'Elf 'n' Safety in the mosh pit

There's been some hilarity in the Tavern this weekend at the expense of a nephew who returned unexpectedly early from a gig on Saturday night, having been thrown out for 'misbehaving in the mosh pit'.

The nephew in question, let it be said, is a generally polite and well-behaved ex-grammar school boy; though well over six foot, he does not weigh enough to present a significant hazard to others.

His misdemeanour, apparently, was to keep pogo-ing when asked to desist by security guards. Though he was not the only one, he was the tallest and thus became the the target for a firm escort to the exit.

In fact, far from the churning, headbanging mass some of us remember - with varying degrees of accuracy - from our misspent youth, it seems the mosh pits of today present a spectacle more reminiscent of a vicarage tea-party, with any infractions immediately suppressed.

It's all very laudable, and a relief to know our young will not be trampled, concussed or otherwise injured in the melee, but if, for you, the phrase 'men in black' conjures up the Stranglers rather than Will Smith, then I'm willing to bet there's a small part of you, however irrationally, asking 'but where are the mosh pits of yesteryear?'*


*Or, as Jean-Jaques Burnel might put it (to the accompaniment of a moody guitar solo), 'Mais où sont les moshs d'antan?'

A propos of which, the French Wikipedia article, unlike the English one, includes no fewer than 17 'précautions' such as 'Ne fumez pas dans les moshs!' and 'Ne portez pas de lunettes' as well as detailed instructions for a properly-conducted mosh.

Being prepared on a grand scale

“It's all very well and good preparing for a giant earthquake, but in the end you might as well plan for a meteor strike or a volcano.”

That was the opinion of an unnamed police officer after a three-day police exercise simulating a major earthquake striking our green and pleasant – and usually very static – land.

The event was officially described as ‘extremely unlikely’ and ‘unthinkable’; Britain may get between 200 and 300 quakes a year but the vast majority are so small that the only people going to get excited about them are seismologists who don’t get out much.

Granted, the £826,000 cost of the exercise is a lot of money, given the fact that we may never see an earthquake measuring 8 on the Richter scale, but one assumes the lessons learned could be applied in other circumstances:

‘The disaster, recreated near Portsmouth, caused motorways and apartment blocks to collapse, oil storage plants to be damaged and cars to start burning. In Merseyside the mock exercise involved creating an “urban street scene” complete with burning buildings, trapped “victims” and 40 smashed up cars.’

It doesn’t take an earthquake to cause any of these, as the inhabitants of Buncefield or Warrington could tell you. And if I’m ever caught in a disaster of that kind, I’d like to know that there was someone out there who had an idea of what should be done.

And, of course, if Lembit Opik is to be believed, there’s always the chance that there is an asteroid out there with our name on it.

Quote of the day - Ankh-Morpork special edition

The BBC expresses itself with unaccustomed ambiguity...

Exeter takeaway find £17,500 for hygiene offences

A judge fined a Devon restaurant owner £17,500 for food hygiene offences and said only rats and mice were safe to eat there.

There's a name for that sort of thing...

Once upon a time there was a very good little girl. She worked hard at school, played all the team games and always, always did her piano practice.

The little girl grew up and, such was the economic climate, found it hard to get a job. Still, there was one thing she knew she could do well, and conveniently, she could do it in her own home. She advertised and set about building up a list of regular clients.

There’s always a demand for the service she provided, so soon her books were full and she had to turn clients away. Resourcefully, she set about recruiting someone else to share the workload and found a recent college graduate willing to help out; a venue was booked and everything arranged.

Of course, the clients were hers – she had advertised and found them – so it was only fair that she should take a percentage of the new girl’s earnings. Demand grew; soon she had several girls on the payroll – all working part time – and began to call her business an agency and look for corporate clients.

Some of her girls were students, trying to make ends meet while studying; others were single mothers whose work had to fit in around the demands of childcare. None of them worked enough hours to warrant the trouble and expense of being self-employed, so they were content to settle for a share of their earnings.

Gradually the business grew, until she registered it for VAT – remember, she was a good girl. This meant the charges for clients had to go up, but the amount she paid her girls remained the same; clients were charged £40 an hour, of which the girls were given just £16.

