Gareth Malone Aims For Another Christmas Number One

Following his great success with the Military Wives Choir, Gareth Malone has been working with the Nativity Choir this Christmas

 

(Joseph looks just as bewildered as when Mary told him he was going to become a father!)

Silent Night

I picked up a pack of party nibbles which I thought were 'mushroom' but when I got home I discovered they were a jellied pork. I cried "Christ the savoury's brawn" and the next thing everyone started singing carols!

MP Aiden Burley Apologises For Implying That Germans Would Ever Attend A Party Hosted By Tories

File photo dated 27/03/06 of Prime Minsiter David Cameron (left) with Conservative MP Aidan Burley, (right) who has apologised after reports he attended a stag party with Nazi overtones.

www.independent.co.uk

Save the Red Squirrel

The 'Rhinestone Cowboy' was not 'any trouble'!

We went to Glen Campbell’s (where the f**k am I) Alzheimer’s tour last night - what a great show!!  We knew that Glen would not be firing on all cylinders given his medical condition but nonetheless he gave us his best and entranced a most appreciative audience.

We saw him in Glasgow and, maybe because of that we did not hear a single ‘yee ha’ or see a cowboy hat throughout, which significantly added to the enjoyment of the evening. Clearly Glen was being prompted by his daughter and read the lyrics of his later songs from an autocue. He was not as fluid on the guitar as he once was (as Eric Morecambe said “...all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order”) but he played his standards with absolute surety.

You’ve got to admire the audacity of someone who rhymes “a load of compromisin’” with “the road to my horizon” and I can’t think of another singer who has used “misanthropes” in a lyric – pure genius; we need more misanthropes and guys like him!

  

Spot the Trannie

It struck me last night as I watched Hilary Devey's remarkable appearance in This Week that you never see the lovely Hilary Devey

 

 and the gorgeous Lily Savage together.

 

Is Paul O'Grady moonlighting?

The Diurach Diva?

I have a vision of my daughter's arrival for her wedding on Corran Sands, Jura - it's something like this!

Street Irony

I seems that the preferred tipple of the homeless is ‘Tennents’ while the beverage of preference for street beggars is ‘Buckfast’ - spot the irony?

Beware of Greeks Offering Haircuts

A Greek and a German have lunch together and agree to split the bill 50/50. The bill for €100 arrives and the Greek puts €25 on the plate. The German looks at his companion quizzically and says “We agreed to split the bill 50/50!”

“Yes” replies the Greek “I’ve paid 50% of my share haven’t I?”  

Phone Hacked Off!

The latest irritant is the expression ‘phone-hacking’ in connection with the activities of some Private Investigators engaged on behalf of ‘News of the World’ reporters. So if you’re sitting comfortably I’ll explain why ‘phone-hacking’ is sloppy and misleading.

As I understand it, the Private Investigators are accessing the voice mailboxes of mobile phones. The diversion of mobile phone calls to voice mail is normally under the direction of the mobile phone user; typically diversion is used when the mobile handset is switched off, busy or out of coverage range. Usually the mobile phone user accesses voicemail via the mobile handset following a SMS message prompt. However, there is a facility for accessing the voicemail from any other phone or network. Simply dial the mobile number and press the * key to interrupt the divert greeting. The system then invites the caller to enter the voicemail PIN which is typically a four digit code. Now this is where people often leave themselves vulnerable. The default voice mail PIN is typically ‘0000’ or ‘1234’ so it doesn’t take a keen criminal mind to ‘hack’ into a voicemail if the mobile phone number is known and the user has left the PIN on the default setting.

I don’t suggest for one moment that mobile phone users are to blame or that the ‘hacking’ activities are excusable but I am concerned that the use of ‘phone-hacking’ tends to suggest more than accessing voice mail and indeed I heard Jeremy Vine speculating that a fixed line with an ex-directory number could have had conversations monitored by ‘phone hackers’ – not likely!!
An additional observation, most answering machines connected to fixed telephone lines have a 'remote interrogation' capability which is used in much the same way as the network embedded  'voice mail' used by mobile operators. These machines also come with the default PIN preset though many only have a three digit PIN.

