I am a Champion.

When I started in youth work I was first assumed and then told to be a "young people's champion". As so often with such terms, it has both survived and obscured a number of changes in how young people are seen by governments and by society in general. Usually these changes are resource-driven and justified post hoc and ad nauseam, although in fairness they have occasionally resulted from prior thought.

So young people may be impressionable innocents, misunderstood deviants, fully-formed mini-citizens, social victims, claimants of rights or idealistic counterweights to adult cynicism, but so long as we "champion" them, preferably as indiscriminately as possible and without too many questions about what it is we're championing and why, we - and of course they -are just fine.

But right now I'm confused: I'm not sure whether being a Champion of Young People requires me to lament or to gloss over the fact that, of a pretty representative sample of 19 of them aged 14-16 on a residential trip this weekend, well over half couldn't identify even vaguely the location of Scotland and Wales on a simple map of Britain. Which means that they can't identify England with any certainty either.

After a somewhat stagey rant, an attention-seeking crawl under a desk, the application of salts and no little assistance with uncoiling from the foetal position, I was told not to worry because "History and Geography are only options at school".

Leaving aside the fact that we're almost daily asked to believe that education in England and Wales has never been better (why, look at the exam results!), I think that if people don't leave year 3 of primary school with a pretty good idea of which country they live in, where it is, who their neighbours are and what shape it is on a map, there's not much championing to be done about it and they'd damned well better be given no option about learning it when they start their GCSEs in year 10.

One of the key tests of a "young people's champion" over the years has been the belief that young people should get the vote at 16. And, for the first time in a national election in the UK, they will be eligible when the Scots vote on independence in the autumn.

Scotland has a different education system than we English. I hope for their and our sakes it's a better one.

This film is not for spurning.

Having missed it in the cinema, I have just watched 'The Iron Lady'.

Meryl Streep is absolutely - no, COMPSOGNATHEOUSLY - brilliant: what an actress, whose every tic, stoop and intonation so bit home that by the end of it I couldn't remember what Margaret Thatcher looked like or where the hell I’d been at the time.

More than anything there was - for me - a gradual realisation that she lived - no, survived - a life more ordinary for over twice the length of time she spent in power. If I'm right that puts her second only to Sir Paul McCartney and leaves Nelson Mandela still in his blocks.

I liked the neat opening scene in which "the milk snatcher", having eluded her captors, complains about the high price of that essential calcareous bovine nutrient: 49p a pint - and from a corner shop too! For once she should have followed her own advice instead of her father's and shopped at Tesco's.

But why did the Falklands war occur after the miners' strike? Where was Europe and all who sank in her (mostly over here)? Where Westland? And why was Heseltine played by Richard E. Grant, who only ever convincingly plays Richard E. Grant? Where were Tebbit and Lawson, Big Bang and Gorbachev?  Could Reagan do nothing more than dance? (OK, don't answer that one.)

And above all, why the leap from 1984 to 1990 – and with no mention of the World Snooker Final between that other Dennis, Taylor, and Steve Davis?

I think she'll be back.

 

Are we there yet?

There was an interesting question from Jan Greenwood on Facebook today: "Is it reasonable to assume that all-year Christmas shops don't have after-Christmas sales?"

The answer - as all-year Christmas shops are good enough to be open about - is that there's no 'after-Christmas' any more. Like children, but with fewer grounds for it, we live in a perpetual state of pre-things.

Unlike children, we are encouraged to do so, and it must be said that we respond magnificently and above all with great financial generosity.

For example, it is now the pre-Valentine's Day period. When that's over, although Easter eggs will already have been in the shops for a fortnight or so, we will be pre-Easter, then warming up during the pre-Summer Holiday period, pre-Hallowe'en before the tan has faded, pre-Bonfire Night, with fireworks a fortnight either side of November 5th, and finally (except it isn't) and with barely enough time to catch an autumn chill, pre-Christmas again.

The only thing we prefer not to be thought of as pre- is the one thing all of us are, and that's death, which only those we leave behind are authorised to celebrate - in the nicest possible way of course.

