Swallows & Blind Amazonians

No. 1 son and his friend got a bit excited in the hire boat yesterday and managed to knock my glasses off while I was focussed on steering. My only pair of varifocals were caught by No. 1 son's flailing arms and ended up doing a Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Managed to get back to the landing stage OK, despite being half blind, and purchsed an exhorbitantly priced pair of reading glasses to tide me over.

It's obvious to me that lost spectacles is a common occurrence here, and the local branch of Boots (the only purveyor of specs in the area) has taken advantage of this. The cheapest, half decent pair of glasses were £18, compared to the normal tenner. However, it's a clear case of the law of supply and demand and I can't complain.

No. 1 son was extremely distraught and consumed with guilt - unless of course he's using a particularly nasty and highly effective form of child psychology on me. Kids are very clever creatures and one should never underestimate their animal cunning.

I didn't give in to his demand that I hire a DVD for him so that he could assuage his guilt, so he and his mate went off to do some crabbing from the harbour wall instead.

The London Borough of Salcombe

I used to wonder why older people let rip when sneezing and didn't try to stifle them. I can say now from personal experience that it's a fear of letting rip from t'other end (and following through).

We're currently having a few days in Salcombe in Devon. Half of London must be here!

The Londoners seem to have a uniform comprising lots of blue and white clothing combined with very expensive deck shoes, despite them obviously never having been near a boat in their entire lives. There are also lots of blinged-up women who seem to have spent a considerable amount of money on poor facial reconstruction and botox.

Salcombe, like St Ives in Cornwall, has a very narrow main drag called Fore St. It would seem to me that there's a local rule that you can only drive down Fore St if you have a bloody great 4x4 loaded with moody kids.

Went to the Salcombe Harbour Hotel yesterday to collect one of my son's friends who is going to be staying with us till Friday. Saw a woman who was trying to leave her parking spot back her humungous 4x4 into a Mercedes Kompressor, with a resultant expensive sounding noise. She immediately started to cry.

I'm hiring a small motorboat today to take the boys Swallows and Amazoning in the creeks. Just my luck that the 4 hours hire I managed to secure coincides with low tide. I guess the boys will resemble a couple of mud skippers by the time I get them back to the flat.

BP - the Film

Not sure about you, but I sense another Michael Sheen film on the horizon.

Tony Hayward (left) and Michael Sheen (right).

Call Out the Dogs

Saw a news article last night about the alarming increase in dog fighting in the UK and the legislation to prevent this. Personally, if someone wants to fight a dog then I believe no-one should interfere with this – I suspect the dog would normally come off best in such an altercation, unless of course one were to be fighting a Chihuahua or toy poodle or using knives.

What concerns me more than dog fighting is the increase in dog ‘grooming’. If it’s illegal to groom children, then surely the animal rights activists should be lobbying for dogs to be similarly protected from such perverts?

Stage One

Boy-shed MkI - the start.

A Bigoted Study in Stone

Buckingham Palace yesterday banned a hideous, right-wing bigot from the Queen’s Garden Party. The Palace later apologised to HRH the Duke of Edinburgh for the mistake and allowed him to attend. The Duke said he relished the attention and publicity the Palace’s action provided him. He was later harangued by a bunch of bigots who called him a bigot.

A massive European study has shown that the key to losing weight is to eat less meat. I have a simpler solution that doesn’t require a cohort of 40,000 or millions of Euros – just eat less of everything.

Archaeologists have found what has been termed a twin to Stonehenge in Wiltshire, Who are they trying to kid? It’s obviously a Neolithic visitors’ centre.

The Boy-Shed

My eldest son (aged 12) has come to live with us on a permanent basis. That posed a problem given we live in a 33 foot mobile home with one bedroom.

Our solution was to purchase an 8 foot by 10 foot shed, raise it in a platform butting on to the caravan, cut a hole in the caravan and join the two together, insulating said shed with 2 inches of polystyrene and sheathing it with ply. The hole between the caravan and the shed will enable a decent heat transfer in winter from the wood burner, which will be backed up with an oil-filled radiator in the shed.

A bit drastic, but needs must when you have an active 12 year-old to look after and both parties need a bit of privacy (and when he likes watching programmes we don't particularly enjoy, plays video games and has a bass guitar).

The shed will actually have better insulative properties than the caravan, which seems to have nothing more than a nanometre-thin layer of fibreglass between the inner and outer walls.

The plinth has been built and the shed arrives tomorrow - and we go on holiday for a week on Saturday.

I hope to provide photos of the final boy-shed in a couple of weeks.

The War on Drugs

Nicholas Green QC, chairman of the UK Bar Council, has said: “"A growing body of comparative evidence suggests that decriminalising personal [drug] use can have positive consequences; it can free up huge amounts of police resources, reduce crime and recidivism and improve public health. All this can be achieved without any overall increase in drug usage. If this is so, then it would be rational to follow suit. A rational approach is not usually the response of large parts of the media when it comes to issues relating to criminal justice.”

Drug related crime costs the country £13bn per annum. Just think how much this could provide in terms of public services.

Some MP (and I can’t remember his name) has said that this is an argument for legalising everything. This is an example of the classic ‘thin end of the wedge’ argument, which is intellectually bankrupt and a well known red herring favoured by the bigoted and dull.

Operating on the Edge of Chaos

You know, the more connections something has the more unstable it becomes. I’m not talking in the engineering sense where additional rigid connections actually stabilise a structure, but loose connections affecting something – like the economy, your own brain or the weather. In these cases increasing the interconnected and dependent nodes adds complexity and moves the whole system closer to the edge of chaos, where it sits waiting for the final nudge from a totally unexpected source to tip it into a fully chaotic state of collapse.

Think of adding individual grains of sand to a pile of the stuff; before long just an additional grain can tip the balance, chaos is achieved and the whole pile collapses until it reaches a new state of equilibrium.

The world’s financial institutions and economies are linked in this manner; we buy each others’ derivatives and financial instruments, exporting them across national boundaries while all the time edging the system toward a chaotic state. When a critical point is reached the slightest critical factor among a myriad can result in a cataclysmic collapse of the entire system, which is just what happened when the global financial melt-down occurred (and why economics is no better at being able to predict a financial collapse than astrology).

Given the foregoing, I think that it’s high time that regulators introduced financial firebreaks to prevent too many interdependent connections.

I was reading a copy of Liverpool Life over the weekend (something about the Toxteth Literary Festival or the Everton Opera House) and thought Liverpool could be such a firebreak: before the system collapses in its entirety we arrange things such that Liverpool is obliterated from the map first as a warning of over-criticality.

Scouse Humour

Overheard while on holiday:

The Chairman and family were sharing a holiday cottage in North Wales with the Chairman’s brother and his wife.

Joe, the very affable Scouse owner of the cottage, commented: “Jan – your brother looks very much like you, but it doesn’t seem to bother him.”