Donkin Life

No cause for applause

2010-02-08T15:58:00.008Z

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

2010-02-02T13:02:00.006Z

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

2010-02-01T23:22:00.006Z

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

2010-01-30T13:13:00.006Z

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

2010-01-29T19:44:00.004Z

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

2010-01-17T19:23:00.002Z

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)
________________________________________

SHOCKING FATALITY AT DEWSBURY
___________

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)
________________________________________

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

2010-01-17T19:20:00.005Z

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.....

Birds of a feather

2010-01-09T16:27:00.006Z

We live at the foot of a steep hill which has to be negotiated either by car or on foot if we want to get anywhere. The hill has been snowbound for days and I thought we'd be stuck for a while. A neighbour had talked about a working party but the snow was so hard packed I didn't think a few shovels would make much of a difference.

But I hadn't counted on the willingness of neighbours to come out and work together. There must have been more than twenty of us on the hill this morning. Within two hours we had cleared the hill well enough to get cars to the top. It was hard physical work but people were saying how they enjoyed it. One neighbour came out with coffee and biscuits. Another brought mulled wine.

We all have neighbours but sometimes it takes conditions like this to realise we still have communities.

Meanwhile in the cotoneaster hedge opposite our house we've had some Redwings eating the berries. Redwings, our smallest thrush, only tend to come down to our gardens when the weather is exceptionally cold, which it is, and here they are to prove it.

Porridge by candlelight

2010-01-06T16:19:00.006Z

I have just started work on a new book - a novel this time - about life in the future. One of the problems with such a project is putting yourself in to an alien situation, imagining what life might be like, for example, with dwindling natural resources.

But last night it snowed a lot and this morning we had a power cut. Cooking porridge on the gas by the light of a candle at 6.30 am, unable to get the car out of the drive, there was little else to do but ponder on the things we take for granted.

Gill pulled on her boots, grabbed her Leki sticks, and marched the four miles to her 7 am pharmacy locum at Sainsbury's. She deserved a medal. At least her commitment was appreciated as a few doctors had emergency scripts.

I was pondering on what might be considered essential services. It helps to think back to the jobs considered essential in wartime. Apart from munitions, the Government had to concentrate on food supplies, shipping, fuel and utilities. I remember the disruption we experienced in the 1970s - rubbish building up on street corners and power cuts because of strike action. Then the drought of 1976 led to water bowsers and standpipes in some areas.

It was inconvenient but it wasn't the end of the world. A neighbour was worrying because he had only enough milk for one more day. But we can live without milk. We can live without a lot of things if we must. It's good to have an alternative from electricity as it means we can light a gas fire and cook food. In future we shall need more alternatives.

There will come a time, maybe 50 years in to the future when the rationing of fossil fuels will become a reality, either that or they will have been priced out of the market for most people. When that happens we shall lean increasingly on alternative sources. Hopefully, by that time, there will be more efficient batteries that will store energy from the sun, the wind and that we can supply ourselves from muscle movement.

One possibility is that, if we still find fossil fuels helpful, we shall have worked out ways to eek out what we use so that a litre of diesel or petrol goes a lot further than it does today. I am sure that sail-power will be revived in commercial shipping, benefitting from advances pioneered by people such as these.

Who knows? By that time we may have developed some entirely new form of power unit in the same way that the internal combustion engine replaced steam. But it will need to rely on renewable sources. The days of extracting our fuel from the ground are coming to an end.

Where is 2010?

2010-01-04T20:49:00.000Z

Happy New Year.......if you can find it!

With thanks to Mateusz Skutnik.

Arbeit Macht Frei

2009-12-23T00:49:00.003Z

We do not yet know the motives of those who took down and made off with the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei sign at the gates of Auschwitz concentration camp last week. Does it have a value? As scrap, probably not, but as a symbol of the darkest days not just of the 20th century but arguably any era of human history, its value is incalculable.

I researched the origins of this aphorism for my book, Blood Sweat and Tears, The Evolution of Work, soon to be republished as The History of Work. There are two popular misconceptions about the slogan: one, that it was mocking those imprisoned in the camp and, two, that it was directed principally at the Jews.

The phrase was first adopted by the Nazis within the entrance gate to Dachau, the earliest of the concentration camps, established just outside Munich in 1933. This prototype camp set up by Heinrich Himmler, then Munich’s chief of police, was designed initially to imprison political prisoners – mostly socialists – and other “undesirables”.

Arbeit Macht Frei – variously translated as “work brings freedom” or “work sets you free” had nothing to do with Nazi cynicism or the taunting of prisoners and everything to do with the way the National Socialists had plundered the values of the protestant work ethic and shaped them for their own purposes. Some of those imprisoned in the early days of the camps were indeed freed after a period of time so the message was genuinely intended to convey a spirit of hope, however meagre.

Arbeit, meaning work, was one of those words, like the word volk (people) that was adopted and used in grammatical constructs to create an aura of wholesomeness around National Socialism.

