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.

God Save The Dream

I spent much of yesterday evening and already an hour this morning dabbing my eyes at the joyful and deeply eloquent speechlessness of all of the GB Olympic athletes, rowers and cyclists who did so well yesterday. I am sure this is replicated in the other teams.

Such was the spirit between the heptathletes after Jessica Ennis crossed the final finishing line to win gold that I half expected them all to lift her up and chair her on a lap of honour.

In the end it's only sport, and in the big scheme of things sport is probably rather silly, but to see such distilled human joy amid this gentlest and most generous patriotism transcends that essential daftness, suggests that all is not indeed lost for humanity, and has me reaching for the hankies every time.

The Mass Psychology of Fashion or There's No Smoke Without Ire.

Why are smokers folk-devils? Why has an understandable concern about smoking become so personal?

It's one thing to disapprove of smoking. I do myself. I dislike the smell, I wouldn't date a smoker or live with one, and I’d do my best, without being impolite, to get out of accepting a lift from one. I'd hate my kids to take it up . And I admit that my Sunday morning hangover, incurred after consuming large amounts of what, if it were discovered or invented tomorrow, would be designated a Class A drug, is a little more bearable these days because my hair and clothes don't reek of smoke from the pub last night.

But it’s quite another thing for people to jog along behind moralistic state-sponsored banning-and-ostracising campaigns and call it civic virtue while being indifferent or celebratory about God-knows how many human activities that aren’t under the selective gaze of public opprobrium right now.

I know, I know: the passive smoking argument.  But careful: don't take it too far unless you're prepared to allow the state to legislate that any private home with dependant children should be a smoke-free zone. It's curious how people who happily tell adults how to to behave in places where they and others can choose not to go are indifferent to the very people who can't. So what'll it be?

Tolerance requires dislike or disapproval (which is why so many supposedly liberal and ostentatiously non-judgmental people, er, dislike it).  But it allows for the exercise of discrimination, for debate and for compromise. And it doesn't - because it can't - require laws to make it real and active.

On 'plastic Brits'

On the Today Programme this morning there was a dispiriting debate between a Daily Mail journalist and Sunder Katwala, the director of a think tank called 'British Future'. The subject was so-called 'plastic Brits' representing Great Britain at the Olympics.

The Mail man was saying - quite reasonably, I thought - that sporting mercenaries who apply for a UK passport because they wouldn't make the Olympic squad in their own country are not really British.

Katwala, who throughout was less intent on having an intelligent discussion than on attacking the Mail for its hypocrisy given, for example, its campaign to get the white South African Zola Budd a UK passport in time for the 1984 Olympics, said that anyone who gets a UK passport, including people who do so for mercenary reasons, is by legal definition a Brit so we should welcome and get behind them, and there's an end on it.

That bothered me.

Firstly, the Mail’s sins may or may not be real, but they’re irrelevant to the debate: returning to them again and again was a dishonest debating ploy that shed no light on the matter of ‘plastic Brits'.

Secondly, British Future’s website states that it’s keen to “engage those who are anxious about cultural identity”, though to what end it doesn’t say. One of its main aims is "building a modern British identity which helps us to build [two builds there, guys!] an inclusive citizenship, where we can all be confident about who we are, and which recognises the national and local identities we hold in Britain today too." I’d like to know how conflating, as Katwala did, formal legal identity with the deep, complex, shifting, culture- and time-bound elements of personal and collective identities serves either of those purposes.

I don't think it does. British Future could be building not a broad church but a house of straw. Which could burn easily.

By Gove, you're wrong!

When I was 16, Mr Aherne, my school year head, spoke to all 200 boys in my year in a big room. But he mostly spoke to the great majority who were leaving rather than the small number of us going on to the 6th form. "Good luck," he said, "Enjoy your jobs or apprenticeships and don't get anyone pregnant just yet." It still brings a tear to my eye.

