Clever ploy by the NUJ to make us Stand Up for Journalism, by cramming so many people into the room for last night’s rally that we didn’t have a choice about standing up Read the rest of this entry »

Starting work - 9.12AM
ETA in pub next door - 5.42PM

It’s Work Your Proper Hours Day!

Tagged by Tygerland to write about “10 things that I’d never do”. This is harder than it at first seems. F’rinstance, there are all manner of categories which you have to decide to rule in or out.

First off, there are the kind of principled delusions of grandeur which aren’t ever likely to happen and would make me look a bit of a pompous fool to mention them, such as: Accept a knighthood, date Paris Hilton, be a space tourist, or deceive a tribe of south sea islanders who had mistaken me for a god.

Then we have another whole bunch which are entirely and obviously unethical, so you’d expect me not to do them as a matter of course - eg: mug giros off a pensioner, salute a bloodthirsty dictator’s indefatigabliity, eat a live marmoset. Though of course, if I don’t mention them, I could well be left open to the description of ‘potential marmoset abuser’.

Next up are the temporary ones. I like boycotts, so refuse to use RyanAir, T-Mobile, Esso & so on. But what happens when they see the light (through principle or financial necessity) and start to change a bit, a la McDonalds - surely you need to start actively buying again in order to justify the boycott in the first place? So in the hope that Michael O’Leary one day has a Damascine conversion, I’ll leave his airline off this list.

So after all that prevarication, I’m left with a rag bag of less dramatic ones, which I shall attempt to drag out to 10:

1. Vote Tory. I’m Labour, me. (though not above tacticality in cases of extreme first-past-the-post silliness).
2. Drive a Chelsea tractor or similarly inefficient motor.
3. Sing along with ‘god save the queen’.
4. Send kiddo to private school. (handy way to make my stinginess look like high principle - double points!)
5. Fare dodge on public transport.
6. Bungee jump (shudder… far too wussy).
7. Cross a picket (even if I don’t 100% agree - I’d still want them not to cross one I was on!).
8. Bin a book, when I could take it to a charity shop.
9. Switch to Apple Mac.
10. Buy the Daily Mail (unless it’s for my Mother-in-law, and even then make sure to tell her off for it)

10a. And to cap it all, I would never, ever, collude in the promotion of Iain Dale. What? Ooops!

I understand it is customary to draw this kind of thing out by passing it on to others until the whole internet collapses in on itself, but as I’m so late with this I can’t honestly think of anyone who might enjoy the task who hasn’t beaten me to it already, except perhaps Nighthawk, so Roger - consider yourself tagged!

Commiserations to Cllr Kerron Cross (and especially his cat), who seems to have had a pretty miserable firework season. I’ll declare up front that I do like fireworks very much, so am rather partisan, but I’m not sure though that a ban is the best way to deal with growing firework bother.

I often have to check myself these days, in case my increasingly regular pronouncements on the wastefulness of today’s standards of living (don’t get me started on mini-motos and patio heaters) betray my transformation from angry young man to grumpy old man, but in this case I think I’m justified in harking back to my 70’s childhood, when fireworks were small, ground-based and rather unspectacular. For something impressive you had to go to a public display, but for the back garden, a little box of Screamers, Traffic Lights and Air Bomb Repeaters, was more than enough to wow the kids and make Dad feel useful.

But we’re all ‘pro-sumers’ now, and our firework displays are no exception. Stores now sell the same monster rockets you see on Clapham Common bonfire night, and we’ve got the cash for them, so everyone is now staging displays big enough for a crowd, just for their own families and friends. The result is the growing state of annoyance amongst pet-owners, pensioners, and anyone who likes quiet life.

The danger is on the up too, with serious amounts of explosives in homes and shops. If you look at the side, they now say to either leave 25m or 50m clear around the firework in case it did detonate at ground level. Obviously nobody does this, as they don’t have the garden space, so you’ve kiddies, flammable garden waste and likely neighbours well within a blast zone. What worries me most, is where those 3’ wooden poles go to – they can’t totally burn up, surely? Are they raining down on peoples’ heads in Croydon? Fireworks are being imported from all over, much cheaper than the UK manufactured tiddlers, and with less idea about the safety standards behind them.

