Nil carborundum

I can hardly be alone in finding the automated voice response you get these days from just about any organisation you call as one of the major blood pressure provokers of modern living. When they remind me that the call will be recorded 'for your protection and ours' (who do they think they are kidding?) I just hope the recording starts during the sorry to keep you waiting phase and that they sometimes listen to it afterwards. It's the only chance you get to say what you really think.

Worse even than the 'press one for sales and two for service' type (always ask for sales then sweetly ask to be put through to the right department to save you calling again) are the ones that work on the assumption they can interpret your voice and ask for specific information. They have one of these in a car park in Worcester to rescue those who don't bring enough coins with them. This is on top of the tactic of charging £1.20 an hour, refusing to give change and making you declare your registration number so that you can't pass your remaining time to someone else if you leave early. For those with only paper money they offer the 'quick and easy' option to use your mobile and pay by credit card, with a 20p fine on top of the call charge and parking fee. 

The first few questions were easy: registration, make, colour (of vehicle) and number of hours required. Then the cedit card details, sixteen digits to key in with my phone in one hand, card in the other and glasses in my pocket. By this time a couple had turned up were trying their own luck with the coins. They were also listening in some wonder to my efforts to argue with the automatic voice for I have an obtuse objection to one-sided conversations.

'That number was not accepted. Please try again.'
'I'm paying for this call. How much more of my time are you going to waste?' 
I tried a different card. 'That number is not valid. It did not have enough digits.'
'Of course it didn't you stupid man. I haven't finished entering them yet'. Then I was cut off.

Thinking it was a good thing the voice really was a man's, or I would have been bundled off to the nick on some sex offence charge, I looked around for a Civil Enforcement Officer. This is what they call parking wardens in Worcester these days and of course they are only there when you get back to your car two minutes past the time your ticket expired. Such was the case. In desperation I asked (very politely) the woman who had involuntarily overheard my rant, and who seemed unoffended by it, if she could change a fiver for five ones. Unlike most women in my experience she had other than notes in her purse and equally politely obliged. She is probably dining out on it now.

Editing the editor

A fine row is brewing over Gerald Scarfe's cartoon in the latest Sunday Times. 

The offending drawing depicts the Israeli prime minister cementing what appear to be Palestinains into a wall with the caption 'will cementing peace continue?'. Arms, legs and heads protrude from between the bricks and Mr Netanyahu wields a blood-stained trowel. It's pretty typical Scarfe: a brutal caricature with a message that could easily be understood by a 12 year old, particularly one who knew that Israel had a general election just a few days earlier, which might have come up in his school current affairs lesson, and that Sunday was also Holocaust Memorial day, which might well have come up in his school current affairs lesson. 

A variety of Jewish bodies duly objected and the Sunday Times was reported to the Press Complaints Commission. That much was to be expected. The next step in the story was extraordinary. Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corporation, owner of the Times and Sunday Times, twittered that 'Gerald Scarfe has never reflected the opinions of the Sunday Times . . we owe [a] major apology for [the] grotesque, offensive cartoon'. Later the paper's editor (a new appointment, this was the poor man's first edition in charge), who before Murdoch's intervention had put out a standard defence of the cartoon as fair journalism of the type we should expect from Scarfe and that it was aimed at Netanyahu and the Israeli government rather than the Jewish people, was obliged to apologise profusely to the Jewish lobby and even Scarfe himself apologised for the timing, saying he was unaware that last Sunday was Holocaust memorial day. I confess I had assumed the timing was deliberate. Maybe Israel should not hold its election just before such a meaningful event.

So where now stand the editors of the various organs of the Murdoch press? Murdoch told the Leveson enquiry that he does not interfere in the editorial content of his papers. If so his tweet was hardly a vote of confidence in their judgement. Which will now dare risk the wrath of a man who has a long history of strongly supporting Israel and who is much praised by the Jewish press for his fairness in dealing with its affairs? 

More importantly, where now stands British journalism? Scarfe is well known for his blunt, if rather repetitive, views on war and its consequences and has not varied his approach in years. A political cartoonist is surely employed to raise such concerns, to go against the grain of the paper and of public opinion where he feels it appropriate and absolutely not to kowtow to anyone's sensitivities. His work reflects his own opinion first and anyone else's by coincidence and I find it extraordinary that a newspaper proprietor should think it useful, necessary or pertinent to point this out, or to apologise for a cartoon that, crude and unoriginal though it might have been, was not, as a few have claimed, anti-semitic.

Happily there are two shafts of light in the debate. The Independent is running an online poll asking if its readers think Mr Murdoch should have apologised. When I contributed it was running at 83% No votes. Second, an Israeli journalist, Anshel Pfeffer, has said that the cartoon was 'not anti-semitic by any standard' and that 'Netanyahu's depiction is grossly offensive and unfair, but that is only par for the course for any politician when Scarfe is at his drawing-board'. At least someone understands the basics.

Mind the blue touchpaper

We must cherish the traditional celebrations on November 5th for I fear they will soon be no more. The decision to prosecute Geoffrey Counsell, the organiser of a fireworks display at Taunton Rugby Club in November 2011, with seven charges of manslaughter will, if he is convicted, mean that nobody will dare organise another. For it is claimed that it was the smoke from his display that drifted across the nearby M5 motorway and led to a multiple pile-up of vehicles in which seven people died. The Crown Prosecution Service, which authorised the charges, said with, it seemed to me, some reluctance that there was insufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction of the rugby club and, with rather less reluctance, that no driver would be charged.

The process of neutering such displays is, of course, already well under way. We used to have an excellent evening on our village playing field, always on the 5th regardless of the day of the week it fell on, with a vast bonfire on which much unwanted material such as old beds or matressses was piled during the morning by anyone who could drag it into position. The heat from the blaze was terrific but nobody ever got burned, children waved their sparklers, there was a collection to pay for the fireworks, hot dogs in the village hall and good business in the pub. Now there is a carefully monitored eco-bonfire, tickets are sold at the gate, sparklers are discouraged and a barrier keeps everyone so far from the bonfire that you can't get warm. The crowd gets smaller each year. The front page of the Oldie magazine (www.theoldie.co.uk) summed it up admirably two years ago.

We have resorted to a DIY celebration: no bonfire because trees, both ours and our neighbours', are far too close, but a few fireworks, all the more special for being home-detonated. We have mastered the science of directing the rockets through the gaps in the trees, and this year had a new addition to the arsenal, a brightly coloured box about the size of a melon, marked TNT in garish letters. Oh, the anticipation. The instructions said to retreat to at least 25 metres after lighting the fuse at which, I am happy to say, my grandson, properly brought up in the sceptical tradition, snorted with derision. We watched from five or six yards, which was ample.

