[sos] send in the women

The three greatest difficulties coming back from an apartment repairs hiatus are:

1] You're skint;

2] You get dragged back into a day job situation - speeches and documents banked up to work through whilst the plumber is still there sawing pipes in half in the other room and at the same time you're still in this sort of strange, unsettled mood;

3] You get dragged into a Second Life Blogpower party, dancing till 04:00 with the twinkle-toed Welshcakes Limoncello and later catching three hours sleep like a 20s something.

4] Your hands are shaking so much you can't type this.

On the other hand, repairing the flat has its plusses:

1] You get to create a giant dance floor right in your main room which once was clogged with all sorts of bric-a-brac;

2] You now feel confident that when the lady arrives that you can take down the Danger sign from the loo and feel confident that no creepy crawlies are going to leap out at her and bite her b.

There's nothing quite like the confidence a clean loo and bathroom can give you - it sort of starts the evening off right.

And so to the party. As a late interloper, I finally found out what the Blogmeister Last Ditch Writer has been up to these last few weeks - he's been entertaining all and sundry, the suave smoothy.

It was nearly sickening to see my chat up lines fall flat when he just had to whisper in the ear of a total honey like, say, Anais: "Are you interested in sculpture? I have a particularly fine specimen on my spaceport balcony. Have you seen the rest of my property?"

They stroll off onto said balcony.

So I'm feverishly writing his lines down to use on my own visitor in First Life and though my newly cleared balcony pales by comparison, still, it is a large balcony and it does overlook the city from the 10th floor and it does offer possibilities.

If you want to get some idea of the vista, go to Wolfie's site and glance at his header.

Now to the crux of the matter. With Welshcakes playing hard to get, Ruthie nowhere to be seen and Anais being chatted up by Tom, well:

Ladies, we need you. Apart from the aforementioned, we need:

# Bel is thinking

# Ellee Seymour

# Finding life hard?

# Heather Yaxley - Greenbanana

# Morag The Mindbender

# Ruthie Zaftig

# Lady Macleod

# Mutter&Meanderings

# Nobody Important

So ladies - you know what you have to do. Sign in to Second Life here, travel to here, teleport yourself and the suave Tom Paine will help you from there. We really, really need you tonight for the pre-awards party!

Chaps - forgive me my slant towards the females. The smooth Ziggy, The ThunderDragon, Bags Rants, Free Jersey [whom I thank for the pic above of the early part of the evening before the ladies arrived], Delicolor, Theo Spark and Jocko the Kilt Man - no party's going to work without the likes of you.

As one party animal was heard to comment last night - Iain Dale doesn't know what he's missing. C'mon, Iain!

And Welshcakes, you won't escape my embrace this evening.

Snapshots Of Moscow

1999

I've been to Moscow twice. I love it because you can get a palpable sense of history visiting the city. The first time I visited was in early 1999 with fellow political blogger Peter Smallbone. It was shortly after the Russian financial crisis and we stayed in the legendary Communist carbuncle known as Hotel Rossiya overlooking Red Square (the prominent building in the background of this pic I believe it has just been demolished). In terms of nightlife, Moscow felt like arriving at a party that had just ended. The city had been hit hard. One day a protest was taking place on Red Square and we realised that the cordon that was in place was clearly to protect hotel guests from the massed crowds of Communists. If memory serves me right the crisis in the Balkans was the source of disharmony. On the first night in Rossiya we went for a drink in the hotel bar which didn't have a happy ending. In our group were a bunch of ex-pro-footballers one of whom we managed to persuade to stay with us for a few shots. We ended up leaving him in the bar, but the next day it turns out that he met a woman in the bar who he didn't realise was charging until after sleeping with her. The incident spoilt his holiday which was a pity.

2002

Next time I visited Moscow was in 2002 and things had changed out of all proportion. Restaurants catering for every cuisine under the sun had popped up and there was a buzz pervading the city. Having a confident Muscovite girlfriend as a guide was another plus. Marina had her own personal driver which was handy on a night out. One night we went to an expensive Georgian restaurant which was quiet following a shooting the week before. They had a house magician who went from table to table. As I was struggling to find some change for his two minute show Marina dropped him a note worth £20. I think that's what he got at the other table, too. It was a moment that sort of clunked. On the same day there had been street protests from government scientists who were demonstrating about their low pay. This magician had just earnt way more in five minutes than they did in a week. Another weird incident was when we went to visit the Kremlin. All tickets for the day were sold out, so of course we bribed a Kremlin guard to get in. The guard had no hesitation in assisting us, but was keen to make sure that we didn't get caught. On the basis that they only check foreigners' tickets he told Marina "As long as your Western boyfriend doesn't smile you'll get in all right!". He was right. I can do sullen Russian.

