Author: James Lark

The computer room in my secondary school had a witty poem on the wall which went:

I hate this damn computer
I wish that we could sell it
It won’t do what I want it to
Only what I tell it.

The joke (or possibly the lesson we were supposed to learn) was that computers would do exactly what you wanted them to do if only you had the appropriate knowledge to manipulate it to your advantage.

Times, I fear, have changed. Home computers are increasingly designed to be user-friendly, and telling them to do things has never been simpler. Unfortunalely, as technology grows capable of doing more and more complicated things, certain brands of computer have developed characteristic problems which can only be understood and resolved by somebody who will charge a lot of money for doing so. Thus, a more apposite poem for the 21st century:

I hate this damn computer
I’ll give it up for free
It won’t do what I tell it to
Because it’s a PC.

Last night I settled down in front of Elizabeth and a fine time I had, mostly thanks to Geoffrey Rush, though anything with lots of beards, silly trousers and melodrama tends to keep me happy.

On the downside, it took me about twice as long as the film’s two hour running time to get through it. Why? Because I had to keep looking things up.

I’m pretty bad at watching films at the best of times, because I’m constantly leaping up to check IMDB to put a name to a familiar actor’s face. Films swarming with aging English thespians are the worst for this, which already accounts for a chunk of my research over Elizabeth.

But more significant than this was my increasingly obsessive need to verify the historical inaccuracy of the film. I don’t mean the large-scale historical inaccuracies – as my A-level history came flooding back to me I had no need of wikipedia to chuckle smugly over the liberties taken with historical fact, like the bonkers chronology, or Elizabeth’s completely fictional meeting with Queen Mary, or the bit where Prospero dispatches James Bond to kill Queen Elizabeth.

No, it was the tiny details that got to me, questions like: did Queen Mary have a personal dwarf? (“Dwarves were not uncommon in European courts of the period”, apparently.) Or was the Duc D’Anjou a cross-dresser? (Nope; his older brother, who also courted Elizabeth, was rumoured to be a bit girly, but only by his enemies, so whichever way you look at it Elizabeth is Protestant propaganda).

By the time the film ended I had read up on most of the Medici family, the minituae of 16th century European history at my fingertips for the first time in ten years. Yet one thing continues to elude me, the answer to the question: isn’t that organ sound in the coronation scene rather inauthentic?

My first response was one of musical scorn: yes! that organ sound is completely inauthentic, just what filmmakers think music sounded like in those days, for this choral music would never have been accompanied at all! Then a seed of doubt made me check that fact and I found that, possibly, even in Elizabethan times an organ might have accompanied music in a Cathedral. I still felt the organ sound was considerably larger than the chamber organ sound I would expect from that era – my understanding is that the English didn’t start to get full-on huge organs until after the reign of Cromwell (who had all the old ones destroyed). Yet large organs did begin to appear on the continent as early as the 13th century, so perhaps England did have some?

If any organists out there have the answer, I’d be most grateful.

Fortunately I do have enough musical knowledge to spot that the underscore near the end of the film of Elgar’s Nimrod souped up with a female soprano and unsubtlely segueing into Mozart’s requiem was wrong, wrong, wrong. And not just historically.

Who was it that decided the best way to read a news headline was to emphasise the very last word in the sentence, regardless of its importance? Am I the only person who feels like I’m being treated in a patronising way by the newsreader? (You can’t understand this unless I make it really clear.)

Aside from being really annoying, it can actually change the implied meaning of the story. These examples from Sky News this morning:

“A woman infected by swine flu has died in Scotland” – delivered in such a way as to imply that the real tragedy here is that the poor woman couldn’t have been moved to a more civilised part of Britain before her death.

Better still:

“Researchers have found that men are much more likely to die of cancer than women” – what, really? Men are more likely to die of women? That is an alarming statistic indeed…

I have been urged by text and tweet and email to sign this petition “against racism and division”… and I can’t sign it.

I’m dead against racism and division. Indeed I would put both near the top of my list of least favourite things. But I can’t sign a petition to say that the BNP do not represent me in the European Parliament, because – horrifically – they do.

