experiment

This is how to put photos where you want them within your blog.

1. Write your blog, in part or full as you wish.
2. When you want to insert a photo, use the 'Add Image' icon to select and upload the photo. It will always appear at the top of the post.
3. Click 'Edit HTML' at the top RH corner. You'll see a lot of gobbledegook at the top of the post - that's the photo! You can now cut/copy and paste this stuff to wherever you want within the post.
4. Switch back to 'Compose' and you'll see the result.

Simple, isn't it? SO WHY ISN'T IT????

Experiment results follow:

photo 1 follows




Some more text - photo 2 follows



final text - if you've read this far - am I an idiot, or senile, or a senile idiot, or all three, for not twigging this simple procedure from the outset? Or am I still missing the easy way?

Cliches

The Guardian has been running a correspondence in its letters page, people out-clicheing each other for what seems like, ooh, a year and a day. Trouble is, you can't keep up. Cliches are now entirely the province of journalism, and journalists' job is to keep one jump ahead of the zeitgeist: so journo A coins a killing phrase on day 1; day 2, journo 2 schticks it into an article or leader; day 3, it's a brand-new cutting-edge cliche. Day 4, it's in a letter to the Guardian.

But, a letter today suggested that the latest one might be 'I did nothing wrong'. Now that's wrong. The correct formulation is 'I did nothing against the rules'. And that's an important distinction, albeit one with an increasingly (decreasingly?) small difference. Notions of what is right or wrong are blurring into notions of what is legal or illegal. Which brings me neatly to Lord Ashcroft.

I had an enlightening conversation the other evening with a fairly eminent and well-informed person who was able, from direct experience, to confirm my impression that the Lord had had it set up, in 1999, in such a way that the tax regime would be totally legal, would conform in any superficially apparent way to the undertakings given to Hague, and wouldn't questioned (or even noticed) for, let's say, ten years - "which of course gave him ten years' worth of tax, whatever", as my friend put it.

Anyway, WTF. What goes around comes around - and a week's a long time, as the saying goes.

Road Rage Record

I needed to write this down, and thought the blog was as good a place as any. I don't expect comments or anything, though they're of course always welcome. At the least, you'll be able to witness the fact that I wrote the record within 24 hours of the incident (this is mostly a transcription of my notes made during today).

Monday 15 March 5.30 - 6.00 p.m.

• I'm on my way through Reading to pick up Kate for an evening with Linda and Alan in Datchet.
• I'm tailgated (2 metres behind me) along Tilehurst Road and down Castle Hill by a white BMW reg T 758 JUR. (It's driven, I later find, by a scouser called P. Pickering. Mobile number 07532 169533)
• At the roundabout he jumps a red light and takes the right hand lane (IDR) on the slip road. I catch up in the LH lane for Mill Lane.
• He takes the IDR, then cuts in to the next slip road, trying to get in front of everyone but ending up behind me, ducking and weaving through the traffic so that he ends up in the middle lane, me in the right lane, both following signs and road markings to join Mill Lane (you really need a map to follow this, it's a very complicated junction, but just bear with me - at this point, we're both in the correct lane for where we want to go, even though he's broken at least three laws to get there).
• Mill Lane starts as two lanes which merge into one. The signs say 'merge in turn'. He's a car's length behind me, to my left, so I signal left and prepare to merge ahead of him. He decides at this point to accelerate, still desperate to be in front - and sideswipes my car with his front bumper.
• We pull up in the hatched area where the lanes merge.

