Andi McDowell

Apart from Four Weddings and a Funeral, what has she done that qualifies her to be the face of Loreal and invade my television at every single advert break??

Street Lights

Why do street lights go on or off just as I walk underneath them. This is happening too much to be a coincidence and I am getting a little scared.

Lights over Didcot

I'm not sure if I am going slightly mad (there's a Queen song in there somewhere...). but while out walking the dog tonight, I saw some very strange lights over Wittenham clumps. From the two mounds in the middle of Ladygrove you get a good view towards the mounds. There were some lights in the sky, some hovering (or at least staying in the same place) and some moving around at speed. They were definitely not fireworks, they didn't seem to be moving around correctly for planes and I'm struggling to find any real explanations. I don't think we are due for any shooting star showers in that direction (northeast), and it was not really dark enough or clear enough for them to be stars. There were reddish lights rather than the white lights more apparent with stars.

I am certainly not saying that they were UFOs but I can't find an immediate explanation.

Ho hum, all adds to the conspiracy theories.

I'm A Celebrity

Why? And more to the point, why with these non-entities?

Oxford Parking

Why are all the parking spaces in the Westgate car park in Oxford so small? It is well nigh impossible to get three sizeable cars betwen the concrete pillars. The council really need to hurry up with demolishing and replacing the car park.

Desert Island Discs

The following is an article I was persuaded (against my better judgement) to write for my company's newsletter. I publish it here for no particular reason, it just may be of interst to someone. Actually, that is fairly unlikely.


Distilling my music collection into 4 songs to take with me to a desert island (or possibly Didcot) was always going to be a challenge. Firstly, my iTunes collection has increased to over 13000 mp3s, so much that I can fit less than a quarter of it on my iPod at any one time. Secondly, some of the material on there is so obscure that very few of you would recognise the songs anyway! My shortlist ranged from classic rock (Iron Maiden, Metallica, Queensryche, Slayer) through eighties pop and stadium rock (U2, Bruce Springsteen, Huey Lewis, Del Amitri), blues (John Lee Hooker) and more modern rock (Avril Lavigne, REM, the Manics, Matchbox 20). I deliberately didn’t choose the soundtrack to my profession, “The Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats, as its awful!

For my first choice, “Grendel” by Marillion. I’m likely to be on this island for a considerable time, so a 17 minute escapist epic would come in handy to while away the hours. Its Fish at his most wordy, with an intricate arrangement worthy of more than just an obscure B side to a single which only just scraped the Top 40. Marillion were a much maligned and overlooked band, and taking Grendel means I don’t need to take Beowulf as one of my books! I used to present a late night rock show on university radio in Norwich: it was quite an achievement to only play 3 songs in an entire hour’s programme (you’re welcome to guess what the other 2 songs were). Somehow, I think this explains my audience ratings….

Second, “The Colours” by The Men They Couldn’t Hang. There is nothing like a bit of rebel rousing historical politics, “These are my last words before the scaffold and I charge you all to hear - how a wretched British sailor became a citizen mutineer.”

Third, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”, by the Levellers. A modern rendition of a country classic, fiddle playing with real attitude. One of those songs that causes a phenomenal amount of energy to spring from the speakers. Aural pleasure, indeed, so why was it only ever released as ‘B’ side? And it is superb live.

My final musical choice is basically anything by Magnum. Another hugely under-rated hard rock band of the 1980s and 1990s, they managed three Top 40 singles in 1988 but never made the big breakthrough. They did however look very out of place during their two appearances on Top of The Pops (but not as much as Iron Maiden, who were annoyed at having to mime so swapped instruments half way through the set). I remember seeing them live in Reading, with the unusual sight of someone asleep inside the bass speaker. I very much doubt it was a ‘natural’ sleep. Magnum spilt in the late 1990s, but reformed a couple of years ago and since then have released a couple of obscure (but still rather good) albums since. The song I have plumped for is Midnight (You Won’t Be Sleeping) from the Vigilante album, if only for the excellent saxophone solo.

My books are both extremely long, one of which I have read thirty or forty times, and one of which I keep failing to get beyond the first few chapters. Both classics but in different ways – J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (or possibly the Silmarillion), and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

I’m assuming that the rules stop me from taking a Lear jet or cruise ship as my luxury item, and I’m not going to be sensible and say a penknife. I’ll take a rugby ball – I can practice my drop kicks even if I’m not going to get much of a game!

Sinister phrases

It just occurred to me on re-reading a couple of my posts, that certain phrases creep in which cause me some concern:

• "all right-thinking people";
• "law-abiding citizens";
• "they";
• "the vast majority"

and a load of other phrases. This worries me, as I am doing what I dislike in others, i.e., generalisation and stereotyping.

Traffic Lights on the road to Milton Park

Is it just me, or does this article heading sound like the title of a 1970s concept album? I can see the artwork and triple gatefold sleeve now.

This is one that annoys me every morning. I drive from Didcot to Milton Park (mainly bacause I'm too fat and lazy to cycle) to go to work. There is a long straight piece of road which runs parallel to the railway track. It has one junction in the middle of it, a right turn into Didcot Power Station. In theory, cars coming from this entrance can only turn left onto the main road, as there are "no right turn" signs. I would add in a drawing but that would require more computer literacy that I possess - hopefully the above is clear.

