Donkin Life

A month of pictures

2012-02-01T15:02:00.001Z

Well that's January over. I feel as if I've been on a photography course the whole month, having taken hundreds of images, mostly while walking the dogs. Each day an image has been fed in to Blipfoto, a fun photography site set up for that very purpose.

In between I've been tackling some thorny bits in my novel and I'm a lot happier now, but I'm going to keep on revising a little longer.

At last we're getting some raw winter weather with maybe some snow this week. That would be good. It's been difficult over the past few days since Pippa, our Jack Russell has been in season - still is - and our 12-year-old Westie, Dougie, has shown that there's life in the old dog yet. He won't leave her alone. But then, she's just as bad. We really could do without a couple of randy dogs under our feet the whole time.

I'm not convinced he's up to it but we're taking no risks. If these dogs were people, he'd have been locked up - it's all too much and we'll be glad when it's over. We thought Dougie was on his last legs when we got the puppy in the spring but she seems to have done him the world of good. He's enjoying his walks again although we limit those now to about three miles maximum, while she can keep going all day. There's a lot of puffing and wheezing from the old lad now but, in spite of his age, he's not yet out for the count.

Still, he's too old and she's too young for us to be having any thoughts of breeding, even if it was possible. Jack Russell Westies? Perish the thought. Cute though.

I've been reviewing the images I took in January to feature my favourite three here sifted from this gallery.
The first is our cymbidium orchid, then there's a sculpture in Yorkshire Sculpture Park and finally one of my many salmon fly boxes below.

Ruffled feathers

2012-01-22T18:37:00.000Z

Watts Gallery in Compton, near Guildford was restored a little while back for something around £10m, mostly supplied from the UK national lottery fund. There seems general agreement that the gallery was a treasure worth saving and, to be sure, the restoration has been faithful to the original designs.

And yet..... I remember visiting before the restoration began. Buckets were spread around under the leaking ceiling and every chair was decorated with a sprig of holly to deter anyone from sitting on it, in case it broke. There was a charm to the place, but it was clear that something needed to be done.

The workshop of Victorian artist George Frederic Watts was dusty and eccentric with plaster casts of arms, legs and torsos hanging from the walls. Today it's much tidier and the gallery looks pristine with its restored wooden tiled floor and rich emerald and red wallpapers. But so it should. The place is only the size of a very large house and when you see all those quality builds on Grand Designs for a fraction of this project's costs it does make you wonder where all the money was spent.

Pre-restoration, entry was free with voluntary donations. Today it costs £6.50 with an extra £1 "gift aid" donation, so that's £7.50 each unless you have the brass neck to decline the voluntary bit. I was keen to take photographs as I had in the past and made the mistake of asking first; no photography allowed, said the lady at the door.

I hate these policies. I can understand that galleries may not want flash photographs; I can even go along with the idea a clicking camera might disturb people in the main gallery. But down in the once dusty workshop I could see no harm. It didn't bother the trustees pre-2008, so why now? "You can take a picture from outside looking in to the workshop," said the lady. Well that's big of you, I thought.

With one or two exceptions, I'm not a big fan of Watt's paintings. It strikes me he spent most of his time sucking up to Victorian sentimentality and, indeed, he was a highly successful artist in his own lifetime. Watts was a hot number on both sides of the Atlantic.

Even today Watts has his admirers. I was surprised to discover that Barack Obama had declared Hope, a painting by Watts, his favourite work of art. And, even though I'm not too keen on his work, I will admit there is much to admire about Watts, the man. A small exhibition in the gallery explained how Watts was at the forefront of a national campaign in the UK to outlaw the 19th century plumage trade that was destroying populations of exotic birds to supply a big demand for fancy feathers in women's hats.

Campaigning against this destructive trade appears to have been every bit as organised as that in the 1980s and 90s against the fur trade. Yes, there's much to admire about Watts; his wife, Mary, too since she was an equally gifted artist whose energy was largely responsible for mobilising the skills of Compton's villagers in reviving neglected pottery-making skills. It was the villagers who built and decorated the nearby chapel to Mary Watt's designs (above and below).

To my knowledge Watts never declared himself a socialist, but he was a champion of the working class, commemorating in Postman's Park, London, the sort of tragedies, such as a tradesman dying in a boiler accident, that might otherwise have earned a paragraph in a local newspaper. I wonder what he would have thought to the plaque inside the gallery that divides those who have given generous donations in to "Gold Patrons" and plain bog standard patrons who obviously didn't give as much as the golds.

I detest this trend within the charity sector. I doubt if it is welcomed by many donors either. Yes, it's fine to record donations, where people have not requested anonymity. But creating a hierarchy based on the size of donation is simply crass. I can't believe that either George or Mary Watts would have put their names to that.

Fallow Deer in Petworth Park

2012-01-03T17:49:00.000Z

Three days in to the new year I'm trying to get down to work again but I can't shake of this photography bug. I've always enjoyed taking photographs but the commitment to take one a day and post it here on Blipfoto is in danger of taking over my life. It's a great community quite unlike some of those nit-picking photography clubs or sites where members critique their images on the finer points that most people never notice.

Coming from a journalistic background I understand that the most important thing of any image is to be there with a camera to take it. After that it's a question of framing it and hopefully getting it in focus and exposed reasonably well. It's amazing how many people struggle to do even that. But no matter how amateurish your attempt, no-one on Blipfoto is going to make you feel small. I love the place and the daily commitment is improving my photography all the time. The problem then is that of become ever more demanding of myself.

But that was the same with writing. Mind, I don't try to write clever prose any more, just string the words together and move on. I'm trying not to get so steamed up, as only the media can, about all the news out there. I used to want to change the world. Now I just let those who feel that way, get on with it.

Anyway, while Blipfoto will get one image a day I've decided to post my favourite image among those I've taken of each month here. The one above is a favourite from December: Fallow deer in Petworth Park.

Blipping v Blogging

2011-12-28T12:58:00.001Z

It's some time since I wrote a blog here. It's not because I have nothing to say or to get steamed up about, far from it. It's almost entirely down to a growing interest in photography and a daily commitment to file a picture (like the one featured here of the beach at Estoril) on Blipfoto where my member name is Earthwatcher.

I found Blipfoto through a service called Pushnote. If you use the web at all - and let's face it, many of us do - I would recommend two internet services for finding interesting web sites. One of these, which I have used for some years now, is Stumbleupon. Stumbleupon allows you to list your interests, then feeds you web pages that it thinks may interest you every time you press the Stumble button that is loaded on to your toolbar when you download the software.

Pushnote is a little different in that web pages are recommended by individuals who you follow and who may follow you. In that sense it borrows some of the features of Twitter . But, unlike Twitter, it is not simply about making a statement. Whoever files a Pushnote is pointing you (or pushing you, hence the name) to a web page they have enjoyed or found interesting or useful.

It was a Pushnote link that took me to Blipfoto. I enjoy photography, have had some pictures published professionally, and maintain picture galleries on another website, this one a subscription service called Smugmug.

I know that for those who use the internet only cursorily some of these references may sound a lot of nonsense. But, believe me, each of these services can enrich the way you interact with the internet. On the other hand, there is no doubt that they do draw you in and if you're not careful you may end up spending more time than you bargained for on such sites.

Another draw on my time, beyond book-writing, is playing games made by John and Rob, our two eldest boys. We always play their new games to test them out and sometimes these games, like other parts of the internet, can eat up time you simply can't spare.

I don't expect the blog frequency to improve any time soon as, in between the gaming, the photography and the web posting, I have to make a living. The attraction of living somewhere remote is growing by the day. I'm thinking, maybe Orkney. One way or another I suspect 2012 is going to be quite an eventful year for the Donkins.

Public execution

2011-12-01T14:43:00.001Z

I went on strike once and a little old lady, who must have been Jeremy Clarkson's grannie, came up to us as we stood around our brazier on picket duty and said we should be put up against a wall and shot. She was entitled to her opinion and we all took it in good heart.

I suspect people might have taken Clarkson's comments on The One Show last night equally lightly had he not said that yesterday's public sector strikers should be "executed in front of their families." It was tasteless in the extreme and certainly inflammatory, but nothing out of the ordinary in exchanges you might hear down at the local Conservative club.

Clarkson has form for such wanton disregard for public taste. He might argue that it is part of his brand and therefore should be dismissed as "just Clarkson being Clarkson". In the same vein Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand were just being themselves when they made cruel remarks about Andrew Sachs on late night radio.

And because they made such remarks, they had to go. It was right that they did and both seem to be re-instating their careers after an incident that was soon going to be water under the bridge in the liberal, forgiving world of celebrity land.

Clarkson knows there is no such thing as bad publicity and just now he has something to sell. Every outrageous comment and every tweet or blog (like this one) that responds is pumping yet more oxygen in to an over-inflated ego.

There are a lot of things to admire in the man. He is an articulate and talented writer and broadcaster and had I known him during his early career in Yorkshire newspapers when we would have been contemporaries - he is three years younger than me - I dare say we might have been drinking mates. You had to sink or swim in the banter that exchanged between journalists in those days and I had colleagues at the Yorkshire Post who would have eaten a young Clarkson alive.

I suspect he has become too successful, too rich and far too famous to give two hoots about what anyone thinks of him, including the management of the BBC. I doubt if he will care much if it is he who has to face the firing squad, however metaphorically. He knows he has a franchise he can take almost anywhere and ITV will probably be waiting with the readies for anything he has to offer. But he doesn't think this will happen because he belongs to a small coterie of people in all walks of life who believe they have become unsackable.

I'm not sure that the unions, the TV executives and the viewing public should become too worked up by what he said. It will only play to the sympathies of his hard-core following if they do so. Be in no doubt there will have been quite a lot of people watching their TVs yesterday who would have said "right on Jeremy" in response to his remarks about gilt-edged public sector pensions. He had a point to make and he made it a little more emphatically than the average politician because he doesn't care a damn about niceties. You wouldn't recruit someone like Clarkson in to the diplomatic corps.

We must wait and see if the police become involved, as the unions hope they will, but I would argue that the best way to deal with his remarks if they offended you is to remember them. Remember them, as I will, when tempted to tune in to another rollicking episode of Top Gear.

If you don't like Clarkson, or any other boorish TV celebrity for that matter, one way to respond is to turn them off, ignore their columns and leave their books on the shelf. I've done that for years but these people have a habit of popping up and saying something more outrageous than ever. Perhaps the only answer, come the revolution, will be to drag them in to the street and.......

But not Clarkson. Shooting's too good for him. As die-hard liberals, I think we would need to show some compassion and be satisfied with the kind of punishment meted out to the dissenters of old. How about if he was hanged, drawn and quartered, his innards hung from lampposts and his severed head planted on a spike above Tower Bridge? That'd learn him.

On the other hand, in mitigation, he did once punch Piers Morgan. That alone may be enough to grant him a pardon. But he's had enough pardons hasn't he?

Woman on a tram, England 2011

2011-11-29T09:37:00.001Z

I had other things to do this morning before something on the internet, one of the hundreds of links and pointers that flash across our screens these days, persuaded me to look at this clip of a woman mouthing racial abuse at her fellow passengers on a tram.

I have provided the link and no doubt you will click on it as I did, but let me warn you that if you are British it will spoil your day if you have any shred of pride in what it is to be British. And if you are not British you may feel pity and sadness for what has happened to a nation that believes its national psyche is underpinned by tolerance, fairness and a sense of common decency.

It's shocking, not so much for what is said - although that is indeed shocking - but because of the circumstances of the film. A young woman is sitting on a crowded tram, somewhere in or near London I would guess. A child is sitting on her lap. Unprompted, the woman begins a loud and abusive tirade against foreigners and black people, saying they have no right to be in the UK. Fellow passengers, some of them black, some not, object, but she won't be silenced. All the while, the young boy on her lap, sits passively.

I am sure that incidents such as this, while relatively uncommon, are certainly not isolated. The woman represents a persistent vein of intolerance that continues to stain our nation and trample over the responsibilities enshrined in the right to free speech. This is a woman on a bus, but yesterday Scotland Yard announced that it would be interviewing John Terry, the former captain of the England football team, about racist remarks he is alleged to have made against Anton Ferdinand in a recent match between Chelsea and Queens Park Rangers.

I, and many more like me, like to think we live today in a society that has overcome the prejudices of the past. Walking around London, the evidence would support that conclusion. Everywhere I go people seem respectful of each other and that respect, generally, is genuine. It's not a facade.

But there are places, and I wish they didn't exist, that seem unable to escape an innate tribalism, passed, as I fear will happen in this woman's case, from mother to son. I want to believe that people can change, but I doubt that there is a corrective therapy in the land that will change this woman.

She represents an unwanted strand of DNA in a society that, by and large, seeks to live in harmony. It was too bad for those other passengers on the tram. When I was young we had conductors on public transport who were there to ensure that people behaved properly. Now we rely on collective restraint and politeness. Just occasionally our restraint is challenged as it was here, but her fellow passengers behaved with a dignity this woman simply did not posses.

Perhaps she suffers from some stress-related disorder, but that wouldn't excuse the content of the outburst. Her reactions didn't strike me as unthinking but sentiments that were deeply ingrained in her upbringing. She lives with people who think and speak as she does. And from such suppurating pools of hatred, emerged the killers of Stephen Lawrence. Whatever the outcome of the Lawrence trial, it's sad to be reminded that even today, the most loathsome vestiges of racism continue to flourish just a bus ride away.

Pippa at eight months

2011-11-27T17:41:00.000Z

It's some time since I wrote about Pippa, our Jack Russell Terrier, now eight months old. She's still very much a puppy but she's left that cuddly puppy phase behind and entered what I'd call her teenage phase. And just as many parents, seasoned to the art of rearing young children, are shell-shocked by teen rebellion, we have had to get used to a dog who has decided to push the boundaries.

The call: "Pippa come," worked fine a few months ago in the garden with treat-training. But it counts for nothing out on the commons with all their distractions. We haven't yet suffered anything as embarrassing as this, but have had to get used to running to fetch her back when she runs off to play with other dogs.

I take a harder line in the training than Gill but I'm not sure it's the best way. She seems to respond better with Gill. To some extent there's been some parental stereotyping. It's not quite "wait until your father gets home," but she knows when I'm cross with her and runs to Gill who she's decided is the soft touch. Just like our kids did.

What's really galling is when you ask her to do something and you know she understands what you're saying but decides to ignore it anyway.

All that aside, having a young dog is getting us out, exploring the area and finding new walks. The challenge now is to find a walk with few other dogs, not easy in Surrey. But there are plenty of paths over the Army ranges between Pirbright and Aldershot. I suppose the military uses these ranges from time to time, but we never see any sign of them. They must be well camouflaged.

We found some good paths today when the sun was shining through the trees and late November suddenly didn't seem so bad.

Shower scene

2011-10-26T18:58:00.000Z

I love art galleries. I put it down to the slide shows of great paintings we had in school and the enthusiasm shown by our art teacher, Bob Donald. I can remember him now, as if it was yesterday, describing the lush bits in a Renoir nude. For prebubescent boys it was heady stuff.

So these days I rarely go to a big city without heading for the art gallery. Princeton was a surprise since its relatively small gallery on the campus had a fantastic collection, including the Van Gogh coach detailed below.

There are not many galleries where you are actively encouraged to get in to the exhibit but this was the case at Grounds For Sculpture, a large sculpture park established by John Seward Johnson, a sculptor whose work has sometimes been described as kitsch. Kitsch or not, I couldn't resist the chance to help this young lady find her soap (above). It's a work called Employee Shower by Carole Feuerman. Seward Johnson himself specialises in making sculptures of scenes from famous paintings, as in this depiction of Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party (below). He likes to put himself and his pals in to these works. Not my cup of tea, but arresting nonetheless.

It was dark when we were shown around the park but that just added to the interest for sculptures such as the one below. Yes, Grounds for Sculpture is not your run of the mill kind of gallery.

It's not easy, being green

2011-10-26T12:58:00.000Z

Donkin life has just gone green. There's a reason for this. Partly I wanted to mess around with the customisation options at Blogger.com. But I also wanted to use Donkingreen somewhere on my website. Yes that's right, Donkingreen. Not pea green or Lincoln Green or British Racing Green, but Donkin Green. It's mine. I own it, paid £5 for it to UNICEF here so it's money well spent. It even has its own code: #1a4604 and that's the colour on the masthead.

But you can't own a colour, you may say. Perhaps not, and my ownership is unlikely to be tested since you have my full permission to use Donkingreen anytime you like. I won't even be miffed if you don't call it Donkingreen and give it some other name.

What right has UNICEF to sell colours to anyone, you may ask? Probably none at all. Colours don't have rights. But I'm sure that if they did, they'd be prepared to wave them all in a good cause. Strictly, UNICEF is selling shades rather than colours since you'd be hard put to distinguish Donkin green from many other shades of olive green, or should that be many other shades of Donkin Green? Maybe I have set my sites too narrowly. Why settle for Donkin green when there's a whole world of green out there. But I'm not greedy. I'm very happy with Donkin green and if you happen to be green with envy, go get your own colour, there must be millions left in the 16.7m shades identified in the sale.

Of course some people, or rather some companies, can become quite covetous of their colours. The Financial Times tried to claim copyright on its FT pink a few years back until a judge quite rightly rejected the claim. Then easyJet and Orange, the mobile phone company got worked up about the colour Orange. Now Christian Louboutin has been seeing red after one of its rival brands, Yves St Laurent had the audacity to produce a red soled shoe. Christian Louboutin thinks any other women's shoe manufacturer producing red-soled shoes is ripping off an exclusive design. And Tiffany agrees, sticking its oar in to the case in order to bolster its own claim for Tiffany green.

Good grief. What has the world come to when a shoe company sues over the bit that scrapes the pavement? If Christian Louboutin was to give the money it is spending on legal fees to UNICEF it could just about corner the market on red.

A walk in New York

2011-10-26T09:45:00.007Z

In time the memorial to the victims of the attack of New York’s World Trade Centre in 2001 will be accessible to all who happen to be in the vicinity. But for now, since its opening last month a decade after the attack, it can only be accessed using a pre-booked ticket.

I'd thought, mistakenly, I would just be able to pop in on a short visit to New York this week but the memorial was shut away for all who had not pre-booked. It’s the American way – pre-book and stand in line. They were even standing in line on 5th Avenue on Sunday to get through the door of Abercrombie and Fitch and to buy new iPhones from the Apple box. Recession? What recession?

I went down to the financial district anyway, partly to see the extent of the Occupy Wall Street protest. The protestors have taken up residence in a park. I have some sympathy with the anger at the bankers and financial people who have let us all down. The world is facing environmental melt down - dwindling fresh water supplies, over-population and finite supplies of fossil fuels, not to mention climate change, and yet the economists only know one song: "we have to go for growth."

But this financial model is out of tune with public need. Yes, people are still queuing at the doors of branded clothing shops, but a lot more people are waking up to the understanding that the richest proportion of humanity has too much stuff while billions of others are scraping by on very little.

On the day I headed down to New York's financial district the Wall Street Journal ran an article bemoaning the trend of spenders and borrowers turning in to savers. This, it said, was a real economic problem. Little wonder then, that all kinds of activists have parked themselves off Wall Street and outside St Paul's Cathedral. These people may not have any co-ordinated responses, but they know in their hearts that something is wrong with the world and that people have to start saying so, and in the streets if they must.

Most people, however, have neither the time nor the inclination to protest. They just get on with their jobs. Walking down towards Greenwich village I passed some fire-fighting crews packing up after attending a house fire. Their fire engines had memorial plaques on their sides, commemorating firemen from their stations who died in the 9/11 attacks.

Some of those men, I'd guess, might have questioned the ideals of those who only trade in money. But they didn't question anything when asked to go in to the Twin Towers that day in 2001, knowing there was every chance they would not come out alive. It's the same today, attending a small house fire, as it was a decade ago. Those who serve in the emergency services and in the forces retain a strong sense of duty. "Ours not to reason why," wrote Tennyson in sentiments that have been echoed in succeeding generations.

Maybe today it is time to reason why. But how can we question our broken system, while preserving the nobility and purpose of those who must do their duty and leave the questions until later? I don't know the answer to this, but a walk in New York certainly made me think.

Touching the Earth

2011-10-21T17:11:00.008Z

This is a Diamondback Terrapin we caught in a trap yesterday. The trap is monitored by teams of volunteers from Earthwatch working under the supervision of Hal Avery, a professor at Drexel University in the US.

The Diamondback is a resilient little creature capable of shifting between saltwater and freshwater, but it’s not so resilient against us. Hundreds are killed every year on the roads and hundreds more are killed or injured in the Barnegat Bay area of the New Jersey shoreline.

The Diamondback has been here for thousands of years and once formed part of the diet of local tribes. The name terrapin derives from a native American word for “edible”.

Today it must share its salt marsh habitat with a local population that owns 300,000 registered power boats, many of which are on the water throughout the summer months when the Diamondback likes to bask in the waves, soaking up the sun.

