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Just got back from the Footlights Virgin Smoker (as expected – some very promising performers, some very promising writers, some very surreal ideas, and some utter rubbish), which managed to contain no jokes about the US elections at all. Not one, unless somehow I missed them. I feel cheated.

I also missed the virtual reality helicopter landing on Peter Snow (as reported by Guardian Unlimited), and am close to my threshold of tolerance for the phrase “too close to call”. The TV is downstairs, the web is upstairs – and the web, of course, has more details. The BBC hasn’t yet mentioned, for instance, that no states have been officially called yet – just called by the networks. Although then they’d waste Peter Snow for the first few hours, which would be awful.

I have four different maps open – LA Times, BBC News and C-SPAN are pretty much tracking the same data, it seems, but the Guardian’s, although lacking in any calls whatsoever, has the best interface, and gives juicy infobits like how rich the state is.

We’re gonna be up all night with these – it’s gonna be fun.

Stumbled across “Ban This Filth” last night, on Channel 4: pensioners finding filthy things in the media and showing clips so we know just how filthy they are. Whoever commissioned this should get a medal, because it’s absolutely hilarious.

It is a delight for the Uncertainty Division to announce that its highly important and very prestigious Patron, the Reverend Ian Thompson, has officially been appointed Dean of King’s College Cambridge. That means he is now Very Very Important indeed.

One anonymous acquaintance of mine assures me “we shall never hear the end of this.”

Much as we shall miss Ian’s rooms in Selwyn, we look forward to future rehearsals in King’s College Chapel.

The BBC have proudly revealed what the new Doctor Who logo looks like.

It’s apparently taken five people several months to design it, but it looks like it’s been done in an afternoon by a student using Photoshop.

Is it just me that thinks that lens-flare effect is just a bit naff?

Sigh. I bet the new theme tune arrangement will be crap as well.

On my way into Cambridge today I got stuck at some traffic lights behind two middle-aged female cyclists engrossed in conversation. When the lights changed they continued talking, oblivious to the fact that they were causing an obstruction to all the other two-wheeled roadusers, viz. me.

I was reminded of an incident that took place when I was still at primary school; standing in the early morning line of children entering the school after the bell had gone, I was so deep in conversation with my best friend (we were probably talking about Daleks) that one of the parents felt it was necessary to tap me on the shoulder and say “less talking, more walking!” I remember being quite indignant at the time – she wasn’t my parent, after all, she was clearly just taking advantage of her superior age to tell me off.

How nice, then, to be in a situation this morning where I could now turn the very same comment around and deliver it to two women of similarly advanced years!

Except that they were on bikes, so “less talking, more walking” would have been inappropriate, and I was still trying to think of a word for “talking” that rhymed with “cycling” when they noticed the lights had changed and moved off.

…she was standing in a corridor of the Guildhall (where I’m currently stationed); I was walking rather impatiently back to my office and she asked me if the art exhibition was upstairs. She was standing right next to a big sign saying “art exhibition upstairs” and a big arrow pointing up the stairs, so I sarcastically said “I think that’s probably what the big arrow means, yes,” and she said “oh” and thanked me.

And now I feel terribly terribly guilty.

She was wearing a knitted woolen hat and and she seemed so small and vulnerable to the cutting, cynical remarks of a thoughtless 25-year-old who might one day be equally vulnerable to such things if he lives that long. I’m a wicked, horrible person.

And my desk keeps making a noise like a dove coot, which I am sure is wrong for a desk.

Gosh – just discovered this, kicking around in the archives. Cast your mind back to early February, and remember that Hutton had just announced his “whitewash”, and the Butler enquiry had been set up but not yet started, let alone finished. And I was a bit pissed off with waffle. There is a serious point, hidden at the end, about letting politicians, as with any professional, do their fucking jobs. But it’s not as good as the hyperbole about world disaster, so I guess no one will notice …
The Hutton inquiry is now over, but around the corner comes the Butler inquiry, and then of course there’s Hutton’s inquiry into the leak of the Hutton inquiry, the coroner’s inquiry into the death of David Kelly, and then perhaps an inquiry into why the Hutton inquiry transferred away responsibility from the coroner’s inquiry in the first place. And, for good measure, an inquiry into why we sold arms to Iraq in the first place, because we haven’t had one of those for a while.

