(Old) Dreams and Daemons

Swansong from Old Dreams and Daemons

2007-09-01T13:58:00.000+02:00

Dreams and Daemons has moved home: New Dreams and Daemons can be accessed on the following LINK.

I posted the following as a comment to Gigi's French Windows blog this morning. With her permission I am reproducing it here as a final swansong to Old Dreams and Daemons.

"I won't be bothering with Google/blogger anymore, Gigi, unless or until it stops locking folk out their blogs for no good reason, and allows one's copy to be searchable under Google.co.uk.

I found my present new home by inputting blog co.uk into google.co.uk.

I then went to the first blog I could find, written as it happens by a British-based Hindu, and entered one of his phrases into Google.co.uk and, hey presto, it showed up.

But when I did the same with phrases taken at random from Blogger bogs, or even those from TypePad or WordPress, they only showed up in Google www., and never in Google. co.uk.

I don't understand why Google plays the night club doorman/bouncer where google.co.uk is concerned. I know it's caused a lot of ill-feeling among Brits, especially those who are UK resident, who signed up with the "easiest" blog provider, invariably US-based, only to discover they are automatically excluded from Google.co.uk, which is where a lot of us Brits confine our searches if it's seen as a UK topic.

It is odd, and a bit sinister if you ask me, how Google defends this absurd policy with almost religious zeal.

It's the kind of thing that breeds conspiracy theories. I know Bill Gates made more than one visit to No.10 while His Toniness was still in residence. I must do some research and see if any of Google's top figures were ever issued an invite as well, by TB or Alistair Campbell, if you get my drift.

Who was it who left office complaining about the "feral media" which some commentators read as code for bloggers, both private and MSM.

01 September 2007 12:17:00 CET

Calling my generation - remember Focus with their Hocus Pocus ?

2007-08-17T18:05:00.000+02:00

Yes, I thought some light relief was in order. Here's a YouTube clip of Focus doing that manic performance of Hocus Pocus live, way back in 1973. Unbelievable, hilarious, OTT, fuelled by who knows what ?

The Dutch band has a Wikipedia entry, needless to say. Here's what it says about Hocus Pocus, and that amazing guitar riff :

"1971: The group released Moving Waves, which brought the band international acclaim and a hit on both sides of the Atlantic with the radio edit of the rock rondo Hocus Pocus. This rock classic consists of Akkerman's guitar chord sequence used as a recurring theme, with quirky and energetic interludes that include alto flute riffs, accordion, guitar, and drum solos, whistling, nonsensical vocals, falsetto singing, and yodeling. This album established Van Leer and Akkerman as composers who could appeal to progressive-rock album listeners (a large audience in the early 1970s) and radio single buyers."

Message from the conservative grassroots to David Cameron

2007-08-17T11:33:00.000+02:00

Decisions, decisions...

I've just submitted the following to a thread on the Telegraph's Speaker's Corner , which asks us whether we think John Redwood's tax-cutting proposals will persuade folk to vote Conservative:

"Just as the Wilson/Callaghan era needed a Margaret Thatcher to restore common sense and sanity, so the Blair/Brown era needs an equivalent.

(Brown the Roundhead's wearing of not-made-in-Blair-Land clothes should fool no one, since it was he who used pensioners and taxpayers' money to bankroll one botched, half-baked, misguided project after another. He deserves a lengthy period in the political wilderness to reflect on the enormity of what he and his Laughing Cavalier predecessor inflicted on Britain, leaving an angry resentful population, cynical about politicians of all colours).

The present tax -cutting proposals are welcome, and will help re-connect with traditional Conservative voters who are not all in their dotage. But piecemeal tax cuts are not enough: the Tories should aim to become the June 1st party, that being a target for Tax Freedom day, presently postponed till July 23rd, thanks to the ex-Chancellor and his predecessors. The aim should be small, lean, financially-astute, ruthlessly-cost-cutting Government in which not every other person in the country is on the Government payroll.

There is one other nettle that Cameron needs to grasp if he is to restore confidence in his stewardship. He has to address the legacy of Blair's typically messianic pledge to have 50% of our youngsters in higher education. Yes, I know it's a separate issue, but it's the source of much that is sick in our society.

That pledge looked superficially attractive when first announced, at least to the gullible, but as we now know it was a poisoned chalice, only being possible by youngsters being forced to buy £20,000 of chips on tick to be able to play in Nu-Labour 's employment casino . That's the one with the slogan: "Get something better than a McDo job - at an eye-watering entry fee - and even then you'll have to be lucky."

See what you have created, Mr. Blair, Mr. Brown - a generation of youngsters for whom adult life on the 18th birthday requires immediate decisions that could make or break their entire careers, indeed lives ? How many of us would opt for university, if it meant starting one's working life with £20,000 of graduate debt ? But what are the alternatives ? A job at the minimum wage, with few if any career prospects ?

Welcome to Blair/Brown's Brave Nu-World of opportunity, provided you have a degree from an "old" university, and your Dad has contacts to get you into that vital first job, so you can then start repaying that mountain of debt.

Is it any wonder that so many youngsters, especially on the estates, shrink from adult life and its responsibilities ?

Thanks to that pledge, we have also seen the inevitable proliferation of third-rate universities, devaluation of degrees, and with it, the perception that non-graduate employment means failure, such that we now have to rely on Polish plumbers and other immigrant workers to fill the gap. They prosper, as well they should, while our disaffected youth congregates on the estates, taunting those who still have property to protect.

Don't hug a hoody, Mr. Cameron. Give him a decently paid job, with prospects, that is within his capability, backed up with day-release training. Don't let employers skimp on that - use a carrot-and-stick approach.

Scrap the Blair madness that requires youngsters attend their first job interview clutching £20,000-worth of largely useless paper. Then maybe you will start looking like a credible Prime Minister-in-waiting, with John Redwood as your red-in-tooth-and-claw Chancellor."

Diary of a day spent with a Peace Corps worker in Ghana, Xmas 1967

2007-08-16T14:18:00.001+02:00

Did you read the item two days ago about gap-year students ? According to an article in the Telegraph, those adventurous young folk may be wasting time on projects.

So says the long-established VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas), claiming that what they cheekily call "voluntourism" may be doing more harm than good . According to them, teenagers looking for a life-enhancing break between school and university are being packed off to developing countries to work on one project or another without sufficient training or know how.

Here's a near-verbatim record from my travel diary, written on Day 4 of a 10 day trip into the Northern /Upper East regions of Ghana in December 1967. It describes a chance encounter I had with one Norm Haskett, a US Peace Corps worker. ( How come we never hear of the Peace Corps these days ?)

I'd be interested to hear your views on whether you think Norm Haskett was doing a valuable job or not.

(Hi, Norm, if you're reading this. No, we sadly never kept in touch, but I hope you don't mind my using your real name here, some 40 years on.).

The day I describe here was spent in a region to the east of Bolgatanga. It's a vast and largely empty savannah country up near the border with Burkina Faso (then called Upper Volta). Bolgatanga is marked on the map.

December 20th 1967 (Day 4)

"The greatest impression of my whole 4 months in Ghana. Walked out of Bolgatanga in the direction of Nangodi. The country was just my cup of tea - wide and open, with hills in the distance.

( I was) Just through Zuarungu when a beautiful green jeep stopped with Norm Haskett, Peace Corps Co-op Officer inside with young Martin ( a Ghanaian). He was going to Nangodi.

Jumped at chance to accompany him on round.

First stopped at house of Mr. Bag? (Chief of Spirits). Then moved on to meet Paramount Chief of Nangodi. Watched all the greetings being exchanged with sub-chief. ? Na ?Na ?Na Never looked at each other once.

Then came "pito" a sweet yeasty brew of guinea corn. After greetings we moved to school house for meeting proper. Norm was taking £5 per farmer.

Many had not turned up or paid. Norm sold the 'self-help' idea and said that nothing could start until (there was) £300 in the kitty. Idea was to eliminate the middle man primarily. Co-op buys produce from farmers and markets the collective produce - shea nuts, groundnuts, millet and maybe tomatoes.(We) then retired for lunch at Mr. Bag?. Had a bowl of "TZ" (maize meal), groundnut soup and chicken. More pito. Returned to Jeep, led by men with 'sitar' and calabashes.

(Was) Requested to dance. Did so to great amusement of all. About this time Mr. Bag? called me Atenga, meaning Chief of the Land. Mr. Bag liked me. He himself, however, had just withdrawn from the Coop to join a cattle one instead, he said. We went to his (dead) father's home. His father was previous chief. At place of his grave were four writhing bil-bau (baobab?) trees. Told these sprang up when Chief was buried. More dancing. More pito. Getting a bit fed up with it all at this point.

Then on to Pelogo (sp?) - sub-chief wanted his farmers educated. Felt in very subdued mood. Too much pito I guess.

Then we had to go to place on fringe of Congo district for second round of greetings. First time, said Norm, the Chief was drunk and had no recollection afterwards. He showed marked antipathy to Bolga-based farmers. Said his territory was large enough for separate Coop. This was smoothed over in mysterious way. Then drank akpateshie (palm-gin) by oil lamp. Finally back. Said goodbye to Pious, a very able administrator and interpreter. who like Norm is a Govt. officer.

Back to Norm's place for tasty supper and game of spa. Spa seems to be not so much a mastery of card play as keeping score.

The visits to villages have left a lasting impression.The round stone huts with their stalky roofs, all merging to form a maze, the stumps coated with blood and feathers, the colourful but often ragged smocks of the locals (Nabdam), the dry parched guinea corn, the smell of goats, the flies (tsetse included) the hand clapping, the wonderful hospitality. Tomorrow Atenga continues.

(the following day, Norm gave me four eggs for breakfast, and took me down to the lorry park).

PS: For the record, I went to work in Ghana as a specialist science teacher (chemistry) at Accra Academy, recruited by the Ghana Teaching Service ( ad in the Telegraph!). It was a 2-year contract, supported by the UK Overseas Development Ministry, as it was then called. I was 23, had graduated and done a year of commercial research in industry, combined with 5 hours per week of teaching evening class O-Level Chemistry at the local Technical College."

Update Thursday 18:40

Have just discovered a highly relevant blog by googling. It's called "Sarah's Summer in Ghana". (No, it's not our Sarah). This one worked in Tamale, which is capital of the Northern region, and she describes, with pix, how TZ is made.

My recollections of Tamale: having travelled there by bus from Kumasi (where I had run into 2 work colleagues - the Carters- CUSO volunteers (Canadian equivalent of VSO) - who were en route to Ougadougou and thence by train to Ivory Coast ). There was an incredibly rude women in the ticket booth for Bolgatanga buses - quite the most imperious individual I've met in my life, who treated everyone as though they were an inferior life form, including us white neocolonialists, although she stopped short of calling us that.

And the most amazing row in a restaurant kitchen, with just occasional glimpses of the combatants, screaming at the tops of their voices, with sound effects suggesting that utensils were being thrown each other.

And flying back from Tamale to Accra, somewhat the worse for wear as a result of a bout of dysentery, requiring several days hospitalisation at the Southern Baptist Missionary hospital in Gambaga (at which a kind British doctor and his wife took me into their own home for the duration !).

Guest blog from GROCE (Get Rid of Cow Emissions)

2007-08-14T16:06:00.000+02:00

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*Yes, today it's my turn to take a back seat . Dreams and Daemons hosts its second guest blogger, whose name you may have encountered in the press, from proceedings at the Horseferry Rd Magistrates Courts. Or perhaps you have seen her on TV being dragged by her hair or feet into waiting Black Marias by the Metropolitan Police. It is Chardonnay Crabtree, the Chairperson of GROCE ("Get Rid of Cow Emissions"). Whilst I don't agree with all her positions, and certainly not her understanding of the sciences, I feel she has a timely message to offer which should be heard. Over to you, Chardonnay.

GROCE Campaign logo: " Get Rid Of Cow Emissions"

Hello people. Please spare a minute or two to read my message, and try to suspend any judgements you have formed about me and my organization. Most of what you have read is probably lies, put out by the beef and dairy industry, as well as my step-Dad.

GROCE was formed last year by me and my best friend Stasi (that's pronounced Stacey, BTW) straight after we did our GCSE's in Enviromental Science.

After learning all about Global Warning we felt we just had to do something to help the planet.

The problem is one of wide spread ignorance. Everyone has heard about CO2 (carbon deoxide ), it being a polluting greenhouse gas (GG) , which heats up not just greenhouses but everything else on the planet.

If you know the facts as well as Stasi and me it would really do your head in . Did you know there's another GG which is a much greater thret than CO2. Its called Methane, and it is a major cause of those carbon footprints.

You probably don't know this if you haven't been to school for a long time, but Methane is in flammable gas. If you live near a landfill sight you can see it burning at night, heating the planet. It leaks out through old pipes that have been left sticking out of the ground. Methane burns a lot more easily than CO2, which is why we should be a lot more worried about it, and not just the greenhouse owners.

Where you may ask does this Methane come from ? There are two main sauces: one, which I have all ready mentioned, is rotting uneaten food in rubbish tips (probably stuff like quiches, spinach, broccoli, hole-meal bread etc if you ask me).

The main problem however is COWS. Cows produce a lot of Methane . Sooner or later that methane will catch fire somewhere and warm the planet, which we don't want, certainly not at this time of year.

My carefully chosen campaign logo above is intended to bring home forcibly the thret that cows represent to our continued survival on this planet.

No, I am not suggesting that you will ever see flames shooting from a cow's backside, but belief me, sooner or later that Methane will burn up, probably up in the Ozone Layer where you can't see it.

When it does you get Global Warming which is a major cause of storms, hurricanes, flooding, earthquakes, volcanoes, skin cancer, forest fires, and bad TV reception. When it melts the ice at the poles, the Inwits will not have anything to build their igloos with, and polar bears will have to go and live in zoos.

So much for the science. I hope this has not gone over your head. I realise that old people who read this blog cannot be expected to be fully eau fé with all the modern stuff.

So what can we do to save the planet from the scourge of cow bums you may ask ? Quite a lot, you may be surprised to hear. Me and Stasi have drawn up an action plan for GROCE.

It is our aim in the coming months to campaign for the abolition of all cattle-raising and breeding in the UK ( except for Scotland, because my real Dad who's from Ayrshire, and still doing stir at the Scrubs, and looking forward to his release in November, says Aberdeen Angus cattle do not produce Methane).

GROCE intends to see beef and derry products abolished and replaced with substitutes, like farmed cod and scampi, chicken and turkey, imported lamkebabs etc. Who needs milk when there are lots of other drinks with a more exciting taste and colour ?

Once we get rid of cows, we won't need to worry about foot-in-mouth disease either, which sounds very unhygienic. No wonder the silly moos fall ill when you think what they tread in.

Our first target will be the nerve centre of Britain's beef industry, namely the Smithgate meat market in London, assuming it's still there and hasn't been turned into trendy cafés and boutiques. Thousands of beef carcassonnes are sold there as well, so it's not just our own beef we have to worry about, but imported French beef as well.

We intend to set up camp nearby in somewhere that is quite and specious, like Hyde Park maybe. Don't spread this around, we are also thinking of the back garden of Buckingham Palace for its publicity value. We are just waiting to hear back from Brian May, having wrote him and asked if he can suggest a route over the Palace rooftops.

We hope through our days of action to impede the flow of lorries to the market and generally make a nuisance of ourselves. The aim is to make both market porters and the public aware of the damage being done to the planet by all those cows and their emissions.

Let me say straight away that we are normally peaceful law-abiding citizens who simply have the interests of everyone at heart. Sometimes, though people don't bleeding realize (if you'll pardon my French) what is in their best interests and it's then the job of those of us who are better informed to take a lead. I learned that in the new Good Citizenship lessons at the Cherie Blair City Academy, earning a near-pass which is in my Record of Achievement..

Something else we learned about was the necessity for freedom of expression, which is why I refuse to be judgmental about Stasi's friends in the Direct Action group. What they do is of no concern to me, provided it's not done in the name of GROCE.

I personally abwhore all violence, whether it's against people or property, although I would make an exception for my stepfather who's a low-life scumbag, and not someone you would want to share a park bench with.

So if Stasi's strange friends exploit the situation to further their anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation agenda that's not something over which I shall lose a moment's sleep. Maybe that break-in at the Pirbright lab, and spreading those foot-in-mouth germs around the countryside was maybe a bit OTT, but I think they have their hearts in the right place.

You may be wondering what you can do to help, now you are aware of the justice of my cause.

First, obviously, you have to stop eating beef , or meat from any other rheumatoid species, such as lamb, sheep etc. If a single stomach is good enough for us humans, it should be good enough for farmayard animals too. Pigs are OK, despite smelling 10 times worse than cows, and twice as bad as my step-Dad.

Remember, that means no beefburgers, steak-and-kidney pie, rump steak, or burfborg onion if you're posh.

You also have to cut out milk, yoghurt, cheese, butter and other dairy products. Remember, there's always crisps if you're feeling peckish.

Refuse to buy anything made of leather, unless you're certain it's not from a calf, a cow or a bull.

But whatever you do, don't make Stasi's mistake: she invited all the media to a ceremonial burning of her motorcycle gear, being President of the Ilford Hells Angels. So what happens ? A smart arse journalist picks up a smoking fragment of lining and reads the label: "100% pigskin leather". They made her look a right prat. That's the trouble with the media - they try to confuse you with the facts.

A final word: we are desperately short of funds, after participating in the Heathrow demo'. (it's unthinkable there should be an extra runway while there's the slightest chance of cattle being flown in or out the country, and there were passengers wearing or carrying leather too who deserved to have their flights delayed).

Please make your cheques (uncrossed) payable to Chardonnay Crabtree. Send them to me c/o POBox 23, Unit 3, The Old Industrial Estate, Dagenham, Essex.

Remember: £25 buys 5 balaclava helmets, £50 buys wire- cutters and pepper spray, £75 buys a pack of non-traceable SIM cards, £100 buys a sack of marbles and a dozen smoke bombs. £1000 buys a dodgy lawyer on the Legal Aid Panel.

Thanks for hearing me out. I actually quite like old fogies really. You're like me really. Non-judgmental, except on the subject of those bloody cows and their digestive systems.

Did anyone actually see that spectacular meteor shower ?

2007-08-13T14:01:00.000+02:00

One of those misleading pictures off the internet of a meteor "shower " (a time-lapse photograph, or more probably artist's impression, needless to say)

I thought the big one was supposed to be on Saturday night. So I watched the night sky up until midnight, saw one or two streaks across the sky, thought "Mmmm, that's promising" and set the alarm clock for 2am.

So there I was, out on the balcony, in a handy recliner chair, scanning the night sky in search of those "spectacular meteor showers", as gushingly described last night on the 10pm BBC News. In the next hour, I saw just 4 streaks of light across the sky, in other words one every 15 minutes or thereabouts. That's a lot of concentration span for a pretty small payoff, especially as the trails were fairly short, not a patch on some I've seen "accidentally" in previous years.

According to the books, these Perseid meteors, so called because they appear to originate from a single point in the sky, corresponding with the Perseid constellation, should arrive at the rate of some 80 to 100 per hour, but that's for the entire night sky.

I don't know about you, esteemed reader, but my particular configuration of eyes and cervical vertebrae only allows me to see a fairly small part of the night sky, possibly an angle of arc of some 100 degrees at the most. I could try viewing meteors as if on the centre court at Wimbledon, but wonder what any neighbours might make of it.

I had decided not to try a second night, until looking at that BBC News bulletin last night, and hearing that the main spectacle was yet to come. More later about some of the ridiculous hype that laced that announcement.

So last night I tried standing or sitting under our Velux in the mezzanine directly under the roof. The hinged glass was tilted to give a view from north-east to south west.

In the space of the next three three and half hours , with muscle cramp, and the sensation, psychosomatically at any rate, of being bitten around the ankles and legs by every passing mosquito I saw 4 meteors. Yes, just 4 !

Admittedly there was a thin haze that was dimming the stars last night, and there was the inevitable light pollution from Antibes, a sizeable town of some 80,000 souls. Is that so unusual ? How many folk have the luxury of viewing the Perseids from a location deep in the countryside one wonders ? My situation was probably more typical than theirs

During a spell of boredom, or was it muscle cramp, I logged on to MyTel, to read that my friend Ped in Britanny had already seen 10 by midnight, but he didn't seem too impressed by the spectacle. Ped, incidentally, has recently been awarded the title of Grumpiest Blogger on MyTel. Grumpiness must be contagious: I wondered where I'd caught it.

Did I maybe miss a hundred meteors while looking at those comments on the computer screen ? Hardly likely methinks.

Now to the BBC. As someone who has previously taught science, I'm glad in a way that Aunty Beeb talks up the subject, given that it now seems in its death throes in the UK, but she's rather given on occasions to over-hyping (think total solar eclipse) , and last night was a case in point.

It began with a reference to the "spectacular meteor shower". That's a misnomer if ever there was, because meteors usually come singly, widely spaced in time, usually by several minutes.

Those photographs or other representations one sees of "showers" (see graphic above) are time-lapse, taken by special cameras, much beloved by astronomers , since they give a permanent record of events for subsequent scientific study. It is quite wrong to portray meteor trails in real time as a kind of firework display.

Patrick Moore was wheeled out, sorry, I meant to say interviewed, as usual. He produced an ancient woodcut, showing multiple meteors radiating from that single point in the sky. Incredibly, however, unless I was not listening properly, he failed to say that it too was an attempt by our ancestors to portray the effect of time-lapse viewing. There IS no simultaneous fanning out of meteors, of the kind portrayed in the graphic above.

That is not the first time that Sir Patrick has been less than candid about what we ordinary mortals can expect to see - with our own eyes.

I have never really forgiven him for the time I sat up into the early hours expecting to see the first encounter between a space probe and a comet, only to be fobbed off with a technicolor computer image of the comet's nucleus. Why had he not explained at the outset that we would not be seeing real video footage, as seemed to be suggested in the programme trailer ?

Sorry, Sir Patrick, I know you're a colourful character, and much beloved for your "Sky at Night" series, which I admit I rarely watched, maybe because I'm somewhat irritated by your stuffed-shirt, bemonacled TV persona. I prefer my TV scientists to look and sound like ordinary folk, without odd mannerisms or 19th century dress sense.

More importantly you don't pass that vital Ronseal test. You don't do what it says on the tin, namely educate. You simply want us to know that there's a whole universe of stuff out there which we lesser mortals can never hope to comprehend,, unless one happens to be an iconic TV astronomer with the initials PM, looking like an irascible character to whom Berty Wooster would have given wide berth.

We were then shown a short video clip of children supposedly watching a previous meteor event . It could have been taken from a Steven Spielberg film. There was this vast blinding incandescent comet-like object arcing toward the group of youngsters, all squealing with excitement -or was it terror ?

Inevitably, parents then were given a big hint that they should postpone kiddies bedtime, and transport their offspring out into the garden to enjoy nature's pyrotechnics. To persuade any doubters who thought the sofa was more comfortbale, there was talk about meteors travelling at 130,000 mph, before colliding with the Earth's atmosphere, but with no mention of those long waits between fiery collisions, say10 minutes on average if you are lucky. Ten minutes is a long time to look at the night sky, especially if you can't be sure of looking in the right direction.

I don't think the BBC is doing science any favours by making the real world look tame in comparison with what children see on the screen. It's self-serving in a way: "When you are bored and disillusioned, come back to us. We the fabled BBC, do things properly, geared to your microscopic attention span, the result, as often as not, of spending 4 hours a day in front of the screen. "

Nerds corner
Two niggles re the science, both minor, but an irritant if one knows the facts. The Beeb correctly referred to meteors being caused by collisions between dust particles in the tail of the comet Swift-Tuttle - often no more than the size of a sand grain, - with the Earth's atmosphere. They then referred to them encountering "friction" between the outer atmosphere, and then "burning up".

In fact the heating is actually not by friction, but by a ram pressure effect. What is a ram pressure effect ? Er, look it up. That's what encyclopaedias are for.

The dust particles do not "burn up", in the usual sense, there being nothing combustible to burn. Sand, which is silicon (IV) oxide, for example, is fully oxidised silicon. The mineral grains first glow white hot and then vaporise. The light one sees is not from the glowing speck itself, obviously, but from the surrounding air which becomes ionized (electrically charged) by the intense heat from the incandescent particle.

Update: Monday 13th Aug 23:43

The sky is clearer tonight, and I caught a glimpse of a meteor just a minute ago. I might try viewing from the sea front later on.

The Times has an article headed: "Meteor showers provide breathtaking sight, but British clouds ruin the view".

There's just one small problem. Its accompanying photograph purports to show a meteor shower, but as one "Samuel in Chicago" points out, it's nothing of the sort, merely a time-lapse photograph of stars wheeling in the night sky.
I submitted the following comment:

"It's OK for astronomers to describe the phenomenon as a meteor "shower", using time-lapse photography, but it's a total misnomer from the standpoint of an observer, relying purely on his or her eyesight. Even under ideal viewing conditions, it's unlikely one would see more than one trail per minute.

Samuel of Chicago is of course right.

I have today reported on two nights of disappointing viewing in the south of France."

www.dreams-and-daemons.blogspot.com

Submitting and getting published are sadly two entirely different things where the Times is concerned, as I've said before on more than one occasion. Since that paper steadfastly refuses to date- stamp readers' comments, it may be hours before one knows if one's merely held up in a queue or, as usually happens with my contributions, held back. There is no love lost between myself and the snooty Times.

I believe it's time the media stopped referring to meteor showers, and leave that term to astronomers with their time-lapse photography. Let's simply call them "meteor displays" to avoid raising false expectations.

Links: Wikipedia on "Perseids" and on comets

Wikipedia on the difference between meteors, meteroites and meteoroids

Why I have re-posted on the Tour Montparnasse

2007-08-12T18:25:00.000+02:00

If you're a busy person, ignore this post. If you're a blogger with a touch of geekishness in your makeup, not to say readiness on occasion to think the worst of big business, read on.

I have just re-published a post that appeared at the end of November 2006, entitled "Montparnasse: the Parisian Dark Tower".

Now why would I do that, one might ask ?

