this time to listen to it with a more open mind, if you'll persuade Mrs S. not to bring the camel when you drop by. Well, fair's fair.

2009-12-09T21:48:00.005Z

The evangelising Christian Institute, not a body which you could ever accuse of being non-fundamentalist, is cock-a-hoop because two hoteliers have been 'cleared' of offences with which they had been charged under legislation normally used to dole out ASBOs - offences against public order.

The fact that this case was ever brought to court, and under this particular bit of legislation, is a disgrace. It was not a clash of faiths, but of personalities, and hoteliers who want to stay in business need to remember that the paying guest is always right.

The baying mob of placard-waving hirelings demonstrating outside the court do no service to Christianity, but serve only to further the twin causes of secularism and barbarism, which thoughtful Muslims as well as thoughtful Christians and Jews - people of the great Abrahamic faiths - fear and despise.

So once again the zealots have handed a great story to an increasingly secular and sneering press. Well, jolly well done, CI. Where did you all go to school? Little Rock?

For 'secular and sneering' I slightly misquote Richard Morrison, Times columnist and music critic, but his piece today is well worth reading.

Trailers in books

2009-12-05T18:45:00.005Z

"I say, Jeeves. Look at this!"

"Sir?"

"In this bally book I'm reading, Jeeves. Curve the spine, lower the optics, and take a hook of the proverbial butcher."

"Yes, Sir. It appears to be Page 1 of a novelette, Sir, or so I infer from the presence of the numeral 1 at the bottom of the page."

"Yes, but dash it, Jeeves. I've just read the bally book, and pretty spiffing it was too, but there's a bit of another book here, yet the publishers, no doubt on the advice of their attorneys or their accountants, have only given the first chapter."

"Indeed Sir. If I might elucidate?"

"Pray do, old chap. If there's one thing about you, Jeeves, it's the old grey matter. Never been known to fail, what? My ear is at your disposal. Out with it, then. Agog is what I am all, not to mention at the bit champing."

"You are too kind, Sir. It would appear that your eye has stumbled across what is known in the lower echelons of the publishing trade as a Tizer."

"A what, Jeeves. What's orange pop got to do with this stuff at the end of my book? Elucidate on, there's a good chap."

"A Tizer, Sir. A regrettable contraction of the noun 'appetiser', or possibly 'enticer' - scholars are divided upon the precise derivation. If I might put it in plain words - fearing that its readers might desert to more reputable houses, the publisher in question has adopted a device more commonly encountered in the Television; the, ahem, Trailer."

"Well, dash it all, Jeeves, I mean to say. I bet that chap you're always on about, that Shakespeare chappie, didn't blot the last page of Romeo and Juliet and then think 'I'll just bung in a chunk of Julius Caesar for good measure.' I mean, when all's said and done, when is a book not a book? Who said that, Jeeves?"

"I believe that you are the first to put it in that particular nutshell, Sir. Rem, as I have so frequently had course to remark, acu tetigisti. And if I might say so, you have turned a phrase that verges upon the sublimely epigrammatic."

"Gosh. Well, if you say so, Jeeves. Sublimely epigrammatic, what? Must write that down. Meanwhile, my faithful old retainer, what do you think I should do with this book?

"It is hardly for me to say, Sir, but Cook has been complaining that the kitchen fire has been proving recalcitrant in the ignition phase of late. If you would allow me, Sir...?"

"What, burn it? Burn a book, Jeeves? Never thought I'd hear those words from your learned fish and chips."

"But as you so neatly put it, Sir, When is a book not a book? This object, I venture to suggest, is, without argument, a non-book, and as such it has no place upon the Wooster shelves."

"You win, Jeeves. Daresay you're right, as usual. Here you are then. Take it away and do with it what you will."

"Indeed Sir. And thank you Sir. Generations of future bibliophiles will undoubtedly be indebted to you, as will Cook."

"Bibbly-what? Oh never mind. Right then, toddle off and do the dastardly deed. Oh, and Jeeves..."

"Sir?"

"About that hat. The one with the purple feathers. You might as well take that to Cook, as well."

"A very wise decision, Sir, if I might say so."

"You might, Jeeves. You jolly well might, at that."

Novus Ordo, geetars, and RC bling

2009-12-01T20:52:00.003Z

I just couldn't resist this one - Damian Thompson at his wittiest.

But just listen to the baying of cousin Francis's hounds in the Responses - and start worrying.

Parish Mag, December

2009-11-29T19:50:00.003Z

Valiant readers in such far-away place as Hamilton (Scotland, not Bermuda) and Valparaiso (a parish a bit west of Betwys-y-Coed) are always complaining that our parish mag doesn't always reach them, and remind me that this blog was started to accommodate the stuff that tickled them under the kilt (or poncho) but which my (highly esteemed) editor frequently sees fit to spike, even though many parishioners claim it is only thing which helps them survive four sermons. (Well, OK then, two parishioners, but it's a start.)

Amazingly, this piece made it into the December mag, while other far more worthy pieces didn't.

By the time you read this I am going to be heartily sick of Christmas carols, or at least the sort of stuff that shops start blaring out at you from about the week after Easter. In fact the sooner someone invents a carol-cancelling ear-muff for shoppers the better, as far as I am concerned.

The reason you become a grumpy old git is that you’ve been around long enough for things to get on your wick, like for instance greengrocers apostrophe’s, income tax returns, anything to do with the NHS, the adulation of blokes who kick balls round fields for a living, and, worst of all, syrupy versions of Little perishing Donkey blasted out of tinny speakers in shop doorways when you are unfortunate enough to have had to to nip out to purchase a seasonal cabbage or something for your tea.

It is therefore always a joy (to this GOG, anyway) to discover a carol you haven’t already heard and sung 93 trillion times before, and so I have made it my life’s work to track down those elusive carols, or at least carols unknown in the English-speaking world, which don’t ever use the words Wenceslas, Herald, or Figgy Pudding.

The carols of a nation tell you something about the national character. Austrian carols sound like an oompah band. Scandinavian carols are extremely serious and can give you frostbite. French carols are un peu gamin and flirty, and I imagine carols as a genre are frooned on a wee bittie in the Ooter Hebrides. Heaven only knows if they have carols in Wales, but if they do they’ll be written in the style of Handel for a choir of a thousand (and there’ll be lots of repeats.)

My favourites, actually, are Polish carols. We sing one in England, Infant Holy, although the original is even more ambiguous about where the musical stresses should be, and the better for it.

In choirs in England we’re quite used to new harmonisations of traditional carols, and the melody is always left strictly alone. But the curious thing about Polish carols is that the tune is often changed as well as the harmony, though the essential character of every koleda is always retained. A friend at the University of Warsaw, who was very knowledgeable about the old language still used in the texts of some traditional Polish carols, warned me that these texts are pretty much untranslatable. They also use a couple of characters from old Church Slavonic which don’t appear in the fonts your home computer comes equipped with (even in Poland), so preparing performing editions for an English choir was a nightmare, but between us we did it. Two carols made their English debut at a service in West Yorkshire in 199-something, and I thought the choir made a pretty good job of the phonetic language Anna and I had worked out between us. A Polish lady in the congregation was greatly moved by the music of her familiar old carols. But she thought the choir had sung them in Welsh.