PART 2

• We get out and inspect the damage. It was a minor impact - a graze. No real damage to my car, a bit of loose bumper trim on his.
• Notwithstanding, he immediately opens up a tirade of abuse and threat which scares me (I'm a physical coward at the best of times, and have still, after 65+ years, not evolved a working set of responses to this kind of stuff).
• My recollections of just a few of his choice phrases - it'll give you a flavour of his thought processes as well as his mindset and his communication skills:

• "You fucking cut me up, you wanker, you was in the wrong lane (I wasn't), you cut me up"

  "I've got a witness" (I laughed at this point, which didn't help)

  "I'm going to follow you home"

  "I'd break your nose if you wasn't so old"

  (later, after I'd made an ill-advised comment 'there's something wrong with you, mate') "I'm going to break your nose anyway" (He didn't)

  (later still) "I'd break your fucking nose if there wasn't all these cameras around" (he seems to have this obsession with my nose)

  Much more of the same - that'll do as a sample.

• He threatens several times to call the police. I say OK, call them (although I really don't want this as I know Kate's getting anxious and I don't have her number on my mobile), but of course he doesn't - pretends to a couple of times, but I call his bluff.
• My sole response to all of this is "we need to exchange names and addresses". I write mine down.
• He insists that we need to exchange insurance details as well (we don't), and foolishly I eventually give him my policy number.
• By now, I've had enough. I can see that he's written down his name and insurance policy on a card, but I still don't have his address. I press him for this, and eventually he says "it's on the back". We exchange cards/notes and drive off.
• Of course, his address isn't on the back of the card, just a mobile number. So he's actually committed a crime called 'leaving the scene of an accident without ...' whatever.
• Just before we leave, his parting shot, on seeing my address, is "My mate John lives there - he'll be knocking at your door".
• I'm in some fear that he's going to to follow me to Kate's, but thankfully he turns right into Basingstoke Road. Hopefully I'll never see the little shit again.

So far, neither Pete or John have called round. I have my defences (door chain, phone, digital camera, machete) at the ready.

Blue moon

Just now I stepped out of the back door, and there was the moon - as full as it'll ever be, and as nearly blue as I've ever seen it. And it was surrounded by a huge halo, as wide as half the sky, as if one of the rings of Saturn had come adrift and wafted down over Reading. It almost made me cry, but I didn't, I just sighed.

What is two divided by zero?

This question figured in a basic maths exam which 96% of primary teachers gave the wrong answer, the correct one being 'infinity'. Now this is obviously cobblers. But a letter to today's Observer claims that the right answer is 'there is no solution to this equation', and gives a persuasive argument to this effect - whatever you multiply or divide zero by, it remains zero.

I say double cobblers. The right answer is 'two'. 'Zero' is just notational shorthand for 'the absence of number', or 'nothing' if you prefer. 2 + nothing = 2. 2 x nothing = 2. I rest my case.

Any mathematicians out there?

The Brits

Yes, I watch this stuff so you don't have to. Your own personal Sky+ Box. Here are the awards you wouldn't have seen on the telly even if you had watched:

• Most obnoxious winner: Liam Gallagher, for muttering a few pissed obscenities and throwing his undeserved award at the audience. We love you nearly as much as you love us, Liam.
• Most self-centred presenter: Geri Halliwell, who seemed to think she'd won something herself.
• Most nervously pathetic producer: whoever it was at ITV who muted the sound whenever an artist who might say 'fuck' appeared on screen. Even after the watershed.
• Best live performance: Lady Gaga, with a new song about Ali McQueen. (Also for costume inspiration. Also for being wonderful. (Both of them.)) (Supplementary award for inappropriateness to Geri Halliwell and Courtney Love, who both said 'I'd rather she'd sung something we knew.')
• Best chat line: Lily Allen. Interviewer: 'So, how will you celebrate?' Lily: 'Dunno... drink, maybe?'
• Worst 'live' performance: Cheryl Cole. Extra points for most blatently incompetent lipsynch.
• Lifetime achievement for faked sincerity: Robbie Williams.
• Hot female fashion tip: flash black knickers (front or back).

The sieve of dreams?

Yesterday morning I woke up to find on the bedside table a small notepad, with written on it the words 'solder seive'. Spelling aside, this was a mystery. I don't keep a notepad by the bed. So, sometime during the night, I concluded, I must have got up and gone downstairs, found this pad (and a pen), and gone back up in order to write this note to myself. This isn't normal behaviour for me. I had no recollection of any of this. But even more perplexingly, I had no idea what it meant.

