An Open Letter to my MP About Changing to Central European Time
I feel very strongly that we should be on the same time asmost of the rest of Europe. As the MPs are voting on it on Friday, I thought I’d send my MP a reminder to cast his vote and cast it in favour of the Daylight Saving Bill.
I’ve struggled these last few days in the snow, as I can’t drive due to my stroke and there is little or no public transport. If the evenings were lighter and the morning darker, I could stay in bed until it was fully light and it would give a much longer window, in the middle of the day, for my carer/driver to come and take me to the shops and doctors’ appointments. I have needed taxis at times, and they all seem to disappear when it gets dark.
Now I’m not disabled, but I suspect that those who are, have found these few days very trying.
I also caught a train to Ipswich from Stratford in the rush hour a few days ago. I didn’t have any trouble, but more light would have made the crowded platform a lot safer.
As a trained engineer, I’m also a big fan of metric units, as these make construction and many other things a lot simpler and safer. My middle son incidentally was born in the same hospital as baby Miliband. But there was one big difference. In 1970 my son was measured in kilos, but baby Miliband was given in pounds. So you can see what progress means in the Labour Party!
So please vote for the UK to join Central European Time.
I do suspect though, that we won’t do the sensible thing, as this change strikes too many as cowtowing to Europe.
The Student Fee Debate
If I look at my course at Liverpool University in the 1960s, there were some of us, who did very well, others who did reasonably and possibly quite a few who never did any serious engineering at all. Now they are trying to force more and more people to go to University and this happens when they have a funding crisis, caused by the appalling financial management of the infamous Nulabor government.
In some ways we may well be having the wrong debate.
We have a problem to pay for it all, but are Universities the right place to educate people for careers.
My father was a printer, who owned his own business and if there was one thing in his business he was proud off, it was the success of the apprentices he’d trained. He once told me, that of the dozen or so he’d had, only perhaps one had not been a success. In some ways they were bigger successes than they thought, as he always chose the rougher kids, who didn’t mind getting their hands dirty in one of the dirtiest businesses of the 1960s. I remember him complaining that schools used to send him kids, whose English was good, but if they wouldn’t get their hands dirty they were out. He always said that teaching the English was the easy bit, provided they could read, but learning to get a feel for the lead tyoe used in letterpress was not so easy.
So the first thing we should do is create proper apprenticeships in all sorts of businesses and make the whole system worthwhile for both those businesses and the young people. I’ve owned the stud for twenty years and in that time, we’ve never had any help with training some of the local kids. So what do the big studs do? Import people on short term contracts from places like Pakistan. I may be wrong, but there is something serious missing here!
To give the government credit, they are saying that they are going to create more apprenticeships. We need lots more and obviously they need to be very flexible and backed up by training leading towards qualifications.
It used to be that most nurses and others in the caring professions, were in a large part taught on the job in what was almost an appreticeship with lots of teaching. Now many of these professions need a university degree before you actually see anybody who needs some help or comfort. I’m sure that many are now barred from these professions, as they are not very academic and wouldn’t be able to get on a course. As an example, one of my friends, who has few qualifications, now works as an orderly at Addenbrooke’s and thoroughly enjoys it. She is being given on the job training, to suplement everything she learned as a mother of two. Surely, there could be a route to get this type of person into the caring professions, rather than importing them from the Phillipines and India.
All this proves to me, that on-the-job training is probably the best way to train people to do the important second level jobs, that don’t need a specialist degree. We’ve all met people, who run large companies, organisations or departments, who’ve fought their way to the top without any academc training.
We also have two other routes to getting a university degree; part-time study or the Open University. A schoool-friend used to be the Admissions Tutor at a well-known university and he was very adept at creating courses to fit round applicants jobs and family. He also had very strident views on universities, which are at completely at variance with all government thinking, but are based on many years experience in the field. The Open University always seems to be forgotten in education debates, but surely it is one of the finest successes of our education system in the last few decades.
So if the route for many to a good job and perhaps a degree is based on training and low personal cost, then perhaps we can reduce those numbers who take a traditional degree.
One also has to question whether this is necessary. In the forty years since I left university, I only worked for one year, where I needed any of the specialist knowledge that I learned at Liverpool. But the university degree got me the good job in the first place!
So is that the main reason for universities? They set you up on the ladder of life!
So to me the problem is we’re trying to send too many people to university, when there are better alternatives.
If we cut the numbers, we could probably fund everything in a better and more equitable way!
That is not to say the government’s proposal of no upfront fees, loans and paying it all back when you earn over £20,000 a year is wrong, but students need a choice that gives them value for money and one that they can afford, by getting an academic degree that pays well in the future.
