You Ain’t Nothin’ But A…

•April 28, 2010 • 3 Comments

Today’s “Bigotgate” affair has, undoubtedly, been a total PR nightmare for Gordon Brown, and can only have damaged his already fragile chances of securing a fourth term for Labour at next week’s election.  Personally, I don’t think his ‘crime’ was particularly heinous; we’ve all talked about people in less-than-flattering terms behind their back, and I’d hazard a guess that most of us have accidentally done it to someone’s face at some horrible, toe-curling point in our lives.  The fact that he’s currently trying to persuade the whole country to stake its future on him based on his honesty and trustworthiness merely makes it more embarrassing.  I’m not under the illusion, either, that Cameron and Clegg have never dissed a voter in their lives.  Of course they have.  They were just lucky enough not to be caught.

What’s interesting, though, is the utter frenzy that has descended, and the conviction among most commentators that this is a huge blow to Brown’s chances.  I’m sure it is, and there is no better way to illustrate just what has happened to politics in the UK.  Since the 1990s, politicians have become ever more obsessed with public image, with creating the perfect soundbite, with ever more ludicrous stunts.  Only a few days ago, Brown hired an Elvis impersonator to sing his praises.  If politicians believe that the electorate is impressed by such shallow trivia… well, nobody should be surprised if one unguarded moment has the opposite effect, because that is the mindset they were instrumental in fostering in us.  So if Gordon feels the cold, dead hand of history on his shoulder tonight, he has only himself to blame.

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Caught and polled

•April 10, 2010 • 1 Comment

I don’t generally think of myself as a political animal.  If you asked me to give you a list of my interests, politics would probably feature somewhere between ‘cauliflower’ and ‘cutting my toenails’, if at all.

And yet, in the past few days, I have been constantly drawn to the news. I even watched the BBC Parliament channel for a few minutes the other evening (while they were ‘debating’ the Digital Economy Bill on their last night before breaking up – if that’s the kind of rubbish the last day produces, I’d rather they spent their final hours in the Commons playing Kerplunk and Connect 4 – but let’s move on).  Already Mr SB and I are drawing up our battle plans for Election Night – should we take the next day off and stay up all night, or should we just plan to get up for work at 2am and drink gallons of coffee?

Part of this enthusiasm is probably because I still remember the night of May 1st 1997, and the sense of a new, optimistic national mood as I went to work the following morning, having voted out my local ‘Cash for Questions’ Tory and installed a fresh-faced Blair Babe in his place. There was a real feeling that Things Could Only Get Better. Oh, how times have changed, and oh, how the people in power haven’t.

But, when I really think about it, the main reason for my fascination is probably the same as the reason for my obsession with cricket. I love the numbers. There, I’ve said it.

Maybe it’s my scientific background, or maybe I’m just a natural born geek. (Maybe those two things are related. I should do an experiment.)  But I could look at this, or this, or even this for hours. I always felt a bit sorry for Peter Snow on election night, because he was always a figure of fun, leaping about in front of his swingometer like a kitten dropped into a box of wool – but I would have loved that job. My shoes would have been better, too.

So I think what I’m saying is that I’m looking forward to election night in the same way that I’d be looking forward to a test match.  It’s not about who wins (this is possibly where it differs from cricket, of course), it’s about how we get there.  It’s about the subtle nuances: a couple of seats here, a surprisingly big swing with the new boundary there, a star batsman bowled by a promising debutant somewhere else, and the excitement of a close contest with an unpredictable outcome.

Because I’m British, I shall, of course, be rooting for the underdog. And if anyone wants me in the next few hours, I’ll be hitting F5 on my blog stats page.

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Enzymes, schmenzymes

•March 24, 2010 • 2 Comments

I’ve just spent a good proportion of the commute home being sarcastic to the car radio. The reason?  I was listening to this, in which a ‘raw food’ enthusiast talked a lot of drivel about food.  Her regime involves not eating anything which has been heated above 48ºC, because this “destroys all its enzymes… and we need enzymes to digest our food.”  She talked about the ‘fact’ that we all have an ‘enzyme bank’ which gets ‘depleted’ and needs to be ‘topped up’ by eating food which has more enzymes in it.

The lack of basic science, rationality or good old fashioned common sense in these assertions astounds me.

  1. ‘Enzymes’ are not one substance. They are a whole bunch of substances that catalyse reactions. They help us to think. They help us to run. They help us to fight infections. And, yes, some of them help us to digest our food.
  2. Some of the enzymes in food, however, are for stuff like photosynthesis.  The ability to photosynthesise was not, last time I checked, a prerequisite for human existence.  So adding these to your ‘enzyme bank’ will do nothing at all for the balance.
  3. Enzymes are proteins.  Omnivores digest proteins, they do not put them to one side, intact, to use later when they fancy doing a bit of phosphorescing.
  4. You know what?  We can actually make our own enzymes!
  5. And anyway, if cooking food is bad, why has human life expectancy been increasing consistently ever since we discovered fire?

I’m constantly amazed by the amount of media exposure given to this kind of rubbish.  If you want to live on pizzas made from ‘nut cheese’ (whatever the hell that is) and sprouted wheat, then fine.  I’m not going to stop you, even though I reserve the right to think you’d have more fun with a nice cheese toastie.  But please, please, please don’t try to dress it up as science.

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If They Could See Me Now

•March 22, 2010 • 1 Comment

I started writing this in front of an all-day back-to-back marathon of Who Do You Think You Are? on Sky channel 3075.  This background information is relevant, because it was the inspiration for this, my tricky third blog post.