Michael Gove is right about one thing. Yes, there is competitive dumbing down. Schools, universities, exam boards and governments are driven to collude by a shared rhetoric that has little to do with education and everything to do with justifying their existence. One - just one - of the awful effects of this is to conflate qualifications with education. For example, in my own organisation, as I noted in a previous post, a promising but by no means academic 19 year-old who has never even wanted to go to university is being pushed through an MA from scratch in two years and will become better qualified and - on paper - more highly esteemed than the head of the organisation, whose only consolation is that she clearly employs such excellent part-time staff. Just think, funders, how good the full-time ones must be!

But rather than return to a hierarchical, two-tier system based on purely academic ability, which is what Gove seems to want, we'd do better to do what the Germans and Dutch have done for years, which is have a dual but parallel system, broadly divided between those whose skills are more academic and those whose skills are more practical, but with every attempt made to ensure a parity of esteem between them. The academic kids are just fine, and the less academic ones know they are getting a real education that will equip them not just with skills but with expertise, and they can use it later in real jobs, because not everyone in Germany and The Netherlands works in a bank or a call centre.

On the whole those countries don't privilege those of academic bent like we do, or write off the less academic like we do, so they don't have to come up with bullshit qualifications with bullshit content to try and pretend that we're all academic when we're not, or that the courses mean something when they don't.

Is it an accident that these are two countries which still make things, whose people don't all spend the day behind computer screens or being icily courteous to enraged phone-callers, which have a higher quality of living and, yes, cultural richness than us, and shared between more people, and - which for me clinches it - whose footballers tend to speak better English than ours do?

I'll bet you this: if British kids thought they would get a good education in practical subjects and that there were a good apprenticeship system waiting for them that led to real jobs that made things, we wouldn't have half the problems in our schools - and beyond - that we do today. And we wouldn't need bogus qualifications to prove it.

From the crookde tmibres fo hunamtiy nohtnig staightr saw reve dame

I took my work laptop in to be fixed at my employer’s IT department this morning and while I was waiting I spotted this poster very prominently displayed on the office wall.

I asked the guy who was fixing my computer what he thought of it and he made a face to the rendering of which my written skills are unequal, as this sentence clearly demonstrates.

I asked what he thought, for example, of item 7 on the list (“Team members call out one another’s deficiencies and unproductive behaviours”), against which a score of 3.29 (of something) out of 5.00 (of something) had been awarded in March 2012, as against a score of 2.86 (of something) out of 5.00 (of something) in October 2011, a fall of 0.43 (of something). He said nothing - but did so in a way that I also find hard to describe.

I said that this scoring method meant that there must be 500 levels (of whatever that something is) at which “Team members call[ing] out one another’s deficiencies and unproductive behaviours” could be measured, each of which something would have to mean something if the system of measurement being used were to mean anything. He smiled an inscrutable smile and said that this was the boss’s idea and they had had a half day's training on it.

I’m not the best at reading people’s emotions but I had a strong feeling that his answer in fact meant something like “the whole thing is a load of bollocks and we all know it is, and the best way we can live with it is not to give a damn, otherwise we will all go mad.”

So I stuck my neck out and asked if he or anyone else at the training had asked their boss what the hell it was supposed to mean.

He smiled - more intelligibly than his last effort, I thought - and said, “She isn’t here any more.”

Now I ask you: what says more about the human condition – that no one said anything to her then or that she isn’t here now? Is my glass half empty, or half full?

Another raking from the pig-pen at Folly Farm

Here's one for future history books.

Both the following things have occurred within the organisation I work for in the past few days.

• Two parents accompanying their respective disabled children and sleeping in separate lockable dormitories were turned away from a residential kids' weekend because they did not have a CRB (police) check in place.
• A 15 year-old girl going for the first time to Spain as part of a youth group is staying alone with a local family for a week with no police check required.

In both cases my organisation complied fully with the regulations.

I think this is evidence to bear out my suspicion that the purpose of regulations like these and much health and safety legislation is not to protect people but to avoid litigation.

Let's all be open about it.