Smash-and-grab Tottenham style

Summer and rioting - it's one of those inevitable partnerships like strawberries and cream or tabloids and sleaze. It is a truth universally acknowledged that the probability that a tense situation will erupt into violence rises along with the mercury.

And along with the chance to indulge in a spot of gratuitous violence, these days a riot presents something of a commercial opportunity, if the BBC coverage is to be believed.

Shops and homes were raided and cash machines ripped out in Tottenham. There were also thefts from shops in nearby Wood Green.

The front window of Currys electrical store was smashed while Argos's door was also smashed in and broken glass covered the floor inside and out after looters apparently raided the stock room.

Of course, the BBC ought to know, since they and other news organisations carried constantly updated live reports, helpfully including 'get your looted goods here' maps and street references. The word was obviously travelling fast:

Teenagers and adults were said to have turned up in cars and filled their boots with stolen items, unimpeded by police. Others arrived on foot and piled shopping trolleys high with looted electronic goods.'

With commercials for the illegal trolley dash of the year going out on all sides thanks to mobile phones and the internet, small wonder that Tottenham briefly became the destination of choice for the discerning looter while law-abiding locals cowered in terror.

Is this, then, the default setting of urban Britain? With the forces of law and order busy elsewhere, is this consumer free-for-all the natural order of things? The nature of the goods taken suggests a keen eye on the potential resale value - provided the thief can convert the goods to cash.

While a branch of Aldi was simply torched, looters stripped Argos bare and cleared out electronics, clothes and phone shops. Meanwhile, cash machines were ripped out - something that requires coordination and a certain amount of know-how, according to the police investigating a similar crime near here.

A cynic might deduce a controlling intelligence at work here, giving looters a guaranteed market for their stolen goods; if so, how long before someone decides it's worth actually provoking a riot for the rich pickings of the surrounding district?

Update - about 20 minutes, as it turned out.

Get lost, Ivan!

I've wasted more time than I care to think of checking on Blogger's handy stats page, which is how I first noticed the phantom hordes.

Things have calmed down since then but I'm beginning to get a clearer picture. I suspect that the unwary blogger clicking on any of the links to the dozens of phantom referring URLs to see where his visitors came from might be in for something of a shock.

The give-away is that they are somehow bypassing statcounter, which is rather more informative on visitors' locations and IP addresses, suggesting a desire for anonymity in keeping with their presumed content. I'm reminded of John O'Farrell's excellent description of surfing the net as being rather like the sort of surfing you do in North Cornwall:

'You spent a fortune on equipment, you spent ages just waiting around and occasionally something really disgusting popped up to the surface.'

The latest phantom to crash the system doesn't even try to hide behind an innocuous front; if the URL is to believed, a substantial amount of traffic is heading my way from a Russian site of an 'adult' nature.

Now it's nice that people want to drop in and read my various ramblings - and I'm always pleased to see the Tavern regulars - but I can't help thinking that there's little here to entertain a bunch of horny Russians, so on the whole I'd prefer it if they just left me alone.

And, incidentally, if you are the reader who recently turned up looking for pictures of Hallowe'en tattoos while logged onto the server at the 'Ukrainian State Nuclear Generating Facility' - please stop reading blogs and get back to work NOW!

Saying no to salt?

I can't help feeling that Jesus of Nazareth would get pretty short shrift if he turned up these days in Britain; not only would he have to deal with a lot of immigration paperwork but a certain sector of the population would have some very strong objections.

"Mr ben Joseph, I understand you have been turning water into wine without an appropriate licence. Now, quite apart from the legal implications, we are very concerned about the message this sends. Your actions could be seen to promote the unrestricted consumption of alcohol and run contrary to all our recent national anti-drinking campaigns.

We also hear that you have described your followers as 'the salt of the earth'; this attempt to portray a harmful substance in a positive light is something we regard very seriously indeed..."

Ah yes, salt. While not all the research agrees, the battle lines have been firmly drawn. As NHS Choices - Nanny's preferred organ of communication - explains:

You don't have to add salt to food to be eating too much: 75% of the salt we eat is already in everyday foods such as bread, breakfast cereal and ready meals.

There's a handy article explaining exactly how to cut down on salt particularly if you are elderly (it stops just short of a section on how to extract the nourishment from eggs) and finishes with the coup de grace - a video entitled 'Say No to Salt'.

Now, funnily enough, two people of my acquaintance did just that this year. Both conscientious souls in their eighties, they followed the NHS instructions to the letter and emptied their salt-cellars and banned it from their kitchens forthwith.

And both of them ended up recently needing medical treatment for the symptoms of salt deficiency - not at once, you understand, but after several weeks of increasing illness, debility, dizziness and mental confusion.