Usually in this programme (in which celebrities are led on a kind of treasure hunt around their ancestry before inevitably breaking down in a flood of guilt-induced weeping when they discover someone in their lineage who was much poorer than they are), there comes a moment when the subject will turn, astonished, to an unseen interviewer, and say something like, “I always wondered where I got my stubbornness / creativity / love of animals from, and now I know!  Great Auntie Hilda was just the same!  Amazing!”  This is nonsense. For every feisty, brave woman raising ten children in a one-bedroomed hovel in the Victorian East End, there was probably an alcoholic waster of a deserting husband who had left her behind.  I have yet to see a celebrity identify with the latter. 

My own family tree consists almost entirely of salt-of-the-earth agricultural labourers, cloth workers and blacksmiths.  As far as I am aware, not one of my 1000+ known ancestors was born outside England, and very few of them were born outside Yorkshire.  (Using the standard WDYTYA logic, this should have made me a purple-faced, Daily Mail-reading UKIP supporter with a flock of sheep, but thankfully it hasn’t.)  Unless you count the farmer in the wilds of Wensleydale who fathered his last child at the age of 72, the most exciting person in my entire lineage is only exciting because he was a tramp.

Mr. SB’s tree reads very differently. It contains members of the House of Lords, a Swedish bigamist, a Canadian beekeeper and a harbourmaster of Cape Town.  Most of the others were seafaring folk; his origins are in places as far afield as the Forest of Dean, East Lothian and Ireland.  If he ever featured on WDYTYA, licence payers would be complaining to the BBC about the astronomical budget after about fifteen minutes.  My version, in contrast, would cost about £2.50 all in.

If personality really is determined by heredity, we should have nothing in common. And yet, here we both are, living quite amicably in the same house.

Three generations of my family, not including the dog.

My real point, though, is this: most of my genealogical research has been done without leaving the house, on the internet, using a computer which is no bigger than a Victorian schoolchild’s slate.  On the infrequent occasions when I have needed to venture to the local library, or a distant churchyard, I have taken a day off from my well-paid professional job, left our unremarkable three-bedroomed suburban house, got into one of our two cars, and driven myself there. Using skills acquired during my 16 years of full-time education, I have read books, written notes, used indexes, and evaluated evidence, before packing up and driving home to watch television, play on the Wii, or talk on Twitter to some people I’ve never actually met.

And I am often struck by how utterly alien my ancestors would find everything in that last paragraph.  And I often wish I could resurrect them, and invite them round for a microwaved ready meal, so that they could see what happened next.

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Appetite for Destruction

•February 28, 2010 • 4 Comments

Mr. SB and I had an odd experience last night. At around 9.30pm, having established that there were no films on Sky to satisfy both his appetite for Bruce Willis blowing things up, and mine for Ralph Fiennes doing… well, anything, we found ourselves watching CNN.  The reason we were watching CNN was that BBC News was, in our opinion, not bringing us nearly enough in the way of drowning Hawaiians.

In the event, CNN was unable to bring us drowning Hawaiians either, because thankfully there weren’t any, but I found myself repeatedly wondering about our motivations for watching.  This was – or at least, had the potential to be – an extraordinary news event: live worldwide coverage of a natural disaster, with cameras and reporters in place several hours before it actually happened.  Of course, since the horrendous events of Christmas 2004, the word ‘tsunami’ has acquired a new resonance, and the millions of us watching around the world had front row seats, all wide-eyed and ready to watch the whole thing happen again. Mr. SB and I stopped short of popcorn, but only just.

What were we watching for, and what did the news channels want to show us?  Did we all really want to see massive devastation and innocent people drowning?  There was a palpable air of disappointment among the news anchors and reporters when the promised 8 foot tidal wave failed to materialise at Hilo Bay; a few hours later, seismologists were being dragged into news studios and asked in almost accusatory tones why the thing wasn’t bigger, more exciting, more… newsworthy?  They had wanted to bring us The Day After Tomorrow, and all we got was one dead fish.  CGI is good, but it’s not that good.

And by the way, there also seemed to be a curious double standard in operation last night. At the same time as CNN and FOX were waiting with bated breath for the watery destruction of half the Pacific Rim, the BBC were refusing to show us pictures of a man having his leg snapped in half in a football match. This naturally caused huge disappointment in the SB household, and we had to Google it.

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Welcome

•February 4, 2010 • 3 Comments

So here we are, then. I finally decided to do it. Welcome.

A word or two of caution, though, before we proceed.

I have a long and undistinguished history with this kind of thing. My life so far has been sprinkled with hobbies and projects begun, sometimes pursued for a while, but always ultimately abandoned. I was going to teach myself to play the flute. I bought one. I downloaded the instructions from the web. I immediately realised that it requires lungs the size of Range Rover airbags just to get a note out of it. Trying to play a whole phrase… well, that felt like scaling the north face of the Eiger in a force 9 gale. The flute now languishes on a shelf in the spare bedroom, just next to the calligraphy pens and my childhood stamp collection.

Over the years, there have also been dabblings with playing the piano (now a handy sideboard), singing in a choir (abandoned after three years out of necessity, before I murdered pensioners in cold blood), and making greetings cards.  This last was a slightly more successful venture for a while. I even sold a few.  But in the end, it went the way of all the others, leaving in its wake a pile of pink cardboard and glittery sparkly things which make my spare room look like a Barbie brothel.

Anyway.

An enthusiastic beginning, like so many others. Let’s see how long this one lasts.

Posted in Life, Random Nonsense
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