Oh, and but. As well as having the best carols in the world, Poland has the best strawberries. Or so lovely Anna says, in her impeccable English.

Intravenous positivism and other stories

2009-11-29T19:04:00.005Z

It is always a joy, after a busy week being a member (baptised, confirmed, committed, and staying) of the Anglican communion of the Christian Church, to read Damian Thompson's Daily Telegraph blog, where his few but vociferous responders still evidently believe that camels pass through the eyes of needles and angels dance on points. Damian can't help being an intravenous Roman Catholic any more than DT readers can help being intravenous Tories, but you could never accuse him of being timid in the fray.

The divisions between the Christian churches have more to do with ecclesiology than with theology, as Dr Rowan Williams didn't quite say last week, and when the Vatican has to support its Anglicanorum coetibus with new translations of its law and doctrines that conveniently assert, even consolidate, its view of its own primacy, it is perhaps time to examine the ecclesiology of Rome more closely, as Charles Sherlock did in a piece which is almost guaranteed to summon the ironclads of the Inquisition to the palatial lawns of Bendigo.

As always in this age of spin, the detail is concealed in the small print.

3D calendar puzzles (again)

2009-11-25T17:41:00.007Z

It has been great fun working again this summer and autumn with the only mildly eccentric ex-pedagogue Sirius, inventor of the 3D crossword and tireless fund-raiser for children with visual impairments. Sirius himself is partially sighted, which makes his 3D crossword website and his 3D crossword calendars even more remarkable. We have worked together for two years and we haven't met yet, but we have agreed that when we do meet at Coventry station I'll be the little bald bloke waving a CD of the Financial Times and Eric will be disguised as Patrick Moore.

This year there are two calendars, not one - a calendar of quickie 3D puzzles that we wrote between us, under the wise and knowledgeable guidance of the big bullies in the publications department of the RNIB, who know everything about design and typography and have no compunctions about telling you that your clues are too long, the rotters, and a second calendar of more challenging cryptic puzzles from a host of the best crossword compilers in the land, as well as me and Sirius himself.

Sirius's Milliganesque genius (and his refusal to take no for an answer) last year won over a highly significant moral partner in this venture, Sarah Montague, of Radio 4's Today programme, and the knot was tied with the BBC's Children in Need appeal. This year Sarah Montague took her personal support to a new practical level - she persuaded her Today colleagues to join her in making sound recordings of every crossword in the 'big' calendar to make life easier for solvers who are at a disadvantage by not being able to see very well. Sarah's name, and those of her colleagues, are on the front of the calendar, so I can name them here for a huge round of applause and a chorus of 'jolly good fellow' - Evan Davis, John Humphrys, Rory Morrison, Jenni Murray, James Naughtie, Paddy O'Connell, Susan Rae, Gary Richardson and John Waite.

So can you do anything to help build a grand new school?

Well, yes.

You could pass on the flier at the top of this post to someone you think might be interested (click it for a full-size jpg), either in buying a calendar as a present for a partially-sighted friend or just in spreading the word.

The RNIB calendar is best ordered by visiting Sirius's website and following the link to the RNIB website.

The RNIB calendar is £6.99; the 'big' cryptic one £9.99.

Ta. Locum.

Do we need a Doorstep Preference Scheme?

2009-11-23T20:24:00.008Z

8:20pm, busy working. What I was doing involved a train of thought now lost for ever because of an uninvited intrusion into the peace and quiet of my home, this peace and quiet being something which my wise local authority tells me I am entitled to enjoy.

A knock on the door. Two young men with lapel badges being very earnest about premature babies. I didn't wait to find out where they were from, or what they wanted, but I did ask them what they thought they were up to knocking doors at this time of night, because I know that several of our neighbours are elderly women living alone whom these night-knockers probably frighten half to death. "We're licensed by the local authority until 8:30", one replied, defensively yet belligerently.

Oh, so that's OK then. They are licensed by the same local authority which says that we are entitled to enjoy the peace and quiet of our homes to frighten old ladies by banging on their doors until 20:30 hours.

And it isn't that I'm against premature babies - far from it. In 1968 the first of our two boys was born six weeks early, and it was a nerve-wracking time for both of us, particularly as the hospital in which our baby was in intensive care was 12 miles from where we lived, and his mother was at home recovering, and expressing milk twice a day for me to race off with to the hospital on my Lambretta. My wife didn't hold the baby until he was six weeks old.

So please don't tell me that I am prejudiced against premature babies, or, for that matter, Lambrettas.

But allow me to be prejudiced against any brace of tough-looking young men who bang on my door at 8:20pm when dark night is well advanced, whatever their excuse, and whatever their lapel badge might say. Heavens, I could make you a laminated lapel badge saying whatever you wanted it to say in five minutes, and so could anybody with a computer, a printer and a cheap laminater. They are no longer worth the plastic they're sealed in.

There is a particularly nasty form of moral blackmail that the outfits who send people to knock uninvited on people's doors use, and it's of the "have you stopped beating your wife?" variety. They play tricks with your fears, and they play tricks with your guilt. They make beggars out of perfectly decent young people with disabilities, and you give them money so that they will go away. If the cunning people who send people out on door-knocking missions were legitimate outfits, they would have more sense, because their tactics are inevitably counterproductive. These night-knockers taint what might be inherently a worthy cause with the stink of corruption, because people are inherently suspicious about causes which have to do their business skulking in the dark, whether or not such skulking is sanctioned by their local authority.

In our area residents are being advised by the police and, yes, the inevitable local authority, to put up signs saying "no carol singers." Funnily enough, I am actually solidly behind the police and the local authority on this one, but in the interests of the carol-singer, for if they dare to venture into this house with their squeaky two lines of figgy pudding, I promise you they will not emerge until they are capable of singing in the best Bach choir in the land. But I don't think that's quite what the police (and the local authority) have in mind.

It is quite obvious that if the authorities regard carol singers as a dangerous and threatening nuisance, they should also regard trick-or-treaters and opportunistic drive-renewers and collecting-tin wavers as inhabiting the same category. And while they're at it, political canvassers. After all, we can block rude intrusions into the peace and quiet of our homes by phone by signing up to the Telephone Preference Scheme, so why shouldn't we also be able to protect our front doors from intrusive knockers?

So here is something you can do for yourself, quite legally.

Made a small poster with something like the following words on:

THIS IS A SELF-EMPLOYED HOUSEHOLD

Cold-callers are welcome, but please have your ID and VAT registration number ready for checking.

Our rates are £50 for ID and VAT confirmation, then £25 for the first minute of doorstep consultation, and £10 per minute thereafter.