Why?

Blogging is a vain activity. In both senses of the word. We bloggers are often asked “why?” As my own blog is given over to frivolity at present, let me take the last chance before handing James his keys back to give my answer here. At least my answer for today.

With our companions in life we play the fool, the villain, the romantic lead. We progress to the meatier parts of maturity, until - if we are lucky - we play our Lear and exit. In the meantime, we become typecast. We play to our “type”, however far it may stray over the years from our inner voice. That’s fine on a stage or in a book. All creativity proceeds from an essential truth to a crafted set of gleaming lies. But must there be so much play-acting in life?

Millions, God help them, live without hearing truth spoken, still less speaking their own. Lies - mostly white and petty - are the fuel of human organisations. They spray lies through carburettors of convention and politeness.

Cynical old hacks in every organisation flaunt the conventions slyly. Having believed successive generations of contradictory untruths, they lose the ability to adjust. But even they, except between each other, must pretend to believe.

When a black lie is told, however, these gentle conventions can prevent us from challenging or even detecting it. For how many years of Blair’s premiership, did he have the benefit of the doubt? Though the man was plainly dishonest, his office protected him. He was able to tell the “big lies” that history shows are much easier to pass off than the small ones.

Thus liars prosper. Often the truth is only told in jokes.

I want a space, however small, which is unencumbered with the conventions of my everyday life; somewhere I can tell the truth as I see it. I was so enraged in 2005 by the Prevention of Terrorism Act (and even more by its slavish acceptance by media and addled masses) that I felt I had to speak; however hopeless the cause.

I continued because I found it therapeutic. It gave an outlet for my frustrations. Then the comments began and I realised I was not alone. The comments led me to other blogs and to a new sense of community. I have friends “out there.” It was weird, but I soon became accustomed.

That community became the purpose. Blogpower is part of it. I smiled at the simplicity of it to begin with, but James had really had a great idea. Ellee and Welshcakes provide insights into other worlds from mine, as do Lord Nazh and Ruthie. Blogpower brought shades of grey (and not just Shades of Grey) back to a life which - in my political rage - had become too black and white.

The good news is that there are are people out there who long to tell their truths; great and small. Meet them in their everyday lives and they would be playing their parts. We would not really know them. In a sense, they would not really be them. As bloggers (particularly anonymous or pseudonymous bloggers) their inner voices speak.

ANOTHER EPISTLE

It is a truth universally acknowledged by women d'un certain âge that intelligent, decent, heterosexual men in their forties and fifties do not usually come in single packages. It is another truth universally acknowledged that when they do, they want twenty-something trophies who can reproduce, not bright, witty, kind women of a like age with whom they could actually have a conversation. Readers of my own blog will know that I am an addict of the BBC Radio 4 soap The Archers and a few years ago the story line seemed so ridiculous to me that I wrote the following epistle to its editor:

Dear Ms. Whitburn,

As a long-standing listener to “The Archers”, I write to say how utterly ridiculous I am finding the current “Shula affair” storyline:

All this wrestling with her soul in church seems a little pointless as she and Richard are, after all, both supposed to be single. You’d think she had at least broken up a marriage or two!

The character simply does not come across as a "femme fatale": [1] She is boring and has no sense of humour [except when she giggles irritatingly with Caroline over the misfortunes of others]. [2] She is in some seventies time warp as she [a] never buys a round of drinks and [b] only feeds her men pasta and quiche.

And how come there are three single, decent, fortyish, professional men [Richard, Graham and Alistair] in the village of Ambridge when there are none such in the whole of Cardiff, which has three hundred thousand inhabitants?

Well, if Shula does not want the lovely Alistair, dear Ms. Whitburn, I suggest that you pop him on a train to South Wales; I’ll look after him and feed him fare which is more in keeping with the times than pasta and quiche!

Yours sincerely,

UPDATE: I'm rather glad I didn't take Alistair under my wing now, as he has become a rather sly character who gambles away the family silver. But so would most men, if they were married to Shula!

I only posted this because it's gone quiet over here!

[lost for words] don't stop yet!

I would like to thank all who contributed guest posts during my time away [which hasn't actually finished yet, in an oh so Russian way].

I also wish to thank all those commenters who added to what turned into a mini-festival. I'm gobsmacked at the quality and before you say "he would say that" - actually he wouldn't if he didn't think so. He wouldn't say anything about them at all.