After a few hours, as the rest of the day crowded in on me, I more or less forgot about it, or thrust it to the back of my mind - putting it down as just a particularly vivid instance of the weird psychotropic processes that happen when we think we're asleep. A tribute to the hallucinatory powers of sloe gin, perhaps. I remembered Paul McCartney's famous epiphanic revelation when (admittedly while on an acid trip) he discovered, and wrote down, the secret of the universe - which turned out, next day, to be 'There are Seven Layers'.

So, today I had occasion to dig out an infrequently used sieve (in order to drain a smaller-than usual amount of pasta, since you ask), and discovered that one part of its two-pronged handle had broken loose - something a dab of solder will easily fix.

Makes you wonder, don't it? Anyway, I've left the pad and pen by the bed.

What are your epiphanic revelations?

How to be a General

Sir Jock Stirrup, the head of the Army (I think), interviewed on Radio 4 the other day, said the following (I was so delighted with it that I rushed into the other room and wrote it down verbatim):

"Of course, one of the key determinants of what we can afford is how much money we have."

So, the answer to how to be a General is as follows:

1. Be able to state a blindingly obvious truism in a deep authoritative voice, so that it sounds profound and makes interviewers nod in agreement.
2. Have a really silly name.

Electoral reform

Never one to pass up a snazzy attention-grabbing subject line, me...

So, Gordon is going to let MPs vote on whether to let us vote on whether to have a new system of, er, voting - as long as they vote for the system he tells them to! This is called AV, and has been chosen over many other mechanisms such as STV, SUV, IVF ... sorry, getting confused here. But anything must be preferable to the present system, which is called FPTP, or WTF TATS.

So, here's a new idea - the antivote. In the future there will be two boxes against each candidate on a ballot paper. You can put your X (or number or whatever) in the first, just as in the current or proposed system. Or, you can put an X (or whatever there's room for) in the second box. This means 'Under no circumstances am I prepared to allow this asshole/criminal/sleazebag to represent me in anything, at all, ever.' Antivotes will be amassed and deducted from positive votes, if any, for the candidate in question. A net antivote score will result in the candidate's name and address being placed on a list. I leave it to you to imagine the uses this list could be put to.

A few details may need ironing out, but I think we're on the right track here.

Wedding in Jersey, New Years Eve

I'd promised to write a report of this event, but then I thought, how do you do that? My readers weren't there, and mostly don't know these people, how do I get the feel of the occasion across, etc etc, my usual kind of negativity - so I didn't bother. Until now, when sudden overwhelming popular demand (from Rosie) has kickstarted me. So. Not a blow by blow account, just a few highlights.

The ceremony was at 4.30 pm at St Clements Church. It was totally candle-lit (which I think caused the vicar some safety concerns). Vehicular access to this church, as to most of inland Jersey, is restricted, and the bride was delayed by an unfortunately parked car. The vicar took this opportunity to rehearse the bit in the modern ceremony where the congregation are asked to respond to a question about whether we are prepared to support and succour the couple in their future life together with the words 'we will'. He didn't think we were loud enough, so made us do it again, and again. Then Georgie arrived at last. When that bit of the service was reached, I saw her crumple in delighted shock at this huge shouted response - 'WE WILL!!!'

The journey from the church to the reception venue (the Grand Hall of Jersey's major boy's public school - I am not making this up) was a white-knuckle ride. Our coach driver had a tendency to drive up the narrowest lane he could find, even though there was a perfectly respectable main road, then do an impossible three point turn or reverse out - he also recognised only two settings for the clutch, on or off. Eventually, ignoring our screams, he got us there.

