The Questing Vole

From off spin to spin-offs

2012-01-28T11:36:00.000Z

What did cricket writers do in the days before Twitter? They probably read books, wrote poetry, knocked off a crossword puzzle or do, drank plenty and even, God forbid, spoke to each other. Now we fill the duller moments by bashing out half-baked thoughts in 140 characters or less.

I resisted Twitter for a long time and have perhaps embraced it too enthusiastically since I took it up nine months ago. A colleague here admonished me for filling up his timeline, although I try to give good tweet, sharing amusing thoughts (amusing to me, anyway) or odd bits of information rather than the bland statements others make (why do some people need to tweet "good morning", for instance, or tell me that they feel peckish?).

Sometimes an idea on Twitter is too good to waste on one tweet or gets a life of its own when others comment on it, which brings us to #WestWingSpinOffs, an idea I had while discussing with a friend what might have happened to Nancy McNally, President Bartlet's National Security Adviser, after Matt Santos entered the White House.

The West Wing is one of the greatest programmes ever made but after seven seasons the avid fan is left wanting more. What we need are spin-offs. Good spin-offs, mind, like Frasier or Torchwood, not another Joey or the bizarre AfterMASH, a spin-off featuring Klinger, Mulcahy and Colonel Potter after they left Korea (I'm not joking ...)

So what's next, as Jed might say? Well, in case you are a Hollywood producer looking for fresh ideas, here are the West Wing Spin-Offs I and a few Twitter friends came up with. If you're not a West Wing fan, most of these won't mean anything and you probably gave up reading this by now.

All fresh (and better) suggestions gratefully received.

The Nancy McNally Mysteries, in which she, Donna and Elsie Snuffin solve crimes in New England
Butterfield and Co: the hilarious farce of a former Secret Service head who retires early to run a gentlemen's outfitters
Confessions of a Scruffy Hack: Danny Concannon's late-night chat show
Quincy and Bing: a Friends/West Wing crossover in which a lawyer and a statistics analyst, both played by Matt Perry, are room-mates
Stop It! A new gameshow in which contestants see how long they can put up with Donna's bird tapping at the window
Marbury and McGarry (deceased): Lord John Marbury tries to sort world peace, aided by Leo's ghost who only he can see (hat-tip @jedmiliband)
Where's Mandy? A panel show in which a guest tries to find where Mandy Hampton has disappeared to this week (hat-tip @arjones77)
Big Block of Cheese Day: The US economy cracks as those in power spend weeks tucking into a good Camembert (hat-tip @alan_curr)
Ball Against the Wall: A game show featuring Toby Ziegler. Can you beat the master at his own game of bounce? (hat-tip @eddie_corrigan)
Weatherman: Will Bailey ends droughts across the world by screaming to the skies for rain
CJ Cregg vs the World (featuring Taylor Reid and Big Bird) (hat-tip @paulframe85)
The Ziegler Follies: The speechwriter travels the world looking at whimsical structures (hat-tip @zyohnnymac)

The Learjets and the shark-sellers: the two sides of Dubai

2012-01-24T10:44:00.002Z

England's cricket tour of the UAE has limped on to Abu Dhabi after the stuffing they received from Pakistan in the first Test. Before we moved along the coast I got a chance to see a bit of the unknown side of Dubai.

I've been to the Dubai half a dozen times for work but it is not the sort of place I would ever choose to visit on holiday. Andrew Flintoff loves it, which tells you all you need to know. I've found it crass, boring and rather depressing, a stream of hotels, malls and nightclubs, none of which really appeal to me (why do people always talk about Dubai as a great shopping destination when the products are generally more pricey than back home?)

However, there are people I respect who like Dubai, not least my friends Toby and Lindsey who live out here, so with their guidance I ventured away from the strips of concrete and the hotel bars (£6 for a pint of Hoegaarden, by the way - God knows what Flintoff spends out here).

Down by the creek, where passengers are carried from bank to bank on precarious-looking wooden abras for the cost of a dirham (about 20p), we found a rickety platform on the water's edge where we ate meze and drank a delicious lemon juice and mint concoction.

As the wind picked up, shaking our platform, and a Hitchcockian swarm of birds came diving for scraps of bread, it felt a world away from the bland sterility of the rest of Dubai. Tourists were few and far between.

On we went, deep into "Little Pakistan", to Dubai's Billingsgate, the fish market where under a vast corrugated roof, dozens of fishermen sold their catch. Barkers tried to tempt you to their stall as squid jostled with crab and swordfish with shrimps for space in the wheelbarrows that porters wheeled round the narrow gulleys.

A whole tuna and a kilo of shrimps bought for the barbeque, we then took them to a separate shack where they were cleaned and gutted for a handful of dirhams. Outside, a few small sharks were laid out on the concrete walkway and a gaggle of locals gathered for what seemed to be a bidding war.

It was a fascinating display of noise and passion, the exact opposite of our trip the next night, when we were taken to Meydan, the great Dubai racing centre, for an evening with the horses.

Meydan is a majestic stadium, the stand of corporate boxes and seats looking like a grander version of Stansted airport. In front, the horses paraded before the race, patted as they passed by their wealthy sheikh owners. The place smelled of money and luxury.

And yet the racing was disappointingly sterile. No roar from the crowds as the horses thundered past, no gasps as the favourite slipped back or cheers for the 20-1 outsider who took the post. Barely any noise at all.

This is what happens to racing when you remove the alcohol and the gambling. I'm sure some betting must have gone on, punters using their mobile phones to access websites based overseas, but the lack of evident passion or concern for the result led to an immensely sterile atmosphere.

This is the anomaly of Dubai. The wealthier you are, the more soulless life seems. The immigrant population who built these edifices may live in penury, but they have passion and enthusiasm. I found myself envying the fishmongers and pitying the sheikhs. All the money in the world, but no real reason for being alive. In the battle between the Learjets and the shark-sellers, I'm on the side of the men who fish.

Postcard from Dubai

2012-01-15T14:27:00.001Z

Dubai is a city of skeletons. Everywhere you look, particularly around Sports City where I am covering England's cricket tour against Pakistan, you see half-built shells of buildings. High-rise concrete frames waiting for the gaps to be filled in, yet no sign of anyone working.

No one has worked on them for quite some time. The skyline is full of unmoving cranes. One hopes that they are not leased by the day. This is a stagnant economy, a tourist resort built both literally and figuratively on sand.

If you search online for images of Sports City, all you will find are CGIs. It will look great when - if ever - it gets built.

It is a curious place to be watching cricket, although there can be no complaints about the stadium where the Test match starts on Tuesday or the ICC Global Cricket Academy down the road where England have been practising.

The facilities there are first-class, designed to replicate conditions around the world. The main square is laid half with soil from Lahore and half from the Gabba in Brisbane. The outdoor nets have been imported from other countries, including English clay wickets, while the indoor ones have different surfaces to allow you to practise on spin and pace-friendly pitches. It is an oasis surrounded by acres of neglect.

We're deliberating what to call the two ends at the Dubai International Cricket Stadium (right). Possibly the Building Site End and the Unbuilt Mall End. In the near distance, a canal network has been dug, with elaborate but unfinished Venetian-style bridges poured in concrete but undecorated at regular intervals. A scaffold-clad block of would-be Italianate villas stands dusty and ignored.

“All buildings in Dubai are either half-built or they are fantastic,” an expat said to me last week, but Dubai has long had a dichotomy. This is my fifth visit, having been to a few rugby sevens tournaments and the sevens World Cup in 2003. They are always great fun and a huge piss-up, which contradicts the stories you hear of people being thrown in prison for being drunk.

The Dubai Sevens is the only sports event I have been to where they check your bags for alcohol as you leave the ground – drink all you want in western company but don't touch a drop in front of the locals. There is similar hypocrisy in attitudes towards sex. Public displays of affection are frowned on, you are told, but in certain hotel bars and even as you wait in line for a taxi the amount of very evident prostitution is shocking.

A near-slave workforce from Asia has created this country out of nothing – the UAE only came into existence 41 years ago – but now there is no money to complete their works and many of the workers are unpaid and unable to return home.

Dubai has an Ozymandias feeling to it: a multitude of vast and trunkless legs of concrete. Shelley's poem could sum up the Dubai of the future: “Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.” It is indeed an odd place to play cricket.

Citizens (back) on Patrol

2012-01-11T10:30:00.001Z

OK, so the return to blogging hasn't quite taken off as instantly as I thought last week. I was waiting for a suitably weighty subject on which to give an opinion, so which shall it be: the Ed Miliband rebrand? David Cameron telling Scotland to shove off or stop whinging? The New Hampshire primary? HS2?

No, there's only one story that has grabbed my interest, grabbed it like a Moroccan carpet-seller grasps a window-shopping tourist, pours him a cup of sweet tea and manages to sell him a rug that he doesn't have room for, and that is the impending remake of Police Academy.

Police Academy was part of my childhood. More even than Ghostbusters and The Goonies, perhaps second only to Star Wars, the Academy films were the ones I would stick in the video player again and again. David Graf's gun-happy Tackleberry, Bubba Smith as the mild-mannered florist Hightower and Michael Winslow's sound effects copper Jones were my heroes.

The early films had all the right ingredients to appeal to teenage boys

loveable failures as the heroes
comic-book baddies who either have mullets and pencil moustaches or are bully-boy jocks
slapstick
car crashes (you can never go wrong with a police car on its roof, lights still rotating)
a reformed druggie (Zed) who spoke like the Tasmanian Devil
a dominatrix with pneumatic breasts
a very tall character and a very short one sent on patrol together
an absent-minded man in charge with a goldfish fetish and no idea of what is going on
someone trapped outside naked with only dustbin lids for protection
someone impersonating the bad dubbing of martial arts films
and, of course, the Blue Oyster.

Even now, if you whistle the first six notes of a 1970s tango called El Bimbo to men of a certain age you will get a sudden smile and, if they are of a certain orientation, perhaps a wink as they recognise the music played whenever someone was lured into the over-the-top Village People gay bar.

The Police Academy films tailed off quite a bit by the time you got to the sixth and seventh in the franchise - for some reason, it was never as good when Steve Guttenberg left, even those his character, Mahoney, was insufferably smug - but if New Line, who have bought the rights, can avoid taking the remake too seriously and keep it as a borderline camp, puerile visual comedy, they could be on to a hit.

A new year, a revived blog

2012-01-04T18:43:00.001Z

Look, I know it's been a while since I last wrote anything on here, months in fact. Muammar Gadaffi was still alive when I last blogged, but never leaving any comments as usual.

Blame overwork, blame the baby, blame Twitter for absorbing far too much of my spare time, blame Ed Miliband, blame our switch to Googlemail for the office email which means that I have to log out of the system if I want to blog, blame the Coalition, blame Jonathan Trott, even blame it on the boogie although I really shouldn't.

But we're at the start of a new year and a few people - maybe the only people who ever read my wibblings - have asked why I don't blog anymore, so perhaps it is time to start again. I'm fed up with constricting my thoughts to just 140 characters.

I have a few resolutions for 2012 - lose weight, be happier and more patient at work, try to be a nice person, break 95 on the golf course, write a book, hold a catch, read books, teach my daughter to read books, teach my daughter to hold a catch, learn poetry, stop picking my nose, go to church more often - but like most resolutions some of those will be quickly jettisoned.

I will try to keep this one, though. In 2012 I shall start blogging again and I shall try do it often, a few times a week at least. All encouragement gratefully received. Happy New Year.

Keep the home fires burning

2011-08-13T18:02:00.002+01:00

I flew out from wartorn London on Monday to spend a week in Atlanta, Georgia, which as far as I can make out has not been set on fire since Gone with the Wind. It's strange watching riots in your homeland while you are five timezones away. Strange and quite disturbing; you feel so helpless.

My wife reported helicopters circling overhead in Eltham, southeast London, for much of Tuesday night. Apparently, supporters of Millwall and Charlton football clubs had come out to defend the High Street from looters, which could be taken as a heartening sign of unity if there wasn't the slight suspicion that they were looking for a fight.

Eltham is, after all, where Stephen Lawrence was killed in 1993 and while the area is being gentrified by those of us priced out of Greenwich and Blackheath, there remains racial tensions. I walked past a pub on the High St on Saturday where a large group of pissed white louts were shouting "death to the Taleban" at an event to honour a soldier returning from Afghanistan.

(Not that being anti-Taleban is a bad thing, of course, but I fear that some of them would regard anyone with olive skin and non-western clothing as Taleban).

The most depressing thing about the riots as I see it from the other side of the Atlantic is the way in which people have sought to make political capital out of it without trying to look at the real causes. The hard right have gone for the string 'em up and bring-back-conscription policy, while the left have blamed it on cuts and a lack of compassion from the Tories.

Both are wrong. You cannot solve all the problems of deprivation by throwing money at it, nor can you keep the underclass in check through hard discipline and neglect. It is a myth to claim, as some on the Left do, that all people need is encouragement and opportunity and they will soon be shopping in Marks and Spencer and discussing The Hour with the rest of us. But it is also a myth to claim, as some on the Right do, that these people are worthless ratbags who cannot be saved and they would be better off in jail or the Army.

The fact that deprivation is cyclical is depressing and society has failed by allowing it to happen. Damaged people produce damaged children; ill equiped to raise them, inevitably it just means more lives are destroyed.

It is of huge concern that something like an eighth of children leave school with no qualifications and hardly any literacy and numeracy skills, let alone the social skills that will enable them to mix with others and hold down a job. The only interviews these kids are ever given are held under caution in a police cell. Yet how many of them come from backgrounds where education is valued or respected?

They turn to crime as much out of needing something to be good at as for any material reward. I imagine those swept up in the looting last week must have experienced an exhilarating rush of power. It is such a waste that such energy cannot be channelled into self-improvement.

Ultimately, for all the good intentions of the state, there is a bedrock where some people through lack of intelligence, ambition or family history of prosperity are unable and unwilling to be given a leg up. You can create a job for everyone and some will still not want to work. I'm not sure whether there is much we can do for such damaged adults, not if it means we are taking resources away from those who do want to be helped, but we can try to save their children.

Last week, my cricket team played in their fifth annual charity match at Audley End House in northwest Essex. We formed five years ago because a friend of mine wanted to raise money for Kids Company, the charity set up by Camila Batmanghelidjh in South London to support vulnerable children whose parents are unable to care for them properly through what the charity euphemistically calls "their own practical and emotional challenges".

These are the abused children of alcoholics, drug addicts and the violent. No wonder they grow up angry at the world. Many will have been among the rioting hordes last week.

Yet Kids Company tries to save them not with money (not just with money, anyway) but with love and patience. They give them a sanctuary where they can play, learn social skills and gradually, ever so slowly, start to respect themselves, each other and the world. The more work Kids Company does with them, the less chance there is that the cycle of deprivation will roll on in that family.

Kids Company is not state-run, although like other charities it receives government funding (a fairly small grant in the scheme of things of about £4 million a year), but it succeeds because it offers a hand up rather than a hand-out.

Unlike increasing state benefits, the money is targeted at those who can be helped. Unlike raising the education budget, the money goes to those who want to learn. The trick is identifying those who can be saved and getting them away from the deadbeats holding them back.

If money can be found to fund charities like Kids Company - and if the state can resist in meddling by setting them targets and quotas - a few lives can change for the better. It is not the full answer, but it may be as far as we can get. The Left need to acknowledge that not everyone can be saved; the Right need to acknowledge that some should.

Snorting the craic

2011-07-29T15:26:00.003+01:00

I am writing this while sitting on a rock beside a lake in southwest Ireland, looking across at the mountains. My day job (I'm in Killarney for the Irish Open golf) takes me to some pretty astounding offices.

The gentle lap-lap of the water is the only sound that disrupts this corner of heaven. That and the slight pounding in my head. Was it really wise, having risen at 4.30am yesterday to fly to Kerry, to stay up to 3am on my first night here? Of course it was, there was singing to be done.

We don't do pub singing very well in England. On the rare occasions when anyone does start to sing in an English pub, it is the boorish, chanty, chavving footballer type of song. The sort that has barely any discernible words and even less of a tune. Why are the Irish more charming drunks than the English?

There are few pubs that put on live music and even fewer that do it well, with the punters encouraged to join in. I know of one glorious place in Marylebone that does old-style roll-out-the-barrel Cockney piano nights, but it is a rarity.

In Killarney, every pub has a sign outside boasting of live music. Purely on a whim, I chose O'Connors.

There was a man with a guitar and a man playing the spoons as percussion. And there was a tap dispensing black liquid and much love in the room. After a couple of glasses of the black liquid, I started to join in as the pub sang along to the guitarman.

I didn't know many of the songs, but I could pick up the refrain. When it came to the ones I did know, like the Fields of Athenry or Streets of London, I belted it out with passion. I suspect at this point my wife, if she is reading, is cringing.

At 11.30pm, the guitarist packed up but the pub was not finished. One by one, the punters took it in turns to start a song and everyone would join in as soon as they knew it. We did County Roads, we did The Gambler, we sang You've Got a Friend. A pubload of pissed men (and a few women) singing Carole King. Beautiful.

One jolly fellow called Fergal, a man with an astounding tenor voice made for the stage, serenaded an American lady with La Vie en Rose before doing a couple of numbers from My Fair Lady. Another guy did the obligatory Danny Boy, although his knowledge of the words extended only to the title. No matter.

And then it was the turn of the Englishman. National pride at stake. What to sing? What could I remember the words to at midnight after several pints? I took a sip, opened my mouth and began: "I'm sitting by the railroad station, got a ticket for my destination..."

At which everyone joined in "ooh-e-oohh. On a tour of one-night stands, my suitcase and guitar in hand..."

Yes, Simon and Garfunkel was a good choice. American Pie followed as an encore. After that, everyone told me how much they loved the Queen coming to visit Ireland.

The evening didn't end there. Fergal dragged me along to another pub where there was a fabulous rock group playing covers of everything from Abba to Hendrix. A bearded Goth with tattoos all over his body and the voice of Robert Plant led the way. More singing. More drinking. At three pints for ten euros it would be rude not to.

I crawled off to bed when the music finished. I'm sure that if I had wanted, Fergal would have found somewhere else doing a gig but by that stage my vocal cords were shot. And I'm a professional, I had work the next day...

It's the end of the World as we know it (and I feel fine)

2011-07-10T11:55:00.007+01:00

Will Twitter kill the blogosphere star? It's been two weeks since I last blogged here and yet I seem to spend more hours than are really necessary or even enjoyable on that silly micro-blogging site bashing out quips at 140 characters a time (you can follow me @patrick_kidd if you like).

Still, it's not as if there has been much to write about in the last fortnight. Apart from the former head of the IMF getting off a rape charge, the final flight of the Space Shuttle, the creation of a new country in Africa, a famine in Africa, the world's first synthetic organ transplant, England winning a one-day cricket series and Betty Ford dying, what else has happened?

Oh yes. A 168-year-old newspaper was closed and 200 journalists put out of work. Any job losses in any industry is a tragedy - and some have fairly pointed out that the News of the World had not done too much blubbing over public-sector redundancies - but the death of the Screws is tremendously sad.

It is not that it was a great newspaper (I guess I'm not its core audience, but I always thought it was pretty dull and awful), but it was a success as the 7.5 million readership attests. Most of the staff and, by reputation, its last editor were honourable, hard-working people who had nothing to do with the phone-hacking scandal. I'm still not really sure why the paper had to go.

Advertisers were pulling out all over the place after the claim that the paper had hacked into Milly Dowler's voicemails, but the paper could still have been saved if those who were seen as responsible for its brand becoming toxic had gone.

Suddenly, Hugh Grant is seen as the voice of morality. Not that he did anything about phone-tapping when he was Prime Minister... Max Mosley, whose porn dungeon escapades attracted the Screws, also tut-tutted. I expect Ryan Giggs and Jeffrey Archer will also soon be seen shaking their heads with faux disapproval.

I don't want to excuse the News of the World's tactics. Hacking into the phones of murder victims and the families of those killed in war or on 7/7 is disgraceful; hacking into those of celebrities a bit tedious (as bad as reading their Twitter, I imagine) but nonetheless illegal.

But how many of those who did it were still working at the paper? And how many other papers have done the same? A study by the Information Commissioner's Office in 2006, highlighted in this week's Spectator, revealed that 139 Mirror Group employees and 91 who worked for the Mail had paid for obtaining private information. At News International, there were 30.

The practice was not that common, but it was universal and it should be the perpetrators - on all papers - who get punished, not the innocent subs, designers, brief-fillers and gardening correspondents. Closing one paper and putting the innocent on the dole queue is like hacking off an arm to cure a nose bleed.

It's the freelancers I most feel sorry for; they won't even get a pay-off and will have to join a very congested marketplace. Perhaps many of them will be rehired to staff the proposed Sun on Sunday, but that also raises the question of why the News of the World had to shut. It was the subject of phone-hacking that was toxic, not the paper.

If we were to close down something and change its name every time there was a scandal, we may as well do away with Parliament and open Congress because of the MPs expenses. It does not allow for redemption.