Please ensure that you have sufficient money (cash only) to meet your obligations before you ring the bell.

You never know, it might just work.

Anglicanorum coetibus - 4

2009-11-20T22:43:00.003Z

While Pope Benedict and the Archbishop of Canterbury are skirmishing over the fine print of faith, a firm of solicitors in Ulverston appears to have outmanoeuvred them both and set up a direct line with the Almighty:

Words...

2009-11-11T09:28:00.005Z

Came across this by chance on another blog:

Fascinating anecdote. Such people, while probably well-intentioned, give Christianity a bad name and alienate not only those whom they prosthelytise but mainstream Christians like me.

What's that then: to provide replacement body parts by preaching?

Anglicanorum coetibus - 3

2009-11-10T17:43:00.002Z

It's perhaps a small matter, and someone more qualified than I is bound to mention it sooner or later, but why is a Roman Catholic priest who has converted to Anglicanism denied re-entry to Mother's bosom, while one who denies that 6,000,000 Jews died in in the Holocaust is welcomed home after a short period of exile?

Anglicanorum coetibus - 2

2009-11-10T09:37:00.002Z

There are those in the fanatical fringes of a certain Church who still use words like "priestess" and "bishopess" as terms of scorn.

It would be an act of great charity if, say, Watch, would send them as a special Christmass present a copy of Dale Spender's Man Made Language.

They won't read it of course. When you know you're Lords of the Earth because you possess a willy, you go both blind and deaf.

Anglicanorum coetibus - 1

2009-11-10T09:04:00.006Z

The Vatican has now published its Anglican Constitution, the 'Anglicanorum coetibus', which can be read here.

But this, from the press release accompanying the document*, caught my eye:

Contemporary Catholic worship leaves a lot to be desired. The current translation of the Latin Missal for much of the English-speaking world is a flat, awkward, unpoetical, and often inaccurate translation done in American English, which shows little love for the language and its nuances. Liturgical music nowadays is being driven by music publishers, who promote novelty for its own sake and who charge money for the right to perform their music during the Mass.

On the contrary, many versions of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer show a great command of the English language and a love for it in service of the Gospel; these no doubt can be adapted for Catholic worship. Likewise, the Anglicans' long experience with the use of the vernacular in liturgy leaves us a great body of works that are free of royalty payments to publishers.

Coeli! I had no idea that they read Choirstalls in Rome.

CORRECTION 12 Nov 2009

My error. The extract is from the website of a priest in Missouri to the Coetibus, not from the Vatican press release. And it's odd, but I have the distinct impression that a couple of days ago there was rather more there than there is now...

2009-11-08T19:02:00.004Z

It hasn't been a good week if you're a dead soldier, because the new God, Retail, isn't interested in you, for obvious reasons, you being dead and no longer spending. The people who are unfortunate enough to have to work in Retail still have minds and consciences, however, and occasionally one of them does something highly offensive to this god, and wears a poppy at work to say that dead soldiers will never be forgotten, despite their failure to contribute to the corporate coffers

Causing offence to anybody is, of course, the new sin, and this new god is a jealous god, whose minions are instructed to seek out all infidels who threaten to reduce the annual profits by wickedly demonstrating their loyalty to a cause, whether that cause be Greenpeace, Michael Jackson, the Conservative Party or dead soldiers.

People don't give offence - offence is something which other people take because they happen not to live by the same set of values. The danger of trying not to "cause" offence is that you end up hiding your own beliefs instead of proclaiming them and letting them be tested in open debate.

It is for these reasons that I find quite repellent the squirming volte-face of a retail chain which found its profits threatened by a hostile public reaction when it banned one of its staff from wearing a poppy at work.

"We are happy to change our policy and allow our members of staff to continue wearing their poppies. As our policy has always been intended to ensure that we do not cause offence to anyone, we hope we have not done so and sincerely apologise if that has been the unintended effect."

So that's that, then, Bodycare. You can sit back now and watch the shekels rolling in, as before.

Or, of course, not.

Sorry, God, but we think we're doing our best

2009-11-04T21:30:00.005Z

Yet another of those curious joint services for our three parishes this evening that are an absolute guarantee that a poorly maintained organ will survive for three bars of the first hymn, then die with an asthmatic wheeze and sigh (it did.) I know exactly how it felt.

We should drop the United Waterside Parishes label for these events and call them United Waterside Church Wardens and Choirs services, for apart from clergy that was virtually the entire ensemble.

Mind you, I can't blame people for staying at home. The prospect of listening to an (amplified) 'music group' trying to do American accents in stuff that even Moody & Sankey would have regarded as sentimental drivel, and then having to listen to a scratch robed choir attempting to sing something they'd never seen before, must be enough to put anyone off.

But the good thing for the CofE is that our congregations in the Waterside parishes will never go over to Rome.

They don't even go over the road to their own churches.

La Bohème en banlieue - more on YouTube

2009-10-31T20:15:00.004Z

The Bohème from Bern is now generating unofficial clips such as this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LEMmnooPZg

and a few more like it.

The DVD is (apparently) due out tomorrow, 1 November. Serial number is 5106-951, cost 35SFr (about £21).

Order direct from

http://www.tsrboutique.ch/-p-821/boheme-banlieue.html

Church Unity?

2009-10-31T20:11:00.003Z

Amid all the kerfuffle following Pope Benedict’s apparently generous olive branch to the “beloved sister” (yer wok?), what seems to have rattled the Vatican most was the observation by (the excommunicated) Hans Küng (Guardian 27 October) that all a Roman Catholic priest desirous of connubial bliss had to do now was come across the Tiber to the Anglican church, get married, and go back, for the following press release was issued today:

CLARIFICATION BY THE DIRECTOR OF THE HOLY SEE PRESS OFFICE, FR. FEDERICO LOMBARDI, S.J., ON SPECULATIONS ABOUT THE CELIBACY ISSUE IN THE ANNOUNCED APOSTOLIC CONSTITUTION REGARDING PERSONAL ORDINARIATES FOR ANGLICAN ENTERING INTO FULL COMMUNION WITH THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

There has been widespread speculation, based on supposedly knowledgeable remarks by an Italian correspondent Andrea Tornielli, that the delay in publication of the Apostolic Constitution regarding Personal Ordinariates for Anglicans entering into full communion with the Catholic Church, announced on October 20, 2009, by Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is due to more than “technical” reasons. According to this speculation, there is a serious substantial issue at the basis of the delay, namely, disagreement about whether celibacy will be the norm for the future clergy of the Provision.

Cardinal Levada offered the following comments on this speculation: “Had I been asked I would happily have clarified any doubt about my remarks at the press conference. There is no substance to such speculation. No one at the Vatican has mentioned any such issue to me. The delay is purely technical in the sense of ensuring consistency in canonical language and references. The translation issues are secondary; the decision not to delay publication in order to wait for the ‘official’ Latin text to be published in Acta Apostolicae Sedis was made some time ago.