A final point on this topic – no one has mentioned that the mobile network operators have any culpability for this issue - so I will. The operators could simply set the default as 'inactive voice mail' so voice mail could only being activated by the user and that user could only do so by creating their own PIN.  Simples!

A Kent Aphorism

I witnessed a rather sorry T20 cricket match last night - the Kent Spitfires were comprehensively beaten by the Hampshire Royals at the Rosebowl. The plucky Kentish Men and Men of Kent managed to lose their first three wickets without scoring (brace yourselves) - but they should be congratulated for 'getting all their ducks in a row'.

Fry’s Five Boys

Looking at the fresh faced laddie on the ‘Say Aye tae a Pie’ poster, I was reminded of the Fry’s Five Boys. The other day we were enjoying a pre-dinner drink in the Cloisters Bar and I was drawn into a discussion about Fry’s chocolate – well truthfully I butted in on it. Anyway, I happened to mention the Fry’s Five Boys and none of my new found discussion companions had heard of them. Apparently it was withdrawn in 1976 so that tells you something about the sort of people I but in on these days. So I’ll explain Fry’s Five Boys.

The Fry’s Five Boys were not actually five boys but were the one boy in different states of delirium about Fry's chocolate (his name Lindsay Poulton and apparently he was the son of the photographer).

The Five Boys appeared on the chocolate wrappers, advertisements and metal signs that used to be displayed outside confectioners.

The Five Boys not only appeared on the wrapper of the milk chocolate bar but were impressed on the pieces of a bar.

There was also a bar called Fry’s Five Centres not to be confused with the Five Boys. I say Five Centres but it was a single bar much as todays Fry’s Chocolate Crème, but with five different flavoured fillings: strawberry, orange, raspberry, lemon and pineapple (none of which tasted much like the fruit with the exception of the orange). What made the bar really ‘interesting’ was the internal disposition of the flavoured fondant which was rarely aligned with the segments so you would snap off a segment that was 75% orange and 25% raspberry.

Looking back at the advertising material it struck me that the ‘Realisation’ state is spelt with a ‘z’ – presumably to address the export market. Overall, I fear the Five Boys advertising portrays a seriously creepy image of British childhood in the Fifties - perhaps that's why I talk to strangers in bars about Five Boys!

Say Aye tae a Pie

The first time I tasted a Scotch pie was very nearly the last. I had been through in Glasgow (in Scotland we always ‘go through to’ somewhere if travelling along a line of latitude) and we called in to a café near Queen Street station for what, I was assured by my new flat mate, was a delicious post-pub treat – a proper pie! At first glance it looked quite enticing and somewhat different. The pie was round and had a rim which was just big enough to hold a portion of baked beans on it. “Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face” I mused as I made my first bold incision. Well far from being “a glorious sicht” I was alarmed by what I took to be a greyish ‘ragout’ issuing from the crust. “It’s good; a proper mutton pie” I was hurriedly informed by my companion who obviously detected the apprehension with which I was approaching this delicacy. Now until that moment I had never heard ‘good’ and ‘mutton’ used in the same sentence so, being really hungry and wanting to be culturally sensitive, I pressed on with the culinary experience. But I didn’t try another pie for many a month.

I now have acquired quite a liking for a pie and have sampled some excellent offerings; Tynecastle to mention but one. So imagine my delight when I discovered upon looking in Blacks the Baker window in Dunoon that there is a campaign to encourage the increased consumption of pies in Scotland under the banner “Say Aye tae a Pie!”. 

Now given that this is Dunoon it could be that the campaign was over in the eighties and that their goals have been achieved. I would love to read the Mission Statement ‘Our mission is to get all the people of Scotland eating pies’ or maybe ‘Who will eat all the pies? Aye, us!’ 