This was the best bit:

After the main course (braised ribeye beef with parmesan mash and beans, I think), the house lights go out. Everyone thinks 'oh no', then a waiter appears with a ladder, climbs up it, the lights come back on - and to an orchestral backing track, he pulls a microphone out of his pocket and launchs into 'The Marriage of Figaro', in a superb baritone voice. Everyone was flabbergasted, applauded - then a girl jumps up from one of the tables (where she'd been posing as a guest), and performs another operatic aria, can't remember what ... They did about eight numbers in all. The element of sheer surprise was what made it so great. (Apparently, only two people, not including the bride and groom, knew this was going to happen.)

I was going to put a picture of the singers in here, but frankly I've had enough of trying to get Blogger to do what I want it to, so I'm signing off this post for now - suffice to say it was a magical occasion, which I hope will never have to be repeated (that is until younger brother Alex decides to hitch up, maybe - you have an act to follow, lad!)

PS If anyone knows how to make pictures land exactly where I want them to within a post, rather than always at the top, please drop me a line ...

Hurrah ...

... the recession's over! A magic number (which nobody except the statisticians actually understands) has gone positive (+ 0.01%), so we're back to normal apparently. Whew, my life feels transformed already.

I'd intended to write at some length about the above, but my dinner intervened. It was, for the second time in twelve months, a Haggis! Complete with tatties 'n' neeps - well, carrots, actually, not having any neeps in stock, also not being quite sure what a neep is: some kind of Scottish turnip? Anyway, like the man said, Sonsie! (I know I was two days late, but I did make up for this by having the wee dram, or four, two days early courtesy of Paul and his Glenmorangie last Saturday.)

Curiously, as one who loves and admires most things Scottish, apart from a couple of exceptions I've never really visited the country. The first, which doesn't really count, was numerous business trips to bleak finance-industry business parks outside Edinburgh, called things like 'South Gyle'. The other visit was to stay with friends in Glasgow in about 1995. They lent us their spare car, an ancient Allegro or somesuch. We drove northwest, skirting Loch Lomond (amazing how quickly you get out of the city into country, but that's because it's surrounded by mountains and lochs, which you can't build on); then across the pass called 'Rest and be thankful', to the top of Loch Fyne and so down to Inveraray, our destination.

I know it's tame compared to other places, but this had a bit of that frontier-town atmosphere I've always been drawn to. Big sky, wind, coiled ropes on the quayside, a sense of far-off, different places out there over the water. We had fish and chips in a heaving pub (the lights went out halfway through, normal apparently), then back to the car. I put the key in the door and turned it, and it snapped off in the lock.

Slush

Around one o'clock today, as I was toying with the idea of a small sherry, I heard the loud noise of a diesel engine out in the Close by the side of the house.

'Aha!' I thought. 'The Council have determined that the packed ice has now (as I predicted) turned sufficiently slushy for the dustmen to get their Vulture [which is called Dennis, by the way] down the Close and empty our bins. Better put the bin out, then.' So I went out for a look.

But it wasn't the Vulture, it was a huge bulldozer. 'Aha!', I thought. 'Some kind Council person has noticed that we of the Close have struggled over the last ten days to get our cars (or even our legs) out onto the Avenue, and has sent a bulldozer fairy to save us. Bit late, but - Good Council!'

But, as I watched, the bulldozer, without lowering its scoop, executed a difficult three point turn at the end of the Close, drove back out and vanished off down the Avenue. I think I shouted 'Oy!' or something after him, but to no avail. The slush is intact. (So, so far, is the Council.)


By the way, apologies to everyone who sent me a snow-clad Christmas card, against which I unfairly ranted in a previous post. It was the snow I wanted to burn, not the cards.

Snow

Everyone is banging on about this, so let me put my wellie in. Snow is objectionable. It maims, if not kills, hundreds of people every time it shows up, and disrupts the innocent lives of millions more. How many people in Britain are anxious about running out of food because snow is preventing them getting to a shop? How many are cold, smelly or both because snow has cut off their power supplies? How many spent 18 hours trapped in their cars on the A3 last night? How many, like me, are at severe risk of exhausting their gin supplies? There's no conceivable defence for the stuff.

