Wednesday 29 April 2009

Not the worst result for Arsenal I think. Not sure what Diaby contributed in the game. Expect a team like United to be able to punish ten men (or nine when bendtner came on).

Tuesday 28 April 2009

Bad guts

Returned home from the Arsenal game on Sunday by way of a crappy bar in Peterborough (Bogarts has been closed due to allowing underage drinking). Met with some locals and decided it's about time I got to know the denizens of this city. And they were horrible. I tried to like them but the group I met were insincere, obnoxious and spoiling for a fight. And that was just the girls. Pugnacious and vituperative. They also liked to appropriate personal belongings. It was like being back at school and running in to the bullies. This is what happened to them. Their moment of triumphant success was in the playground and they want to prolong it.

I have a stomach ache - irritable bowel I guess you'd say. Took the time off work just as the swineflu thing was appearing. I have done loads of work on preparednes for bird flu and it all applies. I feel like I ought to be there in order to busybody around with bird flu but in fact as an advisor I am only one or two steps ahead of them and in my absence they have taken all the right decisions. Maybe I'm not really needed although I suspect it would reassure them to know I'd had some involvement.

One aspect of the Mexican outbreak that hasn't really been revealed is the age and prior state of health of the fatalities. Flu is survivable with prompt medical care, as is secondary pneumonia. But in an overcrowded smoggy place like Mexico City would flu have a higher rate of attrition than in San Diego? I suspect so, especially amongst the elderly, the poor and neonatals. We should still have only a watching brief rather than a reactionary response at this stage I think. At the moment the WHO are discussing changing the alert status to 5. That would be to say that the virus has reached pandemic potential status and would trigger antiviral production. If they do that we could have just as many fatalities from seasonal flu amongst those who would normaly be vaccinated in the approaching season. They will be elderly and infirm and children. Big decision. Most of the recent typed patients with swine flu in the US and Canada and now the UK have pretty mild symptoms. Testing positive for A(H1N1) doesn't mean you are going to die. The important thing is to quarantine those who test positive (for one thing to prevent further mutation possibilities interacting in a host with another virus).

It's safe to eat pork as well.

It emerges now through the WHO press conference that Mexican victims were apparently healthy young adults and that the similar virus was cropping up in different locations. This doesn't explain why they have a large number of fatalities in Mexico and none abroad. But it does bear the hallmarks of early stage pandemic in that, like 1918, it isn't just attritional amongst those who would not have a high probability of surviving an acute febrile infection. I think the next trigger point will be a fatality in another country.

Friday 24 April 2009

Panorama - may contain nuts

The Panorama program approached the subject of health and safety exactly like any member of the public. They resent being told what to do, don't like well paid consultants, will not countenance any risk for their own loved ones but are happy to accept significant personal risk if the rewards are there, feel someone should always be blamed for any failure, hate bureaucracy but demand accounatbility, think that government agencies are incompetent and do not like beauty spots or burial places for their loved ones desecrated. All of these things sound like "common sense" but are actually complex and interdependent issues and some must always be sacrificed for others. The primary tool is good risk assessment (and the program did point this out and should be credited for that at least). The National Trust got it right and Bassetlaw got it wrong. The greater the risk, the greater the need for rigour and intelligence in risk assessment. Noise is never fatal so the control measures must be proportionate but it is complex - sound not just a level on a db meter. You can't do sound level monitoring on an iphone and the noise regs when properly applied using a proper judgement of risk should never interfere with a cellists interpretation of Elgar. That there are serious uncontrolled risks on construction sites up and down the country going begging for a good H&S intervention whilst our artists are being assailed by over fussy regulation is a travesty and they are right to point this out. As professionals we need to avoid jerking our knee every time an investigation uses a slightly mickeytaking style to address genuine concerns about how much regulation and enforcement is enough.The fear of getting sued is massively overstated and the threat of it allows all sorts of busybodying disguised as H&S. This is giving the whole profession a bad name and providing ammunition for our detractors. It's some of the professionals that need training first; training to get out of the restrictive uptight and hidebound mindset and to explouit deregulation rather than beg for proscription and invent it where it's lacking (guidance is only guidance, it's ACOPs that have less wiggle room). Training to open up their creative processes in finding novel solutions to allow the right amount of risk; to faciltate, as one judge put it "well thought through risk taking" . Training to understand that some people follow rules and some don't, to find out why, and to properly decide where different control measures are needed for each circumstance. We are getting better all the time I think and we're only really being undermined by a handful of instances of poor judgement. But we must be aware that every single one is food for lazy journalists. A bit of self criticism in the business of H&S wouldn't go amiss. Just because we're criticised collectively for one individuals barmy misreading of a reg or cotton wool control measure doesn't mean we should't examine our solutions sometimes and ask ouselves if we really took all our possible stakeholders into account when we chose them

