Tuesday 21 December 2010

Great quotations, ancient and modern.

“From the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight was ever made” - that was Kant.

“Men make history but not in circumstances of their choosing” - that was Marx.

"The best is the enemy of the good" - that was Voltaire.

“We will make this the best place in the world for children and [sic] young people to grow up” - that was Balls.

Tuesday 14 December 2010

Christmas newsletter

Well it’s time for our annual update on life chez nous and we hope you’re all keeping well, so...

MERRY XMAS EVERYONE, or should I say “Merry X-FactorMas” ;-)!!!!! (And here are the football results: ITV Blockbusters 20 million, Yuletide Logs nil LOL!) I just can’t believe it’s all come around so fast, and with the Easter eggs in the shops already it’s Go Go Go all the way!!!!!

But seriously we love this time of year. The pitter-patter of tiny reindeer feet, turkey and all the trimmings and snow on the way (so they say!)! And who says no one goes to church anymore? Our new vicar is really throwing himself into the spirit of things and attendances are up, what with the nightly topless carol concerts under our new Jack Vettriano-inspired nativity ceiling: OK, it’s not the Sistine Chapel but we like it, and that’s good enough for us - and I’m sure it’s good enough for Jack too, which is even more important after his Desert Island Discs fiasco ;-D!! So what’s Santa bringing you then?

It’s been a funny old year. On the plus side, Charlotte’s pregnant again and it beats me how she does it quite frankly. More of a bummer is that I only went and got diagnosed as having Chlamydia, didn’t I? :-( Sometimes I really wonder what the world’s coming to: I mean, you can’t even trust your own kids these days ;-P. But that aside we mustn’t grumble and are soldiering on.

Despite slipping on ice and breaking his leg in two places at about the 14km mark, Barry came a very creditable fourth in the school marathon last week, narrowly missing out on a medal position and anyway the first three were all Kenyans, which I thought was a bit odd at the time but didn’t want to make a fuss. I don’t know where that boy gets it from!

Georgie is still on her travels before going to Uni. Doesn’t time fly: she’ll have been gone twelve years on 7th January but it doesn’t seem a day since she left! She reports that the bungee jumping Down Under is definately not to be missed (do they ever do anything else down there, I ask?! Sure as hell can’t play cricket ;-D – mind you, as you may have read in the papers, she and a friend were arrested for jumping off ... the Sydney Harbour Bridge no less! Georgie got fingered by the good cop (fnaaar fnaaar lol, I said “LOL”!!!) and got away with a suspended sentence but her mate was less fortunate and ... wait for it! ... went inside for a long stretch!LOYAL ORANGE LODGE!!!!!!

Back here on planet Earth, work’s looking up at last, which is the only direction you can look if you’re flat on the floor already ;-(. Still, “if you can keep your head while all around are losing theirs” and all that! Fortunately in these tough times I have a caring employer and we’ve all been told to make sure that we take regular breaks away from the computer so I recently started going home in the evenings, which lets me snatch a bit of time for family bonding and even some to write this to you all! Word has it that we’ll get even more time at home in the near future! What’s that? “More kids on the way?” you ask? You cheeky bugger: slap for that man please! Speaking of futures, I remember my Uncle Podger telling me again and again when I was a kid that the future was in banking, but did I listen??? Ho hum!

Can’t complain though: the house is looking a treat with the decorations up and blinking for all the world to see (SSHHHH!!: no planning permission – WHOOPS!!!:-0 and we’re all as snug as a bug in a rug and waiting for the snow!

Do leave the turkey on a low grill or whatever and pop in for some jingle bells and egg nog on Christmas morning! We’d love to catch up with you and yours LoL! Know what I mean? Well DO. YOU. KNOW. WHAT. I. MEAN??? lol LOL!!!!!

... etc. etc. etc.

Friday 5 November 2010

It's madness gone politically correct!

I received this alert through my organisation's email system yesterday:

"Nursery workers ... are taking their mobile phones into Xxxxxx nursery .... This is currently illegal due to safeguarding [sic], and a recent case where a nursery worker was sent to jail for taking photos on their phone of the children."

(In the case mentioned a nursery worker was prosecuted for taking and distributing indecent images of some of the children in her care.)

By this logic, and leaving aside whether extreme cases make for good policy, which I touched on in my post of 6th August (On Contact Point and Abuse), no mobile phones containing cameras should be allowed in any public facility where any young people are present. Not only do we have a duty of care to them all and not just the very young ones, but most paedophiles don't suddenly see the error of their ways just because children reach the age of 5.

Nor should we allow chairs in such places, just in case a member of staff decides to bludgeon children about the head with one. Nor cuddly toys, which could easily be used to smother and suffocate any survivors.

Nor, indeed, should staff be allowed on the premises if they are considered potentially this dangerous even after lengthy and rigorous pre-employment checks.

My gentle enquiry as to the precise degree of lunacy being applied to the matter met with the standard response that we are only following the rules. This plea was insufficient at the Nuremburg tribunals but it looks like we have either moved on, or forgotten. Or just don't care.

Monday 1 November 2010

Youth Work: what now?

Should there continue to be a discrete statutory youth service in Britain, and is it appropriate for the state to take the lead in what has always been seen as informal social education? This has been bothering me since long before the bankers did us all in and the new British coalition government came to power.

Youth work has always been vaguely defined, sometimes deliberately but too often sloppily so. However, I think there are two broad approaches to it that are worth looking at here. It's not about adopting either one or the other, but about the balance between them within youth work as a whole, and what kind of youth work should sit where in the mix. I don't have an answer, but I do know that we are trying to ride them both at the moment. It's not pretty to watch - or comfortable to do.

As I see them, these are the two approaches:

1. Youth work as informal social education under conditions of universally accessible and voluntary association in which young people decide where they want to go. Most youth workers would agree that this is the ideal. I've always thought that youth work is one of the very few mainstream state services that isn't dominated by remedial agendas but should by its very nature have people's positive development as its prime aim. So far as possible I've sought to preserve this ideal against what I suppose I shall have to call 'deficit models of youth' emanating from both Right and Left as well as from the massed ranks of post-political, candy-floss Stalinists who have long had their tree-hugging hands around the throat of public service in this country.

