Your musical education - number whatever

Songs in the Key of Life - Stevie Wonder

Christmas 1976 and a broken hearted JerryChicken has just split up with the first love of his life, is regretting the dump and feeling sorry for himself, he buys himself the new Stevie Wonder album, a double album with a free EP inside.

Its a landmark moment, both in Stevie Wonders career and in the 20 year old JerryChickens life.

If I was to recommend one album from the seventies to anyone who wasn't there then this would be it, no question.

When an artist is told by his record company to release a double album its usually because they have one too many good songs to fit onto a single album and the next two months are spent in a blind panic trying to find some bilge to fill out the second part of the sleeve.

In 1976 Stevie Wonder must have had enough new songs to fill five or six albums, so good is the quaility of every single track on Songs in the Key of Life and it makes you wonder what happened to the ones that were rejected - they were squeezed onto an EP and thrown in for good measure as a freebie is the actual answer, a double album and then four more tracks shoved inside.

From the first bars of "Love's in Need of Love Today" you melt into this album with its several long tracks of self indulgent, wonderful, not blindingly commercial but nevertheless platinum selling soul music the likes of which had not been heard up until then and in my opinion has never been surpased.

Almost every track has been covered or sampled on some far more inferior trash but no-one has made the music speak the message like Stevie Wonder does, twelve tracks from seventeen charted as singles under Mr Wonders banner and since then ten of the tracks have been covered and god knows how many samples have been included by assorted rap and gangsta wankers - "Pastime Paradise" being the most famous, released as the inferior "Gangsta Paradise" by some twat called Coolio.

And I shudder as I write this, and curl in embarrassment for I am truly ashamed of being British at this point - in 1977 Stevie Wonder released the single "Isn't she Lovely" which celebrates the birth of his daughter Aisha and includes audio of her baby bathtimes, its a great track and a very personal one to him and was destined make No 1 in the UK singles charts without doubt.

And then, in an act of gross vandalism, and an extreme violation, nay, rape of the artistic merit of the song, a record company in the UK who had earlier received permission to record the song with a no-mark called David Parton (no, I'd never heard of him before or since either), released their version as a spoiler - and in a tragedy that has never been explained properly the crap version reached number one and kept Stevie Wonders original down in the bottom of the charts - unforgiveable.


Its impossible to pick a favourite track off the album, there are simply too many, but for starters I'd recommend the aforementioned "Loves in Need of Love Today", "Joy inside my Tears" and "As".

Your new house, in hours

Whilst browsing t'interweb this morning I noticed that a construction company by the name of Persimmon Homes seems to be doing quite well for itself having completed 16,700 homes last year with profits rising by 17% - thats not bad going in anyones books.

It was a little bit different when I first came across Persimmon Homes in 1980-ish.

I was working as an estimator for an electrical contractors when we were approached by Persimmon for what was to be their first ever construction site in the north-east having just opened an office in York. They were one of a few companies pioneering the timber frame method of house construction in those days and the ethos behind all of those house building companies was to ram as many houses onto a site as possible - Bowey Homes in Newcastle were another client of ours and they broke all records for the petite-ness of their dwellings where the customers garden shed would often have more floor space than the ground floor of their new house.

Indeed we used double sized wooden garages for our site cabins in those days, breaking them down and transporting them to new sites as the need arose and it became an old joke that whenever we were erecting one on a new building site you'd always be asked by a passer-by (usually a confused old lady) what you were doing, to which you'd reply "building a Bowey home love" and they believed you every time, wandering away with a "eeeh, they're not very big are they love".

Traditionally in the UK houses have always been built from stone or brick and for 150 years or so have had two leaves of brickwork, and inner and outer wall with a gap inbetween to prevent incursion of damp into the inner walls, it works very well, but its expensive and inner walls tended to be built from cheaper concrete blocks - still the same principle though.

In Europe and America the timber framed house was well established, only the outer wall was brick or stone and did not support anything except itself, the actual house was in fact a giant wooden shed and could be manufactured in a factory and delivered to site on the back of a truck with a minimum of fuss and just a few hours of construction to get the thing up off the ground.

A friend of mine who eventually became an architect bought his very first house in Leeds from Geo. Wimpey the well known builder not realising that it would be of timber frame construction (he paid a bit more attention to his own clients projects after that). We'd always go for a pint on a saturday lunchtime and the first week after he'd signed the contract for his house he suggested that we drive to the site and photograph his house every week as it was being built.

The first week he took a photograph of the concrete slab that his house was to stand on, we went back the following week to photograph a few courses of brickwork to find his house standing there, finished.

And that wasn't unusual, a week to put up the timber frame, build up the brick outer walls, put windows and doors in and to an outside viewer the house would be complete, whole sites could be erected within a few months and the builders who pioneered this method of construction in the UK became very adept at getting their sites finished quicker and quicker, which of course made the houses cheaper, and when they made them smaller they could get more of them on a site and sell them cheaper still - I can still drive onto a housing estate that is 20 or so years old and tell you instantly whether or not they will be timber framed or not, they are all of a stylee.

Generally though that method of construction has fallen by the wayside, rumours abounded of how you couldn't hang pictures on the walls because if you put a nail through the internal plasterboard and penetrated the plastic membrane liner beyond the timber frame then damp would set into the woodwork and your whole house would fall down - a bit exagerated maybe, impossible to do unless you hang pictures on 6 inch nails, but still, they were not popular and are not generally built that way anymore.

I nearly bought one a few months ago but was beaten to it by another buyer.

I hope they don't have lots of pictures to hang inside.

We're mopping up the dregs...

Remember the Leeds Supertram fiasco

How ten years of planning and financial arranging all got pissed against the wall last year by HM Government ?

How the people of the City of Leeds were royally shafted and told that our plans for a nice, clean, green public transit system were crap, after being told how good they were for ten years ?

How, for the sake of £500million, a good percentage of which would be raised via private investment, this fourth largest city in England would have to stick to filthy unsafe buses that may or may not turn up in accordance with the rough guess that is the "timetable" ?

Well, the small print of that incredible Dept of Transport ineptitude was that they would research "some viable alternatives" for the city and get back to us.

And true to their word they've done their research and they've got back to us - with £1.7million and some red paint.

The viable alternative to an integrated city-wide electric tram system (like many cities in the UK already have) is to paint a bus lane down one of the major routes into Leeds and use the existing filthy, unsafe buses on them.

Burley Road (A65) is one of several major routes into Leeds, its two lanes wide in both directions and it clogs with traffic for a couple of hours every morning and every evening. It already had various sections of it as dedicated bus lanes so that the car traffic can effectively already only use one lane at peak times whilst the dedicated bus lane stands empty most of the time waiting for the next bus, which may or may not come along depending on how pissed off the driver is that day.

Notice how I mention that the A65 already has a bus lane for most of its distance ?
Thats because its true.

So the new viable option (which will cost £3million in total) is to have, erm, well, a bus lane.

"But you've already got one" I hear you all cry.

Yes its true I reply, but you see the old bus lane is a black and white one, that is the bus lane markers are white paint ont he black road surface - the new bus lane is going to be painted red, so, well, it different - now come on, thats thinking out of the box there isn't it, how did we not think of that one years ago, why did we think we needed £500m spending on supertram when all along we could have had inventive red bus lanes to do the same job for a fraction of the cost - how stupid we were.

Thats it, thats what we're getting, a bus lane where a bus lane already exists, its just a colour bus lane instead.


And another thing ...

Note how I use the word "unsafe" when referring to the old dirty buses ?

Its because a friend of mine has a 14 year old son who was travelling into Leeds with two friends at 5pm one evening a short while ago when they were mugged by three older boys with three mobile phones and a quantity of cash take - the bus did not have video and the driver was not interested when the boys told him, in fact he put them off the bus at the next stop.

The friend of mine is actually a police officer and attacks and muggings on buses as well as disinterested drivers are apparently not uncommon.

Its why I don't let my girls ride on Leeds buses - they are not safe.


The red bus lanes will be nice though.

Evidence of global warming ?

Take a look at this post from last year.

The frogs woke up and spawned all over my pond on 31st March last year, and I commented that that was a few weeks earlier than usual.