Sunday 19 April 2009

New England

I had a very productive day. This is what happens when I'm not knackered from work. Tongued and grooved the bath panel to a rocksteady beat, bought some tools from B& Q and went down the dump twice. The dump is a difficult place to be if you're not either a mouth breathing simpleton in a hi-vis vest or a middle aged woman with an Audi full of cardboard and paving slabs. The latter, blissfully unaware of the queue behind her, decides to park nearest the skip she needs and then blocks off parking for anyone further up. Selfish; but then women never discern the unwritten road rules most men implicitly understand. It's why we let each other out of junctions in turn and park 2 ft (no more, no less) from each other. It's a kind of graciousness but it's really born out of competence. I leave another driver enough room to get out of a parking spot but not so much that another car can't park in the remaining space. In this age of equality why have women not adopted the characteristic courtesy they have always expected from men, along with the rights they so desparately desired? Rhetorical questions should of course avoided in blogs, but luckily I have had no comments yet and no one seems to have twigged this blog (although a couple of people asked for a link - which is nice).

I had some weird philosophical experiences yesterday. I went to the corner shop and the owner was chatting with another asian man and felt the need to explain the gist of his conversation to me after his friend left. "He thinks I look Indian" he said. I shrugged. The owner then went on to explain that people from the subcontinent should be distinguished only by whether they are Hindu or Muslim, as any other type of classification risks causing offence. He then went on to explain that Christian snd Muslims have more in common with each other than with Hindu's. "90 percent of the bible" he said, "is the same as the Qu'uran". By this time I was edging towards the door. He didn't speak enough English for me to argue with the obviously crackers conjecture even if he had left room for me to respond. Seeing my anxiety he told me, "I'm not Al-Qaeda". "I'm sure very few people really are" I said. "Well Mohammed", he retorted, "was persecuted for 10 years and when the Angel Gibril came to him and asked him if he'd like the city of his persecutors destroyed, he answered No".

I didn't know this story. I take it that this is a significant story of compassion and forgiveness. But to point it out as if it was the semi-divine character of The Prophet that stayed God's hand - like the normal and obvious thing to have done was to have beseeched the angel to raze the place to the ground - seemed like sophistry. I would not have wanted to see the destruction of a whole city either, even if a few of it's inhabitants had cruelly abused me. And I'm not a prophet. That's because I know bigotry is limited to the ignorant and insecure and is ultimately only going to lead to defeat. The Jews know this. They do not burn with desire for the destruction of Germany. They can tell the difference.

Then I went to the second hand shop to look at a bookcase (which was knackered as it turns out). Inside is a man of east mediterranean extraction ranting about how he hates the Poles. He went so far as to say that Hitler had the right idea invading them. I didn't stay to hear the rest of his sermon. Nevertheless I could deduce he clearly has the idea that any mass extermination of a swathe of people who belong to a group a member of whom has recently pissed you off, is perfectly reasonable - like Hitler was some kind of personal valet-cum-bodyguard working to clear the park of oiks so you could picnic in peace. No suggestion that when - to paraphrase Pastor Martin Niemöller - they have finished with whichever group it is you detest they won't march right on and get you as well.

In the mainly Mirpuri area of Gladstone Street there was, for about four days, an abusive anti-Polish slogan on the side of a Muslim grocery store. This is what New England is like (no irony and no bullshit, that's where I live). I wonder if so many people from so many disparate countries and cultures end up in "New" England precisely because it sounds like an invitation to a reconstruction. I plan to write a book this place though. But I'll just stick with the blog for now.

Incidentally, whilst I'm writing this XTC's "No Thugs In Our House" just came on the stereo. The beauty of random shuffle.