2. Youth work as harnessed to remedial agendas, employing informal education techniques to support ends considered socially desirable and stymie socially damaging behaviours. This requires a priori judgements about what we should be doing and the targeting of young people perceived to have problems or be at risk of them, but employs youth work methods to attain the desired ends. This is the more utilitarian view and compromises many of the principles youth workers hold dear. Nonetheless, from drug and alcohol work to sex education and even the current therapeutic obsession with correcting low self-esteem (don't get me started!), this is in fact what youth workers spend a lot of time doing already.

If the balance is to favour the first model - that is, openly accessed developmental work - why should the state deliver it at all? Does youth work really fit there? Wouldn’t it be better to restore the responsibility for informal social education to the formal and informal institutions of civil society? The state is compelled to formalise the informal and tacit, is dominated by written procedures from which it scared to depart for fear of prosecution, is necessarily prescriptive and is subject to ideological, discursive and party-political agendas. Its institutions are cumbersome and its targeting and data collection methods invite an often fraudulent culture which, in a vicious circle, skews the very data on which future policy is based.

In defence of the state, insofar as it can avoid party political agendas, it can be an honest broker - if often a slothful, incompetent and wasteful one - and better able than civil society to guarantee equity in the reach and uniformity in the quality threshholds of what is provided. Leaving things to civil society also puts youth work at the mercy of enthusiasts - of which there are good and bad varieties.


If the balance is more in favour of targeted and remedial work, I think this is in principle a legitimate concern of the state, although particular governments' policies and assumptions may be open to question and I am sceptical of constructions of young people as either criminals or victims, with not much space in between. If this model predominates I see no reason why this kind of youth work can't be done by suitably trained informal social educators within state organisations (for example, youth offending and social work teams). I'm no expert, but I believe that this type of social pedagogy is close to the model followed in European countries like France and The Netherlands.

However, it begs the question whether there should be a discrete "Youth Service" at all rather than a corpus of professional competencies and techniques that can be applied to different situations. This raises further questions about the increasing subjection of young people to professional intervention - not least in what are supposed to be informal interactions - but perhaps this would be appropriate in this context. It would also requires a very robust civil society to provide for the developmental social education of all young people if the state were to withdraw.


Either way, I think that the justification for having a “Youth Service” - as opposed to people who do youth work - looks very shaky indeed. I am erring on the side of getting non-remedial youth work out from under the state's wing altogether, but my goodness it's a huge risk, because there isn't a Big Society out there worth the name right now.

Sunday 31 October 2010

I will fight, fight and fight again to save the game I love!

I propose some changes to the rules of association football and would like your opinions about them.

Here are the problems I want to, ahem, tackle. Too many players are sent off. Too few referees dare let common sense confuse their timorously rigid application of the rules. Early yellow cards mean defenders are thenceforth scared to tackle opponents, which is what they're there to do, for fear of dismissal. The ease with which cards are given encourages players to cheat in order to get their opponents into trouble.

Although teams can and do adapt tactically when a man short, this usually spoils the game for spectators, who are ripped off as it is. Football should be a test of skill, tactics and endeavour between two teams of 11 players, not a test of resourcefulness in overcoming - or attempting to engineer - numerically unequal opposition.

It all used to be so different ...

When I was a wee lad following Charlton Athletic I was regularly passed over the heads of the spectators so that I could throw my pocket money at opposing players while simultaneously avoiding the urine streaming down the terraces from those who could afford beer but not a seat. In those days a player’s leg would have had to reach row G in the stand for the referee even to think of sending anyone off. To be dismissed from the field of play was a sin and a shock. Fathers would shield their sons' eyes from the departing miscreant as one might from someone convicted of interfering with livestock.

We must return to those days, with the exception of letting sheep fertilize the pitch at half time, although I propose that this practice continue to be permitted at Millwall.


Here are some rules to improve things, both to enhance spectators’ enjoyment and to help bring some of the little shits who play the game into line.

1. Adopt from rugby the idea of the ‘penalty try’. Either of these sanctions will concentrate minds wonderfully after a first judicious application:
  • Award a goal if the last defender handles the ball before it would have crossed the goal line. Don't send the defender off or show a yellow card: the conceded goal is both sanction and deterrent.
  • Award a goal if the last defender (this includes the goalkeeper) brings down an attacker. Again, don't send off the defender or show a yellow card unless the tackle deserves one regardless of where it was made. Watch for cheating attackers though - see Rule 4 below.

2. Adopt the ‘Sin Bin’ instead of a second yellow card (which presently results in dismissal). Unless the offence is serious enough to deserve instant dismissal - that is, it is malicious or reckless such as to threaten serious injury, or so cynical that, elsewhere, a custodial sentence in an open facility would be required - the offender must spend 15 minutes out of the game (so is effectively dismissed if it happens during or after the 75th minute or the 105th minute if extra time is being played). Once back on the pitch, any further misdemeanour that merits a card results in straight dismissal.

3. If the last outfield defender brings down an attacker who would otherwise have only the goalkeeper to beat, send the offender to the Sin Bin (unless the nature of the challenge deserves a straight dismissal) and award a penalty, whether or not the foul happened inside the 18-yard box - so it's still attacker against keeper, but on the attacker's terms.

4. Toughen the sanctions for cheating. Send to the Sin Bin any player who dives, dissents, feigns the need for reconstructive facial surgery after a pat on the back from an opponent or asks, "anyway, how much do you f*cking earn then?" as he gets up after a robust tackle.

5. In the case of malicious or reckless tackles, the referee will only have the option of the Sin Bin or a straight dismissal.

Right, that’s sorted. Now to the Palestine Question. Which, if I can solve the problems of football as easily as I just have, should be a piece of cake. Hold my calls unless it's Tony Blair, in which case say I'm out for dinner with Henry Kissinger.

Friday 29 October 2010

They don't make 'em like that any more!


The phrase "good quality" has a distinctly old fashioned ring, yet there is a place for such traditional expression, even in today's frenetic, cost-conscious world. The quiet popularity enjoyed by the Vanden Plas 1500 is ample proof of that, and it's an intriguing exercise to discover why discerning motorists are so convinced of its sterling qualities. To begin with, the car is totally international in concept: it would look equally at home in Rome, Paris, Vienna, or any other of the great European capitals, yet it has a distinctive air of good breeding that is unmistakably British ...

