The boy whose suffering touched a nation.

 Like most people, I suspect, I've become a little bit immune to the daily dose of mindless violence which besmirches our newspapers and TV screens.  On the other hand, like most people who've read or heard about it, I find the cruelty inflicted upon poor six-year old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes almost defies belief.  How anyone could do something like that - least of all his parents -  is certainly beyond my comprehension: it's so far outside the range of normal human behaviour that you couldn't make it up (not that anyone would want to make something like up, although the wicked stepmother apparently tried to claim during her trial that people were making chunks of it up).  It made depressing, harrowing reading , raising the question "What the hell were those people thinking of??"  To which, of course the answer is "Themselves!"  They certainly weren't at any point thinking of poor Arthur, that's for sure. 

 In a lovely tribute to his short life, football fans up and down the country yesterday broke into applause and wore T-shirts with "We love you, Arthur" in reference to his plaintive cry of "No-one loves me", captured on video during the last day of his life.  Less convincing is the government's announcement of a "no stone unturned" review of what went so tragically wrong, because clearly something did and although this is certainly the worst case of child cruelty that I can remember reading about, it sadly isn't the first, and they keep happening despite officialdom's attempts to stop them from happening again.  Will this time be any different? 

At least the jail terms of 29 and 21 years apiece will have got justice of a sort for Arthur, so props to the West Midlands Police for building such a strong case and securing the conviction of two such determined and manipulative liars.   I don't believe they thought they were going to get caught.  I'm quite sure neither of them envisaged they were gonna be put on trial for murder, found guilty and sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in jail for what they'd done!  R.I.P Arthur.

 So.. that odious smug Matt Hancock may be about to get his come-uppance, I see.  Being caught with the proverbial trousers down was pretty careless to say the least, and a half-baked 'sorry' for being caught in flagrante delicto boesn't quite cut it.  I feel sorry for his wife and kids: being 'exposed' by the gutter press can't be pleasant, even when you're the innocent party.

 The question now is... where's JVT when you need him?  I quote his memorable response from this time last year "In my opinion, the rules are clear and they have always been clear.  In my opinion, they are for the benefit of all, and in my opinion, they apply to all."  Well said, that man!  Pity Boris doesn't appear to agree, but the weight of public opinion may yet force his hand.

The die is cast

And so - the fall-out from surprise result of last Thursday's referendum continues in the wake of the vote for "Brexit".  17.4 million Britons, or 51.9%  voted that they no longer want to remain in the EU.  Six weeks of campaigning produced a close result, which was expected, but an overall vote to leave, which wasn't.  There is apparently a petition currently attracting signatories - many of them allegedly fraudulent - demanding a re-run.  But seriously: the question was simple enough: in or out and it produced a majority in a free vote.  That's how democracy works in action.  You can't have endless re-runs using slightly different rules until you get the result you want.

I'm old enough to remember Britain's first attempts to join what was then known as the 'Common Market', twice frustrated in the 1960s by the veto of French President de Gaulle.  Over the years since then the face of Europe has changed beyond recognition with the virtual end of the Cold War, the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the enlargement of the EU into a sprawling union encompassing virtually every country in Europe.  The character of the union has changed too, from a simple trading area to a more of a political union raising in turn questions of national sovereignty.  So the pressure which gave rise to the demand for the referendum in the first place I think was inevitable.  What has tipped the balance seems to have been the migration/refugee crisis, Europe's collective failure to deal with it, and the resulting pressure on the UK public services and facilities.  A relevant question to my mind is why, with open borders and 25 other countries to choose from, do so many migrants want to come here?

Much of the scaremongering which marked the campaigning was just that - scaremongering.  The plain fact is that no-one actually knows what's going to happen to jobs, prices, and trading in the future.  Gone will be the loathsome petty diktats which regulated amongst other things the curvature of bananas.  Perhaps too we shall see the end of the 5% VAT on gas and electricity which was a Brussels imposition.  But I've no doubt whatever happens we shall survive.  Better off in some respects and worse off in others.  However the feeling of having chosen to do something as opposed to having it imposed against your wishes is in my view a price worth paying.

Allons-y!