It was the suddenness of the decision that proved so shocking. Few saw it coming, not even Mystic Meg. I was one of the first to tweet the news on Thursday, not through any great connection that I have but because I was one of the few to wade far enough down the email that was sent to all News International staff by James Murdoch. It was two thirds of the way down before he said "By the way, you're all fired. Release the hounds." I imagine most colleagues had given up reading by then.

There was genuine shock and bemusement in the Times newsroom when rumour spread. The Times editor, who had only been told himself half an hour earlier, came and addressed the troops briefly and with dignity, saying that our paper was not tarnished by allegations and that we should continue to set the standards for professionalism in our trade.

As I left the office that evening, the crowds spilt out on to the plaza from the nearest pub. Wisely, the News of the World staff were taking to drink, joined by colleagues from The Sun. It was claimed by some on Twitter that the Sun staff had gone out on strike in sympathy. They hadn't, but they wanted to down a couple with their friends. It would have been nice if Rebekah Brooks had put her card behind the bar.

Purple power

2011-06-24T10:14:00.001+01:00

Hurrah for the Purple Poofters. The front page of today's paper carries the happy news that Colchester Royal Grammar School won the Times Spelling Bee competition yesterday, sealing the title by spelling "chrysalis" correctly. As an Old Colcestrian, I'm delighted and more than a little envious.

No Spelling Bees in my day, not even a Spelling Gnat, but being able to rite propa was drilled into us from the first year with Mad Fred Evans, the Cuban heels-wearing chemistry teacher and first-form master, setting us weekly spelling tests after taking the register. Chrysalis (not to be confused with crystal) was a Fred favourite.

I am always grateful that I had the chance to go to CRGS, a state school in name and funding but a private school in output and ethos that regularly spanks the top fee-paying schools in the exam league tables. It was good in my day, with 13 pupils in my year of 100 going to Oxbridge, but is now jaw-droppingly good. Last year, 41 CRGS pupils were offered places at Oxford or Cambridge.

Opponents of grammar schools hate it because it creams off the brightest children at 11, weakening the quality of the other schools; others argue that it gives a chance purely on the basis of intelligence rather than class or the state of their parents' bank account. It is elitist, but based on potential and ability rather than money. Why is that a bad thing?

Anyway, the pupils suffer in other ways thanks to the distinctive purple blazer, with French mottoes on the breast pocket depending on house. It made you stand out in Colchester; since it is a garrison town that was not necessarily a good thing. "Purple poofter" was a regular shout from the oiks at the comprehensive school. They were probably just jealous. Most of them couldn't even spell poofter.

Ed Balls, the teenage cricket geek

2011-06-11T17:46:00.002+01:00

They say that you should never meet your heroes, but it is also wise not to meet your bogeymen in case you find that you quite like them.

So it was when I interviewed Ed Balls in the Lord's pavilion yesterday and discovered that we were both teenage cricket geeks.

I should loathe Balls, the former right-hand man to Gordon Brown. He has a reputation as an arrogant bruiser and a bully and I imagine that there is little in politics on which we would agree.

Except that for a pleasant half an hour, he talked with passion and enthusiasm about boyhood days spent playing dice cricket and impersonating Derek Randall. Guess he has some redeeming features.

I went to interview Balls because he was keeping wicket for the Lords and Commons team against MCC, but the Shadow Chancellor was all over the papers for plots and intrigue yesterday morning so The Times also dispatched Roland Watson, our political editor and a decent cricketer himself, to ask about leaked memos.

We wrote up the interview for a piece in the Times today, but there was a fair bit that didn't get in about Ed Balls's schooldays that I think is worth sharing, if only because it reveals an obsessive and rather sad fascination for cricket and maths. This is the tale of the making of a Treasury wonk.

Like many slightly nerdy teenaged boys, the young Balls loved cricket but could not play it. He never bowled for his school team and batted at No 11, but when it came to playing “dice cricket” in his bedroom, Balls was a master.

“I developed my own version and played games between England and an All Star XI using a scorebook I bought from Trent Bridge,” the Shadow Chancellor said. “My system was quite sophisticated. You rolled dice to see what the weather was like and used grids that attempted to simulate different kinds of play, like if it was a batter's day or a spinner's day.”

He admits that playing the games was “quite a chore” as he rolled the dice over and over to replicate a Test match. What excited him was what happened after the match.

“I would get to the end and recalculate by hand all the averages for the players,” he said. “I would write them out in order and then repick the teams and start again.

“The thing I really loved was doing the averages. I would get through the game as quickly as I could so that I could do them. The only thing is that England tended to do well so I think the dice may not have been rolled completely fairly.” He added that on family holidays he used to hope it would rain so he could stay indoors and play.

It brought back my own memories of playing "calculator cricket" in maths lessons, using the random number generator. Like Balls, I also drew up my own eventualities tables to reflect weather, pitch and momentum in the series. God, I was quite a sad little character.

The first Test match that Balls saw was the great West Indies side in 1976 at Trent Bridge. His hero was Randall, the madcap England batsman who was noted for his eccentric behaviour at the crease and his fielding acrobatics.

“We wanted to be like him at school,” Balls said. “We spent ages practising running, picking up the ball and throwing it at the wicket. We were the most exhibitionist team around and when we batted we would stand at the crease continually fiddling.”

Alas, we had little chance to watch the Balls fiddling yesterday. Only 11 overs were possible in the match, the first time the annual game had been played at Lord's since 1939.

Having been driven off once by a heavy downpour after 40 minutes, they emerged tentatively after lunch but rain started falling as soon as the covers were removed. The match was abandoned at 4pm; the gods had seen enough of Balls's wicketkeeping.

It was just long enough, though, for Danny Alexander, a left-arm medium-pace Cabinet minister who shared the new ball with Jo Johnson, MP for Orpington, to trap one of the MCC opening batsmen leg before wicket.

The Shadow Chancellor was the first man to shake hands with the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, all rivalries forgotten in the name of sport. "He told me 'God this is probaly the only time you'll ever be able to congratulate me for something'," Balls recalled as rain teemed down outside. "I said I was slightly worried that it was going too far down the leg side to be given out."

Alexander was lucky that the batsman hadn't edged the ball behind for Balls to catch given his rather feeble efforts at taking the ball in his gloves. "More goalkeeper than wicketkeeper" was his own honest assessment. "I'm just relieved I didn't drop any catches," he added.

Instead of sledging the opposition, Balls and his slip cordon, the Tory MPs Crispin Blunt and Matthew Hancock, made cracks at their team-mate, John Redwood. It is probably the only time Balls and Redwood have found themselves on the same side.

"In 1997, I played for the journalists against the MPs team and hit three fours off Redwood in an over," Balls recalled. "That's the highlight of my cricketing career. I got 25 or so that day. John and I have always got on fine."

The 11-year-old Balls went along eagerly to nets at his secondary school, hoping to impress the master in charge. Afterwards, they gathered round and the teacher told them that one boy had stood out above the rest.

"For a fleeting second I thought it could be me," Balls said. Instead, it was James Morris, the man who captained him yesterday and whose day job is as Tory MP for Halesowen and Rowley Regis. Balls was the token Labour MP in the team.

Balls admits that it was a dream to get changed in the away dressing room where Sri Lanka had prepared for last week's Test match and the name of their captain, Tillekeratne Dilshan, had been freshly painted on the honours board after his century. "We all looked at the honours board in disbelief," Balls said. "Cricket always has more reverence for history than other sports.

"When I watched TV as a boy, they would show classic moments on TV during the rain. To be in the place where it all happened, the sense of history and majesty about it, is different to anywhere else." Except, some may argue, the Houses of Parliament. It is easy to be blase about a place that you visit every day.

[pics by the estimable Graham Morris]

Tina Fey's Palin impersonation foxes Fox producer

2011-06-09T14:19:00.000+01:00

Fox News had a little difficulty this week in telling the difference between fantasy and reality. Well, more difficulty than usual.

An item on Sarah Palin's voyage round America's tourist sites, amending Wikipedia as she goes, featured an image of Tina Fey, the star of 30 Rock, spoofing Palin on Saturday Night Live in 2008.

Apparently the producer who boobed has been disciplined, but probably not in a good way. Palin is not only Fox's poster girl, but since last year she has provided political commentary for the station. It should not be difficult to tell her and Fey apart. For a start, Fey's Palin is rather more foxy than Fox's Palin.

Fey recently reprised her Palin on SNL, having a pop at "the lamestream media who twist my words by repeating them verbatim" and promising to run for office every four years. "This is my Olympics, and I'm gonna win a whole bunch of silvers," she said.

The world will be hoping that Palin does have a crack at the White House next year, if only because it will raise the quality of satire. Sending up Tim "Call me Tim" Pawlenty is not quite the same.

A smug of iPads

2011-06-06T14:20:00.000+01:00

Via the Guardian's Mind Your Language blog, I've discovered the wonderful All Sorts website, which exists to catalogue and create collective nouns for objects in modern life.

The Grauniad was seeking a collective noun for iPods and suggested "a rectangulation", which I rather like but not as much as the almost perfect "a smug of iPads".

The most popular suggestion for a group of journalists is "a gutter", although I like whoever suggested "a scoop" and, with a nod to those sadly-now-gone days of legendary lunches, "a bevvy". Sadly, "a redundance of journalists" may be gathering momentum.

I'm also very impressed by the suggestions for a collection of tweets - a failwhale or a boredom being the best - while top marks must go to "a wunch of bankers" (think about it...), "a sneer of critics" and, to quote Brian Sewell, "an arse-fuck-cunt of Tourette's sufferers".

"That's a Smith & Wesson and you've had your six"

2011-06-02T16:07:00.000+01:00

There's a fabulous piece of correspondence on the Letters of Note blog about James Bond's "rather deplorable taste in firearms".

A gun expert, Geoffrey Boothroyd, wrote to Ian Fleming in 1956, praising his books but saying that the .25 Beretta that Fleming had given to Bond was "really a lady's gun, and not a really nice lady at that". Boothroyd went on to suggest other guns that the secret agent could use instead.

Fleming, to his credit, was delighted to take the suggestion and equipped Bond with a Walther PPK in Dr No. He said he would pay Boothroyd for the advice and offered to recommend him to any company who might film the Bond books. How many authors would do that today?

As a final gracious gesture, Fleming gave Bond's armourer, Q, a name for the first time in Dr No: Major Boothroyd. It wasn't the only time he borrowed someone's name: Blofeld and Scaramanga were both named after boys he knew at school.

No DIY this weekend...

2011-05-27T18:54:00.001+01:00

Looks like most of the country will be spending this weekend in front of the TV with the curtains drawn. It's arguably the biggest weekend of sport ever scheduled, even if some of us wonder why people care so much about chavball, which as well as the Champions League final between Manchester Superinjuncted and Barcelona at Wembley has play-off finals.

In rugby, there is the Premiership final between Leicester and Saracens and the Magners League final between Munster and Leinster. And then on Sunday England play the Barbarians at Twickenham.

In cricket there is the Test match in Cardiff and the Indian Premier League final, in tennis the French Open (come on Andy), in golf the European Tour's flagship event at Wentworth (Luke Donald aiming to become world No 1) and in vroom-vrooms there is the Monaco Grand Prix. For those who like wheels but not engines, cycling's Giro d'Italia finishes in Milan on Sunday.

Meanwhile, I'm off to Munich in the morning for the final two days of the rowing World Cup regatta, where all of Britain's crews progressed from today's heats, most of them winning them. I'm tipping at least eight golds on Sunday from what is promising to be Britain's most successful Olympic sport in 2012. Trouble is that with all the other sport that is on, will I be given any space to write about it?

The 12-year-old girl who beat me and then the world

2011-05-27T13:30:00.000+01:00

Last week, Claire Vigrass completed a career grand slam in the sport of real tennis, adding the world singles and doubles titles to the full house that she already holds in the British, French, US and Australian Opens. In terms of dominance, she is Britain's greatest sportswoman, albeit in a sport with a relatively small base.

I've taken an interest in the growth of Claire's career because seven years ago she and her sister gave me and my father an absolute spanking on the tennis court, beating us 6-0 in a doubles competition. She was 12 years old at the time.

I don't know if you are familiar with the noble sport of real tennis. It's the twisted mother of the version Andy Murray plays, only done indoors with sloping roofs that you can hit the ball along, jutting-out bits of wall that you can aim for a wicked ricochet off and netted windows into which you can win a point by striking the ball.

It's like tennis if imagined by MC Escher. One theory goes that the reason for its bizarreness is because Henry VIII was a keen player and every time he lost a point he just claimed that there was a new rule that meant he had actually won. Only Calvinball is more bonkers.

Anyway, I've been playing this sport for about 15 years (once breaking into the top 1,000 in the world rankings no less) and when eight years ago I entered a doubles tournament with my father, a pretty nifty lawn tennis player in his day, we had some confidence.

Up against us in the first round were a 12-year-old girl and her sister. Mentally, we started making plans for round 2. Bad mistake, they played us off court. I'm not sure we even won a point, let alone a game.

To cap it all, these schoolgirls did not even smile. Every perfect return, every pin-point volley or winning serve was met with the same grim expression. Even when they got a lucky break, the ball clipping the net and flopping over, they did not acknowledge their fortune with a grin. It was ruthless, bloody, win-at-all-costs determination. Now I think of it, I don't think they dropped a set all tournament.

A couple of years ago, I met Claire again while she was training at Lord's. She has become a beautiful, charming woman, but as the results at the world championships show, where she won the final 6-1, 6-4, she clearly still retains that killer determination.

I just hope she has learnt to smile while winning. What is the point of doing sport if you don't enjoy it? Or is that the view of a loser?

Peerless eccentric

2011-05-18T18:40:00.000+01:00

The Earl of Onslow died at the weekend, which is a great shame for fans of eccentric members of the aristocracy. Onslow was one of the 92 hereditary peers who were saved the axe that fell on members of the House of Lords in 1999, but he was in favour of an elected Upper Chamber, once saying that he yearned for a House of Lords

"in which there will be no more place for a descendent of someone who got pissed with Pitt the Younger than for a man who once adorned the Cabinet in the useless position of secretary of state for prices and consumer protection".

I agree with the Earl about not giving peerages to useless Cabinet members - see Lord Prescott - but I would far rather have as a legislator someone whose relative once got pissed with Pitt than an elected senator.

The great thing about hereditary peers in my view is that they do the job purely out of a sense of duty and because of the cheap wine on offer in the Palace of Westminster rather than out of any need to campaign for my vote by making promise they won't keep.

I'd have an Upper House made up only of hereditary peers and an assortment of appointed national treasures from politics, the arts and industry (Stanley Johnson, Michael Palin, Floella Benjamin and Paddy Ashdown, say. And perhaps the bloke who used to run M&S.) Leave elections out of it. Look what elections have done for the House of Commons.

Onslow, who was occasionally a popular guest on Have I Got News for You, delightfully always referred to himself as "a disloyal Conservative", which strikes me as the very best politician to be.

He also once hosted a Radio 3 series on a variety of music styles including rap, acid jazz and thrash metal, introducing it each week with "It's time to get tripping with me, Lord Onslow".

We need to be governed by more politicians like this.

Less height, more prestige

2011-05-18T18:21:00.000+01:00

Heard a lovely quip from an MCC member at Lord's last night about the England cricket captaincy being divided between Andrew Strauss (centre in this pic and Test captain), Alastair Cook (left and ODI captain) and Stuart Broad (right and Twenty20 captain).

"Does the height of the captain vary in inverse proportion to the importance of the job?"

"Don't say Christmas dinner... we're not the Daily Star"

2011-05-13T19:24:00.000+01:00

With the news that the Heffmeister is leaving the Daily Telegraph, will this mean a slackening of standards? Simon Heffer's style notes are required reading for anyone who, like me, gets a bit cross at poor grammar and dodgy spelling.

As a tribute, the Guardian has linked to Heffer's huffiest email to Telegraph staffers. Some of his comments are delicious, including...

There have been so many literals this week that I suspect some of you either never could spell, or have given up trying. Perhaps my favourite was "hocky mom", followed by "plumb compote" (bring on the lead poisoning). While it is good to provide the customers with amusement, it should be intentional.

The style book also reminds us that our readers tend to eat Christmas lunch, not Christmas dinner; this is not the Daily Star. Unless we are referring to a repast that is specifically to be held in the evening, be careful to refer to Christmas lunch in all those mouth-watering articles you are preparing about festive food.

Somebody actually allowed a piece of copy through this week with the adjective "posh" in it (it was not a reference to Mrs Beckham, and nor was it being used satirically). It was lucky this was spotted and removed before a nasty accident occurred. I repeat: we are not the Daily Star.

If we are setting quizzes for our readers, do try to ensure the right answers really are right. A test for would-be immigrants managed to get the voltage figure for this country wrong. It also said that one had to be 16 to enter the lottery which, as several readers pointed out, appeared to be hard on those aged 17 or more. The answer "16 or over" would have been better.

Is Osama bin Laden your neighbour?

2011-05-06T13:59:00.001+01:00

As a former property journalist, I'm still on some PRs' mailing lists. Got the following from an estate agent (realtor, sorry) in New York that seems to have a slight sense of proportion failure...

"With the OSAMA BIN LADEN termination, we can celebrate the end of an era where hopefully his death marks some closure for those affected by his monstrous actions, which may indeed be all of us. The cost of this monster’s activities have to be in the Trillions in our estimations. We are somewhat amazed that his neighbors had no idea of who they were living next to, although living in Manhattan this is not an entirely new concept."

They then link to their blog, which has the post titled "Is a Osama Bin Laden your neighbour?" and the following commentary. I particularly like the "on the up side, Bin Laden created lots of jobs in the airline security industry" line.

"He was found in a heavily guarded, large compound in a suburban neighborhood in Pakistan, Abbottabad. Is it just me, or isn’t the world standing in utter disbelief that not ONE of his neighbors knew who lived next door? And if they knew, did they decide to remain silent?

"Are we here in the USA as gullible? Haven’t we heard enough stories about when a mass murderer is caught neighbors interviewed admit to being completely clueless? Do we not want to know who our neighbors are? Does nobody watch ‘Desperate Housewives’?

"So, dear real estate dwellers, I am asking you PLEASE to get to know who your neighbors are. If you see lots of armed guards, this could be a sign of something odd…. try to find out sooner rather than later. As it turns out, sometimes your neighbors can be very, very bad people responsible for the death of thousands.

"While the Abbottabad neighbors may have protected the identity of Osama because he killed a few thousand Americans, maybe they had forgotten how this single indiviual is also responsible for the deaths of HUNDREDS of thousands of Muslims, and how single handedly he was the worst possible public relations for Muslims around the world causing HUNDREDS of millions of innocents needless pain.

"And if none of this is motivating enough, think about the cost of Osama bin Laden to New York City real estate…..the security sign in desks, the airport check-ins, the additional policing, etc, etc. If anything, he helped create thousands of jobs, but the cost to all, especially those who lost their lives, is imeasurable.

"SO PLEASE EVERYBODY AROUND THE WORLD, AND IN NEW YORK CITY ESPECIALLY: find out who your neighbors are, be friendly, be kind, but if there is any suspicion that they may be people causing our society harm, let us know….pretty please?"

Christ. I'm not sure I need to add anything else...

Three in one: Latin, history and cricket

2011-05-06T13:26:00.002+01:00

Imperator Anglorum est omnis divisus in partes tres, as Julius Caesar might have written if he was a modern day cricket writer. And I'd like to think that is the path he would have taken, not least because English Twenty20 cricket is sponsored by a drinks manufacturer called Rubicon.

Caesar knew a bit about three men doing one job, which is the situation facing the England cricket captaincy after yesterday's announcement. In 59BC, Caesar, Pompey and Crassus formed a triumvirate or three-man alliance to organise Rome's domestic cricket tournament. The Romans were mad keen on cricket, as this photo of a set of stumps proves.

Pompey was six years older than Caesar, had several notable successes behind him and was undeniably posh. Andrew Strauss, the Test captain in cricket's new triumvirate, is Pompey.

Caesar was also posh but tried to hide it (by going to darts contests at Ally Pally, probably). He had promise but his best victories were ahead of him. He is Alastair Cook.

Which makes Stuart Broad, who will lead the T20 side, our version of Crassus, who was in Caesar's triumvirate because he controlled the money, which sort of sums up Twenty20.

The Roman triumvirate didn't end well. Crassus was bumped off early after a super-over decider against the Parthians and Caesar and Pompey had a massive barney, resulting in both of them losing the confidence of the selectors. Octavian took home the ashes.

It might all be happier for the triumvirate running English cricket. Broad and Cook don't seem to be over-run by a desperate need to topple Strauss and Andy Flower, the England team director, said yesterday that he hoped everyone could be mature about it. It may work.

What is certain is that while Cook takes on the one-day side with a modicum of leadership experience behind him as captain of England Under-19, MCC and the England senior side when Strauss skipped the tour to Bangladesh last year, Broad has been given the reins with no captaincy experience to his name. That does not mean that he will fail - and I wish him well - but he has never had to think about running a side in this way.