Consume and Live

Charity shops are the answer to middle class moral agonies about obsessive consumption: I get to indulge myself at minimal cost while kidding you I’m thinking of others. (And kidding myself: when deceiving people it always goes so much better on the conscience if you bamboozle yourself first - in fact, that's the main difference between theologians and politicians.)  And of course charities get the money and the high-street, supermarket and internet chains don’t. Then, instead of feeling guilty when I get home I can look down on everyone else. It doesn’t get better than that.

These are just some of my purchases since Christmas:

Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ will cost you £7.99 in Waterstone’s but I parted with just £1 in Age Concern, Chalfont St Peter. OK, less than half a lateral inch on the bookshelf  but an eighth of the price in the wild and, being second-hand, it will look to others like you’ve actually read it.

A used set of a rare Marx Brothers 6-DVD boxed collection is £54 plus P&P on Amazon, but I saw just £25 Go West in The Hospice Shop, Gerrards Cross.

A Paul Smith shirt that looks like a tube of Refreshers would have cost me an arm and a leg at £125 from the eponymous retail outlet - which, incidentally, rather defeats the point of buying it in the first place - but I secured it for the mere toenail clipping of £5 from Cancer Research in Beaconsfield, and with not a soup stain to be seen.

I wouldn’t be seen dead wearing it, but you know what I mean.
 

A Christmas reflection on the significance of continuity.

Christmas having been with us for nearly three months now and showing no signs of going away, I have retreated to my bunker, the approaching red, muzak-wielding Nicholine hordes nearly inaudible down here, to consider why, even in multi-billion dollar films and with the power of CGI and modern editing techniques at the fingertips of highly observant and gifted men and women, the continuity between one shot and the next is so often absolutely shocking

I invite those likewise disposed this Christmas eve to peruse, as only two of many pieces of supporting evidence, the opening scene of 'The Sound Of Music', in which Julie Andrews runs up a hill in bright sunshine to belt out the most famous opening line of any film beneath a sullen, grey sky, and the one on the snowy mountainside in 'The Fellowship Of The Ring' in which Boromir spies and covets the Ring in a blaze of sunlit colour and Aragorn promptly intervenes in ghoulish twilight.

Shocking. Just shocking. Do any more spring to mind?

And while I'm on the subject, why, in 'Calendar Girls', after shooting the whole film on location in lime- and gritstone-built Yorkshire, is a dispensable part of the final scene - supposedly taking place in the same village - shot in the very red-brick and southern hamlet of Turville in Buckinghamshire? OK, Pinewood is nearby, but if they'd forgotten something why set the conversation outside?

It really gets me and it threatens to ruin my Christmas. And because this is a time for sharing, here is a final thing that, if you have a beard, I hope will ruin yours too: do you sleep with it inside or outside the bed covers?

I know: it's Christmas and all I do is moan, moan, moan.

But REALLY.

The Way We Live Now (3)

Tesco’s again.

I chose an orange juice and a lemon chicken wrap from the ‘Snacking’ fridge. Each had a “Meal Deal for £3” sticker, so I took them to the till with the specified coinage.

“Would you like any help with your pack...”

“Don’t fuck with me, lady.”

“Of course, Sir. That’ll be £3.30, please.”

“I think these are on your £3 Meal Deal offer.”

A quick scrutiny of the till. “You didn’t get any crisps.”

“A correct observation in which, however, I fail to discern the slightest relevance to the comment I have just made.”

“It’s only £3 if you get crisps too. That’s the Meal Deal. It’s a deal, you see.”

“A deal that appears to mean the less I buy, the more I pay. I really must present that idea at our next sales conference. It'll go down a treat with hard-pressed consumers.”

“No, it’s a deal. You have to get crisps to get the deal. “Meal Deal” – look, it says it here.”
She looked a bit annoyed.

“Madam, please don’t take this personally, but does anything seem strange about the fact that your company is asking me to pay less for buying more? On that principle, might I be allowed to have one of your excellent 60-inch flat screen TVs in lieu of the crisps?”

“No, IT'S A MEAL DEAL.”

The Way We Live Now (2), or Never Ask How, Only Why

Another supermarket just yesterday, but it wasn’t Tesco’s. It could just as well have been another organisation, though - let me see now  ... your local council, for instance? I should warn you that this has a happy ending.

 

Lady at the ‘Baskets Only’ till: “I’m sorry, Sir, but you’re not a basket.”