I’m not happy about it. I didn’t vote for them myself. But in a democratic election they were chosen to represent my country, which means that for all that they don’t represent my views, they represent a majority. And therefore me. That’s the way democracy works. If we took a “not in my name” attitude to all elected officials we hadn’t voted for, over half of the nation would be ignoring most of the government at any given time, which is division – and we’ve already established that’s a bad thing.

At the time of writing, the Hope Not Hate petition has 21,095 signatures: clearly a lot of people feel strongly about this. But not enough people felt strongly about it to get along to a polling booth on Thursday and do something about it – indeed, in my constituency alone 97,013 did feel strongly enough to vote for the BNP, and even that wasn’t enough for a majority in this area. Those people have got to live with the indignity of – horrors! – a Conservative majority and a near win for UKIP, but I don’t see any petitions against it on the internet.

Not only is the Hope Not Hate petition of bugger all use to anyone, it’s churlish. If people want to do something about the new and scary threat of fascists holding real power in our country it’s too late to do anything about the election we have just taken part in (or, in many shameful cases, haven’t just taken part in). They need to do something about the next election – find an alternative to support and promote, talk to people, blog, tweet, point out to every single person you know what an absolute dickhead Nick Griffin is (indeed, in a political world of grey areas that is one of the few things I believe I can say is absolutely factually undeniable).

Or, if all of that seems a bit too much work, get out of bed and vote next time…

‘Oh… look! Look honey! Those crisps, they’ve been on TV! That’s means they’re, like, famous! Let’s get some before they all go! I know we’re only here to buy petrol, but I’ve never seen petrol on TV. Except in that episode of Heartbeat. Shit, petrol’s famous as well – go get some more! I’ll just grab these crisps!

‘Or is it the maltesers…?

‘Hell, I’ve seen them on TV as well, I’m going to have the crisps and the maltesers!

‘Come to thing of it, I’ve seen everything in this shop on TV – you know, in those bits between the actual programmes! And we could like, buy them for ourselves! That’s nearly like having a bunch of celebrities in our house! Quick, grab a trolley!’

General, my cynical view of government combined with laziness means that I am disgracefully disinterested in voting.

HOWEVER:

“The most recent and reliable polls consistently show that the BNP is very close to winning a number of seats in the European Parliament. Most polls show that BNP on 5-7% nationally which would give the BNP 3 seats and polls tend to underestimate BNP support.

The most recent You Gov poll on 1 June, the biggest so far of ,over 5,000 people, put the BNP on 7% of those certain to vote. On these figures the BNP could win a seat each in the North West, Yorkshire and the Humber and the West Midlands and East of England regions.”

Time to get out and cast your vote, folks.

(Am assuming this blog has a mainly anti-BNP readership.)

(If not I may have just scored a massive own goal.)

The desert menu arrives.

Him: Are you a cheese person?

Her: No, I just sweat a lot.

Let’s ignore the use of the apostrophe, for all that it is both incorrectly and inconsistently applied. After all, there is a slim possibility that “Party’s charity events” is intended as a single phrase, if a rather odd one.

Instead, let us examine the bold claim of this man (or woman) to be a “stormtrooper look alike”.

Are you a “look alike”, Sir (or Madam)? Or are you, as I suspect, simply wearing a costume?

So Magners are selling their Pear Cider on what they seem to believe is its unusual quality of actually containing what it says it does, viz. pear.

They clearly think they’re making a clever point about advertising, highlighted by some observational comedy on estate agents from ‘Steve’. (Steve, if they say it’s ‘light and airy’ and it only has one window which can open, try a different estate agent. It’s a crap time to be buying a house anyway.)

But I could put up with this non-selling point or this slightly tired joke if it wasn’t for the fact that Magners compound their lack of originality with an out-and-out LIE. Magners Pear Cider is NOT, as they claim, 100% pear. That would be pear juice. Either that, or the 100% is true and the cider bit is a lie. I won’t stand for either.