But they were excellent.

I had no idea what would happen and to the commenter who thought it was in order to "up my stats", I can say with a completely straight face that that was the furthest thing from my mind. I confess I thought that if I invited 32 guest posters, if even half of these contributed, then there'd be a pretty interesting read for people.

It has been a fascinating read [I've now finished them all] and there is a favourite post or two but I'll keep that to myself.

What I think might be an idea in the long term future is to run a three day festival, say quarterly and invite certain people to post on certain days. No one would know when someone else would appear. Or else everyone would know - it would be scheduled.

But that gets into the Carnival idea which I'm not crazy for as I think the "made to order" post always lacks something unless the blogger is lucky enough to already have the idea half formed in the mind.

I must confess that when I'm asked to guest post, I always fear that I won't do justice to the blogger who invited me. One of our guest posters felt this and Lady MacLeod replied to her, I think correctly:

[Y]ou are a modest woman of excellent manner, however the above statement says more about our judgement than your modesty. I have a touchy trigger on this subject (we all have something), but I was given this lecture when I was quite young - the example being if someone tells you are pretty or smart and you say "No, I'm not." you just called them a liar or a bad judge of what is; how much better to duck your head and just say "Thank you." :-) there I'm done, I feel all better.

Now as to this EXCELLENT post m'lady……

I see guest posters as putting up pieces they might not normally get around to on their own blogs but the most important thing is that they must be left free to post virtually whatever material they wish.

Awards madness continues

Anyway, to those who posted from the 18th to the 29th inclusive and also to former guest posters, for you is this little award from me if you'd like to have it. Many, many thanks. Now there's one condition attached to copying and pasting the award - you must NOT embed a link directly to my blog but rather to your own guest post.

Similarly, for those who contributed more than one comment during this time, this award is for you and along with it also go my thanks.

Silent invisible readers

MyBlogLog clearly shows [haven't checked Sitemeter yet] that many people came in many times just to read and to you - if you'd like to use the second award also, I'd deem it an honour.

If you're interested, these were the stats I had up to Tiberius' problems with the words "aisle":

Guest Posters

L'Ombre [4]

Westminster Wisdom [3]

Shades of Grey [3]

The Last Ditch [2]

Sicily Scene [2]

Adelaide Green Porridge Cafe [2]

The Cityunslicker

Nobody Important [2]

Buckeye Thoughts [2]

Devil's Kitchen

Ruthie Zaftig

Flying Rodent

Lord Nazh

Trixy

Fabian Tassano

Imagined Community

Commenters

Welshcakes Limoncello [14]

lady macleod [7]

jmb [6]

Matt [5]

Colin Campbell [5]

mutleythedog [4]

Delicolor [4]

Mr Eugenides [3]

Ruthie [3]

FlyingRodent [2]

CityUnslicker

Hooker

Rev. Dr. Incitatus

Winfred Mann

Janejill

Reactionary Snob

Lord Nazh

Gracchi

istanbultory

Trixy

dirty dingus

Praguetory

Norfolk Blogger

Wolfie

Tin Drummer

I'm not really back yet. Tomorrow is a pretty Russian day with a lot of to-ing and fro-ing and so I probably won't post until late tomorrow or Saturday. The flat looks like new and in the process I've been lucky enough to score two new cleaning ladies who will keep it that way. They've just shown their wares now, we've come to an agreement and they've departed for the evening along with the other three ladies.

Oh, I forgot to mention that my cleaners are 37 years old [i.e. their ages add up to 37].

More tomorrow. Please don't stop posting until the 29th is well over. Pretty please?

Gordon Brown take heed

A warning from the Adam Smith Institute Blog that Westminster isn't quite the desirable area it sounds:

By the way, it may be Gordon Brown's dream home, but Downing Street is in a seedier area than folk imagine. In a council house just over the back fence lives an extended family run by a grumpy old woman who keeps a pack of fierce dogs. Her husband makes racist comments and a local shopkeeper says he murdered his son's girlfriend – but the police do nothing. Most of their kids have broken marriages, and their grandchildren are always out clubbing. They all live off the state, and every day the papers are full of their excesses. Who'd want to live near Buckingham Palace?

(Crossposted (and heavily pruned with the ofensive stuff about the outgoing Prime Minister removed) from ShadesBlog

How to spell aisle?

