Three Come at Once and then Nothing
We have had three declarations from Sunderland and we’re still waiting for another about an hour later.
Coupled with the poor performance of the polling stations in locking people out and not having enough ballot papers, isn’t it about time we used something like the Estonian Method of voting?
In Estonia you vote over the Internet and you can do this as many times as you like, with the last vote counting.
The Third Seat has a 4.8% Swing
Swings are all over the place.
What was it Disraeli said? There are lies, damned lies and statistics.
In fact according to Wikipedia, it wasn’t Disraeli but Charles Wentworth Dilke.
So where will it all end up? Wait until 20 seats have been declared and then use the average swing.
Emily Buchanan’s Touch Screen
It’s very big!
I want one.
It would do this idea just fine. Especially if it was a lot bigger!
The Second Seat has an 11.6% Swing
Even more interesting!
Both the first two seats in Sunderland were safe Labour seats, where it would be expected that the swing would be less than the national average, which has been predicted to be 5.5%. This is because Cameron has flagged up that there will be government job losses in the North East.
The First Seat has an 8.4% Swing
Interesting.
The swing to the Tories was higher than expected, but my old school colleague Peter Kellner, said it could be due to a new candidate. The Lib-Dems were down a bit and thankfully so were the BNP.
Does anybody know that Peter was a very good fast bowler at school?
Cynicism About Organic Foods
I should say before I continue, that I do buy organic foods.
But!
I am always suspicious that they don’t live up to the hype.
Take my supper yesterday. I ate several Jersey Royal potatoes, which were not organic. But they are produced by farmers who care about the quality of their product. They were exquisite.
Take just before Christmas. A farmer brought me some washed supermarket parsnips round, as a favour for his wife using a stable for a pony. They were much better than those you get from Waitrose or Sainbury’s, but that is where they would have ended up. However, that takes a couple of days, whereas they arrived from his field in a couple of hours.
So it seems that how the product is handled after picking is perhaps as important than what goes on before.
I suspect that it is more true with something like meat. After all I’ve kept animals for years and know that the better you treat them the better they perform. Or in the case of food animals, does that mean taste?
So where you know about the provenance of the animal and can trust the farmer are you getting a better and perhaps a more humanely kept product. After all organic means that some drugs used for medicinal purposes are banned. Is that humane?
So when I read this report in The Times yesterday, my cynicism was increased.
This says that a study by Professor Benton of Leeds University has shown that organic farms are not necessarily the best for wildlife.
The research found that organic farms had, on average, 12 per cent more biodiversity in terms of the number and variety of plants, birds, earthworms and insects. But the yield from organic fields was 55 per cent lower than from conventional fields growing similar crops in the same areas. While there were more plants and butterflies on organic farms, there was no difference in the number of bees and there were 30 per cent more hoverflies on conventional farms.
Organic fields contained more magpies and jays but 10 per cent fewer small birds such as yellowhammers, corn buntings, linnets, skylarks and lapwings. The researchers found that the larger birds, which were attracted to organic farms by their denser patches of woodland, were scaring away the smaller birds and preying on their nests.
It is all very interesting.
One point Professor Benton said was that greater benefits were detected where there were clusters of organic farms. That I would understand as in the studlands of Newmarket, there appears to be a much greater diversity than on ordinary agricultural land. That is also because horses are such inefficient grazers and leave lots for hares and deer.
Rubber Horse to the Rescue
This article amused me.
But you can’t knock the fact that training is good for a difficult job.
Drug Problem in Egypt?
The Times yesterday reported that hashish was in short supply in Egypt.
I feel very sorry for them. Not! They could always drink a nice bottle of Obelisk!
The Result of a Burqa Ban
A headline in The Times yesterday was “I’ll keep her indoors, says man, after wife is fined for wearing veil”.
I’m not in favour of women being covered up in public, but then I’m not someone who think it should be an offence. What has happened in Italy is a case of heads the woman loses and tails the woman does the same.
What we must do is make sure that men and women treat their partners equally. Read about the history of Islam and you’ll find that in the early days women were equal. Are they now? In many cases they are, but in other cases, it does not appear so to me.
But then I also think that any man who doesn’t let his woman out of the house is probably a very inadequate man, who is frightened she might realise what a complete loser he is.
The Atomium
As I said in the post on Heysel, I took the Metro essentially to see the Atomium.
I should say that be careful on the Brussels Metro, as Line 6 is essentially a ring and you can end up going a lot longer than you need, by following the obvious route. I travelled from Rogier and quickly realised that instead of going direct to Heysel, I should go to Simonis and change. The difference was twelve stations and using the London formula of two minutes a station, that is 24 minutes.
I remember the Atomium being built as a child and although a friend said not to bother to visit, I did!
Some of the pictures also show the pavilions for the Brussels International Exposition that took place in 1935. They were reused for Expo ’58, for which the Atomium was built.
Was the visit worth it?
Yes! For the views from the top, but I know C wouldn’t have thought much of it.
The Anonymous Widower 