Saturday 18 April 2009

Oh dear

Some people - who do not think hard enough to power an LED - might be wondering how Arsenal just squandered a perfectly good opportunity at a cup final after being trophyless for 5 years. The answer is quite simple: they are a team of naive fatalists who think that results are consequential. 

Friday 17 April 2009

Lament

Just hearing Lee Morgan composition on Jazz625 called "Lament for Stacey" - never heard it before and I'm guessing Stacey was a girl (they almost all are apart from me and dastardly womanising drug addict and namesake Stacey Keach). Tonight's program follows up a program about Nica De Rothschild and her relationship with Thelonious Monk. And the next Jazz625 features the great man himself. I'll stay up to catch that. It's also sad to see a young Humphrey Lyttleton hosting (he once came to our school to see our Palm Court Orchestra because he was mates with our headmaster). He's sadly missed, as is another legendary polymath of radio comedy gameshows, Clement Freud who died this week.

The program about Nica focussed on her humanity and her great love of Jazz music and the muscians themselves. She stuck two fingers up to prejudice of every type; not only snobbery, but disgusting racism which is realy shocking in the retelling (especially Quincy Jones account of driving all night through endless southern towns just to find one diner that would serve them some food, and passing through a town where a negro effigy hung from the steeple of a church! And despite being accused of being some kind of succubus, and being surrounded by drug-taking, Nica genuinely was above all that and all about the music. Biopics these days tend to demolish reputations in order to get to "the truth", but all they do is just tell a different story; it still isn't truth because the revisionist approach fails to bring forth what one persons life means to someone else, which is why great artists achieve any kind of noteriety in the first place. They are greater than the sum of their misdeeds, as they are greater than the sum of their achievements.

I particularly like programs where great jazz musicians are interviewed. You have to be intelligent to play jazz well, even instinctively, let alone with the calculation of someone like Monk, the fluency of Bird or the spirituality of Coltrane. So to hear them speak is always a blessing. Not enough is heard from philosophical, wise, intellectual black men. When we hear from them it's often Hip Hop speak which, whilst lyrically sometimes brilliant, is often confrontational. It's stridency makes for a certain cleverness at the expense of thoughtfulness. Of course Jazz musicians don't often speak because they have a transcendant language they can use. And because of this (and because Jazz is now a middle-aged niche interest that ranks alongside running steam locomotives and tending lawns, and so not worth more than a fleeting scintilla of the TV schedule), the instances when you hear their thoughts on film or radio or record are rare, and all the more valuable for that.

Watching Thelonious Monk's quartet now, I'm impressed with how the three sidemen seem to allow the same asynchronous, polyrhythmic and pause laden style to overlay their own solo efforts, especially on Hackensack. On Epistrophy Monk himself plays like he is trying to provoke the piano, or maybe like he was trying to decode something and the piano was being intransigent and not offering up all it's secrets readily. The same figure is played with slight variations in timing and position. But he seems like he is perfecting a theme rather than playing around with it. He is not unsatisifed with the results, but it is rather as if he is grasping something fleeting and his urgency inplaying is only to make it reappear just a few more times in a few more guises before it is gone forever.

Thursday 16 April 2009

20 years

Fantastic night last night in The Gunners. Although I couldn't get a ticket I'd say The Gunners is the next best thing, although I was disappointed they have got rid of the barco in favour of a smaller plasma screen tv. there was planty of singing and backslapping and the feeling that this current Arsenal crop can get something from a patchy season. I was later gratified to learn that The Pens overcame the Flyers in their first play-off game. The papers today were full of the Hillsborough memorial and I think next weeks match at Anfield could be quite emotional and poignant. It felt in 1989 like we should almost concede the league title out of pity or that in winning it we were somehow not playing fair. The flowers were a great gesture and it something I'd like to think will be repeated. In between no and then is the small matter of a semi final against Chelsea and we appear to be running rapidly out of defenders. Hopefully we will have enough fit to make a decent game of it. 