The drafts prepared by the working group, and submitted for study and approval through the usual process followed by the Congregation, have all included the following statement, currently Article VI of the Constitution:

§1 Those who ministered as Anglican deacons, priests, or bishops, and who fulfill the requisites established by canon law and are not impeded by irregularities or other impediments may be accepted by the Ordinary as candidates for Holy Orders in the Catholic Church. In the case of married ministers, the norms established in the Encyclical Letter of Pope Paul VI Sacerdotalis coelibatus, n. 42 and in the Statement “In June” are to be observed. Unmarried ministers must submit to the norm of clerical celibacy of CIC can. 277, §1.

§2. The Ordinary, in full observance of the discipline of celibate clergy in the Latin Church, as a rule (pro regula) will admit only celibate men to the order of presbyter. He may also petition the Roman Pontiff, as a derogation from can. 277, §1, for the admission of married men to the order of presbyter on a case by case basis, according to objective criteria approved by the Holy See.

This article is to be understood as consistent with the current practice of the Church, in which married former Anglican ministers may be admitted to priestly ministry in the Catholic Church on a case by case basis. With regard to future seminarians, it was considered purely speculative whether there might be some cases in which a dispensation from the celibacy rule might be petitioned. For this reason, objective criteria about any such possibilities (e.g. married seminarians already in preparation) are to be developed jointly by the Personal Ordinariate and the Episcopal Conference, and submitted for approval of the Holy See.”

Cardinal Levada said he anticipates the technical work on the Constitution and Norms will be completed by the end of the first week of November.

Another sister church sister

2009-10-30T21:54:00.011Z

A small piece in Church Times today:

New head of EKD elected

BISHOP Margot Kässman was elected as the leader of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) at its synod in Ulm, Germany, on Wednesday. She has been Lutheran Bishop of Hanover since 1999, is 51, and divorced.

It couldn't happen here, of course - a woman, at the head of the established church?

Church Times online

2009-10-30T09:30:00.003Z

The on-line archives of Church Times, a priceless resource for those interested in churchy things of an Anglican nature, have hitherto been denied to those of us who get the paper from our newsagent unless we coughed up another sub, which on principle we have refused to do.

Then a few weeks ago, worried no doubt by the impact on its direct subscribers of the postal strikes, CT offered them free access to the online version and the archives, in what appeared to be a temporary measure.

It seems that this offer has become permanent.

At £65 a subscription is exactly the same price as 52 issues at £1.25 from the newsagent, with access to the archives thrown in, as well as access to the online CT (in case the paper copy gets lost in a corner of a little red van.)

Our subscription form is already in the post.

La Bohème en banlieue - still on Arte

2009-10-27T19:19:00.010Z

The stunning production of Bohème live from the streets of Bern last month was only supposed to be viewable online for seven days, but one is delighted to report that it's still there,

http://www.arte.tv/fr/Echappees-culturelles/La-Boheme-en-banlieue/Revoir-l-opera/2851048.html

Even if you don't think you're interested in opera, give it a try (the opera starts eight minutes into the 151-minute programme.) The last scene, at about 131 minutes, is intensely moving. And yes, the Endstation bus was hired for the production (probably the biggest prop ever), but the principals mainly used scheduled bus services to move from location to location. The block of flats whose interior and exterior were used as locations is regarded locally as a ghetto block, but that didn't stop a couple of dozen of the residents from being given walk-on roles. The orchestra played in a shopping centre while the cast moved from location to location (usually by scheduled bus services or trams) and sang with headphones and mikes. Each principal had her or his own sound technician just off-camera, and between them they had worked out codes of gestures for such messages as "give me more orchestra", or "give me more me". What was almost unbelievable, considering the technical and human complexity of the production, was that it all went off without a single (noticeable) hitch.

Once or twice in my life telly has done something that spectacularly justifies its existence, and this production - which went out live on Arte, SF and other channels to Switzerland, France, Germany, Austria and Italy, and to the rest of the world as streaming video - elevated the wretched goggle-box to a height of new respectability and worthiness.

The DVD is due out in November. It will have a programme about the making of the show (in two versions - German and French) as well as the opera itself. It will probably be available online from Arte.

More information when I have more details de source sûre; di fonti secura; aus erste Hand; ex ore equi. (Dunno the Greek.)

Also worth a look: the announcement of this joint Arte-SF production from Maya Boog's (ie Mimi's) agent.

http://www.imt-agency.com/pages/gb-maya-boog-schweizer-fernsehen-la-boheme-29-septembre-2009.html

Nasty neologisms

2009-10-26T20:02:00.005Z

Well, we lost the battle over flammable, didn't we? It was predicted at the time (early 1970s) that sooner or later some unlettered PR person for a children's nightie manufacturer would coin the word inflammable, believing that it meant "No, it won't burst into flame if little Nathan (or, as it might be, Victoria) stands too close to the electric fire." And now I have seen the word applied to sofas. Usage that denies etymology is fraught with perils.

Not so dangerous, but equally unpleasant, is the now ubiquitous adjective homophobic. It is used to describe people who hate, or even just dislike, homosexual people, but both elements derive from the Greek (phobos, fear, and homos, same), so all that silly word means is "fear of the same". It would be a useful adjective to apply to those worthy people who get a fit of the wobbles when the programme they are watching on the telly turns out to be a repeat after all, but that is not how it is used.

The language could certainly do with a word that clearly meant "hatred of people who are sexually attracted to people of their own sex", but homophobia simply doesn't do the job. It, and its adjective, are not words. They are labels, which come with a whole set of prejudices inherent in the gum on the back which save anyone actually having to think.

Words like homophobia and flammable do not come into the language spontaneously. They are invented words which sound and look right to tabloid journalists and advertisers. They creep into our brains like viruses, because they are the product of people whose sole job is to manipulate our minds by their cunning use of language. And they are succeeding, to the extent that some of us can no longer distinguish paedophiles from paediatricians.

I used to be a child, which is why I am worried. Without language, whom should I trust?

checkout operators

2009-10-21T21:06:00.005+01:00

I can hardly believe it, but checkout people in our supermarkets are the new untouchables, the lowest of the low. They have to take every insult but smile back, because the new ethos of our secular society is that the customer is always right, and it's perfectly OK to bully checkout operators if you are a customer. They don't have any comeback, and don't we know it?

A French woman wrote a book about the insults she had had to put up with in her time behind the tills, and it became a best-seller (among whom, you might ask. Other checkout operators?) Here's a BBC report:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7984859.stm

It came home to me today, when some wizened scrote of a male said something nasty to the woman in charge of our till, and she was visibly shaken. She asked us if she could refuse to serve offensive customers. Sad to say, but she can't. She has to sit there and take it.

This was in Sainsbury's. I have to ask Sainsbury's what you are doing to protect your checkout operators from bullying by customers, whom you consider always to be in the right.

Could some of your personnel people perhaps read this book by a French woman, and make your supermarkets a safer and nicer place for the good people who run your tills and rake in your loot?

