WORLD'S BEST PIANIST

MARTHA ARGERICH PLAYING CHOPIN

Of all the arts, Music is the one which, for me, seems to have the most emotional impact. Perhaps because it takes place over a period of time, the piece of music has a progressive impact on you, particularly when that impact is under someone else’s control. Music is the only major art form which needs an interpreter between you and the original to appreciate it in its intended form. So it’s the combination of the inspiration which gets the original notes down on paper, combined with the art of the individual/group of people interpreting it which makes each performance so individual and unique.

Yes, you can stand in front of a painting, and see new things in it, either by using your own thoughts and feelings, or you can look at it anew having listened to someone else’s views about it. Bu the immediacy of the music performance is, to me quite unique.

We are overwhelmed today by a total immersion in music. You almost can’t get away from it, and this omniprescence can work against the music all too easily. Everything can be found on a CD these days, and while that allows us all to listen to literally anything we want, when we want, as frequently as we want, that unrestrained availability stunts the sense of occasion which only a live a performance can bring. It's all to easy to lose the sense of occasion. Beethoven, for instance, did not write his Eroica symphony to be listened to as background music. And just to make sure the balance is not tilted towards the Classical end of things, neither did Paul Simon write “Bridge over Troubled Water” to be played as the soundtrack to a trip to a shopping mall. They were written to be listened to with focus by an audience, because both composers were trying to say something remarkable, where they wanted to change the way people thought about the way life worked.

But for music, you always need an interpreter – someone who can bring the music out, and lay it before you. Sometimes, it’s the composer, sometimes not. To my mind, there are some pieces of music where only the composer will do. Can you think of anyone who can sing a Rolling Stones song better than Mick Jagger, or does anyone even try to cover anything by Pink Floyd, Genesis, Dire Straits. Here, the music and the performer go together absolutely.

Other composer’s work is not the same, and that’s not to criticise it, just to recognise that it’s different – there are reputedly over 3,000 versions of Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” – which is the best one? The simple answer is - You choose.

So in these cases, the performer can be just as important as the writer, which results in all of us having our favourite versions – be it Pop or Classical music.

Now, I have a reasonably eclectic range of musical likes and dislikes. My great love tends to the Classical side, except, of course, when I prefer Pop Music! Today, while doodling around on YouTube, I came across a raft of snippets of historic classical music performances, which took up a couple of hours and stirred me to write this.

Taken as a proportion of total time listened to, Piano music probably occupies the Number One spot for me. The piano has a unique range of sonic possibilities, and can be as close to an orchestra as any instrument can, all of which sets the question rolling in my mind – Who is the best pianist in the world?

To my very limited knowledge, there’s only one choice. There is a tremendous range of pianists today, all with prodigious technique, who all seem to be able to reduce the most difficult pieces ever written to simplicity. But, at the very top, you need more than that. You need a mercurial quality, the ability to astonish, to provide insight, to burn a hole in your heart as well as your head. And when you put the list of the Great and the Good Pianists against this measure, some of the Premier league players don’t make it for me. I keep feeling the words “cold” and “technical” jabbing at my thoughts when I listen to them.

For as long as I can remember, Martha Argerich has stood head and shoulders above the rest. I first heard her ages ago playing Chopin, and I was bowled over. Listening to the musical, and physical, power being radiated by the radio I was listening to, I could not believe that its source was actually a young slip of a girl who was still a teenager when she had recorded the piece that was transfixing me. Since then, the woman has been the musical love of my life, and watching her today playing on a very grainy, small Black and White film brought it all back to me.

Her first Album, for once correctly called “Martha Argerich plays Chopin - The Legendary 1965 recording” is simply stunning (see the Amazon http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=martha+argerich&hl=en&start=10&sa=N link). Just click on the “Listen to this” tab, and be enthralled.

The recording engineer, usually the sort of person who has been round the block a few times, remembers hearing her play the Chopin Op.53 Polonaise in the Abbey Road studios when he first met her. He recalls how he “sat up in my chair with a long drawn out “Jee-sus” – the balance engineer said “Wow!”.

WITH CLAUDIO ABBADO

She plays with a passion and a totally personal vision, and a technique to rival the very best, but it’s the mercurial nature of her playing, the way she brings a fresh view to everything she turns her hand to which is so captivating. Some people accuse her of occasionally playing too fast, and sometimes you see a real tempestuous streak, but she is capable of hugely tender moments. And if anyone thinks it’s only the romantic Chopin, Listz and Rachmaninov where she excels, try her playing Bach – it’s like a breath of fresh air. Then again, listen to her blinding version of Prokoviev’s Op. 11 Toccata – 4 minutes where you will sit totally unable to believe there is only one person playing the notes.

I know I’m biased, because for me she can do no wrong. I also know in my head, that fan worship has many pitfalls, but for her, even with me at the age where I should know better, I think I’d throw my knickers onto the stage!

Tags:

martha argerich,
argerich,
chopin,music,
piano

FIRST SHOOT YOUR CORMORANT - COOKERY CLASSIC

The first few words of a book are like a hook. If the author get's the right ones down, you’re captured. This works even with something as potentially uninspiring as a cookery tome. Try this for size –

“This book is written for men. Men who, through choice or circumstance, live on their own, so that they can give a small dinner party, and at the same time remain on speaking terms with their friends.”

Ten seconds to read it, and the writer had ensnared me, and I’ll bet you want to know what follows as well. Excellent.

My Brother in Law sent me “Countryman’s Cooking” by W.M.W. Fowler as a totally inspired birthday gift, and I found it a complete joy to read. You don’t need to get more than a couple of paragraphs in, to realise that it was written when the words “political” and correctness” had never been used in the same sentence, and you’ll go a long way to find a fresher and more riveting read. Having read the book, and rummaged around on the Internet to fill in a bit of the man’s background, a terrific story emerges.

IT was published in 1965, and immediately bombed, which neatly dovetails in with the fact that Fowler (Willie to his friends) was a Lancastrian who flew in, yes, RAF Lancasters during the Second World War. He was shot down, and spent some time in Stalag Luft 3, where at one point in the book, he records having slaked his hunger by “stewing the Kommandant’s cat with one black market onion!” Brilliant.

He mixes recipes based on cooking all manner of meats and fish, in a robust, forthright, Steak and Kidney Pudding sort of way, with sharp, and often hilarious anecdotes which tell you exactly the sort of man he was. Clearly no stranger at all to female company, he was not interested in what he saw as the frothy parts of cookery, and arranged for various female “sous chefs” (probably in both senses of the word!) to attend him and “do” the vegetables and the pastry for him. He would invite “Luscious Lettie” and “Flakey Flossie” over - “Lettie darling, do come over. I’ve got a cucumber and some tomatoes, and all sorts of things. You’re so much better at dealing with them than I am.” One does suspect that the evening meal that night would have been eaten cold. A similar fate awaited Flossie – I simply can’t imagine what Delia would have made of it.