Sadly it’s not very quick at getting out of the way of power-boats and jet skis. The jet skis in particular invade shallow channels though the marsh grass which is prime Diamondback habitat.But without the Diamondback there wouldn’t be much marsh grass since the snails and periwinkles on which it feeds would have eaten it.

Its breeding habitat is also at risk. The good burgers who run things in the bay area have allowed the construction of bulwarks - wooden barriers – around much of the bay. The bulwarks look neat and tidy but they prevent the terrapins crawling on to land where they sink their nests.

If Hal Avery, his collaborators and his Earthwatch volunteers weren’t here researching the Diamondback and its habitat, the people who have made Barnegat Bay their home would have no idea of the crucial role this animal plays in sustaining their coastal environment. “Some people live here and don’t even know that the Diamondback Terrapin is out there. Some have never seen one,” says Hal.

This kind of ignorance is not unusual, and some people simply don't give a damn. It’s why Earthwatch is engaging thousands of volunteers each year in research on the frontline of environmental study. And it is a front line. There’s a war going on out there and we must win it for the sake of our children and their children.If you help Earthwatch you won’t save the Diamondback alone, but you will become part of a family (part of it pictured below) that is committed to giving the Diamondback and thousands of other threatened species a fighting chance.

What kind of world do you want to leave behind when you’re gone – a playground for jet skis, or a world that respects every other living organism that contributes to the health of our planet? People often ask me what is it that Earthwatch does? Well this is what it does - just one project of many around the world. With Earthwatch you can touch the Earth, not ruin it.

Ice Cream Dave and Bosham Church

2011-10-16T19:08:00.012Z

Lunch in Old Bosham today at the Anchor Bleu pub with George, our youngest son after picking him up in Southsea and seeing his student pad (below - no, the one below the one below). The newly-opened Hindhead Tunnel has cut journey times to Portsmouth by some margin. The swans, above, were in the sea just outside the pub.

Bosham can provide plenty of entertainment if you catch it on the right day as people often park their cars by the water-side without realising they will be caught by the tide. Ice Cream Dave, who has a regular pitch there, likes to photograph the results and has loaded a compilation on to You Tube for the enjoyment of all. He also videos dogs who like his ice cream. Amazing what you can do from an ice cream van.

The car drivers who come to grief here are, unwittingly perhaps, honouring a royal precedence for it is in Bosham (or somewhere nearby) that King Canute is said to have sat on his throne and commanded the waves to turn back in order to make a point about the limitations of his powers. Sadly there was no Saxon equivalent of Ice Cream Dave to record the event.But a Saxon equivalent - in the form of English seamstresses - was on hand to record Bosham Church (pictured above) in the Bayeux Tapestry, an account of events surrounding the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Harold Godwinson had earlier set sail from Bosham to Normandy - a trip that enable the future King William to claim that Harold had pledged the English crown to him. Note the similarity of this church and St Mary's, West Horsley, in the previous blog.

We dropped George off after spending a while on the South Downs during the afternoon plundering the blackthorn, collecting enough sloes to make a bottle of sloe gin (which usually disappears surprisingly fast). Our excuse for the visit, not that we needed one, was to take him what was left of his old bike. He has a great bunch of housemates who were all very welcoming - particularly to the dogs.

Sir Walter Raleigh's head case - new clues

2011-10-14T19:34:00.024Z

Up to today I knew four things about Sir Walter Raleigh, all gleaned from reading a Ladybird Book c.1964: that he introduced tobacco to England from the New World; that concurrently he introduced the potato; that in an act of chivalry he once laid his cloak in a muddy street at the feet of Queen Elizabeth I (proof here); and, finally, that he was beheaded in the reign of James I. From memory the Ladybird book didn't mention why but it seemed a bit unfair after he'd put himself about so much.

Imagine life without those contributions: no chips with your fish, no pie and mash, no cheese and onion crisps, no Spud-U-Like, no unkind Wayne Rooney jibes; no cigarette lighters or cut glass ashtrays, no Brief Encounter or Casablanca, no Rizzlers, no Sherlock Holmes or Tony Benn, and a much lower incidence of lung cancer.

Today, however, I learned a little bit more about Sir Walter, not all of which you will find on Wikipedia so pay attention. The information was uncovered by a posse of distinguished former and existing FT journalists who describe themselves collectively as "The Old Lags" (see this earlier note). Some old lags below (and at the pub, bottom).Organised by Maggie Urry and John Willman, the Old Lags meet monthly to walk, talk and enjoy a good lunch, sometimes supplemented by a cream tea, opportunity permitting.

Today's walk, around West and East Horsley in Surrey, was put together by Bill Hall who has walked all over the place in his time. This was a pleasant leafy walk in glorious sunshine in mid-October. It took in many of the Lovelace Bridges (rather fine bridges built at the bidding of the first Earl Lovelace so he could avoid the dips when riding through his woods.But the high spot, for me at least, was probably St Mary's Church, West Horsley, if only because it cleared up a few points the Ladybird book neglected (they were pretty thin books. All the same you wouldn't imagine Horrible Histories missing these details).

After Sir Walter lost his head his body was interred in St Margaret's Church, Westminster. As an alleged plotter against the king, not withstanding his conviction on the flimsiest evidence, custom and practice would have dictated that the head be mounted on a spike and displayed above London Bridge.

But whether out of compassion or an acknowledgement that he'd been the victim of a stitch up, his head was handed to his wife who kept it with her for the rest of her life (another 29 years). When she died her husband's head was buried at her home, West Horsley Place, but later it was transferred to a new resting place which happens now to be situated under St Mary's church organ. This must be music to his ears.

Some time ago, according to one of the chaps looking after the church during our visit, St Margaret's made a tentative approach, asking if they might have the head - to complete the set, so to speak; but St Mary's declined. This church doesn't do anything in haste. Its tower was built around a ladder in about 1120 and there the ladder stayed until "about" 2000 (I like the vagueness about the later date in the online account) when workmen managed to extricate it, and now it hangs from the wall. Some ladder. The St Mary's congregation is rightly proud of its church and has recently uncovered some frescoes (right) that would have been painted over during the Reformation.

Returning home, I was shocked to discover that Raleigh's beheading was carried out to appease the Spanish Ambassador for the kind of seaborne raid that was pretty common at the time. If you read some of the things Raleigh said ahead of his execution he didn't seem to mind very much. I suppose when you've sold the country on potatoes and tobacco everything is down hill after that.
Footnote: The vintage Ladybird book site pays homage to the publisher's contribution to education. Ladybird was founded in 1915 and if you'd bought its ABC Picture Book for very young children in that first year you would have found that A did not stand for Apple but for Armoured Train. I can only imagine the others: B for Boche, Bayonet? C for counter attack, campaign, cut to pieces?

Free society? Not when you're shopping

2011-10-10T09:18:00.009Z

A few years ago I was challenged by security guards in the shopping mall of Grand Union Station, Washington, for taking photographs like the one above. It wasn't allowed, they said. I asked why. Rules, they said.

Now these same rules are filtering in to the UK with the apparent support of police on the ground that anyone taking pictures in shopping centres could constitute a terrorist threat.

I understand the terrorist fears. We must all be vigilant to an extent. But when a society becomes afraid of its own shadow the terrorists have won something haven't they? When a man is confronted by security guards and police for taking a picture of his four-year-old daughter in a shopping centre, you have to begin asking whether we are living in a police state?

How many CCTV cameras had already recorded the family's presence before they even sat down in the centre?

My biggest worry is that companies are making up their own security rules on the hoof, often in collusion with police, and no-one in government is doing a thing to stop them. Why should commercial premises be off-limits to photographers?

If terrorists, thieves, or anyone else want to study images of the Braehead Shopping Centre, Glasgow, they can do so in the comfort of their own homes by pulling it up on Google images here.

I don't want to be part of a society that takes a heavy-handed approach to parents taking pictures of their children. I enjoy taking pictures and don't want to feel like a criminal if I walk around with a camera around my neck.I took this picture of my local shopping centre a few nights ago. I have no idea whether it has a "no photographs" rule but I think the picture is harmless and, again, it joins scores of other similar images that can be viewed online. In his novel, 1984, George Orwell wrote about the risks associated with too much state power. Perhaps some of those risks have been transferred now to the corporate sector.

Bicycle bits

2011-10-09T14:02:00.008Z

George came home this weekend and cannibalised his old bike. He's living in Southsea this year, not far from my cousin Andrew who gave him his old bike. It has a wobbly wheel so George's idea is to use the serviceable bits on his bike to replace the worn out bits on Andrew's bike.

He stripped the frame almost bare apart from the pedals and didn't have an Allen key big enough for that job. I have a set of Allen keys somewhere. But our Allen keys are the sort of use-every-now-and-again tools that, inexplicably, have never found their way in to a tool box.

Gill said she knew where they were but that I had moved them. I, who am incapable of remembering about 90 per cent of the things I do on any particular day, could not argue one way or the other. It's quite possible I did move them. I wanted to chuck the bike away but because of the pedals it is now in junk limbo, a victim of rubbish blight on account of its re-usable pedals.

The house sort of implodes when George comes home. There's an earthquake whenever he goes upstairs. He has some ridiculous "animal feet" slippers that Pippa, our Jack Russell, has decided are wild and dangerous (we view George in rather the same light). So he walks in to the room and the dog attacks - chaos. I guess this was normal family life once, but as the nestlings have moved on, Gill and me are getting used to a quieter life.

The fridge looks as if it has been grazed by locusts, the toilet paper has all but disappeared, there are wet towels strewn around the bathroom and bedrooms and the doors are hanging off their hinges. It is as if a foraging army has passed through town, taken its fill, and moved on. Today he's gone to his girlfriend's house. I hope they're insured.

Martians in Woking

2011-10-08T18:30:00.009Z

What fun, I thought, when just less than a month ago I signed up to Blipfoto with the aim of recording a picture a day for the next 365 days. After nearly four weeks of snapping I can tell you that it's a tall order for a casual photographer. But I'm enjoying it all the same. It's forcing me to look more intensely at my surroundings.

The problem is that there are days when I never venture out, and when I do, I've often got the dogs in tow. This afternoon we took them to the sandpits on Horsell Common (above), used as a setting by H G Wells for a Martian landing, when he wrote The War of the Worlds in 1895. He was living in Woking at the time.

Woking can't have left a lasting impression on Wells as he made sure that the Martians destroyed the town in his book. Now the council has taken up where the Martians left off. Only this time they're burying the place in high rise developments. At least someone finally woke up to the Wells connection three years too late for the book's centenary when a "sculpture" of a Martian tripod appeared in the town (below).So I've Blipfotoed the Horsell sandpits and the tripod and I'm quickly running out of interesting places in Woking for the rest of the project. I suppose there's the cemetery but I can't walk the dogs there.

The West Highland Way

2011-09-29T14:53:00.015Z

Back in to the old Jeep for the last (and seventh) trip to Scotland this year, this time to walk the West Highland Way, a 97 or 98-mile walk, depending on the guide book, from Milngavie, north of Glasgow, to Fort William at the start of the Great Glen.

The problem with such walks is that you must leave your transport at one end and then get to the other for the start or finish. We drove up, parked, then stayed the night at Fort William before taking the train down to Cardross, then a taxi the next morning to the start at Milngavie.

After the route march that was the Coast-to-Coast walk last year, we decided on a more leisurely eight day schedule for this one with friends, Charles Godden and Toni Taylor and their labrador, Wanda. We thought about taking our Jack Russell pup, Pippa, but decided it might be a bit much for her.

It was not an auspicious start when I discovered on the morning of the walk that one of my boots had a gaping hole in the toe, fixed temporarily with a liberal application of Evo-Stik. It didn't last.

It might have lasted had it not been for the downpours of rain that continued for the whole trip until the day we drove home when the country was bathed in bright sunshine.

Most of the first part of the walk follows the eastern bank of Loch Lomond - much negotiating of tree roots and a rocky shoreline. We called at the Glengoyne distillery, producer of the first of many malts we would try in the next week. Gill decided she would try a malt a night but often it was two and I tried a few different ones too, so between us we sampled quite a lot.Married status apart, I will refer to the Godden-Taylors as the Goddens for brevity. They are avid walkers so only Gill was doubting her fitness because of a dicky knee which began to play up coming down off a windswept Conic hill on day two. We took refuge from the wind and rain in a pub, which, like too many on the way, was not dog-friendly.

As a dog-lover I don't care much for anti-dog establishments and Scotland seems to have more, proportionately, than the rest of the UK. At this pub a waitress came to the rescue of our wet friends and sheltered their dog in the back of her car over lunch.

Scottish bars, generally, are a lot better than they used to be, but too many of them still need to pull their socks up. Cask beer was available at no more than a quarter of the pubs we visited and most of the keg stuff came ready prepared for the urinal without the complications of passing through a digestive system.

The worst pub of the trip was the Inversnaid Hotel about half-way up Loch Lomond, relying for much of its lunchtime income on captive coach and pleasure boat parties. The sandwiches were pathetic and when I asked at the bar for a packet of crisps I was told I could find one in a vending machine. The Goddens and their dog stood outside in the rain while we found a dry niche in the ballroom. It takes more than tartan carpets and waist-coated Eastern European staff to deliver a friendly welcome in the glen.

Scottish bars love their big tellies and gleaming silver taps for pressured keg beverages. The best room we had on the whole trip was in a small bed-and-breakfast run by Heather and Colin Clement in Tyndrum - spotlessly clean and good warm showers, not these wall attachments that have all the pressure of a can of hairspray.

The Green Welly shop in Tyndrum was a foot-saver as my old boots were letting in water. It's not recommended to change your boots mid-trip but in this case it worked a dream with a fine new pair of Lowas in the sale.

Gill's knees were improving so from the half-way mark it was just a matter of covering the hard yards to the end. It was wet on the way to Tyndrum and wet again over Rannoch Moor to the last stage beyond Glen Coe when it rained again. Jane Corfield came down from her lighthouse at Neist Point on Skye to join us on that last wet day.Despite the rain, despite the conversations when we wondered whether we'd have preferred sunbathing in some (much cheaper) resort overseas, it was good to get some walking in. I'd like to say it improved my fitness but back home I've discovered that I put on half a stone, eating all those big breakfasts that I thought I would walk off during the day.

Next time we should have our own dog to confront the prejudices on the way. I'm not sure what dogs did to deserve such treatment. Most people seem to like them but we live in a sterile society and dogs and sterility just don't mix. Perhaps that's why I don't get ill too often.

I've kept up my picture-a-day regime on Blipfoto. All those expansive scenes can't last. It's back to photographing the paperclips.

For those interested in doing the walk, I thought it might be helpful to add a schedule. This is what I would call a comfortable schedule with a mixture of days between 10 and 15 miles. Those wanting something a bit tougher could shorten the time and lengthen the distances. The options are outlined neatly in the Harvey route map of the West Highland Way. Don't buy the Cicerone guide. It is dull and out of date. A good place to stay in Fort William is the Lime Tree - great food.

Day 1: Milngavie to to Drymen (12 miles)
Day 2: Drymen to Rowardennan (15 miles)
Day 3: Rowardennan to Inverarnan (14 miles)
Day 4: Inverarnan to Tyndrum (12 miles)
Day 5: Tyndrum to Inveroran (10 miles)
Day 6: Inveroran to Kingshouse (10 miles)
Day 7: Kingshouse to Kinlochleven (8 miles)
Day 8: Kinlochleven to Fort William (14 miles)

Blipfoto

2011-09-17T19:44:00.009Z

I'm not sure I'll be able to keep it up, but I've joined a web site called Blipfoto where members are encouraged to post a photograph each day. This is mine for today, featuring the Bad Eggs Online team, John and Rob, playing, surprise, surprise, Bad Eggs.

It's hard to remember the camera. Today I was walking around Waitrose with the camera over my shoulders. I photographed some onions but it wasn't very inspiring. We've been busy packing so we can head off to Scotland tomorrow to walk the West Highland Way. The boys are dog sitting. We decided Pippa was a little too young and Doug is definitely too old to do the walk.

You never know, it might come in for something

2011-09-17T11:57:00.007Z

Gill is a hoarder. I hoard a bit myself although I'm fighting it because hoarding is frowned upon in the new wave of minimalist thinking dominating the lifestyle magazines. That aside, when you start to fall over clutter, it's really time to get rid.

I've been chucking stuff out lately, including a stash of empty jam jars. Then, earlier this week, we made chutney from all our green tomatoes. "I told you not to throw those jars away," she said, while producing a "stand by" stash from God knows where that saved the day. "Lucky I had these," she said. Lucky indeed.

Yes there are times - not many - when a hoard fulfills its raison d'etre. Youngest son George has just moved in to student digs in Southsea. His bed is in what most northerners would know as the "front room" and what southerners reared on Enid Blyton would call the sitting room. The room has a tall bay window which, before today, had no curtains.

Ordinarily Gill is a normal woman going about her everyday business, but when one of her sons activates the hoard button she's into the nearest telephone box changing in to her supermum kit. As soon as she saw that curtainless window she was heading for the attic faster than the speed of light, rummaging among the suitcases of old denim, toys, ice skates and cigarette cards, until she found what she was looking for - a box containing brand new curtains, circa 1979, bought in a Batley mill sale for £3.50. Now that's what you call value.

We never used them as, even for the 1970s they were a bit jazzy, but now they look quite retro, says George who texted his mum to say they were "ace". And that made her day.

"I've been waiting 30 years for this moment," she said, beaming with fulfillment. I suppose it's a good news story but it's bad news too. Meeting her son's need in this way has justified all Gill's hoarding over all those years. We'll never throw anything away again.

Eggpocalypse Now

2011-09-12T14:02:00.011Z

Lock up your chicks. Today is the day the bad eggs roll in to town. Bad Eggs is the new multi-player game from the two eldest Donkin boys, John and Rob, and they have high hopes for its success. If you or your children are interested sign up to the beta version and be the first to try it out. Yes, it's free to play!

Unlike their previous games, this one has its own web site and its own forum where yours truly is already posting. I don't expect to be able to stimulate too much intellectual discussion in a market over-populated by monosyllabic youths who seem to communicate in grunts and abuse. You will have seen the sort of thing if you visit YouTube.

But I'm game to try and encourage a bit of fun input on egg words, that sort of thing. I've noticed that John and Rob have given themselves their own eggdentities but they haven't given me one yet so I have to settle for Dadegg with my very own custom-made eggshell.

If you're a regular online games player you don't need me to tell you what this is all about. But I know that people with lives also read this blog. In case you may have just a modicum of interest in games of skill and judgement, let me explain that this multi-player game allows between two and six people to be playing each other online at any one time. The idea is taking turns to blast your opponents from the game, thereby earning various awards, treats, extra weapons, that kind of thing.

The best way to learn it is to play it. I can confirm it's a lot of fun as it also allows you to interact with other players through a chat function. John has been busy making scores of egg characters these past few weeks, plus the graphics, while Rob has been concentrating on the coding.

I'm biased as I'm their dad but I'm also one of their strongest critics and I can tell you this game is brilliant and it can be enjoyed by young and old alike. It's also one of those games that allow people to build their skills. Enough enthusing; take a look for yourself. Any constructive feedback in this pre-launch phase is welcome.

Pippa's Scotland diary

2011-08-31T09:05:00.019Z

Phew, what a long slog, cooped-up in this zip-up basket that the governor bought to stop me roaming the car - as if I would. The worst is that the old man, Dougie, gets to stretch out in comfort like a lord just because he does as he's told. He hasn't the energy to bounce around anyway. At least he's independent. I've no time for these dogs that play up for the cameras. Eat the cup cake damnit!

I liked the shop on the way up with the rough carpet. That was great for stretching out, getting under people's feet while I enjoyed a full-on belly scratch. It seemed to take an age to get to this Scotland place and when we did there was all this water, just like the pond at home only bigger and moving. I didn't fancy a swim.

Nice cottage; I left a peemail within minutes of getting through the door. The governor didn't like that. There were lots of other dog smells too. It looked promising.For some reason the governor took to standing in this water up to his waist waving a stick about with a bit of string for hours at a time. Then I met Misty, a German pointer they say, same kind of colouring as me but just a little bit bigger, friendly though; we got on well. That's Misty in the picture keeping the rain off my head.