 

Sowing and reaping

Like many people, I was both saddened and disturbed to read of the tragedy in Cults Academy, an Aberdeen secondary school, this week: a 16-year old pupil was stabbed to death by a classmate in what's been described as a "pointless fight which got out of hand".  Incidents such as this are fortunately still relatively rare in UK schools, but this one appears all the more shocking in that it occurred in what is reportedly a 'good' school in a 'nice area'.  In what must be every Head Teacher's worst nightmare, headmistress Anna Muirhead has paid tribute to the "gentle, caring pupil" Bailey Gwynne who lost his life, while presumably asking herself the question "How could something like this happen in my school?"  One young life has been lost, another has been turned upside down, while for two sets of families nothing will ever be the same again.

Rumours have surfaced to the effect that the attacker had been being "teased" about his weight but so far it's not at all clear what form this took. Judging by the outpouring of sympathy and the tributes that have been paid, Bailey doesn't fit the typical profile of a bully and I can't detect any undercurrents of this being an issue - although there is and always has been a fine line between the supposedly harmless tradition of teasing at school (in which the victim sometimes gives back as good as he or she gets) and its more malicious and sinister form properly known as bullying.

Fights themselves at schools are of course nothing new: we had playground fights when I was a schoolboy and I well remember the chant of "Fight... fight... fight..." that would go up as we all flocked round to try and get a better view.  That in turn was invariably the signal for a couple of prefects or a Master to appear out of nowhere and break it up, fortunately before any real harm had come to either of the participants.  I've written about my own experience of being picked on for a fight at school: looking back on it now, although I can still clearly remember who my assailant was, I've no idea what started it nor do I attach any real significance to it other than it being part of the rough-and-tumble of school life at the time.  I guess that's probably true of the ten or dozen other playground fights I witnessed during my schooldays, too.  But we never had fights or violence in corridors, still less in classrooms. Nor were weapons of any sort used.

So the other dimension, I suppose here, is the use of a knife.  We had metal knives rather than plastic for use in the school dining hall, albeit rather blunt ones.  And in those days quite a lot of boys had penknives, especially those who were keen on scouting activities (which didn't incidentally include the stabbing of fellow scouts - at least, not deliberately!).  I didn't own one as far as I recollect, nor did I have one of the other types popular at the time - a flick-knife.  Illegal I believe they were at the time, but brought back in appreciable numbers from the Continent!  I didn't personally know anyone who had one and I can't imagine that anyone who did would've dared bring it to school.         

Back in the present, there are no easy answers to the question of why this happened in the way that it did,  I daresay in the fullness of time questions will be asked, reports written and the proverbial "lessons will be learned".  That's what schools are for, after all.  But it will, sadly, come too late for poor Bailey.

What a difference a day makes!

The "day" in this case being the day of one's sixteenth birthday, when - amongst other things - sex becomes legal.  And that's the interesting facet of this story, which in other respects bears striking similarities to the Jeremy Forrest saga which I wrote about in my last entry.  The whole tone of the reporting is different: schoolteacher Emma Ager is not described as a 'paedophile' nor even a 'pervert' (she did, after all, turn down the request for a threesome).  The teenage boy pupil is not a 'victim', nor was he 'abused' - he simply became a "legend" when the inevitable happened and all his mates found out.  And neither was he 'groomed': after all, "I bet you won't be able to keep up with me during sex" is hardly the subtlest chat-up line to use.  Admittedly they didn't run away to France together when his mother got suspicious about the phone calls and told the school - the whole thing in fact seems to have not been a "relationship" in any meaningful sense of the word.

But it was illegal: she was a teacher at his school, he was a pupil under 18 - the whole "abuse of trust" scenario is plain to see, and she quite rightly has now been struck off for it.  She has not, however, as the commentators on the article have been quick to point out, ended up in jail.  Admittedly prosecutions for sexual offences are largely contingent on the alleged victim(s) filing a complaint, and the boy seems to me to have had no obvious reason to make one, since he both started and finished the affair.  Furthermore it's only just now surfaced, six years after the event.

Despite all that I may perhaps be forgiven for wondering if it doesn't stink ever so slightly of double standards - especially with the top-rated comments being along the lines of "lucky lad"?           

Pour encourager les autres?

Back in the autumn of last year, I wrote about the news story which had hit the headlines - the maths teacher by the name of Jeremy Forrest who'd fled to France with his 15-year old girl pupil.  I'd better not link to it, because I'm no longer legally allowed to name her, despite the fact that like everyone else I could and did back then.