A book like this only works if the quality of the recipes, which are its backbone, stand up to scrutiny. All I would say is read them, and you will immediately have no doubts on that score. Just read the ones for Steak and Kidney pie and the Beef Olives if you’re in two minds about it.

To catch the mood of the original, the book also reproduces the original plates one of which is shown at the top of this piece.

One recipe which has you well skewered when you’re reading it is in the Poultry and Wildfowl Chapter, and addresses the “classic recipe for the preparation and cooking of a Cormorant” – how PC is that? Just read this –

Having shot your cormorant, hold it well away from you as you carry it home . . . these birds are exceedingly verminous and the lice are said to be not entirely host-specific.

Hang up by the feet with a piece of wire, soak in petrol and set on fire. This treatment both removes most of the feathers and kills the lice.

When the smoke has cleared away, take the cormorant down and cut off the beak. Send this to the local Conservancy Board who, if you are in the right area, will give you 3/6d or sometimes 5/- for it.

Bury the carcass, preferably in a light sandy soil, and leave it there for a fortnight.

This is said to improve the flavour by removing, in part at least, the taste of rotting fish.

Dig up, skin and draw the bird. Place in a strong salt and water solution and soak for 48 hours.

Remove, dry, and stuff with whole, unpeeled onions . . . the onion skins are supposed to bleach the meat to a small extent so that it is very dark brown instead of being entirely black.

Simmer gently in seawater - to which two tbsp of chloride of lime have been added - for six hours.

This has a further tenderising effect. Take out of the water and allow to dry. Meanwhile, mix up a stiff paste of methylated spirit and curry powder. Spread this mixture liberally over the breast of the bird.

Finally, roast in a very hot oven for three hours. The result is unbelievable. Throw it away. Not even a starving vulture would eat it.

If that doesn’t get you looking for the ISBN number and the stockist of the book, you’ve got no soul!

Just to help, try “Countryman’s Cooking” by W.M.W. Fowler – it’s a hardback, £16.95, and is available from Mr Burnett at Excellent Press on (01584) 877803.

It’s Book of the Year stuff.

Tags:

willie fowler,
cookery,
recipes,
books,
fowler

RED EYES AND BALLS THAT GLOW IN THE DARK

After AIDS, Malaria is the most infectious disease on the planet. Up to 2,700,000 lives are lost to the disease, mainly in Africa, and because we don’t get it here (but wait for Global Warming?), we, in Western Society hardly seem to see it as a problem. It seems you can’t hear the screams if you are far enough away. The news that there are real breakthroughs in the fight against it being announced by researchers therefore is good news indeed.

In America, they’ve developed a new strain of Genetically Modified mosquitoes which are more resistant to the Malaria infection. The idea is that if these are released into the wild, they could become the more dominant strain, and therefore because fewer of them then carry the disease, it will become less prevalent. But the mozzies developed by the American scientists seem to have developed, either inadvertently or vertently, eyes which glow either red or green. This apparently allows them to be more easily identified from the wild non-GM varieties.

MALARIA RED EYE ("Times" today)

Coincidently, in Britain, so the story goes, a team from my old training establishment, Imperial College in London, has progressed along similar lines and developed a GM mosquito which has fluorescent testicles. This, equally apparently, allows them to be more easily identified and then sterilised. They then would get released into the wild, breed with the normal females, who then would produce fewer eggs, thereby reducing the number of insects to pass on the disease.

It would seem in pretty poor taste to see any form of humour in all this, but....

I have absolutely no idea how many mosquitoes there are in the world, but it must be up in the squillions, and the idea of selecting mozzies individually for treatment either by the colour of their eyes, or, even more bizarrely, by the glowingness of their naughty bits, seems to me to be a way of attacking the problem which I would never have considered. You’d have thought that some form of Mozzie genocide was what was required, rather than a form of insect sniper.

My simple mind thinks that – if it takes 1 minute to sterilise a mosquito, and I really have no idea how long it actually does take, then it will take 1,000,000 minutes to sterilise 1,000,000 of the little blighters – that’s around 2 weeks. Now if there is a Billion of them out in the wild, and you want to “do” 50% of them, that will take you 1000 weeks, or 20 years. But mosquitoes don’t live for 20 years, so…… I’m confused.

Ignoring the potential pitfalls in using genetically modified insects in such a dangerous area as malaria, you have to believe that anything which addresses this terrifying problem has to be a good thing. It would indeed, give the “No GM at any price” merchants a bit of a moral dilemma if, by using GM Mosquitoes, significant inroads could be made into the level of deaths from Malaria.

So Good luck to them both – anything which holds out the hope of reducing the effect of such an awful disease can only be a good thing. Let’s just hope that The Law of Unexpected Consequences never needs to be used in the future to explain something nasty away.

Tags:

malaria,
GM,
genetically modified

A VISIT TO NORTH YORKSHIRE

The reason I’ve been off-air for a few days has been a sojourn in North Yorkshire with my Brother in Law. He lives in a beautiful Georgian house facing a typically British Village green. As well as being the best cook I know, we seem to spend the day putting the world to rights, drinking a little too much wine and watching the cricket on TV. There are few better ways to pass the time!

The towns and villages in the region are very distinctive, and extremely attractive. Places like Boroughbridge, Masham (Black Sheep Brewery, and excellent sausages!), Ripon, Thirsk and Northallerton (Bettys is an absolute gem, and an institution around the area) all have wide, generous and prosperous looking main streets, lined with attractive stone buildings.

A very, very pleasant part of the world to spend some time, especially when you can eat like a King into the bargain.

THE MAESTRO AT WORK

GENERAL STORE - BOROUGHBRIDGE

BLOSSOM - THORPE PERROW ARBORETUM

WINE SHOP - BOROUGHBRIDGE

RECLAMATION YARD - MASHAM

SUNSET TAKEN FROM KIRKLINGTON VILLAGE GREEN

Tags:
yorkshire,

photography,

landscape

BOB WOOLMER

What a terrible shock to hear about Bob Woolmer’s death in the West Indies yesterday.

He really was a man who lived for the game, and pulled cricketing sides together in a way not given to many people. Although I’m not a cricket guru, I can’t think of any other better coach this country has produced, which is odd seeing how many good cricketers we’ve had. Just track South Africa’s progress under his watch, to see what he was capable of. Even with Pakistan, which must rank as one of the most difficult jobs in all of sport, he kept his cool, and plugged away, ever positive through Ball Tampering, Drug investigations, and the gentle ebb and flow of Pakistani politics.