By now, she had long since stopped working herself – there are things you do for pleasure that are no fun at all to do for money. She married and moved to a nice house in the suburbs. And the money kept rolling in – take off the VAT and overheads and she still pocketed a good percentage of the takings.

And the best thing of all, there was almost nothing to do. With plenty of demand, and clients referring others by word of mouth, she hardly needed to lift a finger, yet she was making a decent income from her girls and setting up new contracts all the time.

So when your child comes home from school this term with a massive bill for music lessons, don’t blame the teacher until you know whether there’s an agency involved. Your child’s piano, flute or violin teacher is doing all the work but someone else may be pulling the strings.

Abandon hope, all ye who log on here...

The Telegraph this week carries the story of a particularly sordid and unpleasant domestic murder. The details of the crime are irrelevant here (so no link); what struck me about the case is the way the couple in question met. When they established contact,

Both were already in long term relationships but they finished with their respective partners and moved into together at a rented two-bedroomed terraced house.

This wasn’t exactly what you’d call an equal partnership, though;

The couple struggled financially with only Joanne working as a security officer. Despite Higgs getting a £5,000 windfall from his mother he failed to get a job and the couple were seen arguing.

And eventually, in a fit of jealous rage, he killed her. Like so many before her, the 41-year-old grandmother had picked herself up a bad bargain on the internet.

Manchester Crown Court was told the couple met in 2009 through playing games of ''social networking poker'' on Facebook which in which users play to meet each rather than win any cash.

There's a lot of it about; people meet online, somehow decide that this forms the basis for a lasting relationship and ruthlessly burn their boats, heedless of the fact that their new partner has admirably demonstrated a willingness to cheat. The grass is always greener in cyberspace.

And it's proof, if any were needed, that any medium can and will be debased far beyond the expectations of its inventor - imagine John Logie Baird confronted with Big Brother, or Alexander Graham Bell's reaction to phone sex lines. Facebook is rapidly coming to mirror Dante's vision of Hell.

And 'social networking poker' surely must have a circle all of its own.

Whoops! There goes another one!

Remember Lembit Opik? Once upon a time, before he got all starstruck, his preoccupation was the rather less flamboyant subject of asteroids, specifically how to detect them and prevent them turning most of us into history (and those nearest the strike zone into geography).

Lembit never got his wish; there is no National Asteroid Agency - which is probably all for the best, as it would surely have been high on the list of the Coalition's potential cutbacks. And in any case, there's reason to believe it wouldn't have been very effective.

With all the technology at their disposal, NASA told us barely hours ago that a couple of asteroids were on their way past. The first passed 284,000 km away at 9.51 GMT this morning and the second was a scant 80,000 km away at 9.12pm GMT.

The first was estimated at 15m diameter and the second at 10m, so even if they had impacted we wouldn't have gone the way of the dinosaurs, but one can't help feeling it would have been nice to have a little more notice - not least because it's a great excuse for a party.

In fact, these fly-bys are far from uncommon in the cosmic billiards game of the solar system - turn out there are little asteroids popping up all the time. Anything under 10m would probably burn up on entry, so we weren't really in any danger from the nearest observed miss to date (6,500 km, 31st March 2004 - 6m diameter).

The thing is, that one wasn't spotted either until hours before its approach. So if the big one is out there with our name on it, when will we know? Will we have enough time to build and stock shelters, and for Morgan Freeman to make philosophical and inspiring speeches? Or will there be nothing but an undignified scramble?

For those of us who grew up in the era of 'Protect and Survive', the idea isn't so unfamiliar - oblivion from a clear sky with almost no warning. Would we handle it with dignity - or would it be better not to know at all?

Three unmentionable pachyderms - or why children fail

Are you a 'talentless and embittered individual tapping away at your keyboard in the intellectual vacuum of cyberspace'?

Neither am I - even so, I was tempted at first to get irate about Rod Liddle's contemptuous dismissal of bloggers. But then, on further reflection, that would surely be demonstrating exactly the same readiness to take offence that many of us satirize on a regular basis.

Which is a long-winded way of saying this post is bound to offend some people, but only if they allow it to. With the start of the new term, matters academic are permeating the blogosphere once again, and I feel there's something that needs to be said.