Another common source of confusion for those who have not visited Auschwitz is the camp itself since there is more than one camp in the whole complex. While more than a million Jews met their deaths at Auschwitz, the vast majority of them were killed in the Birkenau camp, often soon after stepping down from trains that came in to the camp from across Europe. These people never saw the Arbeit Macht Frei sign since that belonged to the original Auschwitz concentration camp constructed earlier, in June 1940, some two miles from the Birkenau complex.

As Laurence Rees made clear in his book, Auschwitz, the Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, the camp or camps had a complex history. Auschwitz-Birkenau was part prison-of-war camp, part concentration camp, part labour camp and part extermination camp. Its role as a labour camp explained the notorious rail head selections when those picked out for labour were parted from their relatives who would then be marched off immediately to the gas chambers.

Who knows why anyone should want to own that symbolic sign above the Auschwitz gateway? But in its own way the sign has earned a familiarity just as potent, if not more so, than many of the world’s most familiar landmarks. That sign, like the camp itself, must be preserved as a memorial, an inanimate witness, to one of the greatest crimes in history.

And we like to think we're important......

2009-12-21T12:29:00.003Z

Sometimes you see something that puts things in perspective - like this. Cosmic.

Book rustling

2009-12-12T15:50:00.002Z

Another one of my books has arrived (see story below). Again no note inside and the writing on the package was a childlike scrawl, not the way I would expect a book to be packaged by a professional retailer. I think Amazon should be investigating these sellers. If the book is being sold new at less than the cost to produce it, there are only two possible sources - an unwanted review copy or theft. I'd call it book rustling.

Christmas decorations and the Law of Eternal Buggeration

2009-12-12T15:32:00.006Z

Christmas is all about timing. There should be a law against putting up decorations at any time before the second week of December. Those who jump the gun in November should be thrown in to jail without trial and not released before the New Year, by which time they would already be thinking about Valentine’s Day and looking for Easter eggs, having booked their summer holidays last July.

Sadly only one law applies at this time of year and that is the law of eternal buggeration. The effects of this law are progressive and cumulative. For example, when we called by the local garden centre for our Christmas tree this morning it seemed no more than a minor inconvenience to discover it was closed until May.

Another garden centre close by would do fine, we thought, until we saw the prices. Christmas trees priced at £50 each might seem reasonable if you’re a banker who has just cashed his Christmas bonus or an MP who can claim it on expenses. But for mere mortals it smacks of daylight robbery. No wonder the place was empty apart from the odd pin-striped suit.

We moved on to the outskirts of town to a Christmas tree farm that had a big range of trees from £10 to upwards of £50 with various colour codes denoting the prices. But how to remember the price against the colour? George solved the problem, photographing the list with his mobile phone. Teenagers do have their uses after all.

The place was teeming with people and cars. One chap was holding up a tree in the throng, calling vainly for his wife.

“Nice tree,” I said.

“I know. But we’ll have to look at thirty more before she’s happy,” he said, casting the tree aside and walking off, shoulders hunched, to rejoin the melee.

We didn’t spend too long choosing and found a reasonable specimen for £25. When we got it home we found the trunk was a bit bent at the bottom, giving the tree a pronounced lean in its pot. Mind you, in more than thirty years we have never been able to erect our tree without a pronounced lean, owing to the law of eternal buggeration.

The principles of this law mean that when we go in to the loft and get the Christmas lights out of their box, they don’t provide so much as a flicker when they’re plugged in, even though they worked perfectly when put away the previous year. No amount of familiarity with the law of eternal buggeration is capable of preparing me for the crushing sense of disappointment when I flick the switch and nothing happens. Deep down, I know what’s going to happen. Perhaps this is what creates the churning anxiety that accompanies this ritual. Something in our evolutionary journey instilled in us an innate – but foolish – optimism.

So now I’m left with that other tiresome ritual of fixing the lights. I cast around for spares. I know we have them since two Christmases ago Gill tried to preempt this seasonal problem by getting some extra lights. Have you ever tried to buy spare Christmas lights bulbs? Logic would tell you that the spares would be available at the shop that sells the light packs. But that is a logic that fails to account for the law of eternal buggeration.

No, Gill had to search them out online and that’s what she is doing again just now - delivery date after Christmas. But there is hope. Through a process of trial and error George has managed to get every fourth light blinking, so we have lights of sorts. The decorations are looking a little careworn like their owners by this stage of the day. Now just where did we put those spare lights? Common sense would point to the light box. But, as we know, there’s a law against that.

By late afternoon the Christmas tree is fully tinseled and baubled and the lights (well, some of them) are winking away merrily. I'm trying to tell myself that the tree is filling the hall with fragrant wafts of pine wood. But no-one else thinks that. There's a pungent smell all right, but it doesn't need the family to tell me that if this is pinewood then it bears a remarkable similarity to something less wholesome.

It recalls that traditional German carol, O Tannenbaum:

O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree,
Much pleasure dost thou bring me!
For every year the Christmas tree,
Brings to us all both joy and glee.
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree,
Why must you smell of cat pee!