Hang on, let’s start that again. Bloody pikeys.

 

Lady at the ‘Baskets Only’ till: “That’ll be £1.78, Sir. Would you like help packing?”

Myself: “I beg your pardon?”

The Lady: “Would you like any help to pack your groceries?”

I look carefully at what I have bought.

After a while: “No ... no, it’s just two small bags of lemons. I think I can manage.”

I lean against the counter for a short while, breathing as deeply and as evenly – and, indeed, as crisply – as I can. A late autumn fly dances the dance of love and death among the late autumn corporate Christmas decorations.

Myself: “Excuse me, but may I ask you why you asked me if I needed any help packing a total of 8 lemons?”

The Lady: “Our manager says that we have to ask everyone that, however little they buy.” She gurns conspiratorially.

Myself: “So the manager of a flagship branch of one of the most ruthless retail empires on the planet asks its employees either to take time away from serving customers or to call another member of staff away from whatever carefully planned and rationalised task they are supposed to be doing in order to help a physically able man pack 8 lemons in a bag?”

The Lady: “Yes. I did ask him why but he said we just have to do it. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? But I did ask.”

Myself: “Madam, you are a heroine, the golden leaf that fell at the flutter of a butterfly's wing in that northern forest!”

The Lady: "Enough of your sauce, young man!"

More conspiratorial gurnings, this time shared. There is hope after all.

 

The Way We Live Now

The Way We Live Now, named in honour of that great man Richard Hoggart, will be a collection of absurdities to which I encourage all to contribute.

Any contributions must:
- be true
- have been witnessed by you or related to you by a trusted person
- only be embellished to enhance the original effect, and only if the urge is irresistible
- be linked to a wider theory of why we're all going to hell in a handcart
 

Here's my starter

Scene: a British supermarket (my legal team's advice is that I shouldn't name it, so its initials are M-O-R-R-I-S-O-N-S).

Customer: "I see that your organisation is presently offering to dry-clean 4 items of clothing for what, I must say, is the distinctly reasonable price of £16.00 - that's just £4 an item!"

Deskbound institutionalised automaton jobsworth: "Indeed we are, Madam, and may I say we are proud to do so as a gesture to our customers!"

Customer: "Then I am delighted, for that very purpose and in the spirit you so generously evince, to reciprocate by vouchsafing the requisite number of articles unto your keeping."

DIAJ: "Thank you. Madam ... Ah, I'm afraid that one of them is silken in nature, of material inappropriate."

C: "I quite understand, and thank you for saving me future sartorial empurplement: just the three items then!"

D: "Certainly, Madam! That'll be £17.50."

C: "I beg your pardon?"

D: "That'll be seventeen pounds and fifty pee, please."

C: "Alright, cut the crap: how come it's £16 for 4 and £17.50 for 3?"

D: "The offer is for 4 items, Madam. You only have three."

C: "So you mean you're charging me more for giving you less work?"

D: "The special price is for 4 items, Madam, as our literature clearly explains."

C: “Thank you, and so it does. BUT DO YOU MEAN YOU WANT TO CHARGE ME MORE FOR GIVING YOU LESS WORK?"

D: "Well, Madam, I ..."

C: "Dry-clean THIS, sucker!"

etc. etc.

 

Cut the Deficit!

When I trained to be a youth worker about 15 years ago, I was warned against what was called "the deficit model of youth". This was held by governments, officials, teachers, parents and park keepers everywhere. I always took that to mean that we shouldn't pigeon-hole the young.

Today it seems to me that there is nothing more ... deficitful than, on the one hand, our obsession with young people's apparent low self esteem and, on the other, only working with them because they accord to certain definitions, for example being "at risk of offending" (a condition more often suffered by their potential victims, I'd have thought) or "at risk of abusing alcohol" (by occasionally experimenting with it, as we have done for centuries) or "at risk of having unsafe sex" (as if having "safe" sex weren't dangerous enough these days, as anyone who has ever had it with me will testify).

But such targeted work - and very little else - is what youth services around the UK, including mine, are being told to do in order to safeguard their very existence. I thought we had social workers, youth offending teams and health services to do just that. They are welcome to recruit or contract youth workers to help, but they, not we, are the experts.