A friend has suggested a facebook group for vegetable growers and I think she is quite a competitive person so it will be a group about growing the biggest or most potatoes etc. I'm always up for a challenge. I am goping to start the courgettes tonight. Will plant whilst watching man City throw away the chances of a UEFA cup final

Tuesday 14 April 2009

Back on the chain gang

I spent all day with the ISO auditor who looks a bit like Liam Neesons bearded avuncular brother, and has piercing blue eyes that probably are a useful tool of the trade. We managed to have a series of embarassing gaffes which made his job a damn sight easier; almost embarassingly so. Two barrels of ethylene glycol appeared next to the cycle racks. Our waste oil was unbunded and no one could tell us if the drain in the car park went to stormwater or sump/soil. No drawing (no surprise) and engineer pulled an ace card marked "selective ignorance" from a sleeve marked "I don't have time for this shit" (he probably didn't but we all have a job to do).

Radio 4 this morning was talking about foodbanks and how middle class families pitch up to request a few tins of broth to tide them over. If twinkies can get hand outs when they both get made redundant and the bank is not very understanding, I do wonder why those of us not so middle-class have WAY more pride and would rather sell a kidney than opt for a soup kitchen. But I know the answer. Entitlement is an innate sensibility and is unaffected by the things one might have to do that the Joneses won't ever find out about. And the reason they are wealthy in the first place is because they are calculating and intelligent with money and will take every freebie and every discount and maximise any money saving opportunity. Those of us on the lower tier who haven't always known when we'll next have money are always stupid when we get it. Those who are paper rich but temporarily embarrased should be turned away until the last single mum with no income with 4 kids (smunfky?) has worked up the courage to call. The truth is that the serious increases in unemployment, the unrented retail premises and the increase in crime are all happening exactly where you'd expect - South Wales, The North and The Midlands. As the Poles go home and the Romanians pitch up, Tarquin and Jocasta's dad is not the one now working alongside them in the lettuce field. If I lose my job though, I'd be there in the fields, because my stupid pride forbids me from accepting any charity whilst i have two hands that can work and plenty of people of my social equal think the very same. I think that's odd because the middle class media perception is the exact opposite; of wayne slob and vicky pollard grabbing handouts and wasting money on fags and booze whilst their kids go hungry. Ignorant is not the same as helpless though. And cockroaches may not have evolved very far but theyre better adapted than the dodo.

Speaking of chavs prevailing, Joe Cole is "in bits" after Chelsea's "donimance" [sic] was severely tested. I know scoring a goal is the third best feeling in the world, but the only reason Chelsea were able to score and undertowel themselves with their consecutive lifelines this evening is because a scouser, no matter how normally staid by the influence of Spanish pragmatists, will always gamble when the see the odds go daft. And it sometimes works. This time it wasn't to be. But 20 years after Hillsborough, if any team can treat Kiplings two imposters with equanimity it is Liverpool.

Monday 13 April 2009

A big hand

Just got back from the allotment. I have a proliferation of comfrey and over winter I made up two barrels of fertiliser from it. Smells like catshit. I used some today and washed my hands about six times afterward, but one hand still smells of cat shit. I expect to wake tomorrow with one normal size hand and one giant shit smelling hand; like Kenny Everett with worms.

Got a few beers in for the start of a big week. Beloved Arsenal take Villareal back to our place on Wednesday and The Penguins enter the playoffs. Tonight Peterborough are away to Millwall. Earlier in the day Steve Howard scored a cracking last second header to sink Leeds. Reckon leicester have got the title but good for Posh to push them all the way. Darren ferguson, despite being the progeny of the evil one, deserves a great deal of credit for turning sleepy Peterborough into winners. I liked both keith Alaexander and Mark Wright and thought the club was daft to dispense with either of them for a big head like Fergie who still rated himself as a player. But results speak for themselves. Boro are odds on for Promotion whilst both Chester and The Silkmen climb over each other to avoid dropping out of the football league. Shows what I know.

Back to work tomorrow. Let's see if I can manage to keep this blog going.