And possibly even sell the book, for the sake of your staff?

Choirstalls column Nov 09, n't

2009-10-19T19:11:00.005+01:00

[This article should have been appearing in the November parish mag, but there isn't enough space. At least, that's the editor's excuse]

I don’t like driving. My imagination is far too vivid to allow me to be a happy, contented driver. I was all right until I was nearly killed by a sheep. The sheep wasn’t driving, don’t get me wrong. It was lurking behind a small boulder on the high moorland road between Owdham and Huddersfield, just waiting for a motorist to pass with his mind on other things, and I was doing 69.9 mph when it took it into its head to leap (or bound) forth in order to savour the grass on the other side of the A62. And I’m sure, in that moment of panic braking, that I caught a malevolent gleam in its eye – “Go on, hit me, sunshine, and it’s a £400 fine and three points. Oh, and a new car. If you’re spared. Meeeeee-ehr.”

I have been extremely wary of sheep ever since, and have been trying to reduce their numbers by a process known as eating.

So when my beloved intimated that a nice self-catering holiday in St Oswald’s land would make a change from the usual G-Line jaunt I smelt a rat, and my right leg (the one with the foot on the end that I use to press the accelerator pedal) starting playing up, as it does when it senses danger.

Now I’m all in favour of visiting those bits of Northumberland within an easy bus journey from the temporary pied-à-terre, but it was evident from the determined expression on beloved’s face that I was in for a lot, and I mean a lot, of driving.

We had bought a satnav thing at my insistence (well, I wanted one, because it’s a gadget, and male choirpersons love gadgets because they’re something to play with during the sermon, and beloved grudgingly agreed.) Emily is wonderful! She’s got a tremendous sense of direction, and she isn’t fazed by anything: “You have driven over a cliff. Make a U-turn as soon as possible”, she says, and I just love her to bits.

Emily, I had hoped, would make even the A1 bearable. The A1, if you don’t know it, is a road that you can’t avoid if you are aiming for St Oswald’s land, and it is populated by self-propelled suicide vehicles whose sole aim, dodgems-like, is to take you out, and themselves with you. And what did Emily of the soothing voice say? “A1. Continue 40 miles...” The A1 gives me nightmares. It is far, far worse than the A588, a road also populated by murderous missiles weighing a ton and travelling at 69.9 mph.

En route we stopped off at Hexham (I am getting to the point, honest) and bought some books, including one about Interesting Churches. It is the sort of book that chaps who collect stamps and go train-spotting and hang net curtains with scalloped hems in the windows of their garden sheds write. Any book about Interesting Churches that mentions Grace Darling as “Grace Darling, the heroine” without supporting information demands, like the Orange Brick, intense scrutiny by a choirperson with a thick notebook and a sharp pencil to hand. And yes, this questionable tome, for which I forked out the price of a bottle of Gordons, was obviously written by a train-spotter and/or stamp collector, for it is all about buildings and bits of buildings. Now church buildings are very useful things for keeping congregations dry when it’s chucking it down or for hanging bells at the top of the towers of, but that’s where their function ceases (unless you’re a trainspotter, architect, antique dealer, or beneficiary of the Pevsner estate). An Interesting Church, surely, is a church with a congregation of 500, a Sunday School with 150 children, a choir of 1,000 and a thumping great five-manual organ to go with it, and a parish share of 49p. Oh, and a few clergy here and there to remind us of what it’s all about.

The most Interesting Church I ever saw was the one Holy Noely, the young priest who assisted at our wedding, had when he moved to Australia. It was the Church in the Carport, for it was in a carport that services were held while the interesting church building was going up. If you saw the Alan Whicker programme with the green tree frog climbing up the parson’s vestments, that was Holy Noely (The Rev’d Noel Allen, who sadly Entered Immortality a couple of years ago, and what a cracking expression that is, Gromit. From Evita, I believe.)

But to move on. Evensong seems to be catching on once more. It must worry the telly people no end, the church poaching their viewers, because they’ve responded by running the Forsyte Saga again. Broughton has an Evensong, Morecambe has one, and now Cockerham is trying it out, with some early signs of success (tip: announce at the family service that the raffle prizes will be awarded after evensong, and any not claimed will be distributed among the congregation present. It worked a treat at Cockerham – there must have been 50 people in the congregation and 20 in the choir.)

There was an extra evensong at Morecambe a few Saturdays ago with the children and young people who’d had another day of singing and fun with the infectious Rachael thingy and Marilyn what's-it from our branch of the Royal School of Church Music. We dropped in on our way back from Northumberland and stayed for the service. It was good to see four of our young people from Snozzies there. There was an impossible amount of music for youngsters, some of them only eight, to learn in a day, but they rose to the occasion like seasoned professionals, to the delight of a tiny congregation and the amazement of the new Rector. Our youngsters are so important. They, not interesting buildings, are the future of our living church.

And they even made the 40 miles of the dreaded A1 a distant memory.

Diwali

2009-10-17T20:57:00.003+01:00

If you were born into one of the monotheistic Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) then you probably won't be celebrating Diwali, the Hindu festival of light, which has just started.

A sneaky confession here - my favourite Hindu god is Ganesh, the elephant-god. You do not muck about with Ganesh, or you're in serious trouble.

Hindu gods, unlike our monotheistic gods, have a habit of dropping in for a chat or a quick trample, and, although venerated, they are approachable if you have the right gifts to offer.

It isn't quite C of E, of course, and Hindus don't do Evensong, as far as I'm aware, but wouldn't it be wonderful to share the festival of light with other people of faith?

That was going to be it, but writing it has sparked off an old memory, viz, sc., and to wit:

Years ago an Indian classical musician from Rochdale was invited to give a 'recital' as part of the season of monthly concerts that ran for many years in Heptonstall parish church. It was a wonderful evening. There was incense, there were rags, and before each rag he explained the scale that was to be used, and how scale and the subdivision of the beat was employed, and I was agog at this glimpse this wonderful musician had given me of music from a completely different culture.

The following week the PCC resigned en masse because a non-Christian had been playing heathen music in church.

That is us. And that is how others see us.

Heroes

2009-10-14T22:15:00.002+01:00

Chums know what I think about the telly, or soma, as a real writer and thinker presaged it. But just occasionally something on that huge box in the corner catches your attention, will-ye, nill-ye, and tonight it was John and Pauline Prescott and Brian Sewell. Brian Sewell is outrageous, but only because telly has made him so, and he loves the limelight, and I bet he's never given a yobbo a good thump in his life, but before telly made him a class-hate figure he was a very sound art critic, and that is what he still is.

Telly loves people who are outrageous, and it turns them into entertainers and celebs, and I do wish sometimes that people who are really interesting would do a Prescott or a Cantona when telly people grope them up, and smack them one in the gob. Cantona did it to a yobbo, and John Prescott did, too, and that is why they are on my hypothetical Christmas card list, because we desperately need people who do daft, wrong things for the very best of reasons - most important of which is defeating yobbism. It is wonderfully un-PC, and what better could anyone say than that?