However the real question is: why are we bothering having all these inquiries anyway? This morning, Michael Howard said quite clearly that if you don’t agree with the findings of an inquiry, you don’t have to accept it. So what is the point of having an independent inquiry at all? With that kind of attitude, we start running down a slippery slope that allows anyone – and particularly the government – to ignore any independent or expert pronouncement it chooses. Worse, by encouraging people to have opinions about everything, how are we ever going to get any real work done?

At a somewhat cynical level, you could consider all public inquiries to achieve little more than closure on an issue. The country pays for a feeling of catharsis, and moves on. It’s even possible to argue that this is the principle reason for having them, and that even if they achieve only that much, it was still money well spent. A report is issued, perhaps some recommendations are made, and everyone feels that something has been done. But when we are encouraged to disagree with the findings, there can be no closure: the end of the inquiry is merely the middle of the process of getting over the problem. Something has to mark an end, because otherwise the debate will drag on. A good inquiry calms the emotions, but a good debate can keep them running high for ever.

In the case of Hutton, we’ve thrown a couple of million and a judge at a contentious issue, and come away with less agreement than we started – mostly because in the course of the inquiry we gained such a huge amount of public information that now everyone has their own opinion. Can we really hope that any future inquiry will provide anything more useful? And if they keep on being run like this, isn’t there a concern that the country will start drowning under completely unnecessary levels of detail? If the Hutton inquiry, by its narrow bounds and disputed findings, spawns a whole series of other inquiries, we may be risking not only the credibility of the government and the BBC, but also our ability to function as a country. “I’m sorry, I can’t possibly work today; I have to read through evidence from Philip Stevens.” But he’s a typist at the Department of Agriculture – and you’re a cardiovascular surgeon. “Yes, but this concerns us all.”

No, it really doesn’t. We have inquiries to look through mind-numbing levels of detail for much the same reason we have scientists to build huge telescopes, peer through them, and tell us what it all means. We can’t be experts in everything: there’s just too much of everything out there. Plus most things, to most people, are incredibly dull. I don’t want to spend ten years watching wasps in a laboratory somewhere in the south of England, and the scientists who do probably don’t want to do my job either. And neither of us wants to wade through thousands of pages of testimony looking for the interesting bits – so we have judges, and clerks, and journalists to do it for us. The same basis allows our democracy to work – the electorate can’t be expected to form a useful opinion on every issue of government, so we elect representatives to do it for us. Anything else and our entire way of life would grind to a halt.

So yes, by all means let us have another inquiry. But, with the aim of still having a functioning economy in the summer, let’s get it right this time. Make sure all parties are happy with who is running it. Make sure all parties are happy with its scope. Make sure there is the time to do it properly. And then until it’s finished, please, for the love of God, let’s talk about something else.

Mark Chapman, who shot John Lennon in 1980, has made a third appeal for parole, and John Lennon fans are up in arms. In their minds there is no question of Chapman being allowed out – because to them he is simply the most evil man who ever lived. More evil than Hitler, even.

Of course, if Chapman is still considered likely to shoot pop stars in the back then it would be unwise to set him free, except under highly controlled conditions whereby he was allowed to walk in areas near Michael Jackson, Britney Spears and Charlotte Church.

But Chapman was only sentenced to 20 years in the first place, and it would be wrong to keep him locked up purely because the man he shot happened to be John Lennon. Would he have been kept in prison for so long if he’d merely shot Mr John Smith from Tooting Bec? I doubt it. However, there are evidently people who believe that murderers deserve harsher punishment if they not only take a human life, but also rob the world of somebody who writes pop songs.

One Mr Porter (who apparently runs Beatles walks in London) commented “who knows what music John Lennon would have made if he were still alive?”

Well, nobody knows the answer to that, of course, but I can make a sensible guess: it would have been awful.