My pond is today full of frogspawn with around twenty frogs clambering all over each other to get at the females - there is also spawn all over the lawn so desperate are the dirty buggers to get it on they can't even wait until they get in the water.

Thats a whole month earlier than last year and I'm not suprised really, we haven't really had a winter here this year, its been an elongated spring with only a half dozen or so days where the temperature has dropped below freezing and only one day when we got what could jokingly be called snow.

The UK now has a mediteranean climate and I can't wait for a long hot summer.

A technical hitch...

There is just one teensy-weensy problem outstanding on our house move.

Our house is illegal.

This whole street of houses was built in 1928 on a field that was owned by a gentleman called John Pickard, they were built to several designs and with large gardens, we know all of this because we've had the deeds in our possesion for a few years now and fascinating reading they make.

I must digress from the main point here and mention the people who originally bought this house from John Pickard, its a great story (not for him though).

The chap who originally bought this house for just £649 in 1928 was a gas meter reader and lived with his new wife in Harehills, an inner city working class area of small terraced houses with no gardens.

For a gas meter reader the investment must have been massive, and brave, for not many people purchased houses back then and the fact that he got himself a mortgage from a building society was remarkable, as must have been the change in lifestyle as Cookridge was very much well out in the countryside at that time and not just a suburb like it is now.

They moved in here and lived a perfectly normal life until 1948 when he was diagnosed as having a nervous breakdown - that bit fascinates me coming so soon after the end of WWII, was it something that he experienced in the war that caused his breakdown - the good thing for him and his wife is that they'd finished paying the mortgage off just one year before so at least the threat of repossesion didn't hang over his wife's head when she committed him to Menston Mental Hospital.

I'm guessing that the care and treatment of mental illness wasn't exactly a recognised science back in those days for he lived at "The Asylum" as it was known locally until his death in 1968 - twenty years of incarceration for what would probably be treated as depression now and eased (if not cured) by drugs so that the victim can live a life with his family instead of being locked into what by other names is a prison.

Things must have been pretty bad for him in 1968, depression and hopelessness leading to him "escaping" the "hospital" and hanging himself in a barn on the hospital estate.

His wife continued living in what is now (for another two weeks) our house until she too was taken into care in 1992 suffering from alzheimers at which point her neice took power of attourney and sold the house in a pretty unmaintained and shabby state to the people who we eventually bought the place from in 2001.

How do I know all this ?

Because the affadavit for the power of attourney contains a full and frank statement from the niece of the family history as her aunt had lost the original deeds and was not mentally able to provide sworn evidence that the house definitely belonged to her, the niece's evidence supported by another elderly aunt was accepted by a judge and the ownership transfered to her in trust.

Amazing story - I love family history.


So, back to the teensy-weensy problem.

The person who owned the house before us had a mammoth task to bring it up to standard as the poor old lady had obviously neglected the place badly, hardly suprising if she'd lived their on her own for 42 years - if I am ever in a similar situation then I will definitely not be hanging onto a house that is too big to maintain, houses do not make homes, people make homes, houses are just bricks and mortar that can also be money pits if you are not careful.

New windows and doors were fitted, new wall ties, the bay window was underpinned, a new damp proof course installed, the ground floor was ripped up and replaced along with all of the plastered walls on the ground floor, and the house was re-roofed.

Phase two of their work was to build a large two storey extension at the back of the house, with full and proper planning permission from our local council, which almost doubled the size of the house and made it the "very pleasant and well appointed dwelling" that the estate agents describe it as now.

The teensy-weensy problem is that they didn't apparently check the original deeds, John Pickards original deeds.

In 1928 John Pickard had inserted several covenants into the agreement to sell the land, one of which stated that no alterations to the floor plan of the dwellings would be allowed, a bit of a bastard that one, especially if you've just near on doubled the size of the house with an extension.

Fotunately John Pickard is the one who would enforce that covenant and as he is more than likely dead by now, or if alive will be well over 100 years old, then the chances of him walking down the street, walking up our drive, peering over the gate and spluttering "You bastards shouldn't have built that" are slim to say the least.

The other point in our favour is that every single other house in the street has also had extensions of some form built and their covenants will also have been slyly ignored, so the chance of a neighbour grassing us up is also nil.

But of course the anally-rententive solicitor of the people who are buying our house has spotted the clause and recommended to his clients that they get us to idemnify them against John Pickard returning from the grave to make us remove half of the house.

The cost of an indemnity policy is £170 and when my solicitor asked me for instructions to pass on to the other party I instructed him to tell them to piss off, I don't think that he used that term but they certainly got the message as he tells me that the other solicitor is now "rather put out" that I won't spend £170 on an insurance policy against dead people objecting to building works - call me stupid but on all of the "Crossing Over with John Edwards" tv programmes that I've ever seen not one single dead person has ever sent a message to this side to say "your neighbours house extension is illegal".

It good fun is this moving stuff.

On the move soon

House signed over, removal date set for 6th March.

Having done this seven times now I have finally relented and booked a professional removal company for the day, well two days actually, they load us up on the 5th, go away with all our stuff then (hopefully) come back on the 6th and wait for the keys to be handed over, sounds like a good idea to me and saves all of the hectic morning-of-the-removal panic and running around trying to get 30 years worth of possesions into boxes and on the van, the only thing that is causing me some deep thinking at the moment is what do we leave in the house on the 5th to keep us going overnight until they come back ?

At least one TV set obviously, with remote control, and the cable box of course, and something to sit on, food, some plates, cutlery, kettle, tea and coffee for the next morning, beds, bedding, clothes, stuff for the bathroom, Jake the Dog (he has to go to the office for two days), Jakes food and bowls, the list starts to look like being endless and you start to wonder just what it is that they'll be able to load up the day before, but its not my problem anymore.

This weekend Suzanne is away on a hen party "do" at Butlins in Skegness, yes you read it right...
Butlins.
Skegness.
I have spent many an evening laughing at the venue, seeking out web sites like this one in order to take the piss out of her and her merry hen party friends who will be attending the chav-est of all holiday camps on a 1980's theme weekend, then she came home the other night with an agenda for the party and I see that on Saturday night there are several live bands on including Madness, The Specials and Toyah Wilcox.

And at the same time I took a phonecall from a friend who informs me that the associated stag party next month, which we are staying in Newcastle for, has booked a hotel on the Quayside. Very nice thought I, Newcastles Quayside is where it all happens on a saturday night, not sure how a party of 50 year olds will fit in, but still. Then my friend tells me the name of the hotel and how he's read a review on the web where previous clients have described the place as "shit", "truly dreadful", "dirty", "bed bugs" - and you should have read the ones who hated the place.

Suddenly I don't want to go to Newcastle next month, I want to go Butlins this weekend to see The Specials and Madness, bastard, why do I get to stay in the dosshouse and get turned away from every bar and club on the Quayside for being too old, why do I have to go to Newcastle races on the Saturday, I hate horse racing, its the worst way to waste a day that I can think of and I can see myself becoming the miserable bugger of the party, in fact I can see the whole wekeed being a fooking disaster as the groom is not known for his organisational skills - its was he who booked six of us, full grown, adult males, some with beards, into a Travel Lodge in London one year under the description "The Graham family", two adults and two children, a boy and a girl aged ten and eight.

I won't tell you which one of us walked past reception as the girl.


Postscript : Moving day now set for Friday 9th

Signing it all away...

In an hour or so today I and my good lady are to visit our solicitor in Leeds to sign the contract to sell our house for an unfeasible amount of money to a young couple with a baby family who think that our house is the ideal place to raise their kinder and invest for their future.

It is, its true that it is, its a fairly big house, big garden, big rooms inside and plenty of them.
Its also a money pit.

But its not as big a money pit as the even bigger house that we moved from six years ago to live in this money pit - that even bigger house simply sucked the very blood from our veins and spat us out four years later almost penniless and still only halfway through our restoration plans - the people who bought that house from us also currently have it up for sale, I think its drawn every last drop of blood from them too.

And in a remarkable coincidence the house that we lived in before the very big money pit disaster is also up for sale, I think the current incumbents must have discovered the natural spring running underneath the ground floor which would fill up the three foot underfloor space after a long period of rain, to within two inches of the ground floor itself.

Yes, we've moved house several times, seven times in fact and for the last three house moves our equity in the house has doubled in value each time, we have sold this particular house for exactly twice what we paid for it in 2001.