As I write in The Times today, Broad may not even have captained a school team. I spoke to Frank Hayes, the former Lancashire and England batsman who is master in charge of cricket at Oakham School, and he could not recall any match. “He may have done in his early years, but not the first XI,” Hayes said.

Paul Cook, a batsman who has played a bit of second XI cricket for Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire and now captains Lincolnshire, was made captain instead. Hayes told me that Cook was simply the more natural leader, although Broad "was always destined to play at a higher level".

Broad was a footsoldier when Oakham played Bedford School in 2003. A young Alastair Cook made a double hundred for Bedford that day, but he had already been marked as a Future England Captain.

Broad had not, but maybe that is something to do with the bias that selectors tend to have in favour of batsmen rather than fast bowlers when picking a captain. Broad will be only the second fast bowler, after Andrew Flintoff, to captain England since Bob Willis in 1984.

That does not mean that the experiment will not work. “Stuart knows the game backwards," Hayes told me. "He’s been a thinking man’s cricketer since about the age of 12. He is a good leader and he loves the game. He has a natural exuberance which is great for English cricket and in my view he is just the man for the job."

We shall see when England play Sri Lanka on June 25 and Broad becomes the 85th England captain whether that hunch pays off.

Bin Laden, twittered

2011-05-03T15:10:00.001+01:00

A selection of random thoughts yesterday on the killing of a tall man with a beard, as bashed out on my Twitter account.

* Well that's not a bad way for Barack Obama to kick-start his re-election campaign. Hard to see the Republicans topping the Bin Laden op.

* I hope that in the unlikely event of Henry Cooper and Osama bin Laden being in the same place, Cooper is punching him repeatedly on the nose

* Now that Bin Laden has gone, does Piers Morgan, also guilty of doing awful things in New York, become the most disliked man in the world?

* Apparently Bin Laden compound didn't have a phone. Was he blowing Al Qaeda 's budget by voting too often on Strictly Come Dancing? A Widders fan?

* Apparently he was living 800 yards from Pakistan's equivalent of Sandhurst. Good work, guys. Thanks for handing him over

* Good news for Julian Assange, he moves up one place on the FBI's most wanted list.

* Unless she was 6ft 6in tall or wearing heels, I doubt that Mrs Bin Laden would have made much of a human shield.

* Disappointing how small and uncool Obama's Situation Room is compared to Jed Bartlet's. More like a broom cupboard.

The Wedding, twitted

2011-04-29T16:57:00.003+01:00

The problem with Twitter, especially on a big news day, is that sometimes you come up with a good gag or bon mot and it gets lost in the morass of other people's twitterings. So, for posterity or those who don't follow my Twitter, @patrick_kidd, here are the pick of my thoughts on the Royal Wedding in 140 characters.

* Less than two hours to go to the unveiling of the dress. My money is on it being white. Possibly with silly frilly bits.

* Very sensible to make Wills Duke of Cambridge. Oxford is a right dump, only fit for Earls

* Huw Edwards interviewing Rowan Williams. All we need is Neil Kinnock and Charlotte Church and there will be a quorum for an Eisteddfod

* John Major surprisingly wearing a pink shirt with his morning dress. Maybe a red sock got mixed in with the wash?

* Lots of people worried about time people have to wait in the Abbey without a toilet break, can't they just do what Jez did in Peep Show?

* "We want wills" the crowd outside Clarence House shout. Probably worried about dying intestate

* I see the police outriders have chosen to wear yellow. Clashes with the Queen's outfit a bit. They should have co-ordinated

* So how long do we give the Daily Mail before they replace the "God bless 'er" stories with "Is Kate anorexic?" columns?

* And they've arrived at the Abbey. Doors to manual and cross-check... Thank you for flying easyRoyal, first-class for the return journey

* Kate enters to "I was Glad" by Hubert Parry. Not, sadly, "I'm so Glad" by Cream. Less waa-waa guitar, more organ

* I *love* Walton's "Crown Imperial", which the couple are walking out to. Almost as good as the Imperial March from Star Wars

* In Britain you need a royal wedding to become a duke or count. In the US, you just have to be a great jazz musician

* CLASSY idea to have William drive Kate away from the Palace in a vintage Aston Martin. Very cool. Wonder if it comes with stinger missiles?

* Radio 4 reporter just said that Prince William will be letting his hair down later. To judge from the hereditary baldness it's too late

* So that's it for Wills and Kate. Everyone back together next year for Harry's wedding in Vegas?

* Still enormous crowds milling around outside Buckingham Palace. At what point is it polite to set the corgis on them?

Bureaucratese and gobbledygook

2011-04-26T18:39:00.000+01:00

A treat for those who hate PR-speak. The excellent Letters of Note blog reprints a fabulous memo from the former chairman of the US Civil Aeronautics Board, Alfred Kahn, in which he instructs his staff to avoid "the artificial and hyper-legal language that is sometimes known as bureaucratese or gobbledygook".

A few extracts follow but go and read the whole thing on Letters of Note. Apparently when Kahn's memo was published it attracted an offer of marriage and the suggestion that he should be given a Nobel prize. This should be compulsory reading...

"May I ask you, please, to try very hard to write Board orders and, even more so, drafts of letters for my signature, in straightforward, quasi-conversational, humane prose - as though you are communicating with real people. I once asked a young lawyer who wanted us to say "we deem it inappropriate" to try that kind of language out on his children - and if they did not drive him out of the room with their derisive laughter, to disown them.

"I suggest the test is a good one: try reading some of the language you use aloud, and ask yourself how your friends would be likely to react. (And then decide, on the basis of their reactions, whether you still want them as friends.)"

He then goes through his pet peeves, which include...

Every time you are tempted to use "herein," "hereinabove," "hereinunder," or similarly, "therein" and its corresponding variants, try "here" or "there" or "above" or "below" and see if it doesn't make just as much sense.

The passive voice is wildly overused in government writing. Typically, its purpose is to conceal information: one is less likely to be jailed if one says "he was hit by a stone," than "I hit him with a stone." The active voice is far more forthright, direct, and human.

This one is, I recognize, a matter of taste. But unless you feel strongly, would you please try to remember that "data" was for more than two thousand years and is still regarded by most literate people as plural (the singular is "datum"), and that (this one goes back even longer) the singular is "criterion," and "criteria" is plural. Also, that for at least from the 17th through most of the 20th century, "presently" meant "soon" or "immediately" and not "now."
Could you possibly try to make the introduction of letters somewhat less pompous than "this is in reference to your letter dated May 42, 1993, regarding (or concerning, or in regard to, or with reference to)...." That just doesn't sound as though it is coming from a human being.
Why use "regarding" or "concerning" or "with regard to," when the simple word "about" would do just as well? Unless you are trying to impress someone; but are you sure you want to impress anyone who would be impressed by such circumlocutions? There is a similar pompous tendency to use "prior to," when what you really mean is "before."

One of my pet peeves is the rampant misuse of "hopefully." That word is an adverb, and makes sense only as it modifies a verb, and means "with hope." It is possible to walk hopefully into a room, if one is going into the room with the hope of finding something (or not finding something) there. It is not intelligent to say "hopefully the criminal will make his identity known," because the meaning is not that he will do so with hope in his heart, and he is the subject of the verb "make."

Those who want more of the same should read Simon Heffer's Style Notes at the Telegraph

The post-Lent diet

2011-04-26T18:23:00.000+01:00

Gosh I haven't blogged in weeks. Sorry about that. Tempus fugit and all that.

Well Easter is over, the tombstone has been rolled back and they've discovered that Christ has done a bunk, which means that I have reached the end of my Lenten fast. Or rather a half-hearted attempt to lose weight that became more half-hearted as the 40 days passed.

The good news is that I lost half a stone. The bad news is that I was aiming for a whole stone. On the plus side, I didn't buy any cheese for the period of Lent, tried to avoid it at work and ate relatively little chocolate. On the minus side, I had two black-tie dinners and a couple of social occasions where I didn't really hold myself back.

I loathe myself for my weakness, but then I did manage to lose one pound a week through only minor changes to my lifestyle. Perhaps that should be a lesson for the rest of the year: small improvements bring gradual rewards. If I carry on losing one pound a week, I can lose more than two stones by Christmas. Perhaps it might be time to do a bit more exercise...

Please release me

2011-04-06T16:35:00.000+01:00

As someone who once wrote copy to promote the Tory Party at the 2001 election (that worked out well), I sympathise with people who work in PR.

No matter how duff the idea, it will be someone's job to try and interest journalists in writing about it. Some are really quite silly, though, such as this press release I received from a vacuum cleaner company:

"Jogging on a hard surface in flat shoes, with no impact absorption, is neither pleasant nor smooth, making the run uncomfortable and clumsy. This insight is what gave the AEG development team an idea for its new and improved UltraOne vacuum cleaner. To create a vacuum that moves smoothly and produces little-to-no sound, its previous small, hard wheels were replaced with larger sports shoe-like wheels that absorb impact."

Thanks for the insight. How much jogging in flat shoes did you have to do to realise that it was hurting? Anyway, many congratulations, you've invented the tyre.

The art of being a good PR is to find a tenuous angle on which to peg your product. Hence this next email that arrived from Santa Cruz, California:

"SAVE THE FROGS DAY EVENTS PLANNED WORLDWIDE APRIL 29TH"

And what is also happening on that day that merits so many capital letters? Well, let the first line of the press release guide you:

"Was Prince William a frog in a past life?"

Clever, clever. The royal wedding is the perfect peg for a piece on saving frogs, who as we all know are just princes waiting to be kissed. Well done Santa Cruz, although given the royal family's background surely Prince Williams is more likely to have been a kraut in a former life?

Still, they got me to write about their campaigns so maybe these PRs do know a thing or two about grabbing the attention.

Occupational hazards

2011-04-02T11:01:00.000+01:00

It's the Vole's ambition always to be a week late in discussing the news, so: the Census. How was it for you?

I refused to answer some of the questions this year. I don't think it is any business of the State to ask me what my state of health is at the moment (how do they know someone isn't just being a hypochondirac or a stoic?) and I fail to see the relevance of the question asking to describe what you do in your job, so I left them blank.

One of my colleagues decided it was best to be honest and put the answer: "Wasting time surfing the internet and bitching about my workmates."

Another, a sub-editor, suggested: "Making people better paid than me look as if they can write."

A letter appeared in The Times on Thursday from someone who had been a Census enumerator in 1981 that revealed a wonderfully eccentric and existential answer. Someone had given their occupation as "sculptor of stone lions" and then, when asked to describe his work, wrote: "I chip away all the bits of stone that are not lion."

We regret the error

2011-03-30T11:43:00.000+01:00

Occasionally, just occasionally, journalists get their facts wrong. Yes, even me. And sometimes that means that newspapers have to print an apology. There's a whole website dedicated to spotting such things.

However, there is getting something wrong and then there is really boobing, as this apology in The Sun reveals:

"In an article published on The Sun website on January 27 under the headline 'Gollum joker killed in live rail horror’ we incorrectly stated that Julian Brooker, 23, of Brighton, was blown 15ft into the air after accidentally touching a live railway line.

"His parents have asked us to make clear he was not turned into a fireball, was not obsessed with the number 23 and didn’t go drinking on that date every month.

"Julian’s mother did not say, during or after the inquest, her son often got on all fours creeping around their house pretending to be Gollum."

Apart from that, the paper got everything spot on.
(yes, I know the cutting is six years old, but I got sent the link today - first with the news, as ever - and thought it worth sharing).

Jolly fine boating weather

2011-03-26T13:23:00.000Z

Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, speaks exclusively to the Vole's imagination about today's Boat Race

"This afternoon, our glorious capital on the banks of Old Father Thames will stage one of England's great sporting occasions, an event as ancient and venerable as the river itself, in which the men in dark blue give a damn good thrashing to a bunch of wastrels.

"I'm talking of course about the noble battle between police and protestors.

"I am delighted that in this modern age with so many other possible distractions, like getting your mistress pregnant or upsetting people from Liverpool, people still have a yearning to steal policemen's helmets on Boat Race day.

"In my time, you did it after the race, of course, and were taken straight to jail without passing Go or collecting £200 where you spent a night in chokey before being given a slap on the wrist and a £5 fine.

"Students today are less patient and want to get their protesting out of the way early before they head down to Putney to watch the Boat Race.

"As Mayor of this fine city I am, naturally, neutral. I don't care who wins as long as it isn't Cambridge. I have often wondered, though, why the Marines have yet to win the Boat Race. I know they give the students a head start, but they have an outboard motor for heaven's sake.

"It is good to see an Old Etonian in this year's Oxford crew even if his name - what was it again? Lulu or something? - suggests that he does not come from pure English stock. Not like us De Pfeffels.

"I was a dry bob when I was at the alma mater. Couldn't stomach those early mornings and the obligatory boater played havoc with my hair.

"I did know a few chaps who messed about in boats, though. Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps won the Silly Bugger award at Christ Church after flipping the college ninth VIII by trying to tap a swan on the shoulder with his blade, while Bingo Little is always catching crabs, he tells me, when he goes out punting with the daughter of the Balliol boatman.

"When I mentioned this to Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York, he quipped that it brought a new meaning to my customary greeting of 'what ho!'

"The morning after the Boat Race is always a bit of a stinker for the rowers, I am told. The pounding head, the aching arms, the nagging feeling that you forgot to check whether the cox had bobbed back to the surface after you threw him into the billowing w.

"My advice is to take a glass or two of Mulliner's Buck-u-Uppo, order a hearty round of eggs and b. and sing lustily of the thrashing you have just given the Tabs.

"Unless by some fluke or act of dastardly cheating the Tabs have won (I have long suspected that they take a short cut round the back of the Harrods depository), in which case yah-boo-sucks to them. No one likes a show-off."

Diet update, two pounds lighter

2011-03-17T18:30:00.000Z

For those who were wondering, my Lenten fast is going reasonably well. I turned down the customary lunchtime pints when I went to the pub with my colleague Nigel last week and I have tried to avoid mid-afternoon snacks at my desk.

I did have a few glasses of wine while out with friends last night but it was counteracted by an hour and a quarter of tennis the day before as the scales, which only lie when they give bad news, show that I have shed two pounds.

Only another three stone or so to go...

Country life

2011-03-14T18:19:00.000Z

There's not really much more comment that I can make on this article that the headline doesn't cover:

Pervert caught pleasuring himself in slurry for the third time

Those long winter evenings in Cornwall must really drag.

Strangely, in the long list of complaints against this disturbed individual, masturbating in the muck spreader is mentioned first before they move on to tamer pursuits such as setting fire to outbuildings and killing livestock.

We're all doomed

2011-03-14T13:10:00.000Z

I was interested to read in today's paper that while the International Atomic Energy Agency has declared a state of emergency at the Fukushima nuclear power station in Japan, it is in fact "the lowest on its sliding scale" of warnings. Not that you would know it from some of the headlines...

Here for those without an IAEA handbook are the other marks on their apocalypse scale:

State of emergency
Oh-oh
Cancel that dinner reservation
Holy crap
Lucky I wore brown trousers
Run like the wind
**** *****ing ****ety **** ****
Boom

Rugby shows its maturity

2011-03-13T13:23:00.001Z

Halfway through the second half of the rugby match in Cardiff yesterday, Wales were fortunate that an illegal try they had scored was allowed to stand.

Ireland had kicked the ball out of play, it bounced into the crowd and Wales, seizing another ball from a ball boy, threw it in quickly before a lineout had formed and Mike Phillips charged down the left flank to score. According to the rules, the try should not have counted: you can only take a quick throw-in with the ball that was kicked out. The assistant referee, who was asked by the referee if it was the same ball, boobed.

It was a mistake, a bad mistake and one that possibly cost Ireland the match. Consider, then, the sensible and balanced reaction afterwards of the Ireland coach, Declan Kidney:

"We lost by six points, it was a seven-point decision, but look at what's happened in Japan. That's life isn't it."

Compare that with the hysteria, the sense of injustice and, above all, the anger of football managers when a decision goes against their side.

If Alex Ferguson or Arsene Wenger had been in Kidney's position, they would have gone ballistic, questioning the referee's parentage, competence and eyesight and probably refusing to speak to the media if anyone dared to suggest that the result was in any way caused by the failings of their players or the coach's strategy rather than a gaffe by a man with a whistle.

The Wales coach, Warren Gatland, in his turn acknowledged that his side had been lucky, a touch of graciousness that you never hear in football.

That's not to say that Ireland have taken the decision on the chin. Brian O'Driscoll, the captain, and other players have said that the try cost them and that the referee should be embarrassed by the mistake - although O'Driscoll tempered his comments by saying "everyone's human and mistakes happen all the time" - but by the time they get together tomorrow to prepare for the next match, it will be forgotten.

After all, Ireland really lost the match because they failed to score the points that their possession in Wales's half demanded, because Jonathan Sexton missed a kick in front of the posts immediately after Phillips's try and because Paddy Wallace cut inside rather than making what would have been a certain scoring pass outside him in the last minute. Those errors will be what they concentrate on, not the referee's howler.

It's why I like rugby more than football. The players and fans have passion but they also have respect. A rugby referee may be taunted during the match, but when the final whistle goes all grievances are forgotten. Everyone makes errors and players make more of them than officials.

The spirit of the game is more important than the result. It is a shame football has forgotten that.

40 days in the slenderness

2011-03-09T16:55:00.000Z

To church this morning for the daubing of the ashes on the forehead and the start of my annual month and a half of attempted self-improvement and inevitable self-loathing.

Each year, I try to lose weight during Lent by cutting out all those things that are yummy: cheese, curry, beer, Belgian chocolate-coated toffee popcorn from M&S and so on. Normally I last three weeks before, chuffed at losing a couple of pounds, I go on a chocolate bender and put it all back on. Not this year.

I now have more incentive really to make an effort to lose weight and keep it off, not least a four-month-old daughter and a rather snazzy new purple velvet jacket that I bought on a whim but cannot do up. I also went for a medical check-up recently and while my cholesterol level is astoundingly low for someone with the fat content of a pork scratching, I have nudged up to the 19 stone barrier and this clearly has to stop.

I don't like being a fatty. It makes me depressed a lot of the time (a feeling that I soothe by eating, unhelpfully) and I often wonder whether I'd be treated with more professional respect if I were slimmer. People tend to like chubbies but they rarely take them seriously. You are seen as ill-disciplined and slovenly, although I in return don't trust anyone with a micro-waist. They are clearly freaks.

I don't believe Kate Moss when she says that nothing tastes as good as being thin feels. She has clearly never tried Cornish Cruncher with balsamic pickled onions or the Duchy Originals chocolate-coated orange peel. But she has a point. Being thinner would make me more happy.

So, to try and find some discipline where none has previously existed, I intend to open myself up to ridicule and maybe encouragement by posting my diet efforts publicly on this blog. I started this morning at exactly 19st (just over 120kg) and hope by losing 2lb a week to shed a stone by Easter. I'll update readers here every weekend, hopefully without getting too boring about it.

All your support, abuse or tips very welcome.

Telling porkies

2011-03-08T12:32:00.000Z

I like a bad joke as much as the next person but there is a time and a place for them and perhaps a sombre Commons statement on the crisis in Libya is not the right occasion in which to crack a feeble and mildly offensive gag about sausages.

John Baron, the Conservative MP for Basildon and Billericay, rose in Parliament yesterday to ask William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, whether he thought it was ironic that we should send "a British warship [the HMS Cumberland] named after a pork sausage to rescue Brits from a Muslim country"?

Hague replied, witheringly, that "it was important to send the nearest royal naval ship available, irrespective of its name" and that the HMS York had also been there. "I hope he has no difficulty with that," Hague added.

Baron, not to be confused with the actor who played CJ in the original Reggie Perrin, is right that the HMS Cumberland has the nickname "the fighting sausage", although it was of course named after the English county and is the eleventh ship to carry the name, the first being in 1695.

If Baron was hoping to grab the news with his feeble gag then it has worked, on this blog at least, but is it really what he went into politics to achieve?

Never dull when following England

2011-03-03T15:13:00.000Z

Good old England, singlehandedly keeping the World Cup interesting. First by almost losing to the Dutch, then by almost beating then almost losing then tying with India and then last night by failing to defend 327 against Ireland.

The bad news for South Africa fans is that England very rarely have two bad games in a row these days. I fully expect England to beat the Proteas in Madras on Sunday, then lose to Bangladesh in Chittagong and then beat West Indies, which will probably just squeak them into the quarter-finals.

England's bowling looks terrible, though. All credit to Kevin O'Brien, Ireland's hero last night who made the fastest century ever recorded in a World Cup match, but if you're going to bowl long-hops down the leg side, you are going to get tonked.

Well done Ireland, though. Having agonisingly failed to close out a win over Bangladesh last Friday, they have restored the reputation of the associate nations. If they beat the Dutch and one other side, perhaps West Indies, they could reach the quarter-finals.

The match on Sunday against India was an emotions-shredding rollercoaster. Surely 339 would be too many to chase (until Ireland's exploits yesterday it was 26 more than anyone had ever made batting second at the World Cup) but Strauss and Bell got England going with a stand of 170.