I know what you're thinking - Ahh, but it's pretty. My friend Caro says 'isn't it exciting!' Oh no it isn't. Look at it. It's just a load of whiteness, if you're lucky. Soon it'll turn into either a cowpat-brown mess of shoe-destroying sludge (which will also erode the underside of your car once you manage to drive over it) or a shiny black slick of ice carefully positioned to break the hip of any OAP stupid enough to venture outside their door for bread, or gin. Not pretty, not exciting.

All the news bulletins bang on about 8,236 schools being closed (nothing about factories, shops, surgeries or A&E departments - why do schools suddenly become the only institutions that matter as soon as it snows?) and what great news this is for the kids. Excuse me? If the kids think it's so great not having to be educated for a few days, then let them get out and drive the gritters and snowploughs, please.

I see from my usual audit that about sixty per cent of the Christmas cards I received this season depict snow, or one or other of its idealised consequences. This despite the fact that it never snows in Bethlehem, does it? They're going to be burnt for fuel, probably. Bah, humbug.

Meanwhile, if anyone within reach of Reading happens to have a spare snowplough...

Christmas presents

Would you like to read a list of all the Christmas presents I've received? No, I thought not.

So here's a description of just the most charmingly quirky one. It's called 'Giulios [sic] Spaghetti Carbonara', and consists of a little wooden box containing small amounts of eight different herbs and spices (including sea salt and peppercorns), plus a shopping list and recipe. When I got back home yesterday, I couldn't resist trying the recipe (the alternative being to get back in the car and go up the supermarket, which may or not have been open by then - and luckily I had eggs, parmesan, spaghetti and, as one does, pancetta in stock). I have to report that it was possibly the best carbonara I have ever made, and I speak as a self-proclaimed expert in this deceptively tricky dish. (The hard bit is keeping the whole thing hot whilst not scrambling the eggs, as Giulio clearly knows.)

But the best bit is the blurb on the accompanying leaflet, which reads, in part, as follows:

'A much contested noodle dish.
'Once by the children of the world.
'Second by the top chefs of the Italian gastronomy.
Giulio took us to a divine pasta palace.'

It's almost haiku-like, isn't it?

Carbonara was supposedly invented by an Italian peasant cook who was asked by some American troops, in 1943 after the invasion, for bacon and eggs. Whether this is true or not, I doubt whether she put cumin in it ... Nice touch, Giulio.

Happy New Year to all!

Cool chick ...

Bird news

The leaves have now all fallen or been blown off the vine, exposing the bunches of useless grapes, which the blackbirds have just discovered. Oh, but those grapes will ferment won't they? So I might have a garden full of drunk birds by Christmas.

As I went down the Close to the car this morning, a pheasant wandered past. That's not meant to happen in town centres, is it? Still, the foxes will have got him by now I expect.

Surprise your local carol-singing group!

I found this in an old book of "Popular Verse" (fill in the other twelve verses for yourself):





"The king sent his lady on the thirteenth Yule day
Three stalks o' merry corn, three merry maids a-dancing,
Three hinds a-merry hunting,
An Arabian baboon,
Three swans a-merry swimming,
Three ducks a-merry laying,
Three goldspinks, three starlings, a goose that was grey,
Three plovers, three partridges,
A papingo-aye:
Who learns my carol and carries it away?"





Who indeed?

Robert Browning

"That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, looking as if she were alive."

Opening lines don't come much better than that, do they? Most novelists would submit to torture for it. The questions tumble over themselves - who is the Duke speaking to? why is he showing his guest this rather morbid depiction? why is she not alive? What's he up to? In the next fifty four rhyming couplets, he manages not to answer any of these directly - the Duke is, you infer, playing a deep game here - but by the end, by God, this warped personage has revealed far more than he intended of himself, and you wind up thinking: 'No, Count's emissary! Don't let his daughter do it!'