The mysteries of book pricing

2009-12-02T16:31:00.007Z

I have just had a book published. It is called The Future of Work. I think it is very good but then I would as the author. For a more objective appraisal you would need to read a review or, better still (as far as I am concerned), read it yourself.

However, I don't want to discuss the content of the book in this blog. I want to discuss the price. You will see from the link above that the retail price of the book is £25 - a bit steep you may think for a book of 272 pages with no colour pictures.

I discussed the price with the publisher when we did the deal at the outset. He told me - and he knows much more about book pricing than I could hope to know - that £25 was right for this kind of book in the market. I spent a year on the book so I would have no trouble justifying that for myself, but as a regular reviewer of what the market calls management books I would say that something around £17 would be about right for this type of book.

Funnily enough, if you go to Amazon.co.uk, you can find it at the discounted price of £17.49. That seems reasonable. That's a good deal.

I wanted to get a few books for myself, however, to give away or to simply have in stock at home. The publisher offered a discount of 40 percent on 40 books which would make them £15 each plus £5 postage, so a bit cheaper than the Amazon deal.

But, wait a minute. Something isn't quite right here. If I go on to Amazon I can also find other retailers selling the book new (and two selling it second hand even though it only came out yesterday! One of these has it priced at £18.42, the other at £44.38!).

One of the retailers selling the book new - Ammobox - was offering it at £5.80 plus £2.75 postage, so that's £8.55 delivered to my door. The deal for another at Middoman was £8.90 and I could get one, inclusive of postage, from Londonderry books for £8.74.

If my book is going so cheaply I want to get it. I know what's in it and that's a bargain! I tried to order 40 books from Ammobox but it said it had just one in stock. The same applied to the other two dealers. So I have ordered a book from each of them.

I went back to my publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, and asked how it was I could get the book cheaper by some margin, inclusive of postage, from an online dealer than I could buy it with discount from the publisher?

"Bulk orders," they said.

"But I was placing a bulk order and this is much much cheaper."

"We'll look into it," they said.

The bulk order explanation doesn't seem to make much sense since each of these dealers said they had just one book in stock and I was unable to buy more.

There must be an explanation somewhere. If not, I'm going to have to continue buying up all the cheap copies I can find (you can't see the three I mentioned above now as I've bought them, but take my word for it, they were there).

Or perhaps I should just stick to writing them.

Mud pies and mucky fat

2009-11-24T07:45:00.005Z

Playing in dirt can be good for children, says a new report. Well that's a relief. As a two-year-old my outside entertainment involved making mud pies in some churned up ground beneath a lilac tree, the only piece of vegetation in the small back yard of our rented terrace house in Dewsbury.

There was an outside toilet that possibly contributed to my lifelong fear of spiders. We had a cat too, called Blacky but maybe I didn't play enough with him as I developed a cat allergy in my later years.

Across the yard was a rag warehouse and we would play on the bales made from oily rags, wrapped in sack cloth. I dare say there must have been a few fleas around but I don't recall picking up skin infections. That's about as much as I can remember of that first house, apart from two spinster sisters next door - who owned our house. We called them auntie Annie and auntie Hilda. I don't know their histories but they were part of that generation that lost so many boyfriends and husbands during the First World War.

On the wall of their house they had an old whip - a cat-o-nine-tails - and its presence was used as a reminder of its terrible potential for inflicting punishment on naughty children. I suppose nuclear weapons have the same value today on a larger scale.

Auntie Annie was a kind old lady who I liked, but auntie Hilda was not very pleasant and was always looking out of the window for signs of mischief. I remember the shock on her face one day when I put my tongue out at her. The whip stayed on the wall but I think I had a slap on the bottom for that one.

There was even less room around the front of the house, just a tiny patch between the house and the pavement. But I still played games there with my best friend, Beverley Hammond. It's difficult to explain how a mat on the ground could pass for a tent and campsite but when that was all you had you needed to develop quite an imagination.

I couldn't relate to the kids in Enid Blyton's Famous Five books who could range freely with "lashings" of ginger beer. We had fizzy pop at home - a bottle of orange and dandelion and burdock when the pop man came once a week. But we always had to be back for lunch which was never ever referred to as lunch. We knew dinner time and tea time.

Dinner might be treacle sandwiches and tea, banana sandwiches or a bit of stand pie, tripe, fat n'bread or a fry up. It would be difficult to find a more effective recipe for arterial sclerosis. the best days we might get meat and tatey pie and on the rarest days, stew and dumplings.

I should elaborate on fat n'bread. The chief constituent of this delicacy is pork fat that posher people than me call "dripping". At home the fat would be in a bowl, separated from a layer of brown jelly a dish that added to the taste - hence the term: mucky fat. When smeared on bread with salt and pepper there was nowt to beat it. In fact I shouldn't use the past tense here since it remains popular today in Yorkshire and Lancashire.