At this point, a few hundred Indians got up to leave. Never understood the point of that. I know that no one wants to see their team blow it but games against England are never over until the final ball. As Zaheer Khan dismissed Strauss and Bell with consecutive balls, the smug expressions on the faces of the English journalists in Bangalore swapped places with the dejected countenances of the Indians.

But in three glorious swipes the match was turned again. Six for Bresnan, six for Swann and then, off the first ball he faced, six for Shahzad. Match tied, honours even, no one wholly satisfied.

That was Sunday and it kept me fairly busy with an 800-word match report, a 400-word quotes piece, 400 words on England's bowlers and three panels of stats. It was 2.30am in Bangalore before I got to bed.

Two hours later the phone rang. Steven Davies is gay, can you write 700 words? Oh well, who needs sleep? Anyway, I had to be up at 6.30am to fly home. When I left, England were still in the World Cup. Blame others if they don't win from here.

Sightseeing in Bangalore

2011-02-26T10:52:00.001Z

It is rare that I get to see much of the places I visit when abroad with work. Normally it is just hotel, airport, stadium and whatever tarmac lies in between. But I had a spare morning yesterday and asked a taxi driver to take me on a spin of leafy Bangalore, a city that I like very much.

We saw the crimson-brick law courts, the excessively grand state parliament (and the even grander new one being built next door), the park and the Bangalore Palace, a rather splendid and very British-looking stately pile started by a schoolmaster in the 1860s and completed 80 years later.

It was intended to resemble Windsor Castle, with turrets, battlements and ivy growing up the walls, and from the 1880s was the home of the Maharajahs of Mysore. There was only time for a brief wander, but the palace was being prepared for a large party tonight thrown by Vijay Mallya, owner of the Bangalore Royal Challengers and Mr Kingfisher beer. Clearly my invite went missing in the post.

Then it was on to what the driver called "the white palace", an evening retreat for the maharajah and now a retail mall. Clearly this was the scam bit of the tour - indeed, my driver quite merrily admitted that he got paid a commission for bringing tourists there, flashing a watch that he had received for customers rendered - but I enjoyed a wander round, looking at cashmere scarves, marble chess sets and saris.

When I walked into the area of the palace where carpets are sold, I was approached by a very nice shopkeeper who had a similar look and manner of speaking to Sir Alec Guinness in his later years.

"You want to buy something," he said and I almost felt like replying "I want to buy something". Must be an old Jedi mind trick. The price label of $800 for a small, if gorgeous, carpet that measured about 4ft by 2ft shook me out from his spell.

We finished the trip on the Ulsoor Lake, a reservoir where for 100 rupees (about £1.40), I was able to go for a paddle on a pedalo round the wildlife sanctuary in the middle. It only took two minutes for me to realise how tough pedalling one of these things is. No wonder Flintoff needed a few pints before getting in one at the last World Cup.

Today, being a Saturday, the British journalists on daily papers decided to leave the press conference to the Sunday hacks. There is only so much you can listen to Andrew Strauss talking about how positive England feel. Instead, we went tiger hunting.

Well not quite hunting, but we took a drive out of the city and went to a safari reserve where we saw tigers, lions, bears and other wildlife. The tigers, particularly the white tigers with their cold blue eyes, were astounding to see up close, but the bears were not how I imagined they would be. None of them were picking pawpaws or prickly pears, for a start.

Driving in India still remains a mystery for me, a combination of aggression and impatience with every spare piece of tarmac an opportunity to gain two inches. "They don't follow the rules of the road," my taxi driver said yesterday, but it wasn't a criticism. "I don't follow the rules of the road either, otherwise it would take much longer."

Today's taxi driver had his own views on driving in India. "You need three things," he said. "Good brakes, a good horn and good luck." So far, we have survived.

Almost like being there

2011-02-24T10:29:00.001Z

It is a sad fact of modern journalism that sometimes we report from events that we have not been present at. Television and the internet make it so much easier to get details these days, while the expense of sending too many people to cover an event means that often I am asked to bail out those who are there.

I promise I am really in India at the moment - I have the slightly turbulent stomach to prove it - but have sometimes covered matches off the TV. Sometimes you see far more than you would in person.

On at least two occasions, I have reported on the final day of the US Masters golf from my living room (actually, one year was done from the bedroom when my wife banished me because she wanted to watch Damages). Augusta National only gives out two accreditations per paper and far grander people than me nab those, but the work still needs to be done.

This is no new practice, as I learnt from reading Inside the Box, Peter Baxter's autobiography of life as producer of Test Match Special. Baxter relates a tale of Alan McGilvray, the Australian who was a TMS summariser for many years, being part of a "synthetic coverage" of the 1938 Ashes in England.

Because telecom lines back from the other side of the world were unreliable, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation decided to have a team of commentators based in Sydney with a large photo of each venue and a series of cryptic cables back from their man at Lord's or Trent Bridge. From that, they would concoct a ball-by-ball commentary for Australian audiences within a couple of minutes of it happening.

The sound of bat on ball was provided, McGilvray said, by a sound-affects man hitting a lump of wood with a pencil. By the time of the next Ashes, communications were better and the remote commentary team were disbanded.

Police give crowd a damn good thrashing

2011-02-24T10:00:00.001Z

In the past week of my World Cup journey we've had congestion, a car crash, pollution and now police brutality. Really, India isn't so different to back home.

The M Chinnaswamy Stadium, where England will play India on Sunday, was the venue today for a remake of the Gourmet Night episode of Fawlty Towers, with the Bangalore police playing the role of Basil and the thousands of spectators who had been unable to get tickets receiving "a damn good thrashing".

Their crime was to be miffed that the 7,000 tickets that went on public sale at 8.30am this morning had all gone within two and a half hours. Believing that more would soon be released, they loitered by the ticket windows, at which point in came the boys in beige wielding their lathi bamboo truncheons and spanked them until they moved on.

"It's not fair," one devastated Indian told me, possibly. "I was really looking forward to seeing Mike Yardy bowl his little darts." Another said that he had queued through the night in the hope of getting a ticket to watch Jonathan Trott scratch around for an ugly fifty.

A third person, this one from Ashford in Kent, was protesting about the British Government increasing tuition fees. With the last three thousand pounds of his trust fund, he had taken a gap year and made his way to southern India to make his point. "I didn't expect to get beaten up here as well," he sniffed.

The British police would do well to watch a video of their Indian counterparts in action and learn how to really bludgeon a protestor. None of your straight back and forwards approach here, it is all wristy dabs and swishes, finding the gaps between shirt tails and trouser waistband.

"We train really hard for days like this," a policeman told me while administering six of the best to the neck of a tobacconist. "You don't just rock up to the ground and expect to find your form. Some of us have been beating up taxi drivers in our spare time just to keep our eye in."

Another copper said with pride that he was planning to be in Mumbai for the final on April 2 and would be available for a bit of freelance violence if the local police needed him. "I don't mind whacking some new faces," he said. "It's good to have a change of scenery."

Going Dutch

2011-02-22T08:12:00.000Z

Just under an hour from the start of England's first match with the Netherlands in the cricket World Cup here in Nagpur and the omens are not good. For a start, we have just had the first - and I suspect not the last - power cut of the day.

Furthermore, if the scenario that the local scoreboard operators have chosen for their equipment check is right, England are about to make a disastrous start to the tournament. The scoreboard opposite has the Netherlands six without loss, chasing a target of only 52 to win.

I had a surreal experience last night as I sat in a bar between Mike Atherton and Ravi Shastri as they debated, calmly in Athers' case, loudly in Shastri's, how much of a softy Sourav Ganguly is. The Prince of Kolkata has a way of carrying himself that manages to rub his team-mates up the wrong way.

Shastri related an argument he once had with Ganguly, who he felt was unwilling to train as hard as the others. "You should listen to me," Shastri said. "You may be captain of India, but I opened the batting for India."

Speaking of captains, I was surprised to see that Times Now, an Indian TV channel, in an advert introducing its commentators billed Mike Gatting as "England's greatest captain". OK, so he won the Ashes in 1986-87, but they were the only two Tests he won in 23 matches in charge. Surely a Strauss, Vaughan, Hutton, Illingworth or Brearley would have greater claim on the title.

The man from The Sun provided the answer. "It's an Indian channel," he said. "They're still delighted that Gatt stood up to the Pakistanis over the Shakoor Rana affair."

One bleeping thing after another

2011-02-22T06:39:00.000Z

This post will contain rude language, for which I apologise, but it is impossible not to use naughty words when quoting Alan Bennett. Somehow, the British National Treasure makes even the coarsest profanity sound charming.

I was sitting in my hotel room here in Nagpur, where England start their cricket World Cup journey today (in Nagpur, that is, not in my hotel room where there isn't room to spread the field), and flicking through the 100 channels on my TV discovered that Bennett's The History Boys was on.

The film had not been dubbed but for Indian audiences who might struggle with the Yorkshire accents there were subtitles in English. And I discovered that the subtitles did not always match what was being said. There was a bit of censorship going on, but only for those who could read English but not hear it.

So, "pissed off", though spoken aloud, was changed in the subtitles to "annoyed". "Tits" became "bosoms", "shit" became "crap", "wank" became "self stimulation" and, I particularly admired this, "how's your sex life" became "how is the physical aspect of things".

The F word was definitely a no-no and that was omitted altogether from the subtitles, which rather spoilt the humour of Rudge's line: "history is one fucking thing after another".

Most bizarrely, though, was the decision of the censor to alter one of Francis de la Tour's lines. When Hector tells his fellow teacher that his groping of the schoolboys was "more by way of benediction than gratification", De la Tour says: "That is utter balls."

The subtitles censor changed her line to "That is utter bollocks".

In it to win it

2011-02-18T10:03:00.000Z

Negativity is a British disease, although some prefer to call it realism. There's the joke about the difference between an optimist and a pessimist in Britain: a pessimist thinks that things can't get any worse and an optimist thinks that they can.

I was rebuked twice yesterday for being negative. At the captains' press conference before the start of the cricket World Cup here in Dhaka, I was sitting next to a Bangladeshi journalist who told me that his country will win the World Cup "or at the very least make the final".

I was too polite to scoff at his confidence, but even though they are playing at home and will have noisy support, it is hard to see the world No 8 side advancing that far. He then asked me what my expectations were for England and seemed shocked when I shrugged and said that we should make the quarter-finals and then would need some luck.

"How can you not believe that your country will win?" he asked. I replied that I had watched them before.

Later that day, as the £20 million opening ceremony, complete with fireworks, a thousand dancers, a giant tiger and Bryan Adams, no less, wound to an end, an Indian journalist asked me for a quote for his Kolkata newspaper.

"Oh, ah, very good, impressive, great fun, certainly much better than anything we could put on in England," I said. To which he again asked in surprise: "Why do you English always put your country down?"

He probably had a fair point, but I was at the opening ceremony for the 2009 World Twenty20 at Lord's. It featured a speech by the Duke of Kent and so much rain that the planned concert by Alesha Dixon was cancelled on health and safety grounds.

That said, that display may have revealed as much of what is at the heart of British culture - royalty, drizzle and petty bureaucracy - as fireworks, dancing and tigers does about Bangladesh.

Servant of the Civil Service

2011-02-16T16:48:00.000Z

I've been enjoying A View from the Foothills, the first set of political diaries of Chris Mullin, the slightly bookish and befuddled former MP for Sunderland South and extremely reluctant junior minister in the Blair Government. He does a nice line in observation of his colleagues and honest (and honourable) indiscretion and also reveals how depressingly accurate was the view painted of the Civil Service in Yes Minister.

Two entries from 2000 that I have just read reveal this. In one, he was asked to approve a letter from his department (Transport and Environment) to the Foreign Office but is met with a brick wall when he suggests adding a sentence.

"Oh that's not for you," blurted my Private Secretary. "So why are you asking for my approval if I'm not allowed to change anything?" Mullin replies.

The Private Secretary first tells the minister that he will pass the concern on - "I don't want my concern passed on. I want to amend the letter," Mullin says - then, after the minister is very reluctantly allowed to make his change, Mullin reports that he got a call a few hours later in the House of Commons and was told by the Private Secretary that he had discovered the Foreign Secretary had rejected that idea before so he had decided to remove the line after all.

"I hope you don't mind," the civil servant says, adding to stop Mullin's retort that he had been unable to get hold of the Minister, who had been in Parliament all afternoon.

The other anecdote reveals the stupid - and costly - consultation process of which the Civil Service is so proud. Having fought a fruitless battle earlier in the year against night flights over Heathrow, Mullin decides to reject the Civil Service suggestion that they pay to commission more research into the effect of aircraft noise on sleep.

"What's the point?" he asks. "Whatever the conclusions, you are still going to tell me that nothing can be done about night flights." He speculates that the disgruntled civil servants will just wait until he is moved on before putting it under the nose of a new minister.

By rejecting the consultation, Mullin saved £1.5 million of taxpayers' money. I wonder how much more was wasted - and still is wasted - by Government on research that proves nothing or, if it proves something undesirable, is never acted on?

Land of the Duty Free

2011-02-16T10:07:00.001Z

Bangladeshis don't travel light. Our flight to Dhaka from Dubai was delayed last night, mainly so that the returning passengers could finish emptying Duty Free. They trotted on to the plane clutching half a dozen plastic bags each, which they somehow stowed in the lockers, under the seats and, for all I knew, up their jumpers.

They could have been asked to put their Duty Free in the hold, but that was already bursting to the gills to judge by the volume of baggage that was put on to the carousel. I waited for an hour as more and more bags were added to the pile and was starting to worry that mine hadn't made it, but when it did arrive there was still half a planeload of passengers waiting for their luggage. Most of it seemed to be wrapped up in duvets tied together with string.

I'm out here for the cricket World Cup - "the cup that counts" as the local advertising campaign rather defensively describes it - and the streets have been decked with lights to mark the occasion. Apparently the Government have also taken all unsafe vehicles off the road and we drove past a graveyard of skeletal and burnt-out coaches on our way to Fatullah for England's warm-up match today.

I dread to think what congestion in Dhaka would have been like if they hadn't taken this measure. The taxi ride from the airport to the hotel last night, a ten-mile trip, took over an hour. London can be pretty clogged too, of course, but these roads were jammed five or six vehicles wide.

That doesn't mean that they were five-lane roads, though. Lane discipline is merely a nice idea here and the standard driving procedure is for short accelerations whenever the merest whiff of a gap emerges, followed by sharp breaking and a toot on the horn at whoever stopped your passage.

Nothing so far, however, has quite matched the Indian taxi driver I once had who drove up on to the pavement to get round one bit of gridlock.

It is all part of the impatient approach to life here and it is charming to a point. Our plane had barely landed and was still making its taxi when there was a stampede by the Bangladeshis on board to line up by the exits. Despite the pleas of the stewardesses to sit down, none of them did even though they must have known they would have an enormous wait come baggage reclaim.

There was a swarm of mosquitoes around the carousels and I have spent much of today scratching at bites. I never got round to getting a malaria vaccination but one local told me there is nothing to fear. "Our mosquitoes are very friendly," he said. "No malaria here."

Lucky 13?

2011-02-16T04:18:00.001Z

The England cricket team's selection policy for opening batsmen is similar to that used by successive British governments for picking transport ministers. Everyone gets a go in the end.

I'm in Dhaka for the start of the World Cup and this morning's big news is that Kevin Pietersen is being given a go as Andrew Strauss's opening partner in their warm-up match with Canada. I'm surprised that Pietersen hasn't been tried in the position before. His natural aggression would seem suited to the powerplay overs at the start of a match where there are more gaps in the field.

Assuming that he is retained for the first proper match of the tournament, against the Netherlands on Tuesday, Pietersen would be Strauss's thirteenth opening partner in one-day matches and they would be the 21st different first-wicket pair tried since the start of the last World Cup, which is remarkable inconsistency even for England.

The previous 12 to open with Strauss are Trescothick, Bell, Loye, Joyce, Vaughan, Wright, Bopara, Davies, Denly, Kieswetter, Trott and Prior.

Death row, Terminal 3

2011-02-14T21:06:00.000Z

There probably are more hellish places to be on a Monday night than Heathrow Terminal 3. Guantanamo Bay, I suppose. The less safe parts of Helmand. At a dinner party with Julian Assange. But not many.

I fly quite a bit for work, usually once a month, and I have spent a fair chunk of the past decade in airports. I don't like the places, from the petty security checks (that ridiculous belief that toothpaste becomes less explosive if placed in a clear plastic bag) to the mark-up that Starbucks charge on a tuna melt panini.

But the worse thing about airports is other people and nowhere quite brings you into contact with the great unwashed like T3. First you are forced to go through Duty Free after passport control and have to barge your way past people who can't go on holiday without stocking up on eight bottles of Smirnoff and a couple of hundred B&H.

Then you are squeezed through a tiny corridor into a barely bigger waiting room where you are packed in like turkeys on a Bernard Matthews farm. If you want to walk anywhere, you trip over bags and limbs.

You just about find a seat between two large ladies reading what I imagine they call "books" but seem to feature 100 pages of photos of Katie Price and Natalie Portman, and then you realise that you cannot read the status of your flight on the iPads that pass for departure boards and so you have to get up and barge past the masses again. At least most flights seem to be taking off. God knows how desperate conditions were here during the great snow-in last December.

Oh well, such is the glamorous life of a journalist. In about an hour, my flight is due to take off for Dhaka, Bangladesh, via Dubai, where I will be covering the cricket World Cup. The waiter in my local Indian tells me that Dhaka is an overcrowded city but surely compared with Heathrow Terminal 3 it will be like the Scottish Highlands.

Archaeology today

2011-02-09T20:04:00.000Z

I don't know why this story didn't get a wider airing when it broke nine days ago (maybe it just isn't true) but apparently Donna D'Errico, last seen running and bouncing along the Californian sand in Baywatch, has come over all Indiana Jones and announced that she is joining an expedition to climb Mount Ararat in Turkey in quest of Noah's Ark.

So serious is Ms D'Errico about her new career that she has even turned down a place in Dancing with the Stars to go hunting those long-lost cubits.

"This has been a dream of mine since I was 9 or 10," D'Errico told AOL News, which is surely kosher enough for this not to be some weird hoax. "I went to Catholic school and was fascinated by Noah's ark. I would do class projects based on the ark.

"I've been studying this for years and know where the sightings have been. According to my research, the ark lays broken into at least two, but most likely three, pieces. I believe that one of those pieces is in the uppermost Ahora Gorge area, an extremely dangerous area to climb and explore."

Archaeology was never this glamorous when I did it at university, but shouldn't she serve her apprenticeship by prodding muddy fields in Wiltshire with a trowel for a few years first?

Fruitloops have been seeking the ark for centuries, apparently unable to accept that after such a long time the wood might have just rotted. One question that no one seems to have answered, or even considered, is if the ark really did come to rest on top of a mountain, how did Noah get all the animals down the mountain safely?

Maybe he ripped up the ark to make skis for the elephants?

(Hat-tip to the Retronaut)

A question of rock

2011-02-07T19:54:00.000Z

A couple of months ago I posted the style diktat of Richard Dixon, the Times's chief revise editor, about the difference between rocks and stones. A rock is too big to be thrown by protestors, apparently. We should more correctly say that they throw stones. That's when they are not throwing fire extinguishers.

Protests are so prolific these days that Richard felt moved to circulate his memo again last week, reminding us that even in north Africa, a rock is something you build pyramids with, while a stone is what you throw. All understood.

But what about the difference between rock musicians and blues musicians? That was bothering me today when I read the obituaries of the much-missed guitarist Gary Moore. The BBC, Times, Independent, ABC and most other news outlets called him a rock legend. A few others, including RTE, said that the Belfast-born guitarist was a blues legend.

This is where I confess, to great embarrassment, that I never knew Moore was in Thin Lizzy, the Irish 1970s group who you would definitely call, on the evidence of The Boys Are Back in Town, a rock group. Although Whiskey in the Jar, one of their other hits, is a folk number.

Anyway, to me he had always been a pure out-and-out blues guitarist. One of the finest. And I had never thought of him as a rock guitarist.

On the way in to work this morning, I listened to his Blues Alive album. Other albums of the past 15 years had such titles as Blues for Greeny, Back to the Blues, Power of the Blues and Old New Ballads Blues.

It shouldn't matter that a bluesman was called a rock guitarist, but it jarred. A life defined in one word and it seemed to be the wrong one.

It got me thinking about what is the difference. As and when Eric Clapton breaks his last guitar string, will old Slowhand be called a rock guitarist or a blues legend by the obituarists? I rather think the latter. But what about Jack Bruce, his bandmate in Cream?

How do you categorise Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page or Keith Richards? All were very strongly influenced by the blues, but I suspect that unlike Clapton history will regard them as rockers. Where do the boundaries lie?

I know this is only semantics and that we should just celebrate Moore and his like as wonderfully inventive talents who cannot be pigeonholed, but it should matter. No one ever described Miles Davis as anything other than a jazz trumpeter when he died, for all the weird electronic, hip-hop, trippy stuff he did later in his career. So, I would like to think that we have lost a bluesman first and a rocker second.