My research into which organisation was behind the campaign must continue and I'm expecting to find other iconic Scottish products have been given similar consideration:-
'Say Och Aye the Noo to an Irn Bru';
'Say okey dokey tae an Arbroath Smokie'. 
I wishfully hope that the campaign is masterminded by NHS Scotland and that the follow-on campaign will be ‘Say Aye tae a Pie and Beans – wan o’yer five a day it seems!’

Hail to the Chief

The recent Royal event has awakened my republican inclinations. I find myself making comments like “if it were up to me I’d have a Gatling gun mounted on Admiralty Arch to strafe the whole family of Neo-Nazis as they paraded down the Mall”. Surprisingly my stance is not universally applauded by Her Majesties Subjects (or British Citizens as I would have it) – but my point gets made. Interestingly, the most frequent support for the monarchy offered is 'the alternative is worse’ argument - which I think is a position of inertial despair if ever there was one. What I find intriguing is the assumption that the UK would automatically move to a situation where the Head of State was an elected or otherwise appointed ‘figure head’ with similar constitutional powers to the monarch (in reality precious few). The ‘alternative is worse’ argument then moves to the final ‘horror’ stage when someone suggests that it could be Tony Blair or Gordon Brown who became president.

Where this argument fails to persuade is its lack of ambition. The presumption is always that the constitutional arrangements would necessarily remain unchanged following the removal of the monarchy. What is wrong with an elected President who presides separately from the legislature, the Houses of Parliament, similar to the US system? Unlike the US and UK systems, we could have leaders elected by the majority of citizens rather than an electoral college (US President) or by a system particular to a political party (Prime Minister) or by feudal inheritance (England). We don’t have to endure another Oliver Cromwell as the alternative to monarchy!

I could be persuaded to stay the executions of the Royal Family particular if the old Dominions wanted to retain the monarch – I think the Queen would look rather fetching in shorts and a Jackaroo hat! 

But the major benefit would be that the English would be spared from droning on about how the Queen needs to be saved by God. As far as I can discern, she’s ‘doing very nicely thank you’ on her inherited wealth and the Civil List without the intervention of divine. A relacement song for the English National Anthem could be sought – better options abound.

Half a Story

Listening to a discussion on the radio earlier the question was are we a ‘glass half-full’ nation or ‘glass half-empty’? This apparently was shorthand for ‘optimistic’ or ‘pessimistic’. Setting aside the necessity to use synonyms when words have more than three syllables, it got me thinking about those glass expressions. My simple reading of glasses and liquids is that if I’m drinking a pint of ale and the level reaches the half-pint line I’d say that glass was “half-empty”, but when I refill the now empty glass and the level reaches the half-pint mark I’d say the glass was “half-full” - nothing at all to do with whether I am popsitive or negative, or have a cheery or grumpy disposition.

A closing thought - at a social gathering where the host was filling the glass, he might contend that to suggest my glass was 'half-full’ was unreasonably optimistic!

Almost a Metric Virgin

I found myself explaining the UK’s adoption of the Metric system to an American and an Australian.

The US has of course remained uniquely wedded to the Imperial system while Australia has fully adopted the Metric system. The UK, I explained, is a bit of a virgin – not defiled by metrification but not pure to the Imperial system. We appear to be metric but we are not really sure about it. So for example, in company with the US, we are the last two countries to measure long distances in miles but in common with most of humanity we measure short distances in centimetres. Fluids are measured in litres but there are exceptions. Beer in a pub is bought in pints, but UK pints are not the same as US pints – a UK pint is 20 fluid ounces (there’s those pesky imperial measures again) whereas a US pint is 16 fluid ounces. Of course a gallon is eight pints but we don’t use gallons any more except we still measure vehicle fuel consumption in 'miles per gallon' even though this creates the greatest difficulty calculating fuel consumption (thank goodness for car computers). But when I say we buy beer in pints this does not apply to beer in bottles which are typically 500 millilitres. There are some pint bottles of course, milk is in pints when delivered to your door but is sold in metric bottles when bought from a supermarket. Uniquely we measure body weight in Stones (although these are being replaced by Kilos) but there are no signs that infant body weight will ever be measured in anything other than Pounds.