I could take to hut living. It was like this giant kennel made for people. The governor loved his kennel. It had a stove which he fed sticks too big for me to chase. There were a couple of young people there too, Rob and Vicky who took me for walks, threw sticks and did general fun things.I saw the lady catch this fish, a salmon they called it, much bigger and a bit livelier than the goldfish back home. I don't know why they didn't give them any fish sticks, struck me as a bit mean. No wonder those fish were hungry enough to bite the little coloured flies on the end of the string. I noticed they didn't seem to want to bring them back, don't blame them. Later the lady took off her boots in the hut. Heaven!So that was it really, sitting around these huts all day, walking down the river banks, cooking sausages (yes that's right - sausages!), meeting other dogs like Misty and then the long slog back, only we stopped for a day in this place with giant ponds. They called it the Lake District. That was where I met the gang of three - border terriers called Jim, Rosy and Penny. Jim's the older one, Rosy seems to run things and Penny's a pup only a bit older than me and didn't she want to let me know that. We had great fun rolling about, all the same. That's me with Penny below.Then if all that standing in the water hadn't been enough for him, the governor and three other silly buggers put hankies on their heads and took to a raft on the river with lots of other silly people on rafts. And he's the one who wants me to be sensible all the time. That's rich, that is.It's good to be back home where I can keep an eye on the old man. The Governor was going to add a picture of old Doug in Scotland but I edited it out as just too dull. He's had plenty of coverage in the past. OK, he doesn't do much but at least he doesn't give me a hard time. Funny though, now we're back home, how no-one seems to want to catch the goldfish. I'll never learn how to understand people. But, who cares? Life is good.

Enough about them; more about me in these earlier blogs:

New Dog, Old Tricks
Dog days and dusk
A Dog's Life
Hot Dogs
Dummkopf
Introducing the iDog
Fetch

Feeding the feral rich

2011-08-16T11:37:00.006Z

It’s a managerial cliche in every corporate episode, good or bad, to “take away the positives”. Surely there must be some lessons we can salvage from the turmoil of last week’s riots.

The riots were shocking for many reasons, one of which is that they lacked any sense of reason. Many of the people engaged in rioting and looting fitted a stereotype of social deprivation drawing on permutations of various descriptions – unemployed, poorly educated, mindless, dysfunctional, criminal, indiscriminate, opportunist, yobbish – pick your favourite combination.

But some who have since appeared before the courts do not fit such stereotypes. Among them is an Oxford University law graduate accused of throwing bricks at police, a soldier who tried to sell a stolen guitar, a fashion model who tried to loot an Argos store, an Olympic ambassador and various university students.

It was as if something in the air gripped an otherwise bored section of society and invited them on to the streets to share in the risk and excitement that goes with wanton plunder.

Most of the “professionals” – the hooded and masked hard core gang members - will be sitting at home today inspecting their new trainers and watching their looted plasma TVs, safe in the knowledge that their features were hidden from CCTV cameras and that their reputation for intimidation is powerful enough to preserve the omerta of the streets.

It is the opportunist amateurs that are packing the courts – young people irresponsible enough to allow themselves to be gripped by the fever of lawlessness that seems to have bred a belief that they could steal and get away with it.

These people are the real source of our worries. There have always been yobs who will riot at the barest excuse. They are not going to go away. Some of them may find redemption if they fall in to the right company – a helpful teacher, a strong parent, an influential role model at work or among their social circle.

But there is a much larger group of people on which any society depends – the people who bother to vote, who will take up their sweeping brushes to clean the streets, who continue to show that they care about their community because they feel a sense of outrage at wrongdoing. This group must prevail for any society to maintain cohesion.

The fear now is that some who we may have relied upon once to maintain that cohesion have become so alienated from government, so lacking in moral instruction or example, so cynical of authority and so saturated in the spirit of entitlement peddled by our consumerist culture, that they can be persuaded to neglect their sense of right and wrong.

A number of commentators have pointed to the lack of a cause behind the rioting. As Zoe Williams, writing in the Guardian, said: “I think it's just about possible that you could see your actions refashioned into a noble cause if you were stealing the staples: bread, milk. But it can't be done while you're nicking trainers, let alone laptops.”

She also pointed to what I would call the death of consequence, at least as a perception. Rioters who failed to cover their faces, she wrote, were failing to understand that their actions could rebound on them: “People just don't believe they'll go to prison any more, at least not for something as petty as a pair of trainers.”

Williams, like many others, was intrigued at the prime targets of the looters – typically gadget shops, electrical suppliers and, in several instances, branches of JD Sports, a downmarket retailer of casual clothes and sports trainers. The trainer, more than any other item of dress, appears to have assumed mystical proportions in gang culture.

Charlie Brooker, also in the Guardian, wrote: “Time and again, shops selling trainers or gadgets were targeted first. Fancy shoes and electric widgets mark the peak of ambition. Every looter was effectively a child chanting: ‘Give me my toys, I want more toys. ‘ “

These behaviours suggest that too many young people have grown up in a dependency culture characterised by a distorted sense of entitlement. This culture, as Peter Oborne observed, writing in a Daily Telegraph blog, has been nourished by the poor example set by expense-fiddling politicians and corporate opportunists.

He wrote: “I believe that the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society. The last two decades have seen a terrifying decline in standards among the British governing elite. It has become acceptable for our politicians to lie and to cheat. An almost universal culture of selfishness and greed has grown up. It is not just the feral youth of Tottenham who have forgotten they have duties as well as rights. So have the feral rich of Chelsea and Kensington.”

It was strong stuff. A day or two earlier a distraught shopkeeper had caught the attention of the media when she likened the rioters to “feral rats”. That word feral struck a chord and Oborne knew what weight it would carry in using it brilliantly to focus attention on unacceptable behaviours among the more privileged in society.

Where do these feral rich go for their inspiration? Their bible, says Oborne, is "the repellent Financial Times magazine How to Spend It". Good on you son. It's high time someone said that. In an otherwise responsible newspaper, this magazine, an acknowledged advertising magnate for luxury goods, is permitted to plough its own furrow, focusing entirely on luxury and everything it represents in its own little blinkered Midas-like world.

As a result, wrote Oborne: “The rioters have this defence: they are just following the example set by senior and respected figures in society. Let’s bear in mind that many of the youths in our inner cities have never been trained in decent values. All they have ever known is barbarism. Our politicians and bankers, in sharp contrast, tend to have been to good schools and universities and to have been given every opportunity in life.”

He could have gone further. These same people gravitate towards and mix in what we loosely describe as the establishment. In so doing they too often overlook their own advantages, a tendency acknowledged across the Atlantic by one of the world’s richest men.

Writing in the New York Times this week, Warren Buffett, urged the US government to “stop coddling the super rich”. Why weren’t billionaires like him expected to pay more tax when those on modest incomes were struggling, he asked. Last year, he paid £4.2million in taxes, but, he disclosed: “What I paid was only 17.4 per cent of my taxable income.” He added: “If you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine – most likely by a lot.”

Buffett belongs to a rare breed - the deserving rich. He has used his wealth to invest wisely in sound businesses, cornerstones of the capitalist system. He lives relatively modestly and has committed most of his wealth to worthy causes. He could never be described as a carpetbagger or an asset stripper, yet such individuals roam this system like hungry hyenas, ripping the heart out of our greatest economies.

The damage caused by unbridled speculation far eclipses any that was caused across London and other English cities last week. That is not to condone the violence of the streets or to forgive the perpetrators. But if one positive thing came out of these riots it is that those in Government and in authority have been forced to sit up and listen to the inarticulate voices from the street.

And if they fail to make sense of the lame justifications we have been hearing these last few days, they should listen instead to those like Oborne who can articulate the underlying frustration of those at the fag end of consumerist opportunism.

I agree with his conclusion that: “The culture of greed and impunity we are witnessing on our TV screens stretches right up into corporate boardrooms and the Cabinet. It embraces the police and large parts of our media. It is not just its damaged youth, but Britain itself that needs a moral reformation.”

Battle Beavers

2011-08-09T16:47:00.008Z

Introducing Battle Beavers - John and Rob's new game. Having played this one I can confirm it's a little bit too advanced for adults and best left to the kids to work out. Rob did the coding and John the artwork.

This is one of their most sophisticated games yet but the market is becoming squeezed as games websites are increasingly reluctant to put up money for publishing deals. This game must earn its corn through a percentage on numbers of plays.

Given their track record in previous games it's quite likely that Battle Beavers will attract plenty of interest, but it doesn't seem just that these games can have several millions of plays for relatively modest returns.

Right now the boys are working on a multi-player game that will have its own website. It's involved quite a learning curve with more complicated coding than that found in conventional flash games.

Gill and me played it earlier this week. Again it's very much a kids' game, not one of the puzzle games that we enjoy most. But I agree with John and Rob that the game has plenty of potential so we must wait and see.

Why Battle Beavers? I have no idea, except they're beavers and they don't like to be pushed around. The game is introduced using a strip-cartoon story. I like the image below that parodies a memorable scene in the film, 300.

Fetch

2011-07-13T11:18:00.007Z

Anyone who has been following the progress of our Jack Russell pup, Pippa, in these blogs might be tempted to think that Dougie, our old West Highland White terrier, has been forgotten in all the puppy love.

That’s probably a reasonable conclusion. He is a miserable old git, very much like his owner. He doesn’t do much apart from sleep, eat, pass wind and evacuate his bowels. Yes…. as I said.

I feel we’ve been letting him down a bit in recent weeks as the new dog can be a real pest for him. She’ll greet him and lick his muzzle which looks cute at first (see above), until she persists and you get the impression that what she’s really trying to do is assert some power over him. She can, and does, run rings round him.

So we’re re-establishing a bit of pack order, ensuring he gets fed before she does. In the same way, when she’s getting rewards in training, we make sure he gets some too even though he doesn’t do anything. Dougie was never a performing dog, always his own man, one reason I’ve always respected him.

Now, in old age, he needs a bit of protection. But it’s difficult to know when to intervene because he’s not completely averse to the attention he’s getting from the young bitch – he’s a chap after all. It’s just that, like the typical trophy wife, Pippa can become a little too demanding.

She has all the toys and accessories a girl could want: a pad of her own, fast cars, servants, pedicures and an adoring public wherever she goes. I always wondered what it would take to break the reserve of Surrey people. Just bring on the puppy and they turn to mush.

No-one pays much attention to Doug now, yet it wasn’t so long ago that he used to get the petting too from strangers. He was a fine dog in his prime and never let us down. He wasn’t affectionate with children but never minded whatever they did to him. There was never a growl or a snap, just a resigned tolerance and a lack of enthusiasm.He was always particular about his toys, preferring to chase a plastic plant pot rather than a ball. At close quarters he liked to attack his raggy. The main subject of his affection, however, has always been his lead. The bitch doesn’t do much for him but he can still become amorous towards his lead. Yes, Dougie is a leather fetishist.He wouldn’t win any best-trained dog awards but his discipline is adequate. He understands a lot more than his overall lack of response suggests. Pippa’s training, meanwhile, is entering a new phase. She has learned to sit, stay, come and lie down in laboratory conditions if not yet out in the big wide distracting world.

This week I began working on the retrieve. I've always wanted a dog that could fetch the newspaper although tracking developments at News Corporation we could be in a race against time.

We're using a method described in the training manual we’re consulting called Good Dog, The Easy Way to Train Your Dog, by Sarah Whitehead. Why did I buy this book instead of any of the others in the shop? It was thin, had lots of pictures inside, an optimistic title and that vital “hook” in the subtitle: easy. How often we fall for that word. I’m attracted to Whitehead’s argument that dogs respond to rewards and affection far more than they do to a kick up the rear. I believe her, I really do, and yet I must confess that just occasionally I regress to the old fashioned remedy.

Anyway she employs what she calls the “two-toy retrieve” in teaching dogs to bring something back to you. The idea is to have two identical toys so I found a pair of old socks then stuffed them with Bubble Wrap wrapped around some balsa wood. My thinking was to simulate an animal with brittle bones encased in squidgy flesh. OK, not all that realistic, but never mind.

The next step is to hide one sock behind your back and throw the other for the retrieve. Pippa pounced on it as the book said she would. I then produced the other sock and started to flop it around. In the book, the dog brings back the first toy and you exchange that for the hidden one which you then throw out for the second retrieve.

But Pippa didn’t bring the first sock back so I only had the second one. I threw that and went to fetch the first one. Within five minutes Gill noticed that I’d got the hang of it. I was doing perfect retrieves every time.

They do say that dog obedience classes are aimed mainly at the owners. Now I know what they mean.

Requiem for a red top

2011-07-08T13:54:00.015Z

Stop all the clocks, silence the pianos, let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead, scribbling the message - Britain's biggest selling newspaper is dead.

It might not have been your north and south, your east and west. Not even your working week, but it may have been part of your Sunday rest, particularly if you grew up in a working class household during the 1960s. Those were heady days for the News of the World when the newspaper was read by more than one sixth of the UK's population.

Even if he didn't go to church, the working man could content himself with his twenty Woodbines, his pint of beer and his weekly feast of sport and scandal in the knowledge that "all human life was there".

The telephone tapping at the News of the World was indefensible; criminal. And yet I feel some sadness that the the newspaper is being closed down by its proprietor, Rupert Murdoch (Will he think again?). I appreciate that sadness is not shared by many. "Good riddance," says a friend and I'm sure she's speaking for the vast majority of people in the UK today.

But be in no doubt, when the NoTW's presses run for the last time on Sunday, a little bit of ourselves will die with it. Whether we like to admit it or not, the News of the World was part of the British national psyche.

Anyone coming to the UK for the first time could have discovered quite a bit about what makes this country tick if they had flicked through a single issue of the NoTW.

Its reporting methods were not to my taste and neither were most of its stories. But I, like most of us, I guess, would lap up the leftovers on a Monday morning in the broadsheets that so often felt constrained to follow up on NoTW Sunday exclusives (see pages 2 and 3). Now what will they do?

Would I know about the extent of corruption in cricket, without the NoTW's exposure of the spread betting scandal involving members of the Pakistan national squad? Would I have known of the Duchess of York's willingness to sell access to her former husband, Prince Andrew? I don't think so.

I'm not sure I wanted to know about Max Mosley's predilection for sado masochism or Angus Deayton's coke-fuelled sex romps, or should that be sex-fuelled coke romps? I'm not a dab hand at tabloid-speak.

And I couldn't give a monkey's about overpaid footballers cheating on their WAGS. Perhaps that's why we won't be muffling the drums come Sunday. The NoTW had become no more working class than a Coronation Street obsessed with transsexuals and gay relationships. Not that I have anything against gay relationships. I just don't think they are particularly representative of what goes on behind the net curtains in the cobbled streets of Salford. But I could be wrong. Stan and Hilda Ogden - News of the World readers, surely - are long gone.

It may be perceived as a tad ironic that the only Sunday red top to survive in the Murdoch stable is that belonging to Rebekah Brooks who was so instrumental in creating the dog-eat-dog culture that characterised the newspaper when phone tapping was part of its newsroom routine.

One day we might look back and recognise the NoTW's closure as the last nail in the coffin of Britain's working class. If so, that might be a good thing because the working class I remember - the class that was my childhood - would have had no truck with phone tapping or the crass behaviour of £100,000 a week footballers. That working class saw Rupert Murdoch for what he was and did its utmost to stop him at fortress Wapping.

So the News of the World dies and the man and woman that made it what it became in its latter years, survive. There ain't no justice in this world and probably not much news any more either, at least not on a Sunday.

Hurrah for the Daily Telegraph's headline writer today who gave us: Goodbye, cruel World. Brilliant. But is this the beginning of the end for all newspapers? With apologies to W H Auden:

The Star is not wanted now: cancel every one;
Pack up the Mirror and dismantle the Sun;
Cast away the broadsheets, pour out the printers'ink,
The plug is pulled on Fleet Street and it's going down the sink.

Tunnel Olympics

2011-07-06T12:03:00.007Z

Did you apply to watch one of the Olympic 2012 events? Were you successful? I have avoided the question in my blog up to now, not wanting to gloat about the four tickets I have for the 100 metres men's final. I'm pleased, who wouldn't be? But I would never gloat.

I applied for just two sessions - that one and one of the others in the track-and-field programme - and got my first choice. Not bad, but all that is by the bye, mentioned in passing, as I try to get my head around another ticket over-subscription. This one involved applications to walk through the Hindhead Tunnel before it opens any time now.

The Hindhead Tunnel, or lack of it (in the sense of a functioning tunnel, open for traffic), was largely responsible for the acquisition of our Jack Russell puppy. Delays in Hindhead last month led us to take the detour that brought us quite by chance to the puppy seller's door.

The reason I can't be precise about the tunnel opening date is that the authorities are keeping the opening time a secret for fear that too many motorists will converge on the tunnel at once. Apparently that's how we get our kicks in Surrey.

I know this because 12,000 people applied for 5,000 passes issued to walk through the tunnel on one day only last month. Spare a thought for anyone losing out on both the London Olympics and the Hindhead Tunnel walk. They must have been crushed.

The tunnel is 1.2 miles long. I wonder how long it would take Usain Bolt to run it? We'll never know. He didn't get a ticket.

Introducing the iDog

2011-07-06T07:42:00.009Z

The Mac Book Air is a trendy piece of kit. Apple have thought of everything, including an adapter with a string-thin cable made from light, pliable material. But did they think how attractive this cabling might be to a Jack Russell pup on the hunt for anything suitably chewy? I didn't.

Electric cabling is generally pretty cheap, unless it comes with the MacBook Air, price £66 for the new adapter and cable. You can't buy the connecting flex on its own. I pondered on this at some length as I watched the battery indicator on my Mac register its working life draining away. Yes, the adapter had to be replaced.

But there's no replacing our Jack Russell, Pip, who has quickly established herself as an integral part of the family. Chewed cable aside, she is fitting in well and hasn't become the little Napoleon we had feared might happen after reading the dog training books.

She's learning every day and, after four weeks in our company, I'm confident enough to say she's house trained. We've been puddle free for nearly a week now. The good weather has helped since the dogs spend much of their day in the garden. She's become used to her harness too and is learning to walk without dragging at the lead. It helps that the training is being shared between three of us trying to maintain some consistency in the pattern of commands and rewards.

I've noticed also a pattern to her naughtiness. It's usually concentrated in a 10 or 15 minute spell in the evening before she settles down for a nap. Just as a small child often reserves its worst behaviour for that cranky time before falling asleep, so it is with a puppy.

I think we've escaped too much damage by being around the dog most of the time. I can only think she co-ordinated her attack on the cable in a few minutes I must have spent making a cup of tea or something.

Pippa's next big test will be our summer fishing trip to the River Dee. I don't think she will be trained enough to wait on the river bank as I fish. Nor do I want her wading in to the river to try and land my fish. I'm sure we'll tackle those potential problems as they crop up. Then there's the West Highland Way in late September. Will her puppy legs be strong enough for a long walk by then? We'll see about that nearer the time. So far, so good.

Media in the dock

2011-07-05T09:41:00.012Z

Newspapers used to report the news. Today they are the news and it isn't good news. What Private Eye long ago nicknamed the "street of shame" has fallen even lower in public perceptions as a result of the latest phone hacking revelations involving the News of the World.

According to the Guardian newspaper police have found evidence that News of the World journalists deleted messages from the mobile phone of murdered teenager Milly Dowler when police were still searching for her and when her family believed she might still be alive.

There were some attempts at mitigation as newspapers pointed out that the NOTW's old regime had been cleared out since earlier phone tapping allegations had been proved in court.

But some in the old regime, principally Rebekah Wade, now Rebekah Brooks, have been booted upstairs. Brooks should be shown the door at News International immediately, no more questions, leaving her free to sue her employer for wrongful dismissal if she chooses to do so. Let her tell her side of the story to the police or the Press Complaints Commission or to the civil courts when Milly's family seek damages from News International. According to an email she sent to staff today it is "Inconceivable that I knew or worse, sanctioned these appalling allegations."

Like most people who climb to the top of the executive ladder, Brooks will have secured some security for herself as a keeper of corporate secrets (and possibly political secrets given her former role in the Tory Party) and we can only speculate on whether any of those could damage her immediate boss, Rupert Murdoch. Suffice to say, Brooks is unlikely to present herself as the sacrificial lamb unless her position really does become untenable. Whatever her personal knowledge of the Milly Dowler hacking, she must accept that it happened on her watch when the culture of phone tapping was flourishing at the NoW.

In the meantime newspaper proprietors and their editors must meet to draw up a code on media investigations covering impersonation, electronic eavesdropping, taping of conversations and the use of hidden cameras.

Some of these methods should be defended. Sometimes the only way to acquire evidence is to do so covertly and to do so with a degree of sneakiness. How else would we have learned of the Duchess of York's audacity in seeking to cash in on her former husband's connections? It could be argued that the sting operation mounted against her was purposefully-designed to exploit her latent greed and stupidity. Better that, however, than one designed by some foreign agency to trap an unwary target in to working for them through blackmail.

People should have some right to privacy but that right should not be extended to conceal illegal or highly questionable behaviour. Nor should organisations be protected by privacy laws other than than the privacy already extended by existing legislation.

If, for example, a Panorama reporter had not been willing to go in to the Winterbourne View care unit in Bristol with hidden cameras and sound equipment we would never have witnessed the shocking treatment handed out to some of the most vulnerable people in society.

The problem with covert behaviour in investigative journalism - and I have first hand knowledge of this, having engaged in many investigations during my career - is that a journalist can become so focused on the target or aim of the investigation that it is possible to step over the line of what is and what is not acceptable.