A grand day out

2011-02-07T19:28:00.000Z

Here's Miliband Minor, the school captain, leading out little Dougie Alexander and the rest of the sixth-form history class on their field trip to Helmand.

I wonder why they are wearing their rucksacks on the wrong way round. Is it so that they can get to their sandwiches more easily?

The forgotten Waugh

2011-01-29T20:13:00.000Z

Michael Henderson, one of modern journalism's great curmudgeons, is at his irritable best in this week's Spectator, ranting at the illiterati who work in Waterstone's these days.

What first stirred his rage was an anonymous staff recommendation in the Piccadilly store for Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, which the reviewer had called "her most evocative novel".

"Exceptional ignorance," Hendo says and charges off to find a salesperson at whom he brandishes the transgendered card. "Doesn't that strike you as odd?" he asks. "There's a rather embarrassing mistake." The shop assistant looks blank and says that he has never read Brideshead.

"But you must have heard of Evelyn Waugh," Henderson continues. "He was a great writer and it is a he. You work in a bookshop. You should know such things."

Irritated, Hendo stomps round a selection of other London Waterstone's stores, collecting evidence that the staff who write their recommendations are idiots. He found lots of poor spelling, worse grammar and, in a woeful misunderstanding of the date of the Peloponnesian War, a volume of Thucydides that is described as "an overview and analysis of the early 20th century".

Henderson laments Waterstone's no longer employing people with degrees in English Literature. I suppose one advantage of the recession and the rocketing graduate unemployment is that he may soon find plenty of those again stacking shelves in bookshops.

Abu Derby

2011-01-29T16:00:00.001Z

I'm in Abu Dhabi for a few days to cover the first English club rugby match to be played outside England. London Wasps v Harlequins at the seven-star Emirates Palace, tomorrow night in front of half a dozen bored camels and a crowd of up to 5,000.

They're playing on a turf pitch that looks lush and immaculate, a far cry from the bog that these two London teams played on when they met at the Twickenham Stoop three weeks ago. Genuine Colombian grass, I was told by a photographer. I think he was talking about the pitch, maybe he was offering me something. He did have a funny squint.

Perhaps the Wasps management were on the Colombian stuff when they came up with the idea of moving the match out here. It's a bold venture to take a sport out of its natural habitat. Football hasn't yet had the courage to move a competitive fixture out of the UK, for all the talk a few years ago of a "39th game" being played in Singapore and such places.

You risk annoying your season ticket-holders for a start, although the NFL seemingly put fan loyalty behind money with little difficulty when they decided to stage an annual league match in London. And in American football you only get eight home games a season.

But tomorrow's match is only an LV Cup game, little more than a competition for development sides, shoved in between the Heineken Cup and the Six Nations. I wonder how many of the Wasps season ticket-holders who are griping would have bothered to go to Adams Park this weekend. Wasps say that 200 of them have made the flight at Lord knows what expense, while those who haven't travelled will get a refund.

I appear to be the only British reporter out here, although others may fly in for the game tonight. To justify the expense, the paper wanted 1,000 words on the venture yesterday, which is all well and good and, you know, sort of my job, but it did mean that I missed the chance to see Daniel Barenboim, the maestro pianist and conductor, performing with the Berliner Staatskapelle last night.

The Wasps fans, an uncultured bunch, were oblivious that Barenboim was playing in their hotel auditorium. They were more concerned with whether Serge Betsen would be playing rugby tomorrow.

Told earlier in the day that the concert (Mozart piano concerto, played by Barenboim, and Tchaikovsky's fifth symphony) was sold out, I did my usual trick when I have a big writing assignment and too much time in which to get it done: I titted around on the internet.

Eventually, with an hour and a half to go to the concert (but still three hours before my deadline), I went for a stroll in the hope that I might get inspiration and bumped into a woman selling a spare ticket.

£50, probably a snip for Barenboim. Certainly the cheapest thing that I could find to buy in the hotel, where even the buffet lunch cost more than that.

I was so tempted but I hadn't even started writing my piece. 1,000 words in an hour and a half is doable when you have done the research, but it would have been pushing it and I could have churned out bilge.

My colleague Simon Barnes, when asked what he does when he can't find the inspiration to write a great piece, likes to reply: "Simple, I write a bad one." Which is a nice line, but he can probably afford to write a bad piece more often than someone making their way like I am.

So conscience prevailed. I returned to my laptop and wrote a semi-decent 1,000 words. The subs didn't mess around with it, anyway, which is normally a good sign. But I was kicking myself.

And then blessed providence smiled on me. I discovered that Barenboim was doing a second concert, of Tchaikovsky's fourth, at 11am this morning for schoolchildren. My days of passing for 18 being long gone, I trotted down to the hotel prepared to nab a child from the swimming pool if it meant that I could get a ticket as their guardian. Although now I think about it, I could have got more than just a ticket for child-snatching.

No need for it, though. A kind teacher had a few spares and was happy to let me have one free of charge. I offered cash but she refused. The tickets had been given free to her school and she was glad that a seat wasn't going to waste. It was so nice in this country that seem so wealth-obsessed to see such generosity. The concert was good, too. But rather too many children.

Shades of Andy Gray

2011-01-26T13:34:00.001Z

Julian Assange must be kicking himself that he didn't break the news on WikiLeaks first that a middle-aged former footballer from Glasgow is a bit of a sexist. It fits into the same "does the Pope shit in the woods" camp as all those telegrams revealing that diplomats can be a bit bitchy about other countries.

I'm generalising, of course. Not all fiftysomething Glaswegian ex-sportsmen have unenlightened views on equality. Some are too pissed to say anything coherent.

What was so wrong about the Andy Gray/Richard Keys double act (now taking bookings for the touring production of Life on Mars on Ice) was not the patronising assumption that a woman who has passed all her refereeing exams and had already been a linesman in a men's Premier League match without crisis (Sunderland v Blackpool in December) might not know the offside rule.

It was the suggestion that the offside rule is difficult to understand. It may take up 200 words of the rule book, but the basic principle is pretty straightforward. There is no hidden mystery.

What is hard is applying the rule - ie, being able to look at three points of play at once (where two attackers are and where the last defender is in relation to them), which one might assume a multitasking woman could do more easily than a man - and having the courage to back your judgment, especially in the face of half a dozen snarling louts, plus the mob in the stands, who think you are blind.

Not to mention the idiots like Gray and Keys in the studio who then use super slow-motion to expose you. Why any man or woman would want to be in that position is beyond me.

Of course, Massey made these neanderthals look even more stupid by showing superb judgment and courage in deciding not to rule Liverpool's opening goal offside.

The Wolves supporters and players may have questioned her ability then, but TV supported her professionalism. It was not her knowledge of the rule, but her application of it that counted.

Anyway, the offside rule as it stands is stupid, in my opinion. Too often, a fine attacking move is stopped by a very marginal decision.

Even when the linesman is correct, the defence usually has more than enough time to respond to an attacking move that begins with an offside pass. I'd personally change the rule so that you are only offside if you are five yards or so in front of the last defender.

Then again, I'd also amend the rules of football to legalise hacking and tripping, which was one of the sticking points that led to the split from rugby in 1863.

The sooner defences are allowed to mow down attackers and get away with it, the sooner we lose the sight of players diving over imaginary boots to try and con the referees into giving them a free kick.

Spin doctor kept diary shocker

2011-01-23T23:06:00.000Z

Well would you believe it? The Mail on the Sunday has the scoop - and has dedicated almost 30 paragraphs to it - that Andy Coulson kept a diary while he was David Cameron's press secretary.

This story fits into the same "no shit" category as the "Football manager says his team can win on Saturday" stories that somehow get page-leads every day of the week.

Surely it would be a better story if Coulson, who stood down last week because of an investigation into "phone hacking" while he was a tabloid editor, had not kept one and had suddenly realised that his memory was a bit ropey.

Suppose Coulson had started in the job with all sorts of good intentions, like the rest of us on January 1, and just found that he never got round to it? This would be a far better story...

"Former journalist with access to lots of gossip forgets to write any of it down"

By Philippa Page

Andy Coulson was frantically ringing round all his contacts in the Conservative Party last night asking if anyone could remember what Nick said to Dave when they were trying to form a coalition.

The former Downing Street spin doctor is trawling through emails and blogs desperate to find some snippets of gossip that he can use to pad out his forthcoming memoirs after suddenly realising on resigning his post that he had forgotten to keep a diary.

"Bugger, bugger, bugger," Coulson told this paper when contacted. "I kept meaning to find a quiet evening to go back and update the blank pages but just never found the time. Before I knew it, I was three years behind and frankly I struggle to remember what happened last week.

"If I just make it all up, will anyone notice? Surely that's what Alastair Campbell did and he got a million quid for his diary."

He was also hoping that Eric Pickles had forgotten to delete the past three years of voicemails on his mobile phone. "Eric's always got good stories, he won't mind if I nick some of them," Coulson said.

Among the events of the past three years that Coulson wishes he had jotted down some thoughts on at the time is the entire general election campaign in 2010. "We won, didn't we?" he asked. "Oh no, hang on..."

When pressed on whether he could name any turning points in the campaign, he referred to the three party leaders appearing on "that TV programme where they stood behind lecterns and said they agreed with Nick ... was it called The Weakest Link?" and said that he was sure that someone called Mrs Duffy played an important role in making Gordon Brown look stupid.

"Was she the woman who put the cat in the bin?" he asked. "I'm sure Guido blogged something about her. I'll just rewrite what he said."

Asked to discuss the private conversations he had with David Cameron about policy, Coulson said: "Huskies. And Hoodies. I think we like both of them. And, er, there was something about inheritance tax. Oh I wish I'd bothered to write it down."

A substantial part of the book will detail the tempestuous relationship Coulson had with Steve Hilton, Cameron's strategist. At the moment the chapter reads: "Why Hilton is a cock: No 1...."

"I'll ask some of the research department boys how to pad that out," Coulson said.

Publishing sources said that if he could scrape together enough legally-defensible titbits to form a book, it would cause the same kind of controversy as diaries published by Dale Winton or Bungle from Rainbow.

Tea-bagging the Chancellor

2011-01-23T19:19:00.000Z

Labour's change of Shadow Chancellor last week led to a few smutty jokes about Ed Miliband losing the use of his Johnson and jiggling his Balls, but the best puerile comment came from an unexpected source.

Hallelujah for the Financial Times sub-editor, perhaps a frustated Carry On script-writer, who latched on to a comment by George Osborne about the tenacity of Ed Balls and puffed it as a pull-quote. According to the FT, "Osborne expects Balls to be down his throat 24 hours a day".

Well, no one can blame an old public school boy for hankering after a few pleasures, but surely he has an economy to sort out.

Speaking banal of the dead

2011-01-17T19:22:00.000Z

One of my bugbears about modern journalism is how editors feel the need to personalise stories about murdered women or children (but very rarely men) by using their first name in headlines. Even my own paper follows this convention, which to me always seems disrespectful to the dead and their families.

The tragic death of Joanna Yeates over Christmas has been covered with an array of headlines featuring "Joanna" or "Jo". I'm asuming she liked to be known as Jo, although suspect it would not have made any difference, Jo being a nice short word to puff in 72 point on the front page and flog some extra papers off a sensationalised claim.

Nothing, though, has been written about this desperately sad story that is more offensive than this drivel churned out by Liz Jones in the Daily Mail over the weekend.

Under the yucky headline "Is lovely Jo just becoming another thumbnail on the police website?", the banal Jones woman follows Yeates's final steps, primarily whingeing about irrelevancies and demonstrating her own hideous slavishness to consumerism.

Who cares that the food served in the last pub Yeates ate in is a bit crap or that they can't spell Laurent Perrier? Would it really have made her death more bearable if her last night out had been a bit more swanky, as Jones suggests? How on earth does this woman know what Yeates was feeling as she bought her pizza or neared her home?

Is it really a travesty that cars aren't slowing as they pass the place where the body was found, or that someone left flowers but didn't write on the card?

Worse of all is her dreadful conclusion, suggesting that the killer avoided the Clifton Suspension Bridge because he didn't want to pay the 50p toll and then giving us a very boring anecdote about how the traffic hooted at Jones because she didn't have enough change for the bridge herself.

Ghastly woman.

Every time I feel depressed that I am going nowhere in my career, I need to be grateful that I don't work for the Daily Mail and that I don't write such self-absorbed toss as Liz Jones.

And then I look at the sales figures for the Mail compared with The Times and feel depressed again.

Going round the clock

2011-01-17T17:10:00.001Z

In the unlikely event that you are reading Questing Vole as I type, you have only a few minutes to get over to this website and see something historic happening.

At just after 5.15pm today, the national debt in Great Britain will tick over to £1 trillion. It has been increasing at the rate of £7,000 every second and the interest paid on it last year amounted to more than £42 billion.

A rather sobering thought whenever we hear people moan about the odd million being trimmed off council spending here and there. How on earth do we get out of this mess?

Thought for the day

2011-01-17T11:25:00.000Z

I find Sunday morning church like watching cricket matches played in Australia: I like the experience but it is always on at the wrong time. Whenever I can stir myself, I have a good time. Mostly I prefer my bed more.

Disgraceful, but I do try to redeem myself with a once-a-month evensong. Last night, after a beautiful service at All Saints in Blackheath, I was buttonholed by the vicar who tried to persuade me to come along to a 10.30am one Sunday.

"Ah, um, but it clashes with the Archers omnibus," I stuttered, expecting to be sent straight to hell for preferring a radio soap opera to holy communion, but the priest's response was charming.

"Yes, but you can't get me on the iPlayer," he said.

A fellow congregant then suggested that I bring a small radio to listen to The Archers during the service. It's things like that which make me like the Church of England. It is religion for the masses, not the Masses.

Miliband talks tough on strike action, possibly

2011-01-16T22:43:00.000Z

Words of wisdom from Ross on Unenlightened Commentary:

"I don't want to be too harsh on Ed Miliband because I think we've got a lot in common. I'm never going to be Prime Minister either."

The Labour Party leader's appearance on the Andrew Marr show this morning reminded me of a story I was once told by Tom Graveney, the former England and Worcestershire batsman of the match in which he made his 100th first-class hundred. Graveney had got to 96 when the bowler, knowing of the landmark, sent down the gentlest of leg-side long-hops, expecting Graveney to smack it to the boundary.

But the batsman missed, so the bowler, being a sporting sort, sent another easier-to-hit ball down at Graveney and was duly the first to congratulate him when he reached his hundred.

Marr's interview tactic is similar, softer even than David Frost ("Good morning minister, and what did you have for breakfast?"), whom he replaced, and there are some who think that he goes easier on Labour politicians, although it could also be argued that the gentler they are treated, the more likely they might be to let their true feelings out.

Anyway, Miliband did get a soft run this morning and still came across as an over-earnest sixth former but he has hardly come up with any policy to be quizzed on in his four months in the job and bashing him for the policies of the last Government would just be dull.

What was interesting, though, were the strong terms in which he condemned the planned transport and public sector strikes due to coincide with the royal wedding on April 29.

They weren't weasel-words or prevarication, he said that he was "appalled" at the idea and that strikes were a sign of failure on the unions' part as much as on the employers'. I hope we'll see him walking with the police if there are any protests on wedding day.

Of course, having won the leadership only with union support, Miliband has to make it clear he is not under their thumb, but it is also true that Miliband can argue for the sort of change in the unions that David Cameron would find harder to achieve.

If Miliband is to take his party back towards the centre and reassure people that Labour is on their side (and I can't believe that most people agree with the militant unions), he has to take them on.

This needs to be about more than words. He should make it clear that he will not accept funding from unions that hold strikes nor invite them to social or political party occasions. The day that Ed Miliband tells Bob Crow to grow up and stop being such a selfish pillock would be the day when he becomes a credible alternative PM.

Badda-bing

2011-01-13T18:43:00.000Z

The idea that an Arizona nutjob was incited to plug a hole in his congresswoman because Sarah Palin produced a map with crosshairs on it is simplistic and ridiculous, but almost as ridiculous is the fact that both parties have now got their lisping dung-shovellers (also known as researchers) trawling the net to find further examples of excessive military messaging by political campaigns.

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Would you believe it, but the Democrats produced a map in 2004 showing the states that they were targeting in the general election and they used what looks like archery targets. So were they suggesting that their supporters take potshots at the Republican candidates there but only using bows and arrows? How quaint and how appropriate for a party that wants to rob from the rich to give to the poor.

A case could be made that Palin's target poster is more aggressive, more active than the Democrats. The crosshairs show the act of shooting from the point of view of the shooter; the bull's-eye shows it from the view of the shot. I say that both are irrelevant.

Look, Republicans like guns. That is not news. Sometimes they even shoot their friends in the face with one, as Dick Cheney did while out duck-hunting a few years ago (something for which, it was claimed last year, he has still not apologised). It's all harmless, they might say, and understandable that some will use military metaphors or symbols in their campaigning.

But generally almost all Republicans, especially, one trusts, those running for public office, do not advocate using firearms as the way to make a debating point. And their supporters do understand that if a crosshair is painted over a state it is not a call to arms.

Jared Loughner, who is registered as an independent voter in Arizona rather than a Republican and who did not vote in the November mid-terms, appears to have been a mentally unhinged, loner with a history of drug use and a hatred of society. Textbook dickhead, in other words.

But the fact that he shot a Democratic congresswoman does not make the Republicans accessories to his actions, no matter how supportive they are of the second amendment or how polemical their campaigning imagery. To recoin a phrase, Fox News and Rush Limbaugh do not kill people; dickheads kill people.

Similarly, it really is quite lame of the Republicans to try to defend themselves by digging up examples of the Democrats using military metaphors. Who cares? You almost feel that some Republicans want one of their own to be gunned down by a man in a Che Guevara T-shirt so they can prove that fruitloops come from the Left as well.

In their responses to the tragedy yesterday, Barack Obama and Sarah Palin showed why one of them is suited to national politics and why one is second-grade. The Palin 2012 campaign had its chance to make her look presidential and instead she appeared petty, while Obama, even if some found his tears insincere and his words too scripted, caught the right mood.

It is a time for sympathy, regret and being part of a community, not for playing the victim or shouting "we'll they're just as bad as us".

Charity drive for Queensland

2011-01-12T19:31:00.000Z

Normally at this stage of an England cricket tour, I would be writing a piece about how desperately boring it is that a thrilling series of Test matches should be followed by one unmemorable one-day match after another, but some good may yet come from the two Twenty20 matches and seven 50-over games.

England's players have agreed to donate part of their match fees from this morning's match to the Queensland flood relief and after the game players from both sides went into the crowd to press the flesh and pass the donations bucket. With 40,000 spectators, it is hoped that a fair bit was raised.

Charity is to continue. Kevin Pietersen has said he will auction his Ashes shirt and bat for the flood relief effort, while Shane Warne and Darren Gough are arranging a match between "legends" to raise more money. New South Wales cricket team has agreed to donate the gate receipts from their match with Queensland the day before England play Australia in Brisbane on January 29.

It is easy to forget that natural disasters hurt developed countries just as much as third world countries. People rightly give money when there are floods in Bangladesh or hurricanes in the Caribbean, but the disruption to life and the cost of remedying it in Queensland after these floods - which have covered an area the size of France and Germany - is just as great, probably greater. Those who have a quality of life miss it more when it is taken away.

It is heartwarming that in the aftermath of the Ashes victory and a few days after the multimillion-dollar auction for the Indian Premier League, cricketers and cricket fans can dig deep to help our fellow humans in need.

OK, we can celebrate now

2011-01-07T14:03:00.000Z

Blimey, we won the Ashes. Never in doubt, of course, not even after the Perth defeat. Rather swamped with tasks for the paper on this whole Ashes-winning malarkey, but will jot some thoughts down later.

Just leave you with this quote from Duncan Fletcher, the former England coach: "In the next few years, England will need to beat better sides than Australia."

Possibly the most damning verdict on the strength of Australia. And he is right: there are bigger fish to fry and while this win is jolly nice, it is not quite the same as the win in 2005, when England had to beat some of the all-time greats of the game.

Australia are so weak at the moment that an England second XI, certainly our second-string bowlers, could have the better of them. An England Reserves of Carberry, Adams (or Lyth or, even better, Trescothick), Bopara, Hildreth, Morgan, Davies, Rashid, Broad, Finn, Onions, Panesar/Shahzad would be pretty impressive.

India, the world's No 1 side, come to England this summer. Beat them, Sri Lanka and South Africa and then we can start swanking about as if we rule the roost.

Death List 2011

2011-01-02T23:15:00.001Z

Well that was a miserable start to the new year. The writers of The Archers, the Radio 4 soap opera, marked the show's 60th anniversary this evening by killing off nice, bumbling Nigel Pargetter, the village toff. At least, I think they have deaded him. The episode ended with him falling off the roof of Lower Loxley, his stately home, having climbed up there in a Force 8 gale to unhitch a Happy New Year banner that was tied to the chimneys.