We're moving down again, down to a regular three bed semi-detached with a regular sized garden in a regular stylee neighbourhood and in doing so are regaining some of our built up equity to pay off various credit cards and loans and make ourselves totally debt free - I can't explain what it feels like to actually state that, fucking relieved is one phrase that fits.

For the last two years our business has not been doing too well, we made a loss for the first time ever two years ago and when the accounts are done for last year they will also show a small loss, we are existing to simply pay the bills and its not been much fun for the past two years.

So we're selling the business too.

We've sold a third of the shareholding (Suzannes share) outright and we've sold a big chunk of my share and Ned,s share, me and him are staying on to run the place for the new owners with a small personal shareholding left behind, and I can't wait for it to happen.

Ned and I are the third generation in our family to run this business and the question has been asked whether or not we have failed in managing the family asset, to my mind we haven't, we are just embarking on the next phase of the company development, we can't do it all ourselves and we need outside help and investment, investment that we cannot provide for ourselves and so inviting a much bigger company in the same trade to come along and invest, but mroe importantly to take away the tiresome administration that is all consuming in every UK business nowadays is our perfect solution - for the first time in at least two years I look forward to coming to the office each morning now.

But more importantly we will be receiving a regular wage again, a monthly salary, sales bonuses and a shareholders dividend at the end of the year, all of which will be a novelty because for far too long, and all other business owners will know what I am talking about here, for far too long we have relied on customers paying their bills before we can pay ourselves, its a big pain in the arse that I simply will not have any more.

The negotiating is done, the numbers agreed and we are close to signing control over - it can't come soon enough.

March 2007 is going to be a very big month for us, a huge lifestyle change, a month when I can finally shake off most of my responsibilities and start a ten year plan to get some serious saving done, pay off the last of the mortgage, retire and paint.

I can't wait.

A reet good film tha'knows

First in a series of reet good film recommendations, and of course it has to be the 1969 classic film by Ken Loach of a Barnsley schoolboy and his pet Kestrel.

But its far more than that, its a documentary of life in South Yorkshire in the secondary modern education system where lads like the subject of the film, Billy Casper, were dumped into the lower stream of non-achievers and told to stay in a holding pattern until they were ready for release onto the unskilled labour market at 16 years old, huge concrete blocks of schools where the only measure of achievement at 16 was the fact that you were still there.

Take a look at this clip, its a classic scene from the movie, the scene where casper and a few of his classmates are in front of the headmaster for various indescretions, a bollocking and the cane to start the day with - the young kid at the end had been sent to the headmasters office with a message from a teacher but the older lads made him hide their cigarettes in his pockets and so of course he got the cane too.

I have it on good authority from someone who actually went to that school that the part of the headteacher was played by the schools own woodwork teacher, and quite frankly I believe it because his acting is terrible, but it adds to the enjoy-a-bility of this classic scene. I also understand that the woodwork teacher (lets not call him an actor) actually did cane the lads in that scene, it would certainly explain the look of shock and the tears in the little lads eyes at the end, no-one had told him that acting could be painfull.

But of course the scene that everyone remembers from this film is this one, Brian Glover as the sports teacher taking the class for a game of football with Casper the Unpopular being picked last and made to play in goals - the sounds a bit out on that clip but its worth persevering with - there's a shorter clip here if the sound delay on the long one is too annoying.

The film was taken from a book, "A Kestrel for a Knave", by Barry Hines who knows somebody that I know, and is the story of a young lad, Billy Casper, living a drudge of a life in a South Yorkshire mining village in the late 1960's, bullied by his peers and especially his older brother Judd who works darn t'pit but still shares a bed with Casper in their dirt poor council house, Casper spots a Kestrel's nest one day, steals a chick and raises it, stealing a book from the library in order to learn how to teach the young hawk to hunt.

Its a story of escapism with none of the Hollywood glamour, no dramatic scenery, not one car chase and not a trace of straight, gleaming white teeth, nor even a well known acting name unless you count Colin Welland the English teacher who is the only person to know of Caspers hawk.

It all ends in tears of course, Judd gives Casper some money to place on a horse accumulator bet which he promptly spends on a bag of chips and a comic instead, the horses in the accumulator all win and when Judd goes to collect his winnings he realises that his younger brother never placed the bet for him, failing to find him anywhere in the village he find instead the hawk Kes and wrings its neck, throwing it in the dustbin behind the house.

And thats the story, plain and simple, no happy ending, no nice moral teachings to go home with, not one American around to save the boys hawk from the dustbin, just a story, a plain straighforward story set in a very realistic setting and like life itself, it sometimes stinks.

I recommend it to the house.

PS - for those of a foreign persuasion the accent that you hear in the film clips is that of my home county, Yorkshire. there are several flavours of Yorkshire accent and this one is Barnsley, perhaps the thickest and most comical of the flavours but incredibly satisfying to listen to - Barnsley fowk still use "thee" and "thou" and call people "love" and mean it, its an honest accent with no frills and no pretensions and the best thig about it is that the soft southern nancies who inhabit the bottom bit of the UK don't understand a word of it.

Why Government are poor customers...

According to reports, HM Government is paying far too much for basic prescription drugs for use in the NHS - to the tune of a possible £500m a year.

It doesn't suprise me.

You'd think that if you were the country's largest buyer of "standard" drugs, stuff like pain killers, blood pressure tablets and indigestion pills, then you'd have the clout to extract the goods from the worlds largest drug companies at the world's smallest prices - buying in bulk, massive bulk, would surely give you a huge negotiating hammer to beat them over the heads with - then offer them some of their own headache tablets when they've agreed the deal.

But no, the contract that the NHS have with the major drug companies is not based on how much money per box they pay, but how much profit the drug companies are allowed to make on the deals.

And that is the problem with allowing Government to negotiate deals with huge global companies - there is a massive hidden agenda.

The Global Drug Company PLC approaches HM Government to sell it 180 million headache tablets and straight away its on the offensive with a deal to base some of the production of those tablets in this country, employing 2000 workers in an area of high employment and paying a few million in corporation taxes every year, and suddenly HM Government isn't thinking "how much per tablet" any more but "we could win more votes in that area of high unemployment".

And so the contracts that the NHS sign with the drug companies reflect the amount of profit that they can make from an agreed base rate price - profit should not come into a negotiation with a client, the profit margin is for the supplier to know and no-one else, the job of the buyer is to screw the last drop of margin out of the supplier and not stop at a pre-determined marker that a politician has set with one eye on his votes for the next term.

We came across something similar some years ago when we supplied goods to the organisation that purchased equipment for all of the schools in Yorkshire, ours was a small contract and they approached us for a price for the goods required, we told them our "standard" price, the price that everyone else paid befor etalking of discount for quantity, and they accepted our standard price even though we were expecting them to negotiate a bit of discount.

Not only did they accept our "standard" price but when the order came through it contained a clause requiring us to add ten per cent to the order value for their overheads - everything that was purchased by that HM Government department has ten per cent added to it to pay for that HM Government department - we'd have easily accepted a ten per cent discount off our standard price if they'd only asked.

It was lazy, inefficient civil service bollacks, not only were they not doing their job as procurers but they had created a whole new level of jobsworth bureaucracy to administrate, warehouse and then deliver the goods themselves in their own branded fleet of vehicles to the hundreds of schools in Yorkshire who actually thought they were getting a good deal from the service.

HM Government needs to shake off the civil service approach to everything commercial (sit here and wait for your pension to come) and look at how all of the major businesses manage their purchasing, having dealt with supermarkets and their purchasing departments for 25 years then I'd suggest that HM Government could do worse than use them as a blueprint for buyers.

Drive like a hooligan...

TI Rally School near York (01759 318820) was the venue yesterday afternoon, Ned and I turned up with eight other aspiring hooligan drivers to experience what is is actually like to climb into a car that has been stripped down to the absolute minimum required to make it go very fast across wet and muddy concrete and, mud.

Its very exilarating is the answer.

Among the group that stood around at the start clad in our matching and very smart fireproof overalls and safety helmets were twenty-somethings who were keen as mustard to get behind the wheel and me, probably the oldest one there, who frankly couldn't really care less about the competition element, I was there for a laugh.