Throwing a Life Away
In today’s world, there is not the point of keeping anything like there used to be. I’ve just spent an hour shredding bank and credit card statements, as if I need them they are on-line anyway.
Whole boxes of memories end up being compressed into a box a third the size of what you started with. Things that you hoped you would trawl through with your wife in front of your grandchildren, just go straight in the skip. Is it sad! Perhaps! But if I don’t do it now, my son will have to do it in a few or hopefully twenty years time. Even my travels of the previous few months, has ended up in a rather small box. But I will make a collage of the train and football tickets in memory of an adventure.
Ocassionally, you find the odd gem, but most of it is just rubbish. The real memories are in my mind or as photographs on disc or in more boxes.
But hey, I’m only 63 and may have a few years yet, so perhaps this is only throwing half the first half of a life away. In a way I’m going back to where C and I started in that area to the north of the City of London, bordered at the top by the North London Line.
Just Another Boy Band!
A texter has just described the Beatles thus on Radio 5.
They obviously never saw them live as I did, or watched as they saved a city from self-destructing, as Liverpool most likely would have done, if they had never come along!
They also inspired me, as in my years at Liverpool University, enough of what they created rubbed off on me, so that I became a modest success. Would I have become the same man without Liverpool and the Beatles? I doubt it!
Should Museums Sell Off Unwanted Art?
It is notr a sinmple question, but I’ll give a simple example concerning my council, St. Edmundsbury.
Mary Beale was the UK’s first professional female painter. She painted society and other portraits in the early seventeenth century. Twenty of her paintings survive and were given to the council some years ago. Only four are exhibited in a dark corner of Moyses Hall Museum. Compare this, with Ipswich’s superb treatment of their Gainsboroughs and Constables!
So if they were offered a sensible solution, where this unique piece of artistic history was loaned or even sold to say a new gallery in a town or city where they would be appreciated, they should take it. After all there are not too many successful female artists from that era and she derserves a lot better.
Memories of Wymondham
I actually passed through Wymondham twice today and not only is it the nearest station to where my Lotus Elan was built, but it has precious memories of the time in the 1960s, when I was courting C.
For two summers she worked as a mother’s help for a family called Wright, who lived at Hingham, looking after their three children Amanda, Caroline and Timothy.
The two girls were bridesmaids at our wedding in 1968, but we lost contact with them all over the years, despite living only an hour or so away.
American Dream
This series on BBC 2 has been fascinating.
One particular interview was with a black American fighter pilot, who after being shot down over Germany was sent to Colditz.
Complexity is Fraud
PJ O’Rourke is another favourite author of mine. He said the title of this post and it is a nice simple quote on Radio 5, this afternoon, whilst discussing his new book, Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards
You could argue that the quote is the corollary of Occam’s Razor, which states that the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one.
He also said this about the American healthcare system, “When I go in for my tennis elbow, I’m paying for someone else’s gunshot wound.”
Matt Ridley on Shale Gas
Matt Ridley is one of my favourite authors. I first read his book,Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters
He has written an article for the Times today about extracting gas from shale rock and how it could solve the energy gap.
Here’s a couple of paragraphs.
Whether Mr Huhne likes it or not, a dash for gas is coming. What’s more, it is almost all good news. The discovery of how to exploit huge global reserves of gas encased in shale rock is causing epochal change in the energy scene. Shale gas is like any other gas except that it is everywhere: from Poland to Pennsylvania, from Queensland to Sichuan. There is even some in the Wirral and the Weald, but don’t hold your breath that the Nimbys will let much of it be tapped.
America, where the shale gas revolution began, has 50 years, probably more, of increasingly cheap supplies. The US is not just turning away liquefied-natural-gas tankers from Qatar (hence the current low price of gas), but considering turning gas-import terminals over to exports. Shale gas is popular with those who do not like being dependent on Putins and Ahmadinejads, so unpopular with those two martinets.
I’ll add my thoughts to his on the various ways of generating electricity or heat.
- Coal – Dirty, polluting and kills those that mine it, either directly or slowly with nasty lung diseases.
- Nuclear – Clean, but unloved by the greens and many of the general public.
- Wind – Loved by the greens, but unsightly, very inefficient and needs to have some form of backup generation.
- Solar – Alright in the Sahara, but problematic elsewhere.
- Oil – Works, but too valuable for other purposes to burn.
- Tidal – Expensive and unpopular.
- Gas – Clean, less than half the CO2 of coal and doesn’t need unsightly overhead lines, as you can distribute the gas by hidden pipes.
So as Ridley says gas from shale has a lot going for it.
I agree for now! But who’s to say something even better won’t come along in a couple of years. Never underestimate the ingenuity of the human mind and the politician’s ability to always look up the backside of a gift horse, rather than check the important parts, like the legs, heart, lungs and temperament.