It is possible that Nigel is not dead - we shall find out at 7pm tomorrow - and will instead spend the next few months or years (depending on how much the actor needs the money and how good he is at begging the editor) in a coma in Felperham General Hospital. Much like Ariel Sharon, in fact.

Which brings me to the Death List for 2011, which for the fifth year in a row has the former Israeli Prime Minister named as one of the 50 celebrities most likely to shuffle off during the next 12 months.

I have been fascinated by the Death List since I discovered it ten years ago. The list was first drawn up in 1987 by a bunch of students in a pub at Warwick University, who were surprised to hear the news of the death of Cary Grant and thought they would see if they could predict which other famous people would pass away that year. Only one of their original list - bizarrely, the Spanish guitarist Andres Segovia - obliged them. Since the internet came along, the Death List has grown from a private gag to a global death-hunt.

Each year, they select a list of 50 people whose death will be noted by the mass media and see how many don't make it to New Year's Eve. It may sound macabre, but it is also a sort of tribute to the accomplishments of the people on the list, some of whom we may have thought died years ago.

You can only have 25 people from the previous year's list, which shows the faith they have placed in Sharon finally slipping out of his coma. Looking through their lists, it seems to be an in-joke that Clive Dunn, who played Corporal Jones in Dad's Army and is still only 89, has to be included each year.

2010 was a poor year for the list. Only nine of their 50 died (Michael Foot, Norman Wisdom, Simon Maccorkindale, Laurent Fignon, Dino de Laurentiis, JD Salinger, Dennis Hopper, Blake Edwards and Cyril Smith), the fewest since 1998 and some way shy of the record of 14.

So this year they have gone for some new faces. Intriguingly, last year's No 1 pick, the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al Megrahi, has been dropped altogether. He may have been given only three months to live when released from prison in 2009, but the Death List panel have clearly decided not to fall for that again.

Among the names who have not appeared on the list before are Gerry Rafferty, who was treated for kidney failure two months ago, Aretha Franklin, who has pancreatic cancer, and Helmut Schmidt, the former German Chancellor who is now 93.

Surprisingly, no one thought it worth putting Nigel Pargetter on the list too.

My sporting year

2010-12-31T20:57:00.001Z

As 2010 is cast into the litter bin of time and we finger the wrapping of 2011 with anticipation, I present my sporting highlights of the year, all events that I had the privilege to see in person and people who I interviewed.

The life of a sports journalist is not as glamorous as some would think. Lots of travelling but little sight-seeing and after a while the run of airports, hotels, stadiums, motorways and being away from my family can pall. But that is not a moan, I am privileged to watch sport for a living. Here are the moments I will remember best from 2010 and links to the articles (all behind the paywall, I'm afraid, but a snip at only 5p each or £1 for 20)

1) The marathon tennis match In terms of events about which you would like to say "I was there", the first-round match on Court No 18 at Wimbledon between John Isner v Nicolas Mahut trumps many a final. It went to five sets, spread over three days, and ended with Isner winning 70-68 in the decider. I was courtside for the final 20 games of the match, sitting a few seats away from John McEnroe and Tracy Austin. The things I most remember are not to do with play, but the fact that McEnroe was incongrously wearing a red baseball cap with his grey suit and tie and that Andy Roddick later described Isner's feet after the match as looking like "deli meat".

2) The Boat Race Because the right crew won in the best fashion. I'm biased, but this year's Cambridge side were particularly likeable and very welcoming whenever I went to visit them. Oxford had the Winklevoss twins, the Olympic rowers who claimed to have invented Facebook, but Cambridge had team spirit. Although they were almost a length behind at Hammersmith Bridge, they fought back to win. Helpfully, their victory netted me £70 at the bookies.

3) Rory McIlroy's first round at the Open My third Open Championship but my first in Scotland. When I arrived at St Andrews it was shrouded in mist and there were questions about whether play would start. I was first asked to follow Tiger Woods but when he failed to tear up the course or blow his top, I switched across to watch a promising young Ulsterman instead. With a round of 63, McIlroy took the first-round lead. Two days later, I played my first round of golf in St Andrews, at the Castle course, and went round in a mere 55 strokes more than McIlroy.

4) Somerset throw away the County Championship I had not been to Durham before - it's a smashing ground - but was sent up there for the final day of the county season as Somerset eyed a first ever Championship. Special request of the Deputy Editor, who is a Somerset fan. Alas, they were unable to beat Durham and so Notts took the title, but I did get to meet a fascinating character called Tractor Driver, who travels the country watching Somerset with his keg of cider and had managed to drink Durham dry.

5) Nadal v Soderling at Wimbledon I have several more special memories from Wimbledon, including watching Roger Federer and Serena Williams on Centre Court, but the quarter-final between Rafael Nadal and Robin Soderling on Court 1 stands out. As Soderling took a 5-0 lead in the first set, word went round that Federer had been knocked out by Toma Berdych. Could there be a double shock? No, Nadal found his mojo and won in four sets, but he had been briefly made to look mortal.

6) England v Pakistan at the Rose Bowl A one-sided match, England winning by 121 runs, but the end of a topsy-turvy one-day series, which the home side won 3-2, and the end of a fractious summer in which the game's morality was called into question. I spent the game chatting to the Pakistan fans, some of whom had travelled from as far as Glasgow.

7) Women's rugby World Cup semi-final They lost the final to New Zealand, although they competed all the way, but England's women looked wonderful on their way there, including this 15-0 last-four win over Australia. Maggie "The Machine" Alphonsi, the England flanker, was the star of the tournament for the way she bulldozed through everyone in her way.

8) Australia v Pakistan at Lord's The Ashes win started here, with Australia's batsmen made to look vulnerable. And all this while Pakistan's bowlers were deliberately underperforming for money.

9) England win Dubai Sevens In four successive must-win games, they beat the four sides who finished above them in last year's Sevens World Series to claim the title, playing spectacular rugby and proving that teams can win in orange shirts (eh, Holland?)

10) Yani Tseng wins the women's Open Royal Birkdale is one of my favourite golf courses, made all the better by the lack of spectators. Hurrah for women's golf. What those who didn't attend missed was some splendid golf by a 21-year-old Taiwanese golfer with superb iron play, a red-hot putter and a charming personality.

And the ten interviews I most enjoyed doing this year

1) Billie Jean King. I spoke to her on the phone for almost an hour while sitting on the floor behind the press box at the Oval as I supposedly covered a one-day match between Pakistan and England. Even an hour wasn't long enough as Billie Jean kept me engrossed with tales of the fight for equality 40 years ago.

2) Paul Collingwood. I had three one-to-one interviews with Collingwood in 2010 and each time he had something fresh to say. A modest, frank, intelligent cricketer, who gives good copy without coming across as a berk, unlike some of his team-mates.

3) An unnamed 17-year-old Afghan. I was unable to name the captain or any of the team who played cricket against MCC in a game I watched at Chigwell. That is because they were all child refugees who had escaped horrors in search of a better life. One of those interviews that really makes you appreciate how lucky we are.

4) Steve Brown Speaking of inspirational tales about people who fight adversity, I found speaking to Steve Brown, a wheelchair rugby player, very moving. After a fall from a balcony, he did not even know if he would survive surgery. Now he has his eyes on a place at the 2012 Paralympics.

5) John Woodcock The 83-year-old former Times cricket correspondent is one of the last survivors of a golden age of sports journalism, when reporters travelled by ship to Ashes tours and were able to socialise freely with players. Better still, they only had to write 400 words a month. I chaired a round-table discussion with Woodcock, Mike Atherton, Christopher Martin-Jenkins and Richard Hobson and then filmed a discussion about Woodcock's personal memories of playing deck quoits with Alec Bedser.

6) Pete Goss Returned to sailing 13 years after he rescued a fellow sailor in the middle of the Southern Ocean. I spoke to him briefly before the start of the Route du Rhum, in which he finished fourteenth.

7) Greg Searle Another great comeback. Eighteen years after winning an Olympic rowing gold with his brother Johnny, Searle decided to get back in a boat and try to qualify for the 2012 Olympics, when he will be 40. It was a pretty good season, in which he won a silver at the World Championships in the eight. We talked about his lucky socks, which are older than half his new crew-mates.

8) Jonah Lomu The former New Zealand rugby player talked about pimping his rides. Worth reading if only for the words "Tongan ukelele music".

9) Rebecca Adlington. Talking Delhi belly with the Olympic swimming champion after the Commonwealth Games at the site of the 2012 Olympics.

10) General Sir David Richards. Not a sportsman, but a highlight none the less. I was asked to interview the head of the Army, now Chief of the Defence Staff, about a new play on Afghanistan. Quite why I was asked, I don't know, but I was up in Birkdale at the women's Open and spoke to him on the phone from my hotel room while wearing only a towel. Certainly an interview I will never forget... It's nice to take a break from sport and use my brain occasionally.

Finally, three events I wish I had seen:

1) The Ryder Cup I was down to report on this but decided to pull out because my wife was due to give birth the next week. Naturally she was two weeks late...

2) England v Australia at rugby The third match of the year, when Chris Ashton ran the length of the field for his second try in a 35-18 win. I covered England's match the next week at Twickenham, but Samoa is a rather less glamorous tie.

3) The Melbourne Test Or any of the Ashes Tests for that matter, but Mike Atherton and Richard Hobson pulled the seniority rank on me there... Still, I am heading to the cricket World Cup in February, so that is something to look forward to.

Hold the celebrations: we haven't won the Ashes yet

2010-12-29T17:32:00.001Z

Honestly, anyone would think we had won the Ashes series. I've done broadcasts on Australian radio and Indian TV today about England's win at Melbourne, while the story was leading all the British news items today. England retain the Ashes - but retaining is not the same as winning. We still lead by one with one match to play.

England have done marvellously well in winning two Tests in Australia for the first time since 1986 and by winning two by an innings for the first time since the series at home in 1985. Their win in Melbourne is the heaviest winning margin in the Ashes since Jim Laker did his spinning tricks in 1956. These are feats worthy of celebration, but the celebration should wait a week.

Delightful though it was to see the whole England team do the Sprinkler dance on the outfield after play, like the cast of The Full Monty only with the jockstraps under their whites, the job is not yet complete. They must avoid losing in Sydney next week to be sure of winning the Ashes. A 2-2 draw will seem like a mighty anticlimax.

If sport's version of Sod's Law works properly, Australia will call someone up for the last Test who they have ignored all series and they will make the difference in winning the match. Perhaps Nathan Hauritz will get a start on his home turf and take 16 wickets; maybe Usman Khawaja will make a double hundred on debut. This would take the gloss off England retaining the Ashes.

Andrew Strauss, the captain, is right to urge against complacency. It was not that long ago, after a heavy defeat in Perth, that people were writing that the wheels were coming off the Ashes wagon. What we have learnt is that Australia and England are remarkably inconsistent. The Melbourne party could be followed by a Sydney hangover.

If we were 2-0 up, I'd suggest that we could let Australia have one for morale's sake. It's what they often did with us, taking their feet off the jugular once the series was won. But England should have more ambition than a mere 2-2 shared series. A 2-1 win is the minimum requirement, 3-1 starts to look like a proper beating.

It could be argued that a 3-1 defeat would be in the best interests of Australian cricket too. Share the series and they can claim that basically everything is OK. But for some bad luck (like losing the toss at Melbourne), they would have won. I think this would be bunk, but Cricket Australia like all governing bodies will be looking for excuses rather than problems.

A 3-1 defeat means that Australia need to look at the coaching, the selection, the scheduling, the development. They need to go through rebuilding and perhaps jettison some members of the current set-up, and not just the players.

They need to confront the systemic failings that it took England several Ashes defeats to face up to. Then they may just be in a position to win the urn back in 2013.

Ponting nears the end

2010-12-27T23:27:00.000Z

Ricky Ponting's distinguished Test career should not end this way, scraping around for runs and ranting at umpires. Not that he was ever much of a one for respecting authority, but his rant at Aleem Dar on Day 2 of the Melbourne Test last night betrayed a man on the verge of despair.

At some point in the next two or three days, barring an astounding rearguard batting effort by Australia to match the way England batted at Brisbane a month ago, Australia will lose the fourth Test and fail to regain the Ashes.

If they do not win the final Test in Sydney, which starts on January 3, they will lose the series and Ponting will become the third Australia captain to lose three Ashes contests, the first for more than a century.

It is hard to see him continuing as captain for much longer, although it would be rather late in the day for Australia to get rid of him as one-day captain, with the World Cup starting in mid-February. Ponting will presumably lead Australia into the tournament, where they have not lost a match since the final in 1996, and then stand aside. Bangladesh are Australia's next Test opponents and it would make sense to let a new captain take the team on.

Generally, Australian captains do not stay in the side after handing over command. In the past 40 years, Waugh, Taylor, Border, Greg Chappell and Bill Lawry all retired straight away.

Kim Hughes lasted one Test after resigning as captain before a pair of ducks ended his career. Graeme Yallop stayed for another five years after his seven-Test captaincy reign ended, but he was only ever a stop-gap while Greg Chappell was away making money off Kerry Packer, while Ian Chappell came out of retirement to serve under his brother.

So, it is possible that Ricky Ponting has only a dozen days and three innings left in his distinguished Test career. Mathematically, it would be nice if he only made two more runs, so that his final career aggregate stands for ever at 12,345, but that would be a humiliating end.

As a cricket-lover and someone who respects Ponting as a batsman, I would like him to go out with one more hundred. Maybe even two. Just so long as England go home with the urn.

A traditional loony Christmas

2010-12-26T17:12:00.000Z

The coachload of Chinese students who were decanted into Greenwich Park on Christmas morning to visit the historic observatory must have wondered at the eccentricities of the English.

Not only was Santa Claus jogging through the park (or at least a man wearing a red and white coat over his shorts, a Santa hat and a strap-on beard), but there were two men hitting a tennis ball to each other on the main road.

Traditions are important at Christmas and, like the Serpentine swimmers who refused to allow the frozen river and cancellation of their annual Christmas race to prevent them having a dip, so my father and I were determined to play tennis on Christmas morning whatever the weather.

It is a tradition going back at least 15 years (the last time I let him lose was in 1998) but it appeared that the cold snap in Britain might have broken the run when we arrived in the park yesterday morning and found the four courts covered in white ice.

No matter, we decided to play in the road instead, which was the only surface free of ice. My car marked the line of the net and the gutters formed tramlines. The baseline was a moveable feast but as we decided to dispense with scoring and just see how long we could keep each rally going, it didn't matter.

We stayed out there for an hour, despite the cold weather, batting the ball back and forth and sharing the odd joke with passing joggers and pedestrians, pausing occasionally to allow a car to drive through our court.

It was wonderfully eccentric, which is as it should be at Christmas. Some stony-faced sourpusses didn't understand why we would want to play tennis in the road on one of the coldest days of the year, but most raised a smile. One jogger deliberately hurdled our imaginary net, while Santa, as he jogged past, promised that next year he would leave a net in my stocking.

Most heartening, though, was the man who stopped to chat to us at the beginning of our match and then returned half an hour later with some mulled wine. "I thought you could do with this," he said. And there, in that kind gesture of a stranger to two madmen, is the true spirit of Christmas.

Miracle on the 3rd or 4th strip

2010-12-26T15:50:00.002Z

"And what did you ask Santa to bring you for Christmas, daddy?"

And so it came to pass that during the night after Christmas a miracle came true in Melbourne. And, even better, Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook made 157 without loss by the close.

So much for the controversies about the groundsman swapping the pitches he would use. There was no devil in this wicket. In fact, while it had quite a green tinge on it, the condition generally was reminiscent of an early-season English wicket. Lovely, what a Christmas present.

I wonder whether Ricky Ponting would have bowled first if he had won the toss? He has never inserted an opponent since England made 400 in a day at Edgbaston 2005 and I suspect that he would have thought about bowling only to bat out of superstition.

Either way, England bowled beautifully and caught well (although they dropped three chances and missed a run out), while Australia's batsmen looked as if they had been at the port the night before. There were some very careless dismissals, for all the quality of England's bowling.

Yet, unlike in Perth, England's success came from them hitting the right length consistently. The fact that all ten of Australia's wickets were caught behind square, six by the wicketkeeper, shows that. Whatever was being said about England a week ago, they are fast learners.

It is hard to see them losing from here, although who knows in this baffling series. Momentum has not just swung back and forth this series, it has shaken. Instead of a close series in which matches are settled by millimetres, as it was in 2005, this is a close series in which matches are settled by miles. We walloped them in Adelaide, they thrashed us in Perth and now, again, it is no contest.

Australia will probably demolish England in Sydney next week, but that of course will all be a bit late.

This match is not yet won, however. England may start Day 2 59 runs ahead with all wickets in hand, but if Australia can take those ten wickets for 100, maybe even 150 runs, they can regain hope of winning. More likely, they will just have to resign themselves to a deficit of more than 300 and try to bat for more than two days to get a draw.

You would really have to fancy England now, though. Poor Ricky Ponting, who may have only three Test innings left in his marvellous career. How Australia could do with him raging against the dying of the light.

Pontifex pontificates

2010-12-24T10:59:00.001Z

What a remarkably humourless, killjoy bunch the National Secular Society is. They must have been delighted when the Pope agreed to contribute a Thought for the Day on BBC Radio as it would give them something to whinge about over the festive period. A Christian message at Christmas? Disgraceful.

Naturally, the Pope should not be allowed to spread a message of love and peace, not even in a three-minute homily. He should have spent the whole time apologising for child abuse. Or that is what the secularists want. After all, isn't Christmas all about child abuse? Abandoning babies in mangers and all that. Why, I bet the shepherds hadn't even been CRB-checked.

The child abuse scandal has been a godsend for the secularists (well, maybe not a godsend but you know what I mean). In the actions of a few wicked men, those who despise religion have an excuse to portray everyone with faith or who practises religion as themselves evil or apologists for evil. As if those without faith don't abuse children too.

It is not a "slap in the face for child abuse victims" that the Pope was asked to broadcast on Radio 4. It is a recognition that this weekend marks a major Christian festival and as a major Christian leader he may have something interesting to say. He isn't Josef Fritzl.

And as for the criticism that the Pope was "pontificating", well isn't that what a pontifex is meant to do?

You may every right to disagree with the Pope on doctrine and Vatican policy, you can be godless yourself (I'm all in favour of Christmas not being a national holiday and people made to go into work unless they attend church), but it is a bit petty to complain about Christian messages at Christmas.

Worse than that, it is dull. Just go and watch X Factor highlights or whatever seculists get their kicks out of instead and stop boring us.

Christmas Quiz

2010-12-24T10:30:00.000Z

Already bored? Struggling to find a new conversation to have with your family or just want an excuse to lock yourself in your room? Alex Massie's Christmas Quiz at the Spectator provides the answers. Or rather the questions. You'll have to find the answers, with a little help from Google...

Snow tales

2010-12-18T21:06:00.000Z

We had a spectacular blizzard in Blackheath this morning, the snow mounding up on the tree next door so quickly and so heavily that the boughs bent dangerously down towards the ground.

With the snow comes a wonderful silence. No trains pass along the tracks at the foot of the garden, no cars come sliding down the road in front. The satellite signal is disrupted so the TV is turned off and my eight-week-old daughter and I sit in blissful peace listening to carols through iTunes.

All very Narnia-like, although farther into Kent it has fallen so deep and crisp and even that, according to my cousin in Tonbridge Wells, it is more Scott of the Antarctic than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Roads are chaotic throughout the southeast; airports closed. My friend Richard was due to fly to Turkey from Heathrow this morning. He made it out, a couple of hours before the runways were shut, but his luggage did not follow. How long he will have to wait to be reunited with his trousers is a point for debate.

At least they sell trousers in Istanbul. Of more concern to Richard is the fact that they don't sell gravy granules. In his luggage was a box of Bisto so that he could make gravy to go with his Christmas dinner next weekend. Already denied of pigs in blankets by his wife's religion, the possible absence of Bisto is too much to bear.

Miracles come true at Christmas, of course, and Richard may yet have something beefy to pour on his bird next Saturday. There's more chance of that miracle coming off than England snatching victory in the third Ashes Test after a dismal performance last night.

Well done Australia - particularly Mitchell Johnson and Mike Hussey, the two local boys - for getting back into the series. 1-1 and on to Melbourne. Let's hope that when England open their Christmas presents, the bowlers are gifted a better control of length and Kevin Pietersen rediscovers his brain.

Ashes fantasies

2010-12-17T23:06:00.000Z

There is an excellent Nick Newman cartoon in the latest issue of The Wisden Cricketer titled "Ashes Nightmare" that first shows someone going to sleep while a voice from the radio announces "and Strauss moves on to nine". Then, below, the next picture shows the same person waking with the sun shining through the window and the radio saying "and Strauss moves on to four".

That is the problem with an overseas Ashes tour: it is always on at the wrong time of day and all sorts of horridness can happen to England while you sleep.

I tried to stay up late to watch the start of most days in the first two Tests, but the third match in Perth starts far too late at 2.30am. By the time I wake, there have been two sessions of play and for a few seconds before I can switch on the radio, I play "guess the score". This morning I was way off.