Nine months on, the wheels of justice have turned inexorably on, and after a two-week trial the sentence handed down on Friday was five-and-a-half years imprisonment.  What?  You get less than that for killing someone.  Having said that, it was rather telling, I thought, that the initial charge of child abduction for which the jury found him guilty only accounted for a year of the sentence.  Perhaps even the learned judge thought it rather quaint to "abduct" a willing participant who testified in Court that she pretty much called the shots in the whole episode.  But alas, their undoing appears to have been the fact that not only had they had illicit sex on multiple occasions before the fateful ferry trip, they hadn't been altogether overly discreet about it.  I mean, come on now.... if you go bragging to your mates that you were 'at it' eight times in one night, and store photos on your phone, don't be surprised if someone drops you in it.  The icing on the prosecution's cake.

And of course, the coup de grâce was that it was her teacher who'd crossed the line, broken all the rules and "betrayed the trust".  Had it been another pupil, there'd have been a bit of aggravation but on nothing like the same scale, and it probably wouldn't even have ended up in Court - any more than the thousands of other older boys who have underage sex.  The prosecutor predictably enough then went for the jugular by labelling the defendant a paedophile, and it's a pity the judge didn't see fit to correct him, if only for the jury's benefit, by pointing out that the term when used correctly describes sexual interest in pre-pubescent children.

Not like Romeo and Juliet, then?  I failed O level English Literature so I wouldn't know.  But Juliet appears in this case to have been supporting her Romeo almost to the extent of being what I think the Americans would term a 'hostile witness'.  And in a Sun exclusive *where else* she declares she's still in love, was capable all along of making her own decisions and will wait for her Romeo's release.

Knock off the nine months he spent on remand, and with automatic release on licence halfway through the sentence, by which time she'll have turned 18 and be free to do as she pleases.  Is the love story then going to have a happy ending?  I wonder.....

Of cans... and the worms that lie therein

In a blog entry written round about this time last year, I concluded with the observation: "In an age increasingly dominated by revelations of sleaze amongst the rich and famous, it's a refreshing change to have come across a genuinely good person".  Normally, I stand by what I write on here as being an accurate reflection of my thoughts and feelings, based on my own perceptions and experience.  However, I'm neither omniscient, infallible nor clairvoyant and so I wasn't to know that other peoples' childhood memories of the late Jimmy Savile are considerably less happy and innocent than mine were.

The full story is yet to emerge.  While I have considerable reservations about the principle of launching accusations against people who are dead and therefore unable to respond to them - and the cynic in me can't help wondering if there's a "me too" element involved with an eye on a prospective claim for compensation - can this many people really be making it all up?  There's certainly a disturbing element of complicity and cover-up allegedly involved and a better-than-average chance that other famous names may get caught up in the fall-out.

Thinking back to when I was a teenager at the time, I'd have been an innocent victim, too.  Would the word of an unknown 13- or 14- year old boy be believed against that of a "respected" broadcaster?  Of course it wouldn't.  Would I have been naive enough to believe that being groped - or worse - by a famous DJ was 'par for the course'?  I might well have done, having overcome the initial shock.  The "untouchables" rely on their victims' continuing silence, as well as on the co-operation of their accomplices.  No-one, but no-one is in a position to blow the whistle.

What's going to eventually happen is at the moment pure conjecture.  The police are still trying to build up a complete picture of the extent of what went on, and you can't of course prosecute a dead person - although you can strip someone posthumously of their knighthood (incidentally I think it's high time we ditched that particular anachronism which has its origins in medieval chivalry, but that's another story).  But if a prima facie case is eventually made out, what good's it going to do?  It's bound to give the victims some sort of satisfaction, certainly.  Perhaps more significantly, it might at last make some headway towards encouraging other victims of abuse to come forward and take a firmer stand.  As events in Rochdale have recently shown, the problem is still being swept under the carpet just as it apparently was thirty or more years ago.

Trial by Jury Facebook

His dream in ruins, the hapless Jeremy Forrest was hauled into a Bordeaux court this morning, handcuffed - and complete with a coat over his head!  What was the point of that, incidentally: his photo was in every paper in the land last week, everyone knows what he looks like?  Anyway, if all goes according to plan, the extradition will be finalized on Thursday and he'll be winging his way back shortly afterwards.

Talking of things going to plan (or rather not, as the case may be) the journos have been busy digging away to find out what really went on last week.  The answer, we're told, is a staying in a seedy back-street hotel, living out of packed bags and subsisting off kebab takeaways.  Oh, and the thing that "betrayed" him - the dodgy fake CV.  Personally I'd have thought that was enough to tarnish the gilding a smidgeon on any fairytale romance, but maybe that's just me.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Megan Stammers, who was flown home on Saturday, has been staying at an "undisclosed location" being interviewed by the authorities (I do hope they're feeding her well after all those kebabs).  Presumably she'll soon have to start back at school: I mean, she's had a week-and-a-half of 'unauthorized absence from school' already or hasn't anyone else cottoned on to that yet?