Some newspapers, and some companies, have dealt with these issues by removing themselves from direct involvement in illegal behaviour. A company may do so by employing a firm of corporate investigators which in turn engages with self-employed private investigators who are prepared to hack phones and rummage through dustbins. The idea is to ensure a degree of deniability and to keep any possible illegal activity on the periphery of the client organisation and beyond its walls.

When a confidential document comes in to the hands of a journalist, the journalist is concerned only to be assured of its authenticity rather the means by which it may have been acquired. There is not, as yet, an effective law against handling stolen information - one reason why Wikileaks has proved such a rich source of stories for the media.

But the multiplicity of information dispersal today means that the media must become more sophisticated and open about how news and information is acquired and used. Without seeking to defend the News of the World, it's worth remembering that phone tapping was not pioneered by journalists but by governments.

Governments would claim the moral high ground here by insisting that covert information gathering by its security services and police, is in the interests of national and domestic security. Newspapers, on the other hand, have engaged in such practices in pursuit of a good story (which may or may not expose illegal behaviour).

The media, very often, is willing to pursue investigations that, for whatever reason, are sometimes not pursued by regulators or enforcement organisations. We should thank the press for that. I really don't know what motivated the News of the World to hack Milly Dowler's phone. I dare say those involved in the hacking would argue that they wanted Milly and her abductor found as much as anyone. But that is not to condone what they did.

The media seems incapable now of policing itself. The Press Complaints Commission should have, but has not, shown some leadership over the propriety of certain media investigative methods. The way forward now is for the media to work collectively with the Government and other interested bodies to thrash out a new code of conduct for journalists that carries the weight of law. I'm not an enthusiast of public inquiries but this may be one way of serving the public interest in this case. In such an event we may find that, faced with the alternative, the public could prove more supportive of the media's right to ask questions than we might hope in the light of this latest story. At the very least it's time to see a few more heads on spikes and at least one of those should be wearing lipstick.

It doesn't matter Hari

2011-06-29T08:44:00.013Z

Fleet Street died a long time ago and with it the kind of writing and reporting that brought me in to journalism. There are still fine writers and fine reporters out there – I don’t want this to sound like the protestations of an old fart – it is just that some of the most talented people are either wasting their skills on drivel or have simply lost their moral compass.

Take Johann Hari, a political journalist who writes mainly for The Independent. It would be journalese to prefix his name with “award-winning”, a kind of shorthand that means “this guy’s good” for those who cannot be bothered to read his work or are incapable of making their own judgement.

Hari has been caught out, presenting quotes from the published works of people featured in his articles as if they were part of his interview. It’s probably one of the more egregious examples of what some in my trade have come to describe as “churnalism”. This word was contrived to expose the practice of some journalists of recycling press releases.

It is lazy journalism but understandable in a media that has become as bloated and consumerist as the society it serves. Journalism used to be about reporting news. Now it is about filling newspapers, or, and this is more troubling, the vast boundaryless expanses of the internet.

But the internet has its uses. The collective wit and wisdom of the crowd is beating journalists at their own game. Once we would have had to wait a fortnight for the best efforts of Private Eye to satirise Hari’s brand of plagiarism.

Today we have Twitter that soon began churning out Hari interview spoofs, the best of which were collated by the newspapers for our breakfast table entertainment. There has to be some irony here.

My favourite was this one: “So, Sooty,” I demanded, “is it true you sold guns to Saddam in the 19080s?” His silence was deafening. The Eye, no doubt, will quickly latch on to this trend but it is no longer making the running.

I would like to believe that Hari’s is an unforgivable sin but his editor Simon Kelner has already come to his side, apparently supporting Hari’s defence that he was expressing interviewees’ written words to articulate their ideas. Without using proper attribution? Come on Hari, that won’t wash.

What kind of message does it send if Hari’s plagiarism is to be condoned? Possibly one that Kelner has conveyed already in appointing Jemima Khan as an associate editor - celebrity is everything. Hari’s work now is sure to be a hot topic of conversation around the weekend debating tables of London’s chattering classes. In such circles anything can be condoned of a bus-driver's son with a double-first from Cambridge who happens to be gay. No wonder he has attracted the warm endorsement of media royalty, Christopher Hitchens and Julie Burchill, whose careers have been fueled on controversy.

Hari has earned infamy but in the big cities where media power resides, infamy and its direct opposite translate to one and the same – fame - and fame sells.

Sadly we live in a world where what sells is the only thing that matters and what matters no longer sells very well.

It is a world besotted by trivia. I groaned when I noticed a snippet of tennis “news” in today’s Daily Telegraph that mentioned Andy Murray’s mum Judy’s crush on his next opponent, 29-year-old Feliciano Lopez who she had likened to a “Roman god”. Cue a flurry of 1,000-word columns from the bitcherati (they love to make up words) whose admirable writing skills are wasted daily on ephemeral compendiums of junk, this time about the fixation of older women on toy boys. First the trawl for “examples” on the internet then the creative but splenetic commentary sewing the stuff together with a couturier’s craft. But all we’re left with is empty clothing.

This is journalism today. It’s why I no longer call myself a journalist and why for the first time in my life I’m thinking of cancelling my daily newspaper. I won’t, of course. I’m still fool enough to think that a newspaper is important to our society. I was going to say as important as milk on the doorstep but we don’t have that any more.

The most worrying aspect of Hari’s plagiarism is that it took so long to be uncovered. It demonstrates how little we read today. We’ve become a soundbite society, all wrapped up in 140 characters a chunk and celebrated on YouTube. No, this won't lead to his downfall.

Indeed it might lead to a new kind of journalism. If it's OK to shovel in to a feature extracts from an interviewee's published works and quoted comments, perhaps Hari could be commissioned to engineer interviews with historical figures such as John F Kennedy, Albert Einstein and William Shakespeare. He could go even further and create things that he believes they would have liked to have said. But didn't Oscar Wilde get there first when he complemented the artist James Whistler on a particularly witty remark. "I wish I'd said that," said Wilde and Whistler replied: "You will Oscar, you will."

Postscript: It looks as if Newsweek got there first with Tina Brown's feature on Princess Diana at 50.

Dummkopf

2011-06-27T08:40:00.011Z

“I’m going to eat this plant,” she says. Dogs speak with their eyes. “I’m going to eat this plant and there is nothing you can do that can stop me.”

“You’re not going to eat that plant, Pippa. Now come away,” I say. She rises up, balances her paws on the side of the pot and tears off a strip of husky bark from the parlour palm. I grab her and throw her out. This is great sport, she thinks.

“You’ve turned it in to a game,” says Gill who has read the dog training manual. But this is not a game: it’s the dog or me and there can be only one winner.

Pippa, our Jack Russell pup, is three months old now. The past week or two have been interesting. Now she’s had her inoculations it’s going to get more interesting as she can go for walks.

She’s already sampled the big outside. I thought I had made the garden so escape proof I was thinking of renaming our house Colditz. I performed the regular guard duties, patrolling the outer perimeter, and all seemed quiet and orderly. Then I looked through the garden gate and noticed that Pippa was on the outside. She looked at me and the eyes said: “Dummkopf!”

It didn’t take long to recapture her and to find the weak spot in our defences as she returned to it straight away. I had fastened chicken wire on the bottom of the garden gate to within an inch of the path. That inch was all she needed to nuzzle a gap big enough to squeeze through. I’ve blocked the gap now with a solid piece of wood, but I guess it’s only a matter of time before she finds another way out.

Like all the best escapers she has started a tunnel. It's in the compost heap but I think this might be a decoy. In the quiet of the night I suspect she is faking passports and making civilian clothing. Next she’ll be asking for a cardboard box in the flower-bed to practice her vaulting skills.

Nothing fazes her. She can take being shut in the slammer, otherwise known as the kitchen. As long as she has her catching glove and ball, she can endure anything. Dougie, our old Westie, is far too institutionalised to go along with her plans. He’s tried teaching her how to chill out and go with the flow but Pippa won’t have it. Her duty as a Jack Russell, she says, is to cause maximum disruption wherever she can.

Slowly, we’re reaching some kind of accommodation. She has her manic times and her quiet times. Wet days are the worst. When the sun shines she’s in dog heaven. She has a toy box with a rope, a sock filled with bubble wrap attached by string to a plant pot (good for wearing her [or us] out), three balls, a rubber ring, a squeaky frog, raggies (large and small), a rubber bone and a rubber chewy thing you can put food inside. That’s more toys than I ever had and still it’s not enough.

We’ve tried a practice walk in the garden. The harness was a bit of a farce. She escaped from that quicker than Houdini could shed his straitjacket. Sooner or later they'll be bringing one for me. Tomorrow we’ll try the real thing.

Photographs

2011-06-18T09:09:00.006Z

I turned to my Facebook page last night and found that some friends were replacing their profile images with those of their fathers for a day or two to mark Father's Day. My dad died a few years back so I can no longer send him a Father's Day card. This seemed a nice way to remember him. It started me thinking about my uncles too, now all dead; and one uncle in particular, uncle Leslie who never married and never had children. I have a few old pictures of relatives and I've noticed that all the best pictures from the war years (that's the second world war) are studio photographs, usually of men in uniform. Once in the forces, young men would nip in to their nearest studio and get a picture taken for their mums, dads and sweethearts. Then I thought of all those profile pictures of men and women in our forces today, taken now as a matter of routine and passed on to the media in the event of their death. So I wrote this poem:

Father's Day

Their best pictures were in uniform,
Studio shots for the mantelpiece,
Dad and uncles Cyril and Leslie.
Cyril was a desert rat,
Les, a fitter in the RAF,
Dad was Royal Engineers,
Sporting his Robert Donat lip,
That was before they married,
Though Leslie never did,
Preferring a solitary life
In the attic flat I never saw,
That’s where they found him dead.

There wasn’t much to mark his final years,
Ticket stubs for operas in his drawer,
“I never knew our Les liked opera,”
That’s what uncle Cyril said,
Dad had Leslie’s tool box,
And when dad died it came to me,
Drill bits in pastel tins.
“A funny bloke,” my dad would say,
“That’s funny peculiar,” he would add.
He found the heat from light bulbs too intense,
So spread a newspaper on his head,
"That was our Les," said uncle Cyril.

Thinking back I can’t remember
A single thing that uncle Leslie said,
But I hear him now,
Cadences in the worn tools
He handled with such skill.
They sing in their work,
Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini,
The cold opera of a fitter’s life,
Remembered otherwise in a blue surge cap,
Like those we see today
Campaign faces captured now,
In pixelated detail,
Smiling for an infinite future,
Reproduced online, TV and in the press,
To veil their violent passing
In a measureless war,
To gaze at us, preserved
This day for men and fathers.

Hot dogs

2011-06-13T18:21:00.009Z

Ten days in to life with our new Jack Russell puppy, Pippa, a pattern is developing of sorts. The battle of wills continues and she is trying her damnedest to assert herself on the pack, picking off the weakest – poor old Dougie, our 12-year-old Westie – first.

He’s a real gentleman and she is, not to put too fine a point on it, a grade A bitch, constantly demanding and never satisfied. If he gets in a basket she will squeeze him out (see above). If he puts his snout in his food bowl she is in there for a piece of the action. Further to that picture above, I should point out that Dougie is genuinely camera shy and always looks away when he sees one.

We’re doing our best to protect the old guy, circling the wagons around him as Pippa runs round, probing for gaps in our defences. She's been getting through too often, reporting successes on all fronts, including the great patriotic chew offensive.

We'd thought the kitchen was dog proof, until Pippa made a meal of a rather nice set of Chinese apothecaries' drawers. I bought them a few years ago in Singapore and imported them on the understanding they were a Chinese antique. They'd probably just been knocked up a few days earlier in a workshop down the road but they looked the part; now more so, since they've been stressed along their bottom edge by lots of needle-sharp teeth marks.

I've coated them with Tabasco sauce which worked well when I applied it to another prime chew target, the end of the table. My fear is that most of our furniture is going to be coated with Tabasco before this dog war is over.

Yes, it's time for a switch in strategy so this weekend we have introduced our new secret weapon – the crate. I’ve been reading up on crates ever since a reader of this blog suggested they could be the solution for a small dog that bites first and asks questions later.

It didn’t seem very big when we got it home. After a particularly tiring morning I would have welcomed the opportunity to shut myself in a cage. But the instructions on the box made it clear this was to be the dog’s territory, not a sanctuary for the owner.

We were warned she might be suspicious of the crate at first and this proved true but we’ve been luring her in, Hansel and Gretel style with a trail of kibbles, and she’s just beginning to feel at home, but still with the door open.

It's been a pretty exhausting 10 days and we needed a break on Sunday so went for a walk in the countryside on the one day, after weeks of blue skies, that the heavens opened and it poured down. When we returned, soaked through, she looked at us both and I think for the first time the dog was thankful for her crate.

Gill seems to be making most headway with gentle coaxing and exchanging treats for obeyed commands. But the dog mustn’t think she’s going to get a treat every time she comes running to sit when asked.

Poor Dougie – she’s worked out that he’s almost blind and takes advantage of it, plaguing him until he snaps at her. She knows his range too. I’m worried she’ll be the death of the old guy. At the same time she thinks he’s wonderful and can’t understand why he doesn’t want to play, ever.

Dougie can still get away by joining me in the office during the day, while Pippa stalks the kitchen and the garden. Nights are working out reasonably well. We still leave the dogs in the kitchen and I go through the bedtime routine, turning out the lights.

But last night, about 2.30 am, Dougie began barking – very unusual. I went down stairs to find that the kitchen was stifling. I had mistaken an underfloor heating switch for a light switch. At 3 am I was still there with all the doors open, cooker fan at full blast and the dogs stumbling around the garden in the darkness. Today we put some tape over the heating switch.

House training is two steps forward and one step back. The step back is usually in to something wet or squidgy. But that’s to be expected. Just now, as I write, all is quiet. Dougie is in his basket and Pippa is snuggled up in her crate, but it won’t last. The evening and the wild time beckons. Why didn't we buy a lap dog, a Pug or something? I love Pugs.

A dog's life

2011-06-08T10:06:00.008Z

Donkin Life is very quickly becoming a dog's life. Pippa, our 10-week-old Jack Russell is chewing her way through our woodwork like a beaver on dam duty. I think she must understand her name now as Pippa-no.

I'm writing during a lull in hostilities as she naps on the bean bag. But sometime soon the barrage will start again and she'll be advancing once more with teeth like fixed bayonets. I wonder if our old Westie, Dougie, has been passing on a few tips about her owners as the old dog and new bitch share his bean bag: "The only thing these Donkins understand is cold steel - they do not like it up 'em. Take their treats and their kibbles and when you see the whites of their eyes let 'em have it. Show no mercy."

If he was to pass on such advice I'm sure it would only be to divert attention from himself. I think we've all been guilty of that these past few days - cowardice in the face of the enemy. Even the plants quake in their pots as she enters a room.

We should never anthropomorphise, but if I was to do so with this Jack Russell I'd compare her to a member of the Gurkha Brigade, small in stature but wiry, always with a friendly smile for anyone until sent in to battle. They say that nothing phases the Gurkha. Oh no? Try our new dog.

Pippa has started to dig around the holding slot for the clothes drier. The slot, embedded in the lawn, often gets overgrown with grass, so much so we can't always find it in the growing season. Well that problem is solved. It looks like a small bomb crater now.

All terriers dig. I remember when Dougie was a pup I would take him along to Chobham Rugby Club when the boys were playing their way through the minis sections. I'd stand on the touchline, watching the rough and tumble, dog on leash, only to look down and find a hole in the grass with a tail sticking out.

We've noticed the old dog has begun to dribble a bit this last day or so. Is it related to the new arrival or is it an old man's problem? The vet has asked for a urine sample. Oh yeah, give him the bottle and show him the loo door. I don't think so.The job of collecting the sample has been designated to Gill. Her first attempt, using a disposable pudding tray, was a flop. The dog is pee shy. Well, as a bloke who values his privacy in a public urinal, I can relate to that. One can easily get put off. So we'll leave it a while.

We're back on the training (pictured) as I write and our pup's new name is Pippa-come. She's responding too. The sun is shining, the dogs are behaving, almost. We're in that good place - the place you see when you watch puppies in films and on TV - a place called Andrex. It's the place that prompts the kids to say: "We want a dog." It's the place that catches unwary parents off their guard. Don't go there. It's like that vision of a summer picnic in a pastel-shaded field. It doesn't show the wasps, the curled sandwiches, the upturned relish jars, the wine spills and the drenching rain. But that's life just now. We're living a dog's life and it's no picnic.

Dog days and dusk

2011-06-07T18:33:00.016Z

Gill is running around the garden in circles followed by a puppy. I haven't seen Gill run anywhere for 30 years. She collapses breathless in the dining room, slumped over the table while our new dog looks as if she hasn't even left the starting blocks.

They have rescue homes for abused pets. But what about homes for abused pet owners? We need respite care. I'm starting to develop facial twitches similar to those displayed by Commissioner Dreyfus in the Pink Panther films. In fact I'll never watch 101 Dalmations again without feeling a pang of sympathy for Cruella de Vil.

Today was relatively peaceful. The orchids were attacked again and there was some gnawing to the end of the table, but nothing too serious. Our Westie, Dougie, bore the brunt of the aggravation. Normally he's the most placid dog on the planet but under the severest of provocation he was reduced to a snarling parody of Spike in the Tom and Jerry cartoons. Spike often suffered at the hands of Tom but it was nothing to Dougie's torment faced with Pippa, our mighty atom of a Jack Russell puppy.

There are moments of peace during the day when both dogs are stretched out in their basket and all the pain seems worthwhile. But you know that sooner or later the puppy will awake. An eye opens and fixes me in its glare and I begin to tremble. It's the evenings I dread the most. The moment the sun goes down, she seems to transform herself from a happy-go-lucky pup into a demon with an angel's face. It's unnerving. I showed her my hand and and she licked it before sinking her teeth in to a finger. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

Our only weapon so far as been the box of Iams "proactive nutrition" puppy kibbles that Gill has been using as "recognition" treats. The idea is that she shouts Pippa's name, Pippa comes running and when they have eye contact, the dog gets a treat. She picked that one up fast - that's the dog, not Gill. But I could do with our pup being a bit less proactive.

On the packet it says: "Iams with PreBiotics - helps support healthy digestion and strong defences." That would account for the teeth marks in my finger. I'm thinking of switching to Iams now. It might be the only way to outlast this pint-sized beast.

Our little dog, is peaceful now, curled up asleep with Dougie on his bean bag. Butter wouldn't melt. You could hear a pin drop in our corner of Surrey suburbia. But I'm looking out of the window at the last rays of the sun......

New dog, old tricks

2011-06-07T08:57:00.009Z

She’s called Pippa, she’s a ten-week-old Jack Russell and she’s the latest addition to the Donkin household. We’ve been thinking of getting a new dog for a while, ever since the two old dogs in our home began to show signs of fatigue, lethargy and boredom. The first, our 12-year-old West Highland terrier, Dougie, is nearly blind and has lost a lot of hair. The second is also losing his hair and spends much of his time these days sleeping by the fire in his favourite chair – that’s me.

The house needed something to liven things up a bit and a new dog seemed just the tonic. I have always liked Jack Russells. They’re tough little dogs and have a lot of spirit. A friend has one called Bertie. He’s a lovely little chap.

So we were looking but not looking if you know what I mean. I’d check out rescue dogs now and then but hadn’t seen anything suitable. We avoided specialist breeders when we were looking for a Westie, choosing a dog that had been reared in a friendly home and had not been removed too early from its mother. He’s been a great dog and now he’s reached his twilight years. He likes the quiet life – or at least he did.

We were bringing our youngest son George back from university on Friday and turned off the busy A3 before Guildford as it was approaching the rush hour and there’s a quieter way home. Just beyond the first roundabout we noticed a sign saying “Jack Russell puppies for sale.”

We drove on a while as I said: “Shall we have a look?” I turned the car around and we found ourselves on a long drive beyond some electric gates to a property that looked part farm, part builder’s yard. There were stables with horses and older Jack Russells in a kennel. In one of the stalls was this tiny white puppy with a brown head, the last of the litter. Once Gill had held her she was going to be ours.

That was about 60 hours and what seems like a lifetime ago, in the space of which, this tiny pup has transformed our house in to a war zone with all the power of a demolisher’s wrecking ball. Gone are those lazy evenings in the chair, gone is Dougie’s perpetual snooze. Instead Dougie and me are occupying our respective trenches trying to fend off the enemy’s next attack. He looks to me for help and I tell him: “If you knows of a better hole go to it!”

When Pippa jumped up to pull a newspaper out of the paper bin it was amusing at first but wearing a bit thin by the sixty-first time. Nothing is safe. She’s attacked the carpet, the settees, my precious orchids and even the orchids’ growing medium. She’s also attacked us, play biting of course, all harmless stuff until you notice the blood streaming down your arm.