At the end of Day 1, England were going to win the Ashes. Having walloped Australia in Adelaide, they bowled them out for 268 in Perth and were 29 for nought when Day 2 started. As I reached for the radio, I thought: "Best case scenario, Cook or Strauss are still in; worst case, Swann and Prior are building a small lead."

And then the announcer said: "And Hughes moves on to three." Bugger. Australia batting again after bowling England out for 181.

It is very easy for people to get carried away with Ashes hyperbole. Victory in this Perth Test is no more beyond England after two days than the Ashes was done and dusted after one day. The thing that keeps drawing us cricket fans to the sport is the wonderful unpredictability.

I have tried to keep perspective. The gloating can wait until when (if) England win the series. Until then, let's enjoy the battle. Knowing cricket history helps: Australia may have been dismissed for a sub-par 268 on Thursday, but in 2006 they made 244 batting first against England and still won heavily.

Furthermore, Mitchell Johnson, their erratic bowler, loves Perth and had 22 wickets from his previous three Tests there. Now he has 28 from three and a half.

But if that should have been a warning for England not to assume the match was won after one day, here is a lesson for why Australia, who now lead by 200 at the start of the third day, should not assume their job is done.

Two years ago, Australia took a first-innings lead of 94 on South Africa, with Johnson taking eight wickets. Australia then made 319, setting South Africa 414 to win. The touring side achieved it for the loss of four wickets.

There is a lot of cricket still to be played and I envy those in Australia (or those with insomnia) who are able to watch all of it. For my part, I'll be waking around tea-time, hoping to hear the announcer say "and Strauss moves on to 57" rather than "and Watson moves on to 139".

Facebooking the Nativity

2010-12-17T21:57:00.000Z

This video of a very modern Nativity (seen on Cranmer) is superb. I'm not sure what any genuinely wise man is doing titting around on Twitter, though.

"Get a life": Lib Dem MP tells constituent

2010-12-15T12:20:00.000Z

Bob Russell, the Lib Dem MP for Colchester, is a bit of a pillock but a highly effective one, especially when it comes to self-promotion. When I was growing up in Colchester, he was never out of the local press, first as a councillor, then as town mayor and then as leader of the council before becoming MP in 1997.

As a former local journalist, he knew how to grab attention. He would attend the opening of an envelope if it got him more publicity.

His political skills have not yet been recognised by his own party, let alone the coalition Government (it probably says something about the esteem in which he is held that his most lofty job has been as spokesman on sport for the Lib Dems), yet he is happy being one of those backbenchers whose job is to ask important questions, on subjects like morris dancing and darts, in order to get another page lead in the Essex County Standard.

Today, though, Bob Russell leapt in my estimation for his blunt reply, below, to a constituent who had complained, no doubt in a particularly mean-spirited whinging way, about the cost of the royal wedding next year (seen on Guido). There are some who will criticise Russell for being rude and there are some who will suggest, without seeing the original letter, that the constituent may have had a point, but I salute him.

Why should constituents be toadied to when they behave like arses? Hurrah for MPs who speak their minds! A bit more contempt for the electorate is in order. All this "servants of the people" stuff is rot. MPs are paid (pretty low wages) to represent us, not to lick up to us.

My only concern is that, knowing Russell, he probably leaked this letter to the press himself for the attention. I'm slightly distressed by the poor quality of his English as well.

Good English rocks

2010-12-14T16:50:00.000Z

I love the esoteric and thought-provoking emails that get sent round the Times office by our chief revise editor, Richard Dixon. Such as this one:

"A stone is a small lump of rock that can be thrown by someone, eg, hypothetically, by an alleged protester at the police.

"In British English, a rock is too big to be thrown effectively in that way; however, chiefly in North American and Australian English, a stone that can be thrown is called a rock.

"As we aspire to British English, please make sure that we do not refer to a rock when we mean a stone."

I'm sure that I shall never confuse the two again. But what if someone throws a piece of Blackpool rock at the fuzz? Apart from the sticky mess it would leave on their day-glo jackets, I mean. Can we call that rock?

Little man with a big dream

2010-12-11T23:35:00.000Z

Ronnie Corbett considered giving up his dream to be in show business if he had not made it by the age of 37, according to an interview in the latest Radio Times.

Fortunately for fans of shaggy dog stories told by short men in Pringle sweaters, it was in his 37th year that Corbett got his big break on The Frost Report, met Ronnie Barker and the rest is Saturday evening history.

This gives me some reassurance as I agonise about my life's direction - three more years in which to polish my golf anecdotes and meet someone funny to hang out with - but after ten minutes' on Wikipedia (what passes for modern research in journalism) I can reveal why Corbett nearly gave up on the dream.

When he was 35, Corbett was appearing as Will Scarlett in a short-lived Robin Hood-themed musical called Twang!!

Despite a strong cast (well, Barbara Windsor and Bernard Bresslaw) and a score by Lionel Bart, creator of Oliver! (1960) and the moderately successful Blitz! (1962), who clearly thought that all you needed for a hit was a one-word title and a bit of punctuation, the play flopped and closed after three weeks.

Bart thus proved, as many people do every day on Twitter, that there is nothing that can't be made worse by adding an extra exclamation mark. Anyway, here's the title track. No wonder the 35-year-old Ronnie Corbett wondered if he was ever going to make it...

Google says... you're an illiterate pillock

2010-12-11T22:51:00.001Z

Many years ago, when I worked in politics and had to write the daily "lines to take" for MPs, there was a more senior chap who used to go through what we had written and alter our punctuation if he felt it necessary.

If a semi-colon was more appropriate than a comma, he would reach for the red pen. It was pedantic but precise and with hindsight I appreciate it. Accuracy matters. Bear that in mind when you read the rant below.

Occasionally I have to write advertorials for The Times. These are paid-for adverts masquerading as written pieces in the advertiser's hope that readers will pay closer attention to them than a standard ad.

You can understand why marketing companies ask journalists to write advertorials rather than get someone in their company to bash out a few paragraphs. We, after all, are supposed to have a certain talent for speling and gramar and fings like that.

Yet I get more suggestions for how my copy could be improved from bozos in promo companies than I ever do from my day-job editors. Generally they want more "core messages" inserted (as if that will make it more readable), very occasionally they spot a genuine error for which I am blushingly grateful (although we have sub-editors to do that too). But mainly they just want to cock it up through their own ignorance.

In one recent campaign, a slack-jawed gopher from a marketing company didn't like me writing "band of brothers" in a piece on the essence of sport. "Can you make it team of brothers?" I was told. Shakespeare did a pirouette in his tomb.

But an email yesterday really made me splutter with rage.

I had written a headline for one advertorial that read "The Gentlemen's Code". To which I received this reply from a promotions guru:

"Not being a grammar expert I think it might be Gentlemans' Code ie is singular and then the s with ' to indicate possession. We did a quick google check and this appears to be correct."

Why would someone who admits to not being a grammar expert assume that we might be wrong? Why does he think that s' is the construction for indicating possession in the singular? And why does he use Google to check his ropey grammar?

For that matter, how did Google back him up? I just typed gentlemans' into the search engine and nothing leapt up to suggest it is accurate. Lots of gentleman's or gentlemen's but no s' option.

So not only did he rely on Google to support his intellectually stunted assertion but he then failed to read the results correctly.

This man has the title "managing director". I dread to think how dim his staff must be.

Country matters

2010-12-06T22:41:00.001Z

"Countryside," according to the definition given to it by Stephen Fry on the Radio 4 panel game I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue a few years ago, means "to kill Piers Morgan".

It was witty, it had a grain of truth that few in Britain would disagree with and, spoken rather than written, it was indisputably filthy.

No one was in any doubt that the National Treasure was calling the then editor of the Daily Mirror a cunt. Quite premeditated and purely for laughs. And at lunchtime on a Sunday too.

I could be wrong, but I don't recall there being any outcry or newspapers running stories about it. There was certainly no apology issued by the BBC and, given that the programme is recorded, there clearly was no problem with what Fry said.

Quite right. Except that Jim Naughtie's verbal slip on the Today programme, which was obviously said in error and apologised for immediately, seems to have got some people hot and bothered. Introducing the 8.10am interview this morning, he referred to "Jeremy Cunt... er, Hunt, the Culture Secretary".

Most found it funny, to be fair, including Naughtie, right, who had a bout of coughs as he tried to carry on reading the news while sniggers went on in the background. My mother sent me a text message within half an hour calling it Naughtie's "Johnners moment", a reference to Brian Johnston's fit of giggles after Jonathan Agnew described Ian Botham not quite getting his leg over.

But Today reported 16 emails of complaint by mid-afternoon and presumably there will be more when the papers report the story tomorrow. The Daily Mail, for whom countryside seems too tame, has already ranted on its website about Naughtie, and Andrew Marr who repeated the profanity when discussing the story, "turning the air blue", calling it an "embarrassment" and a "bombshell".

It is surprising that in this day and age people can still get so upset about the C word. It can be horrid when said with anger or venom, of course, but so can a simple "oi" when yelled by a drunkard in the street. Likewise, while it can be offensively sexist, so can "bitch" or "cow" if snarled on EastEnders. Motive offends more, to my ear, than meaning.

When I started in journalism, working for Giles Coren on the Times Diary column, cunt was used adjectivally. "Where's the cunting Daily Mail?" he might ask although probably not to Rupert Murdoch.

It had the same outrageous force as the words pillock or twat, both of which denote body parts but which come a fair bit lower on the Mail's List of Outrage.

Personally, I prefer the term "twunt", a portmanteau of twat and cunt for someone who doesn't quite fit into either camp. Or both, like Julian Assange.

The word has been about since the Middle Ages, in various spelling forms. Gropecunte Lane was a common street name in red-light areas until it disappeared in the 16th century. Chaucer has both his Miller - "prively he caught her by the queynte" - and Wife of Bath - "you shall have queynte right enough at eve" - use his spelling of the word quite openly.

Shakespeare has Hamlet make a play on the word when he relaxes in Ophelia's lap with talk of "country matters", a sign that it had become Carry On smut but still not offensive, while Katherine in Henry V mishears her English tutor saying "foutre" and "coun" (French for fuck and cunt) when she meant "foot" and "gown" and tells her off for being rude. John Donne, Samuel Pepys and Robert Burns also use the C word fairly tamely.

By the 20th century it had clearly become crude, with Joyce and Lawrence using it, but does it still offend? After all, even Sir Robin Day once used the word, in an interview with Dennis Skinner. And he was so straight he wore a bow tie. (video from Guido)

Cook only part of the story

2010-12-04T11:02:00.002Z

My colleague Simon Barnes is right to devote his piece in the Times today (paywalled, sorry, but there's more than a quid's worth of good stuff on the website today) to Alastair Cook's marvellous start to the Ashes series.

Having arrived in Australia with people questioning his place in the team, Cook made a decent enough start in Brisbane with 67. He followed it with 235 not out in the second innings and is now 136 not out after a day's batting in Adelaide.

It has been 674 balls and pushing 1,000 minutes since an Australian last took his wicket and near the end of today's play he passed Len Hutton's record of 364 runs without being dismissed in an Ashes Test. If he carries on where he left off tomorrow, England can build a total that should be match-winning with three days left in the Test and mean that Australia need to win two of the last three Tests to regain the Ashes.

It is sublime form and even if he makes a duck in every innings he plays for the rest of the series, he will still leave Australia with an average from ten innings of at least 43 and probably, with even modest success, 60 or 70. But let us not get carried away just yet. As England saved the first Test by making a big second innings score, so Australia could bat their way to a draw in Adelaide.

Simon is wrong, though, to say that "it is a long, long time since an England batsman has been in such form in Australia". It was only eight years ago that Michael Vaughan made three hundreds in five Tests and ended the series with 633 runs, the best by England since 1970 and only 25 runs short of being the best since Wally Hammond in 1928-29.

England lost the first four matches in Vaughan's series heavily and the Ashes were surrendered in 11 days. The key to success is more than one batsman over-performing. You need several (hence Trott's support of Cook in both Tests has been crucial, as was Strauss's in Brisbane and Pietersen's today) and a strong bowling attack.

Ultimately, if England are to win the Ashes Down Under for the first time in 24 years, Cook's runs will play only a part. It is the wickets that the England bowlers take that are more important.

Five reasons why Qatar should have lost World Cup bid

2010-12-03T12:06:00.002Z

The Fifa World Cup vote was, of course, a travesty. Not so much that England did not win the rights to stage the 2018 tournament (although if Jack Warner, the Fifa vice-president, thinks he is getting an invite to Prince William's wedding now he is much mistaken), but that Qatar will host the World Cup in 2022. Here are five reasons why:

1) Qatar has never qualified for a World Cup before and probably will not qualify for the tournaments in 2014 and 2018 but will get to compete four years later as hosts even if they don't improve on their present world ranking of 113, which is lower than North Korea, who were embarrassingly bad at this year's World Cup, and even lower than Wales.

When South Africa were given the rights for the 2010 World Cup, they were No 41 in the world, only just outside the 32 that ideally should qualify. South Africa and the USA were 22nd in the world when they hosted the 2002 and 1994 World Cups. Qatar are nowhere near qualifying. There are 15 Asian nations ranked higher; it is simply unfair that Qatar can buy a place at the top table and deny one of those above them a spot.

2) Temperatures will be pushing 50C in the Gulf state at that time of year. But their air-conditioned stadiums, to be built like most baubles in the Middle East by virtual slave labour, will look magnificent and isn't expensive spangly arenas what the World Cup is all about, even if they get dismantled straight after the final?

3) They have a poor human rights record. Not that that stopped China hosting the Olympics. And anyway, do homosexuals, women and Jews, all of whom are persecuted in Qatar, really watch football?

4) The Fifa technical report on Qatar's suitability was, like Russia's for 2018, shockingly bad. They were able to overcome that by proming to spend $4 billion on the tournament. Some might suggest that Fifa should be pressing for that money to be spent on developing football in Asia rather than on building new air-conditioned dismantleable stadiums in a desert. Qatar should have proved its commitment to football, rather than wealth-creation, before being given the rights.

5) It is one of the smallest countries in the world. In terms of area, it comes in below Vanuatu and the Falkland Islands and is only five places higher than Cyprus. It is about 165,000 sq km smaller than Uruguay, the previous smallest World Cup host. It is a third the size of Belgium, who put in a joint bid with the Netherlands for the 2018 World Cup because they thought it would be silly to go it alone. I'm all in favour of the little guy getting a chance and for the World Cup to go to new countries, but this is simply a case of a country buying - some say bribing - its golden ticket and it stinks.

Australian collapse a perfect wake-me-up

2010-12-03T07:32:00.000Z

Is there any better feeling than arriving in a foreign country after a seven-hour flight knowing that an Ashes Test has begun while you were somewhere over Iraq and then, on landing, discovering that Australia lost their first three wickets by the start of the third over?

I'm in Dubai for the rugby sevens (horrible country - the fact that Andrew Flintoff loves it tells you all you need to know - but a great tournament) and arrived at my hotel at 5am, three hours before I was due to leave it for the stadium.

Having risen at 6am the day before to catch a flight from Gatwick that was cancelled because of snow (I went via Heathrow in the end), I am dog-tired, but Australia's dismal start in Adelaide and the fact that they have just been dismissed for 245 puts a bit of a spring in my step.

Eighty-five TV channels in my hotel room, not one of them showing the cricket. You wouldn't know that Dubai is where cricket's world governing body is based from the coverage. Fortunately, a New Zealand friend finds a website where I can watch play live without charge.

He is delighted by Australia's woes, as are the South African pressmen here. "I don't care who wins as long as one side gets thrashed," a Saffer said, without much love for England or Australia. Looks like he may get his wish.

Ashes schmashes

2010-11-30T22:45:00.000Z

Apparently, Australia will do "everything in their power to boost the morale of their misfiring strike bowler Mitchell Johnson" before the second Ashes Test starts on Friday.

What, they're going to ask him to bowl at no one but Marcus North in the nets?

Meanwhile, I see the BBC's round-up of Ashes gossip reports that "Fast bowler Steven Finn celebrated in style after his side sealed a draw in Brisbane - with a hearty steak sandwich". This is followed by "Full story: Twitter".

Surely the whole point of Twitter is that you shouldn't need to click to read more?

England did not save the first Ashes Test, they failed to win it

2010-11-29T23:23:00.000Z

I should have written a post earlier today celebrating England's great escape in the first Ashes Test, but it doesn't feel like that.

England have become quite good at escaping from Tests with a draw in the past two years but this time it was their batsmen who did the hard work. Monty Panesar was just carrying the drinks; Graham Onions isn't even in Australia.

By passing 500 for the loss of one wicket, which has only happened six times and never to England, Andrew Strauss's team (or rather the top three) showed how toothless Australia's bowling is and how flat the pitch was. Why couldn't they bat like this first time out? I watched the first two sessions on Day 1 and Australia's bowling was pretty tame. Peter Siddle found inspiration for a spell after tea but that was all.

An Australian friend, my co-author Peter McGuinness, emailed to express his disappointment. "Many Poms are acting stupidly triumphant but this is a Test they should have won," he wrote. "This match was saved not by England's batsmen but by the out-of-character good-length bowling by Siddle in your first innings."

He goes on to add that while Australia conceding 500 for the loss of one is demoralising for Aussies, so it should be for Poms that England could not capitalise on having Australia 180 for five in the first innings or do much in the brief second innings save lower Simon Katich's already poor Ashes average to 33.

"This was a genuine shitty old draw not a moral win for England like at Cardiff," he wrote, and he is right. But five shitty draws mean that England retain the Ashes. Still, I think our bowlers are rather better than they showed in Brisbane. Hopefully with their nerves gone, they will be better in the rest of the series, especially if the batsmen can continue to score easy runs.

One final point: Alastair Cook has taken an immense amount of flak from the British media over the past six months. Some, like Mike Atherton in my paper, have even argued that he should have been dropped a year ago and wasn't worth the air fare to Australia.

There was some basis for this because he had looked very ropey all summer and, until the Oval Test, was scoring as many single-figure scores as Australia's hot-or-frozen batsman Marcus North.

But consider this: in the 12 months before the Brisbane Test, England's batsmen had made 13 Test hundreds. Four of them were by Cook, three of them overseas. Now he has a fourth in 12 months, a Test double hundred no less and the highest score made by an England batsman since Cook's mentor Graham Gooch made 333. If Cook doesn't deserve his place, we must have a fabulous batting line-up....

Nice beaver

2010-11-29T21:50:00.004Z

First Bernard Matthews, now Leslie Nielsen. Who will be the next giant of 1980s culture to depart this world? My money's on Jim Bowen. Or possibly Gordon the Gopher, whose addiction to crystal meth has surely screwed up his insides.

Nielsen had a brilliant gift for deadpan gag-making, completing the most excruciating delightfully bad puns set up by other actors, none more famous than the "Surely you can't be serious..." "I am serious and don't call me Shirley" exchange in Airplane!

Some other favourites:

"We're sorry to bother you at such a time like this, Mrs Twice. We would have come earlier, but your husband wasn't dead then."
"Is this some kind of bust?... "Yes ma'am, it's very impressive but we need to ask you some questions."
"It took me two weeks to find Stella's apartment. She'd neglected to give me her address."
[offered a cigar he is asked "Cuban?"] "No, Dutch-Irish, my father came from Wales."
"What was it we had for dinner tonight?"... "There was a choice of steak or fish." ... "Yes, I remember, I had the lasagne."

His obliviousness was what made the Zucker-scripted lines so funny, his knack of acting, as Jerry Zucker put it, "like a fish in water". His later films, as spoof followed spoof, were pretty poor but that was more to do with the quality of the writing than his acting.

The Naked Gun trilogy was a huge part of my adolescence. With my friend Richard, I watched the video of the original film until the tape snapped even though we knew all the jokes backwards. We knew some of them forwards as well. Familiarity bred contentment.

It perplexed my father, who often wondered why George Peppard had gone into slapstick. What a shame the A Team remake came too late for Nielsen to tackle Hannibal Smith. "Cover me, Murdoch" (cue coat being dropped over his head)...

Rudderless

2010-11-26T23:56:00.000Z

Watching the start of play on Day 3 in the Brisbane Test just now, the camera picked up and lingered on a round-faced, grey-haired man with glasses who was carefully explaining the rules of cricket to three Chinese friends.

Obviously, anyone who watches the news will have recognised Kevin Rudd, the Australian Prime Minister until pretty recently, even if fewer will have known that he is the constituency MP for the area that contains the Gabba, but it was disappointing that none of the commentators were able to, well, comment.

The footage came during a break in play and the cameras, which presumably were held by Australians, lingered for longer than they normally would if it was Joe Public but neither Nasser Hussain nor his commentary sidekick (I think it was Ian Botham) were able to identify him. Nor, one assumes, was a producer able to whisper in their ear.

I shouldn't be shocked, but I am saddened and rather ashamed of the lack of worldliness by Sky's commentary team. No doubt if it was Lily Allen or Kevin Spacey they would have spoken for five minutes about their entire CV.