Oh my God I've burst my brain.

Sunday 24 October 2010

Don't Wear Remembrance Day Poppies ... yet.

Switching on to watch Match of the Day last night – the 23rd of October – I noticed that all three presenters wore Remembrance Day poppies. Remembrance Sunday this year will be on the 14th of November, which is 23 days away.

It made me uncomfortable and annoyed. Why wear them so soon? Hallowe’en, the next peg from which we hang the year, is still over a week off and most shops’ Christmas displays are only a few months old. I’d be happier if they kept their poppies in their pockets until – let’s pick a date – say the 4th November. That’s a week before the 11th November, when the guns fell silent.

Some may consider this a bit picky or even disrespectful towards those who have died in wars, those who survived but need our help, and their dependants.

It's a tricky one. Money from the Poppy Appeal goes to what most except a few, bonkers, people think is a fine cause, so shouldn’t we welcome all efforts to increase the sum raised? I’m sure this was in mind when they prematurely decked out Messrs Lineker, Hansen and Shearer. Match of the Day has a huge audience. If more money is raised by TV stars wearing poppies now, or from Easter, or all year round for that matter, then where’s the harm? Only good will come out of it.

I disagree. I think that wearing poppies too soon devalues the significance of Remembrance Day, which is fundamentally about respecting those who have fought and suffered not raising money for them. Charity should follow from that respect, which has its source and derives its meaning from elsewhere. Subjecting Remembrance Day to the utilitarian dictates of money making and marketing, however slick, however emotive and for however worthy a cause, puts things the wrong way round.

More, it further inures us to the idea that if something can be done, it must be done. This is a variant of the business imperative which says that you should do something if it suits your purpose and you can get away with it. Although it has no place there, it influences the actions of charities, public services and often well-meaning individuals. But it doesn't necessarily follow, even in a good cause, and the assumption that it does may one day blind us to what are good causes and what aren't, which is not always as clear-cut as we may think.

The reason that Remembrance Day is important is that we think it so and make it so, not that we are told it is so, however fine the motives.

Wednesday 6 October 2010

Tattoos: an apology

I have succumbed.

I have had the words "IT'S ONLY" tattooed on the inside of my left eyelid and "A DREAM" tattooed on the inside of my right one.

So, if you ever see me at a work meeting with my eyes closed, you will know that I'm not asleep.

If, on the other hand, we're making love, don't worry: it'll be the ecstasy of it all. Honest.

Monday 4 October 2010

Transporting body parts? Your questions answered!

As a youth worker on some of Buckinghamshire’s meaner streets (Stoke Poges, if you must know), I am often asked how best to transport body parts by car without drawing the attention of the Police.

The best method is as follows, assuming that your cargo is in the boot and that no EU, Health and Safety or other guidelines with regard to its transportation have been breached (in which case may the full force of the Law and the very Fires Of Hell consume you without mercy and forever).

Carry a pot of adequately watered herbs – basil, coriander, flat-leaf parsley or such like – in a prominent position, for example on the dashboard or the passenger seat. (They can be bought quite cheaply at supermarkets or dug up from neighbours’ gardens; make sure that you remove any labels first.)

If you are stopped by the Police, you will find that they will show great interest in the herbs. They will spend some time sniffing them, feeling them, holding them up to the light at various angles and squinting at you from various angles too. Let them do this for a short while.

When you see them nodding to each other in a conspiratorial fashion it is time to make your move. Do not delay. Pleasantly, and without condescension, inform them of the true identity of the herbs. Make light of their error - it is, after all, of no moment - and carefully enlist their embarrassment to steer the conversation in a direction that suits your purpose.

If this is done with skill and nerve you will find yourself sooner than expected swapping recipes, at which point you may consider the job done. They are by now no more likely to look in your boot than they are to arrest your dead grandmother for soliciting.

You drive off with a cheery wave which they repay in full measure. They do not even notice the trail of red spots as you leave. You have not only got off Scot free, but you may well now have in your culinary locker some long overdue variants on the fava beans-and-Chianti formula, which is now so 20th century, I find. Even in Stoke Poges.

Bon appetit!

On Health and Safety

I recently oversaw preparations for Health and Safety inspections of two youth clubs. They passed with decent scores, although another club managed a Mugabe-esque 99%. I can only guess that my counterpart frequently picked his nose during the meeting with the inspector.

For two months leading up to the inspections, I and colleagues prepared for them. We were assiduous. We wrote or adapted risk assessments ranging from ‘Managing Terrorist Incidents’ to ‘Playing Pool' and, just to be on the safe side, ‘Standing Up Without Falling Over’, for I am a stickler when I get going. We met often, we argued into the night, we guessed and we second-guessed; true, we sometimes erred - but only on the side of caution. At times we even wept together. But my God, we got those two youth clubs through it all!

The trouble was, we did very little else for those two months, and at a time when there were young people out there waiting for us to complicate their lives still further. And when it was all over I had to have my pregnancy-compatible office chair surgically removed from my buttocks. But enough: I could go on about the absurdities of Health and Safety but that's not really my point today. You have The Daily Mail if you need to be reminded that badly.

Anyway, as you'll imagine, a big part of me is pleased that the Government has announced that it will be taking a tough stance on Health and Safety legislation. I hope that Lord Young’s campaign isn’t just talk but also has length, width and girth. I hope he will be as purgative now as he was when he helped put a nation on the dole in the 1980s.

It’ll be tough. Health and Safety (see: even I instinctively capitalise it) is the nearest thing we have to religion now, just as safe sex is the nearest to a moral code, emotional wellbeing the closest to conscience and following a football club - I am a Charlton Athletic supporter - is our best shy at wartime stoicism. They are all of a piece.

But Health and Safety is more than a stack of regulations awaiting a match: it has a creed, a liturgy, priests, acolytes, lumpen masses, wild-eyed heretics and doe-eyed enforcers. People with power and influence really do believe in it and even those who are agnostic render its dues unto Caesar without thought, let alone comment. It's an unhappy marriage of eternal human yearning and time-bound utilitarianism in which neither partner can admit their mutual incompatibility but cling instead to the always-absent ideal of love.