The clues are all in Lennon’s famously popular and revoltingly sentimental, insipid and hypocritical solo hit “Imagine”. (“Imagine no possessions” indeed – easy to sing when you’re sitting at a hugely expensive Steinway in a multi-million pound mansion.) And in the fact that every other post-Beatles song of Lennon’s sounds pretty much identical to “Imagine” – all clumsy repetitive piano chords and maudlin hippy wailing. At best, then, Lennon would probably have continued to write more of the same, which is a pretty ghastly idea.

But a far worse vision of what might have been can be seen in the post-Beatles ouvre of Paul McCartney. McCartney wasn’t shot. He went on to form the Wings, one of the most hated bands of all time. He wrote the Frog Song, which is a lot of fun when you’re five years old, but has never been considered a work of astounding musical genius. He donated his surname to some really rather disgusting vegetarian food. And he became progressively pretentious, trying to con people into thinking he was an artist, a poet, and even a classical composer.

Anyone who has seen McCartney’s paintings will know that, worthy though they might be of display in Tony Hart’s gallery on “Hartbeat”, they are not worthy of a high-profile exhibition at the Walker in Liverpool. Anyone who has bought his anthology of poetry will have realised fairly quickly that they’ve actually been sold a book of pop song lyrics. And anyone who heard his gargantuan mess of orchestral and choral music “Standing Stone” will know why the London Symphony Orchestra has not adopted a policy of commissioning big classical works from the musically illiterate.

Of course, McCartney requires no such scheme to enable him to make a fool of himself in public. He’s rich and famous, he can do whatever he likes – it’s people who actually know something about art, literature and music who have to bear the consequences of his folly.

Some people might argue that Mark Chapman actually did the world a favour by sparing us Lennon’s “Standing Stone”. He probably also did John Lennon a favour – or at least his reputation – because in the popular imagination, Lennon is now seen as the genius behind the Beatles, whereas McCartney’s contribution to the Beatles (hardly insignificant) has been tarnished by later embarrassments. People just can’t accept that the writer of the Frog Song might have once made a valuable contribution to the greatest band of all time.

I wonder if fans of Paul McCartney have considered a petition of their own in support of Mr Chapman’s parole. Although it’s too late to prevent the misjudgements mentioned above, a bullet in the head would at least put an end to his wince-inducing appearances in the media. Quite aside from his orchestral monstrosities and tedious family affairs, every time he stands on stage and performs a Beatles number it further cheapens the memory of his genuinely great work many decades ago.

So let’s withhold judgement about Mark Chapman – it might turn out to be a small mercy if he’s free and armed again before the Queen has another concert for aging rock stars in her back garden.

Working for the City Council just got a whole lot more creative…

The Manager
Evolution Ethnic
Cambridge

Dear Sir

I recently called you to ask if you would be making a donation to this year’s Cambridge at Christmas campaign. You informed me that you would not, because for the last few years you “haven’t seen the lights go up”.

This is a matter of great concern for the City Council, especially as for the last three years Fitzroy Street has had the largest display of Christmas lights in the whole of Cambridge. It is distressing indeed to learn that you have not noticed them.

It seems that there is little we can do until we ascertain the reason for this problem – naturally, since the lights have definitely been up in Fitzroy Street, we can’t help but assume that the trouble is on your side. Have you considered, for example, the possibility that your shop window is simply too dirty to see the lights out of? If this is not the case, may I suggest that you might like to pop along to an optician and see if the problem is with your eyesight – I would be happy to recommend several to you.

Should these areas fail to elicit any reason for your difficulty in seeing the Christmas lights, we’ll have to consider less likely options, for example:

1. a group of thieves stealing the lights whenever you tried to look at them (and indeed putting them back after you’d finished – odd behaviour indeed for thieves)
2. your shop being accidentally upside down, meaning that when you looked up to see the lights you were actually looking down at the pavement
3. a black hole in the vicinity of the lights, your shop, or indeed just you

Perhaps you could let me know if you can throw any light on the problem – no pun intended.

Kind regards,

James Lark
City Centre Management

L Hendy has written a letter to Metro. L Hendy says:

We have to understand that Tony Blair cannot let the Iraqi women out of prison, as they know how to make bombs.

Presumably the hundreds of arsonists in our prisons should similarly never be let free. Or any financial fraudsters who happen to know some interesting uses of nitrates.

Idiot.