A minute ago I was correcting an article on Bits of News about the recent defection of Quentin Davies MP from the Tories to Labour- its a political event which has some fleeting importance. But anyway in writing this, at one point too insignificant to mention I used as a verbal flourish the word aisle- but in my folly spelt it isle instead of aisle. Its a brief incident but as I corrected it I began to think- why had I got it wrong and why hadn't I noticed it when I wrote the original article last night.

The thing is that isle and aisle actually sound exactly the same- the thing about my writing and I don't know whether this is true for others is that as I'm putting these words down on the screen I am sounding them in my head. You are basically receiving an internal monologue- with full stops. So my mind guides me to write phonetically what I should write. That's not quite true though- take the word phonetically- I actually should write that fonetically were I writing phonetically- so its a little more complicated than just that my mind is transposing the sounds I hear in my head direct to the page.

What its actually doing is a feat of translation- there isn't a one to one correspondence between a letter and a sound- the letter e for instance can sound as it does in does, between or even isle where its silent. Rather my mind works with groups of letters, for some reason I have recorded in my brain that the letters g r o u p sound out something that phonetically might be spelled groop- its like a piece of coding that my brain automatically uses to refer to the sound I am making internally in order for your brain to make the same sound internally as you read what I've written. (I don't know about you but as I read I speak the words inside my head that I am reading.) Despite the fact that my fingers are tapping particular keys what I'm actually doing is writing whole words- groups of letters which signify various sounds in my head.

One of the interesting things about this though is that that's not quite how it works- if it were so I wouldn't know how to pronounce a new word that I'd just come across- all of you would know roughly for instance how to pronounce the word pasot though it doesn't exist in English and that's because what our minds are doing is stepping between two sets of signifiers- one is the set of letters, a b c etc, the other is the set of words that we remember where each letter changes slightly its basic meaning. The problem is that definitely in my mind I infer a logical relationship between the letters and the words- I infer that if there is a word I can't spell then I should by logically combining letters be able to spell it.

I think that's the reason I struggled with aisle this morning- because what afterall is that a doing there- doesn't add anything to the sound that isle doesn't already give you. Its silent. The odd thing about it is that at the same time I didn't wonder about the s or the e at the end of the word which also are behaving in peculiar ways- but you see my mind had remembered that the chunk of letters isle were sounded in a particular way- it hadn't remembered the a. I often have this- the word what for instance quite often causes me confusion- because again my mind loses its database of words and tries to combine the letters to get to what- and realises that the logical combination of letters isn't the combination that English actually uses.

The way that letters and words relate strikes me as a fascinating insight into the way that systems can almost but not entirely map onto each other- in a sense if I can be even bolder today its a useful analogy because as words relate to letters, to concepts relate possibly to the data that we receive. Again the data that is contained within a concept ought logically to add to the concept but one of the key lessons of life is that that isn't true- that concepts map indirectly and inaccurately onto the world- that the ideological equivalent of that a in aisle exists.

Ultimately we use words to sort the world, and indeed to sort letters into groups- but those groupings whilst not arbitrary don't neccessarily relate to the logical combinations of the definitions of the letters- the sounds are not neccessarily reflected- its interesting to consider language because I think it reveals wider epistemelogical problems- afterall why is there an a is aisle- there is no a-ness about it- nor is there a p-ness about what that p is doing in phonetically- they are both historical accidents not neccessary conclusions of the arrangement of the language.

And to prove my point I'm sure I've made tons of spelling mistakes in the above!

The Latin

Whenever I hear the word Latin, what springs to mind is a British comedy sketch.

Beyond the Fringe was a stage review put on by four young Brits (Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett and Peter Cook) for a few years in the early sixties. It is considered the forerunner of the British TV shows like Monty Python's Flying circus. This Wikipedia article gives you the whole story.

For the fans of this type of British humour, who couldn't attend the stage productions, a vinyl record was produced and we listened to it eagerly.

To my mind, one of the best skits was by Peter Cook, called Sitting on the Bench. He played a coal miner regretting the fact that he didn't fulfill his ambition to become a judge. The sketch is very funny, but best summed up in these sentences. "Yes, I could have been a judge, but I never had the Latin. I never had the Latin for the judgin'."

Well I had the Latin. In my high school we all had to have the Latin, well at least for the first year. But I loved the Latin, I don't know why. Somehow it appealed to me, the orderly sense of conjugating verbs and different cases for nouns. Almost mathematical in its orderliness. We all hated the teacher, Miss Simons, with a passion. She was a cranky old unmarried teacher (probably still in her forties, I was only 12 after all) handing out detention left, right and centre, making you copy out a vocabulary word 20 times if you missed it in a test. This only happened once to me, let me tell you. But she couldn't deter me. She was my Latin teacher for 5 years, and I even took Latin honours for matriculation. I still insist it was probably the most useful subject I ever took in high school.