There are have been odd things happening with this post for a while. People have been doing Google searches on entirely different topics and have been directed, or rather, misdirected, to my Montparnasse post, and, as often as not, then giving up on their original search .

It gets worse, much worse. In the course of investigating this Montparnasse black hole, I discovered that although I had entered "Tour Montparnasse" into my list of tags, to flag up my modest contribution, "Tour Montparnasse" was not appearing automatically in my list of labels down the righthand side.

What is more, the system still prevents me adding it. It allows "Montparnasse Tour" or "Montparnasse Tower" of simply "Montparnasse" but not "Tour Montparnasse". All very strange, would you not say ?

There may be an innocent explanation, like some glitch or software bug in the system. There again, I may have stumbled on something about the way in which Blogger communicates internally with its parent organization, Google Search, giving greater visibility to some posts rather than others. Note the careful choice of words.

If one enters "Tour Montparnasse" into Google, one gets back a long list of returns. Interestingly, these are usually headed by a sponsored link headed "Tour Montparnasse" which is an advertisement for the Tour, the top floor and roof terrace of which are open to paying visitors. Advertisers pay for those sponsored links. They are the means by which Google has become a multi-billion dollar organization.

My post describes my visit to the Montparnasse tower-block. It relates mainly positive experiences, but lists some negative ones about the multi-story Tower too, like being a blot on the Parisian skyline. I'm not the first to have said that, needless to say.

My post used to be searchable under "Tour Montparnasse" but that is no longer the case, perhaps because of the missing label, or perhaps for some other reason. Who knows ? Any ideas ?

(ed: added Sun 20:55) within an hour of submitting this post, it appeared under listings for a Google search using tour montparnasse, having picked up the above phrase "My post used to be searchable .... ".

It's odd that it went for the phrase in the body of the post, instead of the title.
What's the point of choosing title words carefully, to reinforce tags, if title words are not given top-weighting ?

It will now be interesting to see if it this post goes up or down in the Google rankings. Watch out Google - the tables are turned: Small Brother is watching you.)

It has not disappeared completely off the system: it is still accessible if the search profile includes unusual or "powerful" search terms , but no one will find my post if they have to enter "dreams " or "daemons" into the search profile.

Re-publishing the blog seemed the logical thing to do. I have retained the original title, but entered just one tag/label. You can probably guess what it is: "Tour Montparnasse". Let's see if the post becomes searchable, and if so, for how long.

Footnote: I'd use this occasion to mention another, totally unrelated gripe re Blogger/Google. None of my posts topics are searchable in Google UK. They would only be found from the UK by someone opting to search in Google World Wide Web, but there's a lot of Brits I know who avoid the latter when searching for UK-ish topics, to avoid a welter of US and other listings.

It should be possible to opt for listing under Google UK, or any other national "currency" for that matter.

Update Sunday 12th Aug 20:30

As an illustration of the anarchy of Google image search, try entering plensa nomade antibes, the subject of a recent D&D post. Instead of taking you to that post, it takes you to an image of Prince Charles that I used in the Montparnasse post. Clicking on the image takes you to the Montparnasse post, instead of Plensa's Nomade. One wonders how many prospective readers one is losing through this software glitch.

Montparnasse: the Parisian Dark Tower

2007-08-12T18:18:00.000+02:00

ed: This is a re-posting of a topic I covered way back in November 2006 : see the post immediately after this one entitled "Technical Stuff" for the reasons why I have felt obliged to do this.

There was an article in yesterday's Independent. Paris considers itself to be short of high rise office space, placing it at a commercial disadvantage to Moscow and London.(Moscow ? What about Frankfurt ? Or Beijing or Mumbai ?)
So it is planning to add a super-skyscraper to the collection of towers already bristling on the skyline at La Défense. The tallest, to be known as La Phare (The Lighthouse) , scheduled for completion in 2012, will be be 300m high ( almost a 1000 feet in old money), just 20 m shorter than the Eiffel tower.
The central area of Paris is blessedly free (almost) of that scourge of the London skyline – namely the stick-out-like-a -sore-thumb solitary skyscraper. London knows all about those, ones that are hideously out of scale and character with their surroundings.
A year ago, our beloved Deputy PM John Prescott (aka Jabba the Hutt) was reportedly intent on adding some more. Is it too much to hope those plans have been shelved with the loss of his departmental responsibilies for the "environment" .
But there is one exception to the idea of Paris as a harmonious unblighted feast for the eye. It's called the Tour Montparnasse ( see picture above - but don't on any account click, unless you want to enlarge it still further).
This furoncle gets its own entry in Wikipedia, from which some of the following is cribbed.
Built between 1969 and 1972 and 210 metres high, it was ( and may still be ?) the tallest building in the whole of France. But Parisians were so appalled at the sheer brutality of the architecture that it remains to this day a one-off, at least within a 2 mile radius or thereabouts of Notre Dame. All the more recent skyscrapers are further out, notably at La Défense, the Parisian business quarter that is the equivalent of Canary Wharf.
But from the tourist's perspective, the Dark Tower does have one big advantage.

From its enclosed viewing deck (see picture) or windy roof terrace one gets an unbeatable view of Paris, with the bonus that it includes that other iconic tower - the lacy steel one, that Parisians hated at first, but now regard, along with the rest of the world, as a national treasure.

Apologies by the way for the quality of my pictures . They were taken last year, on a grey March day.
Whereas........ if you join the queues to go up the Eiffel Tower, what do you see – the hideous one ! The moral, then, is obvious.
I expect you know that the boxy Arch at La Défence is carefully lined up so that one sees it through the Arc de Triomphe, some 2 miles distant. It's a clever and ambitious idea that, don't you think ? – to create sight- lines that counter the feeling of being trapped in a concrete jungle, even the superior kind of concrete that constitutes the French capital.

The Montparnasse Tour is also said to be lined up with the Eiffel Tower and La Defense. But as sightlines go, it's missing one small ingredient that would lend it impact, like the Champs Elysées/ Ave Charles de Gaulle etc. !

Here are some other pictures from the roof.

The one above is Montparnasse railway station. This is the one you use if you are going to Britanny. Apparently the station is surrounded by Breton creperie, allegedly there for the benefit of Bretons who might feel homesick within 2 minutes of arriving in the capital.
The next one is looking along that artery known as the Rue de Rennes, (mentioned in Day of the Jackal) towards the Seine and the Louvre.

The last one (above) is the stately and charming Jardin du Luxembourg, with Notre Dame behind.
I was not until yesterday, reading Wikipedia' s entry on the Montparnasse tower that I came to hear of the man dubbed the "incredible spider". It's the Frenchman Alain Robert who scales skyscrapers with nothing more than his hands and his feet. And he's done some 70 of the world's most famous. Britain (typically) paid him to do 1, Canada Square ("Canary Wharf") as a promotional stunt.

What makes things bizarre beyond words is that early falls in his youth broke, or smashed, not only his wrists, ankles and pelvis but left him, as a result of head injuries, with (wait for it) vertigo. Yes, vertigo ! Mind you, I confess to having some confusion as to the precise meaning of the term. Until yesterday, that is, through researching this post.
I had always assumed vertigo to mean " fear of heights" or the symptoms that accompany fear of heights, such as stomach butterflies, paralysis etc. (all of which I get when up a ladder painting bedroom window frames). Well, I was wrong, it seems. Fear of heights is called acrophobia, whereas vertigo is dizziness, disorientation etc , not exactly what you want when climbing, but perhaps not totally incapacitating. In none of the online references is there any mention of fear. Which is just as well for the likes of that spiderman: how could anyone scale a multi-story building with virtually nothing to grip onto if he was scared rigid ? Personally, I don't think I could even bear to watch. Is there a medical term for over-empathising, to the extent that you feel that it's YOU up there, hanging on for dear life, picturing oneself as stawberry jam on the pavement below?

Would you sign up to equity release with this Swiss bank ?

2007-08-11T13:58:00.000+02:00

I have just been leafing through the glossy Riviera Times, an English language periodical which circulates in this part of the world, including Monaco and the Italian Riviera.

It's an Aladdin's cave stuffed full of useful tips for expats, listing of forthcoming events etc. Its cover price is €2.50 but it depends heavily on advertising.

How effective are those ads, one wonders, in attracting new custom? One assumes the paper would never permit discussion on whether the goods or services on offer are a sound investment . What about independent bloggers ? Should they feel any inhibitions about expressing an opinion on what they read ?

Certainly not this one, your fearless man in Antibes.

Where the owners and editors are concerned, a blog post of this nature has an upside and a downside. Firstly, what follows will prove that readers do look at the ads. The downside is that some of us look at them , especially those making a financial pitch, and begin to speculate about what kind of folk rush to the phone, asking for more details.

It was the full page ad, hastily photographed above, placed by a Swiss bank (whose name is prudently just out of the picture) that caught my eye, under the heading "Your home equity". Well, anyone with a garret or two to their name is interested in home equity, so I read on.

Immediately under the title were the words: "... a valuable factor when you wish to optimise your capital."

Mmm. Personally, I would have thought the best way to optimise capital tied up in a house is to live in it, rent-free, wait till one had a decent equity stake, and then sell, moving into a smaller property, or an equivalent one in a cheaper location.

There's the Anglo-Saxon solution, admittedly somewhat derided, which is to re-mortgage with a lender that is relaxed about leveraged buy-to-let investment, allowing one to recycle equity released as a downpayment on a second home, or even to finance something more ephemeral, like a Caribbean holiday or a BMW.

However, this is France, in which the property market is more conservative, with less fierce competition among mortgage providers (which may help to protect it from the current meltdown in world markets).

When Jane and I enquired about re-mortgaging one property to buy another here in Antibes the reply was somewhat peremptory, along the lines of "that's not how we do things".

"How we do things" is apparently to win the lottery, or wait for a relative to die, leaving you property in their will. The system does not encourage those of limited means to become property speculators.

So that leaves the field wide open for enterprising Swiss and other banks to assist folk who are desperate to release equity from their property, but on terms that we in the UK might find intolerable. I leave you, the reader, to judge for yourselves, based on the following précis.

The scheme imagines you own an upmarket property valued at 1,000,000 euros, on which there is no outstanding charge or mortgage. They clearly don't wish to deal with riff raff.

Using the property as security you are allowed to take out a loan for a maximum of 80% of the value of the property, ie €800,000.

But there are strings attached. You are only allowed to take 20% of the loan (€160,000) as a cash sum, with which to buy your yacht or Porsche. The scheme requires that 80% of the loan be invested in a mix of bonds and equities. The composition of the portfolio appears to be of the bank's choosing.

Secondly, the period of the loan is 30 years, no less (!), and the first 10 years operates on an interest-only basis. The total one pays in interest is not given, but must be hair-raising.

One might have expected a fixed rate of interest, but no, it's only fixed for a year at a time. It's presently 4%, low by UK standards, but times they are a changing. Just wait till Nicolas Sarkozy seizes control of the ECB, assuming Angela Merckel lets him, and runs up the borrowing and budget deficits in Europe as a means of stoking up the French economy !

But there is worse to come re the scheme - much worse- when one looks closely at the setting up-fees. (They are at least clearly set out, so no one can complain they were sold a pig in a poke). They come in at an eye-watering €15,500 for a €800,000 loan.

€2,300 of that is an administration fee, a further €800 is brokerage (why isn't that included in the admin fee?) .

It was spotting the final item that inspired me to write this post, touching as it did a raw nerve. It was a so-called "notarial fee" , ie a fee for legal charges, of, wait for it, €12,400 !

Clearly we are all in the wrong jobs - we teachers, scientists, journalists, translators whatever. If you're a lawyer dealing with loans based on property you are in clover.

I don't pretend to know the current hourly rate for lawyers who are not involved in litigation. Let's say it's €300 an hour for perusing documents, making sure that the claimed owner has title to the property, there are no restrictions or covenants on its sale, no outstanding charges etc, no defects that would reduce its market value etc. How long to do all of that - maybe a maximum of 5 hours ? That comes to €1500, not €12,400. Valuation fees, insurance etc add to the total, maybe a thousand or two. So how can that astronomical total possibly be justified ? How much is actually paid to the notaire, one wonders ? How much is in reality another of those lucrative upfront charges ? Let's not forget: in this case the property is not even being sold - merely used as security.

The rest of the figures in the ad are intended to show how those compulsorily-invested funds generate an income that, at least in the example given, more than covers the loan repayments. One can imagine the salesmen making a big play on that, so let's look at the figures in more detail.

The example supposes that none of the loan is taken as cash (unrealistically in my view), that all €800,000 is invested, generating a total of €190,604 in dividends after 3 years. (We are not told why 3 years are chosen, rather than 30).

From that sum is deducted the following charges: the hefty setting-up fees, already mentioned, investment charges - another whopping €15,690 , and interest payments on the loan of €118,980. That leaves a surplus of €40,434. It's not clear if that can be taken out, or has to stay in the fund. Irrespective, it's a modest amount for 3 years investment, seen alongside the property value. Imagine the property were sold for €800,000, and that sum was invested at 5%. That would yield €40,000 a year - 3 times as much income, and virtually risk-free.

Ah yes, there is the small matter of risk. The equity release is based on servicing a loan at a mortgage rate that can vary from year to the next , while relying on investments to perform better.

Suppose one had signed up to this scheme last week, and then, just as the ink had dried on the contracts, one watched helplessly as equity prices head south, and mortgage interest rates in t'other direction.

The worked examples mention only "expected" yields from the bonds and equities, and is silent on the matter of their underlying value, and how that could play havoc with the gamble one was taking.

But if everything goes pear-shaped, they, the Swiss bankers, not only have the deeds to your house. They also have the share and bond certificates. If you defaulted on repayments, they could, and probably would, take you to the cleaners.

The arithmetic looks even more precarious if some of the loan is taken as a cash sum. There is then correspondingly less to invest, a lower dividend income, but the same hefty monthly mortgage outgoings. This equity release scheme could quickly become a financial quicksand, with a millstone around one's neck.

This scheme might attact someone who has inherited a property, and who wants to release a cash sum without having to sell it (incurring capital gains and other taxes and fees). To be told that dividend income "should" more than cover loan repayments would be music to their ears.

So what is the French, I wonder, for "sailing close to the wind" ? What is the Monégasque for "it could all so easily end in tears" ? What is the Italian for "rather you than me, chum ".

What's the Swiss-German for "laughing all the way to the bank?"

Colin Randall goes from strength to strength

2007-08-10T07:47:00.000+02:00

Personalities/blogging
*
Glancing at the Independent today, I did a double-take, that was followed quickly by a sense of déjà vu.

The headline read "Provençal bar is two steps too close to God"

Now where have we read before about a vexatious proximity between wine pichet and communion cup (vexatious, at any rate, for the French, who, with their tidy minds, like to keep things in their separate compartments) ?

Was it not ex-Telegraph journalist Colin Randall, writing on his Salut! blog ?

Indeed it was, and he is now spreading his wings further as a freelance journalist, reporting for the Independent on the foibles of our occasionally perplexing French neighbour.

(He has other blogging interests too, notably Sunderland football club and folk music, but we'll come back to those another day - or, there again, maybe we won't).

I warmed to his opening paragraph:

"For tourists passing through the idyllic Provençal village of La Motte, the Bar des Cascades is a convenient watering hole on a drive round the spectacular Gorges du Verdon."

Why ? Because although Jane and I have still to visit La Motte we made our first visit recently to those Gorges du Verdon, the subject of a post. What a spectacular region that is, and so handy, as he says, for a day trip from the coast.

Anyway, it's good to see Colin continuing to establish himself as an independent with "un doigt en beaucoup de pies".

Operating as a freelance after the security of salaried employment is no easy task, as this writer (and fellow victim of Mammon) knows from his own experience.

Incidentally, visitors to his Salut! will find yours truly has posted Part 2 of his guest blog. It tells of our our recent mission to Tuscany in search of a strategically-sited location for a planned late-life "gap year".

Some may find the organization of my screed a little puzzling, not to say quirky.
Well, I freely admit to the latter. It is quirky, but I don't like my readers to be puzzled, so a brief word of explanation is in order.

Colin R has suffered in his career, no doubt, at the hands of editors wielding the blue pencil. The original script I sent him was prefaced with a warning that my script was organized as a "conversational Möbius strip", my having borrowed that term from a recent article by that clever and effortlessly (?) eloquent A.A.Gill.

I assumed that most folk would know what a Möbius strip was, but Colin, wearing his no-nonsense editorial hat, appeared to think otherwise.

Möbius strip

My script was originally organized as a long preamble, followed, finally, by the main thrust. Responding to faint praise from my wife, it was then re-organized as main body first, with the preamble as postscript, or should that be "prescript", with a jokey pointer at the end back to the main body.

Oi, wake up there, you in the back row !

By sheer coincidence, AA Gill was writing in the Times that day about that "conversational Möbius strip".

The Möbius strip, apart from being a one-sided loop (yes, one-sided, despite appearances to the contrary !), has some other remarkable properties.

If anyone wishes to know more, I'd be happy to do a short post on how you can make your own in a second or two, and then , with a pair of scissors, proceed to amaze your children or grandchildren .

A word of warning: their school teachers might not thank you for stealing their thunder on this vital part of their armoury, like how to keep 3B quiet on a wet Friday afternoon.

Anyway, to loop back to that initial subject ( that bloody strip again) : one hates to see talent go to waste, especially when it has a rare and fine writing style. So hats off to Colin for picking up the pieces and making the best of a bad situation, in so exemplary a style. His wife and family must be very proud of him We his devoted readers certainly are.

Links to Colin Randall's blogs to follow:

Why I blame the Tardis police box for a lost youth

2007-08-09T08:40:00.000+02:00

Humour

Yes, that's right, dismantle it, demolish it. Tell those conservationists or Dr. Who fans to go hang. I'm surprised that any of these pernicious objects still exist on our streets. If they do, then get rid of them, now.

I've explained why in a submission to today's "Your View" in the Telegraph,:

"...time can be warped by the gravitational pull of objects..."

Don't talk to me about time warps. They were commonplace in West London suburbia back in the 1960s.

Each Sunday I would rise at 11am, get dressed, and then find myself drawn by an irresistible force towards The Rising Sun. All my mates were there too, equally helpless to resist The Force.

Now here's the odd thing: we'd re-emerge an hour later, give or take, but on getting home find it was mid-afternoon, with parents furious that we'd failed to show up for Sunday dinner.

Of course, there were still a few of those old-fashioned blue police telephone boxes around, even if rarely used.

I reckon it was they that were warping the local space-time continuum, robbing me and my mates of much of our leisure time as young adults.

.

George Orwell was not wrong, maybe just 25 years too early

2007-08-08T14:36:00.000+02:00

Current affairs

I have no qualms about filching the above image off Google's image file. My pix on this site are free for the taking, and that splendid and apposite image above adorns a statement put out by a French group promoting international Communism . Well, pure communists don't believe in other folk having private property, do they ?

I found the image quickly by punching "Orwell 1984" into the search box. It seemed just right for today's hot topic in the Telegraph's "Your View" entitled "Has Big Brother taken over our security ?".

I find it increasingly difficult to talk about things in isolation. Other thoughts start crowding in. Oh, what the hell. Let it all come out ...

"Governments come, governments go, but the State and its apparachiks are always there, buiding their databases with a pitiful level of surveillance from the politicians. None of this will change while we continue to cast votes at General Elections for career MPs who won't touch issues of this nature for fear of being branded a maverick.

Nothing will change until the present first-past-the-post electoral system is replaced a more enlightened form of PR, suited to the 21st century. Then it will be possible to form minor parties campaiging on single issues - lower taxation, a proper Freedom of Information Act etc. Though numerically small, their support could be needed for coalition governments, giving them some leverage in a political system that is otherwise dominated by the major parties and their stale or starry-eyed agendas.

If a minor party were successful in its objectives, it could disband, leaving a small lacuna in the political firmanent to be occupied by another campaigning on some other issue that is perceived as peripheral to the big picture, but which is important nonetheless.

Personally I would like to launch a "Build a Britannia Mark 2 for Her Majesty" party. After seeing it launched and presented to her on her 90th birthday (or sooner), I would quietly disband my party, and then launch a new one called "Bring Tax Freedom Day Forward to June 1st".

In the meantime, it should be possible to call a number, and obtain a print-out showing which agencies, public or private, have accessed one's personal details and for what reason, similar to checking one's credit rating with Experian etc. We have the technology - what's needed is for we the public to insist it be made available on our behalf.

As a stopgap measure, the threat to vote tactically at the next General Election as a protest against Big Brother might concentrate a few minds."

Colin Berry, Dreams and Daemons

The thrills and spills of Old Antibes

2007-08-07T20:04:00.001+02:00

Local life

The four pictures you see below were taken in the space of about 10 minutes last night, and are in random order. Anyone care to guess the sequence of events ?

Picture 1

(all pictures can be enlarged by pointing and clicking)

Picture 2

Picture 3

Picture 4

A previous post of mine, on Jaume Plensa's 'Nomade', viewed at its unveiling ceremony in daylight, might just provide a clue ...

Technical PS: anyone know why I get those haloes when using the flash on my horrid digital camera (can't wait to replace it with something better) ?

Foot-and-mouth update

2007-08-07T12:43:00.000+02:00

Current affairs

The latest outbreak is still headline news, with the depressing announcement of the discovery of a second affected herd. Being unvaccinated, it too has been culled, and because smoking funeral pyres of cattle are now politically-damaging, the extraordinary decision has been made to move the carcases to Somerset for incineration. How the Somerset beef and dairy farmers must like that.

The Telegraph has opened a thread under Your View, also accessible under the headline article, asking if we think the crisis is being handled properly this time. Here is my second contribution, submitted a few minutes ago, less bland than yesterday's.

"The policy of culling all suspect animals, instead of vaccinating beforehand as a precaution, was one discussed extensively at the start of the 2001 outbreak. We were told that vaccination could mask symptoms, and cause disease to spread further than it otherwise would, and if my memory serves me well, that was considered the clinching argument.

There were others, however, who claimed that the real clincher, behind closed doors, was the special pleading of the cattle farmers, who wished to preserve the status of the UK as F&M-free, and with it their export markets. What we were not told at the time was the cost to the taxpayer of pursuing that policy.

We now know it was some £8 billion - an extraordinary sum of money- just one billion short of the current estimate of hosting the 2012 Olympics. That worked out at something like £1300 for every man, woman and child in the country. Speaking for myself, as someone who probably eats no more than £100 worth of beef a year, I resent having paid some 13 times that amount in extra tax and for what ? Answer: to make compensatation payments to someone else's private-enterprise profit-making business, in which I get no share of the proceeds in the good years, but am expected to act as insurer of last resort when things go wrong.

If farmers wish to continue in this way, with F&M an ever ticking time- bomb that can wipe out millions of animals at a stroke, and make huge dents in the nation's GDP, then why are we, the taxpayer, expected to underwrite this mad exercise in national chauvinism ? Let the farmers arrange private insurance if they wish to play Russian roulette with microbiology. If they won't then let's switch to a policy of vaccination now, and set up research programmes that permit earlier detection of F&M, and restrict movement of animals and carcases except when absolutely necessary."

Update Wed 8th Aug

Have just spotted the following on Orange, one of those handy aggregation sites:
http://blogs.orange.co.uk/news/

Blogs round-up: foot-and-mouth returns
Posted by Dom Passantino

With a second bout of foot-and-mouth disease confirmed at a farm in Surrey, the bloggers have had plenty to say about the countryside outbreak. Here’s our pick of the blogosphere’s best comments on the topic.

“If farmers wish to continue in this way, with F&M an ever ticking time- bomb that can wipe out millions of animals at a stroke, and make huge dents in the nation's GDP, then why are we, the taxpayer, expected to underwrite this mad exercise in national chauvinism? Let the farmers arrange private insurance if they wish to play Russian roulette with microbiology.”

From Dreams and Daemons

It's nice to be noticed !
Thanks Orange.

British building-site look conquers the USA

2007-08-07T09:52:00.000+02:00

Humour

The above picture is one I have just this minute spotted - and now filched - from Toby Harnden's Telegraph blog. Maybe I'm still suffering from last night's tumble (about which more later), but I had intended the following as a caption:

"Has no one told the lady that it's vertical stripes for the fuller figure."

But in the course of copying and pasting the picture, I spotted it had been given a simple filename - "bum" - and then took a closer look.

Unobservant me: the title of Toby's post is : "Ifs and butts on the campaign trail". That's the US presidential campaign, btw. Nuff said.

Ken Livingstone's congestion charge, aka London admission fee

2007-08-06T15:43:00.000+02:00

Chelsea, West London

Politics and environment

Is one allowed to start a blog post with "once upon a time" ?

Right now my head is spinning, and the only way I can see to order my thoughts is to start with a throwback expression like "once upon a time".

Once upon a time, like yesterday, I was reading the Sunday Times front page. There was an article about Ken Livingstone's London congestion charge, and the way it has quietly mutated into something entirely different. My ears pricked up ( well, no they didn't - I'm not sure what the visual equivalent is ) but anyway I read on, and while I didn't quite get the migraine-like fortification illusions that came last week when attempting to submit to Times online, my hackles began to rise.

At least, I think they did, but I'm not quite sure what or where the hackles are. Maybe hackles are the things that prick up when reading something that looks dodgy ? If so, my hackles are usually in a permanent state of elevation whenever I read about the devious and cunning Ken, which I've been doing from GLC days, back in the 1970s, if not earlier.

Anyway, I read about his proposed "pollution" charge on vehicles that emit more than a permitted amount of C02.

Note that I use quotation marks around "pollution" in referring to C02, which Ken and his ilk do not, given that the labelling of C02 as a pollutant is his 21st century brand of New Speak that allows him to belatedly inflict his 1984ish vision of London on us all (he tried earlier with the defunct GLC, but failed, and is now having a second go in its GLA reincarnation).

Yes, I know I am rambling, and no, I have not taken any illegal substance ( and boringly have never done so in my entire lifetime). But that's the great thing about having one's own blog. One can ramble on interminably, and there's no one saying, please, have mercy, stop.

Sometimes there's a flood of words and ideas, trying to get out, without a single superstructure on which to order them. Today is a case in point.