Its how I approach all sports, whatever I play is played for enjoyment, I couldn't care less about winning or losing as long as I have a laugh doing it, and driving like a hooligan in mud is probably as enjoyable a sport as I can think of.

The RS2000 rally car is a design classic, its an old car that has none of todays rally gadgets, no traction control, no four wheel drive, nothing anti-lock, no brake assist and no power steering.

The no power steering bit was apparent on the first run. At the TI Rally School you don't sit in a classroom or watch someone else do the work, you get straight in a car (several identical RS2000's), plug in the intercom and your instructor, in my case Mick, sits in the passenger seat and tells you exactly what to do and when to do it - these instructions usually consist of words like "faster", "handbrake", and "sideways" and occasionally "what did you do that for".

The first trip out was an attempt to get rid of the natural instinct that drivers have to actually drive your way around the circuit. With no power steering and big heavy off road wheels the car feels incredibly solid and its tough to steer at speed in mud, we drove around a short but very twisty course a few times with Mick trying to get me to use the cars momentum to get around the corners - driving a rally car sideways is apparently the norm and the most important piece of equipment in the car is the handbrake which when applied at speed along with a foot to the floor on the accelerator will make the car slide gracefully around any corner no matter how sharp.

But its hard to accept that when it goes against all your natural instincts - I finished the first round absolutely knackered because I'd tried to steer the car around the course, I fell out of the drivers cage thinking I wouldn't last the day if it was all like this.

The second run was on a much longer course with a nice fast twisty bit to start with and by this time the penny had dropped, foot to the floor, drive flat out into the corners and let the car slide around with hardly any movement of the steering wheel - immense fun but with bends and corners coming up at you fast every couple of seconds, incrediby absorbing with no time to admire the scenery, which was good because the scenery was in the main, mud.

Three sessions later and the ten drivers were a lot more confident, especially after we had all managed to drive off the course at least once, and done 360 degree spins both on and off the route, in fact TI Rally School will probably find new routes marked out on their course today such was the enthusiasm of our group.

The final session was a timed one off dash around the long route and this is where the nerves obviously set in for some of the competitors, Mick my instructor asked me if I was nervous as we waited for the countdown on the start line and I replied that no, I was there for the laugh, five seconds later we were tearing into the bends at what seemed like unfeasible speeds and I was laughing with Mick shouting out a constant stream of instructions urging more speed and more sideways stuff - fekking brilliant is all I said at the end, just fekking brilliant and after four competitors had completed the course I was in the lead, the ones who seemed keenest had lost it on the timed run and hit several obstacles which all carried penalties - the "have fun" attitude works every time.

And then at the end we swapped seats and Mick took me on a proper hooliogan trip around the course, a much longer course than we had used and driven at least three times the speed, it was time to sit there like a floppy doll and not move and try not to swear too much as Mick took ninty degree corners at speeds that should simply not have been possible, my back hurts this morning Mick.

They broke one car during the day and had to use a spare, something to do with the gears, or maybe not, it broke anyway and afterwards Mick and Phil (who own the school) told us of their day to day expenses, axles bought ten at a time, drive shafts similar, brake pads changed every four days, one of the cars that we were using needed new wheel bearings, they'd been changed on Tuesday - life in a rally school is tough on the mechanics whilst there in the car park sat my Nissan Primera which hasn't had the bonnet even lifted up this past eight months.

Eventually I came third in our little competition and unfortunately Ned finished first, he won a trophy and got to spray a bottle of fizzy stuff everywhere and I'll not hear the end of it in the office this morning where his trophy will go on the shelf which normally displays my golf trophies - as I pointed out to him last night, I have more golf trophies than he does - he was not slow inpointing out however that they are all for finishing last in the competitions but thats not the point, I had a laugh in every one of them.

King of Cool...

News that Bryan Ferry is to release an album of Bob Dylan covers is to be greeted with deep joy, the coming together of two artists who are up there on my "must listen to at every opportunity" list.

Of course its not the first time that Mr Ferry has covered a Dylan song, the best recording of "A Hard Rains a-gonna Fall" (YouTube link here) was present on his album "These Foolish Things" and "Don't Think Twice its Alright" was on the "Frantic" album, and I'm sure there were others but I can't think of them at the moment, lets be honest, any serious crooner who doesn't include at least one Dylan cover every couple of albums or so is just not listening hard enough.

But "King of Cool" ?
I wish I were half as cool as this , or this, and I wish the YouTube link to "these Folish Things hadn't vanished into the ethernet because that is the coolest video I have ever seen.

So instead, why not drift back to where it all began ?



Right, I must be off now - a day driving a rally prepared Escort RS2000 like a hooligan awaits, if I survive, I'll write it.

A modern war...

It feels strange to think that this country is at war because here at home everything is still the same, the country's economy is booming so much that the Bank of England is trying to put the brakes on it, house prices rise by the day and consumer spending and consumer confidence has never been higher.

It shouldn't be like this in a country at war, we should feel threatened, we should be digging air raid shelters in our gardens and being reminded on every street corner to always carry our gas masks with us, we should be hacking down our iron railings to build ships with and handing in pots and pans for aircraft builders to use.

We should be despondant, we should know someone in our street who has lost someone in action, at least one of our nearest and dearest should be "fighting abroad somewhere" and we shouldn't have had a letter from them "for ages".

Our newspapers should be severely censored and only carry news of advances and victories and predictions that "it will all be over by christmas".

Our shops should be empty and we should have coupons for clothing and meat and we should be digging up our gardens to plant vegetables and raising chickens and rabbits for food, life should be austere and we should all be suffering in the name of patriotism and "for the war effort".


But we are doing none of these things.

We have a professional army who don't want volunteers, who don't need tens of thousands of men to make futile gestures on controlled battlefields in some foreign land - this is a professional war, a modern war, fought in the main, although not always, by technology without the need for trenches and constant conflict.

We see and hear everything that goes on in the modern theatre of war now, our news media are not censored in the way that they used to be and yet in the recent case of the Oxfordshire coroners court we ralise that cencorship still exists, and yet again we realise that in todays modern warfare the media can pressurise governments at the very top level into relaxing their grip on the little bit of censorship that they still posses.

More than anything we understand that modern warfare is driven by politics and not a need for land or riches and if the politicians thought for one minute that a war would affect their chances of winning votes then the war would not exist.

Three war news stories are in the headlines today...

The Oxfordhshire Coroners inquest is to hear a transcript of the American pilots who attacked a British vehicle convoy in Iraq, killing one soldier in a mistaken "friendly fire" incident and still the US military stand in the way of an official release of the cockpit video that we have all now seen on our TV News several times over - the coroner has finally accepted that this is as good as he is going to get and to wrap the thing up quickly he has no other choice but to accept the transcript - he also knows that every single person in the country knows the truth of the matter now and to be honest I doubt there is one person who does not accept that this was a tragic accident of war that happens far more often than we understand.

It happened here again where Cpl Bryan Budd was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, the nations highest and most prestigious military medal and one which is awarded very sparingly to only the bravest of individuals on the battlefield. It is revealed that it is now very possible that Cpl Budd was shot and killed by his own collegues in the confusion of close fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan - another tragic accident of war that happens far more often than we understand.

Should we send Prince Harry to Iraq asks most of the nations press today as his regiment The Blues and Royals prepare to go there on a tour of duty. The Prince (son of Saint Diana, Princess of Hearts of course) is an officer in the guards regiment and will be expected to lead a small group of soldiers in whatever scenario they are placed into, although you can't help but think that if you were a foot soldier under the Prince's command then you'd be very happy to be a foot soldier under the Prince's command as the Prince's command are probably not going to be placed in too much danger by the Generals further up the tree - what sort of General dare come home to face HM The Queen and admit that he was the one who commanded her grandson to lead the attack that lead to his death ?


Shit happens in war, but at least we get to know about it as it happens now, not forty years later.

Bradford's lake evaporates...

Bradford, second city of West Yorkshire was certainly in need of its current city centre massive investment and facelift.

Thats it in the picture (left), looks nice doesn't it ?
Its deceiving is that photograph.
Even ardent Bradfordians admit that their city centre is shit.

100 years ago Bradford was an incredibly wealthy place to live and work, it was literally the centre of the worlds wool and worsted cloth trade and folk travelled from all over the civilised world to buy West Yorkshire cloth at the Bradford Wool Exchange.