Youth work is different and almost unique (there may still be a few educators among the teachers out there) in that firstly, it doesn't select but is open to all who wish to have access to it and secondly, it's developmental, not least of young people as moral agents and creative, curious personalities.

If it is remedial, that is a by-product of this work, not its prime purpose. We should try to keep it that way in case, by the time the recession is over, we've forgotten altogether.

Too Hot to Handle

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/story/2013/09/10/mb-hot-tea-coffee-burns-winnipeg-iteam.html?cmp=fbtl
 
If you are going to drink a hot drink it needs to be hot, PROPERLY hot, just like ice lollies need to be frozen and meringues avoided like the plague. Unfortunately this means hot enough to scald anyone over whom it may be spilled.

It follows that it's not a good idea to drive a car with a hot drink in a position where it might go all over you. I and many people - including this lady - do it, and I'm sure many of you do it too. But that doesn't make it sensible, or this lady right.

I say this because, while she may not be as mad as the American woman who sued McDonalds because she stuck a cup of their take-away coffee between her legs (well, you didn't expect her to DRINK the muck, did you?), she is asking - I presume on behalf of the rest of us sillies - for legislation to set take-away drink temperatures far lower than they are now.

While undoubtedly well-meaning, I think she is wrong.

I'm not a dermatologist but I suggest that any coffee or tea that is too cool to scald will also be too unpleasant to drink.

In fact, if I may speak as a confirmed silly and therefore among the majority she wants to save, I have enough problems with lukewarm Costa and Starbucks coffee as it is and don't want tepidity made compulsory for me and other hot beverage lovers on account of my and your stupidity. In short, it is we and not the law who need reforming, and good coffee should be left alone for both fools and the wise to enjoy.

That said, I intend to continue to drive while drinking hot coffee, and to be fully responsible and red of both face and groin if I get scalded as a result.

But I won't be suing anyone, and I won't be asking the government to do my thinking for me either.

On Telephone Banking: a Rant

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Richard Dawkins's 'The God Delusion': Religiosity is too widespread to be pinned on believers.

In ‘The God Delusion’ Richard Dawkins makes a good scientific case for rejecting the existence of God. He argues that He would have to be infinitely more complex than the universe He is supposed to have created, so where (the Hell) did He come from in the first place? He also sets out (Dawkins that is, not God) – if at an unheavenly length – the many foul acts that besmirch the Bible and other holy books, and that have since been perpetrated by religious fundamentalists down the centuries. He also makes a great case for science and scientists, who by and large are able to change their views when evidence contradicts them.

Some reservations, though:

Dawkins is convincing about the matter of the genesis and development of life but not about the genesis of matter, which this scientifically dense but otherwise literate reader can’t recall him addressing (in this book at least), or about the development of the human race, which in my view has pretty effectively rewritten most of the books about evolution that even Dawkins has read, to the extent that some of his attempts to reconcile human peculiarities with natural selection appear a bit ... guessy and unscientific.

In chapter 7, ‘The ‘Good’ Book and the changing moral Zeitgeist’, Dawkins addresses the common counter-argument that the greatest crimes have been committed not by religious bigots but by atheist regimes (he mentions Hitler and Stalin and not Mao or Pol Pot, but what’s a few million?). He makes a weak attempt to paint Hitler as a religious man and the worship of Stalin as analagous to faith in Christ, ignoring the fact that Nazi racism was based as much on bad (but paradigmatic) science as on blaming Jews for the murder of Christ, and not only that Stalin’s dogma was explicitly atheist but that some of the most persecuted and obdurate of those he incarcerated and murdered were believers who both retained their faith and were living (and dying) human examples to many others who had none. Highlighting Hitler’s Catholic upbringing and selected quotations from speeches from the early 1920s is no good if you ignore both the fact that Hitler was a supreme political liar and his own statement (in ‘Mein Kampf’ - so far more likely to be true) that he actually had no problem with Jews until he actually met one, which says a lot more about something else in the man and about a cultural racism which had long moved beyond the religious.