There's certainly been no shortage of comment on all this.  After all, being a pupil at school is something almost everyone has had at least some personal experience of.  One that struck a particular resonance with me is this one on pupils' changing perceptions of their teachers.  Coincidentally I was just fifteen, when at my all-boys grammar school, we got our very first female teacher.  Married (well, a Mrs at least), 40-ish and by swinging sixties standards somewhat frumpish, she was in our eyes definitely not flirt material.  Her arrival to take our German O level classes nevertheless provided us 15-year old boys with something of a lively conversation topic, which soon descended into plumbing depths of hitherto uncharted vulgarity.  Certainly no-one had a crush on her, and if she had one on any of us she kept it well hidden.  Had she been on the other hand young, single and attractive (or even two out of the three) I can think of several of my ex-classmates who'd have been more than willing to test the water to see if they were in with a chance!  Taking that line of thought one stage further, I'm willing to bet that - then as now - if a 15-year old boy had run off with a 30-year old married female teacher, the level of outright condemnation and frankly rather judgemental criticism would be much more muted.

Perhaps rather tantalizingly if cryptically, Jeremy's lawyer has indicated that we can "look forward to the full story emerging".  Fair size chunks of it already have, courtesy of some determined ferreting.  Some of it scrupulous, some less so.  In my schooldays this would have seen the light of day in the form of a scandalous 'exposé' in the now-defunct News of the World.  Now, thanks to the magic of the internet, considerable material can be amassed and pieced together bit by bit: a tweet here, a photo there, a wish list, a diary entry, a link.... there's a reason it's known as the "Web", you know.  Everyone can play at being detective: forget privacy settings, a picture of sorts can still be assembled.  It may be incomplete or inaccurate: stuff uploaded in all innocence or with the best of intentions can appear to assume a sinister significance far removed from the one its owner or author may have intended.  The finger of guilt will point.

And maybe that's the moral in this story for all of us.  If you're ever accused or suspected or wrongdoing, the thing that will hang, draw and quarter you - even if you're innocent - will be your Facebook page.

Hang on a minute, though..... what now?

So, the runaways have been found, I see.  Twitter is chirping positively nineteen to the dozen with tweets of joy expressing how relieved all her family and friends are at the prospect of having young Megan Stammers back home again.  Don't get me wrong, I'm glad she's apparently safe and well and hasn't suffered the same fate as countless other teenage runaways: in that respect at least she's been lucky.

The reports however are that the pair were spotted strolling hand-in-hand like any young lovers down a main shopping street in the middle of Bordeaux in broad daylight and the police were tipped off.  Megan was said to be "in floods of tears" when the police separated them.  Which suggests to me that she may perhaps not in fact have actually wanted to come back and be reunited joyfully with her family - or at least not just yet.  Either way, the scenario certainly doesn't bear the hallmark of a kidnap victim, and whatever the legal nicities of it, an "abduction" is not the word I'd use to use to describe it.

Jeremy Forrest the maths teacher is under arrest and if I were he, I'd get myself a good lawyer sharpish: he's going to need one.  His job and marriage I imagine are down the tube, and despite the UK judiciary's propensity for pretty perverse sentencing, he's got to be looking at jail time as being on the cards.

And what's Megan going to make of that, I wonder?  She's had an awful lot of her private life dissected in public this week (if anything on Twitter or Facebook can legitimately be described as "private", that is).  Will she blame her parents and/or the police for the abrupt end to her little escapade and the loss of the guy she loved (or thought she did)?  How will she look back on it in years to come?  What will she make of all the things that have been written about her?  Will she one day end up on the Jeremy Kyle show *shudders*?

We shall probably never know.  Out of the harsh glare of media publicity, some semblance of a normal schoolgirl's life should start to return.  But I doubt somehow that either of them are ever going to be able to just carry on as if none of it had ever happened.