I’ve been reading about Jack Russells. All the web sites agree they can be a handful, hence the reason that so many end up as rescue dogs. But we’re not first time dog owners daft enough to be sold on those puppy looks. We know what the word “spirited” means in a puppy. Except we’ve probably forgotten a few things. We’re trying to remember if Dougie tried to bite everything in sight. I don’t think he did.

Anyway the training has started and I’m hoping that she’ll be house trained in short order. The worst times seem to be the evenings. When the rest of us are trying to take it easy, she’s skating around the room like a pocket rocket, paying little heed to Doug’s warning growls.

Feeding times might go better too. We’ve found that Dougie prefers her puppy food and she prefers Dougie’s kibbles. She has a few toys but they don’t seem to provide as much entertainment value as a household object such as a lamp flex or a door mat.

It’s not all negative. I’m encouraged that she hasn’t yapped or whined much - not yet. She seems to have quite an easy temperament - for a Jack Russell. I’m hoping that because she’s a bitch she might not display too much of the breed’s infamous aggression. The only time Dougie was attacked by another dog, it was a Jack Russell that sank its teeth in to his neck and left them there, clamped. He’s been wary of the breed ever since and he’s not forgiving us for the new arrival. In fact I think he believes that this is all a bad doggie dream.

But she’s here now and Pippa will have to learn to live with us – rather than the other way around. You have to watch out for Jack Russells displaying a “little Napoleon” complex, where they try to dominate. If that happens, then you’re lost. No, I think things are going to be fine. Pippa might agree but just now she has her mouth full of trouser leg. This isn’t training; this is war.

Game on

2011-05-24T21:19:00.008Z

When you start a family you often wonder as a parent how your children will turn out. You can't be there for them all the time and you make decisions, often vital ones, over their care and education that you hope will create a solid foundation for the future.

But, schools aside, there are hundreds of other inputs - the way you behave, the things you say - that contribute to the characters they become. Would Rob be the same man he is today, without having read the Beano as a boy? Who knows?

We have three great boys, each with quite different characters. The two oldest boys were good at maths, like their mother and, since they went to quite an academic school that emphasised traditional subjects, it wasn't a surprise to see them shift towards maths and the sciences as they readied for university.

But, although they said goodbye to art as a school subject before GCSEs, they both continued drawing and painting and doodling. All the boys have been attracted to games and puzzles all of their lives. Somewhere in a cupboard is a drawing of a board game they invented one Christmas.

So I guess we shouldn't be surprised now to find the two oldest boys, John and Rob making games together professionally, and who knows if George will join them? I know there'll be an opportunity if he chooses to do so.

Rob did the trail blazing and then stepped in to teach John how to do the coding when John lost his film industry job. John gave the film industry his best shot, but an MSc in film industry management on top of an economics degree still didn't appear to be enough even though he learned plenty about film finance.

Anyway he's taken to game development and picked things up really quickly. What's more, he's particularly enjoying the artwork. We hear a lot about sibling rivalry but I don't see any of that - there's mutual respect between the brothers, all three of them. I can't begin to say how chuffed I am, and yes, proud of what they're doing.

There were a few things we talked about when they were younger that I think may have stayed with the brothers. One was to work at things they enjoyed. Another was to be there for each other like musketeers - all for one and one for all. OK, that might sound corny but I believe that spirit has to be at the heart of any family.

The other great thing is that they're working things out for themselves. George is fiercely independent and each of them knows his own mind. Parents should never try to realise their own aspirations through their kids. We just want our boys to be happy and fulfilled. They're not establishing careers through a parent's contact or because a parent thinks that's what they should do. We just stand back and watch how they get on and sometimes make a comment which they either accept or ignore. In John and Rob's world every new game is as much fun for Gill and me as it is for the lads.

Who knows where the path they've chosen will take them? But they're building something incrementally and they're learning all the while. For sure, they'll make mistakes and they'll learn from them. They may have bigger success and I hope they do, and if they're fortunate they'll continue to have a lot of fun because they're having fun now, the fun that comes with creating something, building on ideas and the satisfaction you get when everything comes together.

One day they'll look back at the great days they enjoyed at the start of this journey, because they are great days when you're building something. The main thing is that the boys are doing things their way and there's a lot to be said for that.

I hope this latest milestone - John and Rob's first game in collaboration, The Adventures of Red, will be the first of many and that they continue to expand their knowledge. It's packed with puzzles - some that will be familiar and some not so, and don't go thinking it's a kids' game. It will stretch the abilities of many adults. I didn't find it a pushover. Red, by the way, happens to be Yellow. John also contributed to another new game of Rob's, Blow Things Up! 2. I asked Rob what he was going to call his things. "They're Things," he said. Duh!

Proof of the pudding is in the haggis

2011-05-12T15:01:00.001Z

It started with a throwaway line on Facebook after an observation that I'd been in Scotland a lot these past few weeks. Now I've decided it's time I affirmed my Scottishness. As a waif growing up in the West Riding of Yorkshire I was led to believe that my family hailed from the North East as there were Donkins in Bridlington who emigrated to West Yorkshire and started our branch of the family.

While I enjoyed roast beef and Yorkshire pudding as a kid I found I was particularly partial to the odd bit of Haggis. Not only that, but I rarely missed an episode of Doctor Finlay's Casebook, read the Beano (published in Dundee) every week and my favourite book was Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stephenson. Then, as a family we'd always welcome in the New Year with Andy Stewart's White Heather Club on telly.

Ginger

Moreover I've always had an inexplicable fondness for stones and my moustache is ginger. I remember watching the Peter Watkins' film Cullodon on TV years ago. Why did I want the Scots to beat the English? It happened again watching Braveheart. It could have been a tendency to sympathise with the underdog but I suspect it's more than that.

There are not many Donkins about in the south of England but they occupy quite a few lines in the Durham and Hull telephone directories. A Donkin even established a settlement in Nova Scotia which he named with an uncharacteristic lack of imagination: Donkin.

There are more notable Donkins in history than you might think, none of whom are ancestors of mine as far as I know (and I haven't looked very far).

Clan Duncan

I know from this website that I can feel at home in the Duncan clan. It's not a bad tartan so I'm up for a kilt even if, as an old friend rudely pointed out, I don't have the legs for one.

The problem with researching a clan name is that it can get complicated as this forum shows, discussing derbhfines (a four generation kin group) and armigers (people entitled to use a coat of arms).

I couldn't give a stuff about either of the latter but I would like to know where the Donkins originated. Just as some residual meme connects me spiritually to the glens, another meme takes me to the Outer Hebrides. I can't see the Norse chessmen (found on Lewis) without experiencing a frisson of excitement (that may also have something to do with a liking for Noggin the Nog as a kid. I love the Isle of Lewis - the way they chain up the playgrounds on a Sunday in Stornoway, the Wee Free heritage and the wholesome miserableness of the place.

It's possible I could be wrong. This site suggests the name originated in Kent but that's plain tosh. I am not and have never been a southerner. While I like the idea that way back there might be some Viking heritage, I think it must have been the oddball Icelandic strain rather than the tall blond and handsome Norwegian types. But I can't associate with the long-haired Celtic types such as Neil Oliver whose voice turns Gill weak at the knees.

Black Bob

Geneology is big business on the internet but I can't be bothered with it. I suppose I should call my cousin Ian in Bradford who's done a bit of that work and traced the record of Black Bob Donkin mentioned here. But Black Bob was part of that Bridlington strain and I haven't gone back any deeper in to the past.

If I did, I know it would take me north over the border in to the heather and finally across the water to the Hebrides, to a hidden bothy perhaps, where a long dead ancestor is drinking the local poteen while moving his Noggin knight. Outside there's a gale blowing and the sun hasn't shone for a week, but Donkin doesn't care because he's at home and warm by the peat fire.

When Alex Salmond decides to close the borders I hope he'll accept my passport and ancient Scottish name as proof of residency. OK, I might not have a great Scottish accent but I can take instruction. In the meantime I will continue to eat porridge for breakfast, renew my membership of the Muriel Grey fan club and recall that Archie Gemmill goal against the Netherlands.

I suppose that supporting the England Rugby Union team is a slight problem but, let's face it, the Scots don't really do rugby, or soccer for that matter. They're good with stones on ice and tossing telegraph poles, stuff that entertains the Queen (who is not remotely Scottish), but musically, well some of us like the bagpipes and some don't. They're not my cup of tea. Did I say tea? I meant whisky. Yes, the memes are kicking in: it's haggis tonight, imported from Kelso, no kidding.

Fun, games, life, work and taxes

2011-05-10T10:44:00.014Z

It's been a funny old few weeks spent mostly in fishing huts, yacht cabins and wading in various rivers. I suppose this is what retirement looks like for people who can't wait for the day. But some of us have no intention of retiring and much of this stuff has involved work.

OK, I know it doesn't look like work, but you have to believe me when I tell you there has been work going on during this time. I've picked up some nice stories and material for my journalism and books. If you're reading this taxman - and I know he does read my blogs - this is how it works. It's something I have tried to explain in books and another blog, The Future of Work.

When I learn a new fly-fishing cast - in this case the Circle C - and I pass it on to other anglers, I'm doing a job and I'm building my expertise which is essential if you seek to write auhoritatively. I had to practice that cast, evaluate its worth, try it on different rods (yeah, right, say friends). The blog gets some of this stuff first as I turn over ideas. "But you don't get paid for your blog," says the taxman. I know he says this because it's been relayed back to me by my tax advisor (who, incidentally, is the kind of advisor who vets my work and expense claims as thoroughly if not more so than the Customs and Revenue. Oh, and I met him on a boat).

This week I'm speaking to people who design super yachts. It helps to have been on one or two of these yachts when you're writing about them. But I'll never own one and it would prey on my conscience if I did. I'm also researching the story of a big fish, probably for the Field or some other magazine if they want it. I photographed it in Kelso and, hopefully, the image will be published in a magazine. It's why I have invested in a good camera and the skills to use it.

I've taken a decision to put my life - or some of it - out in to the blogosphere for public consumption. I cannot help the fact that I have found income streams in some of the things I do for pleasure but it is part of a philosophy of life I have tried to pass on to my children: find something you enjoy doing and find a way to make a living from it.

Life is for living. It's not just about earning lots of dosh. And our quality of life is not something to which can be attached some monetary value, no matter how much the Exchequer wishes it was. I know plenty of wealth-focused people who find little happiness in their jobs. Some have become trapped in a system where they have to earn large sums to service the debts they incur. I'm not blaming them. When you take on a mortgage and send your kids to private school you need to look out for your earnings. But when these debts have been paid it's possible to live on much less. No you can't live on fresh air, but you can taper your work to your needs.

Our two older boys have always enjoyed making puzzles and doing creative things and what do they do now for a living? They make computer games professionally. Rob is already pretty well established and John is getting there fast with two puzzle games, including one he has done in collaboration with his brother.

They have to play games to find out how they work and to get new ideas. They're having fun in the process but be in no doubt taxman, this is work. It's the new work that links lifestyle, the intrinsic reward of work, and financial reward. It's a kind of work that demands new definitions - not the familiar one of something we would rather not be doing (this is the one that the taxman understands), but something that engages us for much of our waking hours.

I'm worried that the problem for my boys will be to stop themselves working although I've noticed that they are trying to channel their collaborations in to a traditional nine-to-five working day.

I have some new work coming in investigating a spectacular piece of tax evasion involving hundreds of millions of pounds. When I'm ready I'll be happy to hand it over to the tax authorities and that will be a rewarding experience for all of us. Will they share with me the commission they earn in pulling in more tax from these people? I doubt it.

The river holds a lesson for those who work in the Customs and Revenue: it's far more satisfying to go after the big fish.

Tay week

2011-04-10T17:39:00.003Z

Remote from control

I found the world for
the price of a cappuccino
in McDonald’s in Perth.
Three hours it took
to get unstuck,
sifting a week’s emails,
storing some,
deleting most unopened.
The river bank
out of signal,
those metal phone antennae,
passing for conifers
at Bridge of Allan,
being ostracized
in these parts.

The TV wouldn’t work,
just a still picture of
some unkempt garden,
a glass cold frame
broken in the foreground.
We looked at it
like dogs begging
at the master’s table,
tried four different handsets,
but the Champions’ League
was as Ithaca to Troy
and Rooney’s goal as
remote as the heel cut that
silenced poor Achilles
and the whole of Stamford Bridge.

So we let the red spot die,
tinkered with the crossword
and had a cup of tea
and went to bed
and even read
a chapter or two.
Communications dead,
we waited on the weather
and stood beside the Tay,
engorged from flooding in the west,
wondering what to do for the best,
we set the satnav for St Andrew’s
and sheltered with our picnic
by the shore
in the lee of
wind-scored rocks.

And afterwards we paid twelve pounds
in Scots and English notes for
a round of the museum
with dozens of golf clubs
and feather-centered balls
and the Claret jug.
I thought they’d take it home, I said,
but no, it’s here,
emptied of everything
but dreams and sweat
concentrated in a moment’s
celebration, jug held high
or kissed for cameras
and the family album,
online these days,
but only at McDonald’s
when fishing near Perth.

Theft of a garden path

2011-04-04T10:44:00.005Z

Many years ago, before moving down south we lived in a lovely old stone cottage near Huddersfield. It must have been about 300 years old. There was something right about the house. It was a happy home. It had a stone roof, sash windows, Bakelite switches for the lights and a real front garden with a York stone path embedded in the lawn and worn in all the right places. Not long after we moved the path was stolen. A lorry turned up in the middle of the day and the men who came with it, lifted all the old stone flags plus some coping stones on the wall and drove away with them. I suppose the slabs ended up in an architectural salvage yard destined for someone else's property. But they belonged with our old house as much as anything belongs anywhere. Not our loss, you may say. We had moved. But I still felt a sense of loss, an anger that something so right had been destroyed. No insurance payout, no new path could replace the old one. It really was irreplaceable. Some people say change happens - get used to it. It seems to me that paths are a record of change. When you take away that record, what's left?

Theft of a garden path

Splash puddles formed in
Hollows worn by centuries of
Foot scrape. The postman’s
Boots, a soldier home
On leave, trench mud,
Powdered, dusting the
Wiped coconut matting,
Before the telegram,
And the bearer’s
Funeral face, lace
Curtains hiding grief,
Etched episodes of
News, hope, sadness,
Love and celebration in
Layered fermentation.
Smooth surfaced,
Grass-edged slabs,
Mason’s serrations,
Chiseled through
Sedimentary time, fine
Sea-washed,
Jurassic bed,
Kilned in the oven earth,
Abandoned in an
Unrecorded time,
Ignored in the chaos of
Man’s irrelevance,
Quarried, shaped, settled,
Respected and admired,
Even, envied in their evenness
Envied, coveted, wanted and
Removed, reclaimed in a
Builder’s morning, all
Shovels, picks and hard hats,
Whistling, donkey-jacket
Innocence, concealing
Base intentions,
Hauled to another place, face
Flaked, grimed
Forgotten stories stripped in
Mute acceptance,
Cold, silent, unremarked,
Prisoned indifference and
Careless of ages.

Poetry, drink and a row in the town

2011-03-21T19:47:00.019Z

A few of us spent the weekend in Ireland, over for the rugby international in what has become a biennial ritual not unlike one of those holy days when fanatics engage in a purging of the flesh, the only difference being that the thrashing was handed out by the Irish to an English team that looked anything but grand in the way it was slammed.

The rest of us were slammed in a manner that seems difficult to avoid on a weekend in Dublin when the combination of Guinness, bars and doors that have the habit of opening when you push them, ensure that the Euro/Guinness exchange rate is raised to unsustainable levels.

In recognition of this risk we usually try to arrange a cultural element designed to keep us out of the pubs for an hour or two. To its credit The 1916 Rebel Tour avoided too great a shock to the system by starting and finishing in a pub, The International Bar on Wicklow Street.

Lorcan Collins who has been running these tours since 1996 and who has co-authored a book on the Easter Rising of 1916, certainly knows his stuff but he did get a bit touchy when one of the party - not one of us - seemed to be trying to out-guide him, so he reimbursed her and chucked her off, a pity since, had she endured, we might have seen a re-enactment of the Irish civil war which would have added to the entertainment.

Whichever way you look at it, the Easter Rising was a tragedy, but, as Lorcan was at pains to explain, it was almost as if some of its members were resigned to failure from the off. Patrick Pearse, who led the rebellion, spoke of a "blood sacrifice" that he believed was necessary to create momentum for change.

As it was, thousands of Irishmen were serving soldiers in the British Army at a time that the British were building their forces ahead of the Somme offensive on July 1, 1916. The so-called "separation" payments made to the wives of serving Irish soldiers were the only means that many had of feeding their families. Little wonder then, that the insurrection was initially unpopular. It was only when the British began executing the ringleaders that public sympathy shifted towards the rebel cause.

A few themes recurred during the weekend, namely the Irish talent for tragedy and sacrifice, combined with a love of lyricism, poetry and song (usually about all the tragedy and sacrifice), and underpinned by religious belief, a prodigious memory for historical grievance, enjoyment of drink and an appetite for a good scrap. The latter was demonstrated only too painfully among England's grand slam hopefuls who were well and truly hammered. We needed to check the score the next day just to be sure (below).

These were only the immediate themes. As enjoyable as we made the weekend, in spite of England's failure, there was the regular intervention of news bulletins reminding us of an insurrection for our times, in Lybia. Supporters of the revolution were demonstrating in the street right outside Dublin's General Post Office, headquarters of the Easter Rising of 95 years ago.

Anyway the upshot of all this is that I was inspired to write a poem. It's not Yeats (and not the first poem I've featured in the blog) but it does try to pull together some of the things we learned - apart from the rugby. That was just too horrible for words. It's called.......

Easter Rising

Many have forgiven,
But some they never will
The putteed boys in slouch hats
And Mausers in the drill,
Old ledgers piled in naked frames
Slit sunshine slicing through,
Its clouded shafts bereft of hope,
Warming the morning dew.

Many have forgiven,
But some they never will,
The limbered guns and sniper rounds,
Lodged in an angel’s breast,
They flew the green a full six days,
From Ireland’s supreme hour,
When lancers, skittled from their mounts,
Sprawled on the cobbled ground.

Many have forgiven,
But some they never will,
The hobnailed march to prison yard,
Guns shouldered for the kill,
Where Connolly condemned in pain,
Hauled from a tended bed,
Sagged his rope-bound bandaged chest,
Trussed in a wooden chair.

Many have forgotten,
But some they never will,
The khakied ranks in poppied fields
Raked in the whistled dawn
Torn in bloodied, serried rows,
A wife’s sad separation,
The soldier’s life in silver coins,
Chiseled name in a chalk field.

Many have forgiven,
But some they never will,
A cleansing of the Roman hands
The flailing and the thorns,
The sweating path, the arid hill,
Hammered flesh on timber,
The shadow of an ancient cross,
Before the Easter rising.

Some more photos:
We met prior to the Rebel tour above the International Bar where they hold comedy evenings. Stanley is testing out the props.
In a quiet moment, Simon contemplates the days, hours, minutes and seconds to his retirement.
A team photo in the hotel: Back row, L to R: Simon Weathers, Peter Allen, Stanley Fisher, Simon Harrison, Stuart Fletcher. Front, L to R: Seamus Quinn, Richard Donkin. More photos (including the 2009 Dublin trip) can be viewed here.

Two Minutes Hate

2011-03-08T09:49:00.008Z

In George Orwell's 1984, people gather round each day for the Two Minutes Hate, a concentration of projected bile at whoever or whatever is upsetting Big Brother on that particular day.

I find that buying the Daily Telegraph does the same job. It brings my blood to the boil with the speed of a microwave oven and it usually does so from unexpected quarters although its female columnists have proven a reliable source of irritation.

Today it was Judith Woods writing about the island of Tresco for no other reason than that is has been rumoured that the Royal newlyweds might be spending their honeymoon there and that a film has been made about the Scillies called Archipelago.

In one unsubstantiated rumour and one class-ridden column-cum-feature the Daily Telegraph and, perhaps unwittingly, the Royals, have ruined the Scillies, possibly for good. The Scilly Isles work as a holiday destination because not many people go there.

Not many people go there because there isn't much to do when you get there. And this is the big appeal for what Woods calls the "upper middles" who are prepared to spend good money trying to recreate an Enid Blyton adventure for their children, replete with rock pools, crabs, bladderwrack, tartan travel rugs and a little wooden boat that is not unlike The Swallow in Swallows and Amazons.

To cap it all there is a ridiculously large picture of Woods standing by an empty beach with a wine glass in her hand. Why?

She is at pains to tell us that part of the exclusivity of Tresco is the cost of getting there and staying there - a bit more than your average package to Ibiza.

Woods is a sharp writer and a sharp observer, so she's careful to step aside from her fellow London-centric chatterers for a bit of in-joke leg-pulling with comments about Boden-on-sea and a "Truman Show sense of staginess" that is spot on in describing Tresco.

