The Gove Bible

I've now had an opportunity to handle one of the copies of the Bible that the present Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, has caused to sent to every school in the land, including primary schools. It is a beautiful object, bound in red, the pages with silvered edges, protected by a sturdy slip case, and some philanthopists have had to fork out a bob or two to meet the £375,000 bill.


But what edition of the Bible is it, you are entitled to ask. One in simple English appropriate for schoolchildren of all ages, with the juicier bits of the Song of Solomon discreetly reworded?


Is it eckerslike. It's a facsimile of the 401-year-old King James Bible, complete with the archaisms of the English of that period (modern editions of the King James Bible update spellings and character substitutions in the interests of greater readability.) As a bonus it also includes earlier forms of the lectionary, prescribing the readings for every day of the year.


It would be a marvellous tool for scholars - but for primary school kids? Even their teachers would be struggling with the orthography.


The clue is in the press release that went with the distribution. Apparently the King James Bible is an icon, in the debased set of resonances that that word now carries ('iconic' is used at least eight times in any single early evening TV news programme, so that it now means roughly 'mildly interesting'.)


An education secretary who compounds a bungled project with the language of spin is inviting ridicule when he makes portentous statements about the English of the KJV.

I do it my way

It's open season for prepositions in the newsrooms, it seems. Traffic reports on Radio Lancashire now suggest that we look to the roads, not at 'em. It could have been the sort of slip-up that anybody could make on air, I thought, until the lady said 'And now let's look to the trains.' Yes, indeed, let us look to the roads and the railways. They should certainly be treated with circumspection, being much in need of attention.

This was hard on the heels of an expert on something-or-other on Radio 3, a few minutes earlier. The 'coup de gras', he said, confusing his paté de foie with his grace. The 'blow of fat' ? I rather like it.

And there was me, thinking a 'coup de grace' was a lawnmower. You unlearn something every day when the wireless or the telly is on.

Lake Winderlake; Mount Snowmount...

Just a minor point, for news people ignorant of (or should that be 'over'?) the finer points of the language that pays their wages.

The '-mere' suffix in Windermere means 'lake', so 'Lake Windermere' is tautologous. The '-don' in Snowdon means hill, or mount, from Old English, so Mount Snowdon is similarly tautologous.  The suffix '-don' in OE also meant 'valley', which is logical enough if you're standing on your head while admiring Snowdon, or merely looking at it through the winder.

I've taken the pledge, Your Honour

NHS - the No Hope Service

My medical record now shows that I am 5' 6" tall and weigh 13st 11lb, which makes me practically spherical, with a body mass index approaching infinity. Or zero - I never could get my head round reciprocals or metric units. No wonder my BP was up. 152/76, to be precise, systole exactly double diastole, which is handy to remember. I could do with losing a few pounds to bring me back into the appropriate percentile for my age, but I'm borderline. Tum turning into a corporation, but that's genetic. My dad's waist measurement was more than double his inside leg, which made his trousers roughly equilateral triangles in front or rear elevation.

It was my annual check-up at the asthma clinic a couple of days ago. In our village practice you are likely to go in for your check-up perfectly healthy and come out in a hearse, so I give the village practice a wide berth, and attend a branch in the next village, where patients are less likely to be verbally abused by Reception Gorgons under a sign that proclaims that the NHS does not tolerate abuse of its staff by patients, especially those who have still managed to stay alive, despite.

My asthma nurse knows absolutely everything about everything, because she follows a flow-chart on her screen which tells her what questions to ask. A bit like a call centre. If my answers don't fit the pattern they are ignored. In vain have I been saying for years that aftershaves and perfumes are far more likely to trigger severe asthma attacks in susceptible people than cigarette or pipe smoke. Two years ago it took one extremely intelligent nurse to spot an anomaly in my cholesterol readings, and submit a blood sample for analysis. Almost entirely good cholesterol. It's on my medical record. I shouldn't have to remember it - nurses with their faces turned to computer screens should see it, flashing on and off in red.

But that isn't really the point. When I got home from this 'check-up' which would have me on a diet of lettuce and statins in perpetuity I weighed myself. I am my usual 12st 5lb, not 13st 11lb.

I endured a 30-minute lecture from a nurse who can't convert kilograms to pounds.

God forbid that she ever prescribes me a painkiller. It would be a hundredweight of morphine, qid.

PS 3 July


Now have my own sphygmomanometer. Calibrated. BP consistently 138/60. When The Times has finished exposing rum practices in the banking industry and/or Jersey it might like to have a look at our village practice.

A dungarees thing

You can forgive children for not being fully clued-up on such things as geography and countries of the world and language and therefore making boo-boos in their compositions, for a little knowledge is, as the adage reminds us, a dungarees thing.


But we should be less inclined to forgive the writer of the following (who just happens, coincidentally, to be American, a fact hardly worth mentioning) in a best-selling thriller -


"It is so wonderful to make your acquaintance," he said with a faint Swiss accent.


No? Well, think about it.

Easter Sunday, the Pagan Festival

Easter blessings be upon all readers of this blog, and particular blessings on the traffic cop who, on this holiest day in the Christian year, was lurking behind a tree in the church grounds with his speed gun as the congregation – a very large congregation this morning - arrived to celebrate the Resurrection. Try explaining that to the children.

Tell me – do traffic cops and community bobbies ever talk to each other and do a bit of joined-up thinking?