... and crushes on 'Miss'

"Childhood is a time of innocence" used to be the old saying.  Much or most of what I remember doing as a child was innocent enough, and although I don't particularly recollect having a schoolboy crush on any of my Junior school 'Miss-es' (or anyone else either) it certainly wouldn't have been looked upon as unusual - almost a rite of passage, you might say.  Going to an all-boys secondary school with (until I was in my O-level year) all-male teachers effectively then ruled out crushes anyway.  In fact we never knew anything much of what our teachers did in their private lives - even those whose own sons were at the school: it was regarded as bad etiquette to tittle-tattle or indulge in slanderous gossip.  And in the days when "social networking" was decades into the future, when phones were things on the end of a wire fixed to the wall, and when "grooming" meant nothing more sinister than making yourself look presentable with the aid of a brush and comb, it was all pretty harmless anyway.  The doodles on the cover of your exercise book and the names on the inside of your satchel or pencil-case weren't plastered all over Facebook and Twitter for all the world to see.

So I can't help feeling a little sorry for Megan Stammers and Jeremy Forrest, the story of whose 'crush' and subsequent 'elopement' to France has been plastered all over the papers this week.  I make no judgement on the rights and wrongs of this, save to say that basically tradition has it that the guy always cops the blame, because whichever way you slice it, he's old enough and supposedly mature enough to know better.  There is some probing and much apparent obfuscation over how much the school, the police and the parents knew beforehand about what had been going on, and what they were doing about it - the net result of which is probably going to make it more awkward for the star-struck lovers to return, if that in fact is what they eventually intended to do.

So far, almost a week after they were spotted on a cross-channel ferry to Calais, the couple seem to have disappeared without trace, although they could now be practically anywhere in Europe.  I've seen it reported that the usage of CCTV and ANPR on the continent isn't anywhere near as extensive as it is the 'nosey' UK, and the fact is (a) they're not armed bank robbers being pursued by a manhunt and (b) no-one really knows where to start looking.  In a way the romantic in me hopes it all works out for them, but the harsh reality of life is that it's far more probable to all end in tears.  Compared to all the missing teenage runaways who disappear every day of the week without anyone much even bothering to start looking for them, 15-year old schoolgirl Megan has at least had a bit of a head start at being found.

Publish and be damned

It had to happen, of course: the only question is what took them so long.  But today, the Sun (who else!) have broken ranks in time-honoured style to become the first British national daily to publish the now-notorious photos of a naked Prince Harry romping in a Las Vegas hotel room.

Were it almost anyone else, it wouldn't even be news.  I've never been to Las Vegas (and have no desire to do so in the future) but I've no doubt people do that in hotel rooms there every day of the week, and probably every hour of the day.  The fact of a possible heir to the throne doing it isn't in itself particularly shocking: he's 27, single and passably eligible.  To allow himself, albeit unwittingly, to be photographed doing it and the results plastered all over the internet is at best an error of judgement and may perhaps encourage him to choose his girlfriends a little more circumspectly in future.

The Palace have reportedly done their best "We are not amused" act from which we're given to understand that any British newspaper publishing the photos would do so at their peril.  Publish and be damned, then!  Long gone are the days when journalists could be clapped in the Tower for displeasing the monarch, and the plain fact is that since the photos are effectively in the public domain, albeit having been put there (presumably) without the subject's consent, any "invasion of privacy" issue is already a done deed.  We're not told what the royal bodyguards were doing while all this was going on - perhaps having a strip party of their own?  But their role is primarily to stop undesirables getting anywhere near, not to act as 24/7 party poopers.

The "public interest" argument for publication is a little less cut-and-dried.  My guess is that most people who want to see the photo have by now already seen it - and it doesn't really raise any important questions of uncovering hidden secrets that the public have a right to know.  The Prince comes of course from a long line of rakes, whose exploits through the ages make this little indiscretion pale into insignificance.  But then of course his grandmother, who epitomises responsible majesty and utmost respectability, would probably prefer us not to be reminded of that - or at least not so publicly. 

A rose by any other name

I was fascinated to spot a "leaked" article in the news yesterday, reporting that the Education Secretary apparently plans to scrap GCSEs and bring back O-levels!

Thirty years after the demise of the O-level, it's at least being recognized and acknowledged that the standard of GCSEs is nowhere near comparable and the pernicious creeping influence of grade inflation is rendering them almost useless as a true indicator of any real ability in the subject.  Predictably, the plans have drawn howls of protest from the teaching unions and also from the Lib Dems, who I suspect are mainly just miffed because they weren't consulted about it first.  It's perhaps rather bad timing for the thousands of kids sitting their GCSEs at the moment, who are understandably not going to be best pleased about the idea of their exams being 'too easy'.  We're told there's also to be a new-style CSE exam for the "less able" pupils, so everyone should - at least in theory - have the chance of coming away with a qualification of some description, and if the end result of all this is a system that actually matches the pupil's real ability it's got to be an improvement on the present rather shambolic state of affairs.