But she is equally careful to include herself among the cognoscenti who have nothing better to do in their north London enclaves, it seems, than choose safe stripy tee-shirts and canvass slacks from the Boden catalogue.

This stuff makes me so sick I want to seek out the nearest tattoo parlour and get a stud in my nose. But behind this rage, possibly at its root, is that I too love the Scillies and had a wonderful holiday there once when the children were young, not on Tresco but on Bryher (which the cognoscenti can tell you has none of the pretensions of Tresco). And yes, at the time, we ran a Golf Gti (Mk I, black, silver stripes) wore Barbour jackets and green Hunter wellies.

In those days the islands were just as twee but they were appealingly unfashionable, confirmed so in people's memories as the place that Harold Wilson and his wife Mary spent their summer holidays, stretching out the pound in his pocket.

As the hate subsides and I come to the end of her feature, I'm prepared to give Woods and her colleagues another chance to redeem themselves in the Donkin household. She writes well and the piece is finely observed.

All it needs is a suitable ending with the ritual burning of a journalist outsider in a giant Wicker Man fertility sacrifice, thus preserving the timeless ritual of birth, death and renewal in a place where you only need to come from Devon to be classed as an ethnic minority.

I can face the day now, prejudices intact. By tonight the newspaper will be in the bin. Tomorrow there'll be another one and Two Minutes Hate all over again.

Hambo

2011-02-28T10:59:00.018Z

He did his tour of Vietnam, returning to an ungrateful nation. Times have changed. No-one wants to be reminded of this forgotten war. Some have turned vegetarian. There's no hero's welcome for veteran porkers, Hambo and Bacon, just harassment from the police who don't want them in town.

Bacon gets roughed up and bundled in to the meat wagon. They've seen too much, done too much together. There's a code among veterans - you don't let your buddy down. Hambo is hurting, then....something snaps.

This is the premise for Rob's latest game, Hambo, that has already notched up a million plays since its launch four days ago, with 380,000 plays on the first day.

Hambo, like his namesake John Rambo, has access to an impressive arsenal of weaponry to hurl at the police who seem hamstrung in response.

The game has 36 levels but a big part of its appeal is that it also allows players to create their own levels and they've been doing so in their hundreds.

Rob has been enjoying a few days in San Francisco (see previous post) at the flash games developers' very own Oscars ceremony. One of his games was nominated for an award but, like Annette Bening and Helena Bonham Carter, he had to watch the prize go elsewhere.

No matter, I'm sure he's had a fruitful time, meeting other developers who he says "all take their jobs very seriously." Of course they do. This is business now, but it's good to know he's still having fun.

The release of Hambo and another game, The Legend of The Golden Robot (both co-developed with RobotJam; Golden Robot is reviewed here), coincided with the Flash Gaming summit, so he had plenty to talk about. Hambo has taken off unlike any other game he has done so far. Maybe at next year's awards this will do what the King's Speech did in Hollywood.

Geekdom beckons

2011-02-24T17:39:00.013Z

It's official: one of my sons is a geek and a second is working his way to geekdom as I write. At this moment Robert (right) is somewhere over the United States on his way to San Francisco where he's among the speakers at the Flash Gaming Summit. This is his session, Rob's on the left. Some of Rob's games have been nominated for an award but that's secondary to the opportunity to network with others in the gaming capital of the world.

Anyone who reads my blogs will know I'm a Flash Games fan and that's not just because my sons are working in this fledgling industry, it's because so much talent is clustering around these games - young people making their own way with none of the strictures of corporate graduate training schemes.

They're making this industry up as they go along and it's growing at quite a pace. A lot of the games are great fun to play and they cost nothing for the player. The financing model depends on advertising.

On an evening, as an alternative to a book, the web or TV, I often sit down with a Flash Game, like this one, for example, from the Pastel Games fold of Mateusz Skutnik whose Sub-machine and Daymare Town series of games have set the standard in point-and-click puzzle games.It's not clear yet where John, our eldest - who has left the film industry - will settle as he learns his coding. He's pictured here in his Wimbledon flat. He's shared with us some early work and the results look promising. Games creators tend to favour either the arts side or the coding side and some do both. Both John and Rob are good at art and maths and this works well in gaming as both skills are important.

So this this is a big weekend for Rob. At the very least he's going to come back inspired. He plans a visit to Alcatraz. There could be a game in that.

Rob's stateside visit means there's one game he will miss this weekend. I'm taking John and their youngest brother George to Twickenham for the England v France Rugby Union match. George (pictured here with the silver rabbit he won at the annual Christmas fan-the-kipper tournament) is not a geek. He was dissecting a squid at university this week. I'm not sure what that makes him - a future mad scientist?

Out to lunch

2011-02-22T10:57:00.001Z

The words weren’t there today. They didn’t come, not for a long time, and when a few turned up this is all I had.

“Come on,” I said, “We can do better than this.”

But the words turned to me and said: “We’re just words. We’re always here for you. You can use us as you wish, but you know we’re witless without thoughts. Thoughts make us work.”

So where are the thoughts? They’re slumbering in the quiet places, concealing themselves from the big beast, inspiration. It hasn’t been seen today.

Where’s inspiration? The thought looked vacant. “Search me,” it said. “It needs to feed,” said another. “That’s your job.”

And then I remembered, inspiration feeds on other people’s thoughts.

The newspaper is still on the step.

Woking's hidden heritage

2011-02-21T08:54:00.012Z

Yesterday we started to research the walk I'm planning for a group of former FT journalists who call themselves “the old lags.” I can’t get to all of the walks, mostly in the London area, but offered to host one from Woking Station, just 25 minutes down the line from London’s Waterloo Station.

The challenge is to get out of the urban environment to offer some rural, or at least semi-rural walking with a pub for lunch. Anyone who has visited Woking - on the fringe of the M25 - might see that as a tall order.

Woking eased itself comfortably in to the book of Crap Towns. It is utterly lacking in charm and seems to be run by people whose architectural vision does not extend beyond concrete tower blocks and multi-storey car parks. Yet every town has something to offer.

In the late 1990s Woking decided to exploit its literary heritage, hence the sculpted interpretation of a Martian tripod in the town centre in tribute to H G Wells and his science fiction novel, War of the Worlds. Wells lived in the town when he wrote the book that drew on some of the local features, specifically the sand pits on nearby Horsell Common. So the tripod can be an early photo call on the five-minute walk from the station to the Basingstoke canal.

The canal tow path, which nudges up against the ring road, will take us within 15 minutes to a hidden bit of Woking, the site of three Bronze age burial mounds right on the edge of the town. When we visited, the biggest and best of these was charred and littered with rubbish from old camp fires on he crown of its mound (mentioned here).

A little further in to the woods and we came across the Muslim burial ground (pictured above). This is a small enclosure that up to 1968 contained the remains of 24 Indian army soldiers who had served with the British and Commonwealth forces in WWI and WWII. These were soldiers who had died from their wounds in British hospitals. This former Commonwealth war grave was established so that it was close to one of the UK’s oldest mosques, the Shah Jahan Mosque that can be seen on the left as you come in to Woking on the train from Waterloo. The graveyard is a reminder that muslims have given their lives for this country and are still prepared to do so.

The graves were moved to Brookwood Cemetery (one of the reasons that Woking exists, recalled in this feature) when they were repeatedly vandalised. There is nothing but grass inside the walls now.

We walked on to Horsell Common and the sand pits that Wells decided would make an ideal location for a Martian landing. It was here in the book, that curious locals gathered around a half-buried machine before the author ensured that most of the area was obliterated in the ensuing war.

I wonder if Wells could not resist the potential for destroying this place in his imagination. I can't blame him. As John Betjamin wrote of Slough in his famous poem, "It isn't fit for humans now." One uniting feature of this quite impressive list of people with Woking connections is that most of them got out of the place as soon as they could.

I'm thinking we might make it to Chobham but we didn't get so far yesterday on foot, although we did drive out to a good locals pub in the village. There's plenty of traditional Surrey heathland around Horsell but a lot of it is churned up by muddy paths. I suppose I could take people to the south of the town and the remains of Woking's Royal Tudor Palace that looked like this in Henry VIII's time. Today there's a bit of a wall and that's about it. But I'll save that delight for another time, should anyone want to return.

Remembering the Lancastria

2011-02-06T21:04:00.008Z

We were turning out the loft recently, trying to shed some junk, and found an old video camera, complete with some tapes made many years ago.

Rob, our middle son, was down for the weekend and he began playing the videos on the TV. One of them featured my father who died in 2003. A few years before his death I’d asked him to tell us about his experiences in WW II so that we had a family record.

In the tape he was telling us about getting out of France after the German breakthrough in May 1940. Dad (pictured here before the war) was in a part of the army cut off from the British forces that retreated to Dunkirk.

He’d been based near St Saens in Normandy, not far from Abbeville where the German forces had reached the coast. Dad was ordered to take his bren gun and cover a bend in the road down which German tanks were advancing. The odds didn’t seem to be stacked very well in his favour so after emptying his magazine, he and his number two ran back to join the rest of his unit who were boarding a lorry to make their escape westwards.

They were bombed and strafed on the road as they drove west towards the port of St Nazaire. The road was covered in wreckage and discarded belongings and weapons, said dad. “We had to abandon the lorry when the road became impassable. I remember helping another chap who was struggling to walk. He threw his gun away but I hung on to mine. It was part of the training that you held on to your weapons, but many didn’t.”

Many of those who reached the port before he did had been disembarked on to an ocean liner, the Lancastria, now packed with servicemen and refugees. Even today it’s not certain how many people were on board. Dad watched from the quayside as German aircraft dive bombed the ship and scored a direct hit.

It was June 17, eleven days after the last British troops were evacuated from Dunkirk. The ship went down with the loss of more than 4,000 lives, the most costly disaster in British maritime history. More people died in this sinking than in the combined losses of the Titanic and the Lusitania, yet not a word was written in the British press about the sinking at the time. Winston Churchill, the prime minister, didn’t want the nation to hear yet more bad news after the defeat of Dunkirk.

The decision meant that the Lancastria and its terrible loss of life was all but forgotten in comparison with other wartime incidents and sinkings. It’s a sobering thought that in the 20 minutes it took for the ship to sink it claimed the lives of nearly eight times the number of allied airmen killed in the entire Battle of Britain.

While other wrecks from this period have been designated war graves this protected status has yet to be applied to the Lancastria (more about the disaster here). Dad was evacuated by another ship - he couldn’t recall the name, but said it began with a letter “B” - that disembarked its rescued troops in Plymouth. Dad would often say how he might have been on the Lancastria had he arrived at the port earlier.

Dropping a Clanger

2011-01-21T12:58:00.005Z

Peter Firmin, the surviving half of the team that produced the children's television programmes - Noggin the Nog, Bagpuss, Ivor the Engine, The Clangers and Pogles Wood - was speaking in London last night about the origins of some of these series. His former business partner, Oliver Postgate, died in 2008.

Of all of them, my favourite was probably Noggin the Nog. He said the characters were inspired by the Lewis Chessmen and you can see the resemblance.

There is a story that the penny whistle noises used to produce conversations between the Clangers were reproducing genuinely scripted words. Some of these words, apparently, were expletives. When one of the heads of children's television saw an offending script he censored it with immediate effect.

It's a good story and Firmin confirmed the truth of it last night although he said the story was embellished in the telling by Postgate. But that's what happens to stories isn't it? The story tellers make them slightly better than the reality, emphasising absurdities. I liked it anyway and take comfort in the knowledge that embellishment is part of the art of storytelling. It's what Noggin the Nog would have done. So that's all right.

Saving face at the Royal Mail

2011-01-09T18:15:00.005Z

The forthcoming Postal Services Bill, privatising the Royal Mail, will insist that the monarch’s head remains on stamps regardless of who owns the business in the future, the Government announced today.

The Royal Mail has used an image of the Queen’s head on stamps by tradition and the Government believes the tradition should be maintained, even in private ownership. The monarchy started the service originally, so you could see why the Queen might be miffed about losing a personal image that has been around for four decades and reproduced maybe 200 billion times.

“I can’t see any reason why any future owner would want to change this as it’s a very valuable and prestigious tradition” says Edward Davey, minister for postal affairs.

It’s certainly a tradition but what value does it serve today and why shouldn’t a private owner have the right to put whatever design it chooses on its stamp, within reason? After all, there is no Government edict that every email we send should carry an image of the Queen. What’s the difference?

When you take away tradition, the arguments for continuity of the practice look rather thin. Given the ties between government and monarchy in the UK, it was natural for the head of state to feature on coinage and postage stamps in the past. Post privatisation the Royal Mail will continue to provide a country-wide six-days-a-week postal service.

That said, why should a Royal Mail in private hands, possibly foreign ownership, appear to enjoy the trappings of royal patronage,particularly if its future service fails to excel against competition?

Royal patronage to the private sector is generally bestowed through the royal warrant, a hard-earned seal of approval awarded to those who have provided goods or services “by appointment” to either the Queen, The Duke of Edinburgh or the Prince of Wales.

But the Postal Services Bill will maintain the royal connection whatever the composition of the Royal Mail after privatisation and it will not stand or fall in the same way that a Royal Warrant can be assigned to or removed from a tradesman.

A privatised postal service may well take pride in using the Queen’s head on its stamps, but we shouldn’t assume that the royal profile is an endorsement. That’s the problem – it looks like one and competitors may object to that.

There was a time when the efficiency of Royal Mail could be a matter of life and death, when carrying a reprieve “post haste” for a condemned criminal, for example. But not any more.

In the UK we seem to be besotted by traditions – preferring our telephone boxes to be red (even though hardly anyone uses them anymore) and our beer to be pulled in pints (even though that too may change soon with the appearance of the schooner).

Most London taxis are black but that doesn’t stop some being covered in advertising in sponsorship deals. Maybe a sponsor might want to have its name on a stamp. Why not Disney stamps, for example, with Mickey Mouse’s head on the cover? That might be more appropriate for today’s Royal Mail which seems a shadow of its former self. It's not as if we have the Royal Twitter or the Royal Facebook; mail is just another service. It doesn’t have to be royal any more, so why this sop to tradition?

Happy New Year..... no, really

2011-01-05T16:34:00.007Z

Just a thought: when should we stop saying "happy new year" in emails? It's easier when we meet people soon after New Year - January 3 or 4 is probably OK to begin dropping things unless it's a friend or relative you haven't seen for a while.

But emails are more difficult. I'm finding that by midweek after going back to work the Happy New Year address is wearing a bit thin although I'm still using it today. By the start of next week it should be done.

Of course, that raises the question of whether saying Happy New Year is a gesture of habit, etiquette or heartfelt sentiment? As one of those Yorkshiremen whose happiness can only be accessed by penetrating a thick crust of misery, equating the new year with happiness seems rather odd, except that you would hardly wish someone a miserable new year even if that was closer to the truth.

It's only a date on the calendar after all. I'm probably happier on December 22 when we've passed the winter solstice and the nights are growing shorter, just as I find June 22 a particularly depressing day.

A typical June 22 over-the-fence exchange with my neighbour would run something like this:

Neighbour: "What a lovely day, nice to see the roses are out."

Donkin: "Aye, but we've turned t'corner, dark nights are cummin' on."

Social networks are bringing a whole new etiquette to the New Year. On Twitter and Facebook all the new year greetings seem to be over on January 1 in keeping with the ephemeral nature of these sites.

At least Happy New Year and Happy Christmas are to the point, much better than "season's greetings." Has anyone ever said that? Using the phrase "complements of the season" probably betrays your age - fine for old men with hair sprouting from their ears, but not something that would be exchanged by teenagers as they meet up in their virtual worlds while playing Call of Duty - or what is now commonly shortened to COD - on New Year's Day.

How long does the new year last? There must come a point at which, presumably, we can stop being happy. It's probably not much beyond Epiphany when the decorations must come down. What would the Magi have said when they arrived in Bethlehem with their gifts? Not happy christmas. Happy new epoch? And how would they have referenced the event in subsequent years?

Balthazar: "Do you remember that day in 1?"

Melchior: "What? Do you mean 1 BC or 1 AD?"

Come to think of it, was Jesus born in BC or AD? Not an easy answer.

Another thing is that, with the best will in the world, the new year isn't going to be happy for everyone. It wasn't happy for Nigel Pargetter in the Archers, or for Graham Seed the actor who had played him for 27 years when he was told by Archers editor, Vanessa Whitburn, he was so popular he was being killed off. Happy New Year Graham.

Earth rarer than tulips

2011-01-04T13:06:00.005Z

In the middle of the 16th century when the world seemed a much bigger place than it does today, anything sourced beyond the borders of Europe could be considered exotic and precious; and few discoveries excited the covetousness of men more than the turban-shaped variegated petals of the tulip.

The Swiss naturalist and father of modern zoology, Conrad Gessner, first excited a European craving for tulips when he described a plant he had seen in a Bavarian collection whose owner had been sent a bulb by a friend living in Istanbul (then Constantinople).

Wealthy people in The Netherlands and Germany began to prize the flowers and were willing to part with extravagant sums for the finest specimens. The tulip became a hallmark of good taste and status, so much so, that the urge to possess a collection filtered down to the middle and merchant classes. By the turn of the century, anyone who was anyone had to have a private tulip collection. One trader in The Netherlands paid half his fortune for a single bulb.

What became known as Tulipomania is perhaps the most famous historical example of irrational exuberance that can overtake whole nations once they become gripped by what Charles Mackay in his book of the same name called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

The mania for tulips that transformed a whole nation – one must only visit the Netherlands in the spring to encounter its lasting influence – did not last beyond a manic trading in tulip futures that collapsed in 1636.

The same fever that excited speculators in tulips has emerged time and again and we can see it again today. Last week the share price of a company rose by 66 per cent, simply because it changed its name to Rare Earth Minerals.

Rare Earth is the name for ores that are rich in certain scarce minerals such as scandium, yttrium, and the fifteen types of lanthanide. The vast majority of the world’s rare earth supply is today mined in Inner Mongolia, part of the Chinese Republic.

Rare Earth Minerals doesn’t have any earth – rare or otherwise; not even a plant pot of soil sufficient to nourish a tulip. According to the Daily Telegraph up to just over a week ago the company was called Zest, a loss-making music business. But penny stock investors seem to like the name and have been piling in to the shares.

Financial historians may recall the South Sea company formed in 1711. The company was granted a monopoly of trade with Spain’s South American colonies and subsequently assumed a large proportion of British government debt. Speculating in South Sea shares dramatically increased the company's value. Not to miss the boat, other speculative ventures began issuing shares on dubious potential.

Almost a hundred of what came to be known as bubble companies were created with all kinds of imagined ventures. Indeed one of them had not even imagined what it might do. This was the business that famously described itself as “a company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is".

Nothing has changed. Just as the Dutch speculated in tulip bulbs, the Chinese have now begun speculating in French wine, driving prices of the best French wines to more than four times their normal value in 2010. This year it will probably all happen again, partly because some are prepared to deliberate on whether the Chinese market for high-priced French wine is sustainable. It is not: the speculation in French wine is a classic bubble in the making.

Two years ago Berry Brothers and Rudd, the wine merchant, predicted that the quality of Chinese wine will match that of Bordeaux wines within 50 years. Make that 20 years or even less. The Chinese move fast. They will soon produce enough fine wine of their own to meet growing domestic demand

The nature of bubbles is that they are not always apparent as they expand. But some don't care whether they are apparent or not and will happily disguise a bubble for their own benefit. The keenest gamblers see bubble speculation as nothing other than a matter of timing, getting out before the pop.

Meanwhile penny stocks such as Rare Earth Minerals are enjoying bubble fever all over again. We’re forever blowing bubbles.

(This note is also published in The Future of Work).

Going to pieces

2010-12-28T12:34:00.008Z

It’s that quiet post Christmas period that I always enjoy for the sheer relaxing boredom of it all. We’re staying at the in-laws in Yorkshire and Gill has gone with her sister to the sales in Leeds. I have retreated to the jigsaw while Alan, my father-in-law, is murdering Nessun Dorma on the organ.

I had my ear bent earlier for trying to shoot a squirrel in the copse over the road. It’s one that Alan has been after for a while as it climbs on to his bird feeder. I’d seen it in the top of a shrub so he dashed off for the air gun and loaded a pellet. I crept on to the patio, armed and ready but Gill turned up at the wrong moment and raised the alarm.

It was like being caught behind the bike sheds with a Woodbine. “Come in at once, you can’t do that,” she said. Naturally I ignored her but the commotion had alerted the squirrel and it dived for cover before I could get it in the sights.

She’s gone now. They asked me if I wanted to join them but I think I’d rather be hung from the ceiling on a meat hook than rummage among the cut price cashmere jumpers in Harvey Nich's. A few years ago everyone wore lambswool because cashmere was for rich people. Now the middle classes too can enjoy that slightly softer feel to the skin if they’re willing to go elbow-to-elbow in a shopping scrum at sale time.