"Congestion charge" ? What a misnomer! What a confidence trick ? What an insult to the intelligence, and an even bigger insult to the pocket if you're driving anything bigger than a Citroen C4 !

Shortly after it was first introduced, traffic levels in the Mark 1 congestion zone were said to have dropped 30%. Ken said he had no plans to increase the charge, nor the zone. Then the queues began to build up again, and what did Ken do ? He increased the charge, now £8 a day, and extended the zone westwards to Kensington and Chelsea. Traffic levels are now just 9% below what they were before the charge was introduced.

Before you sat in a traffic jam for 30 minutes, burning petrol, creating pollution - the real stuff - like carbon monoxide (despite catalytic converters), unburnt hydrocarbons etc. The last thing you were concerned about was carbon dioxide, which was, after all, keeping Green Park green, and all the parks, Royal or otherwise, and gardens too for that matter.

Now you sit in the same traffic jam almost as long, creating all the same pollutants, but now you are paying for the privilege of being there, and being punished NOT for creating carbon monoxide etc - a threat to the quality of inner City life - but carbon DIoxide, which is no immediate threat to you or anyone else around you, but a perceived threat to the entire planet through being a greenhouse gas.

Ken and his ilk are apparently so concerned about planetary C02 that he has created a new environmental tax. If Ken deems you a global polluter he will hit you with a huge extra penalty, even if your effect on London air is minimal. Haven't we been here before ? Remember when left-wing strongholds were declared nuclear-free zones ? Gesture politics ? Political grandstanding ? The loony left ?

He would have much preferred to wage his class war by taxing you on the make and cost of your vehicle, but that would be too difficult to administer. So he has a carbon pollution tax instead, that still hits the nobs in their 4x4 s, or even your 2 litre Peugeot 406 ( the car I had when last living in the UK).

And while you or I may think it's a sordid bit of nob-bashing, he can claim with that sneering smile of his that it's all environmentally green and good for the planet, even if the benefits to Londoners are not immediately obvious.

Oh, but they are. How silly of me to wander off like this, when I had intended at the outset to start this post from an entirely different angle, but knew it would end with the Artful Dodger of GLA HQ. When you read the next paragraph you will perhaps understand why my head's in a spin.

Once upon a time (well, last week actually) Jane and I were in Pisa, the subject of my post on Colin Randall's Salut, and I was amazed to find firstly how down-at-heel Pisa looked, needing a few billions of euros for facelift, yet how we had been able to visit that Leaning Tower without paying so much as a centime.

In fact, apart from a snack, and later, lunch, we made no contribution whatsoever to the City's coffers, and the same could presumably be said for the millions of other tourists who visit Pisa each year.

So I got to musing about walled cities in the Middle ages, thinking, "I bet they didn't allow foreigners access without stopping them at the city gate, and charging an entrance fee."

So I googled "city state entry charge" to see what I'd get.

Amazing: one of the first returns was for a news item from the Independent I had read about last year, namely for plans to charge an entry charge for tourists who visit Venice . (Good thing too in my view, especially if it cuts down the daytrippers off those absurdly large cruise ships that are damaging the lagoon).

Now that was quite a coincidence, would you not say ? The same article mentioned that plans were in hand for other Italian tourist sites to do likewise, although curiously no mention of Pisa.

But then my eye alighted on a gem of a sentence that is responsible for my current blogger's block, or should that be cybersensory overload ?

" ...... The admission that a scheme to charge visitors is on the table comes in the context of a wave of enthusiasm for admission charges to major cities, the idea pioneered on a large scale by the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. "

Wow. Isn't that internet research for you. Up comes what you wanted, but it's got something else that totally preempts your reasons for doing the research, casting one in the role of also- ran, or plagiariser, were one to push on regardless.

I refer, needless to say, to that reference to Ken Livingstone, not as a pioneer of a congestion charge, which as already indicated has largely failed in what it set out to do, but as someone who is the de facto pioneer, intentional or otherwise, of what might be called a "city admission charge".

Once upon a time there was a blogger who thought he could cope with anything the internet threw at him ......

Well, as you can see, we have come full circle, and I seem to have nothing to say that has not been said already, but I'm still indignant, still uptight. Why is that ?

It's that abuse of the science, I think, with Professor Livingstone self-servingly describing CO2 a pollutant, as a pretext for charging an entry tax to London . His sources are impeccable of course: if you go to the fat tfl (Transport for London) report on the congestion charge, you will see tables for vehicle pollution that list nitrogen oxides, PM10s, ie soot particles from diesels and one, and one, just ONE other item - yes, it's that deadly, noxious stuff called CO2 (despite it sustaining all life on earth, starting with the green producers at the bottom of the food chain).

The concept of an admission charge to London may be an entirely valid one, as valid for London as it would be for Venice and Pisa. But call it such, please, Commissar Livingstone. Don't dress it up as something else. It's not a pollution tax if it ignores nitrogen oxides, PM10s, sulphur dioxide and other agents directly injurious to human health. It's not a CITY "pollution tax" if based on C02. If it were, then every city, town, village in the world would be equally entitled to throw road blocks in one's path , imposing a punitive tax to let one drive on.

C02 may certainly be a threat to the planet: the evidence for that is becoming harder to falsify by the day (and that's what we scientists- or ex-scientists do - we try to falsify theories , rather than be starstruck by every plausible -sounding idea). But are we now going to wage war on every appliance that burns fossil fuels - such as our gas- fired central heating systems ? Are we looking for ways to block-up every volcano on the planet that vents C02 ( yes, I read somewhere that volcanoes emit vastly more C02 than all the man-made sources put together) ?

So please stop using mickey mouse science to justify your fake environmental tax, Ken Livingstone, aka London admission charge. Try telling it as it is, without all the smoke and mirrors.

I think I'm finally there, folks, you'll be relieved to hear, but the daemons of "dreams and daemons" have clearly been making their presence felt today.

Taking the rest of the day off

2007-08-05T11:08:00.000+02:00

Science/blogging

The previous post concerning the latest outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain is not quite complete. It might have been entitled " The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind (perhaps)" but that hypothesis - which is not mine, I hasten to add - has now been somewhat overtaken by events.

The strain of virus is unusual, and corresponds with one being used in a research laboratory just three miles down the road from the sole outbreak so far in Surrey. The obvious conclusion is that there has been a breakdown in biosecurity.

Serious though that is, it will be a relief if that is indeed the cause, assuming the present outbreak was spotted fast enough to prevent it spreading. Full marks to Gordon Brown ( not up till now my favourite politician, at least in his role as stealth-taxing Chancellor) for cancelling his holiday plans to chair those Cobra meetings.

Yours truly currently has guest spot on Colin Randall's Salut! blog. There is to be a second instalment towards the end of next week.

If you arrive at this post late, say in a fortnight's time (that's two weeks if you're American), you will find my dreams and daemons laid bare in Salut!'s archives under "Forum" in the left hand margin.

Thanks, Colin, for the invitation.

BTW: Blogger allows me to use "Salut" as a tag, but not "Salut!" !

PS Apologies to recent visitors if they have had problems with this site, like getting multiple images as soon as they try to scroll down. The source of the problem has been pinpointed and dealt with. It was the recent post which had 10 of YouTube's thumbnails on the one page. This post has been placed into Edit mode, where it's now invisible, and will remain so until I have time to go through and replace those memory-hungry thumbnails with simple URL links - they make less demand on a computer resources.

Louise please note (if you're reading this): I've had exactly the same problem with your site, ever since you switched to the dark blue page and/or have inserted lots of images.

Foot-and-mouth disease is Britain's recurring nightmare, but why ?

2007-08-04T17:36:00.001+02:00

Sahara dust: is this the source of Britain's foot-and-mouth disease ?

Science/animal health/environment

Here we go again: Ministry scientists in their biohazard suits, spraying disinfectant. EU bans on cattle movement.

We know what to expect: dire warnings about the loss of the UK's beef and dairy exports, ruinously high compensation payments to farmers, more of those TV images of funeral pyres of cattle, a repeat
performance of 2001. Fasten your seatbelts, UK taxpayer, we have flown into an area of turbulence, yet again.

And why ? All because that microscopic virus , an incomplete organism we are told, with no independent existence, except as a parasite, has returned to the UK, quite how no one is sure.

Perhaps it was on the wind, or on vehicles returning from abroad, or feet. Perhaps it was a re-activation of latent virus, lying dormant since the last outbreak. Or maybe you are open to conspiracy theories, in which case it was bio-terrorism. Thinks: who doesn't like us ? No, that would take too long...

Irrespective of how it gets here, once it's in, it is devilishly difficult to control, more so, it would seem, that in neighbouring EU countries such as Eire, Denmark, the Netherlands etc. Now why is that, one asks ?

We all learn at school how we raise our cattle in the western half of the country, with higher rainfall, a damper climate with lush pastures, preferring to keep the drier eastern half of the country for growing crops, such as wheat, sugar beet, legumes etc.

What that means is that once the virus gets in, by whatever means, and infects a single animal, it then has near ideal conditions in which to transmit infections , not necessarily by direct animal-to- animal contact, as Ministry officials hopefully surmise, but simply by blowing on the wind, especially at dawn when those mists lie over those fields in the valleys.

Now consider the devastating effect on our economics. The UK is supposed in theory to be a free-enterprise nation, or so we are told. Anyone is free to buy some land and a herd of cattle, for milk or beef, and pocket a few EU grants in the process.

If it's a good year, then you bank your profits, and pay the same graduated taxes as your neighbour, who runs a filling station, or a sweet shop in the village, without benefit of subsidies.

If your animals infected, through no negligence of your own ( or you are Bernard Matthews, in which case the rules are waived), then you are deemed a victim of events beyond your control, and if your animals have to be slaughtered, then you can put in a claim for compensation that is based on the market value of your animals, prior to their being infected. After a period of upset and inconvenience, you have a substantial cash sum in the bank that allows you to start over again. You have not paid a single penny towards an insurance policy, so who has picked up the tab ? Answer: central government, in the first instance, and we the taxpayer in reality, whether we like it or not. No one bothers to consult, needless to say.

Free enterprise economy ? It is nothing of the sort. Our system is essentially a soft-centred form of Stalinism, which allows farmers to make hay while the sun shines, then rushes to protect them at the first drop of rain, waving blank cheques from the taxpayer. You might like to remember that next time the speeding de-luxe 4x4 careers round the bend on the single lane road, forcing you into the rough at the side.

Why are we, the taxpayer, so obliging, so understanding, so complacent, passive and indifferent, seeing as how we are the victims of a State-sanctioned con-trick that make us the insurer of last resort, with no cut of the profits in the good years ?

Clearly, it has a lot to do with the curious rôle the Chancellor plays in that unwritten UK constitution., someone who is appointed by the PM, not the electorate. But then, we do not appoint the PM directly either. No 2's task is to look after the finances, veto expensive proposals, over-rule PMs even, yet who is given a green light to play Father Christmas on the pretext of protecting industries, livelihoods, jobs, and, oh yes, that rural vote.

But enough of the politics. Can anything be more depressing thatn watching the way UK Chancellors misspend and squander billions of taxpayers' money, pouring it into blackholes where it disappears without trace. Meanwhile the infrastructure: the roads, railways, airports, water, and other utilities, high streets, schools, hospitals, deteriorate year on year, and one thinks how much better things could be if cash were properly channneled where it's really needed.

A slight change of focus now: you may be wondering why I chose the particular above of the car caked in dust. Yes, it was almost certainly Sahara dust that settled on them with a few drops of summer rain: the picture could have been taken in the UK, but was in fact taken on the outskirts of Pisa on our recent trip to Italy.

I had taken it, intending to add it to an archive of photos to accompany a new theme on this blog, started recently, on innovative technology that might be brought to bear that could make the world's deserts green, especially the Sahara.

At the risk of seeming to go off at a tangent, I would mention that I did a post recently on that vast untapped planetary resource, the Sahara desert, blessed with an abundance of solar energy, but lacking an essential ingedient, namely water, that leaves it essentially unpopulated. But is the desert sand potentially fertile, if modern technology could supply it with water (eg by piping electrolytic hydrogen from the coast, and combusting it to pure water inland) ?

Internet research quickly picked up on the fact that Sahara dust not only falls on Europe, but is carried on winds right across the Atlantic Ocean, depositing vast amounts of dust (millions of tons) on the oceans, and, more importantly, on the Amazon rain forest. Incredibly, this dust is now suspected to be a major source of plant nutrients for this hugely important planetary resource, one which traps a vast amount of carbon as living biomass, slowing the accumulation of atmospheric greenhouse CO2, and the rate of global warming and climate change.

Despite its lush appearance, the soil beneath those trees is a virtual desert in terms of minerals and other nutrients, most of which are already locked up in the vegetation. Without that sprinkling of Sahara dust, the Amazon rain forest would probably have died out millennia ago, to be replaced by a barren landscape.

Speculation ? Fantasy ? Maybe, but even Darwin noted the dust clouds in the sky above him as the Beagle headed west across the Atlantic. That first rate scientist was not content to note the sky was dusty. He collected some of the dust that fell, on the ship, and his precious instruments, making the following observations:

“Generally the atmosphere is hazy; and this is caused by the falling of impalpably fine dust, which was found to slightly injured the astronomical instruments. The morning before we anchored at Porto Praya, I collected a little packet of this brown-coloured fine dust, which appeared to have been filtered from the wind by the gauze of the vane at the mast-head. Mr. Lyell has also given me four packets of dust which fell on a vessel a few hundred miles northward of these islands. Professor Ehrenberg finds that this dust consists in great part of infusoria with siliceous shields, and of the siliceous tissue of plants. In five little packets which I sent him, he has ascertained no less than sixty-seven different organic forms! The infusoria, with the exception of two marine species, are all inhabitants of fresh water. I have found no less than fifteen different accounts of dust having fallen on vessels when far out in the Atlantic. From the direction of the wind whenever it has fallen, and from its having always fallen during those months when the harmattan is known to raise clouds of dust high into the atmosphere, we may feel sure that it all comes from Africa.” (Darwin 1897, p. 4-5)

So what you may ask is the relevance of all this to outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain ? Sahara dust, as noted, is now believed to be a a carrier of plant nutrients to a distant continent. Might it not also being carrying less desirable passengers to the UK, and other countries to the north, like microorganisms, including the viruses that cause foot-and-mouth and other diseases ? Attached to a dust particle, the virus particle may be protected from solar uv radiation that would normally have a sterilising effect. On arriving in Britain, and settling in damp pastures, the virus then re-activates and becomes infective. That's the theory, anyway, and although far from proven, it is one whose implications need to be considered in any discussion of the viability of our dairy and beef industry.

More to follow

Amazingly, much of Sahara dust comes from one small area - the Bodélé depression, marked with a red circle. It's the remains of a dried-up lake, where the lie of the land causes winds to funnel though a gap at high speed, stirring up vast clouds of dust. Their path across Africa and the Atlantic has been tracked by satellite imagery.

Update Monday 8th Aug. "Has the Government handled the foot-and-mouth crisis effectively?" is the title of today's "Your View" in the Telegraph, to which I've just submitted the following:

"What may have saved the day on this occasion ( we hope) is the boring old science, which the public and media take for granted. I refer to the speedy identification of the F&M viral strain as an unusual one not seen in the UK since the 60s, and the equally quick realization that this strain was presently being used for vaccine production.

Of course the nearby Institute of Animal Health IS ramshackle and run down. Such is the fate of most publicly-funded research institutes that do the patient, painstaking, research needed to keep tabs on each new variant of human and animal infectious disease.

In America, it is poorly maintained bridges that collapse. In Britain, it's our science and technology infrastructure that is neglected. Both suffer for the same reason: they are seen as unsexy, and drip-fed just sufficient funds to maintain an appearance of responsibility.

Note the way our research institute directors are hauled in front of the cameras on a Sunday when something goes wrong. What kind of recognition do they get when things don't go wrong ? Answer: only jealousy and sniping at their public service pensions for a lifetime of unglamorous attention to detail, and virtual anonymity - not even a modest OBE or even MBE- but that's provided, of course, nothing goes wrong on their watch."

Advice to Brian May when he defends his PhD thesis

2007-08-03T20:38:00.000+02:00

Personalities/Humour

Advice to Brian May, founder of "Queen", when he faces his astrophysics PhD viva voca (oral examination)

1. Mug up on your external examiner's published work. Try to preface every answer with "Well, as you yourself showed in 1992 ... ?

2. If faced with a difficult question, give a nervous self -deprecating smile, look briefly at your feet, act as if you have been caught on the hop and are forced to improvise. Then launch into your well-prepared answer.

3. If told you have not sufficiently replicated your findings to permit any degree of statistical confidence, reply :

(a) that you did, of course, carry out the whole range of significance tests on the University's mainframe computer : Student's t, non-parametric U tests etc that, needless to say, bore out your hypothesis ...

(b) that you omitted them out of consideration for the examiners, to avoid the thesis becoming excessively bulky

(c) you had been influenced in your youth by the advice of Professor Hans Beerbohm of Stuttgart University: try at all costs to keep your thesis slim and excellent.

If asked asked who Hans Beerbohm was - obfuscate.

(d) Give the external examiners your autograph when requested.

Write " An appreciative Dr. Brian May " on photographs of yourself, floodlit on the roof of Buckingham Palace which you just happened to be keeping in your wallet...

Just jokin' Brian. Keep your cool, wow them, best of luck !

Google Earth image of Minneapolis bridge before it collapsed

2007-08-02T10:10:00.000+02:00

(Point and click to enlarge)

Current affairs

According to press reports, it was the Interstate highway 35W over the Mississippi that collapsed, with a current death toll at least 7, and many dozens injured. One is reminded of that iconic footage of the Tacoma Narrows bridge undulating for seconds, if not minutes, before collapsing, but that was a suspension bridge, as I recall, prone to build up of destructive resonance, not as here, a rigid steel framework bridge.

Using just the I35 identification, and the fact that there's an adjacent bridge in the photograph, I've located the above image of what I hope is the correct bridge, as it might have looked yesterday before the rush hour. Existence can be a terrifyingly ephemeral commodity in our developed societies.

Update Thur 2 Aug, 10:41 Paris time: a quick look at the New York Times confirms I have the correct river crossing, the adjacent one being called "Cedar Avenue". In fact the NYT also has oblique image of the bridge before it collapsed, presumably from a plane or helicopter. It's not an doctored "oblique angle" satellite image, since the side structure of the bridge is visible. (Or can satellites take oblique-angle as well as plan-view pix these days?)

Their small graphic enlarges on demand. Here's the link to the enlarged picture. One can just about make out the lacy supporting structure. Maybe one's being wise after the event, but that framework looks distinctly insubstantial, not so say flimsy, wouldn't you say ?

Update Thur 2 Aug, 11:15 Paris time: The Telegraph describes it as a "concrete" bridge in one of its picture captions.

Whilst there was undoubtedly concrete in the superstructure, supporting the road surface, the main support would appear to have been a network of steel girders, essentially the same principle as the Forth railway bridge. One should avoid playing the blame game at this early stage, but one cannot but help wonder if the bridge might still be standing had it really been made entirely of reinforced concrete.

Update Thur 2 Aug, 23:06 Paris time: One of the pleasures of being an independent blogger in mid 2007 has been seeeing the speed with which one's new posts becoming accessible on Google (assuming, needless to say, that the right search words are entered). During the Annie Leibovitz/Buckingham Palace controversy, for example, folk were visiting my site the same day, following Google links. I only mention this because, unusually, this post is so far totally invisible on Google. Now why is that, one may ask ?

Here's my theory for what it's worth. I have touched on the question of blame, using words like "flimsy". It's my guess that in that litigious society called the USA, Google is screening out, electronically or manually, anything that might influence the mind of jurors in any future legal action.

Update:Friday 3 Aug 08:35

A Google search under " minneapolis bridge flimsy" turned up the following photograph on flickr of the underside of the bridge before its collapse, provided by http://www.bridgepix.com/ from its archives.

Looking at the sheer mass of concrete which that steel lattice work had to support (and that's without including the traffic) I feel , admittedly with the wisdom of hindsight, that corners were cut in the design and commissioning of the bridge.

To be candid, I cannot for the life of me see how a bridge whose span depends on two slim arcing strips of steel ever got off the drawing board. No amount of ties or cross members can alter the fact that if one of those slender strips should fail, the entire bridge collapses. It's not engineering, we're talking about here, but simple physics, to do with weight and gravity !

The article gives some interesting insight into technical and cost factors that resulted in choosing that particular design of bridge. The key fact to consider is that the bridge was unsupported in the middle, so as not to obstruct navigation on the Mississippi. Yet the adjacent concrete Cedar Ave bridge, built much earlier, back in the 1920s, did have obstructing piers in the centre of the river, so it's an enigma wrapped in a mystery, one might say.

This contribution of mine is now finally "searchable" by Google, so the world's major search engine is still trawling, but perhaps a bit slower than usual.

I find it fascinating to track the way one's internet profile can rise in the days and weeks following publication of a post. This one at the moment still needs "dreams" or "daemons" in the profile, which means it's at present essentially invisible. That was the situation when I first posted on Annie Leibovitz (see above) but it's now risen in the Google rankings such that it can be picked up on Page 2 simply with " leibovitz queen" Or was it the other way round (queen leibovitz)? The word order is curiously (and illogically) important. Reversing the order yesterday moved that earlier D&D post from Page 2 to Page 8. The latter is the boondocks, needless to say, in internet search terms. Few people, we're told, go much beyond the second or third page of returns.

Interestingly Shane Richmond was saying yesterday that Google is a major factor in bringing his telegraph.co.uk and its blogs etc to the attention of overseas readers, especially in the US, but was strangely coy on what proportion of readers are now non-UK.

If statistics on personal blogs, such as this one, are anything to go by, the US, Canada, Australia, the entire world, in fact, are discovering and logging on to our scribblings, but it's nothing to get excited about. They rarely linger, once they realize that Google has taken them to something that was not quite what they were looking for!

Lifting the lid on French politics

2007-07-31T07:34:00.000+02:00

Politics

ed Tuesday 10.00: We have been having trouble with our landline. We lose our internet connection from time to time, although it's obviously working now.

The Telegraph's leader today looks at the extraordinary allegations being made against the erstwhile French PM, Dominique de Villepin, namely that he attempted to stitch up the-then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy with trumped-up charges of taking bribes.

Maybe Sarkozy's predecessor, Jacques Chirac, thought that the only problem he faced with loss of Presidential immunity concerned the freewheeling manner in which he ran his expense account while Mayor of Paris. If so, then the recent moves against Villepin look ominous, since Chirac too now risks being implicated in this tale of vicious skullduggery at the heart of the ancien régime.

The leader ends with the following words:

"These are allegations that strike at the heart of the way France is governed. If proved, they will expose something very rotten in the state of its democracy and must impact on us as one of France's closest partners in Europe."

Mine was the first comment. No doubt there will be more in a similar ascerbic vein:

Comments

French voters are repeatedly reminded by their politicians about how they are blessed with having liberty, equality and fraternity.

Integrity in public life? But what is that - some tedious Anglo-Saxon obsession, a quaint puritanical self-denying ordinance perhaps ? No self-respecting French politician would allow his or her freedom of action to be constrained by anything so inconvenient and mundane as a principle.

Posted by Colin Berry on July 31, 2007 6:14 AM

Taking a break

2007-07-24T20:13:00.000+02:00

Yes, we're taking a short break, me and the missus. Tomorrow we head off east from Antibes, and some 5 hours and 235 miles later, barring mishaps, we expect to be checking into a hotel a few miles from the place you see in the picture (assuming it's still standing by the time we get there). Thanks, BTW, Google Earth, for the picture.

It's intended as a reccy, rather than a once-in-lifetime visit. I'll be saying more about the reasons for our trek next week.

Be advised: you probably will not read about it here. It will be a couple of pix and few hundred words at Another Place (says he mysteriously).

Science in the Independent, aka being wise after the event

2007-07-24T17:48:00.000+02:00

Science and non-Science

Here below is an extract from that apocalyptic front page of today's Independent.

As soon as I saw the headline, I knew roughly what it would say (which poses the question as to why one would elect to read, or buy, something that is largely predictable).

A 21st century catastrophe

By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Published: 24 July 2007

"... But the catastrophic "extreme rainfall events" of the summer of 2007, on 24 June and 20 July, are entirely consistent with repeated predictions of what climate change will bring.

It is nearly 10 years since the scientists of the UK Climate Impacts Programme first gave their detailed forecast of what global warming had in store for Britain in the 21st century - and high up on the list was rainfall, increasing both in frequency and intensity.

This was thought most likely to happen in winter, with summers predicted to be hotter and dryer (ed. my italics) .

But yesterday Peter Stott of the Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, an author of a new scientific paper linking increases in rainfall to climate change, commented: "It is possible under climate change that there could be an increase of extreme rainfall even under general drying."

(End of quotation)

Sorry, Peter Stott. Sorry Independent, but that's not science. Predicting that global warming will give hotter drier summers is no big deal. Nor is predicting that winters will be wetter: less rain in summer implies more in winter, unless unless one is predicting a Saharan climate with a year round reduction in total rainfall.

But to wait until we have had one of the most unexpected events of all - namely to be deluged by torrential, almost monsoon rain, in July- and then tell us that fits the theory too, or that the theory can be modified - retrospectively needlessto say - to accomodate new facts, is NOT science. Not only is it not science, but it is intellectual chicanery of the first order to attempt to claim credit for something that one's theory failed to predict.

For the Independent to use its front page headlines day in, day out, to proselytise the gospel of man-made global warming is one thing. Even non- scientists can appreciate that whatever the merits or otherwise of the theory, the Independent cannot be taken seriously as a serious newspaper, assuming that its role is to report NEWS, confining opinion to its leader and Comments pages.

If the Independent wishes to break with time-honoured tradition in order to embrace and proselytise a theory, then that is its decision . No one is forced to read the Independent.

But if I were Peter Stott of the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, I would be seriously concerned about my scientific credentials right now. If I were funding his research, I would be seriously concerned at what I see as a serious lapse in scientific standards, assuming Stott has been quoted accurately and comprehensively.