It's a tale of two schools, set a few streets apart in an industrial town somewhere in Britain. Highlands is the local flagship with a large sixth form; A level results regularly appear near the top of league tables for state schools and a high proportion of pupils go on to good universities.

Lowlands has no sixth form - like many local authorities, this one has gone down the route of making most schools 11-16 and concentrating the sixth form provision on one site - at Highlands - or in technical colleges.

All pupils in the area have the right to attend the school of their choice and to go on to the sixth form at Highlands. Why, then, do the other schools in the area have near- or below-average GCSE results, while Highlands hovers near the top of the tables?

The contrast is even more striking in the shared catchment area of our two schools - Lowlands has a poor record of GCSE results, despite taking pupils from the same area as its league-topping rival.

There are some obvious conclusions to draw; parents of clever children will obviously aim for Highlands so the school is vastly over-subscribed (though selection isn't officially allowed, this will increase the chances pupils are bright) and house prices near Highlands have rocketed, pricing out 'disadvantaged' children.

And there are also some very large elephants in the classroom. For years I've been waiting for at least one of them to be noticed in the endless results coverage but so far they remain unobserved, unmentionable pachyderms uncomfortably squashed  between the lab benches and the computer desks.

Elephant One is heredity. Current orthodoxy is that all 'learners'* are born equal, with the same capacity for achievement, and subsequent differentials are entirely the result of environmental factors or a 'specific learning difficulty'. And it's wrong - heredity says the children of the successful professionals in their expensive houses might well get good results regardless of environment.

Elephant Two is discipline. As it becomes increasingly difficult to exclude disruptive pupils, teachers are struggling to do their job and keep control with almost no sanctions available to them - even sarcasm is banned these days - and often with little or no support from home (Lowlands has seen several assaults on teachers by parents).

The higher the proportion of these pupils, the less the others will learn, however bright and well-motivated they are. Lowlands has a problem of critical mass; one unruly pupil in a lesson may be ignored or over-ruled by the rest - half a dozen can make life very difficult indeed for their hard-working and conscientious classmates.

And Elephant Three, perhaps the most contentious of the lot, is teaching**. Teachers choose to work in 11-16 schools for a variety of reasons - location, of course, and the availability of jobs - but those who want to teach sixth formers will move on as soon as they can.

The others remain for a variety of reasons, ranging from the laudable (they feel they can make a difference where they are) and the mundane (they can't or don't want to move house) to the disappointing (the ones who aren't up to sixth form work academically) and the downright reprehensible (no A-level essays to mark, so plenty of time for militant union activities).

So Lowlands has some wonderful inspirational teachers, but it also has far more than its fair share of those struggling with the demands of their subject, the terminally disenchanted and strident union activists - NUT membership is well over three times that at Highlands, where most staff belong to less confrontational unions.

And there you have it - three elephants whose existence governs the academic achievement of hundreds of 16-year-olds every year. And until someone points them out, there will continue to be much hand-wringing and lamentation over the inexplicable failure of Lowlands pupils and the social deprivation that must be the cause.


*Current edu-speak for the young person in the classroom. In the most nauseating example, teachers are also required to designate themselves 'facilitators and learners', and school heads to adopt the title 'Head Learner'.

**A representative example from a 2005 study of physics teaching by the University of Buckingham:

• Pupils’ opportunity to participate in physics and be taught by teachers well-qualified in the subject is reduced if they attend an 11-16 school.
• Nearly a quarter (23.5%) of 11-16 schools had no teacher at all who had studied physics to any level at university.
• Teachers’ expertise in physics as measured by qualification is the second most powerful predictor of pupil achievement in GCSE and A-level physics after pupil ability.

Euphonious homophones

A few weeks ago, Mrs Rigby took time off from a busy summer to deplore the fate of the humble apostrophe, scattered promiscuously about with no thought for accuracy or grammatical logic.

As the happy smiling faces of parents arrive at primary school gates today, I feel compelled to make a similar point about spelling and vocabulary.

Last weekend, my local paper contained an article on the opening of a nail bar where, it seems, 'the cues stretched as far as the High Street and many people had bought their children'. Readers were also informed that 'Debbie Stark won the grand raffel prize'.