The jigsaw is Renoir’s Ball at the Moulin de la Galette. Gill has already done the best bit - the young girl’s blue and white striped dress - while I’m struggling with some amorphous brown shading under a table in the bottom right hand corner. He must have left that bit until last, using up what he had of the black, mixed in with the rest of the colours, never thinking for one moment, I’ll bet, of the poor sod who would try to put it all together more than a century on after a less than satisfactory cardboard facsimile of his masterpiece had been chopped in to a thousand pieces.

Alan, meanwhile, has clunked his way through Elgar’s Nimrod and now he’s on safer ground with Moon River and I’m still attempting to place my first piece of the day. We’ve done the outline. Gill likes to get stuck in to the meat of the picture but I’m never happy until the jigsaw is framed with all the straight pieces in place. This we have already achieved but I’ve just found another straight-edged piece. How can this be? I see that the lower edge of the frame is slightly shorter than it should be and find the mistake. All is well again.

We’re in to a fairly recognisable rendition of On the Sunny Side of The Street. I’ve noticed that Alan sniffs deeply on certain keys as he plays. I assume it’s an aid to concentration. A hen pheasant has worked its way around to his patio and it's pecking at the grain. The bird is safe.

“I’ve shot enough of them in my lifetime and now I’m making amends,” says Alan. “I’ve moved on to another phase.” He’s going to need quite a few tons of feed if he’s to wipe the slate clean before his time comes.

I’m pleased with the chair I’ve created in the bottom half of the picture but I’m stuck now – too many blue pieces. You don’t notice all the blue in this painting when you see it as a whole. Maybe Renoir had a job lot of aquamarine.

Time for a break; Father Christmas brought Gill an iPad which I’m trying my damnedest not to covet. But since she’s out I find it and scan down the news headlines on the Telegraph web site. One story says that a few miles down the road in Kirkheaton, the police had surrounded a house in the early hours. A police marksman had shot dead a man with a gun. I suppose it only takes a call from a neighbour. I wonder if he too had squirrels on his bird feeder.

Being southern

2010-12-21T13:31:00.004Z

I can’t remember when it was or how it happened, but one morning some time ago I awoke as a southerner. Even then, I didn’t know it. The awareness has been gradual and a little bit disturbing.

The conversion must have begun on the daily commute. A few years ago everyone hid behind their newspaper. That was their wall, erected to keep the rest of humanity at bay. Now I’ve noticed they hide within their electronic devices: mobile phones, i-Pads, i-Phones, Blackberries. 3G has been a Godsend to southerners, enabling them to communicate the words “I’m on the train” to their loved ones in oh so many ways, even via Linked-in if they so choose.

It really is hiding because these devices do not command exclusive attention. No, the southerner is always alert for danger: the danger, for example, of someone sitting next to them on the train (fellow humans are held at bay by coats and bags left strategically on the vacant seat). Other southerners understand this coded behaviour and will do anything they can to find their own empty double seat and sometimes even stand rather than disturb the heavily defended seat.

There must be a bit of me that’s forever northern, since, if there is no alternative double seat I like to seek out the heavily defended seat and force its occupant to move the dumped accouterments to the overhead rack. But this northernness is swiftly suppressed. Once seated I do not speak.

The only time I have seen train-based southerners communing in recent months was in a discussion between three of them who had i-Pads, one of whom was a new user. The other two took great delight in showing off their skills to ensure that their fellow southerner was capable of maintaining his insularity, i.e. southernness. Being a southerner without an i-Pad, and, therefore, possibly poor (another race entirely to the southern middle class), I was not invited to speak. A true northerner would have chipped in anyway, something about it being warm for this time of year, but I hid behind a newspaper while remaining alert to every word spoken. Such behaviour reminds me how I have changed.

The rudeness of southerners has to be experienced to be believed. They have no trouble blanking you if you say “hello” when passing them in the street, even if you say it again, loudly and more aggressively, waving in their face the £10 note they have dropped.

When serving you in a shop, the southerner will look sideways, downwards, anywhere but directly at you, the customer. The message is quite clear: you are nothing, merely the piece of humanity attached to the rectangular piece of plastic which is the only thing that means anything to the southern shop assistant.

Southerners avoid displays of individuality if they can. They prefer to be part of the crowd. It’s a survival behaviour. They know that if they stand out in the workplace they may get fired. They also know, instinctively, that the best way to get promoted is not to rock the boat.

The worrying thing is that as an exiled northerner who has spent almost half my lifetime in this alien land, I retain a somewhat dated image of northerners as chatty, cheerful people, always ready with a smile and a cup of tea. But southernness is catching. Like a virus it has spread northwards in to offices and railway carriages, particularly among the young where everyone speaks like a metrosexual Jason Manford and laugh themselves silly at southern comedian Michael McIntyre who has, to his credit, performed the impossible in showing southerners how to laugh at themselves.

Friends sometimes ask me if I’ll ever go back north to live. But it’s too late. I find myself in a social limbo, too southern to stand at a bar and chat about pies, too northern to understand the etiquette on escalators (that last bit isn’t true; you’re dead if you don’t learn to stand on the right pdq). There’s only one solution: turn into Adrian Chiles.

Where are the sledges?

2010-12-20T11:42:00.010Z

Whenever it snowed when I was a kid, out would come the sledge and I'd be off to the nearest hill with my friends and we'd return long after we should have been home for our teas.

Sledges came in all shapes and sizes. Few of us had proper toboggans. Typically a sledge would be a few pieces of wood hammered together by our dads with rails screwed on to the underside of the wood. But they flew down the icy cobbles and we'd get bruised and cut if we hit a kerb stone or lamp post.

As the snow thawed we'd make the most of the last scrap until it was gone. We still threw snowballs even when the snow had turned to ice. You knew about it when one of those ice balls smacked you on the head.

We'd come home with chapped legs and raw knees - yes we sledged in short pants - all rosy cheeked and ready for the stew and dumplings that our mothers knew we needed. "Sithee 'ere, these'll stick to your ribs," my Auntie Joyce would say, thrusting a hot bowl of stew under our noses and we'd wolf it down and get back out in the snow. I still love the snow and when it covered the estate on Saturday morning we put on our thermals and took the sledge off the wall to make the most of it. Christmas shopping could wait; there were snowmen to build. Maybe three hours later when we'd made our snow angels, two snowmen, a snow man on a seat, and run up and down the hill countless times, chatted with neighbours as they walked to the shops, and left a Christmas message on the hedge, we came in for some lunch.

But something was missing. Where were the kids? Where were the snowball fights? We saw an odd sledge outing as the day progressed but very little. I tell you where they were: they were inside their houses, sitting in front of screens, either watching telly, playing computer games, or engaging in "instant chat" with their friends. Somebody sneaked out long enough just to smash up my snowman but he didn't build his own. Would I swap my childhood for that of today? I don't think so.

Invisible man

2010-12-17T00:33:00.005Z

I hate breakfast time in conference hotels abroad. Whenever I walk in to the breakfast room it seems to be packed with people chatting away amiably and they are all strangers to me, even the people I know, it seems, who are in their own huddles with not a spare chair.

This happened to me in Estoril in Portugal this week at the World Yacht Racing Forum. There was one spare table but I didn't want to sit alone. Instead I wandered up and down trying to choose something to eat and drink. At home this is easy - there's a kettle, a packet of cereal and maybe a carton of juice, but the choice at the hotel is impossible. I sidle up to the coffee machine, place a cup under the nozzle and press a button half-heartedly. The machine rewards my lack of conviction with its own ambivalence so I walk away.

There must be dozens of different kinds of bread and buns and cakes and croissants and jams and cereals I don't recognise. There are about five different juices but I'd like orange juice and the orange juice jug is empty.

I spot an empty table but before I reach it a woman has seated herself there. There are many pretty, vivacious women at the conference and she isn't one of them. I don't know her but I join her anyway and try to make conversation.

It turns out she's not at my conference but at a neighbouring conference on sailing hardware. Her speciality is paints and coatings. If there is one thing worse than watching paint dry, it is hearing someone describing paint. She apologises for the dullness of her trade and I, trying to be the gentleman, assure her that paint is fascinating.

She must have decided that if there is one thing more boring than describing paint it is someone who nods with apparent interest. She leaves the table in search of a bun. As she returns I decide it's time to try the coffee machine again but a waiter appears and offers to pour me a cup. Waiters - they're never there when you want them but they almost leap out to block your escape when you're trying to avoid them.

So we sit there a little longer, me and the paint lady, mostly in silence, having exhausted the subject of paint and coatings (which I can only conclude is another word for paint). Finally she can stand it no longer and flees to the sanctuary of her conference where paint people mix.

By the end of breakfast my fragile social resolve is in tatters as I retreat in to a natural semi-autistic state that finds comfort in staring at the floor. In this state I know that all social gestures are futile.

In Philip Pullman's book, His Dark Materials, there is a character, a boy, who can stand in a room and appear invisible to people. They simply don't notice him. I can identify with that boy.

It makes no difference when I make an effort. I might look up and smile at someone known to me and heading my way, but they pass by with not a flicker of recognition. This happens to me all the time.

I think if I was wearing a toga, produced a knife and stabbed one of these people in the chest, he would groan and say: "Et tu....sorry do I know you?"

What price the gift of writing with your eyes?

2010-12-08T10:58:00.010Z

This is the story of Tony Quan, a man who can write with his eyes. It is also the story of James Powderly and the Creators Project.

James tells his own story far better than I can.

Assuming now that you've visited the site and heard Powderly speak, I wonder if you will agree that this is a truly inspiring story. I like it because it challenges various perceptions and prejudices but mostly I like it because it makes me feel good about people.

It's the story of a man who was a "corporate aerospace engineer" who worked on the Mars exploration rover, among other things, and who gave up this work to work in a laboratory called Eyebeam and through that set up something called the Graffiti Research Laboratory.

That word graffiti will probably trigger an emotional response in most of us. For some it will be a negative response, stoking preformed prejudices. That said, I'm sure we're prepared to overlook any prejudice when we see the cool things that Powderly and his collaborators are creating using light projections to "draw" graffiti on buildings. It's called light tagging.

It's up to you to decide whether it is art, just as it is up to you decide whether the spray-paint tagging of graffiti artists such as Tony Quan, who used the name Tempt in various places across Los Angeles, merits the description, art and artist.

But whatever we think about graffiti, I would challenge anyone to be unmoved by the way these new light tagging technologies have been used to help Quan who has been afflicted for the past seven years by the muscle-wasting illness, ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), sometimes described as Lou Gehrig's disease.

While he has lost movement in his limbs he still has control over eye movement. Coupling that movement to the light projection technology has enabled Powderly and his team to give Quan the ability to write and draw again.

The eye-writing project took just 10 days. Powderly says: "And then on that last night of that 10 days of development Tony Quan wrote for the first time in seven years - using his eyes."

A footnote: amazing as it is, you won't find this story in your Guardian or Daily Telegraph because most print journalists still source news stories in conventional ways, drawing from a daily news agenda, usually led by political, business, court and sports events. In time, probably quite soon, this story will emerge in to the mainstream through the pace of referral multiplication on Facebook, Twitter and blogs such as this (or all of them used together).

I came to it, through Stumbleupon which I would commend to you as a service that finds web sights that match your interests.

I can't remember when it was I began using Stumbleupon on the internet. Suffice to say it was years ago. When I say use, I might spend five or ten minutes every now and then flicking through web sites, using the Stumble button on my task bar.

Just to explain, for those who may not be familiar with it, Stumbleupon.com is a web search engine that selects web sites for you to look at based on various personal preferences you have registered with the site.

Instead of being presented with a random site selection when you press the button it provides something more likely than not that will interest you. Sites are "discovered" by other stumblers and given "like" or "dislike" ratings (which are also noted by the StumbleUpon recognition software). It's the same kind of mechanism that allows Facebook and Google to spot your interests and target you with what they consider to be appropriate advertising.

Anyway this is just a preamble to explain my use of the verb when I tell you I stumbled on this site last night. I mentioned it with a link on Facebook and it seemed to resonate with some people so I'm mentioning it here too.

I'm fascinated by career paths and anything that challenges a belief that we have to follow a predefined pattern in careers. If you have ever read The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, you will have some perception of what it must be like to have a fully functioning brain that is "locked-in" by the inability to communicate.

Is searching through the sands of Mars more important than the gift of communication to a paralysed man? I suppose that's a question of perspective, context and personal values.

Want for nothing this Christmas

2010-12-03T15:01:00.009Z

Christmas shopping? Bored with slippers and perfume? Looking for ideas? You've come to the right place.

First understand this: it's good to shop. Governments are searching constantly for growth in the economy. The only way we can do our bit is to spend, spend, spend and get more stuff. What better time than Christmas to indulge ourselves?

So tear up those charity begging letters and forget the starving millions for once. This is Christmas and for the sake of business everywhere liberate the consumer within. We were born to consume. It's why we exist.

Believe me, I know how easy it is, even as consumers, to fall into the savings trap, putting money away for a rainy day. Resist that temptation. Even worse, if we're not careful we might begin to think we've got everything we need. Well here's something that, deep down, instinctively, we know to be true: that's impossible.

Now shop with confidence in the knowledge that you can never have enough. If you need proof, then read on and get the credit card ready because you won't be able to resist this year's specially selected gift choices brought to you exclusively by Donkin Life. Here goes:

It's always a struggle to find something suitable for your tightwad golf-playing uncle. Not any more. With this twilight tracer ball, he can creep on course at night, avoiding those pesky green fees, and whack his way round in the dark.

How about your student nephew, finding his feet during his first year at university? Assume that he's already worked out his priorities and colonised the student uni dart board. If he really wants to prove himself to the ladies he'll need to work out with this dart-hand developer device. And if it fails with the ladies all that work won't be wasted.

What about your teenage daughter? It's a difficult age and girls need to find themselves. Whatever you do, keep her away from the washing up. It can be stressful. One sure way of doing this is to encourage her to maintain her manicure. To that end this Blow Monkey Nail Dryer will prove a godsend. You know she deserves it and at that price why not get one for each hand?

Still sleeping with your loved one? No-one wants to disturb their partner when caught short in the night. This glow in the dark toilet roll, ensures that a grope in the dark is reserved for under the sheets and not the trip to the bathroom: a must for lasting relationships.

There seems to be a glut of new products designed to ease our night-time excursions. It must be a symptom of modern living and the onset of 24-hour lifestyles. If you want to stay ahead of the trend, particularly if you work as a Golf Club caretaker worried about the threat of new year incursions, you might add a pair of night vision binoculars to Santa's list. At £70 they're not cheap, but neither is a round of golf these days and that's part of the problem. Better to be safe than sorry.

Lots of people like food at Christmas but hampers are so last year and who wants yet another box of chocolates? If you know a man who likes a bit of leg - and what man doesn't - why not get him eight, all perfectly cooked and still attached to this oven-baked tarantula. The spider is real so give yourself a warm glow in doing your bit for the environment. Why squash 'em when the world needs protein?

Warming to the environmental theme, some people need a little reminder about the plight of animals in our crowded world. Overfishing should be a big concern for all of us. What better way to remind your friend, then, than this stuck goldfish bath plug. It's telling me that fish are in a fix. Are you getting the same message?

Great presents, every one, but I know what you're thinking: there's always that special friend who will insist she wants for nothing. So get her nothing this year. At £5.99 it's a steal. But hurry while stocks last.

Getting in to hot water

2010-12-03T10:02:00.006Z

Gill drinks hot water. I don't understand this. I came back from the station this morning and she was drinking it as she often does.

I just don't get it, I really don't. What is so marvellous about hot water? "It's better than cold water when it's snowing outside," she says. Well there's some logic to that.

But what's wrong with tea or coffee? "I like tea and coffee but sometimes I'm happy with hot water," she says. No this doesn't work for me, I need more. Ten minutes of waterboarding drags it out of her.

That hot water drinking fad, she reveals, emerged from drinking green tea. The tea leaves would stay in the pot and could be used several times by simply pouring on hot water. But over time the tea would get weaker and weaker, so weak, in fact, that eventually Gill realised she was happy with hot water.

I've noticed this trend in her tea bag usage. For Gill to use a single tea bag for a single cup of tea would be inexcusable extravagance. The bag must always be preserved for a second cup and, I suspect (although she will not admit this), occasionally a third.

I'm wondering if there could be a market for hot water: hot water cafes perhaps with a list of choices behind the counter just as you can get different types of coffee at Starbucks. There'd be the original of course for traditionalists who come up to the counter and say: "I'll just have a hot water to go, please."

But trendy types would want something a little je ne sais quoi: l'eau chaude peut etre.

Or maybe we could offer "tea without" or a skinny latte extreme, or water at different temperatures: piping, luke, tepid and aired.

So the order would go something like this:

"A cup of luke please?"

"Tall, Grande or Venti?"

"Tall."

"Milk or sugar?"

"As it comes, please."

"To drink in or out?"

"In."

"Croissant?"

"Pardon?"

"Would you like a Croissant with your water?"

"No thanks, I'll have some dry."

"Dry?"

"Bread. What else could it be?"

"Well we sell dry by the glass. That's how some people like their water these days."

They think it's all over

2010-12-02T18:01:00.004Z

I remember the World Cup in 1966. Football then was an honest game played by honest people and watched by honest men and women on the terraces. Footballers were commanding good wages but you didn't find the middle men, agents and fixers and multi-million pound marketing budgets that influence the game today.

There were no allegations of corruption in FIFA back then and, had there been, I'm sure it would have responded in rooting out the bad apples. Today there are documented allegations that certain members of FIFA's governing executive have taken bribes and yet its president, Sepp Blatter, has done little or nothing to investigate these claims.

Instead, today its executive awarded the 2018 world cup to Russia, a country that, according to the latest revelations on WikiLeaks, has been described by a Spanish prosecutor as a "virtual mafia state". Russia and FIFA seem made for each other.

Perhaps it is time for the United Nations to involve itself in sport. It could launch a Nations Cup for all those countries and their national teams who have become disenchanted with the way the World Cup has been run.

I cheered the day I heard that London had been chosen to host the Olympics in 2012. But I didn't feel the same about yesterday's vote. FIFA is a tarnished organisation. There was something grubby in the way that our football stars, leading politicians and royalty stoked the egos of this undeserving committee.

They used to say that no-one could bend it like David Beckham. But Beckham was out of his depth among that lot. The best way to deal with Sepp Blatter and his cronies would be to leave them to rot in their own barrel.

Blow things up

2010-11-28T10:56:00.011Z

Have you ever wanted to blow things up? You know, like kaboom! Go on, admit it, you have. There's a destructive element in all of us. Why else would people gather to watch the council demolish an old block of flats?

There's something alluring about the box with a plunger that just makes you want to push it down. I can never forget that great scene in Bridge over the River Kwai where Alec Guinness in his dying breath, falls over the plunger that blows up the bridge, his pride and joy.

Maybe it was something in his formative years - for evidence I would submit this photograph taken in Disneyland - but our middle son, Rob, never seems to have shaken off the childlike joy of exploding things.

Fortunately Rob has confined his bomb blasting fantasies to internet games. His latest couldn't be more explicit in its invitation to us to blow things up. I couldn't describe the game any better than this review. But I can say that it's fun to play and quite difficult to achieve your objective (to blow things up) with a minimum number of bombs.

I've completed all the levels and have trophies (awarded for finishing the job with the smallest number of bombs) in all levels but one. Level 29 continues to defeat my best attempts to solve the problem (blowing the thing up) with three bombs. Perhaps you could do better.

The game has had well over a million plays in its first week online. He published another game recently called Brain Waves. If you like playing those Nintendo brain training games, you'll like this and it has the added bonus that it's completely free to play.

Headline news? Not everywhere

2010-11-17T16:15:00.013Z

How refreshing to find the Independent, alone among the national newspapers this morning, leading on something other than the Royal engagement. Rather generously, I thought, it devoted two inside pages to the announcement with the addition of a typically venomous Julie Burchill piece.

I was as excited as anyone when I heard the news, thinking "Ooo, another Royal divorce to look forward to." It's all the messy stuff in between I try to avoid. Excelling herself, Burchill managed to compare what she called the "weirdest clan" with both the Munsters and the Addams family in her short column.

The best part about the announcement was that it gave us a day off from the news as the media went in to overdrive speculating on this and that - the wedding dress, the venue, suitable hymns, marriage prospects, future titles etc. without an ounce of knowledge or insight.

Unfortunately Gill likes this sort of thing so I had to sit through part of the One Show, relieved slightly by Giles Brandreth's remark that Kate Middleton had waited long enough to know Prince William was going to be bald.

What a pity the interviewer, Tom Bradby, didn't ask them if they were in love. It would have been the perfect opportunity for the prince to say that yes they were and that yes he knew the meaning of love. That would have been one in the eye for the old man.

In spite of my cynicism, I hope they make it (whatever that means), but the odds are stacked against them in our media crazy world. Yesterday was the start of the open season when the media will go in to overdrive, gnawing over every detail of Middleton's past. I'm sure there'll be no surprises.