It's just as well I have my own blog for pouring scorn on things that stick in the craw, since there is no facility under McCarthy's article to submit one's comment.

Something similar happened about 18 months ago where the Independent and its "wise-after-the event" quoting of scientists are concerned.

You may recall Sir James Lovelock (who, let me say, has made some highly significant contributions to science, notably NASA's early Mars exploration programme, for which his FRS and knighthood were fully deserved). But he then developed his quasi-religious Gaia theory, suggesting the multiplicity of life-forms on our planet behaved as a single giant organism that regulates its own environment, thereby enhancing the survival of the whole.

But Sir James then published his "Revenge of Gaia" (an absurd title I thought) claiming we had provoked Gaia too far with all our burning of fossil fuel etc, and that those self-regulating mechanisms had been fatally impaired: life on Earth was now doomed and it may well be too late to prevent a self-perpetuating cycle of destruction.

As soon as I read this in the Independent, I shot off a letter, pointing out that it was hardly scientific to predict that something was self-regulating, self-protective, one day, able to roll with the punches, so to speak, if this or that factor changed in the environment, but could then be totally overwhelmed by an increase in C02 concentration in the atmosphere from 0.033 to 0.045%.

A theory that can explain or accomodate anything and everything is not a scientific theory; the Gaia hypothesis may have a limited utility in stimulating research into mutually beneficial relationships between organisms , but Gaia is not the paradigm that some have cracked it up to be.

The Independent did/would not publish my letter. I protested, but to no avail. The Independent is not only selective in which scientists it quotes, but protects those same sources from the kind of criticism that is an accepted part of the scientific process - the kind that gives us the distinction between astronomy and astrology, or between science/technology and Scientology.

Oops, sorry, I nearly forgot. This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Now where did I put those crystals - I must remember to put them under the pillow tonight.

More on those floods and the national sport called "Seek a distraction, or, better still, a scapegoat"

2007-07-24T14:57:00.000+02:00

Picture by Pat Rafter of Evesham (submitted to Sky News)

I posted the following a few minutes ago to today's Telegraph "You View" topic entitled "Should Cameron return from Africa to the UK floods ? "

"Personally, I think David Cameron had his priorities wrong in going to Rwanda instead of focusing on his duties as Leader of the Opposition. But now he's there, it is absurd to suggest he should break his engagements, leaving organisers in the lurch.

Re events back home: the only sure and certain flood defence is to build on high ground. However, even with the benefit of a car, it's probably only a minority of folk who wish to haul up a windy hill each day, if the only reason for doing so is to escape serious flooding that occurs only once every 50 years. Most folk in my experience (speaking as a previous hilltop dweller) prefer a level walk to shops and schools to having a spectacular view over their neighbour's rooftops.

We have built our homes on lower ground, close to river banks, flood plains even, for millenia, certainly since the Iron Age, but we seem to have forgotten the risk-benefit equation that comes from doing so.

And when the inevitable flooding occurs, what do we do ? We look round for someone to blame, for not spending enough on so-called flood defences that are hugely expensive and never perfect, and can always be overwhelmed, as New Orleans has discovered. Or we blame the nearest prominent politician for not being on the spot in his wellies, displaying his Dunkirk spirit, whilst getting under the feet of the emergency services. They are the ones who are trained to deal with situations where there are lives, rather than reputations, at risk.

The only kind of high ground being considered on this forum is the moral one, being seized by folk who are using a natural phenomenon, albeit of disaster proportions, to score some cheap political points. "

Own up ! Which of you has gone and annoyed God again ?

2007-07-23T14:34:00.000+02:00

B&Q reports big rush for its Noah's Ark self-assembly kits (NB 1 cubit = 45.72 cm)

Humour (?)

Apologies for the flippant tone of today's post. I do not wish to make light of the distress that many are presently experiencing back in the UK. To watch an unstoppable wall of water invade one's home must be traumatic and heartbreaking. But inevitably there are those who exploit these natural disasters for their own purposes, and I do not just mean the looters or cowboy tradesmen.

Today's 'Speaker's Corner in the Telegraph asked the curious question: "What can be done to save Summer 2007 ?" . My first contribution was serious, but then some religious tubthumper by the name of "David" (David Icke ?) suggested it was all Divine punishment. That drew a quick riposte from the eloquent David Llewellyn, followed close on his heels by my own:

David writes (10.44am) : "I believe that God has had enough of this once great Christian nation's slide into godlessness, selfishness, greedy materialism, and immorality, and that this is his way of saying it."

David may be getting his instructions any day now, from on high, about building a Mark II Ark. He'd better start googling "cubits", before the servers get swamped, and get some doves trained up in homing techniques.

Special plea: ignore instructions to take two of every species, David. Leave behind the grey squirrels, mosquitoes, vampire bats, all viruses and unfriendly bacteria.

If my reading of Creationism is correct, Noah may have decided unilaterally, so to speak, to leave behind the dinosaurs and pterodactyls.

Embrace the principle of proportional representation now, David Cameron, or risk political oblivion

2007-07-22T13:43:00.000+02:00

More Politics

The Telegraph's "Your View" topic today asks " What should Cameron do to fight back ?".

It's good to have these questions posed. If nothing else, they force one to re-examine one's own long-held positions.

I've been realising for a while that I'm becoming thoroughly disenamoured of Britain's "first -past- the- post" voting system.

Years ago it used to be claimed that a vote for the Liberals (or Lib Dems) was a "wasted vote". Isn't it the same true for the majority of the electorate with the misfortune to live in a "safe constituency", where it takes a huge swing to unseat the sitting member, whether a member of the ruling party or not ? Why do we tolerate a system that effectively disenfranchises so many folk, preventing them having any influence on which party forms the next government? Why should real political influence be confined to the relatively small number of marginal consituencies ?

OK, I can still hear Mr. "Dutchy" Holland, my school history teacher and patriarchal Deputy Head, counselling us against proportional representation. The Germans embraced it in the 30s, he said, leading first to a succession of weak Weimar governments, allowing a certain Austrian corporal to seize power through the ballot box, posing as the nation's saviour. In case the lesson was forgotten, post-war Italy seemed to have as many governments as Christmases.

Well we've avoided, by and large, the curse of weak coalition governments. Indeed, Britain is regarded as a bastion of stable government which has no doubt assisted its economic growth, at least since Thatcher's handbagging of the unions in the 80s

But what price stable government in the 21st century, when it's stable New Labour, with no one being quite sure anymore what it stands for ? Is Brown New Labour, or Old Labour, or does he simply fancy himself as a latter day Oliver Cromwell, Britain's puritan Lord Protector ? OK, so he may call an election in Spring 2008, and win it, while the electorate looks disparagingly at the New Conservatives, thinking better the New Devil you know than one on a bike who entreats us to hug hoodies, and plans trips to Darfur while our overstretched troops slug it out with insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Never mind the realpolitik, folks, just feel the empathy.

Things have crystallized in my mind. Scales have fallen from my eyes. Old Dutchy will be turning in his grave, since here's what I have just submitted:

"Given that many of us live in "safe constituencies" in which our vote counts for nothing, and can never be used to influence Government policy - or spending - there are two policy initiatives I would wish to see David Cameron embrace.

The first is to work towards bringing Tax Freedom Day forward to June 1st or earlier.

Today we read that we have to wait till tomorrow( July 23rd) for Tax Freedom, aka Cost of Government Day.
The second, which might allow a strategic alliance with the Lib Dems to break Labour's 10 year stranglehold on British politics, is to wave goodbye to our "first-past-the-post" voting system.
It has served us well in the past, but some of suspect it is now stifling our political evolution towards a fairer and more representative democracy.
Yes, the time has come for Britain to move towards Proportional Representation.
OK, so we run the risk of having weak coalition governments. Given that Gordon Brown was recently flirting with the idea of bringing Paddy Ashdown and other Lib Dems into his government, might it not be a good thing to dispense with meaningless party labels for a while, and have coalitions, shifting or otherwise, that make best use of a limited pool of available talent ?

Think about it please, Mr. Cameron."

If you don't, Mr.Cameron, then you and your party face political oblivion. It's not personalities who will rescue the Conservative Party now. It's policies that voters see as timely, practical and relevant. So why not seize the initiative: sell a different kind of PR - proportional representation- to the electorate. Succeed where the Lib Dems have failed. At least you can be sure of their support, and you' ll put clear blue water between yourself and the present brooding incumbent of No.10. Act now, before Brown has a chance to put down deep roots.

More on the Colossus of Antibes aka the Nomade by Jaume Plensa

2007-07-21T11:47:00.000+02:00

Jaume Plensa's "Nomade" at its "unveiling" (vernissage) on the ramparts of Antibes' Bastion St-Jaume, yesterday, Friday July 20th 2007

Art and Culture

If you have just arrived at Dreams and Daemons from a different site, please be advised that this post is a postscript to the preceding one, entitled Jaume Plensa does Antibes proud with his alphabetical Nomade.

This one is intended as a supplementary archive, with some more photographs and with biographical information on the artist and his previous works. You may well have encountered some of the artist's work in public places before, perhaps without being aware of it, eg. the new Toronto international airport.

That's the artist at the microphone in the pale suit

('point and click' to enlarge, same as other pix)

With him on his left is Jean Leonetti, Député Maire in the darker suit.

(word of caution for non-expatriate Brits: M.Leonetti is not a deputy Mayor, but combines the duties of MP (Député) in the French national parliament, and that of Maire (Mayor) of Antibes here in his local power base. One has to be careful to get that sort of thing right, bloggers included: town mayors are very important people here in France)

Here was the view from the hospitality area

Viewing at the vernissage was by invitation only. I wangled an invitation through being married to Jane, who is secretary of the Antiboulenc Association (Antibes' main cultural/artistic society which runs its own library in the Vielle Ville).

View from inside the Nomade, looking roughly south

That's one of Antibes two iconic Saracen towers you can see through the loop of the J, with the northern end of the Cap d'Antibes visible behind the X.

Recent demolition and partial restoration of the Bastion St. Jaume

When we first came to Antibes some 6 years ago, the port area where the Nomade stands was a bit of a sad sight to behold. It had once been a busy site for naval fitting out, under the name Chantier Navale, but the buildings were derelict and unsafe, being closed off to the public. The Antibes town council decided on a drastic remedy which involved demolishing everything except the remaining sections of sound stonework. It now looks somewhat bare and skeletal, but offers new vantage points for townsfolk and tourists. The port area needed something to act as a focal point, a role which the Nomade serves admirably. It's supposed to be a temporary implantation in Antibes, but given that its paintwork is weather -resistant (well, that's what it says on the plinth), how nice it would be if it could become a permanent feature : the Colossus of Antibes (?).

Links: The first is from the University of Massachusetts website with the following summary of the artist:

Plensa integrates a wide variety of materials such as iron, glass, bronze and resin to take best advantage of the more intangible qualities of light and sound as well as the ideas that arise from spoken or written texts.

His main preoccupation is with the body and the manner in which we perceive our world from the purely sensory to more complicated thoughts, gestures, and expressions. It is his realization of this participatory mode--an always present, primal interaction between perceiver and perceived--that underlies all of his work, no matter the shape it assumes.

Second link: photographs and background info on the artist's work on permanent public display at Jacksonville, Florida and Toronto.

Third link: see the official Antibes-Juan-les-Pins website (French language) for info' on the public works programme at the Bastion St-Jaume - and the flagging up of the Nomade.

Jaume Plensa does Antibes proud with his alphabetical Nomade

2007-07-21T09:23:00.000+02:00

Art and culture

Yesterday evening Jane and I attended the "unveiling" (more correctly, vernissage) of Nomade by Jaume Plensa, that accomplished Spanish master of plastic arts.

Incidentally, that word plastic should be taken in its French meaning for 3-dimensional art (sculpture etc) irrespective of materials.

Nomade is breathtaking in its form, simplicity and perhaps symbolism, given its beguiling lattice work consisting of nothing but letters of the alphabet.

How did he manage , I keep asking myself, to create that continuous smooth, curving surface, with an intriguing broken edge at the jawline.

What, if anything, did he use as formwork ? I'll add still photographs later during the day that will knock your socks off ! Second thoughts: here's a taster, viewed from inside, looking back towards the Old Town.

Christian Adam and his "Make us Laugh" cartoons

2007-07-20T20:09:00.000+02:00

Humour

What you see above is Christian Adam's cartoon in today's Telegraph "Make us Laugh" series. In case you weren't aware, Christian supplies the cartoon each morning without a caption, and we have to email him a fitting caption by 4pm. The result appears an hour later.

Congratulations to Robert Smyth, who is today's winner. But at the risk of seeming thick, or woefully out of touch with Pottermania, can someone please explain the caption to me, cos I don't get it !

I hope Christian (or the Telegraph) will not be upset by my filching today's cartoon for D&D. I suspect Christian will not: he's a splendid and approachable fellow - I had some email correspondence with him a while back, asking how he sets about his daily task. Does he have a particular caption in mind when he draws the cartoon, or is it pure current affairs/draughtmanship, with no attempt to elicit a particular response ? His answer was that he does it either way, which can vary from day to day !

Link: Christian Adam's website

It is Christian himself who decides the winner. Here's a suggestion to consider : Telegraph supremos and space permitting, why not publish the 5 best captions each day, as well as the winner ?

My own caption, for what it's worth, was "I got a pirated copy off the internet. "Deathly Hellos" is total rubbish."

Get it ? What do you mean you don't get it ?

Final thought: The "Little and Large" blog in the Telegraph a few moons ago showed a splendid picture of Her Maj, Philip and Charles sharing a joke at the races which turned into an unofficial caption competition. Was it that which inspired the Telegraph to formalise it ?

Did you know that it rains less in London than in most parts of Yemen ?

2007-07-19T12:06:00.000+02:00

Environment

"Desalination plant approved for London" is the title of an article by Graham Tibbetts in today's Telegraph.

He quotes a spokesman from the WWF, apparently wearing his "rent 'n environmentalist" hat, who condemns the scheme as too costly, and inappropriate for Britain which he says " is not Yemen and gets lots of rain".

That sent me hotfoot to the keyboard with the following missive:

"This is the UK, not Yemen, and it rains here a lot".

Sorry, Mr. Oates, but you really ought to check your facts before you go talking to the media.

Those of us with a predilection for collecting jaw-dropping statistics have long known that Southend-on-Sea, the driest place in Britain, has less rain each year than Jerusalem.

Out of interest, I have just done a comparison with Yemen.

"Average annual precipitation in Yemen varies from 910 mm (36 inches) to 500 mm (20 inches) depending on the region."

link

In other words, Southend-on-Sea, with an average annual rainfall of 517mm, is only slightly wetter than the driest place in Yemen with 500mm.

That desalination plant on the Thames estuary is long overdue, and could have been up and running years ago, maintaining the year-round quality of life of those who live and work in London.

It would have been, but for obstruction by the over-opinionated Ken Livingstone, assorted hairshirts and others promoting their allegedly green credentials, whilst ignoring, or ignorant of, the scientific facts and hard reality.

The very idea that Londoners should have to eke out water as though living in a desert oasis is ludicrous."

Posted by Colin Berry on July 19, 2007 6:20 AM

Digg auto-created blog post

2007-07-18T22:18:00.001+02:00

Blog watch/Digg

ed: You will find below a link to the Digg article referred to in the previous post. It appears here automatically through my having experimented with the Digg's "blog it" command.

Having previously registered Dreams and Daemons with Digg ( a major news aggregation site), hitting that key is all that is necessary for it to appear as a ready-made blog post !

But I've cheated, or rather meddled. It appeared initially under the title of the original post (Is Humanity Doomed Unless We Colonize Mars Within 46 Years?) but I wasted no time in replacing it with the one above. Folk might otherwise have thought it was my title, or that I had adopted American spelling !

Here's is the body of the auto-created post, which only makes sense if read under its original title:

"Dr. J. Richard Gott believes it is. He has issued a wake-up call: To ensure our long-term survival, we need to get a colony up and running on Mars within 46 years. "

read more digg story

Digg gets a new recruit

2007-07-18T20:43:00.000+02:00

Science, environment and space exploration

Digg.com, as I'm sure you are aware, is a site where you submit items you have read, and invite comments. Those comments in turn attract other comments.

The key feature is the ability to register approval or disapproval - of the original item or subsequent comments.

Its ethos is very American - reading the comments I get the impression, right or wrong, I'm the only Brit there so far. Whilst unable or unwilling to adopt protective colouring re prose style, I am obediently following the advice of the US-English spellcheck, so that -ise word endings become -ize etc.

The topic that caught my interest was one claiming (on the basis of somewhat tendentitious probability theory) that Planet Earth is doomed, and that we should therefore waste no time in colonizing Mars.

I've sent two comments. The first, this one, has already attracted a couple of "diggs" ( approvals), which is a relief, given the culture shock I feel on this site.

"Why Mars. ? Why not the Moon ? Oh, silly me. I forgot. Mars has a atmosphere - a thin one, without oxygen. It's so thin that the atmospheric pressure on Mars is less than 1% of Earth's, so you would need a pressurised space suit for Mars same as if you were on the Moon. Water ? Sure there's water, but none of it can exist as liquid, on account of the near-vacuum conditions, so you'd have to chip it out of the poles as ice. Temperature ? Much cooler than the Earth or Moon, being so much further from the Sun. And if something seriously goes wrong, I'd much rather be on the Moon, a mere quarter of a million miles away than a 6 month journey or longer in space, with proportionately greater chance of being hit by a micrometeorite or frazzled by radiation.

If mankind cannot make the Sahara and other deserts hospitable (a new project on my recent blog, plug, plug) what chance is there of colonising Mars in our lifetimes?"

Footnote: I discovered after posting I'm not supposed to promote my own blog, at risk of being barred. It's considered "advertising". That is a strange position: cross-linking between sites, aided by search engines, is what makes the internet so powerful as a research tool. I'm amazed that Digg should have adopted so Luddite a posture on that, and that its vocal clientèle have not rubbished and buried it. Which reminds me: if you don't like what you read on Digg, you can hit the "Bury" key !

Update: Wed 22:52 I have now been awarded 4 diggs (votes of approval) on the above, which is about 3 more than your typical score (if you'll forgive the blowing of one's own trumpet). Have finally been able to access my second comment (below) which so far has attracted only one measly digg , boo hoo, as Sarah might say. But the number of readers does tend to fall of sharply as the story drops out of sight. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.

"You have to hand it to them: NASA and other agencies have done a masterly PR job in promoting Mars as an almost Earth-like planet that could be made habitable with just that little extra effort, and a trillion dollars too, give or take.

That much is clear, not just from the thrust of this article, but the few comments regarding Mars' absence of anything that could be described as tolerable atmosphere.

Look at the number of folk here who state the main problem as absence of oxygen. That's the least of one's problems. To get oxygen on Mars, all you would need to collect some polar ice, melt it, then electrolyze it to hydrogen and oxygen (using a solar array as a source of DC electricity). Oxygen is not the problem, which is the lack of a magnetosphere, causing Mars to have lost virtually all its atmosphere of C02, nitrogen etc.

There's so little atmospheric pressure, as I said earlier, less than 1% of Earth's, that the smallest tear in your spacesuit would cause you puff up like a pumpkin and probably explode, giving the "Red Planet" a whole new twist. I

've been convinced for some years that NASA et al have played down the near-vacuum conditions on Mars. That's to make it it seem more hospitable than it really is, so as to keep us gullible folks on side, voting billions of funds for pie-in-the-sky space programs. They want us to see Mars as the next step in man's journey to the stars. Bollocks ! It's the end of the line where mankind is concerned .

Personally I'd prefer to see the money spent on making the Sahara and other deserts bloom, creating new carbon sinks, keeping this jewel of a planet habitable.

PS As a newcomer to Digg can someone explain why I have difficulty in scrolling to the end of comments ? I'm generally unable to get closer than an hour ago, and then get stopped by the Send Your Own Comment box.

More gripes

2007-07-18T11:59:00.000+02:00

Moan(s) of the day

Fresh from my victory with lastminute.com, Moan of the day was going to be about my experience with laptop computers and with the electrical chain (Darty) from whom I so unwisely bought them. But that can wait a day or two.

Before moving on, has anyone encountered the problem that is bugging me right now, which is entering text online (reader feedback, blog comments etc) and finding that the text stops adding at the end, and inserts itself in the middle of previous sentences ?

Come to think of it, it's not just online. I had the problem yesterday when using Microsoft word offline.

This laptop was recently upgraded from 256 to 512MB, so lack of physical RAM should not be the problem. The hard drive was defragged this morning, but the problem still there.

It should not be a virus if McAfee is doing its job. I also occasionally run free checks for tracking software with Lava etc, but the definitions are now way out of date.

Any ideas as to what could be causing the problem ? Overheating ?

Change of subject: Andrew Marr is one of my favourite TV journalists. Don't you just love that engaging, mischievous, gently ribbing style of his? He's taken potshots today at a number of things in his Telegraph column, including one of my own bêtes noirs, namely those cattle markets that we call airports.

I submitted the following, perhaps too quickly, grammatical errors and all :

"My pet hate is being moved from the so-called final departure lounge to a final departure corridor, without seats, and usually without ventilation, where one stands jammed together for half an hour or more watching the incoming flight arrive and slowly disorge its passengers.

Ryanair did this to us at Marseille recently, en route to Madrid, despite ours being the last flight out that evening, leaving behind us a deserted departure lounge.

One of us was also given a so-called priority boarding pass, as a reward for carrying hand baggage only, for which others had to pay - some £3 as I recall- but the value of which is somewhat questionable or even negated when a bus arrives to take one to the aircraft, onto which everyone swarms aboard, with or without those passes.

Do airline and airport executives ever join with hoi polloi to experience the sheer misery of what they have inflicted upon us in the name of cost-effective crowd control ?"

My dream for making the desert bloom

2007-07-17T12:23:00.000+02:00

Planet Earth and environment

Sahara desert - before the great 21st century greening project

After the greening project

The Sahara desert is an untapped resource in two chief respects:

1. It receives a vast amount of solar energy from the sun, much of which at present simply heats the desert and the air above it. It would be better to convert this energy to electricity and food.

2. If the Sahara and other deserts (Australia etc) could be made to bloom, it would remove sizeable amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through creation of new carbon sinks.

So what, you may wonder, is running through those pipes (shown blue) that has produced the miraculous greening of the desert ?

Water, from desalination plants ? No, water is heavy, needing too much energy to pump long distances.

In fact the pipes contain hydrogen gas, produced by solar-powered electrolysis plants sited along the shoreline of the Atlantic and Mediterranean oceans.

The hydrogen is piped inland, where it is burned (at nightime) to produce electricity and pure water. Electricity is produced during the day from solar arrays.

The water that collects overnight is then used to create a patchwork of small desert oases, being suitable for both crop irrigation and for drinking.

Feasible ? The science is I believe OK, but there are some formidable technological problems still to be overcome. I'll be discussing these in future posts. In the meantime, I'll be scouring the internet for possible solutions, and maybe register with some specialist online discussion groups, such as those hosted by Digg etc.

Economics ? The threat of global warming and climate change means that old schemes, previously dropped for requiring too big an initial capital outlay, can now be dusted off and looked at afresh. That is dependent, needless to say, on being able to produce convincing evidence that such schemes can slow or counter the effects of man-made climate change through excessive burning of fossil fuels.

My flashy next door neighbour called Juan-les-Pins

2007-07-16T19:08:00.000+02:00

One of the main drags in the centre of Juan-les-Pins

Living in France

Feeling jaded ? Want to show you can still strut your stuff with the best of them ? Inner man or woman in need of a pep ?

The place for you in my part of the world is Juan-les-Pins. It’s Antibes' next door neighbour, but the two places are chalk and cheese. They could be 50 miles apart to judge on scenery, and light years apart in temperament.

Antibes is first and foremost an ancient fortified port. Traditionally austere, it then discovered that narrow back alleys attract tourists in droves if filled with cafés, boutiques, bars etc.

But Antibes faces east, with only a few privileged places catching the sun in the late afternoon and evening, and there’s a dearth of places where one can wine and dine with a sea view. Most serious drinking of an evening is done on the Boulevard d’Aguillon, which has the monumental Courtine blocking the view of the harbour, save for the odd archway or two.

Juan-les-Pins in contrast is a purpose-built modern resort, founded in the early 20th century on a sweeping pine-backed bay that faces south. It is first and foremost a destination for sun-worshippers, in which private enterprise has bagged the most accessible stretches of sand for beach clubs and restaurants.

There's a curious feature about the way the place has developed: although there is no shortage of restaurants along the promenade, with their stunning views of the Esterel massif to the west, there are relatively few bars . Those wishing merely to have a drink find themselves funnelled into the relatively small area with a concentration of glitzy boutiques, neon lights, ornamental palms, ice cream parlours, with the Casino luring in free-spending punters with flashy cars to match.

Beach club restaurant. The leaning palm a warning of things to come ?

(according to this week's Sunday Times global warming may soon be bringing hurricanes to the Mediterranean !)

There are the inevitable Brazilian acrobats, doing their amazing somersaults on hard unforgiving asphalt, the street traders and beggars. Kittens are popular this year with the latter, no doubt to attract silver from the pockets of parents with small children or from kind-hearted old ladies.

There was a sprinkling of hookers, looking appraisingly at unaccompanied males (except me with my camera), probably pickpockets and drug dealers (the downside of Juan in the season) and a very visible police presence, including the CRS heavies.

Juan-les-Pins is a place we visit once, maybe twice a year of a summer’s evening, generally when there’s the added attraction of a firework display, as was the case last Saturday on Bastille Day.

Juan-les-Pins, you see, is a frontal assault on the senses, but not somewhere I'd wish to be for a week. It’s that crush of humanity, with inevitable loss of personal space that hits one, and the strange intensity and impersonality. Despite sitting cheek by jowl in the crowded street bars, strangers rarely talk to each other once the sun sets.

Another beach club restaurant, looking west towards Golfe Juan

The fireworks were splendid. We saw new ones we've never seen before. There were some that created lacy orange sprays in the sky and sea level, reminiscent of weeping willow trees. There were others which pulsed in red strobe-like flashes on the way down, and others which ended as incandescent flares floating on the sea, like theatre footlights.