I have the impression that manslaughter charges of this type are on the increase. One could argue that this is right in that some shameless operators have been getting away with a lack of proper concern for people's safety for far too long, or that it is an insidious development of the blame and victimhood culture and our reluctance to accept that anything with a bad outcome might simply be an accident. There is often an unsavoury tinge of a desire for revenge in the behaviour of the families of the victims that must make it very difficult for a jury to reach a sound balance in its verdict and I would hate to have to decide where an unforeseeable circumstance, quite reasonably not provided for, ends and gross negligence, rightly to be punished, begins. I am developing a nasty feeling that the more such cases go to prosecution the further the boundary creeps towards assigning blame where it does not properly belong.

Soak the oldies

As an example of illiteracy in the presentation of 'statistics' a recent report by the Intergenerational Foundation would be hard to beat. It was used as the basis for an article in the Times (Think the Unthinkable About the Untouchables) by the paper's political columnist Rachel Sylvester, arguing that older citizens who are well off should be deprived of some of their traditional perks, such as free bus passes and the winter heating allowance, and that governments should summon up the courage to stop being swayed by the fact that most of them use their vote and to tackle this 'final taboo'.

It appears the Intergenerational Foundation (IF from now as I may have a good deal to say about it) has devised an Intergenerational Fairness Index, based on various indicators of, presumably, fairness and that the index is moving relentlessly in a direction that is less fair to the younger generation. This reminded me of the alcohol affordability index that I wrote about some time ago and I was similarly intrigued. My own position as an oldie entitled to a bus pass but not yet to a free TV licence, and very definitely not one of the 'almost 2 million people over 60 in households with assets above £1 million', might not make me a target of the initial attack but these things have a nasty habit of creeping once the initial breach has been made - airport departure tax being a glaring recent example.

So I looked up the IF's report presenting the index and read its 29 pages. Page 1 revealed that the IF is a charity, though it describes itself as a think tank. Oh how I would love to work for a think tank. After the contents list there is an entertaining foreword by one Professor Laurence J Kotlikoff, who asserts that intergenerational inequality is 'the moral issue of our day'. It involves a 'systematic Ponzi scheme' and 'accounting practices that would make Enron blush'. The developed economies have engaged in 'fiscal child abuse and . . . educational, health and environmental child abuse'. The index, it is claimed, makes this clear.

The meat of the report defines (well, describes) 16 measures of intergenerational fairness under nine headings that have been tracked retrospectively for a varying number of years, though with gaps in some cases, and been given a base value of 100 back in 2000. The values for the following years have then been calculated, anything over 100 representing an increase in unfairness. The headings with more than one measure have then been averaged to find a single measure for that heading and the nine headings themselves averaged to arrive at the latest available Index, which is apparently 128 for 2010. 

I found the report worryingly naive in its logic and alarmingly so in its statistics. The young are variously defined, to suit the available data, as under 25, under 29, under 60 in one case, or as the workforce or the employed. The proportion of those aged 25 to 34 voting in general elections, lower than for the population as a whole, is apparently a measure of unfairness. And there was I thinking it was up to them. The level of CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions is presented as a crime against the young when some might argue that the expensive steps being taken to deal with them, which will have minimal effect globally, are what is poisoning the economy and doing rather more harm to the young and their employment prospects.

Happily examination of the final table shows that only two of the measures, government debt and the cost of pension provision, both generally and for the public sector, have a significant effect on the index. Since these are well documented and widely accepted as problems - for all of us, not just the young - the IF index has added little to the debate. Maybe if the young voted in larger numbers, and they outnumber the old even now, they could influence policy in the way the greedy oldies are seen as doing. It seems to be starting to happen in America. 

Rachel Sylvester is of course welcome to advance her views but it is not such a good idea to rely on her readers' blind acceptance that a quoted source of information and research is a sound choice. As for a body such as the IF being a charity, that deserves separate discussion, shortly to be provided.

A gentleman after all?

There has been discussion recently on the Times letters page, most of it feeble in the extreme as is sadly typical these days of the Times letters, of what is a modern definition of a gentleman. When this comes up, as it does from time to time, I cannot think beyond the wonderful Beyond the Fringe sketch about the railway lost property shop advertising 2000 pairs of ‘lost’ corduroy trousers. Jonathan Miller muses about how they came to be lost all at once, imagining a regiment of men detrousering on command at a predetermined point in the journey and marching off bare legged, to the horror of a watching matron in charge of a group of children – ‘turn your faces to the wall dears, while the ‘gentlemen’ walk by’.

The trouble with the sort of definition that Times readers come up with is that it is nearly always pseudo-funny or pretentious, when gentlemanly behaviour is more than anything a matter of good manners and certainly nothing to do with class. I had a supervisor once who might have passed at first meeting but soon revealed his true colours through his inability (it seemed more than a reluctance) to say please or thankyou to waiters or secretaries. (He also claimed to speak French but could not grasp that a feminine noun in French, such as personne remains feminine even when it refers only to males, a dead giveaway if ever there was one.) In fact it was almost a defining feature of British industry up to at least the sixties that senior ranks behaved in this way – the lack of please and thankyou I mean, not the bad French.

Which brings me to Alastair Campbell. I have long regarded him with the utmost distaste and have held it against Tony Blair that he would ever employ such a person. But from the rash of opportunistic memoirs that have appeared recently following Blair’s departure it is clear he moved in polluted waters. For Cherie Blair, in her own most untimely and inappropriate memoirs, made a number of uncomplimentary remarks about Campbell, including the accusation that he once referred to her ‘personal stylist’ Andre Suard as ‘only a fucking hairdresser’. Campbell denies this vehemently with what, if true, is a good working definition of a gentleman in the modern world. He claims ‘there are other direct quotations... which were not accurate, but this is the one I would like to deny, not least since it goes against the rule I have tended to operate most of my life, which is to save my harshest words for colleagues at or above my level within the organisation’. Of course this could just be an obtuse way of placing his boss’s wife in the pecking order of the Downing Street entourage.

Maybe for a final thought we should revert to Jonathan Miller, discussing the meaning of the famous sign that used to be found in train lavatories: gentlemen lift the seat. Was this, he wondered, a new kind of loyal toast, or maybe a latter day definition of a gentleman?