So far so good; my companions were looking somewhat quizzical and wondered why we made life so complicated - but I was saving the best ‘til last. Weather temperature I explained is measured in both Celsius and Fahrenheit so that the British can choose to use Celsius for low temperatures and Fahrenheit for high. So we’ll say it’s “minus 10°” if it’s chilly outside but “its 86°” if it’s a scorcher! The only logic for this is that minus 10° (the Celsius measure) sounds a lot colder that plus 14° (the Fahrenheit equivalent) but 86° sounds a lot hotter than 30° (the Celsius measure).

They concurred and suggested the British were all quite mad (and of course, they are absolutely right)! 

Singapore Fling

By the hotel pool in Singapore we observed the ‘solemnisation of an engagement’. The local couple were very smart in their white outfits and the scene was decorated with lots of sky blue ribbons and raffia balls hanging from the arbour by silver cords. A breeze gently moved the decorations and soft music played before the engagement vows were given. She turned and looked straight at her fiancé saying “Love you plenty long time Mister” – Ah romance is not dead!

OzTrek – Just let it happen?

Back to Sydney where we went up the Sydney Tower – great views over the city.

We got the concession rate which included the ‘OzTrek amazing virtual reality ride across Australia’ – great. The designers had hit upon the idea of enhancing the IMAX experience by animating the seats so that they moved in synchronicity with the pictures. The problem was, as any engineer knows, is bridging the gap between an idea and an implementation – this is where OzTrek failed. We were strapped into the seats like the rides at Alton Towers and the experience began. It started with a few shuddering jolts to the spine reminiscent of driving a Ford Prefect over cobbles. The jolts occurred at a frequency and in a direction totally unrelated to the images on the screen but after a few minutes the jostling stopped and I started to search my mouth for loose fillings. But no, the wretched experience was not over and was about to be further enhanced by the illumination of two side viewing screens (which never actually illuminated) and more relentless thumping. At the conclusion which seemed to last an eternity, we felt decidedly queasy and trampled which put us off beer for a good half hour.

So be warned ‘OzTrek – an award winning way of becoming acquainted with your spinal column and breakfast!’

Is that a Chimerney on the boat Mary Pawpins?

An audio-visual presentation shown on the boat as we sailed along the Gordon River (one of a many river trips as it happens) described how the valiant Capt Matthew Flinders had mistaken the entrance of Macquarie Harbour for the river mouth - he was pressed for time which explains the blot on his hitherto excellent mapping of the Australian coastline. Later another worthy captain by the name of James Kelly navigated the 200-metre opening and named it Macquarie Harbour in honour of the NSW Governor and named Sarah Island in honour of his boss’s wife. Our James was only 23 at the time but obviously had political nous beyond his years. As is often the way of these presentations, a picture of the good Captain Kelly was flashed up and a voice was required to speak the words of his journal. Judging from the accent, the bold James came from the land of ‘Mary Pawpins’ so had been coached in English accents by ‘Dick Vioyn Dioyke’. Now I simply cannot believe that it is too difficult or too costly to find a UK actor to do this work – what is it about Johnny Colonial that makes him think he can ‘do’ an English accent? – it must be the same affliction that Johnny Londoner contracts when doing a Scottish accent!

More bizarrely yet, it turns out that the cunning James Kelly was actually born and bred in Parramatta just outside Sydney over 10000 miles away from ‘Mary Pawpins’.

I’m sorry to correct you but ….