Bootiful

2010-11-26T12:24:00.000Z

Bernard Matthews, the king of the twizzlers, has died at the age of 80. On a farm in Norfolk, a million turkeys have their hopes raised of a last-minute stay of execution.

Gone in 60 seconds

2010-11-25T23:04:00.000Z

I had my first piece published on The Roar, an Australian sports opinion website, yesterday. Written before the start of the first Ashes Test, it was all about the importance of taking the initiative early in the Ashes, as this extract shows. The full article can be read here.

It is never too early to throw away the Ashes. In 2002, Nasser Hussain appeared to have done just that when he walked out for the toss convinced that he would bat if he won and found himself uttering the words “I think we’ll field” as soon as he got the call right.

In those few strides, he had become convinced that his batsmen would not be able to handle Glenn McGrath and Co. Within the space of a few seconds, all plans had gone out of the window. Australia cashed in.

To be fair to Nasser, he was probably just surprised he had called correctly, having won six out of his 27 previous tosses, including a fabulous statistically improbable sequence of one win out of 16 in 2000-01. A great captain, Nasser, but a hopeless tosser.

I was speaking to Phil DeFreitas recently about the importance of seizing the initiative early. “Daffy”, who at the age of 20 was given a Test debut at the Gabba in the 1986-87 Ashes, said it was crucial in that match that England’s batsmen passed 400 after winning the toss (helped in no small measure by 40 for DeFreitas).

It gave the bowlers the confidence to attack Australia and from that initial win flowed the series. England have not won the first Test of an away Ashes since.

Eight years later, Defreitas was the older, wiser spearhead of Mike Atherton’s attack as they tried to regain the Ashes. DeFreitas had done his visualisation exercises, putting himself mentally in the right place for the Test. He had worked out what end he wanted and gone through in his mind what he would do with that first ball.

And then, as they walked out on that first morning, Mike Gatting smelt the wind, decided it was blowing in a funny way and suggested to Atherton that they should open from the opposite end.

“I wasn’t happy about it,” DeFreitas told me. “It really threw me. I couldn’t find my line and Michael Slater hit my first two balls to the fence.” And so passed another Ashes series out of England’s clutches before the first drinks break.

The dismissal of Andrew Strauss to the third ball of yesterday's opening day could also be regarded as a momentum-shifter, except that England did not quite roll up and die.

Historians may yet come to regard his ill-judged cut stroke as the point at which England lost the 2010 Ashes, but fifties from Ian Bell and Alastair Cook at least ensured that England are not quite out of the game. By reaching 260, they gave the England bowlers something to work with.

I am foolishly grasping to a recent example from Australian state cricket at the same ground. Last month, New South Wales played Queensland in Brisbane and were dismissed for 262, two more than England. They went on to win by an innings and 90 runs. Time for England's bowlers to follow that.

Welfare hypocrisy

2010-11-25T22:23:00.000Z

Spot the difference between the first two items on this evening's BBC's Ten O'Clock news:

1) Former Tory MP Howard Flight says that the welfare system gives incentives to the poor to breed and discourages those in work. He says that this is not very sensible. Labour's attack dogs play the "shame and offence" card. David Cameron, spineless as ever, says that the comments were wrong and Flight should apologise. The whole spin on the item is "are the Tories still the nasty party?"

2) Ed Miliband goes to speak to Labour voters and they are filmed telling him that they are fed up with working hard and being penalised while those on benefits have no responsibility. One says words to the effect that "they're encouraged to have children while we can't afford to" (see about a minute into this video). Miliband nods and says that this has to be sorted out.

Am I missing something, or are both stories making the same point? Why is it OK for Labour voters to say there is a problem but not for former Tory MPs? Why can the BBC not link these stories and have a proper debate about it? And when will Cameron grow a pair?

Baby warning system

2010-11-25T12:51:00.000Z

It appears that my month-old baby has already developed an impeccable sense of occasion when it comes to cricket.

Last night, I stayed up to watch the first two sessions of the Test match, while my daughter slept in her crib, oblivious to Strauss's third-ball trauma and Cook's scratchy fifty and the flamboyant but all too brief innings of Pietersen and Trott.

With eyelids drooping, I decided to turn in at tea but had barely been asleep for an hour when a grizzle emanated from the crib beside the bed, gradually getting louder until it woke me.

After first checking that my baby was all right, I switched on the radio to be greeted by the news that Alastair Cook had just been snaffled by Shane Watson. And so, thanks to the baby warning system, I was able to listen to the next two balls of Peter Siddle's hat-trick.

Not sure if the daughter appreciated them as much as she should - or felt quite the same despair as her father - but at least she can say in years to come that she was listening when Siddle turned the 2010-11 Ashes.

North Korea, east of Delaware

2010-11-25T12:09:00.000Z

Dear old Sarah Palin proved her presidential credentials yesterday, suggesting that North Korea, part of George Dubya's axis of weevils, is an ally of Uncle Sam.

Slagging off President Obama for the way he is handling the brewing tension after North Korea shelled Yeonpyeong island (it's just like Nantucket, Sarah), the would-be next Republic president said:

“We’re not having a lot of faith that the White House is going to come out with a strong enough policy to sanction what it is that North Korea is going to do... Obviously we gotta stand with our North Korean allies.”

Palin says in her new book that it is sexist to call her a bit thick and that her malapropisms don't really matter. It brings to mind the spin by a Bush aide after her candidate was unable to name several world leaders, including the heads of Pakistan and India, during the campaign for the 2000 election.

"He is seeking to be the leader of the free world, not a Jeopardy contestant," she said.

Still, the 2012 campaign will be a lot of fun if Failin' Palin goes all the way...

The loneliness of a long-distance Ashes follower

2010-11-24T21:00:00.002Z

If you want sports nostalgia, you can't do better than Frank Keating. The veteran Guardian writer, now in his seventies, only seems to be wheeled out these days to talk about sport when all the participants are dead, but he does it beautifully.

Take this piece on the Ashes, for instance. Keating recalls his 8-year-old self listening to the 1946-47 Ashes on the wireless while away at boarding school:

"It was the week before Christmas and I swear I can remember vividly still that telling first moment I twiddled through the hiss and crackle, the strident squeals and seashell static to deduce from a faraway voice with a metallic, self‑satisfied colonial twang that Australia had declared at 659 – Barnes 234, Bradman 234 – and England were on the way to a slaughter."

The first Test slaughter is a common part of my Ashes awareness. I was ten when England last won the opening Test of an Ashes Down Under and cricket had not yet seeped into my skin. I'm afraid I have no memories of the 1986-87 Ashes.

Other events from 1986 have stuck: Space shuttle Challenger exploding, I can definitely recall. I'm pretty convinced that I remember the Government announcing plans to build the Channel Tunnel, too (there's a joke in Asterix in Britain about needing to build one, so that is probably why the news stuck). I remember the Hand of God and the Jeremy Bamber murders, which happened in a village close to ours. I remember seeing The Great Mouse Detective, Disney's take on Sherlock Holmes, at the cinema. But I don't know if I took an interest in the Ashes and Gatting's success. For shame.

That was the last Ashes tour that I did not make a point of following and the last that England won. Since then, I have fanatically been glued first to the wireless - and, rather desperately, to Teletext - then to the internet and satellite TV. In three hours' time, I will start the ritual again as England attempt to beat our old friends in their own backyard for the first time since 1986.

It will be a lonely vigil, unless my month-old daughter decides to join me, and I am sure that I will not make it far past lunchtime on any day. And then I will wake when the baby wakes, probably with an hour to go in the evening session, and switch on the TV again, wondering for half a second whether England are still in the match or whether they have again been slaughtered.

Sixty-four years ago, Keating listened to the fourth Test as the slaughter continued and found enough brief joy in a short passage of play to send his mother a brief birthday card with the line:

"Dear Mum, Happy birthday, Bedser bowled Bradman for a duck, Your loving Francis x."

She never threw the card away. Today, children would probably send it as a tweet and it would be lost almost as soon as it was received. How sad.

I end this post with a delightful tale of Keating's about the passions that listening to the Ashes in bed can arouse:

"During that victorious 1987 England trek the Observer published an unforgettable letter from a reader, Vicky Rantzen, who told how her best girlfriend was making love to her husband at dead of night when, just as mutual passion was reaching its heady heights, she noticed something in his ear.

"Ardour dampened, she pulled away and asked him what it was? "Be quiet, woman, I'm listening to the Test match from Brisbane."

All change (apart from US, Brazil, Ireland and Yemen)

2010-11-22T15:23:00.003Z

There is a fascinating new world view over on the Strange Maps blog, which shows a revised atlas with the countries that have the biggest populations assigned to the countries with the largest areas. A larger, zoomable version of it is here.

China, the most populated country, gets to shift northwards and take over Russia, the largest land mass whose population is only ranked at No 9, which qualifies them to inhabit the space currently held by Kazakhstan. India, with the second largest population, takes over the vast mass of Canada.

Pakistan is given the whole of Australia to occupy, which at least ensures that there will still be winter cricket tours to the Antipodes, although the United Kingdom is now sitting where Niger usually is. Australia takes over Spain, which means that only Mexico stands as a buffer zone between the Ashes rivals. The UK is now occupied by Tunisia, which will upset the Daily Mail.

The USA, the third largest country in terms of population and area, stays where it is, as does Brazil, which is fifth in both lists. Less predictably, Yemen and Ireland also remain where they are. Does that make those four countries the most efficient on our planet? A small crumb of comfort in these troubled times for Ireland, perhaps.

Meanwhile, in a delightful twist, South Korea would take over South Africa, which should suit them fine until they inquire about who their new neighbours are. "So who's moved into Botswana then? Oh fuck, not North Korea again..."

Star Wars in art

2010-11-19T13:44:00.000Z

The ever-excellent Retronaut has some splendid mash-ups of Star Wars characters in classic art. I wonder where people get the time and talent, let alone the ideas...

Peer silenced for speaking his mind

2010-11-19T13:10:00.000Z

David Cameron can be quite menacing. Asked about Lord Young's comments yesterday, in which the Tory peer said that the majority of people had "never had it so good" during the recession and that some people did not have a right to state support, Cameron snarled: "I think he will be doing a bit less speaking in future."

Given that Lord Young is only an unpaid adviser to the Government rather than under collective responsibility, I don't see how Cameron has a right to silence him.

I know that Young's comments will be embarrassing for the Government and the opposition and trade unions have been predictably hysterical in condemning him. It would have been better if Young could have expressed sympathy for those who have lost ther jobs and are finding the economic situation tight.

But his basic points were not inaccurate. They certainly were not "offensive" as a Downing Street lackey called them. With interest rates at 0.5%, those for whom a mortgage is their main expenditure have done OK. This recession has been less calamitous for more people than other recessions.

There is belt-tightening and uncertainty, but not soaring costs for the majority. Very few people have had their homes repossessed. Government spending is only being cut back to the level it was three years ago. Some people are suffering and that is tragic, but it is a great shame that Cameron could not simply have said: "Those are his views, he is entitled to express them. It is not the view of me or my Government."

The Daily Mash makes a fair point:

The Tory peer was later forced to apologise for his sadistic, upper-class rightness, adding: "I'm very old. Look at my bow tie. I'm not right in the head.

"I now realise that if your income stays much the same and your biggest monthly expense goes down quite a lot then you're worse off. You don't need a PhD in maths to work that one out.

"And I don't know what I was thinking when I said some people think they have a right to state support. I suppose I must have just thought it was okay because it's a view shared by more than half the Cabinet and the vast majority of the people in this country.

"I'm so old. Can I have a cup of tea now?"

"Couple who met at university to marry"

2010-11-16T18:54:00.000Z

The Caledonian Mercury has the best take on today's big news:

Two people who went to university together are to get married, it has emerged.

William Windsor (or possibly Wales or possibly Saxe-Coburg-Gotha) and Kate Middleton, both 28, met at St Andrews University eight years ago.

Mr Windsor is a Flight Lieutenant in the RAF – and also a prince.

Wall-to-wall, dewy-eyed hysterical coverage can be found in every other media outlet.

Win the Ashes, win a beer

2010-11-16T18:33:00.001Z

Sorry for the delay in posting. Having a new child and the sleep-deprivation that brings has rather affected my energy levels.

Still, the Ashes is only nine days away and my baby daughter and I can start planning to stay up through the night watching England's efforts in Australia. Hopefully she can stop grizzling, even if we win the toss and choose to field in Brisbane.

One of my friends taught his baby to raise a finger at the mention of the words "Ricky Ponting" (an index finger, indicating "out", I'm assuming). I'll have to teach my daughter to chuckle at the words "Nathan Hauritz, Australia's best spinner".

There is a mood of pessimism over the Australia camp. For the first time in 24 years, England have headed Down Under as favourites. But now I hear that an Australian brewery has come up with an incentive to the nation. If the Aussies win the series, Carlton and United Breweries will give a free pint of beer to every Australian.

I'm not sure that weak Australian pissbeer would be much of an inducement to me to cheer on my side, but as a marketing gimmick goes, it could prove costly. With about 15 million adult Australians in the population, it is estimated that the promotion could cost the company £12 million.

Could Carlton and United end up regretting their gimmick in the same way as Hoover, who offered free flights to anyone who spent £100 on their products in 1992 and found themselves £50 million out of pocket? Or might England actually not lose the series and spare their blushes?

Pot... kettle...

2010-11-05T22:16:00.000Z

Rather surprising to see Simon Hughes, the Lib Dems deputy leader, pop up on the Ten O'Clock News to have a go at Phil Woolas, who he said had come "severely unstuck" after being found guilty of smearing his Lib Dem opponent during the election, behaviour that Hughes called "unacceptable".

Perhaps Hughes has forgotten that he benefited from dirty tricks when he was first elected as MP for Bermondsey in 1983 as his team ran a homophobic campaign against the Labour candidate, Peter Tatchell, that involved billing Hughes as "the straight choice" and wearing stickers saying "I've been kissed by Peter Tatchell".

Hughes, who revealed that he was bisexual four years ago, apologised for the 1983 campaign when he was running for his party's leadership and said that he never wanted to see a campaign run like that again. He is completely right, of course, but it might have been better to let another Lib Dem give Woolas a pasting. Glass houses and all that.

Disgraced Phil Woolas not even worthy to be called Mr

2010-11-05T21:06:00.000Z

Who says The Times has lost its thunder? Within hours of Phil Woolas, the shadow immigration minister, being found guilty of deliberately making false statements about an opponent in his election literature, the following email was sent round to Times staff by the paper's Chief Revise Editor:

"He should not get an honorific as he has been found wanting in the electoral court by High Court judges under Section 106 of the Representation of the People Act 1983. We remove honorifics for those convicted in criminal cases, and indeed for doctors, teachers who are, eg, struck off the register."

So the MP for Oldham East & Saddleworth (until the by-election) can carry on drawing a parliamentary salary and claiming on expenses while he appeals against the court ruling that he accused his Lib Dem opponent of pandering to Islamic militants, but the Paper of Record has already decided that he is no longer fit to be called Mr Woolas. That must sting. It is, of course, the correct thing to do.

By doing so, not only is Woolas lumped in with crims and bent quacks, he is also treated in the same way as sportsmen. The Times has long ruled that the Rooneys and Hensons of this world are not to be styled with an honorific. It just looks silly.

Which makes me wonder: now that Ann Widdecombe has moved from Parliament to the world of light entertainment, should she also be known as just plain Widdecombe, rather than Ms W?

The woofs to the left....

2010-11-04T12:15:00.002Z

A delightful anecdote on Iain Dale's blog:

On Wednesday night during a Commons vote, David Blunkett's guide dog took him towards to aye lobby, which of course is the lobby Government supporters normally vote in. Being nice guys, the Tory whips helpfully pointed out he ought to be voting no in the other lobby.

During a vote yesterday afternoon the dog again took Blunkett to the Government side of the committee room. Blunkett proceeded to explain to the assembled that although he was in opposition his dog was still in governing mode!

Some might argue that Blunkett's dog, Sadie, would perform the duties of an MP just as competently as much of the lobby fodder on either side of the House. Probably would charge less in living expenses too.

It was Sadie's predecessor, Lucy, who was famously sick on the floor of the Chamber during a speech by David Willetts, now the universities minister. If only frontbenchers today could match the quality of Lucy's interjection.

From ward 2 to Cell Block H in five days

2010-10-28T14:43:00.001+01:00

We experienced the best and the worst of the NHS during our recent stay in hospital. When they dealt with my wife, the midwives were wonderful. Hard-working, patient, encouraging and thoroughly competent. They were public-sector professionals at their very best.

The problem was how long it took to get anything done. If it wasn't absolutely urgent, there was a lot of waiting around. The three hours between my wife being admitted and them beginning to induce her for the first time was frustrating, but nothing compared to the 12-hour wait between the first and second induction (when it should have been six) or the 12 hours between them saying they would put her on a drip to kick-start labour and it happening.

And then there was the long wait to get sent home. My wife was given the all-clear by the doctor by 4pm on Tuesday. All that was needed was a bag of drugs from the pharmacy and a signature on a release form from a midwife. It took until 8.30pm before we could leave.

The pharmacist took his time, but the main hold-up was because the woman in the bed opposite needed to be processed first so she could be sent to prison. Oh yes. You don't get that sort of company in the Portland.

I don't know whether the soap opera that went on the other side of the curtain was amusing or desperately saddening. The woman (little more than a girl to look at) had given birth on Thursday and needed to attend court on Tuesday. While she was away being sentenced, her ratbag mother and sister alternated care for the baby with frequent cigarette breaks.

I never found out what she had done, but when she returned in the afternoon with two social workers in tow, we heard that she had been sentenced to four months in a secure mother-and-baby unit. Her new-born would start its life behind bars. Sadly, I suspect it won't be the last time it is there.

Her partner wept after an argument because he couldn't spend time with his child, but it was clear that he did not really understand his responsibility towards the family. Meanwhile, the sister expressed relief that her own partner's anger-management problems had gone and that her children "didn't know him when he was ill".

It seemed immoral that a woman could be made to attend court so soon after giving birth and she complained that she had been made to sit for so long in the court-room. Yet it wasn't her personal discomfort that distressed her but the fact that she had been "dying for a fag".

This was a snapshot of London's underclass that we rarely encounter outside of television, a cyclical deprivation that one fears can never be cured no matter how much money is thrown at it. The social workers were helpful - one offering advice on bus routes to the prison and suggesting how much the parents could save if they stopped smoking - but the suspicion was that it was a wasted effort.

Some could wonder if the American woman who was over here recently sterilising drug addicts for money should expand her remit, although regular contraception that is not self-administered would be better and more humane. Kindness and guidance is better than punishment, but how much kind advice sinks in?

The actors in this soap opera rarely develop beyond the childish state in emotional intelligence, so it is no wonder that most struggle to raise their own children.

As they left hospital after all the checks, the mother smiled. "Free at last," she said.

"Well, up to a point," replied her sister. For the underclass, they will never really be free.

Swing low sweet Harriet

2010-10-27T14:45:00.000+01:00

Delighted to announce the birth of the future England cricket captain/fly half/polymath and Archbishop of Canterbury - but most importantly, my daughter.

Harriet Elizabeth Nancy, known as Hattie, appeared at 6am on Monday after my wife had spent an Athertonesque 57 hours in hospital waiting for her to arrive.

I'm looking forward to spending the coming sleepless nights with her watching the Ashes. We spent our first night together watching old episodes of Bullseye and a Led Zeppelin concert. It's important to get them started on appreciating culture early, although I was glad that she nodded off before Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You as that could have been traumatic.

She shares a birthday with my good friend Bob Miller, captain of the PG Wodehouse Society cricket team, and also with the Battle of Agincourt and the Charge of the Light Brigade.

Office's Tim to play Bilbo

2010-10-22T14:00:00.000+01:00

I'm delighted to read that Martin Freeman will play Bilbo Baggins in the film version of The Hobbit. I think he'll be excellent in the role.

I like the idea of Richard Armitage (Lucas in Spooks) playing Thorin Oakenshield, the head dwarf, too. Presumably he'll be bearded, but he has a suitably grim expression.

Hopefully Sir Ian McKellen and Andy Serkis will take on the roles of Gandalf and Gollum that they played in The Lord of the Rings again.

My only bugbear about a film that I'm now beginning to look forward to hugely is that Peter Jackson, the director, is going to split the story into two films.

I know he has no discipline for cutting his work - the three LotR films would have each benefited from having half an hour chopped - but The Hobbit is not a big book, barely 400 pages. It could easily have fitted a three-hour film.

I guess the first film will do the whole Rivendell/Misty Mountains/Gollum story, maybe ending with the dwarves being rescued by the eagles from the wargs and finding sanctuary at Beorn's house (am I showing a worrying depth of knowledge here?). The second film could then take them through Mirkwood, up the lake and on to the battle with Samug (who really should be voiced by Alan Rickman, I think), but it still could be compressed.

Oh well, all this has got me wanting to go and read the book again. It is one of the great children's books of the 20th century, with arguably the most fabulous cover design, designed by Tolkien himself.