I didn’t have my camera . Who takes a camera to Juan after dark except to take pictures of friends across the table. ? One goes to Juan to revel, not record for posterity.

So I returned last night alone, sat at the same bar, walked the same lanes and promenade, taking pictures without a flash, which explains why they are in some cases an impressionist blur.

Make sure you have your speakers activated when you play the YouTube clip which I took outside the place called Pam Pam, with the vocalists and band inside pushing decibels aplenty out into the street.

There's a street with two ice cream parlours, with just a shop separating the two. If you like rum and raisin, avoid the one that claims to be Italian – its offering tastes of neither rum nor raisin. In fact it tastes of nothing at all.

Ice cream parlour (I'll try this one first next time in preference to its neighbour)

If you have a few hours at your disposal, book a table for dinner at one of the beach restaurants eg Juanita, and watch the sun go down behind the jagged Esterel, the far side of Cannes, with a candle on the table. Magic ! But smear yourself well, especially ankles, to protect against things that bite in the night.

Cute to look at, perhaps, but not electric: has a rasping little two stroke engine

The main casino

Links Pam Pam

Juan-les-Pins nightlife

It pays to complain

2007-07-16T15:40:00.000+02:00

A dispute resolved

A week ago or thereabouts I had a go here at lastminute.com under the heading "Moan of the day".

I shan't bother repeating here in detail what it was about - it's all in the link above. Sufffice it to say that we finally had a reply from lastminute by email this morning.

They took up our complaint with Confortel Suites about their Madrid hotel being described as central and ideally situated when it is, in fact, way out in the north- eastern suburbs, 10 stops on the Metro from the centre, needing a change of train as well.

Lastminute said the hotel was unwilling to accept any liability for what it agrees is a misleading description, thanks to which we weren't able to see nearly as much as we wanted in the time available. As a goodwill gesture, lastminute.com has refunded £100 to our account from its own resources.

It took them a while to respond - a full month in fact - which is far too long. But they apologised for that as well, and I consider the settlement to be a fair one, don't you ? As the title says, it pays to complain, especially if one has a cyber-rooftop from which to shout, aka a blog!

The Queen, the BBC and that Orwellian doctored film footage

2007-07-13T08:54:00.000+02:00

Yesterday's hot topic

Here's one I made earlier, and submitted to the thread of readers' comments beneath a leader in today's Telegraph.

"It was not just the transposing of scenes to create a false impression that was appalling and unforgiveable. It was the early, and as it turned out, false reports too, carried in this paper and elsewhere, that Her Majesty was seen and heard to interrupt Annie Leibovitz before she had completed her sentence, and then supposedly shot back with "Less dressy?" making her sound as if she were on a different planet.

Maybe that was what the clip intended to do, especially as we now know that it was intended for private circulation only (according to the BBC)- a schoolboy attempt to lampoon monarchy and make it look ridiculous and out-of-touch.

In fact if one listens to the clip one hears Leibovitz complete her sentence with the word "dressy" before Her Majesty makes clear she is unhappy with the request to remove her tiara.

Despite the BBC's excuses and attempts at damage limitation, I am appalled that such liberties could be taken with footage from a Palace media-shoot involving our much respected and cherished Head of State.

The BBC's explanations do not, I'm afraid, convince me. There is something rotten and nauseating in the heart of that organization. It seems to consider itself the real voice of the United Kingdom, holding the only opinions that matter, expecting the entire world to genuflect to its presence.The sooner it is cut down to size the better. That should not be too difficult, seeing how we - taxpayers and Her Majesty's subjects- pay its fat salaries."

That encounter between the Queen and Annie Leibovitz

2007-07-12T10:25:00.000+02:00

Personalities

ed: I followed this with a later blog post entitled "The Queen, the BBC and that Orwellian doctored film", once my suspicions were confirmed that there had been some liberties taken in the editing of the photoshoots at Buckingham Palace. A plague on your houses, BBC and associated companies. You are beneath contempt.

Am I the only one to be puzzled and bemused by that brief spat involving the Queen and fashion photographer Annie Leibovitz ?

It was all captured in a fly-on-the-wall documentary to be screened in the autumn (which I'm just itching to see, being a real sucker for those rare glimpses of the Her Maj' speaking off the cuff.

Here's what passed between the two strong-minded ladies, according to today's Telegraph:

"I think it will look better without the crown because the garter robe is so..."

Before she could finish the sentence the Queen shot an icy glance at the photographer and said: "Less dressy? What do you think this is?" referring to her robes which came complete with diamonds and ermine.

The Queen, who is rarely seen ruffled in public, then turned on her heel and strode out of the room with a courtier in hasty pursuit lifting the large train of her blue velvet cape off the floor.

The Queen was then heard pointedly telling a lady-in-waiting: "I’m not changing anything. I’ve had enough dressing like this thank you very much."

I'm not sure I understand why the Queen shot back first with "less dressy".

Even if Ms. Leibovitz was on the point of saying "dressy" before being so royally interrupted, "less dressy" would seem be something of a non-sequitur, if you'll pardon me saying, Your Majesty. In any case, Leibovitz was about to say "extraordinary" according to the Sky News report of the incident.

I cannot help but wonder if there was not some history between the two that had preceded this video clip.

Maybe the photographer had already got under Her Majesty's skin by the manner in which she had set about her assignment ( "the Rolling Stones today, Queen of England tomorrow, who's down for Thursday ?").

Maybe Her Maj anticipated the word "extraordinary" or something similar, and immediately rankled, the way I rankled, when reading a Stateside comment re Britain's monarchy which the writer described as "bizarre".

I remember being sufficiently miffed to fire off an instant riposte. Thanks to the power of Google I've been able to dredge it up from the archives ( a Telegraph staff blog):

"An earlier comment in these threads about Americans considering our Royal Family (aka constitutional monarchy) "bizarre" is another case in point. Call it traditional, outdated, undemocratic if you want, but don't call it bizarre unless you deliberately want to get backs up."

One wonders if the Queen felt a similar indignation, confronted by a hint of garrulousness on the part of our transatlantic cousin, the latter coping as best she could with a situation entirely out of her experience.

Which reminds me: do older readers recall a similar situation involving Walter Annenberg, back in the 1970s, who on being introduced to Her Maj as new US Ambassador to the Court of St. James, broke into that "elements of refurbishment" monologue. Curiously it too was captured for posterity on the first Royal fly-on-the- wall documentary, to the poor man's everlasting embarrassment.

In fact I do feel a certain sympathy for the photographer: the combination of crown and robe is indeed overkill in a purely photogenic sense.

One is reminded of that magnificent 1954 Annigoni portrait of the Queen in her Garter robes sans crown, showing a beautiful head of hair and giving its owner an almost defiant heroic quality, yet highly feminine with it too.

Acknowledgements to all those, including the Telegraph, whose pictures appear here. te

Update Thursday pm

Lots of new developments since penning the above. The most noteworthy is that the BBC has issued an apology to the Queen for editing the tape in the programme's trailer to make it seem as if the Queen had stormed off in a huff.

She had done no such thing. The BBC had taken a shot of her on the way to the photoshoot, with those words : "I’m not changing anything. I’ve had enough dressing like this thank you very much " and then cut and spliced it to appear after the photo session to make it seem like a flouncy exit. Methinks a BBC producer might benefit from a spell in the Tower for his lèse majesté.

But that's not all. I suspect there may have been some monkeying, or at any rate, premature truncation of the soundtrack also to create what seemed like a non sequitur on the Queen's part.

But according to the Guardian, the Queen did not, it seems, interrupt before Annie had completed her sentence.

http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,2124777,00.html

I quote:

"Yesterday, at the BBC1 autumn launch, journalists were shown clips from the forthcoming RDF Television-produced documentary series, A Year with the Queen, in which Leibovitz was shown asking the monarch to remove her crown so the shot would look "less dressy."

So Annie did use the words "less dressy", making the Queen's reply entirely sensible, relevant and coherent.

Update:

It's now 8:45 London time, and the BBC's apology has been up several hours. But no-one seems to have told Sky News (online). Judge for yourself by the following words that accompany the trailer clip.

"The Queen is used to having her picture taken, but it seems one photographer pushed her majesty too far. Snapper Annie Leibowitz provoked a royal walkout when she asked the Queen to take off her crown while posing for a portrait."

Orla Chennaoui reports.

There was no walkout, Orla, and your editors have failed abysmally in their responsibility to warn viewers of that video clip that the so-called "walkout" preceded the photoshoot.

Returning to an earlier point, here's how Sky quotes Annie:

"Before she could finish the sentence the Queen shot an icy glance at the photographer and said: "Less dressy? What do you think this is?" referring to her robes which came complete with diamonds and ermine. "

But if you listen to the soundtrack on Sky's own video clip, Annie IS heard to end her sentence with the word "dressy". So what can you believe these days ? We've seen two instances of seriously sloppy journalism. I blame the schools myself.

New look Dreams and Daemons - Day 1

2007-07-09T13:45:00.001+02:00

Politics

For several days now, the Telegraph has been urging us to sign its petition, calling on Gordon Brown to honour promises that we, the UK public, would be allowed a referendum on Europe in the event of more powers being conceded to Brussels.

Well, in what must be on one of the most dastardly acts by any PM in decades, Tony Blair, at the 59th minute of the 11th hour of his benighted premiership, did just that, allowing a failed Constitution to be resurrected as as Treaty, effectively selling the UK down the river. Borroso is telling Brown that he is duty-bound to honour Tony Blair's treacherous undertakings.

The Telegraph has 3276 responses its petition so far. I have not tried reading them all, but most needless to say are predictably against ceding any more power to the EU, which most folk see as intent on becoming a United States of Europe.

Whilst agreeing with much of what is being said about the arrogance of Brussels bureaucracy, its contempt for democratic processes, there's another side of the argument that is not being articulated. I have sent the following, with tongue in cheek, obviously, but I confess to wobbling on the assumption that we need to keep Europe at arm's length (supposing that were possible).

Here's what I've submitted:

"Why don't we just accept that we're a clapped out nation, thanks to comprehensive education, political correctness, over-taxation, uncontrolled immigration, corporate greed, social atomisation, gutter press and so-called reality TV, booze culture, knife culture, gridlock on roads, rail and utility privatization, government spin and dossier doctoring, imperial pretensions and self-appointed global policing, devaluation of university degrees, mismanagement of the NHS, squandering of billions of taxpayers' money on botched projects, overpriced public transport, rip-off consumer goods indistry, destruction of industrial base, national obsession with celebrity and trivia in general, dumbed down media, home-grown terrorists, break-up of the UK, unaffordable homes, record levels of debt, ASBOs a badge of strret cred, highest level of divorce in Europe, graduate debt .... sorry, I'll have to stop there - there's somebody at the door - probably a crooked utility salesman or distraction burglars.

Given that our country has been so thoroughly trashed in the last 20 years, can Barosso's EU Empire really do any worse ?

Why not give wholehearted membership of the EU a try ? Can things really get any worse than they are now, short of outbreaks of rioting in the streets ? Might things not become better in a fully-fledged United States of Europe ? Let's face it: the UK is a busted flush."

With this new format, using standardized headings (politics, humour etc) I've been a bit slow to realize how to exploit the format to best effect.

So far I've been entering text under the headings in any order, depending on which ideas come first, and leaving you, the reader, to hunt for new content.

That's hardly user-friendly now, is it ? So what I'm doing now is placing the most-recently updated heading at the top of the page.

So here's the most recent one to be updated: Moan of the Day, with star-billing for, da da,

lastminute.com.

Moan of the Day

Update Monday July 16

We finally received a reply from lastminute.com this morning. It was most apologetic for the delay in responding to our complaint ( see below). The misleading description of our Madrid hotel as having an "ideal central location" had been supplied, they said, by the hotel, which was unwilling to entertain any claim for compensation. We were pleased, then, to be told that as a gesture of goodwill, lastminute.com was returning £100 to our account, no less. That's actually a bit more than I was expecting, but I'm not complaining !

The hotel was called Confortel Suites. It's on a street called Lopez de Hoya in the Prosperidad district, on the north-eastern side of Madrid. The nearest Metro station, 10 stops from central Madrid was called Alfonso XIII.

Finding ourselves in the the outer suburbs was not our only complaint. After one night there, Jane was suffering dizziness and nausea, which we traced to a bad smell from the bathroom. I discovered that the wash-hand basin had been plumbed in without benefit of a U-bend.

We were moved to a different room, which was free of odour (despite having the same slaphappy plumbing). One assumes that the sink in the first room was closer to the main soil pipe.

Anyone considering a visit to Madrid may do well to consider giving Confortel Suites a miss - unless, that is, they like long Tube journeys, and the smell of drains.

Anyway our thanks to lastminute.com. They took their time responding, but finally recognized the legitimacy of our complaint. There are many things we weren't able to see or do in Madrid, especially in the evening, through being unwilling to make that long and tedious return journey twice in one day.

Original post

Be very wary of lastminute.com, especially its so-called "Secret Hotels" deals. That's where you don't know which hotel you will be in until after you have paid.

Now why would anyone willingly agree to such terms, you may ask ?

Because you can find yourself booked into a good, well-situated hotel at half or less the normal price. We used the "secret hotel" deal on our last visit to London, and found ourselves in the Holiday Inn near Gloucester Rd tube station - but then we were told that we would be somewhere in Kensington.

Perhaps as the result of that one good experience we lowered out guard, and tried the same deal in Madrid last month. Lastminute.com stated we would be "in an ideal central location... ideal for business travellers or leisure visitors".

We arrived at night, and had the jolting experience next morning of finding we were on the north-east outskirts of Madrid, a ten euro taxi ride to the centre, or 10 stops on the Metro, no less, needing a change.

Well, we were not amused, needless to say, and said so at reception. But decided to put up with it, and not let it get us down, whilst resolving to lodge a strong protest to lastminute.com when we got home, and press for some compensation for the extra out-of-pocket expenses.

There's worse to come. It took a while to find a "contact us/complain" facility on the website. We finally found it, complained we had been seriously misled, that it had impacted on our enjoyment of our holiday.

Back came an auto-reply saying we might have to wait 28 days for our complaint to be dealt with. We sent a second message a few days later, saying we expected our complaint to be dealt with more speedily. It was, after all, a simple matter of misleading description - a hotel that is 10 stops on the tube from the centre is hardly "an ideal central location". It's as if one booked for a central London hotel, and found oneself out at Golders Green (yes, I've counted 10 stations from Picadilly Circus).

Apart from a second auto reply, we've had no reply as yet to our complaint, made some 3 weeks ago !

Lastminute.com would not exist if it were not for the internet. One has to take on trust the few words of description that one reads on its website. If lastminute.com betrays that trust, and then fails to respond to complaints posted through its own website facility, then it is guilty under the Trade Descriptions Act.

I hope through tags and feeds, Tradings Standards Office will be reading this, or the BBC's Watchdog programme, or anyone, for that matter, thinking of using the services of lastminute.com. That organization is taking huge liberties with its online customers, and spoiling folks' holiday plans. Do they really wish to gain the reputation of being a grubby organization?

Politics

Gordon Brown wants us to believe that spin has no part to play in his brand of politics. Yet his response the welcome MCB statement condemning the actions of the mad medic fire-bombers was to place an embargo on use of the terms Muslim or even Islamist when describing those who engage in suicide bombing. That was presumably a sop to the MCB line that condemns the media for describing as Muslims or Islamists people who wage jihad in the name of Islam. It is tantamount, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) claims, to describing IRA terrorists as "Catholic terrorists".

That is ridiculous: the IRA campaign was never about imposing a fundamentalist form of Catholicism on Ulster, even assuming such a thing existed. Nor did the IRA ever resort to suicide bombing, because its agenda was primarily political, not religious. Nor were there any Catholic priests urging the IRA to become suicide bombers, with promises of rewards of the flesh awaiting them in paradise, even if some priests were sympathetic to the aims of the IRA, if ot the methods .

If it is true that Gordon Brown has banned use of the M or I word, then that in my view is a depressing and dangerous concession to political correctness. It makes us all a hostage to fortune, allowing the MCB, if so inclined, to retreat back to its previous state of denial, but one that is enormously strengthened, and can then be presented as a propaganda coup. Brown's line should have been : "Now you're talking sense, and not before time. But let's not stop there. Let's get a few other things straight while we're about it".

By rewarding the MCB with the right to dissociate non-terrorist Muslims from what is done in their name, by extremists in their midst ( whose identities are often known, or suspected, but rarely if ever reported, because they are basically "nice boys") Brown is guilty, if not of positive spin, but of negative spin. But it's spin all the same, because by gagging his Ministers and others in Government, preventing them from telling it the way it is, he's putting an undeserved gloss on things, by default.

The Koran and hidiths are open to numerous interpretations, some of them involving indiscriminate slaughter of non-Muslims. For as long as misguided individuals, including (amazingly) hospital doctors, whose intended role was to save life, try their level best to kill us in the name of Islam, then we are entitled, indeed obliged, to describe them as Islamist terrorists. That sends a no-nonsense signal to mainstream non-violent Islam that it's time it put its house in order.

If the IRA had acted in the name of Christianity, we in the West (not just the UK) - Christians, other religions, agnostics and atheists - would have been out in the streets protesting furiously at their attempt to sign us up to their psychotic tendencies.

Gordon Brown has failed his first test, and by his own yardstick, namely his claim that spin is a thing of the past.

Personalities

Watch this space

Blog watch

This heading was intended as a bit of self-chivvying - to get me touring some of the millions of other blogs out there, and reporting back on anything that stood out from the background.

But I'm hijacking this title today for something different that may look like self-promotion (which it is) but is possibly a pearl of wisdom for fellow bloggers.

Down at the bottom of this page is my Mark II hit counter, the same as the one of Sarah Hague's (where I discovered it). If you click on it, you will find it gives an amazing amount of detail about visitors to this site, eg the site from which they have arrived.

An increasing number of visitors come to this site from Google searches, and the hit meter even reveals what people have entered into their search profile.

Yesterday I was toying with the idea of putting up a post on search-engine superfluity - a majority of folk enter whole phrases into Google, when as we know it ignores words like "from", "to", "in" etc unless part of a phrase within quotation marks.

But something else caught my attention that has left me absolutely gobsmacked, and not a little delighted too. Someone ( a visitor to this site, but I won't say who) had simply entered "conforama" ( the French furniture chain) and had been led to this site ? Why, I wondered ? So I entered conforama, and guess what ? Dreams and Daemons was on the second page of listings. All I had done was list Conforama among stores that sell dodgy imported goods. It was not singled out for particular attention.

Today I discovered a visitor from Adelaide in South Australia, and wondered if it was the splendid "Bearsy" who, along with his missus Boadicea makes brilliant contribution to My Tel ( which I still read, but no longer post to).

But then I looked at the Google search profile from Adelaide. It was simply "places to visit in Madrid". When I keyed it into Google, I found my recent post on Madrid there on the very first page of listings !

Why you may ask is a personal blog with a modest Technorati ranking appearing so high in Google searches ?

I think it's because of "info-mass", my own variant on the term "bio-mass". This blog has been going for some 9 months during which time I've posted on a wide range of topics that through tags have linked to hundreds of other sites. Google rankings are apparently determined largely by one's web of linkages, and as the months go by, a site like this acquires a progressively higher profile.

The moral then, to fellow bloggers, is to be patient, take a long term view, keep posting, and as time goes by one gets picked up by the search engines, attracting more and more visitors, creating more hits and links, attracting more visitors etc etc. It's in effect a virtuous circle.

There will be some who judge a site purely by the number of comments. I won't pretend that I'm indifferent to the relative paucity on this site, but I hope these few words will demonstrate that success or otherwise in blogging can be measured by more than one yardstick.

Living in France

Buying and selling property in France can hit one with much larger expenses than in Britain, especially estate agents fees. last week I was quoted a whopping fee of 6% to sell a small guest apartment, which is a five figure sum in euros !

In fact, I'll probably let it out instead, but it was an opportunity to try direct selling through the internet. I keyed in "Antibes property" into Google to get a high-profile listing, paid my £59 last Friday for an ad with 4 photos, and it appeared yesterday:

http://www.frenchpropertylinks.com/frenchpropertyextradetails.asp?property=PremierAdvert1167448M6

I'll let you know if and when there's a response.

Already the firm has emailed to warn of crooks who offer to buy the property without viewing it. They weren't specific, but we've heard that it typically involves persuading gullible folk to accept cash, which is counterfeit, needless to say.

Lifestyle

Watch this space

Money matters

"Olympics Budget is out of Control" was the title of an article by Brendan Carlin in today's Telegraph (Tue 10th). Here's the first comment that went up, from your truly, NTS:

"Calculated per competing athlete, of which there were some 11,100 at the most recent (Athens) Olympics, a bill for £9bn represents well over three quarters of a million pounds per sprinter, long jumper, javelin thrower etc.

There is simply no justification for this level of expenditure, especially as it comes every 4 years, and is foist in the first instance on cities rather than entire countries.

London should be the last old-syle Olympics. There should then be a permanent site, carefully chosen for clean unpolluted air (which rules out a number of previous venues, Athens included).

We should now swallow our pride, and propose a belated sharing of the 2012 Olympics with Paris, or perhaps Madrid and other failed contenders.

The disastrous way in which London came to be selected with a blank cheque from Blair, Brown, Livingstone and Coe, is a signal lesson in what happens when Parliament cedes too much power to the Executive. The media also failed to exercise proper vigilance, preferring instead the easy headlines to be gained from the narcissistic showbiz presentations that took place in Singapore. "

Humour
Cannot resist plagiarising a joke that appeared from a contributor on Damian Thompson's Telegraph blog:

I can beat that one
peterNW1 10 Jul 2007 00:03

St Peter decides to take the day off to go fishing, so Jesus offers to keep an eye on the Pearly Gates for him. Jesus is not sure what to do, so Peter tells him to find out a bit about people as they arrive in Heaven, and this will help him decide if he can let them in. After a while, Jesus sees a little old man with white hair and a white beard approaching who looks very, very familiar. He asks the old man to tell him about himself. The old man says, "I had a very sad life. I was a carpenter and had a son who I lost at a relatively young age, and although he was not my natural child, I loved him dearly." Jesus looks closely at the old man, "How would you recognise your son"? "He has holes in his hands and feet". Jesus wells up with emotion. He throws his arms around the old man and cries, "Joseph!" The old man replies, "Pinocchio?"

New template for Dreams and Daemons

2007-07-09T13:12:00.000+02:00

Yes, here's my new blogging template, as flagged in a comment on Sarah's current post.
(Thanks BTW Sarah for the award under "Thinking" bloggers).

Here are the provisional headings.

Each time I put up a new post, I'll try to say something under at least 3 or 4 headings, and then fill in the blanks in the following day or two. Once the template is filled up, it will be time to repeat the exercise with a new blank template.

Politics
xxxxxx

Personalities
xxxxxx

Blog watch
xxxxxx

Living in France
xxxxxx

Travel
xxxxxx

Lifestyle
xxxxxx

Money matters
xxxxxx

Moan of the Day
xxxxxx

Humour
xxxxxx

Technical note: it's been a bit tedious creating even this small template, since there is no formatting wizard on Blogger.

To avoid having to repeat the exercise, I have saved the format to email (hoping the style attributes - font size, bold, colour etc - are saved and then back-pasteable).

As a belt and braces safeguard, I am also pasting to a series of draft posts that can then be stored in draft mode, and then activated at will. But there's a snag doing it that way, as I've previously discovered: when one finally hits the Publish key it appears on the date it was created, instead of the date published , with no facility that I can see to edit the date. However I can always copy and past the entire page to a New Post if necessary.

Any thoughts on those categories ? Are there any obvious ones I've overlooked ?

PS: As suspected the formatting commands are lost when one tries to Copy and Paste a template in Blogger, whether direct or from email. There's a trick one can use, which is to save the HTML coded version, to paste that into a blank page in HTML mode, then convert back.

Here's what my template looks like in HTML:

Politicsxxxxxx
Personalitiesxxxxxx
Blog watchxxxxxx
Living in Francexxxxxx
Travelxxxxxx
Lifestylexxxxxx
Money mattersxxxxxx
Moan of the Dayxxxxxx
Humourxxxxxx

PPS Oops. It's gone and "translated" the code without being asked to do so. I'd forgotten that can happen. There are blocking codes to stop that happening, but I'd have to look them up.

Le Tour de south London suburbia

2007-07-08T12:50:00.000+02:00

It's 12: 50pm French time, and along with tens of millions in Europe and elsewhere, I have been watching the first stage of the so-called Tour de France.

But as everyone knows, it has made a rare return to British roads -a signal honour, one would think, especially given the recent blow to French pride re the awarding to London of the 2012 Olympics.

So you might have expected some care with the choice of route, to make it a treat for cyclists and TV viewers alike. I knew it was to end at Canterbury, a well-deserved favourite with French cross-channel day-trippers.

I also knew that the route is to take in a lengthy stretch of delectable Kent countryside, so-called Garden of England. But for the last 45 minutes I have seen nothing but unprepossessing south London suburb, with overpasses, long drab sections, industrial estates, power station chimneys.

London's delightful Thames Estuary, looking south from the Dartford Crossing towards route of Tour de France from Greenwich to Canterbury

The helicopter camera then lingered over the Dartford Crossing aka Queen Elizabeth Bridge, as desolate a stretch of Thames Estuary as one can imagine (see above), with that cheapo cable stayed-suspension bridge, with adjacent fuel storage tanks.

Which cretinous individual was responsible for choosing Greenwich (in itself a atmospheric place) as the starting point, ensuring that first 45 minutes at least of the route was the non-descript underbelly of London, tens of miles of urban sprawl ?

Why do we as a nation persistently squander these rare opportunities to show the world the stunning nature of our countryside. So what purpose was served by inflicting our built- up suburbia on the Tour de France, when we have a glorious Green Belt around our capital city ? We take the latter for granted , but it is something that has no counterpart in many less fortunate nations. Go to Belgium and you'll see interminable stretches that are neither suburb nor countryside, but something midway between the two. Do I detect the hand of Mayor Ken Livingstone in the decision to ensure that swathes of Labour voter-territory were the first thing the world would see for mile after grinding mile?

