Lacking a sense of ...

Here goes with a rant: Why do so many women appear to have no inborn sense of danger?

If you drive, you'll sooner or later come across a vehicle stopped on your side of the road, at night, on an unlit road, with some hapless bloke hauling out the spare wheel and jack. Chances are you won't actually see this until the very last split second, because his female passenger will be standing behind the car (observing? supervising?) and she'll be - I can almost guarantee this - standing in just the right place to obscure your view of his offside rear light.

So - do you swerve (at night on an unlit road, remember) and maybe hit another unseen gawping bystander who's in the wrong place? Do you jam on the brakes and pray you don't squash the gormless wench against the rear of her fella's car because the driver that's too close behind you slams into your unexpectedly-braking car?

Once, I too had a flat tyre on an unlit, twisting, narrow country lane. Guess what my wife did? And then accused me of "bullying" when I tried to persuade her not to stand immediately behind the offside rear light.

We're all at it

During a visit to Bangladesh I was assured that the British don't suffer the kind of corruption endemic in, shall we say, certain developing countries. Politely, I explained that corruption certainly exists in the UK but is conducted with more subtlety than in some parts of the world.

Soon afterwards the MPs' expenses scandal broke. But nothing could have prepared us for the spate of revelations and allegations surrounding Rupert Murdoch's News International. Nobody in their right mind would have even imagined - until it happened - that NI would shut down the 168-year-old News of the World, biggest-selling Sunday that ran at a healthy profit.

As for the farce of Murdochs, senior and junior, before the House of Commons select committee, the resignation of Metropolitan Police high-ups, the cosy links between members of Parliament, the Press and the Police ... words fail me.

Makes you laugh and cry

Have a look at hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com and tell me if it doesn't make you howl with laughter as well as put a lump in your throat. The writer/illustrator is the nearest I've seen to a genius since Charles Schultz died.

Not half bad

If you want to check the class status of a new acquaintance (and which English person doesn't, if a trifle guiltily, want to do this?) I offer a simple test. Tell them a friend saw a film/watched a play/read a book and told you it "wasn't half bad." Ask them how your friend rated the experience.

Middle-class folk, as well as most Yanks, will tell you your friend thought the film/play/book was pretty good. Working class people will understand that it was worse than bad, it was execrable ;   the same interpretation will be put forward by those of working class origin who are merely pretending to be middle class.

Double negatives

This has bugged me since I was a lad: most languages accept the double negative (as in "I never saw none of them") simply as a more emphatic negative; pedantic teachers of English insisted - perhaps still do - that "never seeing none" meant the speaker had at some time seen at least some of whatever was referred to. Speakers of everyday English, as opposed to commentators on the language, use the double (or triple, quadruple, even quintuple) negative as increasingly emphatic versions of the simple negative. Where I grew up, a speech such as "I ain't never seen ne'er a one of 'em, not never" would be accepted as a vigorous denial. It might also provoke suspicion that the speaker was protesting too much, but that's beside the (linguistic) point.

Trailblazers for M Jackson

I forgot to mention "Mr and Mrs Smith's Five Little Boys" and the umpteen-million record selling Mills Brothers. See more at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mills_Brothers

but don't ask me what happened to the Smith Brothers I remember well from 1950s radio. There seem to have been any number of groups calling themselves by that name or something very similar.

Guardian loses it

Of all the newspapers to have a front page lead on the death of Michael Jackson, the Guardian was the last I'd have expected. Not only that, they gave us an umpteen-page supplement on the man with Saturday's edition.

All this for a pop singer? Are they taking the Murdoch route?

Whatever happened to news values?

DNA database

If the Metropolitan Police, as reported, investigate some MPs for alleged expenses fraud, will those MPs have DNA samples taken? If so, will those samples be stored on the DNA database, even if they're acquitted, or even not charged, as happens to everyone else?

Or will a busy Parliament find time to change the rules?

Or, will it be a case of rules applying to everyone except Members of Parliament?

Your guess is as good as anyone's.

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson, King of Pop? Blazed a trail for other black artists?

BULLSHIT!

He followed Diana Ross (and the Supremes), Aretha Franklin, Martha and the Vandellas, Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstine (both big in the 1950s), Leslie Hutchinson ("Hutch") the black West Indian singer popular immediately before, during and after World War Two, the Inkspots (ditto) and Paul Robeson, to mention just a few.

Martha, in her 60s, is not only touring Britain just now; back home she's a busy Detroit City Council member. You don't have to be wacko to be talented.

Please, let's have no more synthetic grief for a reasonably talented yet flawed (aren't we all) individual most of us never met.

Public disaffection

All MPs should have a page like www.dearjacqui.co.uk/ devoted to them. I say this because some, Jacqui Smith included, don't always reply to or even acknowledge receipt of emails sent to their official email address.

Dangblast it! Didn't she pay her husband with our money to do the clerical stuff back in her "second" home in Redditch? What was he doing when he should have been acknowledging my emails? Oh yes, that's right! Part of the time at least he was viewing dodgy stuff that was later "by mistake" claimed on her expenses.

He spent another part of his time writing numerous letters in support of Jacqui's policies to local newspapers, signing them "Richard Timney" (his real name) but failing to add that he is married to one of the most repressive Home Secretaries we've ever had.

There are more restrictions on our freedoms now than there were during World War Two, when we all had to have national ID cards. I've never met anyone who was ever asked to produce their civilian ID card in that period, when national security was genuinely threatened.

Two things most people don't know about WW2 ID cards:

1. They were made of cardboard;

2. They did not (repeat not) have a photograph;

3. They were valid until 1948, the year the National Health Service started. The alphanumeric code unique to your ID card became your NHS identification.

(I just remembered number 3 while typing the first two.)