Inauguration of hope

One of the less edifying sights of the political near future will be that of George Brown sucking up to President Barack Obama. The incongruousness of it is staggering. The man who will lead the free world, whose oratory has inspired millions, who embodies the American creed of yes we can and who so far has proved it, is set to be tainted by association with the bullying, dogma ridden, tediously uninspiring co-architect of the party of no you can’t, don’t you dare and let’s not even think about it.
Twelve years of New Labour, its glib pronouncements, its cynical attitude, its bullying of the whole parliamentary process through an unassailable majority, its twisting of the facts, its redefinition of the basis of any measurement of progress or performance so as to present news to its advantage have reduced me to a despairing impotence and obliterated any memory of why I originally wanted the Tories out. And now Brown is going to try to get some of the glamour, the hope, the sheer quality of Barack Obama to rub off on him. It will be like watching a hyena trying to steal the show from an Afghan hound, a vulture trying to soar with the wandering albatross.
When Obama made his now almost definitive race speech I started a piece that I tentatively called ‘if only we had one like that’. And I didn’t mean black, coloured, African-American or whatever the right term is. His race is understandably important to millions of Americans and more millions elsewhere but to me it was irrelevant. I rejoiced because first the speech emphatically removed race as an issue in the primary process but second and mainly because it revealed him as so clearly the best person for the job, demolishing in the process any claim to special consideration that Hillary Clinton, in many ways an entirely worthy candidate, might have had simply for being a woman. For some reason I never finished the piece, absorbed in the arithmetic of the primary race and daring to hope that someone of Obama’s character and quality could go all the way. In November we celebrated with our American friends and today we simply basked in the final confirmation, as one does at a wedding after the build-up following the engagement announcement. His inauguration speech came down a little from the celebration of his acceptance but seemed to me to have just the right tone - I’ll start as I mean to carry on.
And now our papers are full of speculation over if or when we might have a black prime minister. They miss the point. The British system emasculates potentially good politicians and makes it almost impossible for them to achieve high office before any inspiration or originality has been squeezed out of them. The last one to beat the system, for good or ill, was Margaret Thatcher. It’s not a black prime minister that will save us, it’s a good one. When he or she shows up it won’t matter if he is black, white or green so long as he is a citizen, not a politician.

A time to race

Time to hide from the TV or finish that thousand page book you started a year ago, for the Olympics are upon us. Yes, I shall watch a few events - the 1500 metres final is the cream of them, long enough for tactics to be potentially decisive but short enough to maintain the tension. But the dancing and prancing ones, the swimming, in which who is who is distinguishable only before and after the action, and most of the team games (baseball and softball rightly for the last time) I will skip. Of course one has to keep an eye out for a genuine new star and the occasional woman competitor of both skill and beauty, like the Canadian high jumper Debbie Brill of long ago. If there is a new one I hope she has enough skill to make the final so I can get another look.

The Times will be represented by a mixed bag of writers led by its chief sportswriter Simon Barnes. Barnes is a versatile journalist and unusually erudite for a sports specialist, up there with Bernard Darwin and Henry Longhurst. He does a column on wildlife on Saturdays, has written novels and rides horses enthusiastically - he understands the mechanics of the reverse (or is it inverse) canter that is apparently a crucial part of the dressage stage of the three day event. But his main, recurring, theme is what one might call the soul of sport, appreciation of its ultimate meaning, why we do it, why the best practitioners do it to the limits, what it means to win and lose in terms of basic, raw human endeavour and emotion rather than titles and prizes. He does it better than anyone else.

On Tuesday Barnes reported on a ‘gig’ he had attended that was sponsored by Omega (BBC and advertisers of over-hyped cure-all foods and medicines please note that is Omega, not Omega), responsible for timing at the games. Jaques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, was there and obliged to make a speech. Barnes feared a traditional brotherhood of sport spiel and was surprised to hear a philosophical essay about time and its relationship to sport. Neat, appropriate and tactful on Rogge’s part certainly but I felt Barnes, unusually for him, missed the mark in his endorsement and appreciation of the theme.

Time matters in sport, Barnes said, adding quite rightly that bullshit, the staple of nearly all post-event commentary, doesn’t. But I think that much sport is at least independent of time and sometimes distorted by too much emphasis on it. The most exciting races are the ones where two or more great competitors come together to find the winner. The winner’s time is secondary. Coe raced Ovett, not the clock. Roger Bannister may be mainly remembered as the first man to beat the four minute mile but his greatest race was when he beat John Landy, who had stolen his world record in the meantime, passing Landy on the outside of the last bend as Landy looked over the other shoulder to see where he was. Gordon Pirie, by contrast, held all sorts of world records but was consistently beaten in head to head races by athletes with slower personal best times. If we miss seeing a race we ask first who won, not what the time was. Time is a measure of progress in training but decisive only when the nature of the event does not allow head to head competition and this surely is why the winter Olympics are so dull, for almost every event has to be decided by either timing or subjective judging. The drama is gone. In which connection what a good device the Cambridge bump races are. With a river too narrow for side by side racing the crews are not timed but set off at equal distances from each other and succeed or fail according to whether they catch up the boat in front before the end of the course. Good primeval competition with the winner clearly apparent as it happens. That is how it should be.

Outside racing sports time can be crucial in defining the end of hostilities. Basketball matches always seem to be determined in the last few seconds and even in chess players run into time trouble and have to rush their moves. Is there a sport unaffected by time? Bowls perhaps, or snooker and some might say golf, but on this last I disagree. There is now a standard for the time a round should take but I have not had much success to date in bringing it to the notice of my club. Just give me time.

Basic certificate in UK citizenship

Elementary Level

Paper 1: Numeracy, objectivity and healthy scepticism

Q1. (80% of marks) An article in the Times reported that a government survey of drinking had found that alcohol had become 69% more affordable between 1980 and 2008. Discuss.

A. Without further information not given in the question one cannot say whether this loose phraseology is the product of the government’s standard of analysis or the current standard of reporting at the Times.

The obvious first question is: 69% of what? It is a reasonable assumption from the data that an arbitrary definition of alcohol affordability has been postulated and given an initial value, based on data for 1980, of say 100. It would then appear that the corresponding value of the index, recalculated for 2008, is 169, which would indeed be a 69% increase - in the index.

Next, to make a proper objective assessment of the significance, if any, of such a finding we need to know how the affordability is defined. Again, one can only postulate and a reasonable assumption would be that researchers have investigated typical patterns of income and spending in 1980, taking into account the then prevalent wages and salaries for typical occupations, the level of taxes on those wages and salaries and the prices at the time for say a pint of bitter, a bottle of chardonnay or a litre of gin. A measure such as the price of a pint as a proportion of disposable income might then be devised. Or it might be the number of pints that could be bought with a week’s disposable income. And here we immediately hit a common confusion when results of such research are quoted in percentage increases. If alcohol has become cheaper relative to other ‘discretionary’ spending, which is presumably, in qualitative terms, what ‘more affordable’ means, then the first measure will show a reduction in the proportion of disposable income needed to buy a pint. However the second measure will show an increase in the number of pints that the disposable income will buy. Only one of the two will show a change of 69% and the second will be the larger. It is therefore likely, in its efforts to make a case for the restrictive actions that will follow, that the government has chosen the second measure.

To further test the official analysis we also need to know the definition of disposable income – assuming that this is indeed the basis of the ‘affordability’ conclusion. One hopes, though one hardly dares assume, that it starts from a basis of taxed income and that essential spending is then subtracted. What is considered essential? Has this changed between 1980 and 2008? Where does council tax figure in the calculation? What alcohol prices were used in the comparisons – a cheap six-pack of Belgian lager sold as a loss leader in a supermarket or a pint of real bitter in a pub struggling to make a living in the face of the smoking ban without degenerating into a pool hall and food outlet? What sort of typical income was used as the basis – a City banker, a man working as the only breadwinner with two children and a mortgage, a professional man trying to keep up with the increases in school fees and golf club subscriptions, or a pensioner whose council tax takes up an ever larger proportion of his meagre income?