And he was no mean player either. Look up the Ashes Test in 1975, when he batted for 499 minutes and scored 149 to save the match. That’s over 8 hours –against one of the very best pair of fast bowlers there has ever been – Lillee and Thompson. Can you, in your wildest dreams imagine anyone in today’s England squad being remotely capable of that.

The circumstances of his passing leave you feeling very uneasy. He said, just after the Pakistan v Ireland match, which I watched last week - “I’m going to sleep on this one as I’ve had a very bad day, which ranks along with my worst days as a coach. Coaching is what I like to do but whether I continue to do that at international level is under discussion.”

“I’m going to give it some thought.”

Who knows what happened, and in the end, does it really matter, because it won’t bring him back.

He embraced innovation, and his web-site gives you a very good clue to the man. His favourite quote from Stuart Leary, when you are up against it, puts it all into perspective – “Don't worry, you could be down a pit working on the coal face but there is one thing you can't stop and that is the clock”.

Tags:

woolmer,

cricket

CASH FOR HONOURS - THE SMOKING E-MAIL?

First we have the Police picking up an e-mail from “someone” about “Cash-for-Honours”. Then the Attorney General takes out an injunction to prevent the contents of the e-mail from being printed. Then we have an attempt by Our Glorious Leaders to prevent us even knowing that the first injunction even exists.

Now, we are told, that the e-mail, which was written by Ruth Kelly to Jonathan Powell, Blair’s Chief of Staff, was believed to be so sensitive that it was never even sent!

We really are living in “Alice in Wonderland” here. If someone has some thoughts that are so dangerous either to the writer, or the recipient, then it seems to me very sensible not even to think of writing them down.

Here’s another example of the permanent, uneraseable imprint of the e-mail. There always seems to be a Hard Disc somewhere which has a copy of what you do on it. Just pressing the “Save as Draft” button isn’t like tearing up a piece of paper into a myriad of tiny pieces. It just stores them on a different part of the Hard Disc, or someone else’s Hard Disc.

It would be cruelly rather fitting if something which did NOT get sent proved to be the undoing of the people under investigation for this issue. The silly thing here is that, since times immemorial, politicians have been giving or selling honours to people who give them money. All parties are probably doing it, which is why none of the Tory or LibDems are up on their high horses about it. The real issue here which is the one that will get them, as usual, is not the act itself, but the attempt to cover it all up.

They never seem to look at history, let alone learn from it.

Tags:

cash for honours,
ruth kelly

WOMEN - THIS WAY, NOT THAT WAY

Wandering around Norfolk the other day, we came across the signpost in the picture below. I did wonder how I’d explain it to the couple of Americans who were looking at it.

They must have been a tad bemused wondering what the verb “to hickle” meant –

I hickle, You hickle, He/She hickles, hicleorum, hickleis, hickleis.

Now that takes me back 45 years to my Latin classes in school.

You do wonder if she’s in any way related to someone Terry Wogan used to suggest lived near Junction 29 of the M6 – the Preston Turn-off.

Just a thought.

Tags:

norfolk,
humour,
signpost

NHS PENSIONS - A PRESENT FOR OUR CHILDREN

I wrote a short piece the other day about the way that numbers are presented affects the way we perceive them. This was prompted by an almost throwaway article in the paper noting how the NHS Pension Scheme liabilities had increased by some £37 Billion over the last year to a new total of £165 Billion, presented in a way which made the difference look like “rounding”.

The more you ponder on this, the more you get worried by it. The presentation is one thing, but the staggering size of the amount of money involved is a much more serious issue. I know enough about the maths of how Pension Schemes work to know that I don’t know enough about it. When their clients so demand, the actuaries who do these calculations can call on almost David Blaine-like powers involving lots of smoke and quite a few mirrors to make numbers “sit up and beg” for them.

They use a discount rate which reduces future pension costs back to present day figures to calculate today’s liabilities. One of the changes the actuaries apparently used in increasing the NHS Pension scheme liabilities for 2005-6, was to reduce the Discount rate from 3.5% the previous year, to 2.8% for this year. Just changing that percentage by that seemingly little amount can have staggering effects on the amount of money they say is needed today. The only problem with bringing it down to 2.8%, is that for most sponsored schemes in the private sector, that percentage would typically be 2.0%. If you factor that number into the maths, the liabilities would grow, according to Watson Wyatt, a very respected firm of pensions experts, by a further £28 Billion to £193 Billion.

There are a myriad of other factors which must be fed into the maths, all of which can change the final number dramatically. Try Life Expectancy for instance, which is changing at a rate none of us, including actuaries, can predict. It seems to have increased over the last couple of decades at a faster rate than we ever imagined, partly due, you may note rather elegantly, to the efforts of some of the people in the NHS Pension Scheme.

Simple maths says to us that, if a scheme supports 1.26 million members, and it has a total liability of £165 Billion, then each member’s “pot” is around £140,000, which is supposed to last around 25 years – the predicted lifespan of someone who is 60 when they start to take their pension. That’s around £6,000 per year on average. If they get the average age of mortality wrong by just one year, and that’s actually very easily possible, then the calculation is wrong by nearly £1 Billion. It's actgually impossible to calculate what the true liabilities of such a scheme are, but you can guarantee that, whatever number you choose to think of, the final one will be higher!

All these figures seem horribly large, and almost beyond comprehension. The really worrying thing is that the NHS scheme is UNFUNDED – meaning that the Government has put nothing, absolutely nothing away anywhere to pay for it. Unlike all Private Pension scheme, there are no Assets anywhere which have been "ring-fenced" to pay these enormous sums. They have made this colossal commitment to 1,260,000 people, and the only way it gets paid is if you and I pay taxes to support it, for as long as we live.

And that is only one scheme, albeit the biggest, which is handled by the Government in this way. If you take all the state schemes where the taxpayer has been forced, through payment of taxes in the future, to underwrite these schemes, the total amount we will have to pay is around One Trillion Pounds. That’s only three little words, but numerically it looks like £1,000,000,000,000, or a tad more than the whole of this country’s Gross National Product for a year – just get your head around that if you can.

It does rather make the efforts by Gordon Brown to diminish the pension of anyone in the Private sector look very, very sordid and very, very unfair.

Tags:

pensions,
nhs,
gordon brown

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION - YEAH RIGHT!

I’ve unabashedly borrowed the following quotes from “The Times” newspaper, but these are important issues. The words below, interestingly all spoken in the last century, are from the mouths of the men who, in governmental terms, run or ran this country.