The floor of the kitchen/living room of that first house was covered in oil cloth (linoleum) and the table had a plastic table cover. When mum wiped it with a dish cloth it made a high pitch sound that went right through you. Close to the fire place, where the oil cloth met the hearth, I used to look for silver fishes (discussed previously here) in the dust. It must have been the insect life that got me interested in nature. You didn't need to live in the countryside to appreciate other living things. OK, the sparrows were generally black, but there were plenty of insects to find when making mud pies. Yes, dirt is good for you.

Devon shoot with Red Bullets

2009-11-23T11:46:00.006Z

No bird farm lived up to its reputation this year as our full day walked-up shoot with nine guns accounted for one pheasant, one pigeon and a crow. A heavy night in the pub on the Thursday had dampened our enthusiasm but at least the sun shone and we avoided the kind of downpours afflicting the north west.

As members of this once-a-year shooting group move well in to their fifties, the urge - when not shooting, at least - to behave like little boys allowed to run rampant for the weekend does not seem to be receding. The infantile sport of hiding things is undiminished. This year a Range Rover was spirited away.

In revenge, its owner hid the keys to two other cars that would be needed on the Saturday, the day of the driven shoot. Unfortunately he hid them before going to bed and the next morning could not remember where. So the whole house was turned upside down until the keys were found in an airing cupboard.

It usually takes a few pints on the Friday night before we have any kind of a bust up but this year a tussle started between the two brothers in our party just as we reached the bar of the pub. Outside in the car park one of them had snatched the spectacles of the other and thrown them on to a high van roof. As both of them are somewhat vertically challenged, and since the despectacled one could not see without them, his glasses were stuck there.

Fortunately a young chap climbed on to the van and retrieved them. The van belonged to the young man's band called The Red Bullets and they are really very good, singing all their own stuff. Check them out here. The van climber is their lead singer and songwriter, Peter Edwards. He's a real talent.

In fact they are one of those groups you get the feeling are on the cusp of being discovered and signed to a record label by one of those people who do that kind of thing. This is where the real creative talent is - in pubs and small venues up and down the country, not the X-Factor or Britain's Got Talent.

These guys will be successful through a combination of talent, hard work, constant practice and regular performances. There wasn't much space between the band and the drinkers on Friday, but just enough for our smallest shooter - yes the one who threw the specs, hid the keys and had his own car hidden - to squeeze in to a space at the front and begin dancing Dave Brent-style "sort of fused Flash Dance with M C Hammer shit". He was, as the barmaid told him with a bit of prompting, "awesome" or was it "simply the best"?

The driven shoot on the Saturday, meanwhile, was fairly restrained in comparison.

A call to arms

2009-11-13T15:08:00.006Z

Earlier this week, on the day that we remembered the last of the generation that fought in the First World War, a new video game was released: Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 2 that sold 4.7m copies on the first day of its release. I cannot be alone in detecting some irony here. Young men still love war.

I was no different as a youngster but instead of video games my lust for warfare was satiated through Airfix models and small plastic soldiers at two shillings a box (or two weeks' spending money). I must have had almost every box in the series apart from the civilian set. The bloke on the scooter was not bad but the rest was rubbish. I had no use for women sitting talking on a bench.

Of course, had I known much at the time about the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima or the air raids on Dresden and Tokyo I might have been able to use my civilians in a more realistic war game but I was naive enough as a child to believe that wars were about opposing armies. Besides bombing plastic people with plastic aeroplanes would have been a disgraceful thing to do, just as it was in reality.

Blowing up tanks and mowing down troops, on the other hand, was perfectly acceptable. I had a green rug by my bed which made a perfect battlefield. While my armies were capable of inflicting serious casualties on each other it was nothing to the mayhem my mother could reek with her feet as she made the bed. Whole regiments lined up in neat battle order could be scythed down in one careless kick of a carpet slipper.

I had friends who would mix up their Airfix soldiers so that a Confederate infantryman could find himself fighting one of Robin Hood's merry men. The very idea of such indifference I found appalling. No, my foreign legionnaires only fought Arabs. My red Indians (no-one had coined the term "native American" in the mid-1960s) were manufactured in rusty red plastic so that we might not be confused, and they fought either cowboys or the wagon train.

Painting them was a daunting task. Just painting one was inefficient so if you decided to do it you were committed to the whole box, painting legs, faces and arms in flesh tones, then uniforms and finally the equipment. The paint soon started flaking off during play so it was hardly worth the effort.

I still have the soldiers in the loft but the plastic has grown brittle now so their play value is limited. Today video has overtaken the habit of playing with soldiers but I wouldn't have swapped my childhood war games for anything on a screen. Airfix rocked.

Psst! Wanna buy a new TV?

2009-11-12T14:47:00.007Z

Dear Friend, how are you recently? That's how the email started. Most people might have smelled a rat immediately as I'm rarely so polite to anyone. Nor am I likely to be sitting at my computer screen at 6 am in the morning.