I rather hope the actual terms O-level and CSE are re-introduced, although early indications are the acronyms themselves might not be.  But millions of people know what they stood for, would be pleased to see the return of the standard of education that prevailed when they were last used, and are going to be disappointed if it all turns out to amount to nothing.

Seconds no more?

I hadn't actually been following it regularly, but on the couple of occasions I'd seen it mentioned somewhere and taken a look, I was quite impressed with the NeverSeconds- the nine-year old Scottish schoolgirl's daily account of what her school dinners consisted of.  I can't actually remember what I had for school dinners at her age, but I will admit my recollections of school dinners at secondary school are not particularly favourable ones, and I can't help feeling today's kids get a better deal overall than we did - aided and abetted by Jamie Oliver's intervention, no doubt.  Nevertheless, some of "Veg's" meals looked pretty dire, and at £2 apiece not outstanding value for money - although at least she had a choice, which is more than we ever got.

However, it was very enterprising of her, I thought, and at the same time quite supportive of the school, since the photos were apparently all taken with their consent if not encouragement.  Sadly, the school catering service which is run by the local council, came in for some hefty criticism from an article in a national daily paper, and the aforesaid council  chose to metaphorically shoot the messenger in true council jobsworth style by banning the taking of any more photos: the reason given being that the catering staff were upset and "feared for their jobs".  As far as I can make out, the photos simply recorded what "Veg" chose to eat that day from what was available: there's no suggestion that the photos or comments were doctored or chosen to present an unfavourable or unfairly biased representation, and indeed some of the fare looked (and was reported to have tasted) quite good.  Not only that, she raised a staggering amount for charity via the blog.

Anyway, the ban apparently generated so much criticism and bad publicity for the council in such a short space of time, that I see they've now done the decent thing (and probably the only sensible thing under the circumstances) and promptly rescinded it.  Common sense prevails!  

Oh, and we never got seconds of school dinners either - except when the food was so unsurpassingly awful that there was loads of it left over.          

   

Apathy rules... OK?

This week's local council elections produced few real surprises, which I always feel accounts for why the turnout is almost invariably low (generally around the 25-30% mark).  In the absence of any particularly contentious local issues, the policies put forward by the candidates tend to reflect those advocated by their respective parties nationally, and it therefore should come as no wonder that those electors who bother to vote at all seem to take it as an opportunity to express their level of satisfaction with how the government of the day is performing.

A slightly more novel twist this time round was the addition of a referendum vote on whether our City should have an elected mayor.  Perhaps rather confusingly, we already have a Lord Mayor, which as the title perhaps possibly implies, is more of a ceremonial office.  The idea was apparently inspired by the success of London's elected mayor, the Prime Minister being reported as saying he wanted to see "a Boris in every city"!  While I can see the virtue of having a Mayor in London in overall charge of the city as a whole where the day-to-day services are provided by local Borough Councils specific to the area you live in, the same scenario isn't true of Coventry which has only one City Council.  Sceptic that I am, I could foresee at best confusion over who was elected to do what, and at worst a series of constant conflicts with the result that nothing ever got done.  Evidently I wasn't alone in that thought: the vote was almost 2:1 against the idea.

Those who wanted an elected mayor here are predictably disappointed, blaming amongst other things allegedly biased press coverage and the wording of the question on the ballot paper, while ignoring the rather obvious inference that the majority of voters either didn't want one or couldn't care less one way or the other.  At the same time, I suspect the likelihood of anyone standing who had the charisma of either Boris or Ken, probably seemed rather remote in peoples' minds. 

Meanwhile, down in London, I see Boris got re-elected - albeit by a narrow margin.  Once described, I thought rather aptly, as a "buffoon", I suppose he must be nevertheless rather a likeable one.  After all, a million people can't be wrong... can they?

Awww... diddums

I'm not sure if it's the silly season for news or something, but I was a little taken aback by the story of the 6-year old girl "abandoned" and "in tears" because the school bus apparently dropped her off at the bus stop too early and there was no-one to escort her 50 yards up the road into the school.

