No cause for applause

If you were at Murrayfield at the weekend you would have been part of the minute's silence observed in memory of Bill McLaren, a man who did so much to preserve the spirit of Rugby Union in his popular TV commentaries.

When McLaren was at the microphone it was a commentary, not a conversation between commentator and pundit interspersed with pitch-side analysis and interviews. As spectators we indulged in our own analysis and argument. Today all that is done for us.

If, on the other hand, you, like me, were part of the crowd watching England play Wales at Twickenham on Saturday, you would have been invited by the DJ-style announcer who is so in love with his own voice, to show your appreciation of McLaren with applause. I did not applaud. I applaud a great sporting moment, a fine singer a funny comedian, a great speech, but I do not applaud in death.

Come Remembrance Day when the clock strikes eleven I do not feel the urge to applaud in memory of the millions who died in wartime. I would not want to stand in the street in Wootton Bassett and applaud the funeral corteges for fallen servicemen and women in Afghanistan. In fact sometimes people don't applaud and sometimes they do. In this clip people maintain silence until (3.15 minutes on the clip) a big chap with a white shirt, black tie and tattooed arms begins clapping robustly and others follow.

The problem is that as a society we no longer know how to handle death. Respect has become an issue and we are angered by those who fail to show it: a minority in football crowds, for example. One way of drowning out the disrespectful minority is to applaud. Applause is an example of flocking behaviour that can be set off by a single individual - the same one, perhaps, who would start a Mexican wave.

This may be a feature of soccer crowds; but it does not, or at least did not, affect rugby crowds. Rugby crowds are still capable of observing a minute's silence - just. I say "just" because the rugby union crowd is changing, manipulated by commercialism.

Rugby matches used to be great singing occasions, as did football cup finals. I can remember when the Twickenham crowd sang Jerusalem during the game. Today they manage a few lines of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. On the way to the England v Wales match, the England fans would sing a song, then call on the Welsh who never failed to do likewise. Not any more. As we made our way to the match on Saturday the only response from a Welshman came from one of our own group who sang a fine and and faultlessly delivered Land of My Fathers in his native tongue.

On Saturday a big choir came out on to the Twickenham pitch and sang Jerusalem before the game. But the crowd didn't sing along much. Perhaps some do not know the words but these could be displayed on the big screens.

Singing, sadly, seems to be on a decline on great sporting occasions - as opposed to abusive chanting which is something else. Some football fans may think it is amusing to compile a verse on the latest sexual adventures of John Terry, the captain of Chelsea. That is a reflection of the cruelty of people who don't know how to behave towards would-be role models who also don't know how to behave.

When England scored their last try that sealed victory in a closely fought match, a few of the crowd near me started up the mocking football chant: "You're not singing any more." That didn't use to happen. Traditionally there has been banter between fans at rugby matches but, for the most part, it is harmless stuff, not underpinned with the kind of tribalism you get in football.

Another thing - and I guess this is fairly harmless - there seems to be a growing fondness for declaring group identity at these matches in fancy dress. On Saturday I saw blokes dressed as bunnies, some in Elvis wigs and some with flame hair wigs. This trend seems to have been imported from cricket crowds. This eagerness to suppress our individuality behind such themed uniformity betrays a deep psychological need to belong (says this armchair psychologist).

More rugby old fart blogs on remarkably similar lines (I forget from match to match) can be found here, here, here and here.

Invoking Allah

I don't get too involved in the computer games played by my children. It seems to be the role of parents to disapprove. But it's not just disapproval. I simply don't have the reactions to aim and pull the trigger in time to kill rather than be killed in games such as Call of Duty and I can't be bothered to acquire this skill.

George, our 17-year-old, plays the game online on his X-Box 360 like thousands of others. We refused to buy him one of these machines so he saved up enough to buy one for himself. He plays other games besides Call of Duty. He knows I do not like Grand Theft Auto that has collected considerable bad publicity over the years and is thus highly popular among teenage boys. There is nothing like society's disapproval to stimulate youthful rebellion.

I work across the landing from George so I can hear him playing in his room. Just recently I have heard him shouting "Allah" quite frequently, followed by laughter. Keen to know what was going on, I asked him why he was saying this. It seems that George is copying an expression used by one of his friends when he explodes a bomb in his car.