Tony Blair, as I write this, is still the Prime Minister. Gordon Brown, is Chancellor of the Exchequer, the second most important person in the Government – shortly to become the first, unless Charles Clark and Alan Milburn get their way. Jack Straw has been Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, and is now leader of the House and Lord Privy Seal. Lord Irvine managed to blow £59,000 on wallpaper (£300/roll) to redecorate his apartment in the style he felt suited his position as the Lord Chancellor, the highest Law officer in the country. Peter Mandelson was that open, honest and straightforward man who plotted New Labour’s path to victory in the mid 90s.

Just read them, and compare what they said to what is going on around us today.

"Information is power and any Government’s attitude about sharing information with the people says a great deal about how it views power itself and how it views the relationship between itself and the people who elected it” Tony Blair, speech at Campaign for Freedom of Information Act Awards, March 25, 1996

“We need a Freedom of Information Act that ensures not only a presumption in favour of disclosure, but also that the public interest defence must be available where there is a question mark over the illegitimate disclosure of information by civil servants . . .” Gordon Brown, Charter 88 Sovereignty Lecture, March 9, 1992

“We want to break down the barriers that may make the individual see the State in terms of Kafka’s Castle”, Jack Straw Annual Consitutution Unit Lecture, October 27, 1999

“We promised to make Britain a world beacon by creating a model freedom of information regime . . . Government should adequately and actively take the lead in promoting openness. We should be ready to open our doors, our files, our databases, so that the British people know what is being said and done in their name.” Lord Irvine of Lairg, Speech to the Campaign for Freedom of Information Awards, April 28, 1998

“We remain fully committed to freedom of information, to promoting a radical change across Government in the way Government conduct business, and to a new relationship between Government and the citizens they serve.” Lord Williams of Mostyn, Attorney General 1999-2001, Lords’ debate, February 10, 1999

“The rock on which [partnership between people and Government] is founded is trust and without openness and transparency in our dealings with the British people there will be no trust.” Peter Mandelson, quoted in The Times, November 20, 1997

The Freedom of Information Act allows people, organisations, media, newspapers and anyone else who’s interested to ask questions aimed at understanding what our elected leaders are doing, and are spending taxpayer’s (just remember, that’s you and me) money on. The elegant words you see below seem very shallow and naïve when compared to the deviousness being shown by those in power who are attempting to restrict and curtail the embarrassing flow of incompetence and deviousness being shown up by the results of these queries.

You only have to look at the Cash for Honours episode. The Attorney General, who I thought was a man the main part of whose job was advising the Prime Minister and the Government about the legal ramifications of anything they was involved in, currently seems to be acting as a Hit Man for Mr Blair to keep him squeaky clean. He is now trying to ban our newspapers from reporting on any of the new developments which are currently live on the cash for Honours issue, and we find out over the weekend that, at his behest, he is now trying to ban any reporting even on the existence of the ban. Stalin would have been proud of him. What does that tell you about what’s going on?

If you didn’t think there was something rather unpleasant being swept under the carpet, well, I suggest you do now.

Tags:

cash for honours,
blair,
freedom of information

IT'S ALL IN THE PRESENTATION

An innocuous little piece in the newspaper today caught my eye, cunningly hidden on Page 38 of “The Times”. On a day when the front page was the news that eating too much Low-fat Strawberry Yoghurt can act as a female contraceptive, and that too many vitamins may increase the risk of death, the NHS Pension Scheme report for 2006 was also published – boring or what, because it only got onto Page 38.

The way the article was presented raised the issue of how we perceive numbers. So many things today are defined by numbers that we sometimes lose perspective on them. A simple, bald statement in the paper explains that the total estimated liabilities, ie the amount of money needed to pay all the pension scheme members has gone up over the last year. These members, totalling 1,260,000, fall into three categories - people currently receiving a pension, people currently working in the NHS who are building up the right to a pension in the future, and people who have worked for the NHS in the past and have a right to an NHS pension in the future.

The total amount needed to cover these liabilities is £165bn. Doesn’t sound much, does it, written like that? Try writing it as £165,000,000,000, because that’s what it actually is, and it looks a great deal more daunting. Or as another alternative, if you use 50,000,000 as the number of people in this country, that’s £3,300 for each and every one of us, man, woman and child, whether we’ve worked in the NHS or not. Or to put it yet another way, if every single person in the country worked solely for the NHS Pension scheme, it would take us everyone 2 months to produce the money to pay it off. You don’t get the same sense of “Bloody hell” when you read £165bn – so it’s not particularly surprising that they write it down like that. It really is “The way you tell them.”

Thinking more widely, the units of measurement we use tell us a great deal about our style of life. I spent my early life sometime in the last century, being educated on distances very differently from today. We had 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, 5½ yards in a Rod, Pole or Perch (Why three different names for the same distance?), 22 Yards in a Chain (or Cricket Pitch), 220 yards in a furlong, 8 furlongs in a Mile, and so on. Even walking out into the sea from the beach meant that a Mile was suddenly 6,076 feet compared to 5,280 Feet on dry land. But it all made meaningful sense. You could “feel” the distances. If someone said something was a Chain long, you simply had to think of Freddie Trueman bowling a Yorker, add on to it a layed-out batsman, and you were there, within a cricket boot or two. Simple.

The really dumbed down idea of millimetres, centimetres, metres and kilometres, with its Namby-Pamby constant factor of 10, takes all the fun out of it, and makes it all far too boring and more difficult to understand. How does the average man get the feel of 1/299,792,458th of the distance travelled by light in an absolute vacuum in one second, when he’s measuring up his bedroom for new carpet to please his wife?

But, back to the newspaper. “The Times”, either wittingly or unwittingly, has reacted to this problem, and for some time now has used its own system of distance measurement, which is far more effective and simple than these ghastly immigrant units of measure we are forced to use. The basic unit of distance they use is the London Bus, which is defined rather beautifully and elegantly as "the length of a London Bus" – simple, you see! For the avoidance of any doubt, that’s a Routemaster, not one of those nasty, squirmy bendy things. Longer distances, usually vertical ones are always expressed in multiples of Nelson’s Column. Area starts in units of Football Pitches. We all know what one of those is, so it becomes a simple intuitive thing rather than a learned fact all too easily forgotten. Large areas, however, to avoid the need for phrases like “Oh it’s around 1,300 football pitches”, which, until the Olympics Building programme nears completion none of us can begin to visualise, are all multiples of the area occupied by Wales. We've all stared at a map, and know pretty well just how big that is. And that’s it. Simple, intuitive and easy to understand, and susceptible to graphic demonstration quite perfectly.

Some of you may think that the London Bus is far too large a base unit, but we haven’t finished yet. We have hands, fingers, and arms which are far more intuitive than the centimetre. Most of the time, we do not need absolute accuracy, we just need something close. Who, in reality, needs the digital accuracy of knowing, say, time to the nearest second? It’s quite irrelevant for most of us. But because we can have it, we have it.