The only conclusion consistent with rigorous analysis is that the government has commissioned a fudge, designed to make us feel guilty and to act as a basis for further taxes on alcohol and restrictions to individual freedom.

Q2. (20% of marks) On the basis of the content and conclusion of the report do you consider legislation to control alcohol affordability and consumption would be justified or workable in a democracy?

A. The history of similar efforts in other democracies and in other areas is not encouraging. The extreme measure of prohibition was enacted in the US and later abandoned after it had spawned a significant extension of criminal activities (as is happening with banned drugs in many countries now) and in the UK the attempt to restrict the flow of discretionary spending on foreign holidays in the 1960s merely accelerated it by giving encouragement to the package holiday industry as a means of reducing the impact of the regulations.

However, since it is a fundamental principle of New Labour that the innocent must be punished along with the guilty, legislation is to be expected. It has already happened with smoking, with the same effect. It is most likely to take the form of hefty tax increases (they need the money anyway), compulsory label information on units of alcohol and endless messages about the health risks as if, as with smoking, any drinker can still be unaware of them. It may also involve moves to control sales to minors or act against irresponsible retailers and publicans. These will merely have the effect of making life more difficult as well as expensive for the responsible drinker or the person who simply appreciates a good pint.

A good week for democracy

And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?

Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

He chortled in his joy.

Chortling was not enough. I yelled with joy and bounced up and down in my chair, probably wrecking the springs. It took me several minutes to calm down. I am still glowing with delight, as if I had just broken 80 (again, I might add).

The Jabberwock is an apt allegory for the EU, conveying the right degree of doom combined with something weird, unreal, incomprehensible and frightening. I was in Ireland all last week as the final stages of the referendum campaign unfolded, complete with the by then merciful moratorium on any comment about it for the final 24 hours before voting. There were various arguments from the No camp, supported only by Sinn Fein of the main political parties, some valid, some rather spurious but a recurring theme was that voters should not vote for something they don’t understand. The government, which spent far more taxpayers’ money on campaigning for a Yes vote than the privately funded No campaign needed to make its successful case, happily contributed to this by issuing every household a copy, or presumably a précis, of the treaty text. Gunshots and bleeding feet come to mind. The treaty is as impenetrable as a Salman Rushdie novel. It takes over 67,000 words to make its dubious points. The US Constitution, including amendments, needs only 8,000 and can be understood by just about anyone. The Irish on the whole use our priceless language better than we do and have rightly objected to this insult to their common sense and values, in effect saying that if there is a good case to be made why can it not be more clearly explained? In other words, what is the government trying to hide? They even promised under pressure to use the Irish veto at the World Trade Organisation to prevent any agricultural deal that would be ‘bad for the farmers’. The farmers’ leaders seemed happy with this fudge but I heard nobody ask whether they would ask the farmers each time whether they wanted the veto used or not. This ‘trust us, we know best’ attitude is typical of most governments and in spades of the EU itself but it seems not to have fooled the Irish farmers.

On the evening news the BBC treated it a bit like a surprise result in the Euro 2008 football: not in keeping with the form book, now what happens next? Channel 4 gave us an interview with a remarkable politician I have not come across before. Gisela Stuart is the German-born Labour MP for Edgbaston, a drafter of the EU constitution, wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph criticising Gordon Brown for denying us a referendum and understands democracy - a lot of contradictions there. She is also articulate and is willing to give a straight answer to a simple question. Asked whether the treaty is now dead she said yes. Asked whether the EU has a problem with the ballot box she said yes. She berated the EU president for saying everything will still go ahead even before the official result was announced and said he is in denial. Right every time Gisela. The way in which other countries like France and Germany have jumped in to belittle the problem they now have and by implication blame Ireland is disgraceful.

All this will perhaps give Gordon Brown something else to think about as he tries to stop us noticing that he only got his 42 day detention bill through the Commons with the help of nine DUP votes and Ann Widdecome and to kid us that no deals were done in exchange. The resignation of David Davis may have confused David Cameron a bit but he’ll work it out in the end. Brown’s efforts to belittle it are hypocrisy. He firstly knows that Davis will campaign not just on the 42 day issue but on all the areas in which this government has eroded our rights and freedoms and does not relish the embarrassment this will cause and secondly he simply does not understand anyone who could do out of principle something that could harm his career prospects and will have no idea how to conduct the debate. More fun to come there with any luck. I don’t think Labour in general or Brown in particular will be crowing about this for long. The only Labour politician to come out of the 42 day business with any credit is Jacqui Smith and this despite, not because of, being in charge of the department sponsoring it. Matthew d’Ancona, after interviewing her for the Spectator, wrote ‘English, female, articulate, a human being: suddenly Labour MPs are taking a very close look indeed at their Home Secretary’. I thought the order of his adjectives interesting and significant.

Boris to the rescue

The most cheerful week in politics since David Cameron, at his first prime minister’s questions, wrongfooted Tony Blair by offering Tory help to get his education bill passed. It started with the miserable Gordon having to admit he had gone badly wrong in removing the 10p tax band, something he did out of over confidence and vanity and that was exposed within minutes as a fraud that his successor as chancellor would be unlikely to thank him for. It continued with the local elections offering up such delights as a Tory council in Kingston upon Hull. It was so bad for Labour that even their spin doctors could find no way of putting a gloss on it.

Then very late on Friday came the best bit. A properly contested mayoral election in London was overdue and a novelty. This was real American-style politics: two candidates, neither really a mainstream politician, outside the control of their parties though strongly backed by them, slugging it out for a high profile job that is very much what the holder makes of it. It was certainly Ken Livingstone’s true metier and I feel sure it will prove Johnson’s too. Long seen as a loose cannon in national politics and as something of a buffoon in public life in general he, like his predecessor, leaves few people neutral in their opinion of him. As a result we were treated to a campaign in which the characters of the candidates had as much influence on voters as their policies and certainly more than the party labels attached to them and this is as it should be. In such a contest Livingston was a loser from the start against a man quite unembarrassed, and largely unhurt, by various public gaffes and a very competent and entertaining TV performer. The turnout was a third higher than four years ago and it was probably this, if the extra voters consisted, as I expect, of Tories who had had no faith in previous candidates their party had endorsed, that swung it. Was it another case of the power of hope in politics, the appeal to the disillusioned and apathetic to help reverse a spiral of cronyism and mediocrity? Was that why the FTSE index suddenly went up 128 points after barely moving all week?

There is a sense that the cavalry has arrived and now Boris has to deliver. One good sign is that he has made a priority of cutting ‘so-called minor’ crime, particularly on public transport and has made his wishes clear to Sir Ian Blair, the chief of the Metropolitan Police. This is welcome both as an aim and because while he has no direct authority over Blair he is apparently prepared to make life difficult for the Home Secretary, who does, if Blair does not respond. Since Blair sometimes gives the impression of seeing himself more as a politician than a policeman this could be fun.

All in all a good week. London will be a more cheerful place from today and I think England will be too.