You see, the NHS merrily assumes that everyone eats the 'bread, breakfast cereals and ready meals' that supposedly supply 75% of the necessary daily intake. Like so many other NHS policies, it's one-size-fits-all, and I suspect the usual diet of NHS administrators bears little or no resemblance to the home-cooking and baking habits of the previous generation.

And what is truly frightening is that, until both of these people collapsed and the tests were done, all their symptoms were put down to the normal aging process with no further investigation.

This painting-by-numbers approach to healthcare risks damaging those who do not fit the preselected profiles. What is needed is a large helping of common sense in the NHS - but I suspect that would be nothing short of a miracle.

Healthy eating and an odour of sanctity

The recent figures on childhood eating disorders make chilling reading.

Over at Orphans of Liberty, Angry Exile points out - with his customary acerbity - that while the MSM are quick to point the finger at 'size zero' models and the celebrity culture, their own constant reference to the 'obesity epidemic' may well be playing a significant part.

Obesity has given the Righteous a mighty stick with which to smite the unbeliever and the righteous are wielding it with a vengeance; their new morality - derived, I suspect, from the slimming clubs attended by NHS administrators - is an easy one; fat = bad.

A while ago, I posted on NHS staff berating cancer patients for their supposed alcohol consumption or lack of exercise with no evidence whatsoever, justifying their action with the false syllogism:

Cancer is caused by unhealthy lifestyles.
You have cancer.
ergo You have an unhealthy lifestyle

Never mind that the patient hates alcohol and her last drink was a sherry with the in-laws at Christmas, or that she walks seven miles a day with her dog; the gospel of Healthy Living must be preached.

These evangelical harpies recently struck again; a friend was in hospital when a bright-faced young woman came in and introduced herself as his dietician before launching straight into the First Lesson for the day; 'You have to cut down on red meat".

"How much red meat do I eat, then?" my friend replied. This puzzled her; " I don't know," was the baffled answer, "How could I?" Then she brightened up; "But you have to cut down, anyway."

My friend - a Cambridge graduate who has managed to feed himself well for decades while pursuing an active career - ran logical rings round her as she tried in vain to deliver her creed for Healthy Eating; eventually she gave up and went in search of easier prey.

Our secular society is in danger of creating a whole new priestly caste - the Nanny State embodied in an army of 'experts' loudly proclaiming their revealed truth of 5-a-day and reduced-calorie diets and casting out the unholy trinity of salt, sugar and fat.

The message is pitched at a volume designed to reach those whose lifestyles feature more television and takeaways than home cooking and exercise - subtlety is, I think it's fair to say, not the order of the day.The 'healthy eating' message, complete with graphic portrayals of the fate of non-believers, is delivered with aggressive evangelical zeal to even the youngest of hearers.

And, just as some children in the past became fervently religious, a few over-conscientious, sensitive children are taking this message to extremes. The 'odour of sanctity' reported in the cells of ascetic medieval saints was almost certainly ketosis - which produces sweet-smelling acetone in the breath - resulting from extreme fasting in the name of religion.

Who would have guessed we would see its re-appearance in the 21st century?

The tide is high...

There's a horrible inevitability about it. Give homo not-so-sapiens a tidal causeway and a clear indication of when it's safe to cross and he will still end up being fished out by the rescue services.

Despite clear warning signs and tide indications, a Cumbrian couple had to be winched to safety by the RAF this week after trying to drive back from Holy Island an hour and a half after the safe crossing time had passed.

And it's only a fortnight since the Seahouses lifeboat was called out to the causeway for the eighth time this year; this time to rescue an Australian couple whose car was rapidly turning into a submarine. Their spokesman is probably getting fairly tired of having to comment:

Ian Clayton, from the Seahouses station said: "It's incredible that people seem to think they can drive their cars into the North Sea."

"A couple of years ago islanders specifically warned a man to leave the island before the tide came in, otherwise he would get stuck. He pooh-poohed it, saying it was just something to frighten tourists, but half an hour later he was hanging onto the roof of his car and his wife was up to her chest in water, clinging on to their two children."

The locals, meanwhile, are more outspoken on the subject:

Susan Massey, parish council chairman and owner of the island's Oasis cafe, said: "Anyone that gets stuck really has got to be an idiot as there are warning signs with tidal times all over the island. Barriers have been suggested in the past, but if a person wants to cross at stupid time then they will."

An average year sees around a dozen of these call-outs, as yet another visitor to the island thinks he - and it is usually a he - knows better than the locals. One can forgive the RNLI for getting a bit fed up; each lifeboat call-out costs the RNLI 'between £1,800 and £2,000', which equates to an awful lot of tin-rattling on a saturday morning.