Along with that entreprenuership and wealth creation came some fine Bradford buildings, some of which can be seen in that photo, and in the main those buildings were built using the local stone leaving a legacy of some of the finest Victorian buildings and mills spread right across the city.

And then came the 1960's.
And unfortunately the burghars of Bradford found access to ready cash for redevelopment.

Within a decade the complete centre of Bradford had been demolished and rebuilt in a brave new world of concrete and plastic facades, square blocks of shops and offices replaced the fine victorian stone architecture in a town planners vision of what the 20th century city centre should look like - it looked shit.

Within ten years it looked even shit-er and by the end of the 20th century no-one would ever dream of visiting Bradford city centre unless they really, really had to, it was perhaps the most depressing place in the world and its citizens were rightly ashamed of their legacy.

Fortunately the odd pockets of Victoriana survived where the town planners had run out of cash and such places as Little Germany - an area of tall mills and offices just 100 yards away from the most awful of the 1960's blocks - was given a complete renovation in the 1980's to provide 21st century working spaces with glorious stone architecture, tall rooms and windows and a view outside of those tall windows that didn't involve grey concrete - oh how Bradfordians regretted employing fekkwits as town planners in the 1960's when they saw Little Germany and what could have been done to the rest of their city centre.

Fortunately for those citizens the current crop of fine burghars have found some more potloads of money and they are in the process of a long phase of redevelopment of the worst of the 1960's architecture - at the moment everything that is to be demolished is laying on the ground now and the brave new bradford design is on public display all over the city.

One building which survived the 60's wrecking ball was the fine Victorian City Hall, although its bells in the bell tower were long ago replaced with a tape recorder that plays silly tunes in a bell tower stylee rather than just ringing a peal of bells, so that everyone now knows that its a tape recording.

The architects vision of the new Bradford city centre included a huge lake right in front of city hall covering nearly 100,000 sq feet which would offer a mirror reflection of the carved stonework in all its glory, especially when illuminated at night - it sounded lovely.

Except of course to the cynics amongst us who used a little imagination and looked a few years into the future to see a pond full of dirty black water, partly submerged upended shopping trolleys and the odd burnt out car waist deep in water, not to mention the odd hundred or so drunks dancing, urinating (and worse) in there every weekend.

Sanity has prevailed and the lake has been cut by a third to just 37,000 sq feet, still big in anyones books, nearly as big as the pond in my back garden which I have to drain in the next few weeks before we move house (anyone want to give a home to several big golden orfes until I can get a new pond built at the new house ? ), but there is talk from the architects of the ability to quickly drain the lake and use the space for open air concerts and recreation type stuff, I think not, not unless the concert organisers want to spend three days scrubbing the concrete base to remove all of the algae growth before allowing the punters in.

Still, we await with baited breath the removal of the screens and road diversions which now dominate the whole of the city centre, and will do for some time yet, before being pulled down with a theatrical flourish to reveal what, if anything, planners and architects have learned from what was the worst era in architectural design since time began - the 1960's.

Transport, its not working...

The Department for Transport (DfT) is the Government department in the UK for, well, erm, transport.

And just a few months after Home Secretary (he's in charge of The Home Office), declared that said Home Office was "unfit for purpose", it would appear that the DfT may also be failing in its responsibilities.

Yesterday the House of Commons Transport Committee (oh how they love their committee's in the House of Commons), was told that the DfT has failed to reach five out of seven of its own targets for improvements in public transport, pollution and congestion.

The cynics out here are not suprised of course that a government department, who set their own targets, cannot then meet their own targets, but the chairperson of the Transport Committee went further than that to state that given the state of the department at the moment it is unlikely that they will meet any of the targets that they have set for the next five years.

This is the same DfT and the same Commons Transport Committee that earlier this week were declaring that road tolls were the way forward for this country, a highly complex hi-tech satellite tracking network which would record every movement of your vehicle on every road in the UK then send you a bill at the end of the month depending on when and where you had driven your car - it sounded just a little too hi-tech for a government department to think up all on its own and just a little too complicated for a civil servant to administrate, and now we are reminded, from their very own mouths, that the DfT cannot cope with the volume of work that they set for themselves.

Having blogged for over a year on the debacle that was the proposed Leeds Supertram Scheme, a scheme designed to cure Leeds of traffic congestion, a scheme that was scrapped at the very last hopur (literally) because HM Government failed to meet their own side of the bargain that was the Private Funding Initiative that was to pay for it, we (the royal we) are not at all suprised that transport in the UK is a mish-mash of non-cohesive systems and routes, plans and ideas that are doomed to failure, and completely fictional projects that could never be budgeted for even if we discovered the worlds largest oilfield (again) within our sovereign seas.

For once Gwyneth Dunwoody, chair of the Transport Committee seems to be speaking some sense (for a Minister) when she states "road pricing would not solve all the problems of the road network, and public transport had to be improved and made more affordable as well" or could it just be that she has taken note of the huge level of protest in the last seven days over her departments road charging proposals and is making the first attempt at a retreat from the kite-flying that happens when Government makes its proposals known by surreptitious "leaks" of information to the press ?

If I send them my address...

News that Cadbury's are recalling an undisclosed number of easter eggs simply because they are incorrectly labelled has been greeted with joy in my household from whence I have emailed Cadburyland in Birmingham with an offer to find a home for all of the totally ruined chocolate easter aggs with nuts in.

Not that they will have nuts in of course, its just that they might have nuts in because they were made on a production line that had previously been used for a product that defintely had nuts in it, confused yet ?

I can assure Cadbury's that neither I nor my family are allergic to nuts and we can give the bad easter eggs a good home, not that anyone else in my family will get a look in when they arrive.

One of the products that is affected by the recall is the Cadurys Fruit and Nut easter egg which has not been labelled properly as having the possibility of containing nuts because it was manufactured on a production line that had previously been used for a product that definitely contained nuts.

Now of course I can't be exactly certain of this, but if a product that has the word "Nut" in its name, like for instance "Cadburys Fruit and Nut Easter Egg" then surely anyone with a nut allergy will not touch it with a barge pole will they ?

Maybe not, maybe there really are people out there with nut allergys that don't actually read the inch high name of the product but instead read the ever-so tiny ingredients section around the back of the packet instead and not seeing any reference to "nuts" just plough on and eat the product that has whole nuts visibly sticking out of it, maybe thinking, "they cant be real nuts because its not on the ingredient list"

Of course this follows hard on the heels of another cadbury's recall last year when it was suspected that some of their Dairy Milk chocolate bars may have contained salmonella although the six month delay in informing the Food Standards Agency of the fact may have given them a clue that perhaps none of the bars did actually contain the virus after huge swathes of the nation were not brought to their shitting, puking knees at all.

Theres too much arseing around with foods and labelling these days, I'm sure I'm not alone in having a mother who would scrape the mould off the top layer of jam to get at "the good jam" underneath am I ?

No ?

It was just my mother then.

Anyway - send me your cadbury's easter eggs and I'll dispose of them for you, you can't be too careful you know.

You entertainer, Me audience...

Time for another pet hate of mine.
No, its not The Police (left).
But they reminded me of my pet hate.

Saw a video of them performing at a press conference in LA this morning after they have announced that they are to tour later this year in order to rake in lots of dosh for the two other members who were not Sting - ok they didn't quite explain it like that but we know what you mean boys.

But thats not my pet hate either - I quite liked The Police actually, bought albums and everything.

I even have a video of Sting doing some sort of strange yoga exercises whilst wearing nothing at all, its awful.
But seeing Sting naked isn't my pet hate either.

Its this - during the set that they were playing, right in the middle of "Message in a Bottle", Mr Sting shouted out to the audience "I can't hear you", principally because they weren't singing along with him in the chorus.

Thats my pet hate.
Acts who want you to do their job for them.

I hate it when a singer, a DJ, or even a magician - ok perhaps not a magician, magicians acts tend to rely on audience participation - but anyway, any other type of act apart from magicians, shout out to the audience stuff like "C'Mon, everyone on their feet" or "Sing it if you know it" or, like Mr Sting "I can't hear you".