Their second statistic is even more dubious. ‘0% disappointment’, they claim. Really? How did they arrive at this figure? (I see no small print advising ‘disappointment measured from a survey of 200 pear lovers and rounded down to the nearest whole number’.) I wonder if it might not be a statistic at all but simply a guess, perhaps based on what they assume must be the response to their drink:

‘Look, honey, it’s a pear cider which actually contains what it says it does! My, I am pleased – I had imagined that, like Pear’s Soap, it wouldn’t really contain pears. But it does, and 100% pears no less! I must say, that leaves absolutely no room for me to be disappointed by it. If I could measure my disappointment now, I would say it would come it at around 0%!’

Whereas I’m guessing an equally common response is: ‘Mmm, so it’s cider made entirely from pears. Isn’t cider meant to be made from apples? Oh well, I’ll give it a try… *sip* Mmm. It’s okay I suppose, but the apple stuff is the real deal. This is mildly disappointing. Only mildly, mind, but certainly between 10% and 20% if such a thing could be measured’.

That Magners have based their television adverts around the lies of other products is more than a little ironic. And the fact that it’s Mark Watson trying to sell it to me doesn’t make it any better.

Just when I thought the hysteria over MPs’ expenses couldn’t get any worse, George bloody Carey wades in with an opinion as well. In the News of the World of all things, though at least that suggests he finally knows his place.

Not only are his observations pretty vacuous, they’re not particularly accurate either. Maybe matching the complexity of his thinking with that of his readership, he buys into the idea that the “clawing greed” at the heart of Westminster is a recent development, the “straw that finally breaks the camel’s back”. Whereas a cursory glance through the history books shows that the camel has been carrying this particular straw for a great many centuries. A 1986 episode of Yes, Prime Minister (as topical as it always was) had Sir Humphrey getting a 43% pay rise through Parliament by disguising it as expenses; that was the Civil Service, but the principle is the same and it demonstrates that clawing greed goes back at least to the Thatcher era. (I know! It’s bold and daring of me to associate Thatcher with greed. But I’ll stand by it. Though Carey might be reluctant to agree since Thatcher was behind his appointment as Archbish.)

Indeed, back when the reigning monarch wielded political power, one of Parliament’s only real areas of control was in money. Monarchs who needed money essentially did what MPs do now – they fiddled their expenses. Look at how Henry VIII justified the diversion of money that had been going to the Catholic church.

So it’s not that the expenses issue is a new one. Nor, to be honest, is it an issue that any independent review of the system is going to solve – you change the system, people will find a new way to get round it. No, the reason – the only reason – that MPs are being targetted by media, former Archbishops everyone who listens to them, is that we’re in financial difficulties and people need somebody to blame.

Lord Carey’s comments on moral authority might have been more pertinent if he had pointed out that the moral vacuum doesn’t lie at the centre of Westminster, it’s something we’re all responsible for. Fiddling expenses, or taking advantage of the system (I think we’ve realised there’s precious little difference) isn’t just a thing that MPs do – it is the way countries, businesses and individuals “play the game”. Ask any accountant. Most people who file a tax return will have done some creative accounting, especially in the area of expenses, without necessarily breaking a single rule.

Of course, MPs are much easier to hate for it because our taxes pay their expenses. But it’s a drop in the ocean compared to other things our taxes pay for – illegal wars, arms, utterly ill-judged reforms of the education system – and I know which one irritates me more. And let’s not forget, it’s ultimately our taxes which pay for other people’s tax shortfalls when they claim back for that “business dinner” with their “business partner”.

Somebody, somewhere, is filing an honest tax return and bearing the brunt of a whole load of slightly fraudulant accounting.

Okay, MPs are supposed to lead. They’re expected to set an example. Or so the media keeps telling us, though I’d have thought they should be setting an equally good example given their sphere of influence; perhaps we can also have an independent investigation into journalists’ expenses? (They could see what they could dig up on Lord Carey while they’re at it.) But anyone who wants to start talking about moral accountability ought to be very careful indeed that they’re not part of the system they’re criticising – because the problem doesn’t start with MPs, and it certainly doesn’t end there either.