Must write to the Times about it

Don’t bother. It won’t get published unless a) you are an MP, bishop or one of the remaining peers with access to the House of Lords, b) you are exercising what amounts to a right of reply on behalf of an organisation that has been offended, whether justifiably or not, by an article or another letter or c) you have a singularly unoriginal contribution to make to some ‘educated classes’ discussion on unwelcome Americanisms or alternatives to the cuckoo as the first sign of spring and the bottom right hand corner is short of even these makeweights.

I suppose a hundred years ago writers of letters to the Times were mostly known to each other and were using its pages almost like groups of a like mind use blogs today. They would write from the Athenaeum or even the Albermarle in the knowledge that by the time the next day’s pre-luncheon whisky came round (the post was quick enough in those days not to need email) their views would be known to everyone that mattered. The letters editor needed only a copy of Debrett or Burke to decide who to leave out and could probably rely on the subject matter being confined to hunting, military strategy and the iniquity of any kind of social reform.

If I ran the paper I would instruct the letters editor that first of all he would see no letter until a minion had separated its text from its writer’s name and address, leaving only a reference number to enable the two halves to be reunited in the event of publication. He would then judge the texts on merit, topicality and originality alone. The trouble is the present incumbent (is that a tautology? – answer no when incumbent is used as a noun, I’ve just looked it up) either has little good material to work with or is in thrall to categories a, b and c above. I do my best to supply him (sorry, him/her) with appropriate topical, pithy missives but with no recognition to date. Meanwhile the most awful drivel continues to get published, particularly under heading c. I sometimes wonder if the letters go via the BBC first.

My most recent efforts were first to suggest that we should adopt a national oath of allegiance before one is foisted on us by the EU (too subversive I suppose) and then to point out that Roy Hattersley had misinterpreted Chesterton’s poem The Secret People by suggesting that the reason the English have not yet roused themselves and made themselves heard was because of their innate English reserve and modesty. I said that the real reason is that we are slow to come to the boil but the time might be coming near. Hattersley’s craven effort was in an article for which he was presumably paid, adding to my ire.

However one man hit the jackpot recently, a reverend whose letter about how certain Muslim countries prohibit the import of Christian material was printed on successive days. He deserved it. I expect him to make bishop any day.

The ten commandments of New Labour

And the Lord spake unto the children of Britain and said:

1. We are the God that is New Labour, which brought you out of the house of the Tories, out of the land of sleaze. You shall have no other God before New Labour.
2. You shall have no idols but the National Health Service and shall not worship at the altars of any other form of healing, for New Labour is a jealous God and will visit the sins of the unfaithful onto their children even unto the third and fourth generation of those who express self reliance, independence or initiative.
3. You shall not take the names of New Labour nor the National Health Service in vain, nor mock them nor criticise them nor hold them to be in any way less than perfect, for New Labour will not hold them guiltless that take the name of New Labour and its munificence in vain.
4. You shall keep holy the appointed day of May in honour and celebration of the heroes of the class struggle and comprehensive mixed ability education. You shall not propose nor observe any other festive days unless in like manner of honour and celebration and shall be damned with cardinal sin if you espouse any holiday or celebration that is or might be construed to be a triumphalist anniversary of any military excess such as the battles of Agincourt or Trafalgar or the commanders of the imperialist forces involved.
5. You shall honour the father and mother of New Labour, the blessed Tony and Gordon of sacred memory, that your days may long continue in receipt of the blessings of the National Health Service and the ten pound winter festive season bonus.
6. You shall not kill any fox nor other mammal unless by humane methods and without pursuit by dogs.
7. You shall not adulterate New Labour beliefs with visions of individual choice or liberty or freedom to mock or criticise those of unusual habits or behaviour. You must nevertheless accept with a pure heart and closed mind whatever indignities or injustice might be wrought against you by such bodies and tribes as have been given licence by equality, human rights or health and safety legislation.
8. You shall where beneficial to New Labour steal from dissenting parties such policies and initiatives as may be likely to win votes. You shall not take political donations from the faithful but shall disguise them as a loan.
9. You shall not bear witness against New Labour nor succour nor encourage those who seek to expose or criticise New Labour, lest you find yourself banished to the regions of outer darkness and the damnation of your employment prospects.
10. You shall not covet your neighbour’s disability allowance, nor his place in the queue for a hip replacement, nor his public service pension, nor his carbon footprint, nor his seat on the board of a quango, nor his grace and favour residence, nor his free holidays, nor his lecture tours, nor his second Jaguar nor anything that is his.

These are the commandments of New Labour said the Lord: observe ye them and avoid the sins of the Devil, being smoking, drinking, eating and the burning of fossil fuels, and New Labour will provide all your third-worldly needs through the miracles of wind power and colour coded food labelling.

It may be art but . . .

I am not a great reader. It stems from a very low boredom threshold. If my attention is not captured after a few pages, a chapter at most, the book is unlikely to be finished. This trait (the second t is pronounced in English) first came to light at school where I was required to take on Great Expectations, which some claim is the best of Dickens’s novels. Since I was under orders and it was a set text I struggled on for all of 125 pages before I dug in my heels and asked for a different task. To his eternal credit the head of English, who later appeared in advertisements for the teaching profession under the slogan ‘the last man to answer all Jeremy Paxman’s questions’, allowed me to work on a biography of Sir Isaac Newton instead. Newton is far more interesting than Dickens.

Despite this the walls of our house, those not lined with M’s pictures of boats, are lined with books. Many I have had for forty years or more and have read more than once. They are a varied collection because I read for fun, entertainment and information. The literary editor of the Times, which last week published a list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945, and his team seem to read for erudition, social awareness, ethnic solidarity and as participation in an art form. Many readers will have measured their own erudition by going through the list to see how many were familiar to them. I did too and failed, scoring as follows: heard of (meaning I could as a minimum identify the person as a writer), 25; read some of (at least a few chapters and not counting S Rushdie, who comfortably failed the first page test), about 7 or 8; finished a book by, 6. As some consolation these, Roald Dahl (16), Ian Fleming (14), Kingsley Amis (9), George Orwell (2), C S Lewis (11) and Anthony Powell (20) were all in the top end of the list and I bet the last one surprised you. The only one I felt I should have read and have not was John le Carre.

My own list would be based on different criteria from those of the Times, which chose style, influence, longevity and sales, though I felt some had a fair way to go yet to qualify under longevity, several quoted novels having been published only in this century. I would choose a combination of quality of writing (different, I suspect, from what the Times meant by style) and entertainment value. Clearly Orwell got his second place for influence and longevity for his style is hardly racy. He earns his place in my view for his essays on ‘Politics and the English language’ and ‘The prevention of literature’ more than 1984 or Animal Farm. In the first essay he lays out his six rules for clear, unpretentious writing, ignored by or unknown to some of the fifty, who get praised for being genre-crossing or infused with transforming power, displaying consistent integrity and so on. Spare us. If you see the novel as an art form you suffer the same delusion as the French cinema industry.