Apparently the new GTA game comes with a virtual bomb that can be installed in to your car. There is a convention in the online game that, when you stop your car, another player might come and join you in the passenger seat. But some players think it is amusing either to blow themselves and their car up when this happens or to jump out of their car and let it blow up with the other player inside if they can time it right.

Some people will be appalled by this. I'm not too happy myself but I don't blame my son. Children have always played war games. When I was a kid we shot at imaginary Germans or played Japs and Commandos. We had plenty of role models in the comics of the day, not to mention our own fathers. Today it seems the suicide bomb has joined every other convention of warfare that can be turned in to role play. Some will say that is a bit sick. But it's not sick. Neither is it encouraging or breeding potential bombers. It is simply the way things are.

All the same, I wonder what the UK's Muslim community would think about this development - that, to my knowledge, the single influence from this, one of the world's great monotheistic religions, on my child and others like him, has been to invoke the Islamic name of God in the played out ritual of blowing themselves up. So much for multiculturalism. They might care to dwell on that over Friday prayers.

Death franchise

Some days are good and some days are crap. Today was a crap one - a twelve-hour slog, researching dates and book details that should have been done years ago. Blood, Sweat and Tears, The Evolution of Work, a book I wrote 10 years ago, is to come out in a new edition in the spring as The History of Work.

I wrote a new chapter; that was straightforward enough. But in the past week I have been getting re-edited chapters back with queries. Almost all of the queries relate to notations. I didn't pay much heed to the notations in the original book but looking at them now I can see they're full of omissions. I can only assume that the original notations weren't properly edited. It was all a long time ago.

Anyway there was nothing for it than to wade in, checking references. Many of the books I have in my collection but some had to be checked online. One thing that surprised me was just how much material you can find online these days - far more than was available when I carried out the original research in 1999.

In fact it's made me wonder whether some notations are worth the candle since very often all someone needs to do when checking a reference is to stick in the quotation and the whole book appears. Some of these are pretty obscure titles. I'm finding this too with my latest research. There is so much on line, it's keeping me away from trips up to the British Library.

Just now I'm doing a lot of work on alternative energy sources and quite a bit on death. I'm curious about the potential for inter-generational tension as we grow older. I can imagine that the younger generations will be desperate to shove my generation in to retirement. It would be a big mistake, mind, as it would leave them with all the work to do. But then they would grow even more resentful at all those mouths to feed among the aging baby boomers.

There seems to be a growing debate on euthanasia and assisted suicide. I'm thinking that in 20 or 30 years time euthanasia will be taken for granted. More than that, it wouldn't surprise me if people were encouraged "to go early" so as not to be a burden on the kids and to release any remaining accumulated capital for those who might inherit.

I remember how that film, Soylent Green, disposed of Sol Roth, played by Edward G Robinson (who was dying of cancer at the time - this was his last film). Perhaps this was what Martin Amis had in mind when he mentioned street corner euthanasia booths the other day.

I suppose it would work best with a franchise arrangement, supported by advertising campaigns on the lines of "You should have gone to Specsavers."

Overcoming the monster and a thrilling escape from death

I'm nearly four weeks in to my novel. It's absorbing most of my waking hours. All the people I have come to know this last month are those inside my head. The book is set in the future and I'm bursting to tell you what it's about, but you'll have to wait. I don't know all the story myself yet even though I've written a detailed story plan. Things keep changing.

This morning it was the second chapter. The chapter reads fine - about 4,000 carefully crafted words but something wasn't right. I have been reading Christopher Booker's book, The Seven Basic Plots - or rather bits of it. This is frustrating because it's a very well written and readable book and I would like to read it from beginning to end, but there just isn't time. Besides, I'm also reading Andrew Roberts's great book, The Storm of War, covering the second world war.

Roberts has some wonderful little snippets, including something picked up from the war diaries of National Labour MP Harold Nicholson. Writing in early 1940 during the so called Phoney War, before the Germans moved in to Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands, Nicholson recorded that British aircraft had dropped some two million copies of a leaflet over Germany. Ministry of Information censors, however, had refused to publish the contents of the leaflet on the grounds that "We are not allowed to disclose information that might be of value to the enemy."

But back to Booker. His seven basic plots are: overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, and rebirth. As you might guess from a book of 700 pages it's a little more complicated than that. I was reading last night about a sub plot of "overcoming the monster". This is the so-called "thrilling escape from death". Reading my plot again I decided I had just a few too many thrilling escapes from death. Maybe I have been over egging the pudding. So it has been back to drawing board with the creation of a new character, a powerful and rather aggressive woman who, I should add, bears no similarities to any of the individuals discussed in my previous blog.