So even if I did have a new job selling Korean-made electrical appliances, it is unlikely that I would start with my 1,700-strong email list before sunrise. No, the Korean TV seller, or it's spamming software, found its way in to my emails and went for the big sell, all in my name.

The big irritation is that I do have something to sell just now as my new book, The Future of Work, is just coming out and I suppose some marketing types might have advised to use my email list for that. But I wouldn't have done that. I'm not a foot in the door man. Now, however, my emails have probably been added to 1,700 spam filters and that is annoying.

Some good did come of it. People who had probably forgotten I existed were reminded that I'm still around. I was amazed, however, just how many people were "out of the office". Does no one work anymore?

I suppose it's not inconceivable in these straightened times that I might have shifted from poorly-paid journalism to the more lucrative prospects of selling Asian electrical goods.

I've been to the website that used my emails. It's called wto and its sales email is : sales@wto-shops.com. Do me a favour and send them a rude message. How dare this company sanction the exploitation of an individual in this way? Who do they think they are? Will anyone step forward as a volunteer hacker? Perhaps I could get hold of their customer list. But would two million Korean consumers be interested in a foreign language book on the Future of Work? Perhaps not.

But, not so fast, you might be saying. Couldn't this spammy-looking email be a front so that you could act all innocent-like and remind everyone you have a book to sell. Well, it could, but would I really use a Korean retailing business as my Trojan horse? Anyway if any of you are tempted to buy a Korean TV could you let me know and I'll claim the commission.

Life's lottery

2009-11-08T11:41:00.010Z

I wonder how many of us, on hearing that someone in the UK had won £45m on the lottery - as yet unclaimed at the time of writing - wondered what we might do with the money. It's a silly game, but Gill started it last night over dinner.

The worst of it was, that even though we do not buy lottery tickets, the thought of all that money was becoming a real worry. I didn't need that kind of money, I said, before deciding I would like to own my own salmon fishing beat which, on reflection, would cost a pretty sum.

We both agreed that we would "get rid of the Yaris". The poor little unloved Toyota Yaris has served us well, getting two boys through their driving test and now working at doing the same with a third. It has never broken down, it looks a bit tatty and doesn't get washed very often. It's just what we need for the boys. I suppose we could get rid of the Yaris without a lottery win. But we don't. So why should £45m make any difference?

This morning I looked around the bedroom at all the clothes slung over chairs and shoes scattered around. A lottery win wouldn't pick that lot up. I expect you could employ someone to do that but do I want an outsider rummaging through my clothes? I don't think so.

The thing that I like to do - writing - could not be improved by £45m in the bank. In fact the money would probably mean that I wrote less. I travel plenty as it is so I'm not sure I would travel more. I could travel first class too but the ticket price would upset me and I would feel guilty about those in the back. Why should money buy me a better seat? I could stay in posher hotels but the win wouldn't give me some magical access to any wealthy people's club.

If I need that access I get it already doing and writing about the kind of things that attract big money. Sailing, for example, attracts the kind of people for whom £45m is not exactly small change but who could afford to lose that amount without too much pain. It's an expensive sport and with £45m I could afford to own a modest boat - certainly not a superyacht like some of those featured here. It would have to be a classic-styled boat, something from this boat-maker that I visited a week ago.

And that's the problem. Journalism has already introduced me to the world of billionaires - if not a billionaire lifestyle. Owning £45m, comparatively, would make me no more than a minnow, playing in the lower leagues, rather than the premiership billionaires' club. After all, there is still much that £45m cannot buy. Yet a journalist can be one of the accessories - part of the scene in this rarefied world. You are not valued by your personal wealth but sort of tolerated or at least acknowledged, partly for your writing and partly for the access you can command.

Billionaires don't acquire their wealth through lotteries but by making deals, often with each other. You don't get to know Warren Buffet unless you are Bill Gates or the waiter at his downtown eatery in Omaha. The possession of £45m is neither here nor there to these people. Gates wants to know doctors and scientists who are pioneering treatment for malaria. People like that don't own £45m but they can tell people who do where they might be spending their money. That's why Buffet has pledged most of his fortune to the Bill and Miranda Gates Foundation. If you want to do some good with your fortune you need to place it with those who are working at and succeeding in improving people's lives.

The bottom line to wealth is that you soon get used to it. No matter how much you have, you want to invest it wisely. Yes some people who win millions blow a lot of it on fast cars, big houses, swimming pools, the usual stuff, but it doesn't buy the same satisfaction as a job well done.

Our wealth and how we are perceived is relative to the perspectives of others. As the hotel porter said to a youthful George Best ensconced in his lavish room with champagne, a wad of casino winnings and Miss World: "Where did it all go wrong George?"

The porter was probably a football fan lamenting the waste of talent in a footballing career cut short through excess. Best was put on this planet to define a special kind of genius, bringing a glow to the hearts of the thousands who paid to watch him create poetry with a round leather ball every Saturday afternoon. Nothing else mattered.

You cannot build that kind of talent with £45m but, with people like Best, you can certainly destroy it.