Meanwhile, Saturday's Times, no less, contained a review of the new Dyson cleaner with '18ft retractable power chord' - B flat major, perhaps, revving up for a trucker's gear change.

Now I know we're all vulnerable to the occasional typo, but these examples of mistaken homophones are in another league altogether. Someone - who is being paid to write accurate prose - looked at 'cues' or 'chord' and decided that was the right spelling for the context.

In the early days of word processing, I had an eighth share in a secretary who regarded the spellchecker as infallible. Should she mis-spell a word (and spelling wasn't exactly her strong point), she would obediently accept the first suggestion in the list offered by the computer regardless of whether it made sense.

The merest suggestion that her little tin god might be wrong elicited loud outbursts of indignation; finally most of us took to re-typing our own letters in secret rather than sending out the gibberish she produced.

Alas, she was merely a foretaste of what appears to be happening wholesale in our computer-driven culture and will continue until schools find a way of teaching accurate spelling, a broad vocabulary and the capacity for independent thought.

Drop the Pilot

"I'm Mandy Julia. Let me fly you..."

You have to hand it to Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary. No matter how often they say ‘He’s gone too far this time!’, he somehow manages to go one better in the next interview.

Remember the proposed 1 euro charge to use the lavatories, or the idea of flying standing up, with a rudimentary shelf to accommodate the aching buttocks (a rather less beautiful version of the carved misericordes that propped up medieval monks during long hours of worship - perhaps that’s where he got the idea)?

And that’s without mentioning all the no-frills staples we’ve come to know and loathe – no seat reservations, overpriced microwave food, an extortionate charge for any piece of luggage larger than Barbie’s handbag and grumpy cabin staff (not sure how that last one saves money, but I do know it’s a bad idea to greet them with ‘Cheer up - it may never happen!’).

Now he's had another brainwave and it’s a real humdinger, as he explains to Bloomberg BusinessWeek Magazine. In this climate of cuts, everyone’s looking for ways to reduce staffing costs and it turns out there’s a whole person in the cockpit who’s doing pretty much bugger-all.

What exactly is a co-pilot for, cluttering up the place and consuming valuable meals and coffee and being paid for it? Even in the case of an emergency, O’Leary’s confident there’s no need for a fully qualified second banana up front when you've got plenty of personnel back there in the cabin:

"Really, you only need one pilot. Let's take out the second pilot. Let the bloody computer fly it. If the pilot has an emergency, he rings the bell, he calls her [the stewardess] in. She could take over.”

Ryanair’s stewardesses are, it seems, pretty versatile already – at least if O’Leary’s office decor is anything to go by; ‘Hanging on the wall is a 2010 Ryanair charity calendar, featuring the airline's flight attendants in bikinis’* - although I believe their people skills may occasionally leave something to be desired.

So now the idea is to train them in readiness for an emergency, so that, in the event of incapacity or death of the only qualified pilot, the trolley dolly can step up bravely to the mark. One has to hope, in that eventuality, she has been chosen for her brains rather than her potential as Miss February.

There could, of course, be another solution....


*The article doesn’t actually say, of course, whether they are all female – I may be making an unjustified sexist assumption worthy of O'Leary himself.

Blood and sand in Aldeburgh

Events in Suffolk took a somewhat bizarre turn last week when Seamus Heaney was uncomfortably caught by his metaphors in a literary tussle; retired teacher and anti-bullfighting activist Paul Hurt travelled 414 miles in order to protest at an appearance by the poet.

Hurt had seized on references to bullfighting in Heaney's work as proof that the Irish poet is a supporter of the practice, going so far as to label him 'Hemingway Heaney' on the internet. A personal appearance was obviously too good a chance to miss:

'He printed off a number of leaflets and headed off on Wednesday in the pouring rain to make his point at the sell out event the following day. After a rough night's sleeping in the back of the van in a farmer's field he arrived at the hall and set up his one man protest.

He spent two hours outside handing out leaflets and even managed to persuade two guests to tear up their tickets. The organisers tried to persuade him his protest was a folly and the police intervened at one point but he carried on regardless. The organisers even offered him a free ticket but he refused on the ground it would compromise his position.