Later on I watched Stewart lee's comedy vehicle. his "I hate the Trevelodge outine" was familiar since I recall a moment when I was working on a PFI school development in the East End on a pro bono basis and discovered that they had decided in their wisdom to use a helpdesk to handle all school maintenance needs. It turned out that if a child was sick in a classroom it was necessary to route a call through a call centre in Winchester. They would log that call on a computer screen. The school caretaker was responsible for logging into the task screen and acknowledging the task before he went to clean up the sick and then logging back in to clear the task once the sick had been dealt with. This added some time to the cleaning up of the sick. One of the main benefits of having a task management system in maintenance is statistical manipulation of data. In this case a spreadsheet in Winchester is scrutinised by a team of management consultants to see how long it takes for sick to be cleaned up in an East End school and how diligent Mr Watts was in getting to the puddle of vomit and effectively neutralising it. Or not. Maybe no one ever crunched the data and found out just how sick children were at that school or how conscientious Mr Watts was.  The next development is inevitably to use a PDA, which would allow the caretaker to acknowledge tasks whilst on the move. That would certainly improve response times. So to effectively clean up sick you need 1 x caretaker (IT trained), 1 x PDA and 1 x PC, 1 x 24 hr manned helpdesk, 1 x IT Comms specialist experienced in maintaining both PDA's and PC's. And some sawdust. This is how modern Britain works; by taking lessons from the corporate world and applying them successfully in non-corporate environments such as schools, political parties and hospitals. And we all feel the benefit of the increased efficincy such developments have brought.

Sunday 12 April 2009

More...


This afternoon I did go to the allotment and there was rather a large leek growing. Serendipitously it was one that had popped up from the year before, not one I had deliberately planted. It was hidden by a thicket of twitchy grass so I had missed it earlier. Nevertheless I am taking full credit. (Also the asparagus started to appear. I'm not sure how much longer the blessed plot can keep producing asaparagus; but it is lush).
When I came back the Wizard of Oz was on TV. Michelle and Maddy have a deep love of musicals (they also watched Grease later on). I only caught a bit of itAdd Image but I did my usual thing of commentating on a program people are trying to watch. On this occasion I was disturbed by the allegory of the three characters going to the wizard for, respectively, brains, courage and a heart. The wizard gives them validation by providing in turn, a certificate of achievement, a medal for valour and a testimonal in the form of a plastic heart shaped pocket watch. The moral offered at the presentation of this third gift, but valid for all three, is:

"a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others".

"As a moral it is totally moribund" I ranted. "Courage, intellect or philanthropy that only exists when it is recognised and publicly rewarded is compromised since the motive for acting cannot be completely trusted. And the idea that their inherent self doubt could be overcome so readily by a mere bauble, and that the qualities they sought existed in all fullness inside them all along and took only a petty trifling recognition to come out, is such utter nonsense". Both of them smiled tolerantly and then craned their necks to look around me at the TV. 

I have posted a photo of the mighty leek on Facebook. A triumph is a triumph. 

Time to make a start

There is so much I should be doing right now that starting a blog is a wilfully self-indulgent procrastination. I have a half painted fence and a half painted bedroom, a neglected allotment, a dirty car, an untidy dining room, and a pile of washing and I am in need of a bath. So the timing couldn't be more perfect. 

If I am an expert in anything (both professionally and personally) it is "making a start". This week I started the process of ISO14001 certification for my firm. This is a very worthy management system that certifies that your business is keeping a big green eye on things. If it is left wholly up to me, the process will cost thousands and simply result in a lever arch folder full of documents in an archive and nothing else. Luckily, I have people to help me (for which read:  "people to see it through"). The allotment is my magnum opus really, because it allows me to start hundreds of different things and not complete any of them. Any kind of fruition literally happens despite my ministrations.

Today is Easter Sunday and another thing I should do is go to church. But I wriggled out of that by stating that the allotment needs attention. One good thing about having a lot to do is that you can trade the demands of various tasks off against one another in order to sum to zero. You can actually be very busy doing nothing. 

Tempting as it is to take a photograph of the half painted fence as a visual form of confession, I can't because the cat has killed a pigeon in the garden, right next to the fence. The bloody carcass and strewn feathers of the pigeon confront me. I will have to bury the pigeon. That means I need to go to the allotment to get the spade. I was going to go to the allotment whilst the wife and kids were at church. I already know I am likely to forget to bring the spade home. I also need to mow the lawn. I have a half thought that perhaps I could just mow over the pigeon and somehow distribute it fairly evenly and have no need to dig it a grave. This might even be good for the lawn. It might not be a good thing for the kids though. I recall being traumatised by much less at the same age.