The stuff I like doing best doesn't cost too much money (apart from salmon fishing). It doesn't cost anything to walk on a beach, looking for fossils, or turning leaves in a wood searching for mushrooms. It costs nothing to dig over a bed in the garden but it's satisfyingly hard work. Chatting with mates over a few pints costs the price of the beer and to join in a singsong means you have to learn a few words. To capture a photograph of a misty morning you must get of bed. Money doesn't do that for you. It doesn't complete the Telegraph Crossword or remove the irritation you feel when the compiler has used a particularly obscure word.

But it does do some things. It can give you a comfortable car ride (but can't get rid of traffic jams). It can give you a bit more room for your things (some of which should just be binned). I have hundreds, probably thousands of books. Can I read them all? No, but it's nice to be able to pull together a cluster as I did the other day and make notes from each of them. More money could buy me posh bindings and first editions but I like the books I have and throwing any of them would be the hardest job of all.

Yes, money can buy you material things, but it can't buy you favourite things. It takes time to recognise favourite things - like my favourite fishing shirt that is worn at the collar and cuffs yet feels just right, or my favourite jumper that Gill shrunk in the wash. Money can't unshrink a favourite jumper. I have my favourite jacket too. No amount of jackets would stop that one being my favourite.

So that £45m would stick around, eating away at us as we worried about the possibility of it dwindling. We would worry about how much to give the children, lest it spoil their ambitions. People, even our own family would start to look at us differently. Spending money wouldn't get any easier either. We need a new boiler, two new bathrooms and a new kitchen but it's hard enough choosing what to get and then there's all the disruption and the mess when the work gets done and the niggling things that aren't done right.

No I won't be trying to win £45m in the lottery. If I can't earn it, then it should go to someone more deserving than me. I'm happy to have enough but the problem is that I'm not sure what enough is. I'm not sure I have it yet but I might not be far off. Anyway I have other riches, far more important than a pile of money. I am fit and healthy and I have my family. That kind of wealth - real wealth - is not won in lotteries because it's priceless. In life's lottery I have had some losses (how can you know true happiness without knowing what it is to suffer?), but I cannot begin to count my winnings.

Chumping week

2009-10-28T13:52:00.007Z

When I was a kid I always loved the week before bonfire night. The whole week of half term would be spent collecting wood for our fire. We called it chumping round our way although I know it has many different local names.

I used to go off on chumping forays with my cousin Andrew. We would go equipped with rope for dragging logs. Hand-axes and bone-handled knives were shoved in our belts. No-one thought it odd that a couple of snitches in short pants should be wandering around with the sort of weapons that would get you arrested these days if carried in the street.

Many of the nearby mills were derelict so there were rich pickings in oil-soaked wicker baskets that always burnt well. My cousin lived near a railway and the Beeching cuts were going full steam so there was a good supply of old wooden sleepers that made excellent seats on which to eat your pie and peas before these too would be cast on to the fire.

If the bonfire was big enough, and particularly if someone had thrown out an old settee or upholstered chair, we might make a den. Either way we would rip out the back of the furniture with our knives, looking for old coins, usually old bun pennies, threepenny bits and farthings (people kept their furniture a long time in those days). A half crown was a bonanza while finding a silver threepenny bit was akin to uncovering an Anglo Saxon hoard. The only other time you might get one was in the Christmas pud and then it had to be given back for the next year's pudding.

Today, at least in the south of England, most of the bonfires are communal affairs. If you want to buy fireworks you are looking at maybe a £100 for five rockets, all to be handled safely away from all who are watching. Perhaps that's for the better, but I do look back with some nostalgia at the time I would go with my mum to the local store and choose my fireworks individually - a Roman candle here, a Catherine Wheel there. There would always be a "snow storm" and one of those crackly ones and inevitably there would be the bangers and jumping crackers.

When Gill was young, at their family bonfire someone would always tie a jumping cracker to the trouser leg of their neighbour who would pretend not to notice, then jump around in alarm when it was lit. My mother-in-law would happily throw her lit bangers in to the melee. Throwing bangers and squibs was not the pastime of delinquent youths. Everyone did it. Of course you had to hold your Little Demon carefully and throw it before the fuse burnt down. But all that was part of the excitement.

At one friend's bonfire, not far from my home, we would have gang battles, throwing fireworks at rivals trying to raid our chumps. I'm sure the casualty departments were full of injured children but the risk was something you were happy to live with - it was part of living.

Some of that life today has been stifled with well meaning regulations and safety laws. The family bonfire is not what it was. This year I have been invited to a dinner in London on November 5. Once this date would have been as sacrosanct as Christmas in the diary. Today it has been absorbed in to an increasingly colourless world.

Of course in our wealthy society we can stage breathtaking firework displays that light up the sky for miles around. But I wouldn't swap one of those expensive displays for our little bonfires all those years ago where real joy was a natter round the fire, a roast spud and a packet of sparklers etching glowing shapes in the crisp November night.