The thing is Mr Sting, you couldn't hear the audience singing because its your fuckin job to sing to them, its their job to listen to you, if they stood there talking to themselves and ignoring you, you'd be the first one to shout out "I can hear you too well", so how about you just concentrate on fuckin singing and let the audience be fuckin entertained ?

(heres the name dropping bit now)

Some ten or more years ago I was sitting on the balcony of the restaurant complex at Club Rockley, Barbados with the owner of the hotel, a man who looked and sounded remarkably like the old 1950's British cinema heartthrob Jack Hawkins.

We were watching a carribean reggae "turn" perform around the poolside to an obviously appreciative (and drunk) audience, when the female singer started inviting people up onto the dance floor for a jig to the ska beat, but even drunken English people have to be persuaded to dance to a carribean ska beat in front of native carribea-ans and so she resorted to dragging them out of their seats.

Jack Hawkins was not amused and after a minute or so he raised one hand and waggled a little finger to his entertainment manager Curtis who was also standing on the balcony watching the "fun", "Pay them off Curtis" he instructed.

Curtis looked a little shocked and asked his boss why, "Because I pay them to entertain my clients, not to force my clients to dance to cover up their own inadequacies" he informed.

Its a phrase that has stuck with me ever since.

If I'd been in that club in LA last night when Mr Sting told me to sing along with him I'd have got the whole audience to shout in unison "We're not here to cover up your own inadequacies you know"

That would have shown him.

Mixing with the underclasses...

Took a trip to Salford yesterday, ostensibly to watch the rugby but also to take in some culture in the form of the excellent Lowry Centre on Salford Quays where a damn fine collection of the paintings of LS Lowry are displayed.

Had a quick half in the bar before hopping onthe tram to the rugby ground so didn't have time to view the paintings before the game and when we got back the effing gallery was shut, so bollacks to that then - we did get to see one painting which was outside the gallery so that was meagre recompense.

The Lowry picture (above) is "Waiting for the shop to open" and yes, Salford does still look like that.

But the title of this piece is nothing to do with Salford.

Mixing with the underclasses is what I did before we set off for Salford.

My travelling companion is in training for a very long running race that he is to compete in and needed to do a 20 mile run yesterday morning before we set off for sunny Manchester so as I travelled over to meet him he rang me to tell me he was running (haha, see what I did there) late, no problem thought I, I'll drop down into Bingley and have a coffee in one of the trendy cafe bars that exist everywhere in this country now.

Exist everywhere in this country except Bingley.

Bingley is fine for charity shops and travel agents, but trendy coffee bars it has none, in fact it has nothing of anything that opens at 11.30am on a Sunday morning.

Except the JD Weatherspoons pub.

Or as I came to know it, the JD Weatherspoons refuge for single men who dress like tramps and drag themselves out from under their saturday night hedgerow down to the JD Weatherspoon for a pint at 11.30am on a sunday morning, I've seen more sartorial elegance in a Salvation Army hostel.

The feckless wretchs who need alcohol and smoke at that time of a morning were packing out JD Weatherspoons, the air thick with smoke in what I thought was a no-smoking pub, shaking hands holding the first pints of the day furtively scanning the room for a recognisable face, eyes shifting around the room like a radar scanner, conversation at a minimum, the only desire being beer before noon, its an underclass of alcoholic need and JD Weatherspoon shamelessly cater for it.

I ordered a coffee and a blueberry muufin and tried to make it last for half an hour, I managed ten minutes and left, left the dregs of Bingley to spend the rest of their day drinking cheap lager and smoking knock-off eastern european cigarettes.

Living in a box ?

I've been busy this weekend on yet another good idea.

This time its an online publication for those fok who live in trailor accomodation or temporary homes.

Click here to read it

I think I'm on a winner this time

Rip off or fair over charging ?

Not for the first time replica football shirts have been in the news this week.

First in the firing line was the new England football kit, released earlier this week to a resounding "it looks like last years" it was later announced that it would only be sold through "approved outlets" meaning of course that the retail cost was not open to competitive pricing.

This brought howls of anguish from the likes of Wallmart Asda who would normally have stocked the new England kit, and sold them in their thousands - last year they managed to get their hands on 22000 officially authorised replica shirts via "grey" imports and they sold them within hours at £22 each instead of the £40 that the punters invariably pay to the likes of JJB and a few other "carefully selected", so-called "sports" outlets.

Asda have not been slow in coming forward and complaining bitterly in the press that the restriction of trade is ripping supporters off to the tune of almost twice the price, but do the supporters care ?

JJB will not have any trouble in shifting their stocks of the new England shirt (thats not it above by the way, images of the new shirt are suprisingly absent in the media at the moment) at £40 a throw and if the fools, erm, customers, are prepared to pay that for what is nothing more sophisticated than a plastic derived fabric with a badge sewn on it that shows the rest of the world that your wardrobe lacks any form of sophistication whatsoever, then its your £40 to fritter away on whatever you desire.

In a court case this week, Which?, the mouthpiece of the Consumers Association has commenced court proceedings against JJB and six other "sports retailers" in an attempt to win compensation for up to one million consumers who bought England and Manchester Utd replica shirts from them between Apr 2000 and Aug 2001 after the so called "sports retaillers" were found guilty in court of fixing the price of such shirts, if succesful the companies could face compensation claims of several million pounds from punters who, quite honestly, have had the benefit of six years worth wearing the plasticised crap - to be honest they'd be more successful in sueing for the return of their dignity and dress sense, arguing that JJB made them dress like, and do the shopping looking like, chavs and pikeys.

JJB's only response thus far has been that if they lose the test case then compensation claims would be considered where consumers could provide proof of purchase, so thats only the geeks who keep all of their receipts for six or seven years then - what a marvellous use of our court system.

You may have guessed that I'm not a fan of the replica shirt phenominum that grips this country in a permenant frenzy of "must have" nylon clothing. I last wore nylon sometime back in the 1960's when the consensus of opinion was that it was uncomfortable and promoted excessive sweating, especially in the summer, when a haze of bacterial odour hung over most towns and cities and their assorted bri-nylon clad residents.

Manfacturers of course are quick to point out that todays "modern" materials are not bri-nylon at all but "modern materials" which "breath" and "wick away" body fluids and other such crap - if it feels like nylon then it is nylon and to be perfectly honest the evidence on the ground is proof enough that when standing behind any random England shirt wearing, shaven headed, tattoed, lardarse (and thats just the women) in any random supermarket queue, then the anti-sweat capabilities of such attire is sorely tested and proven to failure.

£40 for a bri-nylon shirt ?

You're having a laugh aren't you ?

Start looking for your receipts England and Man Utd fans, JJB are going down if you can find them...

Snow Joke...

Snow Joke...
Tee-hee, I love the old puns.

I love this country when it snows, especially in the south of England.
The UK doesn't do snow anymore, not with global warming, we've had the warmest January that I can remember in my 50 years on this planet, the temperature has barely dropped below 8c for the whole of the month and most of the trees and shrubs in my rolling acres have shoots and buds on them at least three months earlier than they should have - one of them had new buds on in November even before it had got rid of last years leaves.

So when the temperature drops below zero for a few days we all panic, and as a few flakes of snow start to fall everyone runs home from work and hides in their houses, peeking out at the cold outdoors and wondering if enough has fallen to cover the ground yet.

TV News crews were out all along the south of the country on Wednesday warning of a day of armageddon on Thursday as the heaviest snow fall in 100 years was on its way. When it arrived yesterday it barely covered the ground and yesterdays news bullitens were full of reporters standing on roadsides trying to pretend that the thin layer of white stuff behind them was actually several feet deep. BBC News Report here

And of course every school in the south of England closed "for Health and Safety reasons" because we can't have our precious little lambs playing in the snow in school playgrounds, slipping and sliding and throwing snowballs at each other can we ?

Not that its always been this way of course ....

(computer screen goes all wavy and we're spinning through a vortex until we land, bump, in 1968, at cookridge county primary school where a young jerrychicken trudges up the hill through 4 foot snow drifts)

When ah wor nobbut a lad "snow days" off from school were unheard of, we were expected to get to school by whatever means were available on even the heaviest of snow days, and I'm talking seriously of falls up to four feet in depth here.