As you'd expect, many of the comments on the article are from people vying with each other to tell the best 'hard times' stories of how far/how long they had to walk to school at her age back in the 'good old days'. That I can certainly relate to: at the age of six I remember my mother used to walk me to school (there was no such thing as the "school run" because very few people could afford cars and we certainly couldn't). I'm not sure how far away we lived: it was certainly an isolated house on the outskirts of the village, so maybe 15-20 minutes? At Junior School I went with the other kids on the 'School Bus' (a converted 3-ton Army truck) and at Secondary School I went on my own, first on foot and then, when we moved to Kenilworth, by bus. So my mother only took me up until the age of about seven. I knew where the school was, where I lived, and roughly what to do if there was a problem - which incidentally wouldn't have included the use of a mobile phone.

My mother was a "full-time mum" *what a ghastly expression that is?* until I was 11 or 12 when she went back to work, although only part-time. I was taught to be self-reliant and to use a bit of common-sense and initiative, so I don't think I'd have been "sobbing for a quarter of an hour" just because there was no-one else around. There again, in those days, school gates weren't commonly locked. I suppose we shouldn't judge too harshly, but part of growing up is learning to be a bit independent and coping when things go wrong without relying on everyone else all the time - while at the same time developing the good sense to stay out of real danger.

Oh, and what a lovely line in petulant pouting young Katie has got in the (obviously posed) photo there!

Save water... bath with a friend?

The recent spell of uncharacteristically warm Spring weather came to an abrupt end yesterday, with a chilly night giving way to stormy conditions: rain, sleet... and snow!  The snow admittedly hasn't amounted to much here, but it's the first wet day we've seen for about a fortnight I think - prompting slightly panicky pronouncements of drought conditions and imminent hosepipe bans, reminiscent of the famous drought of 1976.  Looking out now at the rain lashing against the window-pane and the phone wires bouncing in the wind, unending sunshine with temperatures in the 90s for days on end seems an attractive proposition.  It's tempting to conclude that we've learnt nothing about conserving water in the last 35 years, but then again there's arguably been no desparate need to.

I remember the house we lived in when I was a teenager: a pre-war detached house in Kenilworth which boasted an iron rainwater tank just above the kitchen, into which all the downpipes from the roof guttering emptied.  I'm not sure which of the previous owners had the idea to build it: it always struck me as being a bit bizarre, and none of the neighbours had one as far as I know.  It had a tap just by the back door, and during the summer we used it to water the garden, which was a large one and took an hour or two even using a hosepipe.  I don't think I ever found out how much it held, but in the ten years or so I lived there, I only recollect it actually running dry once.  When my parents later on had an extension built on the back of the house, they had the tank removed - which with the benefit of hindsight might perhaps have turned out to have been a mistake.

Oddly enough, the little pond in the local woods, which last year dried up to caked mud for most of the summer, this year seems to be starting to fill with water again - presumably from the rain, as there isn't a stream or anything there as far as I know.  Evidently there is water around, just not where it's needed most.  Which shouldn't really be that much of a problem: after all, the Romans were building aqueducts two thousand years ago! 

Just don't do it in the street and frighten the horses

I had my attention drawn earlier today to this report of an acquittal under the Obscene Publications Act relating to the distribution of an allegedly obscene DVD.  The DVD in question portrays "hardcore" gay sex acts - apparently including "fisting between men, urination, and incidents of sado-masochism". 

The acts themselves are of course not (or perhaps more accurately, no longer)  illegal between consenting adults.  It's the portrayal of them which constituted the alleged offence.  I haven't seen the DVD, so I'm not in a position to comment on whether the material in it is any more likely to "deprave" or "corrupt" than the multitude of clips on X-Tube and elswhere which I have seen catering for the same sort of tastes.  But for me one of the most telling things to emerge from the trial is the revelation that the jury "Although they were quite shocked initially, ... started to look quite bored very quickly"

That certainly echoes my experience of watching a supposedly hardcore German sex video loaned to me some years ago by a colleague at work.  The performances were all very laboured in the extreme: none of the participants seemed to be enjoying any of it and it was totally devoid of any sort of artistry.  Maybe I just wasn't in a receptive mood when I was watching it? 