Now I’m not one to be picky but sometimes you just have to correct people when they perpetuate howlers. While touring the Blue Mountains our guide Steve related tales of the daring adventures of Captain James Cook. He concluded an otherwise engaging exposition by telling us that Captain Cook was not a Captain at all but a ‘Lootenant’ and was not made a Captain until sometime later. Well having some connections with officers in the Royal Navy, I felt able to inform him that the officer in command of any Royal Navy ship is called ‘the captain’ but that the schoolboy error he made was understandable because Captain is a rank an officer reaches after he has been promoted from Lieutenant (Lefftenant), through Lieutenant Commander, and then Commander. I was smug - Steve smiled winsomely.

Award winning hyperbole

Have you noticed the growing trend towards overblown hyperbole? It struck me as we looked through menus, bars blackboards, and tourist leaflets that every item seemed to have a hyperbole attached to it  – not ‘beer’, but ‘award winning beer’. On reflection, I don’t think this is an exclusively Aussie characteristic but perhaps generally redolent of an age dominated by ‘style over substance’. A ‘Good Food’ sign seems to adorn every pub these days and one can understand why that would seem more attractive to ‘Fairly mediocre Brake Brothers micro-waved food’. The use of hyperbole in this way has, I suspect, been around since the dawn of branding, and it’s not that which bothers me – it’s the use of totally unsubstantiated hyperbole. We were in a very small town for coffee (pause for shock revelation) and the small town had two establishments opposite each other – a butcher and the café /baker. The butcher boasted of his ‘award winning pies’ and the café of their ‘award winning Australian coffee’ – neither revealed the provenance of their awards so we were left to guess ‘by whom they were gifted’ and ‘what the awards were for’. I think the pies won an award from the baker for ‘best non-competing bakery product in Tasmania’ and the café received the accolade from the butcher for ‘tastiest low-cholesterol product in Australia’ – but I will never know!  

Don't Panic!

Driving in Oz is a pretty straightforward affair because it is so similar to the UK – there a couple of quirks that one needs to be aware of but more about them later (Oh Goodie!). The thing that I found hardest to get used to was the indicators – the wipers and indicators are on the other side if you’re used to European cars. Older people will remember that when cars were made in the UK back in the Sixties, indicators were on the right, and wipers were activated by a dashboard switch and were invariably powered from a vacuum tank linked to the carburettor. This system delivered variable speed wipers in a somewhat variable fashion – as you drove uphill the wipers slowed and often stopped altogether but when you reached the brow and hurtled uncontrollably down the other side on your four inch cross ply tyres, the wipers smashed from side to side like a fiddler’s elbow – but I digress. It’s relatively easy to retrain your brain to use the right hand stalk for indicating except when you need to draw on instinctive reactions. Driving towards a junction your navigator hits the dashboard and shouts “go that way”. “Which way would ‘that’ way be” you politely enquire as the traffic converges on the junction from various angles. “Left”, no right, no left” – the junction looms and in the panic you find yourself with the wipers smashing from side to side like the afore mentioned fiddler’s elbow.

We returned the car without damage and were complimented on how clean we had kept the windscreen.  

Oh No – It’s Aussie Speak

I have been using a local SIM in my mobile supplied by a company called JUST – it works very well and saves the roaming fees and is highly recommended, apart from one somewhat disconcerting feature. The other day I received an alert to tell me that I had voicemail messages; not aware that I had missed any calls I checked anyway. I was very surprised when the voice automation system informed that I had “nine new messages”. No matter how I tried I could not get through the menu system to find these messages, so I redialled to see if my general prodding of buttons had done anything – no still I had “nine new messages”. So I had another go and then it dawned on me that I had fallen prey to the Aussie diphthong – “You have noiy new messages”!

F1 or F pointless?