A friend asked yesterday whether one victim of the forces of good and evil might be a prominent pink-paged newspaper. In a novel, the options are not so much about intent but choice of weapon. It's like Bruce Willis as Butch in the gun shop in Pulp Fiction, choosing between the sledge hammer, the baseball bat and the chain saw before settling on the samurai sword. It's tempting to nuke a previous employer but not very subtle and far too indiscriminate. Besides there's a fate worse than death for the Financial Times and that's a takeover by Rupert Murdoch. So maybe all my characters will end up reading an online Wall Street Times. Or maybe the FT, if it features at all, will end up having a thrilling escape from death.

Debating point

In the past few days I have been sticking in my two hape'th during an Economist online debate on the progress of women. Goodness knows why they asked a bloke to defend the motion that "women in the developed world have never had it so good." As I said in the opening exchange, it felt like a bit of a hospital pass. But somebody had to do it.

I'm not a big fan of the debating style that underpins the British system of advocacy in our judicial system and the kind of exchanges we can expect in Parliament. It's so combative, so much about winners and losers that you find yourself developing your debating skills rather than questioning the point at issue.

In this case there was no choice but to fight back. My opponent Terry O'Neill came out snarling from the start, testing the old glass jaw, pummeling away at the body, trying to get me on the ropes. I thought I rope-a-doped her quite nicely in the first round, absorbing a lot of her best punches. The second round did not go so well. She ducked well clear of my Mother Teresa hay maker and punished it with the sarcasm it deserved.

Not until round three did I feel confident enough to strike a few blows for my fellow blokes, scoring a point with the Chippendales and delivering a reasonable riposte to her corner man who weighed in with the housework. The vote gave me a clear win but I couldn't claim to have swayed the voting. That swung marginally away from the first round but I think a lot of the damage done then was self-inflicted by O'Neill's startling aggression.

The thing is - and I'm about as qualified to say this as I was to debate in the beginning (not at all) - I'm not sure I agree with the proposition. Most women I know are working harder than ever and some are pretty disillusion by the career ladder. For sure there is still a lot of stuff stacked against women in the workplace. But there is stuff stacked against men too. Work is not such a pleasant place to be right now. The reason so many people keep at it is that the alternative remains even worse.

I do think that there are some women out there who will not be content until they have emasculated every man on the planet and then they will be able to turn on themselves. I'm not a tree hugger, not much of a new man if truth be told. But I've worked all my life in a job where men and women knock along together and where the real equality is in the strength of the whinging. But, after reading some of the silly comments around this debate, I realise that I'm a mere amateur in that respect. Some people really do want their butter on both sides of the bread.

Black Bob Donkin

My great grandfather on my father's side was a man called Robert Donkin, known by all in Dewsbury as "Black Bob". As a child all I knew about him was that he was the first man to ride a coach and four over Chantry Bridge in Wakefield and that he came to a sticky end. Recently I was passed these three newspaper cuttings from the Dewsbury Reporter (which seems to have been called "The News" in the 19th century). The news items that recall his death and inquest were found by my cousin Ian who passed it to my nephew Matt, who passed it to me and I passed it on to my Aunty Kath, Bob's last surviving granddaughter.

As a youngster I often passed the place where he died and knew the people who lived in the house, but never knew of the connection with my family history.

THE NEWS
(Dewsbury Sat 14th Oct 1899 Page 7)
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SHOCKING FATALITY AT DEWSBURY
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A Cabman Killed in Halifax Road