The best school days of my life have been spent on the school playing field engaging in mass brawls in the snow, one year against another, two or three hundred kids intent on murdering another two or three hundred kids with snow as the excuse, year long pent up grievences given a free hand to reap vengance, many noses were blooded, several kids were buried in drifts not to be discovered until the thaw came several days later, bones were broken (especially Stuart Ackroyds collar bone) and when the bell went for lessons hardly a scrap of snow would remain on the playing fields for it would all be stuffed down the necks of victims or rammed hard inside your wellingtons.

But the overwhelming memory of snow days at school was the smell in the classroom afterwards - the caretaker would have turned up the heating full blast and those kids who normally sat next to the window and hence a radiator would be bombarded with requests to "put my gloves on the radiator" or "put my socks on the radiator", "put my wellies onthe radiator" or even "put my underpants on the radiator" from the strange boy who normally sat at the back of the class playing with himself.

By dinnertime the teacher would hardly be able to see most of us so dense was the layer of cloud in the classroom and the stench of scorched wool and scorched rubber would be impregnated into every fabric in the room, for months afterwards you would still smell that smell every time the caretaker turned the heating up.

And in the evening we would congregate on the road that ran up the steepest hill in cookridge as by coincidence it was also the last road in cookridge and on one side of it the countryside commenced, hence the pavement on that side was never used by pedestrians - for several weeks during the winter this side of the road would be sheet ice, crushed and compacted by a thousand kids sledges, impossible to walk up but faster than any olympic bobsleigh run that you care to name.

Here we risked life and limb every evening, right through the dark of night, sledging with torches, an dhere it was that I had a terrible accident on my sledge, a home-made, black painted sledge with silver go-faster stripes and its name spelled out in silver paint, "the black knight", here on one terrific downhill run with Stuart Ackroyd as my passenger we broke the downhill speed record easily until we veered off the course, hit the grassy area to the left and cartwheeled down the rest of the course in a haze of snow, ice, gasps and screams - end result, Stuart Ackroyd broke his collar bone again.

I was fine though.

A witchhunt by any other definition...

News media in the UK today are identifying one of the pilots involved in the incident in 2003 when two American A10 "Tankbuster" aircraft attacked a British convoy of light armoured vehicles, killing one and injuring several others.

Why do we need to know this information ?

Answer is, plain and simple, we don't.

It all started last week when the coroner in Oxfordshire who was conducting an inquest into the death of the British soldier L/Cpl Hull, severely criticised both the UK Ministry of defence and the US military establishments for not releasing a video of the incident which was recorded from the cockpit of one of the aircraft concerned - its the coroners job in the UK to investigate every "unnatural" death, howsoever and wheresoever caused, so reviewing all of the evidence is his job and his call was a justified one.

No video was forthcoming, both the UK and USA military refused at first to acknowledge the presence of such a video and then stated "security issues" in preventing its public release.

Within a couple of days The Sun newspaper had raised enough cash to persuade someone somewhere deep within either military organisations that the video was worth snaffling and within hours it was in the public domain and being shown on TV screens on every news network available.

And from it we could all see that it was simply a tragic accident, the pilots were not trigger happy, they checked several times as to the identity of the vehicles below them and they were told that no "friendly" forces were in the area - so they attacked, as per their training manual.

An accident, an error of identification from someone somewhere on the ground, the pilots were innocent in the affair and were clearly full of remorse afterwards, as the video and audio evidence proves.

End of story, shit happens in wars and no-one understands that more than the combatants.

So why do we now need a witch hunt to identify the pilots involved, why do we need to know their names, their location in the USA and the fact that at least one of them had 20 years service and several bravery awards ?

We don't is the bottom line, its cheap, voyeurism journalism, its dragged a story into the media spotlight that should simply have stayed at the coroners court, the truth of the story has not been compromised, we all knew it was a friendly fire incident, we all knew that during the actual combat phase of the Iraq war more British troops died at the hands of allied forces than Iraqis, thats the way war is, its not a video game and shit happens to people - end of story.

This one won't go away...

HM Government stand up in court today to try and justify their astonishing refusal to accept any responsibility in the failure of the private sector pensions industry to provide the product that they advertised.

Why should HM Government be responsible for lack of any credibility from the private pensions companies ?

Because a decade or so ago HM Government decided that HM Government was not the sort of organisation that should be looking after its citizens welfare when they retired, HM Government would continue to collect National Insurance Contributions from its citizens but instead of being partly used to invest for a pension for those citizens the money would be used for...well...something else instead.

Apart from those people who work for HM Goevrnment of course, they can still have their pension provisions cast in stone, in fact they can have not just a pension, but almost their full salary paid long after they've stopped working - thats only fair isn't it

Isn't it ?

So because HM Government recommended, nay, urged millions of workers out there in the real world, out there beyond the four secure walls of a civil service job, to put their pension contributions into a scheme run by a private company rather than a government pension plan, and because they didn't just recommend but actually endorsed such action, endorsed and guaranteed that these millions of workers would be far better off with a private pension, because of that government ineptitude they are now being held responsible for the collapse of many of these schemes, collapses which take with them all of the shareholders investments - for shareholders read elderley men and women who have no other savings held aside for their retirement but the pension scheme which HM Government all but forced them to invest in.

And just in case anyone is in any doubt over the pathetic state of the private and state pension provisions in this country, does anyone remember my last post on my pension situation ?

Last March the Parliamentary Ombudsman severely criticised HM Government for the way in which millions of citizens were mislead into moveing their state pension "pot" into private schemes - thats the Parliamentary Ombudsman who was put in place by HM Government as a conduit to self discipline in HM Government, if you have a complaint about HM Government you take it to the Ombudsman, he reviews your complaint and makes a ruling that is binding on both parties.

HM Government have refused to accept the Ombudsmans ruling, preferring to go to court to have the ruling enforced in law, not that the law aspect has anything to do with it, they are going to court in the hope that the four individual test cases will not be able to afford the court fees and will drop out of the action - not content with over-ruling the Ombudsman who is there to see that government of the people should be fair and above board, they are now using financial means to frighten off any further challenges.

They are bas'tads and they should hopefully lose the case.

Unfortunately we all know what will happen if they do lose the case this week, they will appeal, and in appealing will hold the test cases to further ransom over the court costs issue.

Its a disgraceful abuse of power, nearly more disgraceful than HM Governments derogation of responsibility of state pensions, in this country which prides itself on its standards of social care, what are we doing when we deny people of 65 years of age and above a decent state pension to retire on and how on earth can a socialist government deny that it is their responsibility to provide such a thing ?

It makes me sick ...

A local news item last night spoke of a 17 year old girl Kiran Mathura who has just been awarded a six figure sponsorship deal to advance her golf career.

Six figure sum - pah !

I spent more than that in my golf career, and I freely admit that I never progressed beyond the point at which friends groaned when they drew me as a partner.

By coincidence I found my Vijay Singh golf clubs in one of our sheds at the weekend, the bag is furry with mould and the clubs are red with rust, as the man in the shop promised they would be.

It's a unique selling point for those clubs that they are made of "soft gun metal" and are not chrome plated like all other metal clubs, the man in the shop said that it made the clubs "much more responsive", "far more forgiving" and "a delight to play with" before then severely criticising my grip, as do all people who watch me.

He explained that a unique feature of the Vijay Singh clubs was that they will go rusty and the more rust that you get on the club head the better you will play with them.

It all sounded a bit far fetched to me, more like "hey look, we couldn't be arsed chromium plating these clubs so they'll be ruined within three months, but buy them anyway" and the other thing that sowed a seed of doubt in my mind was that Vijay Singh, who used exactly the same sort of clubs, never seemed to have a rusty one in his bag - mayby Vijay could be even higher up the world rankings if his caddy would put away the wire wool after every tournement.

Still, like a sucker I bought them, like I bought every other wonder club and gadget in every golf shop I ever went in, if I ever had to play in a professional tournement I'd never get to the first tee as my caddy would collapse under the weight of the bag and I'd be banned for having several dozen clubs in said bag, clubs for every occasion, clubs for getting out of every conceivable tricky location on every type of golf course, clubs that made not one iota of difference to my normally crap game, eventually I had to buy an electric motor driven golf trolley to transport my bag of wonder sticks around the courses with me - I found the electric trolley in the shed at the weekend too.