Eventually he packed up and went home.'

Mr Hurt is, by all accounts, a busy man. As well as pestering poets, he's a member of Compassion in World Farming and an anti-fur protester. The retired science teacher is obviously a dedicated man prepared to make considerable personal sacrifices for the principles he holds.

What he is not, however, is a literary expert. The concept of metaphor, or of extended imagery, seems to have passed him by, suggesting a certain lack of imagination - or sense of humour. This is, of course, borne out by his refusal to accept a ticket for the reading; Mr Hurt's mind is made up, so why would he want to find out more?

It's a useful illustration of the mindset of a certain type of activist; despite denials all round, Hurt maintains that Heaney must support bullfighting since he wrote about it. All literary niceties are wasted here; as Orwell put it, 'Four legs good. Two legs bad', and that's an end to it.

I leave it to my readers to decide whether the brilliant Tom Lehrer is a supporter of bullfighting.

Death in the Afternoon

A riveting programme on Radio 4 this morning told the story of Frank Evans, Salford butcher's son turned matador. 'El Ingles', as he is known in the trade, was gripped by the glamour and danger of the bullring at an early age and resolved to make a career of it.

He's still going strong at the age of 67, despite a knee replacement and a quadruple heart bypass, as well as the best efforts of animal rights campaigners - although it has to be said, a man who goads bulls into charging him for a living is hardly likely to be daunted by the antics of a bunch of urban vegetarians.

A search for further information turned up this video; it's a trailer for a documentary that was never made and for those (like me) unfamiliar with the bullfighting world, it does offer an interesting perspective.

Note: the video contains footage of a bull being killed.



The documentary was never commissioned; El Ingles' liberal use of the F-word may have something to do with it, but it is more likely that no company viewing the final scenes was prepared to go ahead with it.

It's strangely low-key - a matter-of-fact killing accompanied by polite applause - but in today's climate it's hard to imagine any broadcaster taking the risk.

Of course, it's a different matter when the boot's on the other hoof, so to speak; no piece on matters bovine these days would be complete without a link to Mark Wadsworth, who features here and here bullfights that didn't exactly go according to plan.

"Divorce - never. Murder - often."

I’ve been suffering from insomnia recently, the full-on wide awake at 2am variety – and before you make any suggestions, I’ve eaten more lettuce than Peter Rabbit and had enough milky drinks to float a medium-sized barge but to no avail. The result of this has been much blog-reading in the early hours – thank you all for giving me something to do – and rather too much thinking.

Sometime during every sleepless night, the mind inevitably turns to matters financial, especially when trawling the business pages of the news sites. Like many other people, we have investments whose managers obviously saw ‘the value of your funds may go down as well as up’ as a mission statement.

They’re very proud of themselves; every so often, they send us a nice glossy brochure to tell us what they’ve been up to and how much their bonuses were – with a short footnote telling us the product is now worth rather less in real terms than we paid for it a decade ago.

Reading on in the business section in the darker watches of the night, an interesting thought occurs on the subject of an increasingly present theme; endowment policies are linked to life cover. And while PEPs and ISAs bump around in the shallows, endowment investors have been left well and truly high and dry.

A policy bought in the 80s to cover an interest-only mortgage of £100,000 could now have a projected shortfall of up to £45,000, according to recent figures. With surrender values at an all-time low, the unfortunate policyholders are stuck paying in their monthly premiums with no hope of realising that £100,000 unless one of them dies.

It has long been a source of complaint in the Tavern that modern detective stories draw heavily on abnormal psychology and deviant behaviour for motives. The regulars are pining for the days of good old-fashioned British murder mysteries, where the culprit hoped to benefit from Auntie’s will or achieve some other financial benefit – now here’s a perfect and up-to-date example.

I intend to start work on it as soon as possible. Trouble is, the title 'The Endowment Murders' does lack a certain something, don't you think?

Science fiction fans may recognize the title:

"Haven't you ever thought of divorce?" he had once asked them teasingly. As usual, George was at no loss for words.

"Divorce - never," was his swift reply. "Murder - often."

(Arthur C. Clarke: 2061 Odyssey Three)