It's now 13:03, over an hour since the start, and my wife downstairs is saying that the scenery has improved marginally, with alternating shots of the good (eg church towers, greenery, castle on the river bank) but intermixed with yet more boring suburbia.

One wonders how many foreign viewers have switched off by now, suddenly realizing , if they did not already, why it is that so many of us Brits who prefer the built environment to country life choose to live abroad.

Ken Livingstone is apparently making plans for another "Tour d'Angleterre et France". After today, I'm minded to think the Tour organizers will not be rushing to return to Britain, a nation with no proper and fitting sense of occasion, one that is content to fob off Johnny Foreigner with second-best.

This is the same country that is spending billions to salvage, sorry, reinstate, industrial wasteland as the site for the 2012 Olympics. There are times UK plc makes me feel physically sick.

Back now to the TV, hoping to see real English countryside.

PS I did finally get some glimpses of glorious Kent (oast houses , Leeds Castle etc) but there were competing spectacles on this amazing UK sporting weekend, needless to say, from the F1 Grand Prix at Silverstone and the Wimbledon finals.

Tour de France ? Most of the action was in the final sprint finish. That's why the scenery is so important - watching the same peleton threading its way through country lanes can get ever so slightly eye-glazing if one's not an aficionado.

Should universities be more than a stepping stone to a lucrative job ?

2007-07-05T11:46:00.000+02:00

"How can Britain ensure that its Universities remain world class" is the question posed on today's Telegraph Speakers Corner. It follows warnings from a senior Cambridge academic that UK universities risk losing their reputation very quickly, perhaps within 10 years, unless something drastic is done to halt the slide in quality research.

Here's what I've just posted:

"If universities existed purely to select and nurture the next generation of academics, then it would make sense to continue with entry straight from school, on the assumption that the young mind is more likely to be creative than one more exposed to received wisdom.

But increasingly British universities are seen as mere finishing schools for careers in commerce, the professions, teaching, social services etc where no great premium is placed upon creativity or original thinking, and more on ordered logical thinking, and the ability to present a case in a manner acceptable to professional people.

In the latter instance, the case for proceeding straight to University from school is much harder to sustain: a prior exposure to commerce and its ethos and its disciplines would make sense. Some funding might come from extension of the sabbatical principle, eg one year off for study/research for every seven worked ( aided perhaps by universities being free to award one year Master's degrees without a prior Bachelor's degree).

Once Universities are cleared of the intellectual deadweight of youngsters who are there purely as a stepping stone to lucrative jobs in the City etc, it would free up professors and other academics to devote more time to students with true creative flair. That bold but simple step might be what's needed to revive Britain's fading reputation as place where there's a ferment of unconventional thinking and revolutionary new approaches.

This retired scientist is somewhat dismayed at the aridity of so much of what passes for science and technology these days - much of which seems to be mere dotting of (i)s and crossing of (t)s."

See no evil, hear no evil ...

2007-07-05T08:55:00.000+02:00

We've all heard the expression "Don't blame me, I only work here".

There's a comparable cop-out being heard from the Muslim man (or woman) in the street, responding defensively to the attempts by those mad-medics to set up communal barbecues in Glasgow and London.

Seeing it in print under "Comment is free" in the Guardian prompted me to send the following schoolmasterly analogy:

"I once taught a short course on microbiology. The technician made up plates of sterile nutrient agar, the students dabbed or streaked the surface of the gel with swabs from their skin or work surfaces, and then placed lids on the petri dishes. I as the teacher was then legally obliged to see that the lids were sealed with strong tape before going into the incubator. Why ? Because that nutrient-laden jelly was God's gift to germs, including dangerous pathogens, that are everywhere in our environment, and would multiply rapidly on the gel, creating a serious biohazard.

If a pupil had became infected, it would have been no defence to say that my gels were sterile to start with, or there was no deliberate intention to allow them to harbour pathogens.

By the same token, peaceful mainstream Muslims must realize that their religion can be easily subverted or hijacked by those who simply wish to control, intimidate or murder their fellow citizens. Given the freedom of imams to preach different interpretations of the Koran and hadiths, and the absence of a supreme spiritual head, akin to the Pope, to rule on contentious doctrinal issues, then it is incumbent on all Muslims, I believe, to accept collective responsibility for what is said or done in their places of worship in the name of Islam.

If the IRA had claimed to be acting in the name of Christianity - as distinct from a united Ireland - I feel confident there would have been a groundswell of protest from across a broad section of Christianity, including the Roman Catholic Church. "

PS Does anyone recall a general invite put out on My Tel to attend an open barbecue ? Did anyone respond, or attend ? If you did, then do please allay my suspicions ... Apologies to the "Texan" (?) if it was genuine.

A quick swing round the Gorges du Verdon

2007-07-02T21:02:00.000+02:00

Update Sunday 15th July

It's been most gratifying to see the number of hits on this post, most from the bungee jumping fraternity it would seem. In fact, entering gorges, verdon, bungee brings up Dreams and Daemons at the top of Google listings.

By way of saying thank you I have extracted two short video clips from the Berry YouTube archives. They are tacked on at the end. The first was taken at the launch point (?) and shows two young lads in harnesses getting ready to jump. the second was one where I captured a leap from a distance, but you'll find better ones than mine in YouTube archives under Artuby.

The renowned Gorges du Verdon are a mere 70 miles or so by road north-west of where we live (Antibes, French Riviera). We stayed two nights at the spectacularly-situated Hotel du Grand Canyon du Verdon.

As you can see in the picture above, it perches right on the rim of the gorge (point and click to enlarge). I took the picture further along the gorge from one of the places where one can stop the car and take in the view (sadly all too few).

A few words about our choice of route for initial exploration: we decided to go the long way round initially, approaching from the west. That meant we could use the fast autoroute as far as the Draguignan/St. Tropez turnoff, where we headed north, and had lunch at the delightful village of Aups. There we found our favourite kind of restaurant. Called the Auberge de la Tour it had a paved courtyard where you could choose between sun, shade and dappled shade. I went for the plat du jour, which was raviolis au saumon à la crème de basilic, superb flavour and value.

Moving on, we were then then greeted by a spectacular view of the Lac de Sainte-Croix, reputed to be France's largest artificial reservoir. It was created by damming the Verdon, thus drowning a village and Roman bridge into the bargain. Such is progress.

The water is a startling turquoise in colour, which is something to do with its fluoride content, although the claimed link with chemistry seems suspect. Maybe it's the microbiology that's affected - something I need to research. Just before the village of Aiguines we turned onto the road that twists its way round the rim of the Gorge (Canyon?) for some 15 kilometres, until finally one comes upon the amazing Hotel Grande Canyon du Verdon.

Approaching from the west meant we were on the safer side of the road. That was fine for a first encounter, but the downside (no pun intended) is that the few stopping places on the precipitous offside are difficult to access, especially as they tend to be hidden round bends where one sees them too late. Traffic was surprisingly light, given the time of year, but it was annoying and frustrating to find that most of the off-road parking spots tended to be taken already with camping cars and motorcycles.

Most of the guard rails, incidentally, are not corrugated steel, but made of slender tree trunks, of questionable impact-resistance.

I have a rule of thumb re the French- they never do things 100%, generally stopping, perversely, at 95% or thereabouts. The Gorges were no exception. One of the trickiest stretches of road is the approach to the Chalet de la Maline (see later), where the road is almost single track down a gradient towards a hairpin at the bottom. Yes, you have guessed correctly. That stretch has no protective barrier, perhaps on the assumption that if you went over there's a mere 50 foot of barrelling to the return leg of road below, and if you conserve momentum, as that tedious Newton decreed, then there are several tiers of small trees to further impede one's progress down to the river some 3000 feet below ! But don't let me put you off - you're far more likely to get run over on a pedestrian crossing in Antibes, especially when those pretty green lights tell you it's safe to step into the road !

This next picture is the view we get looking east along the Gorge, not from a roadside stop, but from the hotel balcony, just a few steps from our room (see video clip at end). Amazing wouldn't you agree? When you see it around the clock, it's interesting to see how the colour and contrast change with the time of day, or with the weather.

Through binoculars, we could see hikers picking their way along the trails at the bottom, and a couple of guys fly-fishing.

On day 2, we decided to do the complete circuit of the Gorge/Canyon.

NB: I'm still trying to locate a definitive and authoritative distinction between those two terms. The western end is labelled in our guide book as the Canyon du Verdon, the eastern end the Gorges du Verdon, but there's no obvious dfference in character between the two that one would notice, both being varied as regards width, depth, straightness or curvature. Are there any geomorphologists reading this who know the difference ?

These next two pictures are out of sequence. The one above is at the Route des Cretes, where the road crosses the Verdon and turns west along the Rive Droite (north bank). You can probably make out the guy with the head for heights, scaling the sheer rock face. (Point and click to enlarge this and other pix). Yeah, chacun à son goût .

For those with a different type of goût with perhaps a slighter lower risk of prematurely departing this mortal coil, there is this bridge just a few kilometres from the hotel. It's not over the Verdon, but the Artuby, a tributary of the Verdon that enters from the south. It's well known among the bungee jumping fraternity. This is how we saw it early on Saturday morning - almost totally deserted. Returning again on Sunday morning the jumpers were out in force. I did succeed in capturing a short video clip of a jumper doing his thing which I may post later, but uploading to YouTube is painfully slow right now.

I was interested to see the launch point close up. I had always imagined that the elasticated rope was simply attached to the parapet, but it's not, and on reflection it's not difficult to see why. It's all highly organized, with a bit of heavy equipment, painted bright blue, with a winding winch, parked up against the side. The jumpers were wearing a full body harness around the torso, which seems a lot more sensible than merely attaching around the ankles, as I think was the case when two of my own children did that rite of passage (leaving one of them I regret to say with a permanent fear of heights !). OK, so the New Hebridean islanders manage with a creeper round the ankles, but they probably have a different view from ours on the trifling matter of life and death.

This splendid salad was served up at the Chalet de la Maline restaurant which is almost opposite our hotel, but on the other side of the gorge. It takes hours to drive round. It's a centre for hikers who wish to take the trails down to the bottom of the gorge, or along various scenic footpath at various levels above the river. We decided we'd keep that for our next visit !

Here finally is a a video clip, starting in our room, and going out onto the balcony for that million dollar view. Switch off your speakers if you don't want to hear me doing my Bill Oddy impression, aka senile burbling, and, towards the end, confusing pan with zoom.

One final word: the canyon/gorge is dramatic enough, and fully deserves its reputation as one of the natural wonders of Europe. But there's more to it than that. It lies in a vast natural park, essentially a lightly wooded limestone plateau that stretches off to distant peaks and vast horizons, with scarcely a dwelling to be seen, and virtually no pylons, mobile phone masts etc. In other words, the environment has been remarkably well protected from any man-made intrusions, whether useful or otherwise. The few villages en route are typically Provençal, full of ancient stone, steep gradients and flowers in abundance - all in all a truly amazing and delightful part of the world, and one which we hope to explore again soon.

On the way back, we called in at Gourdon, perched on the limestone escarpment about 10 miles north of Antibes. It was this year's venue for the Antiboulenc Society picnic. Jane, in her capacity as Secretary, did as much transacting of society business as nibbling and quaffing - everyone brings along something different for the communal foodfest.

Later, we had a guided tour of an amazing collection of art déco in the Gourdon Chateau, accumulated over many years at great expense by the owner. How strange it all seems, some 80 years on, at once so modern, yet so dated, putting me in mind of one of the local cinemas in my home town that I attended for Saturday matinée "flicks", gazing in wonder at all that avant garde chrome, glass and mirror.

Video clips of bungee jumping at Pont d'Artuby, late addition (Sunday July 15th)

The wanderlust returns

2007-06-28T22:38:00.000+02:00

If all goes according to plan, J and I expect to be on that balcony tomorrow afternoon or evening. It's at a hotel/restaurant about halfway along the world famous corniche sublime that runs along the southern lip of the Gorges du Verdon. For those not au fait with Provençal geography, I'm referring to Europe's very own Grand Canyon. It's not on the scale of Arizona's, of course, but is still hugely impressive, we're told.

We've been living in this part of the world for some 5 years now, and been visiting rather longer, but have somehow never got round to visiting this natural marvel. Tomorrow we set off in a small hired car, which is probably better for negotiating those switchback roads, given there's likely to be a succession of tourist coaches coming in the opposite direction.

The last few days have been spent surrounded by stacks of camping car magazines. We were 90% decided to splash out on a Ford Transit based profile, and were mentally imagining trips to the south of Spain, Norway's north Cape, Croatia, Sicily etc. But there's a formidable problem to overcome - garaging. There are virtually no garages available to rent in Antibes. Buying one would probably double the cost, it would have to be high (close on 3 metres), and most of the garages I see around Antibes have their access blocked by parked cars, which I suspect in most cases do not belong to the garage owner. Who needs all the hassle ?

Provisionally, we've decided to hire a camping car for a week or two, probably in the autumn, and go and explore somewhere new for us - probably Tuscany. That will give us an opportunity to experience the motorhome in practice - warts and all- and decide whether the benefits of occasional gypsy-like freedom outweigh the costs.

Expect a welter of holiday pix in the next post, with limestone scenery very much in evidence.

Beware Sancerre wine bottled "sans care"

2007-06-21T16:51:00.001+02:00

Updated Saturday 24 June (please scroll to end)

Updated Saturday 23 June (please scroll to end)

Up until two days ago, I had always regarded Sancerre a safe wine for entertaining. Everyone knows the name, and this occasional tippler considers the rosé to be well balanced (usually) between sweetness and acidity, without the harsh resinous edge one associates with a lot of much cheaper offerings.

We've had a Sancerre rosé sitting in the rack since last November (about which more later) and decided on Tuesday that we would have it between ourselves.

I'm glad we made that decision, rather than offer it to guests. It was dreadful. After a glass each we gave up in disgust. Thirty minutes later, we both had a metallic burning taste on the palate. It stayed for several hours: had we been entertaining guests, it would have ruined the evening.

One sniff at the neck of the bottle confirmed my suspicions - sulphur dioxide ! The wine had been heavily overtreated with sodium metabisulphite.

(For the chemically uninitiated, metabisulphite comes as a crystalline white solid. It slowly releases its sulphur dioxide in contact with water: anyone who has made their own wine will be familiar with it as Campden tablets).

So where did we get our duff Sancerre, you may be wondering. At some dodgy back street supplier, or from the pile-em-high, sell-'em cheap basket at the supermarket ?

Far from it. It was a trophy we brought back from the Salon du Palais Gourmand at the Cagnes race course, the subject of an earlier post.

The lady had offered a sample at one of the stalls as we passed, and we had liked it. She wanted us to buy a crate, but I politely declined, offering instead to buy the opened bottle at the full price, so we could polish it off at home that evening.

But no, the lady would not hear of that, and produced an unopened bottle of 2004 Sancerre for about €15 as I recall.

So how come it had so much sulphur dioxide, and was there any way we could have known ?

Well, this retired biochemist/food scientist is no innocent abroad when it comes to food additives. Yes, I had noticed the warning in small print on the side of the bottle "contains sulphites". You can see it (just) in the pictutre above, written vertically on the right of the label.

The principle of adding a little sulphite to wine is not in question. Without it, the wine would go off very quickly. Enough oxygen can penetrate even the best cork and cause premature oxidation and spoilage of the wine, turning it to vinegar.

The problem is a quantitative one. Under EU regulations, the label "contains sulphites" is required for levels of sulphur dioxide in excess of 10 mg/litre.

That's just below the level at which most people can detect its presence. Wine becomes unpleasant when the level is about 20-30 mg sulphur dioxide per litre.

Now here's the sting in the tail, which frankly I find unbelievable: the EU allows a level of sulphur dioxide in white wine or rosé of up to 210 mg/litre. Yes, you read that correctly: it's perfectly legal to sell wine that has 7 to 10 times the level that gives wine an unpleasant smell or taste!

So when you buy a bottle of wine with that warning "contains sulphites" you have no way of knowing whether it has 11mg per litre or 210 mg per litre. What kind of idiocy is this ?

In fact, it's not just flavour that is an issue - there are health implications too.

The World Health Organisation recommends a maximum daily intake of 0.7 mg of sulphur dioxide per kilogram of bodyweight.

For a man of average weight this is less than a third of a bottle of a white wine with a concentration of 200 mg per litre.

Regular consumption of conventional wines means regularly exceeding the RDA of sulphur dioxide by a large margin.

More specifically, sulphur dioxide can cause allergic reactions in some people. It is dangerous for asthmatics even at very low levels.

The warning on wine "contains sulphites" is well nigh useless. It puts one in mind of those words "this product may contain traces of nuts", which are inserted purely to protect against lawsuits from people deemed to have rare allergies. Irrespective, it reflects poorly on the EU's consumer protection that French and other EU wine producers can legitimately sell wine that is either undrinkable, a health hazard, or both.

For this and because of some other bad experiences, I have adopted a simple solution. I no longer spend more than 5 (or at most 10) euros on a bottle of wine. If it doesn't taste right, it goes down the drain, and I try another bottle !

PS: I've used the British spelling for sulphur and sulphites. There is now, I read somehere, agreement in the scientific community to standardise on the American spelling (sulfur/sulfites) but for some of us, at any rate, old habits die hard.

Update Saturday 23rd June

I am presently doing internet searches on preservatives in white, rosé and red wines. There's an awful lot of dross, some quite poetic, but dross all the same. Just once in a while, one chances on something that is illumintaed with a little hard science.

Here's a link I would recommend:

http://www.wineint.com/story.asp?storycode=1810

It's an article written by one Jamie Goode PhD, who has his own site ( which I yet to visit!)

http://www.wineanorak.com/

What caught my eye was the following statement:

Sulphur dioxide's main role is binding up the aldehyde formed, so that we don’t smell the oxidation product’.

Well, well. After trawling through page after page about sulphur dioxide acting as an antiseptic in the early stages of winemaking, and as an antioxidant in the cask or bottle, here we get a totally different view of it acting to mask an alleged off-flavour.

Alcohol is converted by bacteria first to acetaldehyde (aka ethanal), and then to acetic acid (aka ethanoic acid, "vinegar")

CH3 CH2OH -> CH3 CHO -> CH3COOH

According to Goode, the real purpose of sulphur dioxide is to react with acetaldehyde, present from prior oxidation, converting it to a (presumably) tasteless compound.

(The reaction between aldehydes and sulphur dioxide is in fact standard A-Level chemistry).

If that is so, I find it appalling that a smelly, toxic chemically-reactive substance, sulphur dioxide, one that is a recognized hazard to asthmatics, and perhaps other susceptible individuals, is being used simply to mask another flavour. What is particularly absurd is that makers of certain sherries and madeira wines encourage the production of some acetaldehyde in order to impart what has been described as the flavour of freshly-cut apple.

It sometimes takes days or weeks of of patient reading to get to the real truth behind the use of certain traditional processes that would probably never have been approved if discovered yesterday. Thus speaks the retired Head of Nutrition and Food Safety for a major industry research association. I shall continue to scour the literature to see what else might be lurking there that needs to be brought to public attention.

Update: Sunday 24 June

Have just this minute posted the following to Sally Peck's Telly current blog post entitled "Who makes the best wine?"

An excess of sulphur can ruin any wine

Colin Berry 24 Jun 2007 14:12

A French wine-producing chateau, or its equivalents elsewhere, may produce the finest wine of its type in the world. But all that is irrelevant if the wine is sent out with an overdose of chemical preservative.

Many red wines are preserved naturally to some extent by their own grape tannins, but in white and rosé wines, where tannins are absent or lacking, there's the age-old tradition of adding sulphur, in the form of potassium metabisulphite.

It's usually claimed to protect wine against bacteria/wild-yeasts prior to fermentation, or against chemical oxidation afterwards (although some industry insiders say it's real purpose is to mop up aldehydes, preventing a certain flavour, but that's perhaps controversial) .

Irrespective, neither the principle nor practice of adding a little sulphur is being challenged here, provided it's not overdone. Most folk can't detect the sulphur dioxide at levels below about 20 to 30 mg/litre.

The problem is that many wine producers appear to be adding add extra sulphur dioxide just for luck, and can get away with this, thanks to lax labelling regulations. I've just had to throw away half a bottle of 2004 Sancerre, bought at a French food exhibition, on account of excess sulphur dioxide.

http://dreams-and-daemons.blogspot.com/2007/06/beware-sancerre-wine-bottled-sans-care.html

If you look carefully at most bottles of wine, you will find in tiny letters the words "contains sulphites". All that indicates is that the wine contains 10mg/litre of more of sulphur dioxide, which in practice includes virtually all wine. But the wine can legally contain up to 210mg/litre of added sulphur dioxide quite legally, in the EU, making it undrinkable, and a health hazard, at least to asthmatics.

Until this labelling nonsense is sorted, and wine is labelled so that consumers know what they are buying, then comparisons between French and other wines are futile.

A wine that is over-dosed with sulphur dioxide can leave a metallic or burning sensation on the palate that can totally ruin a meal. Why do we, or the French for that matter, tolerate this state of affairs ?

I for one will stick to vin ordinaire until this is sorted. Then, if it does not taste right, it will go straight down the drain, and I'm not too much out of pocket if I have to open a second bottle."

Goodbye President Blair

2007-06-18T18:20:00.000+02:00

It's been a while since I last posted to the Telegraph's original blogs, now called "Staff Blogs". That's because of a huge diversion called My Telegraph from which I decided to withdraw some two weeks ago (see previous post). I've since begun to recognise myself again in the shaving mirror.

Daniel Hannan MEP, who blogs under the Telegraph's "Politics" category has always impressed me, as someone with that rare combination of an analytical mind who can also write in a light upbeat style.

His most recent blog was entitled "Labour's Constitutional Contortionists", to which I sent the following comment, which finally appeared after a 6 hour hiatus under my wife's "My Tel " log-in (don't ask, it would take too long to explain).

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/politics/danielhannan/june07/laboursconstitutioncontortionists.htm

As it happens, I read off my draft to her, before submitting, as is my wont, so when I announced that it had gone up under her name she was unfazed, saying it represented her own viewpoint entirely. Which is just as well, since the techies at the Telegraph would have got a smoking email by now if she had been asssociated with views that were not her own .....

Title: Playing with fire

Once the immediate threat of being Blair-bounced into the Mark 2 constitution, sorry, Treaty, has passed, the next item on the agenda ought to be that notorious unwritten UK Constitution.

I refer to the one that allowed the Granita deal to land us with a French style cohabitation, between right-wing President Blair, largely responsible for foreign affairs, and leftish "Premier" Brown, largely in charge of home affairs.It gave the President, aka de facto Head of State, the power to sign us up for the toppling of Saddam Hussein, with ne'er a thought to the aftermath.

It allowed the President to swan off to Singapore to sign us up for the 2012 Olympics - a menu without prices, whose current £9 billion estimated cost represents some three quarters of a million pounds for each of the 11,000 or so competing athletes.

It now allows the President to pitchfork us into a revived EU Constitution which he knows full well would be thrown out if put to a referendum in the UK, not because we are anti-Europe per se, but because we see it for what it is - yet another power grab by anti-democratic apparachniks in Brussels.

How come President Blair, with 10 years experience as de facto Head of State, cannot see that he is playing with fire?

It's not just his legacy he stands to lose in the next few days. It's the entire plot. He won't be able to show his face in the street if he tries stitching up the entire UK in his feverish eleventh-hour dealings with Merckel and Sarkozy.

Far be it from me to divine what the real UK Head of State is saying to him right now in those Wednesday meetings at the Palace. I just hope Her Majesty is not being tight-lipped.

How oddly appropriate that it takes the EU Constitution to bring home the glaring inadequacies of our own. We scrutinise, quite rightly, every word in the new draft. Yet for the last 10 years, our unwritten Constitution has been the plaything of a silver-tongued chancer, still in thrall to his own reflection.

Quick look at Aix-en-Provence

2007-06-15T18:23:00.000+02:00

Heart of old Aix (Place Hôtel de Ville)

We made a day trip last year to Avignon by train – a wedding anniversary present from the children - and had been greatly impressed by that veritable time-warp of a destination. There were just two niggles . First, they still haven’t got round to repairing that Pont d’Avignon. Surely the nation that built the Millau Bridge can cope with a footbridge over the Rhone. (Just joking, of course: the Rhone in spate would probably deal with any new bridge the same way it’s dealt with all its predecessors. )

The other complaint is its size. Avignon, or at any rate the historic heart thereof, is not that big, and the square next to the Papal Palace is a magnet for every single tourist around lunchtime.

It’s just one stop on the TGV to the neighbouring Aix-en-Provence. Not having had time to see it on the Avignon trip, I assumed it would be quite some time before we felt ready to face another lengthy day excursion. But as mentioned in the previous post, we used Marseille airport to get to Madrid, so hit on the idea of bed-and-breakfasting in Aix on the return journey.

Nothing could be simpler from a logistic standpoint. You come out of the airport terminal, and there’s a regular express bus service into Aix. First stop, in fact, is Aix’s TGV station, way out in the wilds as TGV stations tend to be, so it was handy to get a glimpse of where we would be boarding our train back to Antibes the next day.

As soon as one sees Aix’s first edge-of-town filling station, one is almost at the putting -down place for buses, and it’s then just a 10 minute walk, if that, up to the Place General de Gaulle, Aix’s busy main square, with its vast Rotunda fountain, topped by what seems like the Three Graces. Our hotel for the night, Le Christophe, which we can recommend for olde-worlde French décor and atmosphere, is right on the square.

After unpacking, we plonked down with a degree of trepidation at a nearby restaurant. It was 10pm, and there were other diners tucking into their desserts. We need not have feared; in fact folk were still arriving some 30 or 45 minutes later. Such a change from Antibes, where curiously, despite its year round flood of visitors, things tend to close up early, too early one feels.

Typical Aix thoroughfare (from Petit Train)

The next morning we made enquiries and were relieved to hear that Aix had that essential facility for the flying visitor, namely Le Petit Train.