Although I never managed to score below 100 on a normal round of golf, or break into double figures in a stableford competition, I had an official club handicap of 21 - all of which is meaningless to those who do not play the game but those who do understand the club handicapping system will now be scratching their heads and shouting at the computer screen "how the hell did you manage that then ?", the answer is of course, we cheated.

I say we because it involves the conspiracy of my brother too, who unlike me can actually play the game properly and is well rated at his official 21 handicap, but we joined a new club in one of their first years of trading during one of the wettest and coldest of recent winters, quite frankly we couldn't be arsed playing the number of requisite rounds on wet cold sunday mornings and so we snaffled three scorecards each from the pro's desk and sat in the car park and filled them in as if we had genuinely played.

And I must say that we played quite well on each of those three rounds, I was impressed at my ability to score six on the par fives on that course as I'd never actually got down to single numbers on those holes, and my 2 on one of the short par 3's brought admiring looks fromt he club secretary when we handed the cards in, having scuffed them up a bit and left one of them out in the rain for a few minutes.

A couple of weeks later our handicaps were posted on the notice board and as far as I'm aware they are still there, I'm the only golf club member to have ever fiddled his handicap in the wrong direction and my handicap often bore more resemblence to the number of balls that I lost in a round rather than any workable indicator of skill.

Six figure sponsorship deal at 17 years old - makes me sick.

Whipping up the public opinions...

A consequence of t'interweb on news sites is that you can now quickly whip up a frenzy on any news story, for instance the BBC News comments page on avian flu.

Despite the virus H5N1 being almost impossible to pass to humans - being air borne the only way to catch it is to snog a turkey or stick your head up its arse in the same way that Mr Bean does (left) - the BBc comments page is full of sometimes hilarious and often hysterical outrage, for instance ...

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"Is it a natural descease"? i have always wondered if it is man kind who is playing around with nature in the laboratories. H5N1, sounds very much like it is a mutant virus, developed in the lab, "can anyone shed any light on this, are these the result of experiments gone wrong."?

jim evans, brighton

Yes Jim, its a "decease" that a mad scientist has invented from within his workshop underneath a pretend volcano in the south seas, he picked Suffolk to release it because its near to where James Bond lives when he's not saving the planet.


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COULD THIS VIRUS HAVE BEEN PUT THERE BY THE ANIMAL ACTIVISTS?

THEY WOULD GO THIS FAR IN MY OPION.

mauro, St Ouen,Jersey C.I.


Mauro is so concerned that he's lost the use of his caps lock, that woul dbe those animal activists who carry out their acts of terrorism because they are concerned about animal rights then would it Mauro ? Passing on a deadly virus to the animals they are trying to save would be a good idea then ?
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The recent infection in Suffolk highlights the disastrous consequences of cramming such a huge number of creatures in so confined a space. This is unnatural, and nature fights back. We need to listen and learn. Factory farming is a violation of nature's law, and the sooner we realise this and introduce sustainable agriculture, the better.

John Buckley, Reading, UK

Yes John, its that "Natures Law" again, what a shame we don't own a printed copy of "Natures Law" or that we can't stand Bernard Mathews up in court accused of "violating Natures Law", its not right is it John ? You did eat a turkey at christmas didn't you John ? Didn't raise it yourself did you ? Did you ask where it came from John or did you just pick the cheapest one in the fridge ?

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This planet has too many people. It needs a cull. Nature is trying to do this for us. Better to be a bit poorer with space to live, than affluent living next to those we would happily kill.

Global warming will wipe out the economically unproductive, bird flu will kill the weak. Mankind will grow stronger as nature kills those for whom selection is exclusive, not inclusive.

The world is not ending, just cleansing.

P J Heamon, Lincoln

Are you related to John ?
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Divine retribution if even there was such a thing!
The only victims are the poultry. I have no sympathy whatsover with the greedy humans that use and abuse the animals for profit. I just hope that they are not adequately insured.

sue catt, Headcorn, Kent

Are you related to John ?
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And then just when you think that the lunatics have taken over the BBC, you get a sensible soul at last ...

I am in complete shock over this story, I wasn't aware that Bernard Mathews used real turkeys!

[Syni_Cal], Manchester, United Kingdom

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I can't wait for the Jeremy Vine radio phone-in on Radio 2 later today ...

Speed Kills ?

There's an interesting article in The Sunday Times this morning, right here in fact, which is one of those "opinion articles" that is always written in response to another "opinion article", mainly to fill space in the non-news sections of the Sunday papers - the non-news sections taking up ten times more space than the minute news section.

Its in response to the BBC's tv programme "Top Gear" last week during which they showed the footage of one of their presenters crashing a jet car at 288mph during a speed record attempt - by some unknown means the presenter eventualy survived and was on the programme to joke about the incident.

Of course it provoked fury amongst those who campaign for all vehicle drivers to be fined and jailed on each and every occasion that they exceed any arbitory speed limit, speed limits that would be lowered to less then walking speed if the campaigners had their way, making cars out of foam rubber would be their next step too.

The Sunday Times article argues that its not speed that kills, but inappropriate speed, and in that respect the writer is quite correct, the speed limit outside most urban schools in the UK is 30mph but only a fool or those in leave of their senses would suggest that that is an appropriate speed to drive at when the school is turning out up to a thousand pupils at 3.30pm.

Unfortunately the writer of the article then goes on to try and back up his argument with "facts", "facts" that show apparently that only 10% of accidents involve excessive speed and that only a third of that 10% were in excess of the speed limit.

The problem with producing such figures is of course that they are so inaccurate as to be useless.

No-one who has just been involved in a road accident which involved them breaking the speed limit is ever going to tell a police officer "oh yes, I was definitely doing 40mph in this 30mph limit, at least 40, more like 50mph actually" and the forensics of calculating speed from data gathered at the scene depends on measuring skid marks, which may actually be completely absent depending on when and how hard the driver started braking. Add to that completely unreliable witness statements, "he was definitely speeding, oh yes, I'd say 60mph easy, maybe 50...or 40, definitely speeding though, no I was looking in this shop window" and you see that the gathering of speed statistics only works when you have well defined skid marks on a dry road and even then you can only estimate what the dissipation of the speed was according to the model of the car and the condition of the brakes at the time, and even then you only get a rough idea of what the impact speed was if you know what the speed was at the start of the skid - in other words the only way to accurately measure speeds is in commercial vehicles with tachographs - cars do not have them.

What is unarguable is that the introduction of speed cameras on every street corner in the UK has revealed that almost every driver in the UK drives above the speed limit at some time, the few who haven't yet picked up a fine and licence points are simply the ones who are good at spotting the cameras and slowing down in time.

Simple truth is - everyone drives in excess of the speed limit sometimes, not just 10%.

As a bullshit Sunday newspaper filler its not a bad article though.

Why Bruce Springsteen Rules OK...

Friday night is my "browse Napster or YouTube" night - its a crap night on tv and I spend all of it sat with the laptop on lap, in-earphones rammed in ears, trawling for good stuff.

Bruce Sprinsteen is god, everyone knows that, but when I found this YouTube clip I thought I'd died and gone to heaven, its simply superb.

I heard the Springsteen Seeger Sessions when they were released some months ago - its yet another example of how versatile the perfomer he is, not many rock acts have succesfully drifted across to folk/country (Ghost of Tom Joad writing period) and back again, then back once more to take up some of Pete Seegers stuff, not many performers would consistently stick their neck into a genre that they have no right to sing and yet consistently proove that if you have the music and the belief in the genre in your blood then you can sing anything - compare and contrast to the myriad of singing acts making chart music who simply mouth the words without even thinking about the song.

So, "Pay me my money down", this clip (link above) combines American folk, Cajun and New Orleans jazz, its simply stunning in its simplicity and yet complexity at the same time - it just works and if you don't smile and tap your feet when you watch it then you must already be dead.

And while we're here, have a look at this clip too, has a film sound track ever been written that is so, so synominous with its film, this one hits the button, its perfect, sums up the film beautifully even if you've never seen it, even if you've forgotten that you've seen the film it will instantly remind you of its haunting theme - haunting, thats what the song is and the shot of Tom Hanks towards the end of that clip is the definition of haunting, if the hairs on the back of your neck don't stand up then you too are already dead.