No, the Arms Width is a perfectly good measure for something approximating to ¼ of a Bus – we could call it a “Cab”, to maintain the intuitive element. Anything smaller can be measured in Arms, or Hands, or Fingers or various multiples thereof. Actually, the word “Cubit” has for some unknown reason just flashed into my mind – can’t think why.

Areas could use subdivisions of the Football Field – the Goal, the Box, the Dug-Out, and so on all lend themselves consistently and rigorously to this structured approach. The idea of 10 Spit Blobs equalling One Red Card has a real degree of visual elegance about it that 0.0073 Hectares can never approach. I mean, is there anyone out there, apart from the underclasses of Estate Agents or Council Tax House Banding estimators who can truly say they have any idea how big a hectare is? But if you called it A Football Field, everyone would be on the money straight away, and isn’t that what it’s all about? We do complicate things so.

So, that’s agreed then. We could call it something like the Ton, Rod, Fortnight System to differentiate it from the SI system we currently use but despise so much. All we need now is a plan of action to get this slight change implemented.

Any ideas?

Tags:

numbers,
perception,
pensions

UNITED 553

DOROTHY HUNT

Following on from the piece on 13th February, one of the more disturbing things to come out of the Watergate saga is the story of airline flight United 533. There have been untold stories coming out of Watergate since the early 70's, but this one is still an open book which gives the conspiracy theorists something to chew on. If you give up on Princess Diana, David Kelly, John Lennon and even John Kennedy, and if you still want a real conspiracy theory, consider Howard Hunt who died recently, or more precisely his wife Dorothy.

They both worked in shady areas of the world for the CIA. Hunt was suspected of being implicated in Kennedy’s assassination. He was in charge of the Watergate break-in, and when that went horribly wrong, he had his political back against the wall. To protect himself, he set about blackmailing the government to stop him spilling the beans on what he said he knew, including, he said, evidence about Nixon’s role in Kennedy’s death.

Dorothy was acting as broker with White House aides to negotiate a pay-off, which apparently was agreed to be around $250,000, whilst at the same time she was also talking to journalists and members of Congress. It seems quite clear that John Dean, Council to the President, told Richard Nixon that she was “the savviest woman in the world. She had the whole picture together” – the implications being she was a dangerous woman, and that the White House, at the highest level, knew that.

One day, Dorothy Hunt, who was being used as a messenger for the White House to distribute Watergate “Slush monies”, got on a plane, together with a very clued up Watergate journalist, Michelle Clark, a Member of Congress and fifty or so other people, nine others of whom it later turned out were involved in Watergate.

She had just bought $250,000 of Life Insurance, the payee being Howard Hunt. The plane crashed landing in Chicago, killing almost everyone on board. She was certainly also carrying $10,000 in cash, although there seemed considerable evidence that up to $2 million of pay-out money and cheques was also with her, as well as the original copy of the papers which reputedly linked Nixon to Kennedy’s death.

One writer claimed that just hours after the crash an anonymous call was made to the WBBM Chicago (CBS) talk show. The caller described himself as a radio ham who had monitored ground control's communications with 553, and he reported an exchange concerning gross control tower error or sabotage. CBS, the employer of Michelle Clark killed in the crash, kept this information from the authorities investigating the accident. One FBI agent went straight to Midway's control tower and confiscated the tape containing information concerning the crash. Apparently, the FBI did this before the NTSB (National Transport Safety Board) could act - a unique and illegal intervention.

This writer also pointed out that FBI agents were at the scene of the crash before the Fire Department, which received a call within one minute of the crash. The FBI later claimed that 12 agents reached the scene of the crash. Later it was revealed that there were over 50 agents searching through the wreckage.

It was completely irregular for the FBI to get involved in investigating a crash until invited in by the National Transportation Safety Board. The FBI director justified this action because it considered the accident to have been the result of sabotage. That raises two issues: (i) How were they able to get to the crash scene so quickly? (ii) Why did they believe Flight 553 had been a case of possible sabotage? This question is not answered by Freed, the writer, but it could be argued that it is possible to answer both questions with the same answer. The FBI had been told that Flight 553 was going to crash as it landed in Chicago.

Another writer has pointed out that the day after the crash, one of Nixon’s close White House aides Egil Krogh was appointed Undersecretary of Transportation, supervising the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Association - the two agencies charged with investigating the airline crash. A week later, Nixon's deputy assistant Alexander P. Butterfield was made the new head of the FAA. Coincidence?

When you delve into this story, there then seems to follow a continuing trickle of extremely convenient murders, which further adds to the mystery. Dorothy was rumoured to have been poisoned by cyanide during the flight, and her body was cremated with indecent haste, apparently following considerable pressure from CBS, the employer of the journalist travelling on the plane with Mrs Hunt – though just how a News organisation has any power to influence such a thing is beyond me. The undertaker who carried out the autopsy, was murdered shortly afterwards – a crime still “unsolved”.

Just to add to the mix, two or three other people, involved with the White House on other, non-Watergate matters, apparently received phone calls that day advising them not to go on the flight, or to take a later one.

Howard Hunt, who at the time of his wife’s death was under arrest, caved in following the crash, and pleaded guilty to his involvement in the burglary.

And it goes on – there’s more if you want to find it. See http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKhuntD.htm. It’s got the makings of a bloody good film, and as the real people involved die, perhaps there really still is more to come. Howard Hunt’s autobiography is, apparently, just about to be published …….

It does make the “Cash for Honours” issue a bit tame, but you never know. Watch this space.

Tags:

dorothy hunt,
watergate,
united 533,
conspiracy,

SELF HELP PROGRAMME

Now I’ve just re-read last night’s piece about the Stornoway Moles. Now, I just felt that in the verbage, there was something just a tad irritating about my writing style, and I think this has been creeping up on me insidiously over the past few weeks. Now I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, but I’m going to see a specialist about it, to try and catch it in its early stages.

Now, for those who are still interested, the programme is called NOW. Now this is a TLA for the Now Obliteration Woutine (as you can see I type with a lisp, which I’m also getting specialist help over), and it involves facing the problem head-on, and coming to terms with it, well….Now.

Wish me well. I may be some time.

THE TUNNEL TO THE ISLES

There you are, browsing through the newspaper, and suddenly, you read something which makes you look at the date, wondering if two months have suddenly fast-forwarded, and it really is April 1st. The double-take last week was the story that plans are afoot to build a tunnel from Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, to near Ullapool, somewhere near where the Arctic Circle crosses the Scottish mainland.

The tunnel is planned to be 41 miles long, some 10 miles longer than the Channel Tunnel, and since it was reported in the “Independent” it must be true. Subsidiary paragraphs reveal alternative plans to build a much shorter tunnel to come out just near the bridge on the Isle of Skye – this one being only 25 miles long.