I was never that worried about a guy to burn on the fire. My mum thought that standing around asking for a "penny for the guy" was begging. But in Lewes, in East Sussex, they still take their effigy burning seriously only they burn the Pope as well as Guy Fawkes. In Lewes they continue to commemorate the 17 local Protestant Martyrs burned to death in the town in the reign of Queen Mary. "No Papery" signs in shop windows are not uncommon. Health and Safety has never quite made its mark in Lewes and the locals still parade with 17 fiery crosses.

If your preference is for more modern customs you might want to read the note on Trick a Treat (third item down).

Swine flu - it could be getting a whole lot worse

2009-10-14T08:58:00.008Z

In one of my other blogs this week I've written a story which in my days as a daily newspaper reporter would have been described as a scoop. It's well sourced, not hearsay and it's the kind of story that could make a front page headline on a national newspaper. But there's a sensitivity to the story because it involves swine flu.

The sensitivity probably explains why the warning of a second pandemic has not been press released yet since the National Health Service is terrified of creating panic particularly among the parents of young children.

Fears of a second swine flu pandemic this winter are not new. What is new, however, are the indications that we could already be two weeks in to this second wave and that the NHS is treating a winter swine flu attack as a serious threat to employers. What is also revealing is that the NHS has created a model - it's worst case scenario - that envisages the virus spreading among 30 per cent of the UK's population. That is 18m people.

Unless the virus grows more virulent the vast majority of those who fall down with swine flu are likely to experience the usual kind of flu bout - unpleasant but endurable. The worst cases, as we now know, are being experienced among the young who have had no exposure to previous pandemic strains.

The inescapable conclusion of this experience is that there will be deaths from a second wave of swine flu and some of those will be young children. If the second pandemic affects 10 times more people than the last one, it follows that we might expect to see the number of deaths multiplied by the same factor.

Should parents panic? No they should not. They should be concerned and take precautions, such as insisting on good habits in hygiene such as a frequent washing of hands. But they should also retain a sense of proportion over this virus. Every year in the UK there are 3,000 to 4,000 deaths a year (sometimes as many as 20,000 in a bad year) from what is termed "seasonal flu." Those figures, however, will do little to appease the parents of a swine flu victim. If the projections are correct, there will be victims and the cases will be reported in the press.

While each individual death is a tragedy, it is the same whatever the cause and every year thousands of people die from a series health problems - cancers, heart defects and other conditions.

One reason I chose to place this story initially in a blog aimed at the management community is that the effects of a much bigger pandemic are likely to be felt most severely economically since the estimates suggest it could literally decimate the working population. More than decimate in fact, because the worst case senario points to 12 per cent workplace absences.

If any companies are planning substantial redundancy programmes they would be wise to hold off until the full scale of the next wave is known. If the wave is as strong as it might be we should know very soon as the number of reported cases and demand for the Tamiflu treatment will increase exponentially.

There is a fine line between running a "scare story" and providing balanced information. My own view is if the health service is concerned enough to distribute its fears among practitioners it should be doing so among the rest of us.

One big problem is that if the pandemic really does take off this month it could outstrip the speed at which the licensed vaccine, GSK, is being prepared. Supplies will not be available until the end of the month and delivering the vaccination programme could take several months. That is time that we simply might not have.

So is swine flu a killer flu? Yes, for a small, vulnerable minority. Is it going to get worse? The health service thinks that this is a distinct possibility. When could this be happening? It may be happening as you read this. Should we be worried? Of course we should. Each of us should take what we think are the most sensible precautions and hope for the best. Short of migrating to a remote island there is no escaping this thing. Personally I will carry on exactly as before.

Before I forget.....

2009-10-09T17:18:00.007Z

Making coffee just now I was mulling over how absent minded I had become, counting the spoons in to the cafetiere, when I noticed the glass container that I'd just washed, drying by the sink. Looking down there was the metal frame and a neat little pile of ground coffee on the kitchen surface.

This kind of thing happens only too frequently. The other night I undressed, getting ready for bed, while chatting to Gill about something. Before I knew it I was half dressed again with fresh clothes. Looking around the room I knew I had missed something - ah yes, of course, the night!

Come to think of it, I've always been absent minded. I remember once going to school without my blazer under my top coat. No big deal you might think. But when you're the single grey jersey among a sea of navy blazers in school assembly you're made to feel a proper plonker. No-one wants to stand out at school.

Once on holiday in France we travelled miles up the motorway and I was thinking how clear the traffic looked through the rear-view mirror until we noticed that the hatch of our estate car was standing vertically, fully open. Fortunately our cases were so squeezed in the rear we avoided the nightmare of belongings strewn across the motorway.

Another time, on a train journey in to Paris we discovered we were on the stopping train and switched platforms to the fast line - except Gill left her handbag with all our passports and money on the other train. In Paris we waited for the train come in to the station and I dashed down the platform. Through a window I saw a woman placing the handbag in to her shopping bag. Bounding in to the carriage for perhaps the only time in my life when a smattering of French came in useful, I shouted: "C'est mon sac!"