This junction has traffic lights on it, whcih I admit is sensible. However, the seqencing and timing of the lights has no logic to it. The lights allow traffic across the junction from each of the three directions in turn. This means that if you are driving along the main road, you have to stop and wait for cars to come towards you on the opposite side of the road, when there is no possible way for them to cross your path. I don't have a problem with stopping to allow cars out from the side road, and indeed this is on a sensor so it only stops all the traffic on the main road if there is someone wanting to come out of the Power Station. However, a lot of cars coming from the Power Station turn right (against the signage). If they didn't do this and followed the correct instructions then there would never be a need to stop any traffic going towards Milton Park. Alternatively, as the traffic is all stopped anyway, then there is no reason for this to be a"left turn only" route. This leads to several problems:

• lots of cars run through the red lights, especially away from the busy times when the road can be completely empty: you can see the whole length of the road;
• cars break the "left turn only" rule routinely, making a mockery of the law itself;
• those law abiding citizens who stop at the lights get frustrated, as they are held up, seemingly for no good reason.

I have never seen any monitoring (police, cameras) on the junction, which leads to more and more abuses of the lights.

Obviously, a decision on how to set up the junction has been made somewhere within the local councils, I would guess at the Highways division of either Vale of the White Horse DC or Oxfordshire CC. I also know that in theory these councils are accountable to the electorate as they vote on the make up of the councils themselves. However, in actual fact you don't vote for the real decision makers as these are the people in permanent jobs (public sector/ civil service, etc.). They are tasked with making the decisions that actually affect the way that our lives are run. They will be accountable to the local council but are not themselves elected. I realise that stopping at one traffic light is not an enormous problem for me, but it illustrates the point nicely, and brings me on to the nature (and illusion) of the UK's brand of democracy which I might get onto in a different rant.

Having just got back from a few days in Athens I feel competely able to talk about democracy in all its historical forms. Of course, I only mean in my own usual uninformed way!

Ringtone adverts

Why do any voice-over artists for ringtone adverts have to have such high and squeaky voices ("only 50 p per tone"...).

Why on earth would you need up to 20 ring tones per month. That's 5 a week, so you'd change your ring tone nearly every day. Maybe its just because I loathe mobile phones, I only have one because Sam bought one to use abroad. Her Star Trek phone doesn't work abroad. However, I think that in the last year I have had about 5 phone calls or texts onto my phone and I have made about 10 calls out from it. The fact that I don't have any friends helps. It's cheap at least.

Also, why are the ringtone adverts the only ones which advertise on the satellite music channels, so in one ad break you get the exact same advert 3 or 4 times. I'd go and make a cup of tea except for the fact that I loathe that stuff as well.

Banning Hunting and Government Interference

There are some very interesting legal arguments about the government's attempt to ban hunting with dogs. For example, how do you prove that someone is actually hunting. Just because you meet up at a pub (say, the Fox and Hounds...) wearing hunting pink and with a large number of dogs, horns and hunting paraphenalia, this is not proof that you are actually hunting. A Chief Constable was on 5 Live this morning saying that the police would have to see a wild mammal and also see it being hunted in order to bring a case. Considering that most hunts don't result in a kill and a lot don't even find the scent of a fox anyway, these could be very difficult cases to bring!

It is also interesting that President Tony is suddenly worried about the combined effect of the bans of hunting and smoking in public places, especially coming up to the election (probably in May). How can someone with such a vast political majority and with his opposition in such deep disarray manage to get that worried about what he is doing. Could it possibly be that he realises that in pandering to the liberal middle classes he is alienating large portions of the electorate who don't like the vast amounts of government interference in all aspects of our lives.

Let's just count up the major interferences:

• banning smoking in pubs
  
• banning hunting


• vast increases in school beaurocracy and testing for the sake of testing


• enforced metricism (if that is a word)


• vastly increased proscriptive H&S legislation

Several of these were just as bad under the Conservatives, and the H&S bits are a result of the UK having to take on bad proscriptive EU law rather than devloping our own risk-based legislation. All taken together, they show a government hell-bent on controlling every aspect of our lives. I am not necessarily arguing that some of the above are not good ideas, but each one has alienated another section of the community. Surely this is not the right way to use a massive parliamentary majority, just to force your views on others?

Sam has a blog

My wife is a better ranter than me. Not only does she beat me at University Challenge and Mastermind most weeks (and note I said "most" not "all" - I need to retain some element of pride!), but she makes more coherent, succinct, terse and wonderfully phrased points than I do.

Humbug. Humbug.


Humbug, Mr Baldrick?

The Sun's Dream Team

It gets worse. I now have a total of 306 points, and am in 444722nd in the league. That's out of a total of 473980 entrants. Vast acres of ground between me and any chance of winning anything. There is one person with 0 points, obviously going for rock bottom. His team is:
Gallacher (Norwich)
Caldwell (ex Newcastle)
Woodgate (ex Newcastle)
Powell (Charlton)
Thome (ex Bolton)
Le Tallec (ex Liverpool)
Linderoth (ex Everton)
Juninho (ex Middlesbrough)
Dichio (ex West Brom)
Di Canio (ex Charlton)
Owen (ex Liverpool)

Ho hum, roll on the new Football Manager 2005.

Letter from the HSE

The following is a letter to the Editor of The Times from the Chairman of the HSE.

Sir,

The suggestion that children should wear safety goggles whilst playing conkers is just the type of thing that gives sensible health and safety a bad name.

The issue of requiring Head Teachers to ensure children wear safety goggles whilst playing conkers is not something HSE would ever be involved in, the notion that HSE has inspectors monitoring playground activities across the country is nonsense. Obviously safety goggles are very important within the correct environment, for example, whilst using cutting equipment. HSE inspectors will be inspecting, where there is a real workplace risk, to ensure that these risks are managed effectively.

BILL CALLAGHAN
Chair, Health & Safety Commission