Published authors displaying both quality of writing and entertainment value are fewer than the number of published, accepted and often praised authors. My list would contain several writers who would receive no consideration from the literary editor’s team because they trade in some lowly, despised genre. We can start, because he is fresh in my mind, with George Macdonald Fraser who died a few days ago with the chronicles of the entertainingly despicable Flashman sadly unfinished. Fraser’s narrative touch was sometimes reminiscent of P G Wodehouse, than which there is no higher praise. To combine this with serious military history was brilliant. To Fraser, without implying an order of merit, I would add: Leslie Thomas, for being able to bring true life pathos to a good bawdy tale; Tom Sharpe, for fiendishly wicked angles on the targets of his satire; Roger Woddis, for showing that poetry can still rhyme and scan; Frederick Forsyth (first three books only), Len Deighton, and Bernard Levin, if only for The Pendulum Years (well they said writers, not novelists). My shelves also house William Cooper, Nigel Balchin, E F Benson ( I’ve never read any but M loves them, keeping me awake at night with her cackling), John Wyndham, David Lodge, Nicholas Monsarrat (no, not The Cruel Sea, The Nylon Pirates) and Adrian Mole. Even Nevil Shute, whom the Thunderer would despise utterly but who could tell a good tale better than most and was one of few who even mentioned real flying, let alone understood it. Not an airport novel or bonkbuster in the list - is the Times saying I am not well read?

Browsing, I came across the appropriate summing up quite by accident in the words of the Master – of the entire twentieth century and since, never mind the puny post-1945 lot: ‘. . . she wrote this novel and it was well received by the intelligentsia, who notoriously enjoy the most frightful bilge’. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

The lights are going out, except in France

I remember a newspaper cartoon from the fifties or sixties. It showed a group of emaciated people huddled around a fire at the mouth of a cave, while in the background could be seen the crumbling remains of a city, its idle factories with smokeless chimneys and broken windows. The group is dressed in animal skins, primitive tools lie around and the oldest of them explains: ‘well, first they shut down all the nuclear power stations’.

The eternal and increasingly tedious energy debate comes down in the end to electricity. We need enough electricity, always available, at a reasonable price, to fuel our industry, commerce, health, hobbies and leisure. The debate should be about how to supply this now and in the short, medium and long term without unacceptable harm to the planet. In fact it is less a debate than a lecture from the pious, self-righteous evangelistic green lobby.

For the eco-fanatics look only at the second part of the problem: any harm to the planet is unacceptable. Yet their solutions will not keep the lights on in the short term, never mind in twenty years time. I submit that one of the fundamental duties of a government, after national security and a sound currency, is to keep the turbines running – enough turbines. Demand for electricity can only rise as the population and aspirations for a better standard of living increase. If generating capacity does not increase to match it we will have the same problems as have been seen recently in California and South Africa. China seems determined not to suffer, but at the cost of building a new coal fired power station every month or so – provide the power, forget the planet and lock up the yoghurt knitters. In Britain, we have a rapidly growing population, are running down the nuclear sector, which provides 19% of the power, and any new conventional power station, let alone a nuclear one, is vigorously resisted by the environment lobby. ‘Renewables’ – a silly name, we’re looking for inexhaustibles – are simply not being installed fast enough to cope and suffer from some existing problems, such as transmission losses between remote offshore wind or wave farms and population centres, and some new ones such as not knowing when the wind will blow. On top of that we already import electricity from France, nuclear generated of course. No doubt the French would be glad to cut off the supply next time we breach their diplomatic sensitivities or their farmers are offended by the import of some decent lamb. Or maybe just when they need it all themselves.

I resume, following a coincidental but timely boost to my argument in the shape of a power failure. On a mild, calm, dry day the voltage was abruptly reduced and anything sensitive to it stopped for an hour or so. This is common where we live, being as much as ten miles from a cathedral city and barely within spitting distance of a trunk road. We know exactly where to find a torch and my wife has an ample supply of candles and matches always on hand. A small generator, just enough for the central heating, sits in the garage (a false sense of security this one, being powered by the only Honda engine I know that absolutely will not start).

Yet the government, despite its announcement yesterday, has no clear plan. It is almost too late, even if the objectors were summarily overridden, to get enough new nuclear capacity going in time; wind and wave power comes in small increments and will not keep up; trying to blame the consumer with the tale that 8% of power goes on appliances on standby (a figure I simply do not believe) and urging him to change his habits is pointless. The price alone is enough to make us take all reasonable economies. The gas that fuels many of the power stations will one day have to come from Russia and if I joke about the French cutting us off I do not joke about the Russians – it has already happened. To fail to provide for self sufficiency in electricity is traitorously irresponsible. It cannot be left to committees, focus groups and blinkered special interests. It needs executive action, untainted by electoral considerations. Without it we shall before long find ourselves with an electricity supply that is as reliable and predictable as rainfall in the Australian bush.

Smoke and mirrors

As a regular visitor to Ireland I have been delighted with the no smoking laws that were introduced a few years ago. One can eat and drink in clean air and go home with clean clothes, with the further advantage (yes advantage) that my wife will now come with me to the pub, for she is happy to drive me home, having been put off in the past, and in England, by being even more sensitive to the smell than I am. There was the quaint quirk of being allowed to smoke on the boat only until it entered Irish territorial waters.

Now, from a Sunday morning a few months ago (at 6am to avoid confusing Saturday night owls), the same rules apply in England, the last country in the Union to introduce them. And I find myself with mixed feelings. It comes down to the old problem of the English way of doing things. We seem constitutionally incapable of finding a middle ground, of agreeing to differ, and most of all of trusting anyone to use their common sense. So now every workplace and public building that is deemed an enclosed place must prohibit smoking and eject those who dare to. The definition of enclosed space has been tightly and comprehensively drawn, including company cars (unless a soft top with the roof down), private cars on company business (a workplace), bus shelters that have sides and even the vast expanse of King’s Cross station. I understand that the Millenium Stadium in Cardiff is also covered when the roof is closed, if you follow me. A further twist became apparent the other day when I attended a dinner at which the loyal toast was proposed but without the traditional addendum.

As an aside, the law has led to a new word, smokefree, entering the English language. It will not be going into my personal spell checker additions any more than will its cousin freefrom, that one now sees labelling the aisles of supermarkets.

One might have thought that a universal ban like this would need to be stated once, with a few reminders perhaps at its inception and would then become part of the public’s background knowledge, like driving on the left or not looking for gas leaks with a naked light. Children would learn about it at their mother’s knee (smoking allowed so long as the instruction took place in a private house) and be fully conversant with the rules by the age of five or so. But no, under New Labour you cannot tell people something only once – they would have been useless in occupied France – and every building, even churches, must now have a prominent notice at each entrance and more indoors. One result is a rash of ugly home made signs, run up on an inkjet printer and crudely laminated to protect them from the rain and fixed to doorposts with a drawing pin. Our pub has one such while inside there are no longer ashtrays in which to put one’s empty crisp or nut packets. This pub has few customers and a landlord who smokes heavily, giving me my only laugh in relation to the ban when I passed by and saw him standing outside having a quiet puff safe in the knowledge that he was unlikely to be keeping a customer from his pint.