One’s first thought is “I didn’t come up the Clyde on a bicycle”, which is actually quite a nice phrase in the circumstances. Perhaps some clever marketing person is trying to get The Western Isles “on the map” so to speak, and get a hefty dollop of good publicity by using the lampooning style of Ryanair and Sir Montgomery Cecil (see www.unlimited-spurt.org for details) in trying humour to get their messages across.

Now I’m only a bear of very little brain, but, assuming this isn’t an example of that rare commodity, Northern Scottish humour, I would have thought that the cost of such a venture would not be trivial. If the Channel Tunnel cost $21 billion, then a 41 mile tunnel would cost proportionately $28 billion. Take a bit off for improved efficiency, and put a bit back for Inflation since the tunnel was finished in 1994, the fact that the Western Isles are a long way from anywhere (so why then do you need a tunnel - No, don’t go there), so everything and everyone has got to be moved enormous distances, it’s difficult to see how you get much change out of $30 billion.

Now, at the last 2001 Census, the population of the Isle of Lewis was 16,872, excluding the sheep. Now that’s clearly not the whole story, because there also is an influx of tourists which increase that number significantly each year. But you have to ask why they go there. I suspect, for the sort of people who go, the difficulty of getting there is actually a small part of the pleasure - the other part being the profound sense of isolation when you're there.

Now I may sound as if I don’t like the place. But we used to go to Skye, the next island down, almost every year for our family holidays, and I don’t believe I can think of a more beautiful place than that part of the world. Just as a taster, here are some of the images I've taken of the island.

For the tourist, there is undoubtedly something quite addictive about the place, with the mountains, the sea, the beaches, the long walks, the history, the isolation (the nearest Marks and Sparks is 4 hours hard drive away in Inverness, so heaven help you if you forget the Vanilla yoghurts). Its infinitely variable weather can present the place one day as a Greek island, or a 60 mile long carwash the next day. Its culture, its occasional rawness and its almost religious feel can cast a spell that’s very difficult for a Southern Jessie like me to resist, although, on occasions, dark clouds of marauding kamikaze midges sometimes do show you another side!

As a tourist, you can’t really see it from the inhabitant’s viewpoint, and I suspect that life on these islands is a bloody sight harder than anything we have to go through in the cosseted South. The influence of religion is utterly different from England. They still observe the Sabbath, and, as far as I know, the only place open on a Sunday on Lewis is a petrol station, and that’s only for 4 hours.

We have little idea what it’s like for the ferry not to arrive, and supplies simply not be available. The wind, the rain and all the other myriad testing things that hit the inhabitants are almost unknown to us. But that’s not the point. We all live under different pressures, and the ones in Southern England are literally a different world from those which mould the Highland Scottish character. And I’m afraid, if it all gets too much, there is always the option to gird up your loins and “Go South”. Croydon awaits!

That’s not to say that development of the area should not exist. As a family, we watched the effect of the bridge which was built to join Skye to the mainland. The act of joining something to the mainland which previously was an island hit some islanders very hard, and some of them thought it would ruin the place. I have to say, from our viewpoint, it didn’t. The volume and the type of tourists seemed little different – it’s still a good 5 hours drive (admittedly along some of the most beautiful roads you’ll ever find) beyond Glasgow, so that sorts most of them out!

But that was financed privately, and only (!) cost £30 million. I know it’s not all about money, but if anyone expects to get any form of Cost Benefit Analysis to work for a tunnel, then it’s beyond me. My simple sums for that work out at $1.8 million per Lewis inhabitant (again, excluding the sheep).

There is a lovely web-site where a guy reckons that the Channel Tunnel was so expensive because they used rogue British (probably English) and French cowboys to build it. His idea instead was to go to Norway where he says building tunnels is much more of a core skill, and he knew someone there who could knock it out for £110 million. Well that sorts the money side of it.

As a confirmed Englishman, who still does not even know the answer to the West Lothian question, it seems to me very simply that this is a purely Scottish issue. They didn’t start too well with the Parliament building costs – Yes, I know it was only an extra Zero, but to us miserable money men, that’s sometimes quite important. So if they really want to drill a hole 40 miles long, where the only benefit would seem to be that the pizza deliveries from Ullapool would still be warm when they got to Stornoway, then let the Scots work out how to do it without it costing me a bean.

If I go there again, I’m quite happy to take the ferry – it’s much more romantic!

Tags:

skye,
tunnel,
channel tunnel,
stornoway

DEEP THROAT

I'm on a Watergate kick at the moment. A couple of postings ago, I showed a tremendous set of images taken from the "Washington Post" archives which had, as well as showing the all "Usual Suspects" without their Prison Numbers, a really smoky, atmospheric "You were there" feel to it all.

The one guy who was completely missing from this set of images, and who became an overnight star through the film "All the President's Men", was Deep Throat. Deep Throat was the insider who knew everything that was going on about Watergate inside the President's team. It was he who kept Bob Woodward, the "Post" Journalist, on track throughout the whole investigation. The two of them held meetings, just like in the best Spy films, in Multi story Car parks at 2am, so as to avoid Deep Throat's identity ever being revealed. In the film, he was only ever seen in sillhouette, rim-lit with cigarette smoke drifting very artistically against the car park safety lights, but his existence spawned a whole raft of theories about who he was.

He had to be someone very, very near the Top in the Government System, otherwise he simply wouldn't have had access to the Gold Standard information he knew. So he had to take great care not to pass on anything that would allow his identity to become obvious to those seeking him out, bent on destroying the "Post" and its sources.

And throughout the whole time the story was developing, no-one apart from Woodward and Bernstein knew who Deep Throat was. Even Ben Bradlee, the newspaper's editor, was not in the know - and still he backed his journalists with the story. Brave man.

But now, some 30 odd years after the event, following innumerable efforts, books, investigations, rumours, claims and denials, he has been identified as W Mark Felt. Felt was the Assistant Director of the FBI at the time. Almost everyone in the Administration came under suspicion, but it is really quite amazing that Felt's name has been keep secret for so long, thus putting the last big piece of Jig-saw into the Watergate puzzle. When you read about him, his fasacinating life, and the cunning way he involved himself with Woodward, you imagine a real James Bond type.

All the pictures of the man show him now as a very frail 91 year old, but there are a couple of pictures which show him much earlier in his life. The one below, in one simple image, briings into stark relief, the gulf which exists between the way things are in America and the way they are here. Just remember, this man is 2nd in Command of the America's premier policing body, reporting through J Edgar Hoover, directly to the President of the United States.