In trying to reform it at the level of regulation we miss the point: like our obsession with risk and mine with Charlton Athletic, Health and Safety is a repository, however meagre, however warped and laughable, for deeper human needs, and the debate about it - if we're ever bold enough to have one - will need to have that in mind.

Thursday 30 September 2010

Throw me a bone!

Calling all dog breeders! What EXACTLY is the difference between a pit bull terrier and a Staffordshire terrier? I've given a lot of thought to this.

Is it that a Staffie will chew your baby 36 times before swallowing it?

I give up. I don't think there is one. Throw me a bone!

Monday 27 September 2010

Spin Unspun

Spin is no longer our conscious attempt to doctor reality, but has become the prism through which we observe it. It’s no longer enough to sum it up as "Don't worry if we cock it up now: we can always spin it up later".

It's worse. We now so far conflate substance and message that we often give scant attention to getting things right in the first place. Ironically, spin has become so normalised that we are becoming oblivious to how we present things. Far from conning others, we're starting to con ourselves.

It’s a bit like editing a mail-order catalogue: you spend so much time checking and rechecking the tiny details that you miss the fact that this year’s edition is still dated ‘2008’. (And my goodness: now that I'm looking - so was last year’s!)

Here are some examples. Both the county councils I’ve worked for – and they aren’t alone - have an 'Anti-Social Behaviour Coordinator'. The one I’m with at the moment not only "offers support for domestic abuse" but will soon appoint a 'Drugs and Alcohol Champion'. And only today I saw a notice strapped to a lamp post: Caution: Police Crime Operation in Progress. (I'll ignore the use of “in progress” as this is tackled with brutal finality in my post of 29th August.)

You’ll immediately have spotted what links these examples. Just in case you haven’t, it’s this: the forms of words used are ridiculous, but weren’t picked up by those best qualified to do so, namely the organisations themselves.

To take the first: at the simplest level, what should we expect an 'Anti-Social Behaviour Coordinator' to do? Of course (it’s in the job title, stoopid!): coordinate anti-social behaviour. How? Here’s an example.

In my village there is a small gang of pensioners who terrorise local youths at the bus-stop opposite our new branch of Sunset Retirement Homes. I know this, by the way, because there is a road sign just before you get there. It reads Danger: Old People. Oh yes it does.

At the other end of town is a loose collection of former nuns who dropped out of The Good Shepherd Convent last year and have recently discovered the pleasures of cider, only to have been barred from The Good Shepherd public house on account of it. They accost passers-by for money, leave empty bottles in the park and sometimes urinate into open-top sports cars, but because they are drunk most of the time they rarely leave the area, which has become something of a home to them.

The two groups – the pensioners and the ex-nuns - never mix.

I telephone the Anti-Social Behaviour Coordinator. He (sorry, but we need a He in this tough, demanding role) is soon On The Case. Above all, he is concerned that there is no contact - let alone coordination - between the two groups, their members going about their daily predations upon the society that sustains them as if the others didn’t even exist.

We must coordinate their activities! Our man is no slouch. He promptly organises a meeting between them, rounding up for good measure a number of people who sleep rough in the woods and never make contact with anyone unless it is to direct wolf-like and other eerie noises at primary school children on their way home in the afternoons.

Alone these people are mere nuisances; but together, under the stern but benevolent eye of our Anti-Social Behaviour Coordinator, they have at least the chance to become a formidable drain upon the resources and will of a whole community. And we thought social solidarity was dead!

But serious questions remain: there are no signs either that the pensioners drink to excess or that the nuns have yet developed a crack cocaine habit that might induce them to assault and rob those from whom they currently merely solicit money. And the sleepers in the woods are, so far as we can tell, ‘clean’.

So, because he really takes his job seriously and does not want simply to tick his own boxes, the Anti-Social Behaviour Coordinator networks for partners.

Who is first on his list? Why of course, the Drugs and Alcohol Champion!

(As for the Police Crime Operation, well at least they’re up front about it these days, whether or not it is yet in progress.)

Friday 17 September 2010

On Richard Strauss: a Good European

Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen has one movement, is scored for 23 strings and lasts for only a few minutes longer, unless you are Otto Klemperer. He finished it weeks before the end of the Second World War. By then, much of Dresden, Munich, Hamburg and many other great German cities had been destroyed by Allied bombs.

Strauss wrote it in memory of a great artistic culture whose legacy had been first traduced by the Nazis and then blown to pieces by the Allies, and whose rebirth he could neither foresee nor perhaps even imagine. Few people knew or loved that culture better than he did. It must have been terrible to try to put its loss into music without falling into despair. He didn't, and the result is one of the noblest, most moving things I have ever heard.

For despite its subject, Metamorphosen is a positive work, never melancholic and never sentimental. Its sadness is great but is seeded with hope. The culture Strauss celebrates and the loss he laments are all of ours. Allied bombs and Nazi genocide; western culture devouring its innocent children: the grief is shared, not personal, and just as the tools for such destruction were immanent in the western tradition, so are the means for redemption. Strauss portrays neither the bombs nor the horror but a state of mind in the face of them.

Metamorphosen begins quietly, gently and elegiacally. There are allusions to Wagner and Beethoven. After the wild firestorm of the middle part the music calms but then swells again, gloriously reworking and re-layering earlier themes picked now from the rubble. It closes quietly, neither in anguish nor banal optimism, or even in repose, but as if Strauss had gently laid it down for us to pick up again - but only if we will. It is the sleep not of death but of Brünnhilde, or of Arthur.

This weak bridge carries me to thoughts about why I can't separate how I see Metamorphosen from how we see Strauss, ‘we’ being those other and often reluctant heirs to our wonderful European cultural heritage, the Brits. Assuming that we are bothered to think about Strauss and Metamorphosen at all these days, here is how our default cultural setting, which selectively seduces people across the political spectrum, might encourage us to see them:

Strauss is suspect; he makes for a good ‘Other’. He was German, bourgeois, liked money and wrote a lot of big, bombastic, often tiresome, almost Meatloafean, tone poems. He accepted the post of President of the Nazis' Reichsmusikkammer, even though he never joined the party and was always a bit contrary. He was, in short, ‘one of them’, or at best one of those Germans who kept quiet; and ‘they’ - all of them - got what they deserved, or at least what had to be done. This is losers’ art and, since losers don’t write history, as our greatest wartime leader said, why should they creep in through the back door with their music?