La Bohème-en-Banlieue v. Evita at Blackpool

2009-10-01T21:07:00.009+01:00

Lots of food for thought this week, music-drama-wise.

The production of Bohème from Bern on Tuesday marked a whole new direction for opera, even more than did the Traviata in Zurich last year. Both productions broke out of the confines of the opera house and took to the streets, and after these two pioneering productions (and the experiments in live broadcasting of stage productions in London to giant screens in public places) the future of opera is assured, thanks to new technologies and, much more importantly, people in theatreland who are excited by their vast potential of possibilities.

Meanwhile, in Blackpool, there has been a short run of Evita, and we had booked for the matinee, today being our 43rd wedding anniversary. I have been sneering at Andrew Lloyd Webber for years, aided and abetted by knowledgeable barytons familiers anglais des scènes européennes, whose musical education we had to eat bread and cheese for for 15 years to fund, but the score for Evita is quite Puccini-like in many respects, such as in the use of little leitmotives which serve to give thematic unity.

There was nobody famous in the cast. Eva (Rachael Wooding) comes from Doncaster; Perón (Mark Heenehan) from New Jersey; and Magaldi (James Waud) from nowhere, this being his first professional role (where has he been?) Che (Seamus Cullen) is a seasoned performer of, er, rather pop-py stuff and Gospel, but boy, can he act! He has the gift of attracting the audience's attention before the spotlight finds him.

Any production of Evita has to fight the echoes of the film (possibly the best thing Madonna ever did), and you see the similarities in the costumes and the hairstyles - not because this production copied the film, but because both it and the film strove for authenticity in the detail and arrived in the same place. But film is film, and stage is stage, and creating the illusion within the confines of a small box without a front, in real time, is what makes theatre more demanding, and, I think, more satisfying.

Rachael Wooding's Eva was a tremendous piece of character acting, at least equal to Madonna's Eva. The ambiguities in Maria Eva Duarte's life as Evita (were her concerns for the poor and for women's suffrage genuine, or was she a cynical manipulator?) are important to the drama, and an actor has less than two hours to create a compelling picture of a poor girl with ambition who rose to be the darling of a troubled nation. Ms Wooding pulled it off. Madonna didn't, quite.

To start with the only negative comment: the Latin sung by the ensemble sounded terribly English, what with all those un-Italian diphthongs, but in all other respects they were terrific, with a precision in their movement which many an opera chorus could learn from (these people have to dance and act as well as sing).

Robin is far too young (and snobby) to have noticed the close connections between ALW and Puccini, and he won't discuss it, because he knows best (of course. And why? Because that's how he was brought up to think.) He says ALW is worthless. I say ALW is doing exactly what Puccini did -stagecraft, melody, heightened emotions, music theatre, the rest.

La Bohème en banlieue

2009-09-30T10:07:00.004+01:00

Last night's Swiss TV/Arte production of Bohème, live using different locations in Bern, was amazing - a new genre in, what, opera verismo. It can be watched for the next seven days on Arte7.

http://www.arte.tv/fr/Echappees-culturelles/La-Boheme-en-banlieue/2790004.html

It is well worth watching, even if you're not the father of the Marcello!

Duruflé Requiem

2009-09-28T17:28:00.003+01:00

The village choral society is bravely attempting the Duruflé Requiem, in a programme that also includes the four Handel Coronation Anthems. The Handel can be quickly passed over, for about the only musically interesting bits are the occasional hemiolas, Handel being a composer, or should I say having been a composer, who wrote far, far too much. GF's greatest sin, other than that of giving far too many top Ds (or worse) to basses, was to bequeath a certain way of writing hymn tunes to a myriad amateur hymn-tune writers, mainly from Yorkshire or Wales, with which we are still saddled in some quires and places where they sing. ('Ee, we allus sing Albert Snatterthwaite's tune for While Shepherds Watched 'ere. The tune come into 'is 'ead when 'e were muckin' out t'pigs, Albert used to say. He said it were Divine Intervention after he'd bin to see t'Halifax Choral do Messiah. He din't know nowt about music, Albert din't, but that din't stop 'im thinkin' up' that tune. Choirmaster rit it owt forrim, and wim sung it air since. Just at Christmas, like.')

But that is by the by.

The Duruflé is a rather different animal, ball-game, or kettle of fish, though. It is always a surprise to a choir when orchestra or organ get involved, usually at dress rehearsal, and launch into what sounds like a completely different work. A whole choral society's collective hair has been known to turn white in the space of 20 minutes.

Three skills are required of a choir person attempting this work -

1) the ability to count (though only up to nine)

2) the ability, and the desire, to see the conductor

3) the ability to go selectively deaf

I would add a fourth skill - sight-reading - but for some reason amateur groups have always placed sight-reading skills (or even being in possession of a usable voice) well down in the table of priorities, far below an aptitude for chair-stacking, tea-brewing or being on a Committee. And as for an ability to count, see the conductor or blank out disruptive aural influences, well, we didn't expect to have to work when we joined this choir, did we Mildred?

Mind you, if everybody in a choral society was an expert sight-reader the number of rehearsals needed for the next concert could be counted on the thumbs of one hand, and that would destroy the whole point of a local choral society, which is primarily social.

Duruflé's big mistake was to write his Requiem in Latin. It is a fact well known that no English person is capable, without years of tuition, of singing in Latin, especially if he (or she) learned about puellae in herba longa with pueri and that old viperas, which used to give us such delight in 2A when viperas was pronounced in the classic English tradition. The English tradition is not the tradition of church Latin, as Pope Pius X had to remind the unruly French in about 19-dot. Duruflé may have taken notice, but generations of English choral societies have carried on singing per-pet-chewer without benefit of clergy.

Still - and this is the unanswerable argument of your average choral society - the audience won't know any different.

But it's just such a shame for Duruflé, or Do Roughly, as I shall fondly think of him henceforth.

Years ago I was drafted in at the final rehearsal to augment the basses in what was predominantly a school performance of Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, a work which I had not sung before and have not since, more's the pity. There was grudging respect from a few young 'erberts when I, an old git even then by their standards, managed the Hebrew text and complex rhythms at sight. albeit with most of my fingers crossed.

On that occasion the choir was well prepared, but the organist wasn't, and I think he must have been horrified at the complexity of the organ part, which he hadn't bothered to look at beforehand, being a teacher and therefore omniscient. The only things I remember about the concert is a splendid performance by a young alto soloist which rescued a most unholy mess-up, and falling gratefully into the pub-next-the-church afterwards in order to obliterate all other memories.

Ste Thérèse de Lisieux

2009-09-26T19:38:00.002+01:00

It's easy to sneer at the RCs for queuing up to gawp at a few bits of a dead saint, but on the other side of the fence relics are considered to be extremely holy and objects of veneration in their own right. That we outside Roman Catholicism don't understand it is no excuse for sectarian sniping, which we can safely leave to the new religion of Atheism. Dr John Sentamu evidently has some reason for opening the doors of York Minster to Ste Thérèse, and that is good enough for me.