Nor, given Hitler, Stalin and the rest, is it possible to believe Dawkins’ assertion that there is a consistent, if sometimes erratic, historical direction in the 'Zeitgeist' - a term he uses horribly freely - towards greater liberalism. Perhaps some readings in discourse theory might have come in useful here: have these Zeitgeists not been ... exorcised? In fact the 20^th century is unique both for the number of innocents who were murdered and for the bogus justifications that were made for the carnage, few of which had anything but the most vestigial remnants of religious underpinning. Surprisingly, there is little mention of the real professional murderers but only the blip in this liberal teleology represented by American religious conservatives and the Taliban, who appear to share the same bed even if they rarely break sweat together. That's not good history.

When, Dawkins asks, has anyone ever murdered people in the name of atheism? That's not the point.

Christmas Newsletter 2012

Fuck me, has it come around again already?

Jeez!

Leap Before You Look

Dear Bell’s Scotch Whisky,

Several times during the build-up to Christmas I've heard your radio advert on Tawk Spawt: "You can raise money for charity by abseiling down a cliff, or bungee jumping off a bridge ... or drinking a glass of Bell's! 10p from every bottle sold goes to Help for Heroes."

You appear heavily to suggest that the last method of raising money is the one we should go for. But something isn't quite right.

Let's say that I could raise £100 (at a very conservative estimate), net of associated outgoings, for taking part in the above-mentioned precipitative activities, with about a month spent fund-raising plus about half a day hanging off Beachy Head.

However, if I'm to follow the fund-raising course you recommend, in order to make the same amount I'd need to drink 1000 bottles of your product at give or take 15 quid a go and at an unredeemable total cost of about £15,000 . If I chose the same period of a month, though on doing the maths I probably wouldn't, I'd need to drink 30 bottles every day.

I mention this because you conclude the advert with a second recommendation: that I enjoy your product responsibly.

I don’t want in any way to suggest that you cynically abuse people's desire to help wounded ex-soldiers and bereaved families so that you can make a quick buck during this season of goodwill, or that you think that we are all stupid.

But others might - if they’re not already pissed.

Yours abstemiously,

Peter Roberts

On accountability and responsibility

The more the panic at the BBC develops – the Director General resigning after a few weeks in the job, being given twice his contractual pay-off for doing so, and with suspensions and stand-ins all over the place – the more I ask why George Entwistle went in the first place, even after his craven interview with John Humphries on 10^th November and his admission that he took insufficient notice of the Newsnight crisis once it had started to develop.

There has been a lot of talk – not least from Entwistle – about his ultimate ‘responsibility’ for what happened. In fact, he is ultimately accountable for what happened. As he noted, the Newsnight programme went through the various checks that existed long before he became Director-General. Both the journalism and those checks were done in a sloppy and unprofessional way and didn’t keep to basic standards, but others were responsible for them.

As a manager, accountability incorporates responsibility if you set up structures and/or procedures that are flawed, fail to reform them when you detect problems - whether inherited or your own, or fail to have sufficient oversight of those that are in place. The first doesn’t apply to Entwistle; the second can’t yet apply as he had only been in the post for a few weeks. The third is more arguable, but I believe a new person in a huge job should be allowed to make errors, if only for the purpose that they learn from and don’t repeat them. Also, in theory a fire could develop anywhere in the BBC’s vast forest, but one cannot expect the DG rather than the system he or she oversees to pick them up.

Finally, with regard to the second point above, accountability is an active thing: it is about putting things right, and the new DG was not been given this chance. If he had been given that chance, and had failed, then we could have started talking about his responsibility.

Meanwhile, let’s panic. What else is there to do?

In praise of maps

What wonderful things maps are. No symbol of our loss of innocence is more beautiful.

Maps changed our world - that line of mountains, those headlands at each end of the bay, the horizons beneath which we carried on our lives - and the lands and people beyond it. The world was flat until maps appeared in all their essential flattiness.

Now Mankind could fly without leaving the ground, could burn his wings without crashing to earth. The world became of three dimensions. While always compromised by its curvature, maps are things of revelation. Even the most prescriptively and deliberately drawn leave as much to be imagined as read, while large scale topographical maps are a wealth of the unstated but discernible. And they are never up to date. Maps contain within them the tools with which we can question both what we see and what we understand.