The new rules are not there to discourage smokers, whatever the do-gooders may say. No smoker, except perhaps a deaf, blind, illiterate hermit, can possibly be in any doubt that smoking is likely to damage his health. Those who want to smoke will, if perhaps to a lesser extent by reason of reduced opportunity. This is easily demonstrated just outside the main entrance to our local hospital, where the in-patients gather in their dressing gowns, some still attached to their drips, for a restorative drag away from the haunt of the superbug. The authorities have had to move them on, like loitering hoodies in the towns, to enable visitors to get inside unpolluted.

The rules are ostensibly to reduce ‘passive’ smoking, a term coined as a handy shorthand for inhaling other people’s smoke, the risks of which have been much debated even if its unpleasantness is accepted. Since non-smokers cannot be in any less doubt than smokers of the dangers of the noxious weed it follows that, at least for adults in pubs, passive smoking is a largely voluntary activity endured as an accepted risk. Am I being inconsistent in being still firmly with those who would like to be able to visit a smoke free pub and fully supporting workers’ desire, now made a right, for a smoke free workplace while objecting to the draconian, clumsy and bossy way it has been implemented? If not, what is different in Ireland? I think the answer is in the bossiness. While waiting for a bus at Heathrow recently I noticed a no smoking sign (not just a reminder sign but an edict, with text) in the bus shelter. This structure had a roof and one side. The other side and both ends were open. Did it really need to be a non smoking area? In a much more sinister example a Virgin flight to the Caribbean recently was returned to Heathrow after an hour and a half in the air because someone had been detected smoking in a lavatory. Who paid for the wasted fuel and extra landing fee? Could the offender not have been left to the mercy of the local authorities on landing? Or simply locked in?

So once again we are being protected from ourselves, a true hallmark of New Labour. No decision too small that it can’t be taken for us and none of us with enough common sense or initiative that we can be spared the how as well as the what and the why.

Bisques to the fore!

Golf is often cited as a game that enables players of widely different abilities to compete realistically and with broadly equal chances of winning. With every player having a personal handicap rating, based on his form and record against the theoretically perfect scratch score, someone playing off 18 could have a meaningful game with the amateur champion, who might be off plus 4, with no adjustment to the rules (illegal in golf anyway), by being in receipt of 22 strokes. The outcome would not be a foregone conclusion. Such a match would be impossible at, for instance, tennis where the good player would win almost every point unless truly handicapped, such as by having to play left handed, or in diving boots.

In everyday club golf a match between two unequal players requires the better player to give the lesser one a number of strokes equal to the difference in handicaps. This is at least an improvement on the arrangement of a few years ago which gave the lesser player only three quarters of the difference. However the strokes have to be taken at the holes specified on the card. Which holes get which stroke index is decided by the committee, under recommendations from the national golf union. Anyone who has played under this system will have noticed that two things happen in most matches: you have a stroke at a certain hole but go out of bounds and lose the hole by two strokes; or your opponent goes out of bounds and you win the hole without needing the stroke. In either case the stroke is wasted and cannot be used elsewhere. The advantage is always with the better player. Why should the committee decide which holes you get your strokes at? There must be a better way.

There is. It is so simple that I cannot understand why it is not used. You simply take your strokes when you need them. They are called bisques. I believe this is originally a device used in croquet but its adaptation to golf has been long recognised, not least by Bernard Darwin who wrote on the tactics of bisques many years ago in Tee Shots and Others. Contrary to the practice at my club on the rare occasions bisques are used, you do not have to announce your intention to claim the stroke on the tee. This would be little different from the arbitrary allocation according to stroke index. The stroke is taken after the result of the hole is known and must be claimed before leaving the green and you can, if the match has reached a critical stage or you have been too mean or too proud in using your bisques thus far, claim more than one at a time.

Clearly a stroke when you need it is a more powerful weapon than one arbitrarily allocated according to where you are on the course, so it can be argued that the higher handicap player does not need so many of them. In medal play you have to finish each hole and may have to use up some of your handicap allowance on an eight or a nine. In match play you would not normally expend bisques on mitigating such disasters. So I would settle for three quarters of the difference in bisques and would happily offer an opponent the choice between that and the usual arrangement, whether I was giving or receiving the strokes.

A mischievous variation on the bisque is the half bisque (also used in croquet, where you may take the free hit but not use it to score a point). A half bisque may be used to claim a hole that has been halved but they may not be added together, so to use half bisques effectively the higher handicap player must be able to halve a good number of holes on level terms. Bernard Darwin enthused over the tactical possibilities of this one but had only vague ideas on how many half bisques to allow. It needs experiment and statistical data and I challenge enterprising golfers to try it and report the results.

What do we do to deserve these refs?

To the pub in the next village to watch the world cup final. Ours would probably have soccer on and about three people watching. I predicted about a year ago that South Africa would win, thinking then that England would be nowhere and not foreseeing how we would help them by eliminating Australia. That evening, with both Wallabies and All Blacks going out to less fancied sides, will remain one of the sporting godsends of my life.

I have no England shirt so wear a short sleeved red one above a long sleeved white one – the message should be clear. Can’t decide whether to sit in the posh bar with the hooray Henries or the public one with the real people but there is a seat in the posh one so that decides it. Everyone stands for a rousing rendition of the national anthem. I find myself next to a girl in an England shirt with a boyfriend in a South African one. He knows all the rules and evidently has remarkable eyesight – every England infringement instantly spotted and explained. In the interval I ask him where he is from. ‘Pritoria, South Ifrica’, he says. The South Africa part I had guessed.

The first half is close, England trailing because of a couple of silly penalties. At the start of the second we make a super break and score near the left hand corner, a good yard in from touch. A conversion would give us the lead 10-9 and anything could happen. Then the Franco-Irish ref, inappropriately English-French bilingual on this occasion, decides to refer it to the television official. This is an overworked option that should be resisted. It was clearly a try that should have been awarded without hesitation and would have been until the new technology came in. The television official now has the job of trying to find a reason not to award it because either a) he would be out of a job if he gave it or b) the endless replays that would follow and that might suggest he should have denied it would discredit him. There was nothing in the replays that proved Cueto was in touch before the ball was grounded. It was morally a try whatever the technicalities and should never have been referred. This is slavery to the technology. It happens because tacklers seem to have been trained to try to drag the try scorer’s feet into touch as an easier option than tackling him properly. If this goes on wingers will have to be trained to raise their feet as they dive for the line, and if they catch the tackler in the face, so much the better.

I find myself with a depressing sense of déjà vu. In 2003 we had to contend with a ref who kept finding reasons to drag a clearly winning side back with strange calls for scrum infringements against a scrum that were clearly on top. I have heard allegations that he was on a bonus, presumably from the television company, to extend the game into extra time and an even bigger one to take it to a penalty shoot-out. Now we have to contend with a man who had not the moral courage to take a big decision in a close game.