Mocking is easy. Respecting the practices of different belief systems is a lot harder.

The Beautiful Game (yer wo'k?)

2009-09-20T18:13:00.004+01:00

I am belatedly coming to realise that what divides clergy from laity, vicar from curate, organist from choirmaster and bishop from dean is not doctrine or the role of women in the ministry or whether Amazing Grace should ever be sung in church at all, but something far more fundamental - the doings of football teams.

(Football, in case there are readers of this blog on the planet Uranus, is a game in which a lot of people, usually grown men, kick a ball around a field and try to get it to pass between two sticks with a lid on while somebody else tries to stop them from doing so. There are a few more rules, but that is the general idea.)

Now I have searched for any reference to this activity in the Old Testament, and in the New Testament, which is more up-to-date, but in vain. The tribes of Israel might, in their wanderings, have dropped in on a game of buzkashi ...

(Buzkashi, dear Uranian reader, is a precursor of football played in Central Asia, either on horseback or yakback, the aim of which is to pick up the carcass of a headless goat or sheep and deposit it in a designated place. It is a jolly interesting game, unless you are a goat or, for that matter, a sheep)

... but, if so, there is no record of it. And certainly there is no record of their ever having played football. For one thing, they were far too busy avoiding being persecuted, enslaved or exterminated to have the time to spend on such trivial pursuits.

So, if there is no biblical precedent for it, why is it the dominant topic of conversation in any place where men foregather, such as the choir vestry?

Child Protection

2009-09-14T12:44:00.000+01:00

I know this is a delicate subject, and one which nobody dare say anything about in case of reprisals from the Government's Department of Lunacy, but the latest proposals from Nanny should be enough to strike fear into the hearts of every parent. Not fear of perverts doing nasty things with our children, but fear of the fear of it, which is now setting us one against another, and making us not only suspicious of each other, but suspicious of ourselves. The vast majority of fathers (and mothers, for we should never forget Myra Hindley), whether of boy children or of girl children, are as protective of the children of other mothers and fathers as they are or were of their own, and the networks of parental friendships and trusts are something which binds us together as friends and even co-parents (in the sense that when you entrust your child to us we behave as we think you would, so that they are comfortable and trusting wth us.)

None of the protective measures which have been set up at enormous cost has made, is making, or will make, a ha'porth of difference. The sort of people who want to prey upon children don't behave in ways that governnments can legislate against. They will control their urges until they've got clearance, and then they will have a field day, with an entree into any youth group that takes their fancy. They are, as our bumbling Minister for Children admits, very clever at getting what they want.

They can spin their words as much as they like, these nannies of our alarmist State, but the fact remains that for possibly the first time in this country a lot of us adults - 11,000,000 or so - are presumed guilty until the electronic apparatus of the State says we're innocent.

It is an awful fact that about one in ten children will have been abused in one way or another by the time they reach puberty. But it is also a very relevant fact that the majority of such abuses are committed by family members or other children, and they are not covered by this massively expensive grabnet. So this draconian measure isn't going to do much for them.

What I fear is that it will be a golden opportunity for nasty neighbours to make malicious complaints about people, and have those complaints recorded and used to blacken someone's record. This isn't hypothetical, for last year someone falsely accused me and my wife (and two other families) of persecuting him because he is gay, and we were all hauled up before the local 'Safety Partnership' to explain ourselves. And there will be no redress for victims of false accusations under the ISA scheme, for the information about you will be kept secret and the basis of a bureaucrat's - not a court's - decision not to allow you anywhere near a child will also be kept a secret.

Sensible adults, even those who have been CRB checked, make sure that they are never alone with a child, and not only for the child's protection but their own, for far too many people's lives have been damaged by false accusations.

The ISA was set up in the wake of the Soham murders. Matthew Parris, writing in The Times, had this to say:

Those murders would almost certainly never have happened were it not for the incompetence of the police, social services and education authorities. The result is that in consequence of the failure of three state authorities, a fourth state authority has been set up.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article6831413.ece

And today Libby Purves picks up the baton:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/libby_purves/article6832993.ece

What can we do? Well, we can stop electing halfwits, for a start, especially when they might be daft enough to become government ministers.

Local restauRANTS - I

2009-09-11T18:58:00.007+01:00

I was a bit bothered when I saw, in the foyer of a much-lauded local restaurant, a hastily pinned-up A4 sheet bearing the slogan "We no longer accept cheques for under £100" (and I probably paraphrase), and only mildly reassured to learn that the North West Development Agency had been involved in funding a pretty serious refurbishment, because the true test of a restaurant, as opposed to a caterer, is not the ambience but the taste of the food, but we'll come to that later.

The best eatery that ever assaulted my plastic and flirted with my palate was, without any doubt, my old friend Rob Moss's little bistro (or brasserie) in New Hey. Rob, who had worked for far too long for the sake of his soul and his happiness in insurance, and had hated every minute of it, eventually gave up the soul-sickening graft of conning people out of their loot and opened this little bistro in a converted terraced house to share his love of northern French cuisine with local punters, only about 16 of whom could be accommodated in his nosh-house at any one time. I don't know whether Rob ever had a commis chef - I think his kitchen was too small for more than one person at any one time - but with so few covers he could cope on his own and the place was always nearly full. We used to go with our friends Kim and Bill about once a month (both of them mean cooks) for the two years that the place was there, then Rob was called to higher things and became a postman on a Scottish island where his wife Carol ("Brain") got a job teaching deaf children.

I mention this because there is a point, measured by the number of mouths to be fed and the competence of the chef, where cuisine stops being cuisine and becomes catering.

And at this much-lauded local restaurant that is what we got - catering (plus a barney about whether or not we had ordered chocolates to go with our coffee, which, by the way, tasted of acorns.) But the barney was about a couple of quids'-worth of choccies (most of which were consumed anyway by the Vicar's wife, who is a connoisseuse of such things), which in the light of takings of something like £500 from our party, plus the profit from the bar and the wine list, is mere chicken-feed unless you are an accountant by trade, knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

The starters were fine - my smoked salmon was delicate enough to let the taste of the prawns get through, and the dill sauce was subtle, and it all worked beautifully together.

But the best thing I can say about the entrées is that they were bland enough not to frighten the taste-buds of your average Daily Mail reader. Ann's lump of lamb was huge, but too fatty, and with no hint of rosemary or even oregano to give the occasional morsel of lean meat a bit of a lift. My chicken breast was tough, and pink in the middle, which with chicken is always a bit of a worry, for it suggests that it has been cookd on too high a heat for safety. And the veg! The promised cauliflower cheese was strong in cauliflower, but wet with cauliflower cooking juice in which floated a few blobs of something yellow which might have been cheese, but which didn't taste of anything. Cauliflower al dente is delicious, but we all know what the cooking liquid smells like, and we don't really want that stuff swimming around on our plates.