I went to see a comedy gig the other night - Richard Herring topped the bill for a combined Oxfam and Sue Ryder Charity "Eggstravaganza" (and he made an excellent joke about the two rival charity camps having a death match for the proceeds). The wacky title should have warned me that there might be some am-dram smuggled in (those drama students who could not do hysterical and unfunny routines in front of you were the ones roaring encouragement to their peers from behind you - we were in a banshee sandwich at one point). The compere of the show, Rob Rouse, had a number of quite physical routines (including bumbling about the stage in an ill-fitting rabbit costume and imitating a dog fellating itself vigourously to the point of asphyxia). As part of his physical comedy he also indicated how horrified he was by the crucifixhe saw in his mother-in-laws house. He acted this by stretching out his arms and screaming. What Rouse did was to highlight the incongruity of having such horror on display in a family home (he contrasted this with the allegation that you still cannot see an erect male member on television). 

I was struck by this because abject horror isn't a characteristic I have ever seen in a crucifix myself (maybe there's something wrong with me). To my  mind, in those icons, Christ is always forlorn and broken. In fact Catholicism seems to revel in just how defeated or dead they can make him appear. Crucixion would have been agonising, but being confronted with a fight for life, by someone holding on to vitality, by grim determination despite horrific injury might indicate that Jesus had not wanted to die; that he had not so willingly sacrificed himself as it would appear. There would be no humility to behold and the church wants at least your humility, or, if not, for you to witness a paragon of humility and feel shame. Despite my belief in a Christian God, I have never wanted to idolise the image of the crucified Christ. Why has his resurrection never been rendered symbolically when that's the most important bit?

Persistence is a trait I would dearly love to have. I admire it in others - the fighting on, the struggle over the odds. It's the essence of humanity. I remember a story from The Falklands War where a squaddie describes bayoneting an Argentine conscript whilst the poor teenager clutched at his rifle and implored him to stop. The whole thing lasted many minutes; certainly enough time to consider acquiescing and to contemplate the different consequences involved in desisting or pressing on. And yet we can die so easily. An ill-judged step off a kerb can result in a fatal basal skull fracture. Life is fragile, but the desire to hold on to it is the strongest instinct we posess, stronger than any desire. I would certainly paint the fence if my life depended on it. 

It seems to me that we are now engulfed in our humanity. We tolerate all sorts of viscera in our line of sight. We wallow in flesh and indulge in an orgy of the material. Although there isn't a cornucopia of phalluses decorating the television, we're pretty inurred to the sight of genitalia actually. We can accept megadeath statistics in abstraction as long as no one we know is involved. Even dead bodies themselves soon lose their resemblance to the living things they once were. We no longer raise an eyebrow at disintered remains on forensic cop shows and we probe inside still living tissue to extract a giant tumour for the cameras. 

Perhaps that only leaves self-sacrifice left as something truly obscene. Why give your life for another; especially someone who doesn't want you to; never asked to you; is not yet even born?Why do it willingly and without complaint? It is perverse when looked at from a humanist point of view. We are asking young men and women to put themselves at risk of death on our behalf every day in Afghanistan. They are doing so for a far less noble reason than that for which Christ gave his life - geo-politics. And they are being sacrificed by someone else. And I doubt any of them, if asked, would give their life so that the flow of opium might be slightly disrupted. Suicide bombers appear to sacrifice themselvs for an ideology but in reality they are young lambs sacrificed by their elders who have no intention of giving up their own lives when they are stilll gainfully employed recruiting more semtex fodder. More prosaically, in the current recesssion the wealthy (who are usually older) are seeing their pensions dwindle and in order to preserve what is left they are making others (usually younger people without pensions) redundant. Would Abraham have given up his son if God had not provided the ram instead? I believe he would have just because he knew he would not be judged for it; God had said it was ok. Sacrificing youth for what you believe to be the greater good isn't nearly as hard as it ought to be.

So did God sacrifice his son, rather than Christ sacrifice himself? No, because Jesus had the power to save himself on any number of occasions and he knew exactly what he was doing. At no stage did he ever just run off, or lie, or ask someone to hide him or lie on his behalf. Arguably he also knew that his death would be the most significant self-sacrifice anyone had ever made in the context of the politics of Judaea if not the future of the world.

We're still talking about it. 






 
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