Farewell Harry Carpenter
The BBC has produced some legendary commentators. Harry Carpenter was one of the best and most professional. He was certainly the best boxing commentator.
Sadly, ‘Arry died last night. He will be sorely missed by everyone.
But don’t just take my word for it. George Foreman has just said a lot more on Radio 5.
Cameron Plays his Trump Card
Lord Snooty today played his trump card for the election. Or rather the good Samantha laid down and did her bit for the Tory Party and their election chances. i.e. She got pregnant and that’ll sway the vote. Or certainly many people hope so.
But seriously, my late wife did a lot of difficult family cases in her time at the Bar. If the Camerons had ever asked her, should they have another child after the death of Ivan, she would have told them to go for it. She saw many relationships that had been ruined by the death or illness of a child, but always told me that those that had another after the tragic event were more likely to stay together.
If you want to read a serious view on pregnancy and politics, Michael White has a nice piece in The Guardian.
The Battle of Bolton
Yesterday, what happened in Bolton was not the way to protest.
You could argue that on the one hand it was a protest very similar to the Battle of Cable Street, where East London was determined to stop a march by the British Union of Fascists. My father, a left-wing Tory, was at that battle in 1936 and his view was that it was all of the East End against a rather nasty group with connections to Hitler. It could not be argued then, that we didn’t know of the ambitions and awful nastiness of the German dictator.
You could also argue that on the other, there are strong fears about such things like Sharia law and militant Islam.
I was listening to Radio 5 last night and the two sides had an argument with the presenter, as they thought they’d been duped into talking to each other by the BBC.
That probably shows more about the groups than anything else. They wanted a fight and that is what they got. But it was mainly with the police, who as ever were stuck in the middle. They should have let both of these groups get on with what they wanted to do. Preferably, in a place where they couldn’t do any damage to anybody else.
Those on both sides of the argument should talk to make sure that nothing like this happens again.
Beckham Makes The Times Leader
Yesterday, David Beckham made a leader in The Times.
This illustrates the power of the man and the respect most of us feel for him.
I saw it most in Belarus, when I went to support England. The amazing cheer when he came on, was not just from the England supporters but also from those of Belarus.
I sometimes wonder how we’ll all see Beckham in say twenty years time. He will surprise us all.
Fear of Libel Laws
In a piece called Scientifically Correct – Raymond Tallis, I drew attention to the problems of the British libel laws. Now one of my favourite authors, Simon Singh, has had to give up his column in The Guardian because fighting the libel writ is taking too much time.
Simon says that it may come to the point, where quality American publications refuse to publish in the UK, because they are feared of the consequencies.
Where is free speech?
The Accidental Artist
Tommy McHugh was on the television this morning. He’s an artist, who had never painted before he had two brain aneurysms. This is his story from The Times.
Amazing!
Blunt from Bluntisham
I don’t normally print articles in full from other publications, but this one from Fred King in the Hunts Post deserves to shown almost in full.
Maths was never my strongest subject but I do know what two plus two equals, and judging by the figures for the Guided Bus that have been banded about by Cambridgeshire County Council finance officers, I have my doubts that they do.
The original estimate for the Busway was £116million, £92m from the Government and £24m from the developers of Northstowe (don’t hold your breath as no houses have been built yet).
There is an overspend – all parties agree on this – and the council is set to borrow £40m this year to cover this. What was not widely published is that they will borrow a further £10m next year to pay the contractors, and I understand that the final bill for the Busway will be £161m. Bearing in mind that none of the predicted £24m from the developers has materialised that leaves £69m to recover.
I am not conversant in commercial law but it seems strange to me that a client pays a bill in full and then has to resort to legal action to recover part of that sum back from the contractor.
However robust the council thinks its contract is, I have my doubts.
Despite the council saying that the Busway will cost the ratepayer nothing it will be interesting to see how much the rates increase in the future.
The letter writer was from Bluntisham.
And the government is thinking of building some more of these busways. Surely, if they were that good, there would be busways everywhere.
Echoes of Orde Wingate
In The Times today, there is an obituary of Major-General David Tyacke. The first two paragraphs talk about how he worked for Orde Wingate.
David Tyacke was the last officer on the staff of the Chindit HQ at Sylhet in Assam to see General Orde Wingate on the morning he left to fly to “Broadway” and “White City”, the jungle bases of 77 and 111 Brigades attacking the Japanese lines of communication in Burma.
Writing in old age, Tyacke described how, when Wingate’s aircraft was first reported overdue, a strange euphoria spread among the HQ staff as they realised that the general would not be keeping them on tenterhooks that evening. But it was soon replaced by a grim foreboding that their eccentric but visionary leader was dead.
Somewhere my father must have met Wingate, or perhaps someone he knew had served with him. But he was one of my father’s heroes.
I have read quite a bit about Wingate and feel that although some of his views were questionable, on the whole his was the right sort of thinking in difficult times. Wingate definitely was not a conservative thinker. The trouble today is that we have far too many of those.
Andrée Peel: A Brave Lady
Andrée Peel was a heroine of the French Resistance and she died a few days ago. This is the first paragraph of her obituary in The Times.
The youthful Andrée Virot was running a beauty salon in the Breton port-city of Brest when Germany invaded and overran northern France in May-June 1940. Being adventurous and high spirited, she was an early recruit to the Resistance movement but her work was initially confined to the distribution of an underground newspaper. Later she worked for an escape line smuggling shot-down Allied airmen out of France to Britain and the reception and dispatch to safety of the occasional agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
She went on to survive the war and incarceration in concentration camps. After the war she married an Englishman and settled in Bristol.
Perhaps though she had the last laugh on all those who punished and imprisoned her. She lived to be 105.
Would we do the same now, if we were fighting a foe as ruthless as the Nazis?
Germans Fix Potholes Differently
If you fancy owning your own pothole, then look no further than Neiderzimmern.
Now there’s an idea.
The Anonymous Widower 