For this reason maps should be treated as kindly as books, and we should resist the shallow, utilitarian prescription of satellite and other devices, for to travel is better than to arrive - whether you think you know where you're going or not.

But would Petraeus betray us?

I hope I'm not alone in thinking it ridiculous that David Petraeus has resigned as head of the CIA because he had an extra-marital affair. That's between him and his wife and family.

It doesn't matter whether he was good or bad at his job, since the 'rule' would apply to the good as well as the bad, and could apply to any organisation or post.

Nor does it say much about the suitability of his character for the high post he occupied, if that is the reason. John F. Kennedy was himself an adulterer, Winston Churchill a drunkard and Adolf Hitler a teetotal vegetarian who wept to music and couldn't abide cruelty to animals (and in that sense he was a man whose time has come, a modern role model if ever there was one).

That Petraeus had it off with his biographer might make people want to read the book with care, but it's not as if he was popping over to Iran to call on Mrs Ahmadinejad and leaving his papers in the wardrobe, is it?

Meanwhile, there is no doubt tumult everywhere in Langley, Virginia, and you don't have to love the CIA to see the danger of following the principle elsewhere.

It's just daft.

The Meaning of Life

At the end of the day and when all’s said and done,

And the finishing post at the end of life’s run

Can be glimpsed in the distance – just over the hill

That we all one day roll down whatever our will –

We fall to consid’ring the meaning of life,

Its purpose and pity, its trouble and strife.

Thus exercised, surely we can but conclude

With a shrug of the shoulders, a sagging of mood,

That the nearest to knowledge, the furthest from doubt,

The best guess we have as to what it’s about

Is the Hokey-Cokey:

Knees bend,

Arms stretch,

Ra Ra Ra.

That’s what it’s all about.

Yes, that’s what it’s all about.

Dumbing up, nailing down.

Sinister developments in British higher education: 70-odd of 104 universities (my God, we have 104 universities?  We ARE bright!) have signed up to a scheme that, according to BBC Radio 4, is intended to replace simple degrees over time. This will be an end of course report, written by the institution - of which the degree result will be a part - that details 'other activities' such as volunteering, club and society membership, sporting achievements, roles in the student union and so on.

Designed to "benefit employers, and above all students" (note the order, not the emphasis), in my view this is the logical extension of the patronising and utilitarian straitjacket that increasingly passes for education lower down the brain chain. On being asked rather neatly by the interviewer whether "part of student life is sitting and thinking, sometimes in pubs”, the man (it was 6.40am, I was cuddling my pillow, and I didn’t get his name) simply dodged the question.

If students, who are legally adults whether we like it or not, want to list, promote or fabricate their achievements, they have a mechanism called the curriculum vitae. Universities have no place in either writing it for them or, by so doing, making them mere cogs in a machine that we should continue to kid ourselves they may run one day.

Go away!

I once challenged a Staffordshire Terrier owner whose dog had jumped up at one of my kids at the entrance to a playground. I asked her to control her dog. She said that he was quite friendly and wouldn’t hurt them. I pointed out that, however friendly her dog, my and others' kids might not like it jumping at them in that way. The woman and her male companion’s response was to repeat the words “Go away, go away” again and again in a rising crescendo of anger.

In the end I was grateful for my children’s presence. Not only were my fellow adult citizens public-spirited enough to modify the words “fuck off” which would otherwise have leapt to their lips as their preferred means of continuing the debate, but I didn’t have to take the three of them on armed with nothing but a large cuddly toy. And come to think of it, had my children not been there I wouldn’t even have had that.

There are plans afoot to train UK citizens how to deal with "challenging situations" like this. You know: people who are recreationally damaging things or who can't control their kids in public and - by extension, because these are the ones that are most likely to hospitalise me - people who throw litter everywhere or let their dogs defecate indiscriminately. Among the things to be taught are 'conflict resolution techniques' and 'negotiation skills'.

Leaving aside the question of whether the state should mind its own business, what fascinates me is the fact that we have let individual sovereignty over society go so far that the non-negotiable no longer exists. How many ways are there of negotiating someone out of letting their dog shit where the bus queue stands? You just don't let your dog do it, and you clean it up if it does, and if you can't work that out on your own I am not going to waste my time chewing the fat with you.

I'm going to tell you this just this once.