It’s time we moved on. This loser can teach us something and, as all good art should, Metamorphosen may make us look at ourselves too. Strauss was a good European. We could be better ones and should embrace the baby he laid on our doorstep.

Friday 10 September 2010

On burning Korans and denying Holocausts

To Muslims, both Jews and Christians are 'people of the book'. This makes Pastor Terry Jones's chest-pumping all the more depressing. And at least Berlusconi runs a country.

How sad, too, that all books will soon be online. It may solve problems like that created by Pastor Jones's wanting to burn one, since publicly deleting computer files doesn't quite have the same style. But it would create another one: now bigots everywhere will have to return to burning other things, like people. I'll bet they can't wait.

Anyway, about burning the Koran:

  • Pastor Terry Jones and those like him are unpleasant, dangerous people who abuse the spirit if not the laws of democracy, and are cowards because they use its laws as cover for that abuse. Jones encourages other bigots, including Islamic ones, to do the same and worse. He should not burn the Koran or encourage others to do it. He should shut up.
  • The American government's response, which is to discourage rather than prohibit his words and actions, is the right and noble one, and in keeping with the spirit that Jones so crassly offends, even if it sits ill with its foreign policy and may be the death of many of us some day soon (I'm thinking by the end of the next decade here and I have decided to move to west Wales, which is upwind of most catastrophes I can foresee).

Reporting the controversy, the BBC today contrasted the American response with what European countries might do in the same situation and noted that denying the existence of the Holocaust is illegal in 16 of them.

But I don't think it should be illegal to deny the Holocaust, any more than it should be illegal for Pastor Jones to be a nasty man and offend people, whether they want to be offended or not.

Having a vile, self-serving or pecuniary motive for holding an opinion does not invalidate it; sound contrary evidence does. If someone thinks they can prove that the Holocaust didn't happen, or happened differently, they should be free to say why they think so. Their evidence can then be weighed against the opposing evidence.

Governments should foster respect for truth above falsehood, and open debate in a spirit of good will is a fine way to go about it. If Holocaust deniers are wrong - and I presume the governments of all the 16 European states believe this; as, by the way, do I - it's better if people see that they're wrong than not, and better to have their views in the open than underground. If they're right, or if their evidence causes some revision of what we believe to be true, well, we'll just have to deal with that.

I recently went to an education conference on 'valuing people' - or some other publicly funded, recession-proofed gagfest; they tend to blur into each other - where 'not valuing people' rapidly came to be epitomised by the British National Party rather than our own petty inadequacies, which would have been much more pertinent. By this means, 'not valuing people' was somehow blithely equated with a return to Nazism, Apartheid and segregation in the deep South. The hall was stuffed with teachers; perhaps some were history teachers, although I hope not, because their silence wouldn't have said much in their favour.

I commented that the connections being made weren't just historically and culturally illiterate but played into the BNP's hands: that odious party benefits because both national and local governments see the issues it exploits as outside the compass of open and reasoned debate. More silence, except for one or two groans and the sound of urgent scribbling by the head of my organisation in her notebook.

Are governments really scared of racists, anti-semites, religious bigots and homophobes, or of what they assume is our stupidity when confronted by them?

Let them, and others, speak.

Tuesday 31 August 2010

On Job Interviews

Job interviews are a poor way ro recruit. The interviewee is only going to tell the interviewers what they want to hear already, and the interviewers are entirely complicit. They should expect deceit because they openly encourage it.

This is a bad start to a working relationship because neither deceitfulness nor being a yes-man is a virtue.

To a boss who later says "Ah, but you said at interview that ..." the correct answer is, "Tough. Look to yourself. It was clearly what you wanted me to say, or you wouldn't have taken me on. The fact is, however ..."

Phrase it as you like, but I don't think they can touch you for that.

Monday 30 August 2010

On yer bike!

On the subject of yesterday's post, I saw this one on my Saturday walk too, between Frieth and Marlow. It clearly tells me that I can cycle here, and I thank the landowner for his or her kindness.

If you don't believe me, a man once won a case against the New York Subway, who had tried to prosecute him for smoking in a carriage that had signs saying 'No Smoking Allowed'. The court held that the sign meant that he was allowed not to smoke if he didn't want to.

This sign says the same about biking.

Now it's a beautiful August Bank Holiday morning, and what better than a ride in the countryside? I think I'll take a spin up Frieth way ...

Sunday 29 August 2010

A perambulation in the forest of words

What is wrong with this sign, which I found yesterday in the Hambleden valley, Buckinghamshire? Its message is clear enough: people are chopping down trees in this area and you should be careful in case one of them should fall on your head and injure or even kill you.

So why, on a long walk through the Chiltern Hills, did I trek back half a mile through the woods to take this photograph? What worm burrowed into the frontal lobe of my cerebral cortex in those ten minutes and, although I was wet and tired and still many miles from my evening's lodgings, made me retrace my steps?

It was, I discovered, the words "in progress". For they are not needed. The words "Danger, tree felling" tell us all we need to know. The words "in progress" are superfluous: they add nothing. Why put up a sign warning of tree felling if it were not in progress? You might just as well put up road signs saying that you don't have to drive at 23 miles per hour.

Why - and I thank you for reading on - is this important? Well, as it is written, with its unnecessary appendage, the sign implies the need for another sign. This would state that tree felling is not in progress. This sign would be erected not only in unexploited forests but also, for the sake of thoroughness and probably Health and Safety legislation, wherever trees are not being felled, so that the people of that area could go about their lives without the fear of gravitationally exacerbated arboreal menace eating away at them.

Picture it. The noble Bedouin would emerge from his tent to find his way to the nearest oasis blocked by such signs. Likewise, the Inuit of northern Canada would do battle not only with the elements and marauding polar bears, but with hordes of signs (let us call them 'hordings') that kept him from his fishing holes and thus threatened not only his health and happiness but those of his loved ones too. Faeroe Island puffin hunters, adrift upon the wild North Atlantic, would look up from their ...

... anyway, it doesn't bear thinking about.