Yesterday, Robert Donkin a cab driver well known in Dewsbury as “Black Bob” drove Major Taylor to the Dewsbury Infirmary (where the coroner had arranged to hold two inquests) and after delivering his fare he had the misfortune to lose his life.
Donkin was in the box turning the horse round after the coroner had alighted when the blinkers came off and the horse dashed down Halifax Road at a terrific pace.
At the corner of Commercial Street the cab overturned and Donkin was pitched into the top of some palisadings, which surround Mr W. Ineson paperhanger’s shop.
Chief Inspector Campbell of the Dewsbury Borough Police was near when the fatality occurred and at once hurried to the scene accompanied by police constables Hargreaves and Pickering.
When the officers arrived they found the unfortunate driver wedged between the pailings and his cab with his right arm stuck through the spikes of two of the rails which were broken off by the force of the man’s fall.
Chief Inspector Campbell lifted the deceased’s arm off and despatched the two constables for Dr Beattie and the home surgeon at the infirmary.
Dr Beattie was at the scene first and restored Donkin to consciousness for a minute or two. He was then put into the cab but breathed his last on the way to the infirmary.
Deceased leaves a widow and an upgrown son and daughter. He was a native of Bridlington District and was formally in very comfortable circumstances. His brother is at present the proprietor of very flourishing livery stables in Bridlington.
The cab, which is the property of Mr Edwin Box, was very badly damaged. If the coroner had not had the good fortune to leave the vehicle before the driver attempted to turn round, he might also have been killed.
Major Taylor is reported to have said after the accident that he has no desire to attend his own inquest!
It was expected that the coroner would hold the inquiry on Donkin’s body immediately on the conclusion of the inquests at the infirmary but he did not do so.


THE NEWS
(Dewsbury Sat 21st Oct 1899 Page 6)
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THE LATE “BOB” DONKIN

The remains of Robert Donkin a Dewsbury cab driver, who met with a shocking death last Friday, were interred at Dewsbury cemetery on Monday. A large number of sympathizing friends were present including every cabman in the town. The horse and cab, which the unfortunate man was accustomed to drive followed the hearse empty and without a driver. It was decided to open a subscription list for the widow with the result that the handsome sum of £22 was handed to Mrs Donkin on Thursday by Mr Edwin Box who acted on as the secretary. The money has been subscribed by cab drivers, the people whom Donkin has been accustomed to drive and the general public. The cabman much appreciated the kindness shown towards their deceased’s comrade’s widow.


THE BATLEY REPORTER
(Dewsbury Fri 20th Oct 1899 Page 6)
________________________________________

INQUEST ON ROBERT DONKIN

Major Taylor and a jury sat on Saturday morning at the Dewsbury and District Infirmary to enquire into the circumstances attending the death of Robert Sykes Donkin aged 57 a cab driver of 31 Victoria Road who was killed on Friday last after driving the coroner to the infirmary. The particulars of the accident appeared in our last impression. Deceased it will be remembered was returning into the town from the infirmary when the blinkers fell from the horse’s head and animal ran away. Donkin was thrown from the “dickey” against the palisading in front of the premises of Mr Ineson paperhanger, Halifax Road and was wedged between them and the cab. He was picked up by Chief Inspector Campbell and conveyed to the infirmary, where he expired. Chief Inspector Campbell in the course of his evidence described the accident- Two of the spikes on the top of the pailings upon which deceased was thrown were broken. In answer to Mr. C. A. Ridgway who appeared on behalf of Mr Box who employed deceased. Witness said deceased had been always looked upon as the most capable and steady driver in the town. Police Constable Hargreaves said when the horse was turned round at the infirmary; the animal stumbled and ran with its head against the opposite wall. The blinkers came off and the horse bolted. The jury returned a verdict of accidental death. Donkin’s remains were interred at the cemetery on Monday, the funeral being attended by nearly all the cabmen in the town.

Exam revision - the search continues

Sir David Attenborough has been given one of his most difficult assignments - to capture on film for the first time a teenager in the act of revising for his A-level examinations.

His team (for Attenborough relies on other people to do the camera work) called the Donkins of Woking in early January to arrange a stakeout. A cameraman called Rod, set up his hide in the bedroom wardrobe of our 17-year-old son, George.

The first week passed uneventfully as Rod recorded hour upon hour of George, leaning back in front of his X-Box 360 playing Call of Duty. Sometimes he was joined by an older brother and they alternated play while one sat out the downtime on George's bed.

More footage was recorded of George on Facebook, George on YouTube, George instant-messaging friends, George texting messages on his mobile phone and George eating cereal piled high in bowls.

There was occasional film of George involved in angry exchanges with a parent, and George stamping around his room, pleading, often without success, for use of the car.

But footage of the revision remains elusive. After two weeks Rod has been relieved by another cameraman, Ron who seems equally dedicated to the cause.

Teams of studio producers have been scrutinising hours and days of footage for the slightest sign - there was a squeal of excitement when George was seen to log on to his school web site (checking the school closure notice after heavy snow), but so far, nothing.....