So what prompts these latter-day Cnuts* to defy the tide? Perhaps it's a failure to grasp fully the implications of the word 'Island', or an inability to read or understand official notices, but I'm inclined to think that it has much to do with the nature of our society.

After all, as a trip along any British motorway will amply demonstrate, if you bombard a population with endless instructions and warning signs, sooner or later they will stop trying to distinguish between the necessary and the unnecessary and simply ignore them all.


*'Canute' was a rather twee attempt to anglicise the pronunciation of the original (and prevent ill-bred sniggers from the back of generations of classrooms); and of course, being rather more intelligent that these characters, he wasn't actually ordering the tide to retreat but making a point about the limitations of power.

"Were you truly wafted here from paradise?"

Remember those adverts for...well, whatever it was... in the 1970's? Doesn't really matter anyway; the one thing everyone remembered was the punchline - "Luton Airport". There was even a single released to cash in on what became a national catch-phrase.

If easyjet have their wits about them, it might be an idea to try to recreate this phenomenon ahead of the launch next year of London's newest gateway to the sun; ladies and gentlemen, I give you....Southend International Airport.

Southend needs all the help it can get if it is to sell itself to the jet-setting public. Stuck out on a peninsula between the Crouch and the Thames estuaries, it will serve only the East End of London, a small part of rural Essex and an awful lot of fish - other travellers will surely use somewhere closer to home.

And, let's face it, despite its glorious past as the resort of choice for Victorian London, Southend is hardly a destination to make the heart sing (just ask JuliaM); the list of destinations suggest that, like Luton before it, Southend is somewhere you travel away from rather than towards.

So I suspect that it will feature in the in-flight magazine only as a staging-post on the way to London, a place to get out of as quickly as possible (rather like Luton, where in-flight announcements occasionally offer the on-board sale of tickets to St Pancreas station; a source of much ill-mannered amusement to some, I'm sorry to say).

Southend, then, needs a bit of a boost if it is to compete on a world stage and capture the public imagination, so how about a nice retro advert to launch the new service: a glamorous couple in an exotic location, possibly the cheesiest chat-up line ever and, of course, the obligatory punchline -

"Nah, Sarf-ehnd!"

Would you Adam and Eve it?

Two nations divided by a common language we may be, but anyone watching Torchwood this week - 'I think you mean ATM and gas station; oh, and we call them chips' - could be forgiven for thinking they were laying it on a bit thick.

One thing, however, that has not made it across the pond is a particular sort of wordplay. Spoonerism seems unknown (or the Pitt menage would surely never named their child Shiloh) and more people would recognize Klingon than Cockney rhyming slang; something abundantly illustrated by a shop window display that caused the Spouse much ill-mannered hilarity during a trip into town this morning.

The usual photos of WASPs frolicking on windswept New England beaches embellished a selection of items from Ralph Lauren's new label rejoicing in the title of 'The Big Pony'.

Didn't anyone check*? Surely among all the trendy types orchestrating Lauren's UK campaign, someone should have realised that when many Londoners use the word 'pony', they are not actually referring to equus ferus caballus - or even to the sum of £25 -  but to something altogether more fundamental.

Not exactly the image you want associated with your perfume, is it? Or perhaps it's only people like me and the Spouse - and Pavlov's Cat with another example - who find this sort of thing funny and as we aren't the target audience anyway, who cares?

*Those bemused by all this will find enlightenment in the section 'Rhyming slang and taboo terms' in Wikipedia's article. Rhyming slang is a constantly evolving form reflecting a certain dry humour; for example, the 1980s saw people referring to 'a Cynthia' when they meant a cane (following the trial of one Cynthia Payne for running a house of ill repute which catered for such interests).

Let them eat cake... or wear designer shoes

Did we fall into a parallel universe while I was away? While the front pages have been busy recounting the tragic events abroad - or speculating on the deeds of flame-haired Rebekah (43) - an event of truly staggering triviality has made the fashion pages.

The Olsen twins, famous for appearing on American television on a regular basis since birth before breaking into the fashion business, have turned up in a poverty-stricken part of Honduras on a mission of charity. So what might these Hollywood ladies bountiful be dispensing to the deprived children of the neighbourhood?

Why, shoes, of course! And what's more, designer shoes; the instantly recognizable iconic brand 'Toms' (nope, me neither), as worn by Hollywood's finest, apparently. Who needs food or education when you wear the same shoes as Knox Jolie-Pitt (brother, of course, to the Spoonerist's delight Shiloh Pitt)?

'...the Olsens travelled to Honduras to help fulfil the "One for One" ethos of the popular shoe brand: for every pair purchased, Toms give one pair to a child in need.'