What, you may already have asked - and thank you again for reading on - is my point? Well, as you may already have concluded from my own indulgences, it is that we use far too many words when we don't need to. At a time when everything is being rationalised, stripped down, made redundant, subjected to 'efficiency savings' and the like, we just keep on spewing out words as if they were bankers' bonuses. I know I do.

I propose that the Government step in. God might reasonably have allotted us a given number of words before He called time on us (and how different human history would have been: Hitler would have perished in prison after the Beer Hall Putsch and Stalin would have been just another poet who died young). But He didn't, so it falls upon the state to regulate our output.

It can start by putting its own house in order. May I draw to your attention that my proposed alteration to the sign pictured above amounts to a massive 40% reduction in the number of words used. This should become the minimum. Strategies, policies and the like must be discarded unless they can be fitted onto two sides of A4 paper at most, and with a maximium font size of 11pt. Progress reports get up to a page. Corporate mission statements must be no longer than 10 words for national, 7 for local government. Election manifestos and 5-year plans must be written on the backs of envelopes, if they aren't already.

More widely, and just for starters, Sunday newspapers will not be allowed to weigh more than 5 kilos and Dylan Thomas's poetry will be burned, even the good stuff. It can be done.

As for the rest of us, with a sadly necessary disregard for the great man's other sensitivities, Government should enforce George Orwell's demands for the use of Plain English on pain of a cage full of rats being strapped to offenders' faces:
  • Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
  • Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  • If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  • Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  • Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  • Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

My, I have gone on, haven't I?

Arty Farty Hot Airy Carey

John Carey’s book What Good are the Arts? is of an age - our age - in which those at the top of education aim to be barbarians in citadels not keepers of flames, while too many of those who get the education that this attitude fosters are stunted and small-minded, their only consolation being the bogus, guilt-laden ‘celebration’ that they receive from all quarters, not least Professor Carey’s.

I work with some of these people. Believe me, they don’t need the support that Carey offers. Richard Hoggart, that noble man, parodied the patronising neglectfulness of the anti-elitist elite as ‘just stay as sweet as you are’.

Anyway, Carey attacks some common assumptions about the arts. He claims, among other things, that:

  • ‘High art’ is no better than ‘low art’.
  • Art doesn’t make us better (Hitler, after all, was artistically a rather cultivated man), although he does say that arts programmes can serve certain utilitarian goals.
  • A work of art is anything that anyone thinks is a work of art: since we can’t know how one person - let alone all of us – subjectively responds to anything, there can be no shared definition.

As Emeritus Merton Professor of English at Oxford, Carey knows more than I do about his subject. That is factually true. But no matter: by his argument (if not mine), I suppose that if I think his book is crap, then it is crap, and I can finish this post here with that clear in my mind, if no one else's (and certainly not, I imagine, his). He might even go so far as to assert that flawed modern belief that I am entitled to my opinion. But if I’m wrong, and I hope he'd allow me to be, I may well be entitled to express my opinion but I’m not entitled to hold it. This gets us nowhere.

So here’s a brief stab at tackling each of Carey’s above claims. What do you think? Am I entitled to my opinions?

‘High art’ is no better than ‘low art’. Yes it is, because it requires more and deeper reserves of human imagination, skill, application, ingenuity and empathy in order to produce it, and these qualities, even if they are not all shared by all human beings in all cultures at all times, are accessible to all. In short, J.S. Bach's The Art of the Fugue is better than The Brotherhood of Man's Save Your Kisses for Me. Oh yes it is.

Art doesn’t make us better. No it doesn’t, but it has a wonderfully rich capacity to do so, which, as moral agents, we can welcome, ignore or pervert as we wish, and that is what matters; for every Adolf Hitler there is a Daniel Barenboim, for every Richard Wagner a Richard Wagner.

A work of art is anything that anyone thinks is a work of art. Only unimaginative, lazy, infantile - or habitually patronised - people will be content to say “I like x because I like it” and leave it at that; humans have and can give reasons for what they think and feel, and we have flawed but potentially fruitful shared means of making these reasons intelligible to others. Art is not an individual statement but a mutual discussion and exploration. The quality of the artistic experience should be a subject for that discussion.

I think Carey’s approach, whatever his intention, will encourage people to close down rather than open up good, inquisitive debate in a spirit of good will. I think it impedes the development of the ‘critical literacy’ (another Hoggart phrase) which Carey has in spades but would deny people who need it. I think it condones and supports the selfish and anti-social individualism encouraged by the market values he no doubt – and, if so, rightly – abhors.

He, and the many relativists in education and beyond, are not as radical as they think they are.

Friday 13 August 2010

It's Here. And Now.

"Daa-aaad ... Are we there yet?"

Parents everywhere will know this one. I usually ignore it for the first 2 hours, or the first 100 miles if the traffic is bad, or the first 5 miles if I am on the M25. Then I park the car and turn round in my seat. Quite slowly, for effect, and with a languor I do not feel.

For the cry is an important moment in their little lives, and no less so for being repeated every time they get in the damned car. It is the first embrownment of the bright, green leaves of their childhood. Soon they will enter the long, damp Autumn of adult yearning which can only end in the Winter snap of cold disappointment that will, in its turn, finish them off, their songs unsung.

This is my chance to make a difference, to change all that, to shatter the false mirror in which they play so heedlessly.

"My Children,” I say to them, “Enjoy this journey and enjoy the here and now. No, we are not there yet. There is no such thing as ‘there’ because you will find that, when we DO get ‘there’, 'there' will at that very moment have become 'here', which is where you are already. So a life chasing what you think is 'there', or even trying to get 'there', will be a disappointing one. ‘Here’ is where we are now, and is the only place you will ever be, and by Christ we are going to enjoy it.

“Ah, my little ones, fortune is always hiding – and you will find that it is always hiding over there. So live large, my children, and dream small, and ...”

It’s at this point that they usually ask for their Mum.

“She’s over there,” I tell them, and start the car again.

Friday 6 August 2010

On ContactPoint and Abuse

Today the new government "switched off" ContactPoint, the 11 million name national child database created after the horrible abuse and death of Victoria Climbie in 2000. I am very glad it did.

(How I love that term "switched off", by the way: £235 million to set up, services thrown into turmoil at God knows what extra cost, yet another root and branch reinvention of what public professionals do, their reputation dragged through the mud in the process, and you just ... switch it off!)