Petit Train negotiating a tight bend

In fact, to its credit, it did not look like a train at all, as befits a mellow town that attracts couples rather than families with younger children. It took the best part of an hour to do the main sights, and Aix impressed with its sheer size and seamless authenticity: there seemed to be one busy thoroughfare, or square after another, usually boasting some noteworthy relic from the past. We were also taken out of town up a hill, near the top of which is Cezanne’s house, which is open to the public (though we didn’t stop). The guide explained that the great man had chosen that spot deliberately, being fixated by the sight of Mont St. Victoire, which appears in scores of his paintings.

The main street of Aix is the Cours Mirabeau. I've just discovered from my guide book (which I rarely look at in detail until after a visit !) that it's been dubbed "the most satisfying street in France." It's lined with lofty plane trees that, unusually for France, have seen little pollarding. It was originally created for the horse and carriage, needless to say, and still has a feel of a more gracious age.

I was greatly impressed by the two huge sculptures of the bearded gents, supporting a balcony over a doorway.

I've since learned (more retrospective reading of the guide book) it is (was?) the Hôtel Maurel de Pontevès, built in 1647. It is in an excellent state of preservation ( a tribute, one assumes to clean air, being some distance from the Marseilles refineries.

We quickly located one of the main touristy squares we had seen from the train. There was what for me an unfamiliar beer on the menu, which I ordered on spec', feeling that anything new was likely to be an improvment on standard French beer. How can one put this charitably ? Are the French brewing beer using a wine-making recipe ? How do they get it SO consistently wrong? One would have hoped that the takeover of Kronenbourg by the Newcastle Brown brewery would have injected some Anglo-Saxon know-how, but K is still the same fizzy pee it’s always been. Imagine my surprise to find that the “Dorelei” was half decent beer.

I’ve since looked up "Dorelei" on the internet: it’s brewed in Strasbourg, which is almost Germany, needless to say, and is apparently, and oddly, a conscious attempt to mimic a Belgian beer. So, its quasi Germano-Belgic, or quasi Belgo-Germanic. Either way, there’s some mellowness, flavour and subtlety, and I might try asking some local tourist bars in Antibes if they can’t get some in. I’d willingly pay 6 euros a pint than have to stick with the present mares' urine/gut-rot offerings that masquerade under the name of beer.

And finally, to round off six nights away from home, we chose a long-established restaurant on the Cours Mirabeau for our last main meal. It's called Les Deux Garçons, and apparently world-famous, established, it says in 1792. The date's on the plate as well, just in case it slips your mind- assuming that number's not the calorie count.

I ordered the salade gourmande. Although not the greatest fan of paté foie gras, that pale slice sitting on top was something else - butter-like in its creamy smoothness. Note also the cured duck.

Overall verdict: I wish that Aix was closer. We only had time to see its main streets and squares, but there's clearly a lot more to see, tucked away in side-streets. Nothing beats people-watching under the Provencal sun, in a square with tables, chairs and shaded with plane trees.

If we use Marseilles again for a flight, we may well decide to repeat the exercise, and add an extra night or two, as a way of getting to know the place better.

Negatives: too many tourists. And, as always, those French prices for wining and dining - especially noticeable after Madrid.

Visit to Madrid

2007-06-14T19:09:00.000+02:00

Retiro Park with Alfonso XII mausoleum in background

Madrid is one of those places I had always intended to visit one day, but I kept putting it off. There always seemed to be other, more enticing places that had to be seen first.

Last week we did finally get round to checking it out, taking the TGV to Marseilles, and then a Ryanair flight to the Spanish capital. Having spent 5 nights there, I would concur wholeheartedly with an article in the Sunday Telegraph travel section that appeared while we were there: Barcelona had better watch out. Madrid has quietly been getting its act together. It offers as good, if not better an intoxicating mix of things to do, places to visit as its Catalan rival. Indeed, I had a greater, more immediate sense of "being there" in Madrid than in Barcelona
which we visited some four years ago.

The first thing that hits you is the colour and variety of the architecture, and the way that modern additions blend easily with the old – enhancing rather than detracting. Then there is the sheer abundance of bars, cafes , shops and restaurants. But it's the people that create an impression too: there are fewer foreign tourists than Barcelona, most of the voices one hears are Spanish, and indeed the amount of English spoken is minimal – even in hotels and restaurants. So the overwhelming sensation is one of cultural and linguistic harmony.

There's something else about Madrid that appeals, especially after a recent visit to London. It's the near seamless spread of prosperity one sees, not just in the centre, but extending way out into the suburban residential areas. But it's not look-at-me yuppified prosperity: I think I saw just two Porsches in Madrid. In parts of London, every other car now seems to be a Porsche, Aston Martin or Ferrari, making one feel the poor relation. And Metro tickets are priced for ordinary folk, in contrast to Mayor Livingstone's cynical policy of ripping off locals and visitors alike.

Apartment-land is not something I would normally enthuse about, but that is where we found ourselves in Madrid, thanks to a misleading entry on the lastminute.com website. But at street level there was an abundance of friendly restaurants and cafés and little shops, with a great sense of community spirit. I found myself wishing I had taken a job in Madrid, and been privy to that easy-going unaffected al fresco scene.

But beware of rose-tinted holiday perspectives: the guide books warns of the Madrid climate: it is Continental, rather than Mediterranean. So expect nippy winters and a short furnace like summer. Well, that's the theory, anyway. For some reason I had imagined central Spain to have dust-laden skies, with a photochemical smog over the towns and cities. While we were there it was almost perfect weather, reminiscent of Provence, with clear blue skies, seemingly pollution free, and an amazing quality of light.

The Metro was a joy to use: modern, sparkling, clean, colourful, with frequent trains. My one complaint: illuminated displays on some lines, that helpfully tell you the number of minutes since the last train departed ! The locals presumably know the frequency of trains on that line !

I didn't take many pictures in Madrid. It's one of those places where there are few things that are hugely photogenic – at least in a small camera viewfinder – so that any attempts to photograph fail to do justice to the enveloping Surroundoscope feel of the place.

One notable exception was the Retiro park – a vast rectangle of green on the eastern side. The many-pillared monument to a past king, Alfonso XII, up there on his high horse, is striking in a purely monumental sense, if you care for that sort of thing. But again, the camera fails to do justice, given that the feature forms a backdrop to a huge boating lake. Another consideration is that the entire eye-catching ensemble can be viewed at leisure through a slight alcoholic haze, if one is so inclined, by sitting oneself down at the open-air cafeteria , with its comfortable seats, sunshades and tasty nibbles – even if the crab in the salad was fake.

We made a side trip to see the famous Palace and Monastery at San Lorenzo de Escorial, about an hour by road to the north west of Madrid. To be honest, I was more interested in the scenery en route , with curious outcrops of rounded boulders in the orchards and pastures. The countryside was a lot more verdant than I had imagined for central Spain. But there's the expected sense of vast emptiness, starting just a few miles from the city centre. The impression of an underpopulated country is reinforced on the flight back, it being more than 300 miles of rolling plain from Madrid to Barcelona, punctuated by some curious eroded rock formations and the occasional meandering river with O-level geography textbook oxbow lakes.

We had planned a trip to Toledo, but there were multiple long queues at the windows, in the ticket office with little or no air-conditioning, and Toledo trains were shown on the boards as "completo". A momentary whiff of the Third World, I thought, one of the few blemishes on an otherwise modern, well-ordered capital.

Biggest disappointment ? Picasso's "Guernica" (Centro de Arte Reina Sofia). It is shown in our Lonely Planet guide book as multicoloured, a blend of golds, ochres, chestnut. In fact it's almost monochrome. Great imagery and draughtsmanship certainly, but I don't think I would have described it as the 20th century's greatest painting if I had chanced upon it without fanfare.

We called in at Aix-en-Provence on the way back - a most impressive if overcrowded historical centre. Fortunately there was a "petit train" that allowed us to take in the main sights quickly. I'll look through the pix and decide if there's enough for a second blog post.

Ryanair may get a mention too. Great prices, but why do they treat their passengers like cattle ?

Ornamental gardens in Retiro Park, looking west

See you soon

2007-06-07T10:04:00.000+02:00

Just a quick update, since there's packing to do. We're off to Madrid for a few days. It's somewhere I've always wanted to visit.

I decided yesterday to retire from My Tel. It's a bit of a vortex, sucking you in, taking over your life. Some of the threads get tedious and fractious, and it's especially galling to make what one thinks is a telling point and have the agenda-pushers carry on regardless. Oh yes, agenda pushers - they could be the subject of several posts in the way they operate, arriving on the scene like gentle little mice which then mutate into bug-eyed monsters.

Sorry if I'm getting carried away. My Tel is brilliant in principle, but deeply flawed and dysfunctional in the way it operates. There are threads at the moment with some navel-gazing on the subject, and one or two good ideas, but all it takes is for someone to cry "no censorship here" and everyone scurries for cover.

When I get back from Madrid, I'll give a brief report on main impressions, and then unveil a mischievous take on a certain type of individual one encounters a lot on holidays, but who lurks in workplaces and blogs as well. It's one I provisionally call "Caravan Man" (or Caravan Woman). They don't have a caravan, but seem to tow a lot of their parochial mindset with them wherever they ago. But the main problem is the way they appropriate and defend territory, indifferent to others with an equal claim. More about that later.

God, is that what a month of My Tel has done to me ?

Did you think I'd got lost ?

2007-05-28T23:32:00.000+02:00

Apologies for having absented myself for so long on this site, without explaining why. I shan't bore you with all the reasons, but the following, cut-and-pasted from today's My Telegraph, tells at least part of the story.

Could we have our lives back please, MyTel ?

You know how it is: you put up a post, and you wait for comments.

If you're lucky, comments trickle in. Then what do you do ? You reply, goes without saying. Well, it would be rude not to do so.

But you know what happens. Replying tends to generate more comments, which means more replies. You should by now be getting my drift .....

Then there are all those other posts that people put up - provocative, irritating, hilariously funny, incendiary, deeply thought-provoking, scathing, mickey-taking ....

OK, I'll just post a short comment, one here, and another there, just to show that I don't regard blogging on My Tel as a one-way street.

Hey, but hold on - someone's addressed me by name in the title of their comment. "Not so, Colin B," it trumpets . Well, one can hardly ignore that, can one - or they will think one rude, or that one runs a mile at the slightest hint of criticism ?

Is it any wonder that I've had no proper exercise for days, that my eyes are beginning to smart, that I'm repeatedly hitting the Refresh key, and wishing I personally had a Refresh Key as well ?

What's the solution ?

To blog between fixed hours each day, and tell folk what they are, so as not to risk giving offence?

To blog on certain days of the week only ?

Or to go for the nuclear option: to get Blog Central to shut down its servers from time to time, giving us all a break, a chance to reconnect with the real world ?

Or is this the Real World ? Had we all been leading furtive, hermit-like lives until this thing called My Tel invaded our lives.

Comments by 9pm British time please. That's to give me time to read yesterday's Sunday paper that I've barely had time to glance at so far......."

Posted by ColinB at 17:11 on 28 May 2007

If there are folk reading this who have not yet visited My Telegraph yet, then I strongly urge you to do so. It is an amazing addition to the blogosphere.

I'll post this straightaway, but return from time to time, adding some links that take you to the different features of My Telegraph . That said, the site is admirably intuitive, meaning that it's easy for pretty well anyone, including complete novices, to understand and use the different features).

"My Telegraph" poser

2007-05-16T11:18:00.000+02:00

Well now, there's an interesting situation developing on My Telegraph in which I have decided that discretion will be the better part of valour.

It's like this: there's a highly articulate "new face" by the name of Simone_w who speaks a great deal of common sense, but once in a while - and this is a personal view obviously - a hint of youthful callowness intrudes.

Yesterday I posted the following to Simone's post on the subject of street beggars, in which she expresses amazement that we do not all drop coins in the tin, on the grounds that it would be judgmental not to do so. She makes it abundantly clear that she is following the examples given to us (allegedly) by the founder of Christianity.

I keep my money, nett of income tax and NI, in my pocket

ColinB 15 May 2007 20:40

You refuse to judge a beggar, Simone, which is fine. I have no problem with that. But is there not a sense in which you are implicitly sitting in judgement in those of us who choose not to underwrite the lifestyle of these individuals - which is, after all, a matter of deliberate choice on their part ? Nobody is forced to beg. There are jobs for the unskilled which pay the national minimum wage. For those who are not medically fit, or have mental disorder, there is the safety net of the social services - both State and charity-funded.Homelessness I grant you is another aspect, which is a complex one in how it develops, and how to deal with on the ground. But dropping coins in a tin simply perpetuates and, in a sense rubber stamps, the status quo, and as each day goes by, the chances of escaping from that ever downward spiral decrease.

Later, I posted a comment on Malbonster's blog, in which he cheekily invited us to volunteer our ages (about which more later).

In scanning the other comments one sees Simone declaring herself to be just 13. It was simply that, a pure numerical reply, with nothing else to indicate whether this was irony on her part, which I doubt, or should be taken at face value.

Let me say straightaway that I have nothing whatsoever against youngsters posting to My Telegraph, provided their parents have been consulted. But I for my part am relieved that I have learned sooner rather than about her (supposed) age.

I will frame any future replies accordingly.

But what about others who are three, four times her age, still commenting away merrily on her posts, apparently unaware that they are engaging with a lass who is barely into her teens.

Someone I feel ought to tip them a wink, as I very nearly did that this morning: but how does one phrase it, so as not to appear dismissive of someone who is clearly a bright young lass, one whom her parents can justly be proud of ?

Any ideas anyone ?

Incidentally, I posted a second comment to another of Simone's threads yesterday (proving again she has maturity beyond her years in teasing out our responses).

It will explain (in passing) why there will be a short hiatus in my blogging activity for the next few days.

My Tel a counter against social atomisation ?

ColinB 16 May 2007 07:54

I'm 62, but trapped inside an Adonis-like body (although not everyone "sees" it first time - you have to kind of look straight through, like you did with those Magic Eye books).

I shall be in London for the next few days, re-engaging with that youth culture to which Malbonster refers. My daughter, the youngest (27) of our 3 is collecting her MRCP, so she and her 2 older brothers will no doubt ensure we experience the buzz and vibrancy of our capital city again (we now ive in France).

One of the greatest changes in UK society is the so-called atomisation, due to family members living further and further apart, working mothers, less mixing between neighbours, less involvement in clubs and societies etc etc.

It will be interesting to see whether My Telegraph and similar social sites can assist in reversing the trend. Older folk may well have the confidence (or foolhardiness?) to allow a gradual blurring between the real and virtual worlds. Already on this site we see examples of folk agreeing to meet up, as Phil Slocombe will attest (if he's reading this!).

I'm trying to decide if the "social atomisation" angle is worth developing in a full post to My Telegraph, ot whether it's too self-evident to bother with further. Again, ideas are invited.

Should we allow Tony to modernise Hell ?

2007-05-15T14:42:00.000+02:00

This is my writing project for the day, and has just been posted to My Telegraph. That would be the place to post any comments (not wishing to fall foul of copyright or other legal considerations).

Do you support Tony Blair's proposed new Act of Parliament ? It's the one which just a week ago was a scribble on the back of an envelope, but which is now being forced through the Lower and Upper Houses at breakneck speed.
Just to remind you of its main points:

1. Hell is an outdated concept, at least in its present form. It needs to be replaced by something more in keeping with the 21st century.

2.Hell should become seen as a cooler place, making more efficient use of fossil fuels, eg for background heating purposes only, just sufficient to maintain a comfortable environment in remedial behaviour classes.

3. Too many folk are being consigned to Hell in secret hearings, on the basis of hearsay evidence, and without proper legal representation. Hearings should be be brought forward into one's pre mortem existence, allowing character witnesses (Peter, Alistair etc) to speak on one's behalf.

4.There needs to be a new body of human rights legislation to oversee the whole question of who is committed to Hell, and on what criteria. This could be done on an EU basis, delegated to Peter in Brussels.

5. Eternal damnation serves no useful purpose, giving the offender no opportunity or incentive to mend their ways.

6. Consignment to Hell should in many cases be replaced by a period of community service on Earth. A spell of quiet contemplation, eg pruning vines at a friend's villa in Tuscany, could substitute in certain instances.

7. Consideration should be given to a wider range of mitigating factors, like having grumpy next door neighbours, incompetent deputies , making bad decisions when jet lagged, and having one's arm twisted by men wearing check shirts and cowboy hats.

Sunday Telegraph 13th May 2007

2007-05-14T22:17:00.000+02:00

Here's a snapshot of Yesterday's Sunday Telegraph; page 2 of the main section.
It should enlarge on clicking, but here's a transcript anyway of the item top left headed:
TELEGRAPH.CO.UK/
MYTELEGRAPH

My Telegraph, our personalised website for readers which launched last week, has already been a huge success. More than a thousand readers have signed up for a webpage on the site and around 500 have begun writing their own blogs.
Joining couldn't be simpler. It takes just a couple of minutes to create a profile and then you will be able to create your own blog, comment on blogs by other readers, save articles to read later and form your own network of bloggers.
Writing your own blog on the site requires no technical expertise - it's as easy as writing an email and the perfect way to keep in touch with family and friends.
There are more features to come over the next few weeks but if you missed out introduction to the site in yesterday's newspaper, there is a beginner's guide at my.telegraph.co.uk/about/.

"There have been four quantum leaps in my lifetime where keeping up with news and opinion is concerned. The first was TV obviously (as a child), then Teletext (learning the latest on the Falklands War), then the Internet (about 1997). You can probably guess what the 4th is. Yes, it's My Telegraph, where I can be as passive or as active as I wish, responding to other blogs, or creating my own. It can be a heady, effervescent thing, My Telegraph, with its instant feedback. A word of warning though: it's not for the faint-hearted."

Colin Berry, Antibes, France

"What I have enjoyed most about blogging at My Telegraph is the chance to air my views on some of my views on topical issues, and to engage in debate with interesting, intelligent people around the world."

Mark Boardman

An unusual challenge

2007-05-12T23:42:00.000+02:00

I assume that folk who visit this site are in search of things that are a little off the beaten track. So having got here, please cast your eye down my little "slice of life" short story, because there's something unusual about the circumstances in which it was written.

The title is "Walk in a herb garden ", and it runs to slightly over 1500 words.

**************************

It was the best holiday they had ever had.

Derek and Fiona Cooper had to begin with preferred organized package holidays. Gradually they ticked off all the places they wanted to see, plus a few more which Holiday programme had said they must see. Having seen them, they couldn’t really see why.

Friends, more accurately erstwhile friends, had recommended other destinations. Derek and Fiona prefer not to talk about those, thank you very much.

It was Derek’s idea – the cheap flight to Toulon, picking up a hire car, and going into Marcel Pagnol country. He’d liked the film you see. What was it called now, La Gloire de Mon Au Pair or something ?

Actually, it was the French film star who played Marcel’s mother that made the greatest impression on Derek. He thought she was really dishy, and the music was quite good too.
Fiona on the other hand was entranced at the idea of those sun-parched limestone hillsides, and that abundance of herbs, just there for the picking.

Every night at the motel or nearby resto she chose anything on the menu that looked as if it might have herbs in it, on the assumption that if it had au or à la in its name, it was a fair bet it had herbs.

Derek’s aperitif was unchanging – a small lager first as a concession to French refinement, followed 5 minutes late by a proper half-litre. With the stomach suitably lined he was ready for anything that France or Fiona would throw at him.

When a week later they handed back the car at Toulon, Derek assumed that her herbal pilgrimage was now over, and he could return to “proper food”. How wrong he was. In the previous 7 days Fiona’s flirtation had developed into an all-consuming passion. Her every waking hour centred on those clumps and cushions of aromatic foliage that defied the oven-like condition on those hillsides in and around Aubagne and Garlaban.

Within minutes of parking the car on the hard-standing at the front of the house, Fiona was sizing up the frontage carefully, viewing it from different angles, and peering under the car.

It took Derek, busy with unloading suitcases, just a short while to twig to what was going through his spouse's mind, but when he did, his comment was short and sharp. “No”, he said, “ don’t even think about it , dear. Non, a thousand times non, comprenez ! "

“It’s comprends, my dear" she replied ”assuming we‘ve managed to break the ice after spending a dirty week together in France”. During the following week, the neighbours assumed it was another of those bad Cooper household holidays.

They heard the raised voices, the slamming of doors. Gradually word got around. Fiona was determined to have her herb garden, and since they had no back garden to speak of – barely room for the dustbin, rotary drier and rusting barbecue, it would have to be at the front. But where was Derek going to park the Toyota ?

The following Saturday, the peace of Peston Street was disturbed by the sound of a pneumatic drill, as Derek broke up the slab of concrete inside the carefully drawn rectangle that he had marked out. Its dimensions were carefully chosen such that with care he could still park his car above the excavated section.

A day later he backfilled the plot with Fiona’s planting mixture of chalk, sharp sand, broken pottery, and a few unmentionables, which she deemed would simulate her Provencal hillside. It was the planting out that bothering her now.

Could she trust the maximum height figures she had gleaned from library books and off the internet for all those new and exciting herbs ? She decided to take a chance, and soon the mail order packets arrived with the daunting Latin names.

Thereafter, the car was never on the hardstanding during the day. If Derek had a day off work, the car had to be parked on the street until one hour after sunset. Fiona was quite insistent about that. She also got Derek, reluctantly, and with much muttering under the breath, to mount vertical panels of aluminium sheets on the fencing surrounding the plot. Fiona said they would capture the maximum amount of sunshine.

During heavy rain she would rush out with sheets of polythene. Gradually, the herbs established, the bare earth gradually was colonised, and Fiona became a changed person, radiating spiritual contentment, Derek returned to his holiday aperitif habits as herbs gradually intruded on every meal that Fiona placed in front of him.

In time her repertoire of recipes increase, and her confidence grew. Inevitably, the problem with that car parked off-street became a source of marital friction. When Derek drove off each morning, Fiona was straight out, mourning the loss of each lopped stalks, or the foliage that had been roasted against the exhaust manifold. Derek dreaded the first 10 minutes of arriving home each night, as Fiona reeled off the list of damage, and insisted that something just had to be done.

At the weekend, a sullen Derek was to be seen stomping the lines of vehicles at the second hand car dealer. The salesman watched as he knelt under various vehicles, measuring up their clearance.

A few days later, the Toyota was gone, traded in for a pittance, and in its place was a Korean all-terrain vehicle with balding tyres, a remarkably low mileage for a five year old vehicle, and what the salesman described as a once in a lifetime finance deal ( one-third deposit , 14.5 % over 3 years plus 150 administration fee ).

For the next few weeks, Fiona was in renewed ecstasy, planting out ever taller herbs .
Let’s invite the Jones’s in for a meal” she suggested . “I’ll do them that recipe you so like she said. Let’s not dwell, dear reader, on the details of that flawed decision, or the strain it put on relations, between man and wife, between two sets of friends.
Suffice it to say that after a few mouthfuls of Fiona’s recipe, it became clear that the aromatic flavour they were tasting had less to to with Provencal hillsides, and more to do with the leaking oil sump on that 4X4 with the dodgy paperwork.

It was Fiona who discovered the trail of drips leading from the underside of vehicle across her precious herbs, adding a certain je ne sais quoi. Castrol lab technicians would have known exactly what, identifying partially degraded viscostatic GTX generously endowed with particles of soot and iron filings. The marriage survived, yet again, but now the vehicle was banished to the street, prey to every passing dog, vandal, and wingmirror.

Derek was back again with that hired pneumatic drill. Having decided that la coexistence between herb and car on the same plot was no longer possible, he had been persuaded (read nagged) by Fiona into breaking up the entire slab of concrete, thus quadrupling the area under herb. But Fiona suddenly realized she now had a problem with this larger plot. How was she going to harvest herbs at the centre, without trampling others to reach them ? Derek tried various solutions, like placing ladders and even hired Kwik towers over the bed to reach the middle, but then went and injured his back. His insurance company rejected his claim on the grounds that he had infringed paragrpah 93 subsection H. of the policy schedule.

He mentioned the problem to Fred at the Rotary, who in turn mentioned it to Bill down at the allotment, who brought in Alistair at the horticultural society. Within weeks there was much swapping of back-of-envelope drawings on possible solutions.

There was one thing on which everyone was agreed. There would have to be access pathways to the centre. But each square foot of path was one less for herb. What was the optimum pattern that provided best access with least sacrifice of planting area ? In time, word of the Derek’s conundrum spread, and began to engage and then ensnare a progressively greater range of experts.

Food began to go cold on plates in the Senior Common Room of the local university, as mathematicans attempted to struggle with the novel problems thrown up. Eyes began to gleam as the prospect of Nobel Prizes looming for cracking open entirely new area of mathematics.

You see, the problem defied all the usual methods of calculus - differential, integral and infernal, that CERN and NASA routinely use to deliver optimum solutions. They simply could not cope with the multivariate, polynomial equations that had to be solved.

Professors began to neglect their research and students as they applied themselves to numeric analysis. Even so, they found that their computers slowed as they tried to seek that perfect solution, in some cases grinding to a halt as processors began to overheat and melt, and printed circuits began to buckle under the load.

It’s not known exactly how long the Cray supercomputer at a certain elite institute was diverted surreptitiously onto the task of solving Derek’s problem. All we know is that key multimillion pounds programs booked on it months, sometimes years in advance, in areas as diverse as genetic sequencing, criminal profiling, modelling the Big Bang etc gradually slipped from their deadlines, leaving scores of frustrated angry researchers.

But the problem WAS finally cracked, and Derek put it immediately into effect, overcoming a lifetime of republican sympathies. Shortly after remodelling that herb garden, he began to get UKIP and BNP literature through the door, and passing cars with tatooed, skin-pierced men would sound their horns as they passed.

Why you may ask ? Because they had seen Fiona and Derek, out for a walk in their optimised herb garden, she pruning, thinning and harvesting, and he collecting up the cigarette ends tossed there by passing pedestrians. You see, the 4 criss-crossing paths, two at right angles, with two diagonals, created a patriotic Union Flag !

END
****************************************

Well, what do you think ? Any literary merit there ? Even if there were just a smidgeon, I'd be tickled pink. Why ?