Browning has been classified as the master, not to say inventor, of the 'dramatic monologue', and certainly his yarns rattle along. (Read him on rats in the Pied Piper of Hamelin.) But there's a lot more to him than just that, obviously. A couple more opening lines:

"My first thought was, he lied in every word, that hoary cripple ..." (Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came)
and
"I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave! You need not clap your torches to my face." (Fra Lippo Lippi)

Characterisation! In those few words, you already know a lot about the person: in the first case a driven obsessive on an increasingly surreal quest, against all odds and advice, for an ill-defined and probably futile goal; and in the second a devious, querulous artist whose aim it is to subvert the medieval doctrine that art must depict the spiritual, not the physical - and thereby spark the revolution in thought that was the Renaissance and so most of what came after ...

But perhaps most importantly, he paints in words. At its best, you can almost read this stuff with your eyes closed. Listen:

"All that I know of a certain star is, it can throw (like the angled spar) now a dart of red, now a dart of blue;"

And finally, of course, he's funny, sometimes self-deprecatingly - the next line of that is "Till my friends have said they would fain see, too, my star that dartles the red and the blue!"


Gosh, that was a fan letter wasn't it?

Bonfire night

My best ever firework display was the Southbourne Prep School bonfire night in 1951, when I was nine years old. The fireworks were laid out ready on trestle tables on the playing field in front of the school, to be set off, one by one, by the assembled masters after the bonfire had been lit. Boys and parents were lined up on the touchline, ready to go 'ooh' and 'aahh'.

It might have been a stray spark from the fire, or a master's dropped match or fag-end - for whatever cause suddenly the whole lot started to go off, all at once. At first we thought this was part of the show, but then the masters began to run away ... Adult decisions or panic reactions must have taken place, but there was really no choice but to let it run its course. It lasted about ten minutes, and it was spectacular. Rockets flew off horizontally, Catherine wheels span away into the sky, firecrackers leapt around like liberated venomous insects ...

I was enthralled by the undeniable beauty of this unintended display. But the real reason I now think of this as 'best ever' is that it awoke in me, for the first time in my life, a sense of gleeful anarchy, a realisation that the worlds of controlled order and wild chaos are sometimes separated by no more than a random spark. That perverse exhilaration has never entirely died down, and I hope it never will.

"Selling off the bank branches"

Any clues as to what this diktat from the EU (strangely unchallenged so far by the likes of UKIP) is supposed to mean in practice?

Look at your average "bank branch". It consists of a) some premises which are effectively a retail outlet, rather like M&S or Vodafone; b) some local employees manning the above; and c) a bunch of customers' accounts which have been grouped together, largely for historical reasons to do with obsolete technology relating to cheque clearing, under an identification code known, amusingly archaically, as a 'sort code'. All these branches use exactly the same centralised computer systems, distributed networks, and front-of-house presentation and product range. So what, exactly, will be up for sale?

Well, it could be the the premises - but where I live in Reading, empty retail sites are currently as cheap and available as oven chips, so not much of a deal there. The staff? Nah. So that leaves the business - the customers. But hang on. Does the EU really believe that these are also an "asset" which can in some way be sold off willy-nilly to Virgin or Tesco along with the bricks and mortar?

Given that I will under no circumstances accept the enforced transferal of my banking business away from my current preferred supplier to the likes of Tesco, I would presumably have to go to Newbury or Glasgow or somewhere if I wanted to chat face-to-face with my bank. Meanwhile, a new customer in Reading will have, at best, the same number of local choices of bank as he does now, just different ones. How exactly does this increase competition?

Finally, coming at the question from a slightly different though intrinsically related angle, I've heard a lot of talk about the need to break up certain banks because they're "too big to be allowed to fail". Personally, I'm very pleased that my bank was too big to be allowed to fail - I'd have lost a lot of money otherwise.