Anyway, Despite My Warnings At The Time, ContactPoint was and remained unanimously supported by all the organisations I have worked for and alongside, and most colleagues I have worked with. I fully expect them to be unanimous in rejecting it now. I admire consistency, and they have been consistently unanimous. Well done.


Now that we all agree, here are a few points that I've also been consistent about since the plan was hatched:

Firstly, that governments - not newspapers or public opinion - should make policy, that extreme cases taken out of context make for bad policy, and that the obsession with the elimination of all risk should not trump common sense in either policy or practice.
Secondly, that the Climbie investigation showed that it was mostly the failure by social workers to follow procedures that contributed to her death, not the procedures themselves. So why did we go to all this trouble, expense and inconvenience in the first place?
Thirdly, that the rarity of cases like Climbie and Baby P in a nation with a population approaching 60 million might actually show that care services are working rather well and not the reverse.
Fourthly, given that no professional will want to be fingered for missing a possible case of abuse in the current climate (and given the alarming ways in which 'abuse' is given meaning with which I continue this piece), was it ever right to open every child in this country to well-meaning interference by putting them all on a national database?


Which brings me to Abuse more widely in the context of the general demand, not limited to social care, that we eliminate all risk (not, I stress, minimise it; eliminate it).

'Abuse' is imagined and sought everywhere these days. The term is caught up in a vicious circle: firstly it is deployed with elasticity, then it becomes anchored in a disputable meaning, then it is defended and asserted rigidly - while still being used elastically. It has fairly recently been extended to include 'financial abuse', which I presume by now covers stopping pocket money for drowning the hamster and then feeding it to the cat. But I want to talk about parental smacking.

I once challenged a trainer from a national charity who had asserted that more than a third of all people are abused at some time in their lives. Once the room's collective intake of breath had subsided and a couple of people had been carried from it, I asked him, not very scientifically, if he really meant that at least 12 of the 36 adults present were likely to have been or would at some time be abused. He replied without hesitation that it was probably more. My colleagues were once again unanimous - in their silence.

Whereas I, of course, had been naive and inattentive to recent developments. For 'abuse' now includes, among other things, parental smacking - of any kind, at any time, regardless of immediate and wider contexts and the quality of the overall parent-child relationship - with all the consequences that follow from trying to police it, one of which is the national database that has just been 'switched off' so summarily.

As a result, I sit through meeting after meeting with my head in my hands as I hear earnest, well-meaning people (mostly women: the feminization of discourse within the caring services deserves a brave researcher to examine it) unquestioningly lament the scourge of Abuse as if there were no difference between an occasionally smacked juvenile bum and a regularly violated one.

But there is. We need to be more careful when talking about 'abuse', as about many other things, than we are.

The best writer on this aspect of the risk society is Frank Furedi. Anyone who simultaneously wins the praises of Terry Eagleton and Roger Scruton is OK by me.

Thursday 5 August 2010

On Paul McCartney turning 103.

Last week I said I would attempt to answer the question, "How could the same Paul McCartney write both Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time and Blackbird."

I regret to inform you that I have been unable to do this. I did not help myself by walking into a bar and hearing Ebony and Ivory, and at that point I just gave up.

Open minds? Empty vessels!

Keeping an open mind has become an end not a means. A virtue has become a vice.

As well as being open to new experiences and ideas, the purpose of being open-minded is to assess them with a view to reaching better conclusions about them than you would if you didn't do so. It requires us to be keen to learn and to go beyond what we think we know and believe already, and to make judgements based upon the experience. This may also require us to change our opinions from time to time.

But too many people see ‘an open mind’ as one which reaches no conclusion and avoids judgement for fear of not being seen to be ‘tolerant’. Worse, they seriously believe this to be virtuous behaviour. This kind of thinking suffuses British public service, which I have had the privilege if not the pleasure to inhabit for some 15 years now. Of even more concern is that most people I have prodded on the subject tend to believe it as well.

But this kind of open mind is really an empty one. It's timid, fearful and afraid to make mistakes, and people who never make mistakes never learn. And it’s not even tolerant. You can only tolerate things of which you disapprove. If you shrink from judgement of any kind, and from negative ones in particular, you can't be tolerant. So in fact it's an outward show masking moral squeamishness, like someone who won’t try foreign food and then dresses their small-mindedness as principle.

Worse, these people are intolerant. For all their often rigid sense of personal righteousness, their social ideals are weakly developed. Because of the power they have and exert, they push others backwards too. They work against their own professed aims. Careless as they are in distorting meaning (discrimination, for example, has been reinvented as a vice - unfair discrimination is the vice), they nonetheless insist that everyone else should maintain strict semantic and moral hygiene.

I do wish they'd be more open minded.

Sunday 1 August 2010

Spiritual? ME?

I'm not religious and see the dangers, but find many hardline atheists quite insufferable and pig-headed given that they can't prove their belief either. Were Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot religious? Is Jonathan Ross? Mind you, what the hell does 'spiritual' mean, or is it just the lay term for narcissism?

Friday 30 July 2010

Imagine THIS

Why does John Lennon's Imagine have such a hold over people? It is an anthem for the age, by which I mean one for children of all ages. It's routine for it to be close to the top of almost anyone's list of special music (and if it isn't, you'll find All You Need Is Love in its place). Indeed, I propose that celebrities on Desert Island Discs be presented not only with a copy of The Bible and the collected Shakespeare but with Imagine too. That really would show that the BBC can please Murdoch and move backwards with The Times.

Well, I think Imagine is self-centred, egoistic, nauseating drivel, just as I think hippies are, in general, a selfish, calculating and greedy bunch. "I hope someday you'll join us..." US? Away wi' ye back to yon penthoos wi' yer wee wifey, mon!

And this was the man who wrote Strawberry Fields Forever.

Next week: how could the same Paul McCartney write both Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time and Blackbird? That one keeps me up at night, I can tell you.

Monday 26 July 2010

Belgians of the World, Ignite!

Belgians is it?

Let's scotch that shameful "I bet you can't name 10 famous Belgians" jibe for a start. Adolphe Sax, Georges Simenon, Audrey Hepburn, Frankie van der Elst (he was a footballer), Arthur Grumiaux, Rubens, Breugel, Magritte, Jacques Brel; and of course the world's (let alone Belgium's) greatest cartoonist*, Georges Remi, AKA Herge. See: there's 11 for a start, and I deliberately left out Eddie Merckx to reinforce my case. OK, some of those may not be Belgians, but you get my point. And anyway, Andy Townsend played for Ireland, so does it matter at all?