In your wildest imagination, can you imagine in this country, Stella Rimington having a picture to match this in her personal picture albums. If she has, someone would pay an awful lot of money for it. This is the best we can do in the meantime!

Tags: mark felt,
watergate,
deep throat,
stella rimington

PRIME MINISTER - THE MUSICAL

We’ve had “The Producers”, a spoof film about Hitler by Mel Brooks. We’ve had "Thatcher – The Musical”, and now, as if we haven’t suffered enough for Goodness sake, we look forward to “Prime Minister – The Musical”, a frothy confection about the life and times of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.

But, bless it, the letter’s page of the "Telegraph" has, over the last couple of days, tried its hardest to remove the cloud of depression that this ghastly thought has generated in me at least. One correspondent (a Mr Miller of Liphook Hants) firstly spilt the beans that the poor soul under consideration to play John Prescott in this new masterwork is, heaven help us, none other than Meat Loaf. Now, if ever you want a definition of the word “inspirational”, you’ve just read it.

But one wonders here whether our letter writer has stumbled on something akin to Anthony Blunt, The Third Man or Deep Throat (the Watergate version!) and discovered one of the great hidden secret stories of our age. The more you think about it, the more you conclude that there’s more to this tale than meets the eye.

Let’s look at the evidence. It’s fair to say that Prescott’s behaviour patterns are not what you’d expect of a Premier League politician. He is the very model of incoherence, grunting monosyllabically when you’d expect some attempt at rudimentary use of Common grammar and syntax – you know the sort of thing – Subject, Verb, Object. You expect from such people a vision, a way forward, a mesmerising, blazing oratory to energize us all to take up his new ideas and follow him at least towards, if not into, the Sunset.

And what have we got? A potentially great Croquet player. A man who spits his teeth out at audiences. A fairground employee’s level of ability in the noble art of Fisticuffs, just because someone landed an egg on him. A “serial groper”, who “just leapt on me at one party and his tongue was halfway down my throat” according to an ex (is that surprising?) - Labour Party Press Officer. A man who thrives on big cars, big houses and Big Macs. Now doesn’t that sound more like a rock star than a humble politician.

Perhaps our doughty correspondents have just seen what should have been obvious to us all along. We all thought when JP went to the USA last year and “allegedly” accepted hospitality at the ranch of Philip Anschutz, the billionnaire owner of the Millenium Dome, he was pushing the position of the Deputy Prime Minister a bit close to the line, seeing he was the Government official responsible for the regeneration of the site.

Perhaps, however, this was all a brilliant cover-up. Perhaps he was actually in the recording studio in America covertly working on the album for this new Musical. Perhaps they’re getting Meat Loaf to write all the songs, before he goes on tour with the show when it’s finished. There have been rumours that Meat Loaf and JP have been working together for some time on this project, Mr Prescott piecemeal, Mr Loaf more on a well, wholemeal basis. Perhaps even all the timing kerfuffle surrounding the PM’s departure is actually being arranged to allow Blair (Tony, not Lionel) to join the cast as lead guitar when his current job is over.

The second “Telegraph” correspondent (a Mr Lisney of SW6) even scoops the name of one of the songs in the show, which really confirms everything written above. You may still think all this is conjecture, but, as the BBC says in these instances, a document has just “come into my possession” which shows things to be far more advanced than we’d previously suspected.

The album cover for the Musical is already completed, and this blog presents it as a World Exclusive. Clearly derived from Meat Loaf’s previous albums, it shows our Prezza riding the famous motorbike which started Meat Loaf’s recording career off. The colour of the new album’s cover reflects JP’s new found Green, low non-Yeti sized Carbon Footprint leanings - only one car, only one House, only one woman.

And the title, which is so brilliantly scooped in My Lisney’s exposé confirms it all – “Bat Out of Hull”.

Remember, you saw it first here!

Tags:

Meat Loaf,
prescott,
Bat out of Hell

AND NOT A DROP TO DRINK ......

A short while ago, this Press release hit the newspapers, confirming that much of South East England were no longer under the grip of the hosepipe ban which had been in place since early 2006.

Press Releases

home page : news & comment : press releases : hosepipe ban update

Four water companies lift hosepipe ban
17/01/07

Thames Water, Three Valleys Water, Southern Water and Sutton and East Surrey Water today announced they are lifting their hosepipe ban effective immediately.

On the same day, in sunny Shropshire, the pictures below were taken of yet another major flooding which had hit the county. Now I know it's not as simple as all that, but on a day like the one in the pictures, a young man's thoughts turn to a National Water Grid, or at least a bloody big pipeline from Shrewsbury to somewhere like Croydon.

Yes, I know it would cost a lot of money, and yes, I'm know there are many reasons, all of them very carefully explained on the various Southern Water Company's Websites, why such an idea simply wouldn't work. But I'll bet you if old Isambard Kingdom B was still alive today, he'd be turning in his grave about it.

You can just hear him saying - "Let me at it."

THE IMAGES OF WATERGATE

The death of Howard Hunt, a few days ago, went relatively unnoticed, but here was a man at the centre of the greatest political scandal of the last century – Watergate. Even though Watergate was only 35 years ago, it seems to have faded in people’s memories, so the other day, I took another look at the Dustin Hoffman/Robert Redford film “All the President’s Men” to see what the fuss was all about. The film itself was good rather than great – too much of what didn’t suit the story was left out, and the narrative itself stopped way short of the real climax – Nixon’s resignation – the first President so to do.

However, when you re-read the story from this time-distance, and just look at the list of casualties it threw up, the whole thing was simply seismic – I don’t think America has still recovered from it. Trust (or more precisely, lack of trust), cynicism and lack of belief in the honour of those who govern them still remain. When Watergate claimed its final Presidential victim, the list included the Attorney General and his Deputy, Nixon’s Chief of Staff, and several front line “Counsels to the President” – many of the biggest cheeses around. This was in addition to a raft of lesser lights of whom Howard Hunt was one – the whole saga took down 40 people in the White House administration.

The almost complete ineffectiveness of the FBI investigation into Watergate doesn’t leave a warm feeling at all about the checks and balances in the American political structure. In the end it was down to a huge part played by the American press, almost exclusively “The Washington Post”, to piece together what had been going on. Had it not been for brave people like the Post’s editors Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee, and the dogged reporting of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the likelihood is that the scandal would not have turned out as it did.

The internet is a treasure-trove of little snippets about the goings-on in Washington during 1972-4, and as a taster just look at a terrific selection of the atmospheric photographs which “The Washington Post” has on its website. These pictures, which I think are a truly superlative set of images go straight to the heart of the story, and give you an unmatchable feel about the people involved. I do not apologise for showing quite a few of the collection, simply because they are all such good pictures.

I know of no better set of images covering a story which have come from one source – remarkably well done “The Washington Post”.