Some may be shocked to learn that there are still a few things I don’t understand. Excluding women, which only gay men really understand, there are some ‘sports and pastimes’ that I just do not get. Being extraordinarily Rumpsfeldian about this, there are those that I don’t understand but could if I tried and there are those which I don’t understand and never could no matter how hard I tried. In the first category I include Aussie Rules football and baseball, but the second category includes such pointless pastimes as basketball and F1 motor racing. To air my peeve about basketball first; as far as I can tell the game consists of tall black folks running from one end of a court to another and tossing a ball through a hoop. The other side then does exactly the same but in the opposite direction and this continues until the time runs out and one side has scored a hoop more than the other – typically 68-69. Now I do not doubt for a moment that great skill is involved in throwing hoops but the reason it seems pointless to me, is that both teams always seem to be good at it never missing a hoop and so the game is won or lost depending on the on the timing of the clock! But today I want to talk about F1 – which is big in Melbourne at the moment. Now as far as I can tell this pointless pastime seems to be about tearing round a track very fast, making a very loud whining noise and stinking the place out with petrol fumes and burning rubber. It would not be pointless, and bear in mind our hotel is host to about 100 Ferrari grease monkeys wandering about the place in their red overalls so I observe first hand; if the result was ever in any doubt. The first day was spent tearing around as a practice, the second day was spent tearing around to see who starts at the front, the third day will, I predict, be spent with all the cars following each other in the exact order they started unless one of them breaks down. So the whole pointless exercise seems to be predicated on the reliability of the car and there must be better ways of improving vehicle reliability that F1. As a nearby spectator (they also seem to dress in red overalls) you blink and you miss your team car and so just enjoy the lingering taste of petrol exhaust and rubber, and as a distant holidaymaker in Melbourne, one can’t avoid the scream of the massed engines ripping through the world's precious resources.
Pointless? – I should say so! 

Oh how manly you are!

We took the ferry to Manly and learned that not only does it have a fine brew pub (the 4 Pines) but that Manly was so named by Capt. Arthur Phillip. It is reported that ‘he was passing a group of unarmed aboriginal men wading in the water to greet Phillip's small boats. Impressed with their stature and bearing, Phillip is recorded describing them as 'manly', and the name stuck’. Now my dear wife believes this literally referred to their strong physique; me, I think it probably referred to their ‘didgeridoos’ dragging in the surf given that they would have been bollock-naked at the time – but I’m just an old cynic. 

Think bike! - I have and I don’t like it

The question for today - are cyclists inconsiderate road users the whole world over? Based on my experience in the UK and Australia there is a prima-facie case for believing so. Over here they clearly believe they have the right of way on roads, pavements, pedestrian crossings and of course the walking half of the cycleway (having been run off it by a cyclist near Manly Yacht Club). Red traffic signals matter not a jot to the cyclist, neither does a one-way system.

The patterns of behaviour are uncannily similar to the UK - I recall seeing a cyclist gesticulating madly and shouting at a car driving the wrong way down the street in Luss (a small village on the shore of Loch Lomond). He got so angry and nearly fell of his bike he was waving so vigorously. The irony, seemly completely lost him, was that all the time he was cycling the wrong way down the street himself - clearly cyclists have a unique interpretation of the rules of the road and pavement.

Are Texans deliberately obtuse or what?

We spent a day in the Blue Mountains – well I say ‘Blue’ because that’s what I’m told they look like in a certain light but actually I have absolutely no idea what colour they might be as it pissed hard all day. But to move on – we had a couple of Texans on the tour and they were quizzing the guide – a man of tremendous resource and patience as it turns out - about cricket. Now, at the best of times explaining cricket to a non-fan is something of a forlorn hope but trying to explain it to a large Texan is nigh impossible. Our Steve was up for the task it seemed; enthusiastically talking about boundary ropes, fours and sixes, running between wickets, and the difference between being ‘in’ and ‘out’ while out Texan nodded vigorously . After about five minutes of Steve’s faultless detailed explanation the Texan said “So I guess the bat is just an extension of the guys arm”. Steve smiled and politely said “sort of” and changed the subject.

I like to think the Texan was just trying to wind-up poor old Steve – the alternative is too troubling to consider.