Then there are Bruges, Antwerp, Gent, the Grande Place in Brussels and those lovely glowing, yellow bollard-shaped light things at motorway exit slip roads. And the beer.

* Oh yes he was! Read 'The Calculus Affair' - but not on the shiny paper of recent editions so you get the magical colours of Geneva in and after rain on pp 19-20.

Sunday 25 July 2010

On Tattoos

Aren't tattoos horrible?

I know what you're going to say: it's just my personal opinion, which is no better or worse than anyone else's. Moreover, you may add, since most adults now seem to have them, I am outvoted. Who am I to talk?

Balls. Away with you! No - stay awhile ...

I'm not just talking about those tattoos that come to look more and more like a nasty attack of varicose veins as people get older and fatter. The new filigree style has made them a thing of the past, although God knows what people will look like in a decade or so's time. Cobwebbed, I suspect.

And I admit that some of these newer tattoos are nice designs. (But so what? French gothic cathedrals are even nicer but I wouldn't have a scaled down model of one implanted on my head, even though do suffer from low self esteem. Likewise, as a passionate follower of Charlton Athletic Football Club - until I die, by the way, so this is not up for debate - I don't need to incorporate a representation of the fact because I know it already and if I want you to know - and if I think you will be interested, which is quite another matter - then I'll tell you. At length.)

No, my real objection - or rather an objection that I believe is not merely a matter of personal taste, but one that I would invite others to share because it has a wider significance - has to do with what tattoos may be taken by their hosts to mean, what I think they may be trying to say through them and - since so many people now wear them - what this may say about all of us and how we tend to go about things.

Only a little while back, tattoos were seen as permanent. Firstly, you couldn’t get rid of them without a painful, expensive and sometimes botched or at least unsightly operation. Secondly they were evidence of some idea of permanence: I love my Mum; Derek 4 Julie; Charlton Athletic Till I Die. To that extent there was a certain nobility about them. They were worn as external evidence of an unchanging internal commitment.

What's changed is that they have become just another short-term designer thing – like hair styles, street argot, dangerous dogs and loving human relationships.

What interests me - and what I'd like your views on - is that the concepts around permanence and representation of internal commitments, values or beliefs still hang in there, but they are different. The difference is that we are increasingly changing our commitments, values and beliefs at a whim (and, being fashion, we follow and do not lead, even if we like to think we lead). We too easily confuse our personal and often infantile inner needs with deeper meaning. In this sense, we children of the market are just that: isolated, scared children. Yet if you were to put to someone that their ‘personal’ statement was not actually a revelation of who they really are but evidence of their inner confusion and a cry for more permanent and - dare one even say it these days - shared meaning, you’d probably end up in hospital.

Which reminds me of an anecdote about Margaret Thatcher when she was prime minister. She was visiting an old people's home and walked up to a lady slumped in an armchair. "Do you know who I am?" she said in a loud voice. "No," came the reply. "But ask Matron: she'll tell you."

Must dash: here comes Matron now.

Friday 16 July 2010

I am no longer available for selection for the England football team

Following Emile Heskey's shock announcement that he will no longer be available for selection for the England football team, I wish it to be known that I am not available for selection either. In fact, I think we should start a national campaign in which everyone over the age of 16 should declare to the Football Association that they are not available for selection for the England football team, and I will happily deliver a list of these people to Soho Square, along with a large wheely-bin full of potato peelings. I await names from my many supporters, including those of you who have a foreign passport but English ancestry. You can't be too careful these days.

On measuring Age

The conventional way of measuring age (that is, how long you have lived) is wrong. Measuring age as 'birth plus' is probably quite useful in some ways, mostly administrative and including, I suppose, desiding when people should start schooling. But going on to draw all sorts of conclusions about people just because they happen to have been around a certain amount of time is quite another matter and has no justification so far as I can see.

For example, it's crazy that a fit, active, compos-mentis man or woman should have to retire for no other reason than that they're 65 or 103 - or whatever it is the Government wants these days - while some drink-sodden wastrel of 40 whose only exercise is to crawl from the sofa to the front door when the pizza arrives can continue taking paid sickies for another quarter of a century with near impunity.

A better way of measuring age is 'death minus' (that is, how long you are likely to have left, assuming you aren't hit by a bus or catch a disease that could afflict anyone or is no fault of your own). This way of measuring age takes into account not just how long someone has lived, but how they've gone about it. In a nutshell, measuring 'death minus' means that people who are fit and active are considered younger than others of the same 'birth plus' age.

Just think, it means that fit people could actually start to boast about being old (in the 'birth plus' sense) rather than get all hot under the collar about it. The world would change overnight! To see what I mean, here is the new way of calculating age that I propose.

First you have to do a little assessment, like these two examples:
1. A fit 43 year old, based on an assumed death at 90 (if there are no Acts of God): actual age equivalent to Death minus 47.
2. A lazy 43 year old git, based on an assumed death at 60 (if there are no Acts of God): actual age equivalent to Death minus 17

Then the clever bit: you take the above figures and then find out the average birth-plus age of death across the population as a whole; let's say, for the sake of argument that it's 75 for men. Now your real age looks like this:
1. Fit 43 year old: 75 minus 47 = actual age of 28.
2. Lazy 43 year old git: 75 minus 17 = actual age of 58

See! You never have to worry about your age again - unless you're a slob. If you are really super-fit this would open the intriguing prospect of there even being certain over-25s pubs and clubs that might actually deny you entrance or refuse to serve you unless accompanied by an obese person several years your junior (working on the faulty current 'birth-plus' formula)!

Right, I'm off to the pub.

Binge Drinking

‘Binge drinking’ is George Best; it's the flat opposite where the blinds are always down; it's Richard Harris going down to the corner shop for a pint of milk and coming home a fortnight later. We have a problem with how we use alcohol in this country and always have had. But going out and getting tanked on a Friday night is not binge drinking. Please resist, peacefully, those who claim it is.

For starters

Indifference is the cement holding society together.