Desserts were all right. My pancake (oh, all right, crêpe) was limp and soggy, and flopped slimily like a jellyfish over the ice-cream. A touch of buckwheat flour might have put some lead in its pencil, but nobody had thought of it. And everything was swimming in the juice of the black cherries so it was sloppy. Ann passed me her dessert to finish, but the toffee lattice was burnt and bitter.

But the coffee! It was truly awful. I have never tasted anything so disgusting since a Mormon friend gave me a cup of Caro. If you have to cheat and use instant, at least use something that smells a bit like like coffee, even if tastes like acorns. And anyway, who in their right mind would finish an evening meal with coffee (even what English people think is coffee) and risk nightmares on top of indigestion?

Oh, and another thing. This restaurant - refurbished (with the help of the NWDA) in something approaching Art Deco style - thinks it perfectly acceptable to blare incongruous Karen Carpenter songs at you so loudly than you cannot have a conversation at your table. That they turn the volume down when you ask is no excuse - their sin is to assume that you want OAP muzak in the first place. Loud muzak is about as acceptable in a public restaurant as Lynx aftershave or foot odour.

Michael Winner - I hope you are reading this.

OVERALL MARKS

ambience - 8/10

service - 9/10

food - 4/10

wines - 7/10

VFM - 6/10

Recycling rage

2009-09-03T20:54:00.005+01:00

Recycling bin day today. Put out big green bin (garden waste) and green box (plastics, glass and metal.) Green box new - last one disappeared in 50mph gale (green boxes not very heavy when empty), so thoughtfully left lid on to reduce aerodynamic properties and as afterthought placed heavy brick on lid on account of strong winds of about 51mph, with worse forecast.

Went out for day on coach trip to Buddhist temple. Om.

Returned 6:30pm. Brick OK, but no sign of green box, nor of next-door-neighbour's green box.

Green bin on side propping up car. Green boxes probably blown into Irish Sea for all I know. Om.

"You would think, wouldn't you..." but question rhetorical. Bin men nowadays are paid to complete round in fastest time possible, not think, or stick thoughtfully provided heavy brick back on top of empty green box. Om.

But questions remain. If I placed large objects on pavement outside my property on any day other than bin day I would be deemed to be obstructing said pavement, in case mums with pushchairs are forced into the road because of them and get squashed by a passing steamroller or charabanc or blind people fall over them, and I would probably be collared or at least rebuked by a constabule, but council bins seem immune to the consequences of obstruction-causing behaviour, as do their masters. Om.

And if I drove along the street scattering plastic bottles and tin cans willy-nilly I would face an on-the-spot fine for littering, but council waste disposal operatives seem similarly exempt from such due process of law, so residents have to spend much of bin-day removing the rubbish deposited on our streets by council vehicles and returning it to the same bins it came from, ready for the next Brian Rix farce in a fortnight. Om.

I have a suggestion to make. Wyre BC could save an absolute fortune by cutting out the middlemen. Residents could just empty their bins straight into the street and save the bin-men the trouble of doing it for us.

Om.

Petrol station rage

2009-08-29T19:40:00.002+01:00

Scene: the crowded forecourt of a petrol station, late morning today, the Shell place on the A585 at Singleton, always crowded because it is also used as a cut-through by people driving from Blackpool to Fleetwood, not always in the best of tempers.

Lady driver wedged and unable to move forwards until customers in front have paid and departed. Loud blasting of horn from vehicle behind her. Obvious to us, and post office lady in front of her, that she is locked in, but not to vehicle behind her. Loud blasting continues until queue has moved forwards, and lady and loud-blaster are at last unlocked. Post Office lady now at pump. Loud-blaster, behind her, now has time to emerge from vehicle and scream in rage at middle-aged lady who had blocked him. He is over six feet tall, fat, and purple of face and language. He is so fat that his breasts wobble while he is raging. He returns to vehicle, male honour satisfied. Lady victim quite shaken, but fills up.

Several witnesses in queue to pay do the un-British thing and say something nice to the lady, who appears to be cheered up somewhat by the support of strangers. But it isn't enough.

Behaviour like this bully's dirties the day, not only for his victim but for everyone in earshot.

There are severe penalties for people who drive under the influence of alcohol or drugs, but not for an equally dangerous combination - ego and testosterone.

I didn't manage to get his registration number. But the next time anything like this happens the reg will go into the blog as a tag, and Google will pick it up, sure as eggs is eggs.

And the Yahoo can sue me.

West-Eastern Divan Orchestra

2009-08-22T18:56:00.004+01:00

If you missed last night's prom by Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan youth orchestra you can still catch it for a week on the BBC's iPlayer. It wasn't so much the concert that riveted my attention but the conversation broadcast in the interval, in which two people brought together in friendship by the orchestra, a female Israeli violinist and a male Lebanese Arab cellist, discussed with Sara Mohr-Pietsch what membership of the orchestra meant to them.

To hear the conversation go to iPlayer, select Radio 3, select BBC proms 2009, open up the "other proms" pane and click on prom 48, the Berlioz. Use the slider to advance about 67 minutes. The conversation started after Daniel Barenboim didn't make a speech (and if that sounds Gilbertian, it isn't - he turned to the audience and said "No speech.")

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There is plenty on the Web about the orchestra, a joint vision of Daniel Darenboim and the Palestinian Arab scholar Edward Said that has been in existence since 1999, so I won't say anything here. But you can hear something of the vision and its realisation from Barenboim's own mouth when he talked to Ed Stourton on the Today programme here.

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But being a word-bloke, I was curious about the use of the word Divan in the orchestra's name, and while googling yielded references aplenty to Goethe, which looked promising, he being, or rather he having been, a scholar of Arabic languages and literature and author of a book of pomes with Divan in the title, not surprisingly, since one meaning of the Arabic word is "collection of poems by one author", it also generated thousands of other hits which mostly repeat each other or try to flog me a sofa, leaving me none the wiser.

The best I can come up with as a translation of divan is "assembly", with its underlying meaning of "council chamber in which differing views are resolved" (and excuse my hollow ho-ho-hos, for most council chambers I have known are places where differing views become even more cemented as differing views.)

Any scholars out there who can help?

PS, and a most unworthy aside. Assiduous readers will know that I enjoy accidental associations of ideas, so try this one. Day 1 - start reading Hannah Arendt, after British public library system yields The Human Condition (thank you, Camden) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (thank you, Cheshire), as instructed by the intellectually delectable Monika Maria Trost. Day 2 - listen to the Divan prom. Day 3 - spend six hours singing Graham Kendrick stuff to the accompaniment of an enthusiastic gee-tar in a church designed by a Mason.

Enough there for another book by Koestler, I would think. Or Freud.

PPS. Oh God! Not another book by Dawkins? Must cancel The Times and subscribe to The Sun instead. Thinking is such hard work.