On then to the end and a 15-10 win for South Africa that will go down in the books as 15-6. I have no complaint with the result and am proud that England made it to the final and erased the memory of the 36-0 whitewash. We gave them a good game, lineouts apart, and made them work for it and should be able to go on from there. The team should get the same reception on coming home as they did in 2003, though they will presumably arrive on a French train instead of a BA jumbo. The whole tournament was a huge success, with a side beaten in the pool games reaching the final for the first time and Argentina for me the team of the tournament. The only bad taste is New Zealand apparently trying to renege on the deal to hold a 20 nation tournament in 2011 and reduce it to 16. If they persist with that it should be taken away from them and given to Japan.

So to the presentations and for some reason my evening was most spoiled by the sight of our prime minister in the lineup of dignitaries congratulating the teams. He probably thought it was Britain that had lost.

A quick no-hard-feelings chat with the South African supporter and then I spotted his girlfriend taking off her England shirt to reveal a Springbok one underneath. Ann Boleyn was beheaded for less.

Shower of Scotland

The Scotland vs. New Zealand match last Sunday, part of the rugby world cup, was an occasion to miss by all accounts.

The host nation for the competition is France, a major rugby playing country with ample good stadiums. So why was the match played at Murrayfield? Two pool match were also played in Cardiff, as will be one of the quarter finals. This deal was clearly arrived at as part of ‘negotiation’ to obtain host status for France. This is a disgrace and has been made worse by giving, or selling, the 2011 world cup to New Zealand when it should have gone to Japan. Playing matches outside the host country spoils the homogeneity of the competition and is an unreasonable inconvenience and expense to the teams and fans of the countries that have to go there and play what amounts to a home match for their opponents.

Having arrived at Murrayfield there was the problem of what each team should wear, the dark blue and black of the primary ‘strips’ (stupid word) being too similar. Normally in such cases it is a courtesy to the visiting team to allow them to use their own colours and for the home side to choose some other clearly different colour. This is often white, presumably because it is clearly distinguishable from most others and is readily available – I imagine most teams have a white strip in stock for training purposes. Here I speculate but I bet that the Scots would not wear white because it is England’s colour and did not want to observe the usual courtesies because it was not a home game, being played in ‘virtual France’. So the two sides turned out in outfits that were muddled variations on their standard colours and remarkably similar to each other. Whether this confusion contributed to an unusually large number of handling errors on the part of the less than All Blacks has been debated by several reporters. Maybe that dirge of an anthem got to them.

Finally Scotland put out their second team so as to rest the first team for the crucial match with Italy that was always going to decide the second place in the softest pool in the competition. At least that one is being played in France.

There are at last some signs that rugby is developing outside the tri-nations and the original five nations groups and with England clearly a basket case for the moment I am supporting anyone from outside those groups, with France as the only northern hemisphere country with a hope of winning, as the exception. So away with my natural support for England and Ireland and let’s see Argentina, Tonga, Fiji and Italy in the last eight. For the final, at least Australia and New Zealand can’t both get there, leaving a great opportunity open for South Africa.

The equation of life

I have long seen the only problem with retirement as being able to afford it. All that time to do what you want must not be constrained by lack of money to get on with it. Sadly, in Britain the state treats all retired people as incipient spongers itching to soak up what little tax revenue the NHS has left for other purposes. You are not allowed to cash in your pension pot except in miserable slices dictated by the prevailing annuity rates and when you reach 75 you are compelled to hand it all over to an insurance company in return for an annuity at a rate that in any half way robust economy will pay out little more than the annual return on the capital, thus leaving said insurance company with a handy lump sum for themselves when you die.

For those of modest means, that is excluding people with golden handshakes in seven figures and most public sector employees, this means that a reasonable standard of living can be maintained only by eating into one’s capital. Capital in this context is very much liquid assets and not one’s house, since you still need somewhere to live. First you have to warn your children that you are unlikely to leave them anything of value other than the house and second you have to work out how long you can survive, financially rather than biologically speaking. To quantify this I have drawn up the Equation of Life.

The equation is a simple one. It is

Y = (C + D)/ P

where C is current capital, cash in the bank, ISAs or funds you are free to liquidate (therefore not your pension pot), D is what could be added to C by ‘downsizing’ your house and P is the amount per year by which you overspend your pension and any other income. Y then gives the number of years you can afford to live at your present rate of extravagance. I call this the FLE or Financial Life Expectancy. Of course if your P is zero or trivial you can afford to live for ever and have no problem, to which I would say either get a life and take up some expensive hobby or think about who or what else could benefit from your surplus. The worst possible thing to do would be to leave it to be taxed at 40% and have the government fritter it away on health and safety police and new road signs.

I have just worked it out. I half expected the answer to be 42 but no such luck – a mere 28. Since this would allow me to carry on until I reach 96 it doesn’t sound too bad. But one must beware of the variables. P can change even if your spending doesn’t – either because of inflation (there should be a separate measure of inflation for the retired, reflecting their different necessities and priorities and used to revise the state pension; council tax would feature more heavily than in the standard calculation) or, if you have a drawdown pension, because of the performance of the stock market and changes in annuity rates. D depends on timing, the state of the housing market and how far you are prepared to reduce the amount and quality of space you live in. Then there is the effect of once off capital expenditure, like replacing your car. In this light the new kitchen SWMBO wants has its cost not in cash but in years off our lives.

Here perhaps we have the makings of a new victim class for those whose medical life expectancy exceeds their FLE. We need government recognition of the problem, followed by action - though sinister thoughts creep in when one contemplates which end of the problem action might be taken on.

Life is full of disappointments

I mentioned once before that the Irish have started to show signs of betraying their traditionally admirable attitude to life and its stuffier aspects. One such is the building of a golf course on the spit of land leading up to the Old Head of Kinsale. You used to be able to walk (or drive for that matter, but I preferred to walk) along the path to the lighthouse unhindered, admire the view and reflect on the events of May 1915 when the Cunard liner Luisitania was torpedoed off the head and sank within 18 minutes with the loss of nearly 1200 lives. In 1997 a golf course was built here and despite claims that the planning permission guaranteed continuing public access you can no longer enjoy the walk. A somewhat belligerent notice at the entrance points out that the claim has been tested in court and dismissed. Since the lighthouse is unmanned it seems that the only people to get past the gate now are the golfers, the club staff and the man who goes to change the bulb from time to time. As a golfer I mostly welcome the expansion of the game, but not the modern resort clubs at a thousand euro a group for players arriving by helicopter. And this in Ireland, where there are probably more good courses per head of population even than in Scotland.

Meanwhile in Kinsale itself, known without complete justification as the gourmet capital of the south coast, I have been having a long fantasy ‘relationship’, as they coyly say these days, with the tall, blonde, slender, charming, delightfully Irish patronne of the classiest coffee bar cum bistro in town. On my latest visit I noticed that she was wearing a t-shirt with the logo of the Old Head Golf Club on one sleeve and asked if she played there. No, she said, she walked there. To my surprise that she was able to she revealed the devastating news: ‘my boyfriend is the manager’.