So how about a bit of back to basics? Ban all fireworks for public sale over a certain volume of gunpowder (I think there would be a long queue for the job of Head Firework Tester at the HSE). Make a chartermark (which you can tax to subsidise the Fire Service) for those manufacturers who take up the challenge of making small fireworks to a high standard of safety. Make the sale of any firework without the chartermark an offence, with high fines. Adhering to a local standard would also limit dodgy imports (a bit protectionist mebbe, but would help out UK makers like time honoured favourites Standard).

People would still get small displays if they really want them, but anyone in favour of big thrills goes to a public display (I’d certainly want to run a display for my son when he grows up, but I’d hope we wouldn’t care if it was just a quick ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at a Traffic Light and a wave of a sparkler over a cup of hot Vimto). Even the noisy ones of yore, like the fabled Screamer, weren’t that noisy in comparison to today’s megarockets, so a lot of the neighbour annoyance might subside.

However….

Before killjoys like Kerron and I either ban or tax your fireworks, I do heartily (and hypocritically) recommend letting off a big ‘un at least once in your life. When I lived in South Oxford and still had a garden, I used to spend most of my firework dosh on one big rocket (yes, yes, flagrantly breaching the distance guidelines) and hold a very short firework display for friends.

Lighting it is quite different from a little rocket, and a very different experience to a big display. Start the wick (no piddly blue touchpaper here) and peg it back to your pals. You can feel the air sucking in at ground level as you go, and with a whoosh, it’s off and powering up and up, seeming like it’s taking a bit of you on board with it, til it splashes out across the sky, illuminating the whole street for a split second and a ‘thump’ that you feel in your chest, and you’re left with a sheepish grin on your face, and a burning urge to say “See that? I did that!”.

Heh heh. Like I said, I like fireworks, I do…

Just back from Gdansk, where I was visiting the trade union Solidarnosc. Never been to Poland before, and Gdansk was a very nice place, but I’m knackered, so in lieu of any genuine cultural commentary, here are three things I found half-way funny:

1. The plane we flew in on (once SAS had lost my baggage and nearly lost me in Copenhagen) was the smallest I’ve ever been on (70 seater propeller plane), so I found it quite amusing that it was called “Huge Viking”. Apparently, Huge is an old Nordic name, so he was an ancient Viking hero. The name Huge means (well, duh…) “The big one”.
2. We had lunch in the main square, which was very nice, and just about warm enough (though not enough to tempt anyone else). I chose from the special vegetarian menu: “Vegetarian dumplings with sauerkraut, mushrooms and cottage cheese (with meat)”.
3. Best of all though was the free tourist guide and map I picked up at the hotel. I quote the very first paragraph: “If you’ve arrived by train your journey into the old town in straight forward: sidestep any drunks mumbling to themselves, then put your head down and speed straight through the subway full of women selling cut-price underwear. Then presto, there you are: the historic centre.”

Good coverage in FT, BBC, Guardian for today’s new TUC company finder tool - it’s a neato search that lets you find out company structures and performance for UK companies - things like profits, shareholders, ultimate holding companies and so on. Unsurprisingly though, the angle that’s been picked up on in the media is the more prurient fact you can see top directors’ salaries in all their ample glory.
My favourite bit though is the CBI reaction in the FT’s article:

“Keeping staff well informed about the company’s performance, pay structure and
staff representation is already high on the agenda for firms. In most cases,
however, union members will be entirely unaware of details such as pay, benefits
and length of contract for union executives.”

Heh Heh… This is a “where do you start?” one, but I’ll restrict myself to 2 observations… Namely a lot of unions do make this public - pegging their bosses’ salaries to an equivalent post for their members. But the rather more obvious one is that only a handful of union bosses earn over £100k, which isn’t a particularly high wage for people running such large organisations (the CBI pay more than a little better for one), and as such rather different to the bona fide multi-millionaire fat cattery that most people are wound up about.

“I’m voting for George Galloway”.
Admittedly I have context on my side here in that he’s up for eviction in Big Brother, and I’d like to see him off our screens for a bit. The papers are full of letters from his consituents, complaining that by going on telly, he’s drawing his MP’s salary and not doing any work on their behalf (especially given that he’s needed next week to debate Crossrail, which is going to chop big holes in his consituency). But a quick perusal of his Commons voting records shows he’d not be doing very much anyway (he’s 634th out of 644 MPs in the number of votes he actually bothered to show up for).

Playmaker.

Go see Playmaker, the London indie rock band. You might have heard their last (and first) single, Arizona, but they’ve got more on their site and for their upcoming gig on Sat 10 April at WestOneFour, West Kensington