HOWARD HUNT'S NAME IN THE WATERGATE BURGLAR'S NOTEBOOK - THE ENTRY CONNECTED THEM TO THE WHITE HOUSE, AND THE SAGA OF WATERGATE STARTED

HOWARD HUNT DURING THE COURT HEARINGS

CARL BERNSTEIN AND BOB WOODWARD - SHOWING THAT DUSTIN HOFFMAN'S HAIRCUT WAS NOT A JOKE

ON THE CASE

WITH KATHARINE GRAHAM WHO RAN THE "POST" - THEY WROTE THE STORIES AND SHE TOOK THE MONUMENTAL RISK OF PUBLISHING THEM. JOHN MITCHELL, THE ATTORNEY GENERAL ONCE THREATENED HER - "KATHARINE GRAHAM'S GONNA GET HER TIT CAUGHT IN A BIG FAT WRINGER IF THAT'S EVER PUBLISHED". CAN YOU EVER IMAGINE LORD GOLDSMITH MATCHING THAT?

JOHN MITCHELL - ON TRIAL

ERLICHMAN - ON TRIAL.

NOT THE SORT OF MAN YOU'D WANT TO SHARE A BEER WITH!

CHARLES COLSON - ON TRIAL

JOHN DEAN AND HIS WIFE - IT WAS DEAN'S REFUSAL TO TAKE THE RAP, AND HIS DISCLOSURE THAT NIXON HAD MET HIM AT LEAST 35 TIMES ABOUT WATERGATE THAT STARTED NIXON'S DOWNFALL

NIXON -ON THE LAST DAY OF HIS PRESIDENCY

WHO - ME?

BARRY GOLDWATER CALLED NIXON "THE MOST DISHONEST MAN I EVER MET"

HE NEVER GAVE UP

Tags:

watergate ,nixon

THEY'RE ALL AT IT!

Having gone on a couple of nights ago about Hairdressers, and the punny names they all seem to like to call their emporia, I seem to have started to notice this little quirk a bit more. DrivIng home from the vets on Sunday, I went through a little village not too far from home and the road-sign which welcomed me was the one below.

With a name like that one's attention is immediately on alert, and passing through said village, I duly came across the Village Shop.

Need I say more?

GLOBAL WARMING - THE EVIDENCE MOUNTS

Gridlock on the roads around Shrewsbury last Friday - if this what Global Warming is going to do to us, I think I'd rather it stayed cold.

THE NAME'S THE PLAICE

The name on the façade of the shop where I have my hair cut is “Shirley Walker”, mainly because the name of the young lady who cuts my hair’s is - no bating of breath here – Shirley Walker. But for some reason, there’s something about being a hairdresser which drives them to dream up all manner of slightly heavy handed puns to name their businesses. There’s something about Hairdressers, and the way the world perceives them, which probably prevents you from ever confusing them with, let's say, a Hod Carrier. Probably the same reason which resulted in Nissan producing 100 or so of its new Micra C+C Convertibles in a hugely desirable shade of Barbie Pink - a case of Nissan vada-ing a bit of really bona Niche Marketing.

HEY JOHN - GOT A NEW MOTOR?

From a very cursory inspection, Fish shops run them close but, in reality, they must take second, er, plaice.

This name thing is a bit like when you buy a red Fiat, you suddenly start to see millions of red Fiats around. They’re there all the time, but normally we just don’t notice them. But, having seen a couple of Punnish Hairdresser’s names, I decided to make good use of my Double First in Advanced Sadness, and had a quick look around at the local Hairdressers to see if I was seeing “Reds under the Bed” here. If Shrewsbury, my local town, is even halfway normal, then the clear answer, at least on the Hairdresser front, is NO – they’re all at it.

Just from a skim of the local Yellow Pages, the following examples surface –

- Hair-Lines
- Hairlooms
- Alibarber (you just knew there had to be one of those)
- Razor Sharp
- Chopping Block
- A Cut Above
- Barnets
- Capability Brown
- Funky Barnetts
- Gold-E-Locks
- Guys’n’Molls
- Hairborne
- Hairline
- Hairport
- Headmasters
- Head Quarters
- Miles A Head
- Million Hairs
- Scizzor Sisters (I like that one)
- Sweeneys

And that’s just within a few miles of home in rural Shropshire, so Goodness knows what they call themselves in more literary places like Oxbridge. You don’t have to look much farther afield to come across a few more –

- Beyond the Fringe
- Urban Roots
- Talking Heads
- Under Your Hat
- Barbarella
- Blow Your Top
- Off Your Head
- Snippets
- Wavelength
- Hair Are We, and even
- Mad Hackers (At least you’ve been warned!)

Having now spent a worrying few minutes exploring the wit (or otherwise) of the Hairdresser, you start to wonder about other professions. If you want to change your kitchen floor, for instance, it would seem you can go to Croc-a-Tile (I need my floor laid, but make it snappy!), Versa-Tile, or even The Bonny Tiler!

And if for any reason, Taxidermy is your bag, you could approach (very carefully I would suggest in the case of the first one!) S&M Taxidermy, Chris Hackett, Bird Stuff, and (yes, you’ve guessed it) – Get Stuffed.

IAN RICHARDSON - 1934-2007

How very sad to read of Ian Richardson’s death yesterday.

Most of us, of non-Shakesperian stock, knew him through his acting on Television and in films, and it’s only when you read his “credits” that you realise the sheer volume of his work. He almost had two careers, firstly as a leading Shakesperian actor with the RSC until 1975, and latterly, following a nervous breakdown, as a hugely distinctive actor on TV and film. Think of the raft of “good” series on TV, and Richardson seemed to have been in most of them - Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Porterhouse Blue, Blunt (was ever a man better suited to a character?), Gormenghast and Bleak House to name but a few.

But his portrayal of the monstrous Francis Urquhart in the masterly "House of Cards" Trilogy is the one part of his which will stay in my mind for ever. Strangely, having very recently got a bit sick of the current Government dancing around their individual handbags over the “Cash for Questions” affair, I played “House of Cards” again. Once you start watching, you can’t stop – it’s riveting stuff, even 15 years on. It loses none of its sinister blackness, and Richardson’s cold, dark, precise and deliberate playing of Urquhart gives you a real sense of the creeps, and makes you believe that the things that went on in the three series could actually happen.

Of course, in the cold light of day, the idea of the Prime Minister throwing one of his advisors/mistresses off the parapet of the Palace of Westminster does strike one as a tad improbable. But, I’ll bet there are a lot of High-Up politicians over the last 15 years whose personal video copy of that sequence has worn a bit thin through overzealous use of the pause button. You can just imagine them thinking – “I just wonder…..”.