During my years of commuting I must have left virtually every accessory possible on trains: briefcases, hats, scarves, umbrellas, gloves, coats, a mobile phone, more hats. Very few, if any, were later retrieved from the lost property office. My mum used to sow my mitts to a long piece of elastic, threaded through my coat sleeves. Unfortunately I never outgrew this dependency.

Sometimes I forget the whole train and, with a sense of deflation, watch the Woking sign sailing past as we run through the station. Over the years I have become quite familiar with Winchester station down the line in Hampshire.

I would never, ever, ever tie a knot in a handkerchief. It would drive me mad, wondering what it was supposed to be reminding me about.

As I get older the forgetfulness seems to be getting worse. The boys tell me that I'm always starting sentences but before I get to the end.......

And so it continues. I'm sure there are many more examples but as you might guess, I just can't recall them.

Tea cosy telephone

2009-10-08T16:05:00.006Z

The telephone rang at some godawful hour this morning. Gill answered. Nobody there. I tried to return to the complicated dream I was having where all my luggage was being checked at an airport, item by item. But it was no use.

It's not the first time this has happened; not the luggage dream but this type of call (although, funnily enough, I do have recurring luggage dreams). The last time it happened I remember having a row in the middle of the night with someone at BT after fielding a series of such calls. She made me feel as if it was me who was at fault.

I can't recall much about the conversation, or series of conversations, except that I didn't get anywhere. So there was a sense of deja vu today when I called again and BT began to pass me from pillar to post.

They put me through to the nuisance calls service, probably because they know a nuisance call when they get one. A man there told me that we had been the victims of a "silent call". These are calls from automated diallers in call centres that for some reason do not hook you up with the caller (probably the callers have more sense than to pick up the phone). Ofcom doesn't like them but the calling companies are hardly trembling at the knees.

I was told that I could bar the number (0207 719 8407 should you wish to try it) for a month then I would have to pay for the service. "Why did I have to pay to stop someone ruining my sleep?" I asked. "Because everyone has the right to call you," said the BT man.

This can't be right. If a heavy breather or some other pervert gets on the line it's a police matter and they are dealt with. But if it's a company trying to sell you five nights in tropical paradise they can call as and when they see fit it appears. And yes we are ex-directory and have signed up some call blocking service. But some still get through.

There should be a right for people who are called by these companies to have the numbers, names and addresses of all who call them. Then we could give them a taste of their own medicine.

The BT man was going through the call barring procedure with me: "dial this pin number.....press * twice for last call received..... then this pin number.....then..." before he had finished I had lost the will to live.

Didn't he realise that what I really wanted was some futuristic weapon that sent a high pitched frequency down the phone, piercing and terrible enough to vaporise the call centre at the other end?

"Wouldn't it be easier if I just put my phones in the tea cosy?" I asked. Silence. "Do you want the service?" he asked. "I'm going to go with the tea cosy option," I said.

Gill was late to work this morning, thanks to our broken night. That might have left some villager in Chiddingfold (where she was working at the local pharmacy) hanging around for a prescription. But I'm sure there was no problem as people in Chiddingfold are rarely in a rush. They will always stop to give you the time of day. It's a village. The shop closes for lunch and everyone knows that. It's civilised, like things used to be.

When I was younger we didn't have a phone at home. I thought I was missing out. Now I'm not so sure. Tonight those phones are going in the tea cosy inside a box, covered with cushions. Tonight I will dream of luggage.

Hitler - all the rage

2009-10-07T16:04:00.009Z

What if Pontius Pilate had betrayed a speech impediment? What if insurgency movements had been organised like trade unions? What if parish councillors turned out to be mass murders?

Parody has always superimposed the farcical on institutional understanding. The Nazis were prime targets. Think of the Lambeth Walk during the Second World War, Charlie Chaplin's Great Dictator and Mel Brooks' Springtime for Hitler, not to mention his Hitler Rap.

But rarely has one scene from a film attracted so much attention from the send-up artists than the sequence in Downfall (Der Untergang) when Bruno Ganz enacts one of Hitler's infamous rages during his final days in the Berlin bunker.

YouTube is positively littered with Downfall parodies or mash-ups. A whole string of them are devoted to football results from Tottenham v Arsenal to this latest one on Manchester City.

Part of the scene's appeal is the rant, conveniently in German (for all but German speakers), lending itself to the use of subtitles. But the supporting cast enable the parody-makers to construct a series of excuses for whatever performance is being discussed.

The Downfall mashup has become so ubiquitous there seems no end to the scenarios that can be applied to the scene. Sometimes, however, the film rights owner asks YouTube to remove a parody. But even these requests have been parodied. There are too many of these clips (most of dubious quality) to list here but here are just a few:

Hitler complains about the British National Party leak.
Hitler gets banned from X-Box live.
Hitler can't find Wally.
Hitler is upset that he can't use Twitter.

It makes one wonder what Hitler might have had to say about it all?

And Winston Churchill? Well he didn't need to say anything says Orson Welles.