The shoes in question - at least the limited-edition cashmere espadrilles designed by the twins' brand The Row - retail for around £125 a pair. Should Toms be philanthropically inclined, a cynic might argue, surely it would be better to use the money to purchase cheaper, more practical footwear and - here's a thought - endow an educational trust.

But where's the headline-grabbing USP? Far better to release photos of a pretty - if ironically undernourished (the Olsens are allegedly no stranger to eating disorders) - actress putting shoes on the feet of a deserving child; in this case, a matching pair giving added media appeal.

And thrown into the bargain, this utterly endearing quote from one or other of the fashionista moppets:

"Having the opportunity to be a part of something so meaningful has made the collaboration with Toms special to everyone at The Row."

It's a bit like the blessed Bono and his Armani sunglasses - 'buy these £750 shades and we give an African orphan a square meal; go on, you know it makes sense!' How nice to know that spending £125 on a pair of designer espadrilles means that, somewhere out there, a deprived child will soon be strutting about proudly in the latest fashionable footwear.

London is Drowning

A hearty welcome back to Tavern regulars and my thanks to those who continue to drop in (except, of course, those looking for Ryanair hostesses in bikinis - you know who you are...)

Things are still not back to normal on the computer front though I am still reading the excellent output of the hardy souls named in the sidebar.

In fact, this return is prompted by my unsuccessful attempts to comment on a piece at The Cynical Tendency; Demetrius, channelling a stormy petrel rather than his vulture avatar, considers the possibility of water, water everywhere - at least in the Great Wen.

And that led me to wonder about the much-vaunted Olympic Park - how would that react to a potential meteo-tsunami of spring tide, low pressure and high winds funnelling a substantial part of the North Sea up the Thames?

Regulars will know that this scenario is played out in 'The Kraken Wakes'; Wyndham's description of the tense wait for the high tide to spill over the Thames embankments takes some beating. There is much made of the Olympic site's capacity to store excess rainwater but how about a barrier-topping tidal surge?

I suppose they have plans in place to ensure we aren't treated to the women's 4 x 4 paddle or the 100m splash - thought the rowers and swimmers should be fine - but I can't help wondering whether our friends in Vancouver, say, would be watching with interest - and perhaps a touch of uncharacteristic Schadenfreude...

Was it coincidental or prophetic, I wonder, that the Olympic bid was launched to the strains of the Clash and the apocaholic's anthem of choice, 'London Calling'?

The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in,
Engines stop running, the wheat is growing thin,
A nuclear error, but I have no fear
'Cause London is drowning, and I live by the river.

Quarantine

Things have been a bit quiet round here thanks to a nasty little virus. I'm working on borrowed laptops at present, and operating with a super-fussy filter system until it's all been traced and sorted.

It's uncannily like having a Victorian maiden aunt following me round everywhere so I'm having to be most circumspect in my surfing - she doesn't like some of you at all!

Meanwhile, something odd is happening with my Blogger account; I am well aware that should I invite all my regular and valued readers to a jolly reunion, we could comfortably fit into the waiting room of Colwyn Bay station and leave plenty of room for passing travellers.

Blogger insists otherwise, claiming hundreds of phantom visitors are calling in every day, despite the evidence of an independent counter. It looks as if there is a ghost in the machine - or rather a whole crowd of them - so I think the time may have come to switch identities, or at least blogs.

This may take some time but keep an eye out for me - I'll be back.

Quote of the day - did he really think this one through?

Matthew d'Ancona, writing in the Evening Standard on the career of Lord Taylor of Warwick:

'He has passed through the political system like a barium meal...'

A question of recycling

I don't normally recycle posts but, with a heatwave approaching and the matter still not resolved, together with repeated power cuts today as they are digging up the road outside, I hope you'll forgive a re-appearance of this one from last July as a reminder of what's in store.

Back in October 2008, Eric Pickles said a Conservative government would re-instate weekly refuse collections. Well, Eric, get a move on!

It was the blackbird that alerted me. Time after time, I found him sitting near the dustbins with his beak full, looking decidedly pleased with himself. And well he might be; in addition to a sheltered nest site and a bird-bath, it appears the Tavern garden now offers him a fast-food outlet.

Since those eco-minded types at the council delivered our kitchen waste caddy, we have dutifully put all our food scraps into bio-degradable bags and thence into the brown wheelie-bin, to be carted off for recycling - no bin-liners or chemicals allowed.

Trouble is, they empty the bin once a fortnight. And despite washing the bin out two weeks ago, I discovered today* that we have acquired livestock in the shape of several hundred extremely agile maggots busy re-enacting the Great Escape - hence the happy blackbird.

It's not beyond the wit of man (or woman) to see that bi-weekly food waste collections may be acceptable in winter but when the thermometer creeps up past 25C they leave much to be desired. So come on Cameron &Co - let's have some action before the plague of flies descends on us all.