The article to which I've linked reports that discussions will be taking place with the CPS and the BBFC.  Good.  Crown Court trials don't come cheap, and I feel bound to make the comment that it was a waste of public money: what useful purpose would a conviction would have served?  There's no suggestion that the DVD was being sold to minors, nor that the prospective purchasers weren't fully aware of what they were getting.  The BBFC's role of cinema censorship has, thankfully, dwindled over the years and is now more or less confined to 'grading' films according to their content and suitability for a potentially underage audience.  Leaving aside the obvious exception of childporn, it really shouldn't in the 21st century be necessary to worry about whether R18 material is going to deprave or corrupt the viewers it's aimed at and sold to.     

Now then, now then, now then... guys and gals!

I was saddened this weekend to read of the death of Jimmy Savile.  Definitely one of life's great characters, the perennially tracksuited figure, dripping with gold jewellery and resplendent with fat cigar is one of my most enduring childhood recollections - and long before the word "chav" was even thought of!

I think back to all the nights I spent listening to that distinctive voice on Radio Luxembourg, my transistor radio sneakily hidden under the bedclothes when my parents fondly imagined I'd gone to sleep!  To that very first "Top of the Pops" way back in the year I took my O levels, and then to the Sunday lunchtime Radio 1 "Double Top Ten Show" with its challenge of 'points' awarded for remembering the hits of years gone by: I think I still have some old reel-to-reel tape recordings of some of them.

The stories he used to tell of being a porter at Leeds Royal Infirmary, his fundraising exploits for Stoke Mandeville - and of course, all those Marathons he ran!  In an age increasingly dominated by revelations of sleaze amongst the rich and famous, it's a refreshing change to have come across a genuinely good person.

"How's about that then?" 

Happy landings!

Although I'd seen the initial account a couple of months back of the emperor penguin  who came ashore on a beach near Wellington, New Zealand, I hadn't been following the story all that closely.  Nevertheless "Happy Feet", as he's been nicknamed, does seem to have captured something of a worldwide following: penguins are undeniably kinda cute in most people's estimation and I must admit that I can see why he's become something of an international celebrity.  The 'feelgood factor' rules, definitely!  

My knowledge of the subject was hitherto limited to a rather sterotypical image of rows of birds waddling across the Antarctic ice sheet, and I found the blog account of his background rather fascinating.  It's still something of a mystery how he made his way so far from his natural habitat, but then Nature is full of surprising and remarkable achievements (surprising to us humans, at any rate).

As befits Happy Feet's superstar status, he's now got his own website complete with a tracking map to show where he swims to and how far he's got on his journey home - assuming, that is, that he's going "home".  Maybe he's not finished exploring just yet!  He's got his legion of Twitter fans rooting for him and wishing him well on his travels, at any rate.

Bon voyage, Happy Feet!

When only the best will do.....

Unsurprisingly, this year's A-Level results have created an intense pressure for university places, before the fees go up next year. Although the proportion of pupils getting As or A*s, at 27%, is only slightly up from last year, as far as getting a place on the course of your choice is concerned I think you could be forgiven for thinking that anything less isn't worth the paper it's written on. At any rate, it's a far cry from the 1960s, when I took mine, and the top 27% would've included both As and Bs and the top 2% of Cs as well. And an overall pass rate of about 98%, I think has to raise questions about the validity of an exam which hardly anyone now fails.

Not that I'm knocking the achievements of this year's A level students. Thinking back, I remember two years of solid hard slog to get there, wondering at times whether it was all going to be worth it. Both French and German - the two subjects which gained me my As - have undergone a decline in popularity over the last decade, despite the fact that the students of today no longer have to sit through the interminable study of set texts which plagued me when I did mine.

As far as the question of "soft" options go, this is another question which yet again rears its ugly head. The then-new A level General Studies wasn't counted as worth anything by Universities, and so I didn't bother to take it, opting instead for a couple of now-defunct S-Levels. If subjects such as Media Studies are to be denigrated as not "proper" A-levels, then to my mind that is the fault of the examining boards for not devising a syllabus which is exacting enough, and the fault of the Universities for giving them a parity in the points allocation. Whatever happened to the proviso that you had to have a track record of excellence in the subject you were applying to study?

There again, the tendency of Universities to broaden the scope of degree offerings has contributed a lot to the 'Micky Mouse Degree' accusations. In 1980 I went to Polytechnic part-time for three years and got a BA in Librarianship. As a primarily 'vocational' qualification (which my employer declined to pay for, incidentally) it hardly rates alongside an Oxbridge Honours in Classics. But although it didn't bring me fame and fortune (or even an increase in salary) I'm kinda proud of my achievement. And in an educational system which seems these days to be increasingly focused on mediocrity, I guess that's reason enough.