Well, it's like this. Iwoke this morning to find that Jamie McNab on My Telegraph had posted an appreciative comment re my "Nightmare" (see previous post), referring to my "enchanted keyboard". That gave me an idea. Why not make "My Telegraph" serve a useful niche role for whatever interests one has, ignoring that Amazon flow of constant new comment that sweeps everything away within tens of minutes. So I asked Jamie to provide three titles that were capable of humorous or satirical treatment.

What you read above was composed in just over 3 hours (including proofreading). after receiving his title. I've been given two others: "Encounter with a panda" and "Changing an electric lightbulb". They are taller orders, but I'll give them my best shot tomorrow and on Monday if possible (fitted around meeting visitors).

Speedwriting is fun, and forces one to concentrate primarily on plot and pace.

Looking back, I think my beginning was rocky - it risked losing readers at the outset. Candid comments are invited ! I mean that. Without feedback, there can be no learning curve.

Nightmare (posted to My Telegraph)

2007-05-12T03:22:00.000+02:00

Preamble: the following was conceived on the spur of the moment yesterday evening, written at high speed - approx 45 mins- and posted to My Telegraph under my single username, ColinB.

http://my.telegraph.co.uk/colinb/may_2007/nightmare.htm

It was visible on the Home page for less than an hour, NTS, before being flushed away by the deluge of new submissions. During that brief spell of maximum exposure it managed to attract just one comment (thanks Mark), who awarded it a mark of ? out 10. I deign to mention here the score he gave it.

A hour later I made a few alterations and additions, using MyTel's Edit facility, which may or may not have improved it. What are the ethics of that, I now ask myself ? Would Mark have given the revised version the same score ? Hmmmm. Food for thought. Maybe MyTel needs a facility for editing one's comment (or adding a rider). He could maybe add a second comment, I guess. Comments welcome.

Here, then, is the edited version, entitled NIGHTMARE.

I was walking along Buckingham Palace Rd. for the first time in many years. There had been lots of changes. I passed a handsome arched entrance, behind which, offset asymetrically to the right, was a gleaming modern building. I took a small video clip on my digital camera.

Lots of staff were going in and out through those arches, checking their watches, speaking into their mobiles, then making that sharp right turn into the new wing .

Yes, you guessed it. You're looking at the Daily Telegraph's new HQ . The paper spent years languishing in the Docklands while scouring Central London for a suitable building whose architecture would deny its staff any left-wing views.

As I walked on, I suddenly began to lose my bearings. First, the street name changed abruptly to Richmond Avenue. My confusion and disorientation became complete when further along it became Higgis's Way.

I was then amazed to find myself looking at a perfect replica of Buckingham Palace, but over the huge ornamental gate was a wrought iron sign reading "Blog Central". I heard someone say it had previously been known as Buck House.

Here's my second video clip, in which I'm heard to say "now there's a splendid residence". That was before I knew it had changed hands.

I then entered an avenue lined with dead trees and quickly overtook a party of Chinese tourists, doing the Serpentine tour. Something had been lost in translation, methinks, judging by their determined snake-like progress up the street, weaving around lamposts and other street furniture, with self-conscious grins on their faces, and passers by all shaking their heads in wonder. I heard one of them mutter "I can see now why it was called the Long March."

The group was being escorted by a silver-haired gent, staring in disbelief at the antics going on behind him. He had a Telegraph name badge, and was sporting an RAF tie. "The dead trees were intentional," I heard him say, "being symbolic of a previous era. Now PLEASE I ask you again, walk in a STRAIGHT line. STRAIGHT ".

I then heard him ask if anyone had with them an English-Mandarin phrase book. Everyone shook their heads, bar one who said in halting English "No Mr. Slogum, but I have other little red book here in Mandarin. That help you yes ?"

Finally I came to a vast green area. Above the entrance, manned by security guards, was a sign reading "My Soapbox Inc". As I was being checked in, a cheerful bespectacled lady stepped forward. "Would l care for a chocolate ?" she asked. I and some others were then led off in the direction of Old Speakers' Corner. The nice lady led the way, with her Scotty dog on a lead.

It was a long walk, during which we passed ( I kid thee not) thousands upon thousands of soapboxes, all neatly set out. Around each was a cluster of people, all in earnest debate. Some were applauding the speaker, while others, sad to say, were getting a bit hot under the collar, wagging and pointing their fingers, with a few hurling abuse and insults.

An attractive young blonde with a Welsh accent was rushing around, telling certain people to turn down the volume of their megaphones.

We finally arrived somewhat footsore and deafened, at Old Speakers Corner , where we were shown a few chained-off soapboxes - the originals we were told- with Tussauds waxworks of the great names of a bygone age.

There was also an artistic tableau of Richard Coeur d'Orléans at fisticuffs with an irate John Bull, whose bowler hat had been knocked askew. I was pleased to see that the pigeons preferred to perch on Richard.

Suddenly there was the sound of an emergency vehicle, with an old fashioned bell. How could that be, I wondered ? Bells were replaced with sirens a long, long time ago.

The sound of the bell got louder, and louder, and louder. Suddenly a voice broke in.
"Do stop snoring dear, and switch off that damned alarm clock ! ".

New look for Dreams and Daemons

2007-05-10T22:09:00.000+02:00

Yes, Dreams and Daemons has acquired a new look. Why the change ? Well, it's certainly not change for change's sake, that's for sure, since I'm somewhat conservative in these matters.

The problem with the old template was that it made inefficient use of the width of the screen - especially as so many folk, sensibly in my view, opt these days for widescreen laptops.

Look at the facsimile below of the old format. It shows what happened when it was stretched horizontally to use the full screen width.

The actual working space stayed the same - only the green borders increased - about as much use, one is inclined to think, as that famous chocolate teapot.

The present format, which I hope my present 40 or so daily visitors will like, gives a less cramped feel, and a greater flexibilty in positioning text relative to graphics.

Needless to say, you, the reader of this blog, can also stretch this page to make best use of your screen. When I do that long slim paragraphs become short fat ones. In other words, the line breaks are flexible. I'm not sure I knew that till a few minutes ago!

The hippo logo, a Mark 1 feature, has also been consigned to the dustbin of history, and replaced by a different beast, one who's less inclined to show off his dentition.

The present spell of navel gazing will continue briefly with my next blog post, on the matter of this blog's name, and how it seems to have gained a certain currency in the wider world.

When I pulled it from the air, back in October last year, I could find only one Google entry for "dreams and daemons", a reference to an obscure paper in the 1935 Journal of Philosophy. More about that later. I'm also thinking of ways of giving this blog more focus, by restricting posts to a narrower range of topics.

A lucky find in a haunted spot

2007-05-07T17:25:00.000+02:00

It's about 50 miles from Antibes, as the seagull flies, or a bit longer for crows, assuming they prefer to stay over terra firma . We had read about in the guide books - a small compact medieval town on a stretch of Riviera noted for its flowers, although greenhouses might be a more accurate description. It's also a stretch of coast that motorists see from on high - the elevated motorway is visible in the background above, but that stretch of highway, perched on its concrete supports, sadly does the strip of coastal scenery no favours.

All one's misgivings about the hinterland evaporate when one arrives at the foot of the town, where the ancient bridge, with its curious dog-leg bend, straddles the river that brings silt and pebbles down from the hills.

Inside the village is the customary labyrinth of narrow passages, steep flights of steps, ancient doorways with intricately carved or moulded porticos. This kind of timewarp is virtually unknown in Britain, notwithstanding York, Ludlow, Lavenham etc which, although redolent of past centuries, seem somehow too manicured, too made-over with modern products off the shelves of Wickes and B&Q. Not so in this place: most of the stucco began peeling, bubbling and lifting in the 17th century, with little more than accumulations of algae, lichens and cobwebs to keep the remaining flakes in place, if not already bare.

The guide book said a visit to the monastery was a must ( confusingly, one of the books describes it as a convent). Sadly we never got to learn the gender of its inmates, since it was closed to visitors on the day we were there. That was a bitter blow, given that its founders - a Dominican order- had interests that extended beyond the spiritual world to the artistic - acting as patrons to numerous accomplished artists of their day whose work adorns the inner recesses.

But there is one lasting memento of our day trip, tinged as it was with disappointment, which sits on the coffee table in front of me as I write.

As we trudged our way around the monastery walls, something unusual caught my eye in the compacted aggregate that served as a path . There was just a red-brown rounded end visible, poking up just proud of the surface, which I wasted no time in prising out.

Before and after polishing ****************************

It was a knife handle, a little short of 10cm in length, but a knife handle with a difference. This one was heavy for its size - too heavy to be steel. And that red-brown coating was not flaky rust, but very adherent, more by way of a heavy tarnish. The picture on the left shows its original appearance. The one on the right is the other side after polishing, with a bright silvery lustre.

This is not electroplated silver, nor is it electroplate (steel dipped in molten silver). Given the density it has to be solid silver, through and through.

One day we will make a return visit to this time-warp of medieval prosperity, and the knife handle will be in my pocket. Maybe we'll seek out one of the successors of the diligent aesthetes who established their order in this Riviera town, a mile or so inland from a seaside resort of the same name - with added appendage; Jane with her linguistic skills can explain to him (or her) how we came by our find, and give first refusal on this artefact from an age when money was no object.

What would be nice would be for the monk, or nun, to say "Oh, we have five others just like it, but there's a gap in the display box", in which case we would be happy to see it reunited with its rightful owners.

Age of the handle ? No idea, but I suspect it is at least 100 years old, possibly a lot more.

PS Yes, this has been written as a bit of a tease, in the style of the Sunday Times's "Where was I ?"

And yes, you may also have spotted suggestions of writing on the knife in bas relief. Indeed there is, but I can't reveal what it says - that would give away too much, narrowing the search down to a few places within a 10 mile radius.

So where was I ? Answers on an electronic postcard, please to sciencebod01@aol.com. The prize ? Certainly not the knife handle, which is part of someone's national heritage. Hopefully you would settle for seeing your name emblazoned here in a large Technicolor font !

Afterthought: it is probably wrong of me to assume it's a knife handle. That's one small knife. On second thoughts, it may have been a small fork - one of those two, or three pronged ones that might be used for side courses, delicacies, shellfish etc. as distinct from the heavy-duty sort.

What happens when King Tony the First finally abdicates?

2007-05-06T11:45:00.001+02:00

Apologies first of all. I said in my last post that there would be a second progress report on MyTelegraph. That has been delayed for another day or two while I sought an OK from the Telegraph, and gave extra time for thoughts to crystallize.

Here's what I posted to MyTelegraph this morning, prompted by the headline in this morning's Telegraph "Brown to inherit Blair's surrender to Brussels"

(In case you were wondering, it's not the only paper we read. Sunday is the day that one or other of us trudges out to buy the "dead tree" version of the Sunday Times. Old habits die hard.)

Our Constitutional Mockery
Posted by ColinB at 07:56 on 06 May 2007

We are now just weeks away from Gordon Brown's "coronation".

Those of us who consider it absurd have been told to shut up. It's the British way of doing things: we just vote for candidates at General Elections with certain party political labels.

Parliament and political parties do the rest, like decide who is to occupy No.10, and be on our TV screens every night, acting for all the world like a (directly elected) US President.

Even mad George III would have been jealous of the power wielded by a modern British PM, accountable to virtually no-one except his own lackeys, such being his powers of patronage.

To rub salt in the wound, we read today that His Toniness is determined to leave us with a permanent legacy of his 10 year reign at No.10.

In his twilight weeks in office, he is to surrender more powers to Brussels, and do so in a way that makes it impossible for Brown to undo those 11th hour changes.

I will spare you the details - they are the subject of this morning's headline article in the Sunday Telegraph. Here are few key words. Revived European consitution, EU law, EU President. I leave you to join up the dots.

How democratic is that ? How democratic is our entire system that allows Parliament to foist on us leaders about whom we, the public , initially know next to nothing ? We then learn the hard way what these people really stand for, which, as often as not, is self-advancement, pure and simple.

Where are the powers that prevent these same individuals turning into virtually omnipotent rulers, who lead us into wars we don't want, who sign away our rights to outside powers, and who, to "secure their legacy", attempt to tie the hands of their successors.

Our British so-called democracy is nothing of the sort. It's basically dual monarchy: a figurehead sovereign who opens Parliament, who recites the speech of the real Monarch in waiting.

Keep reading your Samuel Pepys's diary if you really want to understand how Britain works. Constitutional monarchy ? Constitutional mockery more like it!

Updated Sunday pm:

Added this to the Comments section, in response to a question about how Brown is designated as Blair's successor:

Effectively disenfranchised

ColinB06 May 2007 10:16

"Brown succeeds Blair because of that infamous arrangement made over the crème brûlée in Granita shortly after John Smith died.

It's a case of Buggins' turn. I would question whether "Blair was voted as Prime Minister".

In my own Bucks constituency the choice was between voting for the Conservative candidate, who could be a labrador, and would still get elected, and a motley collection of other candidates, none of whom had a hope of winning.

It follows that millions of voters up and down the country have had no way of registering their opinion on Tony Blair 's 10 years reign - except by abstaining or making a protest vote.

If we accept that Britain's PM should be the focus of a personality cult, then surely he or she should be elected directly, comparable to a US President.

Personally, I'd prefer that our PMs were more in the mould of Clement Atlee or Harold MacMillan - guiding discussion within Cabinet, delegating as much as possible to Ministers chosen for more than arse-licking propensities.

In other words the PM should see his/her role as just that : prime amongst ministers, and to foster a collegiate atmosphere at No.10 rather than this present narcissistic Louise XIV gilded sofa-style of government."

Comments welcome by email to: sciencebod01@aol.com

Create your own Costa (Lotza)

2007-05-04T11:41:00.000+02:00

This post is one I sent to the pilot MyTelegraph this morning, which is now bedding down nicely.

I will provide a second brief progress report tomorow. It'll probably be the last, since it's reckoned a few more days of testing are all that's needed to expose the remaining bugs.

So, what's this I hear about you folks in Blighty having had the warmest April since records began, way back in 16 something or other?

Who can seriously doubt that global warming is a reality, whatever its causes ?

They now say you can look forward to a long hot summer. Time maybe to start planning that Mediterranean garden ? How about an olive tree as a centre piece ?

Better start saving now. The picture above is from a brochure that came through our door in January. It's from the local garden centre. We live in Antibes, roughly half way between Nice and Cannes.

The distinguishing feature of the Mediterranean climate is not so much its summer heat, as its winter mildness and WETNESS.

Compare that with the Alpine or Continental climates that begin a mere 20 or so miles inland(less in some places), where hard winter frosts will scythe down anything tender in the garden.

But we have had what might be called a winter drought, which had the local gardeners in despair - until, that is, about 48 hours ago.

It has rained solidly most of the night, and continues to do so as I write. We have discovered the downside of having a Velux (hinged skylight) installed in the roof.

It's great for light and ventilation, but acts like a drumskin during a storm, making sleep well-nigh impossible. Oh well, you win some, you lose some......

Notes from a small-minded island

2007-05-02T08:35:00.000+02:00

Bill Bryson confirmed my long-held suspicions today. Beneath that bluff, avuncular exterior is a grumpy, nay angry middle-aged man. That much was clear in the typical chapter of his travel books, when he would detail with loving care all the quirks of the folk he encountered - Americans, Australians, and especially us Brits, who he has taken to his heart.

But you knew what was coming as you neared the end of each chapter.

He'd relate some encounter, say, with a rude or pig-headed checkout assistant, and you knew that an expletive was forming. Bill Bryson in other words, is NOT someone who is "too good to be true". He does NOT have the patience of a saint, and the situations he meets can put him on a short fuse.

So it comes as no surprise to read in this morning's Telly that he's giving up writing to become a kind of Litter Czar. Yes, he loves Britain dearly - its countryside, pubs etc - but is in despair at our growing indifference to litter and fly-tipping. We are fouling up his paradise as well as our own.

Spiritually, I am with him every step of the way. But a word of warning, Bill, if I may be so familiar. Brits can be very severe on anyone who gets too passionate on the subject of litter.

I once knew someone who moved to a new town and was appalled at what he saw in the high street - not just fresh litter, but litter that had lain there for months, got turned into papier maché through several storms, and then congealed around every bit of street furniture. So when the local heritage society asked for volunteers to turn up in the main carpark one Saturday, bringing with them a broom and spade, he willingly volunteered.

Only half a dozen or so turned up, if that, but within an hour the town began to look transformed. It acquired a grace, a dignity, a sparkle, instead of advertising unkemptness and self-neglect.

But then the insults began. "Hello baby face. Why are you doing that then ? Why are you doing the work of a roadsweeper ?", and later " You are SO naive. Can't you see that you are being used to make a political point ? "

Later, one of his work colleagues, no less said, only half in jest, " You know, I'm beginning to have second thoughts about the wisdom of moving to that town of yours. I mean, volunteering to sweep a high street. How naff can you get ?"

You can probably guess who the volunteer was !

Anyway, more power to your elbow, Bill Bryson. You have entertained for years with your books, and charmed us with your quaint anglophilia. But you must know too about our unacceptable face: feting newcomers, turning them into celebrities, filling up column inches, all so we can gleefully knock them down again.

There will be those who will now portray Bill Bryson as someone in the throes of a midlife crisis (indeed, he may be) , who is now revealing himself as a closet Victor Meldrew. There's only one way to counter that: keep your sense of humour, because, believe me, you are going to need it.

Postscript: A short while ago I said on a Telly blog it was high time Bill Bryson was knighted. Back came an email, reminding me of my own description of him as the Thunderbolt Kid from Des Moines. Hadn't I forgotten something, the emailer said, like where Des Moines is ? The implication was clear: I was triply ignorant, in not knowing where Des Moines was, that Bill Bryson was still a US citizen, and that the Queen does not knight non-UK citizens.

And there I was, thinking that Des Moines was London suburb, that Bill Bryson was Yorkshire born and bred, and that it was unthinkable for a non-Brit to be knighted. Bob Geldof (Sir) - an Irishman. Or the philanthropist, now deceased, John Paul Getty Jr.(Sir) who took British citizenship late in life.

You know, there are times when I despair at the tendency of folk to speak first, think later. It tends to bring out my Bill Bryson end-of-chapter mode. Best then to stop at this juncture, me thinks ....

emails still welcome (in spite of everything): sciencebod01@aol.com

Buried under a mountain of junk

2007-05-01T13:05:00.000+02:00

My house is filling up with knackered junk, and I'm getting angry and frustrated. Why ? Because most of it is just of out of guarantee, yet fit only for the bin.

There's that fibre mat from India you see in the picture above. It has faded to antique beige, but is still pristine blue on the underside. It wasn't cheap - 44 euros from a national chain. Then there's the reading lamp with halogen bulb for which we had to place an order, hand over 75 euros, and wait 2 weeks for delivery.

It began flickering the other day. When I opened it up I discovered that heat from the bulb has charred the insulation on the wires where , infuriatingly, they are inaccesible . No, it can't be repaired. I've tried tape (yellow in the picture, which does not work); neither is it possible to feed fresh flex through the support, since the base is a sealed unit.
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Then there's the dining room set - a table and 4 chairs, made of enamelled steel.

One of the chairs has a broken back, and, as before, is essentially unrepairable. What is more, I passed one just like it recently, sitting forlornly in the local rubbish skip.
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There's the rowing machine (see top picture), with a dangerously wobbly seat that does not glide. Thinking I had assembled it incorrectly, I returned to the store to look at the display model. Its seat was even worse than mine.
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We have toasters that don't toast evenly, coat hangers with trouser clamps that snap as soon as you open them, click-clack beds in which the wooden slats break first, and then the welds on the steel frame.

Also in the top picture is an ironing board that we inherited from someone else. I gashed my finger on it the other day: the flanges on the underside have vicious sharp edges. But there is no manufacturer's name, no importer's name, no retailer's name. There is no one to whom one can complain. Why not ?
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Most, if not all, of the goods I have mentioned are imported from India, China and elsewhere in the Far East. Most are priced to undercut local competitive offerings (assuming those firms haven't yet been forced out of business).
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But I know from a recent TV programme that it's our local retailers - like Conforama, Carrefour, Castorama etc - that make a fat margin with huge markups on what they pay. The manufacturers and importers usually operate on pretty slim margins.
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The EU presently runs a huge trade deficit with the Far East. I shan't bore you with the figures, but really, I ask you, does it make sense to import goods from so far away if they are shoddy, dangerous and quickly destined for the bin ?
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From a website, I see that Chinese consumers are just as fed up with shoddy goods as we are.

Where are you when we need you, EU ? Maybe Peter Mandelson needs to make the EU protectionist for the right reasons - to keep out junk, and to encourage the Chinese and others to raise their standards. That's if they want us to continue buying their goods. But few of us can resist a bargain, can we ?

Update Tue 18:00: email from Louise on Chocs and Cuckoos:

Instead of throwing stuff away, Colin, why not telephone Emaaüs and get them to take away what you don't want. It is a great organisation and they will do their best to restore stuff and resell it or it will be sold for scrap

Comments welcome: emails to sciencebod01@aol.com

It's all beginning to make sense (re Bob Woolmer)

2007-04-30T10:57:00.000+02:00

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It never did fully make sense - Bob Woolmer's death that is - by means most foul.

When hints first emerged of match-fixing, one could be forgiven for leaping to conclusions and thinking "Is that how a top-notch team like Pakistan came to be knocked out by the likes of Ireland ? "

And what of Woolmer's role himself. Just an innocent bystander one hoped who, suddenly finding was happening right under his nose, threatened to blow the whistle ?

But the manner of his death just seemed so - how can one put it - degrading and contemptible ? One need hardly say that all murder fits that description, but for a leading figure in the world of sport to die by strangling seemed like an attempt not just to kill, but to humiliate.

How can a grown and presumably fit man be strangled ? Surely he had the strength to resist ? Or show signs of having put up a struggle ?

But then reports emerged that he was poisoned first, to render weak or unconscious, with the police hinting they knew which substance was used, but were releasing no details, except to say that the choice was a clue to the identity of Woolmer's killer(s).

The plot, as they say, thickens, but this no longer seemed like an ordinary crime involving mere money. There was another ingredient involving violent passions. But what could they be, in the world of cricket ?

This morning we learn that BBC Panorama has uncovered what now seems depressingly credible - the fundamentalist I factor. See link to Telegraph article.

There's just no escaping it, is there, even in the world of international sport ?

Several members of the team were not just devout Muslims - which, let me hasten to add, is not an issue - but belonged to an extreme sect. Firstly we are told, it was interfering with play, as individuals left the field for prayers, needing to be replaced by substitutes.

But what's so unusual about that, one might say ? Muslims taxi drivers are known to stop for devotions without being branded as dangerous fanatics, even if infuriating for their passengers.

Nothing perhaps, except it gets worse, much worse. The Pakistan team's former media manager, a Mr.P.J. Mir claims that a fatwa was placed on his head . That followed his condemning those players who, in his opinion, had allowed this particular sect to undermine their will to win, as a result of which he has had to flee Pakistan .

To reiterate the title: it's all beginning to make sense. Are we seeing yet again the sinister and tragic consequences of what happens when extremists hijack a religion and turn it into a weapon of hate?

Comments welcome: emails to: sciencebod01@aol.com

Small earthquake in Folkestone. Not many injured

2007-04-29T22:52:00.000+02:00

Aftermath of the Folkestone earthquake (from BBC website)

Did you read about that earthquake in Kent ? It was piddling on the Richter scale - a mere 4.3, but caused quite a bit of structural damage, and must have been quite terrifying for a few seconds. Being England, which is far from any of the world's major fault-lines, most folk would not have had a clue what was going on. One witness in Folkestone thought there had been a terrorist bomb in the Channel Tunnel.

Back in about 1968, when I taught in Accra, the capital of Ghana, I was taking it easy one Saturday afternoon, putting away a few beers. As I went into the kitchen to get another from the fridge, there was this almighty crash from outside, as if a truck had gone into a pothole or over a big bump or similar.

Briefly I felt the floor and kitchen doorway lurch, and found myself grabbing at anything for support.. But then there was silence; I looked out and could not see a thing, so, somewhat puzzled, proceeded to get another bottle of Club from the fridge.

A few minutes later there was a furious banging at the front door, with my two neighbours, Mike and Ann G. standing there white as sheets. By then I'd forgotten the earlier incident ( testimony perhaps, you may be thinking, to the potency of Ghanaian ale) and asked them in all innocence what was the matter. "For God's sake man, don't you know there's been earthquake ?"

So I explained that I thought it was just a truck or something, and invited them in for a beer, but was the butt of jokes for weeks after - the guy downing beers who did not recognise a severe earth tremor for what is was.

As a one-time science teacher delivering that bit of the National Curriculum called Earth Science, I had to think of a way of getting across the explanation for earthquakes.

They are caused when two tectonic plates come together. When ths happens along a lateral fault line, the two plates are moving in opposite directions and so rub against each other.

But the plates tend to stick, and get locked together, due to friction. There is elastic deformation within the rock strata, with pressure gradually building up over time, which may be decades, centuries or longer. Finally, something gives, the plates spring apart with a sudden jerk, releasing huge amounts of energy.

How does one provide a simple picture ? Inspiration struck. Can you click or snap your fingers ? If so, have you ever wondered precisely how that loud sound is produced ?

It's a similar mechanism to an earthquake. You first press your thumb hard against your longest finger -the one between the index and ring finger- using friction to keep them together while you increase the pressure. When you then let the two slide apart, the finger catapults off, and slaps down noisily on the fleshy bit at the base of the thumb.

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It's an example of stored potential energy being converted to kinetic energy. It would not be possible but for the initial friction between the two surfaces.

End of science lesson !

Wondering about that title in dubious good taste? Years ago, there was an unofficial competition among Times journalists to write the most boring yet factually accurate newspaper headline. It was won by Claud Cockburn with : Small Earthquake in Chile. Not Many Dead.

According to today's Sunday Times, there was only one casualty of the Kent earthquake, who needed to go to hospital, having suffered head and neck injuries. I don't know his/her name, but here's wishing them a speedy recovery !

Comments always welcome: emails please to sciencebod01@aol.com