When I went into Pharmacy people said to me, well aren't you lucky you have the Latin. Huh? Even in the fifties the Latin had almost disappeared from Pharmacy. It was easy for anyone to learn the few expressions left, although those with the Latin knew exactly what the abbreviations meant, for example: bid (bis in die - twice daily) or prn (pro re nata -literally for the thing that is born, or as necessary).

The next use I found for the Latin was in gardening. When you are looking for a specific plant you can't rely on the common name, since the common name may refer to three different plants, depending on the region. On the other hand, one plant may have three different common names. Consequently you need to use the Latin name. Indeed, it has been a great asset to me in all the garden clubs I've belonged to over the years, with those long botanical names rolling off my tongue.

So you see I could have been a judge. I wasn't, but I could have been, because you've got to have the Latin for the judgin' and I definitely had it.


This is a bit of past whimsy from my blog.

A short trip

James normally has me down as the travelling blogger due to the amount of time I spend travelling with work. Actually this has declined alot in recent months so I don't really deserve this title anymore.

In any event I recently did some travelling in the UK for a change. Despite the predictable weather I had a great time. I visited North Norfolk and drove around a lot taking in all the sight. It is a lovely and peaceful part of the country. This is not altogether surprising as it is near impossible to get to due to a chroniclack of transport infrastructure. From London you could get to Newcastle in about the same amount of time. However, this means that the area is left in a timewarp which is very quaint.


The beaches are magnificent and with global warming and so good sea defences they will no doubt rival the costa del sol within our lifetimes. The local villages are nice and some of the bigger towns are a little sh**e-on-sea, but I liked Sheringham which lies on the north coast. For extra fun you can rent a boat and muck about on the broads ( a network of natural waterways and canals).

The local delicacy is Cromer Crab which is in deed very nice; if not quite comparable in size to say Alaskan Crabs.

Overall it was a lovely and relaxing place to spend a few days away from it all and I can see the attractions for the likes of Bryan Appleyard. So if you have a weekend spare and want to do some UK travelling , head Norfolk Bound.

The flooding was preventable

Floods damage homes and were preventable

As I dragged myself from my bed this morning, after the carnage that was the FOREST-sponsored dinner at the Savoy this morning, I wondered what on earth I could compose for 18 Doughty Street this morning. Luckily, a topic leapt out at me, top of the BBC News page.

“Three people have died and thousands have been forced from their homes after severe flooding hit England and Wales.

About 900 people are using emergency shelters in Sheffield, and dozens more were evacuated across Lincolnshire, Shropshire and Nottinghamshire.”

These floods—and the accompanying homelessness, damage and loss of life—are, of course, a terrible event but what makes them even more unpalatable is that they were preventable.

The current issue of Private Eye highlights the underfunding of the flood defences by the government. In 2004, the National Assessment of Defence Needs and Cost for Flood and Coastal Erosion Management pointed out that funding plans fell short by £700 million over the next ten years.

Last week, the NAO produced a report showing that the Environment Agency had not met its targets and that 63% of England's flood defences were inadequate. In fact, the agency says that it needs another £150 million a year, from the government, to meet the targets.

So what? It's hardly a surprise is it? Gordon Brown, the Gobblin' King, has been spending our money like water on his pet projects, whilst other necessary projects have been neglected. But it gets worse than that.

The Environment Agency's budget is controlled by DEFRA (David Miliband's department) which has had its woes recently. The biggest problem it has had is over the Rural Farm Payments shambles; its failure to pay out the money within the allotted timeframe has incurred massive fines from Brussels.

These fines are currently running at £350 million and, even worse, Brown has absolutely refused to find the money from the Treasury coffers and has demanded that DEFRA find it from their own budget. This can mean only one thing: cuts.

Sure enough, DEFRA looked around to see where it could make savings; and the Environment Agency was one of the first to feel the pinch. £15 million has been cut from its budget which was already, as highlighted by the agency and the NAO, far too low to start with.

As a result, projects have had to be put on hold and flood defences neglected. And, sure enough, we now see the inevitable consequences of this policy; huge insurance costs, wrecked homes and dead people.

No doubt, in casting around for something else to blame, David Miliband will make dire prognostications concerning “climate change”, but make no mistake: these deaths are a direct result of DEFRA's incompetence and poor government spending priorities.

Cross-posted at 18DoughtyStreet.