But you have to worry about the carbon footprint of this wedding in newsprint alone. Beyond the couple there's the supporting cast. The parents, already groomed and blooded in favourite Royal pursuits, will be regarded as fair game for the tabloids. But it will be Kate Middleton herself who will dominate the spotlight.

She should bear in mind that there's still time to escape, right up to that moment at the altar. How dramatic it would be to witness a right Royal jilting with a Dustin Hoffman figure replicating that scene in The Graduate. Now that would be a day to remember. Imagine having the power to walk away from a royal marriage ceremony and the brass neck to do it. Anne Boleyn may yet have her revenge.

Lest we forget

2010-11-11T12:19:00.008Z

You may have received an email like this in your office today. This one was sent to staff at the Financial Times:

Dear all,

Today is 11th November, Remembrance Day and at 11am, we invite you to pause for a two minute silence.

A short announcement will be made over the PA system at 11am to mark the start of the silence.

Best wishes,

The Communications Team.

I don't think my former FT colleagues need their "communications team" to remind them of the hour, the day and the month, or be prompted what they should do in response. How we mark our respect or how we think of wartime sacrifice is a personal issue not a personnel issue. Oddly this never happened a few years ago when there were still surviving veterans of World War 1.

I'm not quite sure why I should take umbrage at such a seemingly innocent email; but I do. It's the whole thing, right down to the "best wishes", that irks me. It's as if we're being told: "good luck on your two minutes silence, hope it goes well for you."

We're not going over the bloody top, for goodness sake. This is Remembrance day. What's it got to do with a communications team? It all smacks a little bit of what Jon Snow, the newsman calls "poppy fascism". We should buy and wear our poppies because we choose to do so, not because of any fear of being without.

It's not as if you would tell the difference on the FT writers' floor where it's usually as quiet as the grave on a brisk news day.

Anyway I didn't see the email until it was too late and sitting here at my screen 11 am passed by without a nod to the fallen. So I'm doing that now in my own way and that's for me to decide.

Sour chariot

2010-11-08T17:06:00.007Z

The beer was the same, trains and buses much as always and the stadium hadn't changed at all for the England v New Zealand game at Twickenham on Saturday. But the crowd had changed.

You could see it had as soon as we started our sing song on the bus. They were the same old songs, but instead of people singing along they just carried on chatting or playing with their iphones, saving their contributions no doubt to boo decisions like people do at football matches.

It doesn't seem to matter to Twickenham. It was another full house: 80,000 odd people willing to part with £50 and more for a ticket. Most businesses would call that a result. Yet all is not what it seems.

Tickets are allocated as always through the rugby union clubs that form the grass roots of the sport. That's how I get my ticket. But I know through the grapevine that a lot of clubs were sending their tickets back this year. Demand had fallen within the core of clubs on which everything else rests.

So tickets were put out through the agency system. There were plenty of takers among the smooth city types who would otherwise have watched the match in their sports bars or in pubs, or gone shopping instead.

These people don't sing, apart perhaps from one line of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. When we reached the stadium there were the anthems and everyone sat down for the match. But within minutes some people were trotting off to the bar to appear ten minutes later with their plastic containers brimming with lager.

The game lasts 80 minutes yet some people will spend a good chunk of it at the bar buying overpriced drinks. Everything is overpriced at Twickenham: the pies, the chips, the programmes, the beer, the whole lot.

After the game the option is to clear off or have a beer in one of the many draughty bars designed to sell as much beer as possible in the shortest possible time. Cattle pens are better protected from the elements.

In short the full Twickenham package is crap and overpriced. The established supporters have known this for some time and they're voting with their feet. That will be the only pre-Christmas game I attend.

There is so much that the marketing people could do: print song sheets, get rid of the ridiculous Land of Hope and Glory, make Jerusalem the English anthem (controversial but no more so than the Scots singing Flower of Scotland), make the bars more comfortable, lower ticket prices, get rid of the silly fireworks and manufactured special effects, play with cotton shirts again, play games on a Saturday afternoon instead of suiting telly schedules, and generally get rid of all the gimmicks.

A good start would be to ensure that the marketing team is led by someone who understands the game and who can align delivery of the product, for want of a better word, with the traditions of the game. The RFU has become too focused on profit. As this presentation by Dan Pink demonstrates (it really is worth sparing 10 minutes to watch it), when you unhitch the profit motive from purpose, you have a problem.

Unless the Rugby Football Union understands this danger, there may come a day when the core support has abandoned the international game, rather like some purists abandoned Manchester United in soccer. It won't happen overnight but it will happen. It can take a lifetime to build a franchise and a few years of bad management to ruin it.

Prison visiting

2010-11-03T11:26:00.010Z

I’d forgotten how much I’d been missing London. Yesterday was a good day. I gave a presentation in the morning to some HR managers before having lunch with my old mucker, Jimmy Burns, at RORC (the Royal Ocean Racing Club). We bumped in to David Palmer, a former chief executive of the Financial Times. Palmer was there during the early part of my FT career and, while he had been a journalist initially, had moved to “the other side” – the part that focused on revenues, advertising and production.

There was a strong feeling in the editorial in those days, to which Jimmy and I both subscribed, that journalists were journalists and should have nothing to do with the responsibilities of running a business. This has all changed, but not necessarily for the better. Too much soft, PR-led journalism, has moved in to the newspaper in recent years.

Before writing on work and management I had the role of investigative journalist without portfolio at the FT, a role I was asked to define for myself by the then editor, Sir Geoffrey Owen. Owen was pleased with a story I had covered on the involvement of BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International)in drug laundering. It was probably one of the best pieces I ever did for the FT.

With the backing of his deputy and soon-to-be editor, Richard Lambert, now director general of the Confederation of British Industry, Owen asked me to outline an investigative role. He made it clear that the newspaper had reservations about investigative journalism after having its fingers burnt when it ran a story on the alleged source of Mohamed Al-Fayed’s wealth. That story and the way the FT caved in to a legal challenge had serious repercussions for the way that Al-Fayed was handled subsequently by the rest of the UK media.

Geoff Owen set the tone of the newspaper as a civilised place to work in those days. He had a liking for stories that covered the minutiae of industry. While he was pleased with the drug laundering story, I knew that it really wasn’t his thing. I think he found it hard to believe and somewhat distressing that a bank could engage in such nefarious activities.

Geoff was more interested in companies that made things. I know that it saddened him to discover that in the late 1980s the last of Britain’s once great machine tool industry was being snapped up by Iraqi businesses engaged in building Saddam Hussein's military strength and, more worryingly, laying the ground work for a nascent nuclear weapons programme. Iraq may never have succeeded in obtaining nuclear weapons, but it was not for the want of trying.

I will write more of this investigative work and the arms to Iraq story in future, but I just want to mention a story of mine that Geoff would often recall when I came in to his presence. It was about paint brushes, or, to be more precise, about paintbrush bristles and Chinese pig bristle exports. I know why he liked it. I too enjoyed writing the story. I never knew pigs’ bristles could be so interesting and that was the whole point. Geoff understood that behind many businesses there were all kinds of hidden, if sometimes mundane yet at the same time fascinating, stories, and where better to tell them than in the FT.

He wanted me to do another story, this time outlining the way the stationary and paper supply industry was put together. I began the task but sadly soon lost the will to live, trying to work out what at that time was a mass of small, medium and often interconnected businesses. So I never did go down the paperclips route but instead moved in to a rather more exciting field mixing with merchant bankers, quite a few financial crooks and a whole range of financial investigators, not to mention the spooks, although I will mention some of them in time.

Over the next few months I’m going to blog a series of recollections of my early career at the FT. It was a time when we had so many people who have moved in to influential positions, including some who have become familiar names such as Ed Balls, Robert Peston and Andrew, now Lord Adonis.

I’m not the first to observe that we can become prisoners of our past. For this reason I try not spend too much time reminiscing as I’m too busy thinking about the future. I’m still ambitious and I’m determined to get my novel published with plans also to write more non-fiction books on business and management. But, all the same, it’s good to chat about the old days with a friend and former colleague. They were great days, but maybe the best is yet to come.

Toxers

2010-11-01T15:02:00.003Z

Rob's new game, Toxers, is just out on the Mochigames site. Mochigames have exclusive use for two weeks before the game will be on general release for other sites to download.

It will be interesting to see how the revenue format works. In addition to advertising accompanying the game - the usual source of revenue for games sites - incorporated in to this game is the Mochi currency that players receive in exchange for real money. This can then be spent on so called "premium features" - higher grade weapons than those available in the free version of the game.

In the exclusive period Mochi receive the whole income from this source, but thereafter Rob (aka BadViking) and his collaborator, RobotJAM, get a proportion of the revenue.

It's not one of the puzzle-style games that I enjoy most but Rob tells me these kinds of games are very popular and the deal they have secured with Mochigames certainly reflects that. Of course, as part of his family "focus group" who try out these creations in the development stage, I've played the game, but zapping monsters is not really my cup of tea, particularly when they can zap you back.

Two more games are in the pipeline, one a kind of reaction and memory testing game and another based on an historical event.

Take it from the tap

2010-10-30T11:53:00.005Z

The tap is a brilliant invention. It gives us clean, fresh water so cheaply that we don't consider the cost.

So why does anyone buy bottled water? I have done in the past because I was duped as much as anyone. But not any more.

If you want to know why, just spare five minutes for this fantastic presentation. It will make you think, not only about bottled water but our whole capitalist system and the warped economics that promotes growth through increasing consumption of manufactured goods.

Yes, we need some stuff to make our lives better. But, unless we live in highly unsanitary conditions, bottle water isn't one of them. If you need water on the go, then fill up from the tap. It's why it was invented.

Car silencer

2010-10-30T08:36:00.011Z

James Bond's Aston Martin DB5 was sold at auction this week for £2.6m. I sat in it once, more than 40 years ago. I doubt very much the new owner will be letting any grubby urchins near its steering wheel today. But that's what happened when the car was doing a tour of motor dealers in the 1960s to promote one of the Bond films.

It came to Graham's Garage on Bradford Road in Batley for a few days, and since the garage was not far from where my Auntie Joyce lived, I went down there with my cousin Andrew to have a look at it. I don't suppose the showroom manager was too thrilled at seeing a couple of eight-year-olds in short pants and scuffed shoes climbing all over the interior, but we were with my Auntie Joyce and nobody argued with Auntie Joyce.

I had a Corgie die-cast model of the car. My favourite feature was the ejector seat. I must have remembered all this when many years later I had children of my own. When the boys were young we had a series of Volvo cars. They were roomy estates and cruised up and down the motorways, ideal for a family with push chairs, bikes and the like.

John was our first born. He would sit in a booster seat with Robert beside him. I would tell them stories on our longer journeys. I also explained the features of the car - the automatic drive, the radio controls, the heated window, the lights, oh and that button near the steering column. This was a special button, I said, and it was not to be pressed by anyone except in the most extreme circumstances.

"What is it daddy?" asked John.

"It's the ejector seat button."

"What's it for?"

"It's a special button for naughty boys. If you're being noisy in the back I can push that button and your seat, with you in it, will be ejected through the roof, and then there'd be no more John."

"Oh!"

I never smoked, but that cigarette lighter was without doubt the most useful control in the car. If Volvo had written in its sales brochures that the model came fitted with a "child silencer" I'm sure they would have sold more cars. Ideally the button could have been made slightly larger and coloured red. Mothercare take note.

Give it five

2010-10-29T09:45:00.003Z

Our eldest son John, likes to doodle in his spare time, creating all kinds of weird and wonderful designs. Maybe it's the time of year, but something has inspired this design for a tee-shirt. I suppose I would have preferred something cuddly like a teddy bear, but I like it nonetheless. If you do, he would appreciate your vote. Go on, make his day and give him five.

Earthwatch creating a buzz

2010-10-15T12:03:00.022Z

In the end it was the humble bumblebee that prevailed during last night's Earthwatch debate searching for a suitable British mascot from all the species that inhabit our isles.

As this precis of the arguments, published in The Guardian, explains, there was some sound reasoning for all of the debaters representing the bumblebee, the English oak, the bluebell, the song thrush and deep sea coral. Deep sea coral? Yes we do have coral in our waters. There's quite a bit in the Irish Sea.

I like the argument for the oak. No oak, no Nelson, no Trafalgar Square and quite possibly no independence from the French, in which case our national environmental mascot would most likely be a snail....or a frog, or possibly an onion (garlic? This is another debate). Ultimately we couldn't have an English oak as a symbol of unity. The Scots wouldn't wear it.

But the debate doesn't have to stop here. It's been going on here now for a few days. Yes I'm Earthwatcher who started the thread. Don't I have better things to do with my time than flit around forums and social media sites? Not when I've got a bee in my bonnet (forgive the pun).

I'm trying to make a point about the power of networks (something I've already been banging on about here on another Donkin channel). And the best way to do that, I believe, is to learn how networks work by taking part.

So once I learned the outcome of the debate, I tweeted a link, then posted on the Wild Britain forum and now I'm doing a blog. These single interventions are relatively small - little acorns if you like - compared with the established media such as newspapers and TV. But they can have a cumulative effect in re-tweets and continued forum interest. A story on the web isn't tomorrow's fish-and-chip wrapper. It can hang around (but only if it sustains interest).

When aggregated with the big media (e.g. the link to the Guardian above) ideas, if they're worthy enough, develop a kind of stickiness and in time a life of their own. Within the best networks that are lightly led, less autocratic and more democratic, ideas can flourish in unpredictable directions. Great networks are a marketplace for ideas, a focus for the wisdom, and sometimes the folly, of crowds.

Some organisations perceive this gentle hand on the helm as a threat. They're wedded to the concept of generalship and the grand strategy passed down from above (or cascaded to use corpspeak). They believe that if something is "not invented here" it's not worth doing. These organisations will die.

Within the environmental debate in particular, conservation-focused organisations will only thrive in a spirit of healthy symbiosis. No single body can have all the answers.

A forest of knowledge

I've watched a few acorns growing in Earthwatch these past few years. Within its family of scientists, volunteer alumni and core staff there is a forest of knowledge. But sometimes it's difficult to see the wood for the trees. Some great ideas have flourished there - the whole idea of public participation in science for one. The mascot debate is another example of the cleverness that resides inside Earthwatch.

Big companies, such as HSBC have discovered how Earthwatch programmes can be used to build employee engagement. Earthwatch has one hell of a reputation for excellence among academics, volunteers and its corporate partners. But it doesn't get enough recognition. It's far too modest for its own good. It doesn't climb chimneys to make a point. Instead it busies itself at the coalface. It collects data, or rather you do, if you volunteer. But it does a whole lot more than that.

Perhaps Earthwatch should choose the bumblebee as its own mascot. George McGavin, BBC Lost Lands presenter and honorary research associate at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, reminded us of its importance as a pollinator. A single bee might visit 200,000 flowers in its lifetime. And bees stay in touch. They're constantly communicating, creating a buzz.

Last night Earthwatch was creating a buzz. Now it must keep on buzzing. It has some great media staff with great ideas and it could have so much more. Imagine the power of all those volunteers, all the people it has met and influenced over the years. Imagine the power of their feedback and ideas. How do you capture it and give it a life of its own?

The way to do it is to create a hive like this one. What? Oh yes, Omlet do make bee hives. But I'm talking about the website not the product. There are others of course, but this is one of the best examples I have come across of a website that has created a structure for attracting, building, retaining and spreading ideas, not to mention selling stuff.

Professionals, such as veterinary surgeons, go there for advice. It's that good. Did the site cost a fortune to build? No it didn't. Most of it was constructed from inexpensive software and tools available all over the web.

Organisation of one

Some people understand this and they're busy building their own organisations. My middle son, Rob, is one of them. He's an organisation of one. Incidentally I go to much greater lengths on this stuff in my book, The Future of Work (worth every penny). But a surprising number of big companies are lumbering around in this new world of Web 2.0. They think that a great web site is all about colour pictures, presentation and image. It isn't. They think they have to employ expensive developers. They don't. They tried to ignore Facebook and Twitter. They couldn't.

The start up networked websites were like the little furry mammals dancing at the feet of dinosaurs in the Jurassic, largely ignored by the big beasts too intent on devouring each other. Some corporate dinosaurs will learn to survive and grow wings, as birds did. But many will collapse, fossils in the making.

Earthwatch is starting to pull in external knowledge with initiatives like climatewatch launched in Australia. That's encouraging.

I should declare an interest here. I'm an Earthwatch trustee. I'm also an Earthwatch evangelist. If you want to know what it's like to volunteer please get in touch through my website. If you're a company and want to understand more about the benefit of corporate-sponsored programmes and partnerships, I'm happy to make an introduction. Does Earthwatch need your money? You bet it does. Will you get something back? You bet you will, real value too. It shouldn't cost the Earth to save it.

Green Father Christmas

2010-10-14T10:07:00.008Z

There is a popular myth that in the 1930s the Coca Cola company pulled off one of the most audacious branding coups in the history of marketing. They kidnapped Father Christmas, stripped him of his green clothes and issued him with a bright red outfit to match their company logo.

It’s not true. Father Christmas had been represented in a red suit in Harper’s Weekly by Thomas Nast in the 1860s. Santa Claus had been depicted in different coloured clothing throughout the 19th century. A popular print, illustrating Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, opted for a green-coloured outfit.

You can see, therefore, how the green-to-red story has been simplified. But if Coca Cola didn’t create the red coat, it certainly did much to consolidate the image of the Father Christmas we know today as the jolly old man with white beard and red suit. Throughout the 1930s the company used and developed Santa’s image in line with its own brand aspirations. And it still does.

The world needs a green Santa

Today it’s time they gave him back to us. The world needs a green Santa and Coca Cola needs to make it happen. This is why: we all know that the Coca Cola can is red, while the drink is black and is usually sold in red topped plastic bottles. Red plastic tops are common on many other drinks bottles too.

All kinds of plastic finds its way in to the sea. You must have heard of the accumulation of plastics in certain ocean hot spots such as the North Pacific Gyre. Most of the plastic that’s ever been made is still around on our planet and much of it is floating in the sea, often reduced to tiny particles.

Last night at a presentation at the Royal Geographical Society in London, we were shown a photograph of plastic parts that had been pulled from the stomach of a dead Albatross chick. There was a lot of plastic. Most of those plastic pieces were red. This is because the parent bird mistakes tiny pieces of floating red and faded red plastic for its most common prey – the krill that is abundant in much of the southern hemisphere.

Replacing red plastic tops with green bottle tops is not going to save the Albatross overnight. It’s not going to rid us of plastic in the ocean. But it would make an awfully powerful statement for a company such as Coca Cola.

Changing those red cans to green and dressing Father Christmas in a green outfit would be more than an advertising stunt: it would be a symbolic act of leadership, signalling to every other company in the world that unless the corporate sector begins to think about the environment in the same way that it approaches business and profit, there isn’t going to be a corporate sector in future. There isn’t going to be a world fit for our grandchildren, and there isn’t going to be a Father Christmas.

So what about it Coca Cola? How about turning every lesson you learned in marketing classes on its head. A big risk with a £39bn brand? Perhaps. But it’s a far bigger opportunity. The risk of doing nothing? That’s a shared risk between Coca Cola and every other company in this world. They can all hide behind each other’s sales figures.

Re-branding Santa Claus

But just now the world needs leadership. Our children are demanding that each and every one of us takes a stand on the environment, and we all want to don’t we? It’s just that we don’t always know what to do for the best and we need to be reminded constantly that small things, cumulatively, can make a difference. Look how it's made a difference, disastrously, to the Albatross. If we don’t buy that red-topped bottle it’s a small gesture but one that we can make easily.

But the big boys, the big companies, can make big gestures. Governments and international accords can ban things, of course; but companies can do things overnight with a flick of the chief executive’s fingers. Imagine being the boss who turned Coke green. Re-branding Santa Claus as champion of the environment might just be the start. Coca Cola already has an iconic glass bottle, easily recycled. Why not move away from plastic all together?

So come on Muhtar Kent, Coca Cola's boss. You've weaved enough magic in that company to do something big and this would be big. Doing the right thing is part of your family heritage. Others on your board would say you were mad. People would resign. But some people might get it. Some kid in the Sudan might thank you one day. I would thank you and I'd buy a coke to celebrate.

Chilean miners over the moon

2010-10-13T09:48:00.008Z

I was a grammar school boy when 41 years ago I was allowed stay up late in to the early hours and watch the first man set foot on the moon. The pictures were fuzzy but the coverage was electrifying nonetheless.

Today I'm watching fuzzy pictures relayed on my laptop from the depths of Copiapo, a Chilean copper and gold mine, as the first of 33 trapped miners are winched to the surface one by one. Even the colours of the Chilean flag on the mine equipment resemble those of the Stars and Stripes, although the TV pictures in 1969 were in black and white.

Who would have thought that nearly half a century after mankind had achieved its giant leap on to the surface of the moon, the world, its media and its considerably advanced technologies would be focused on pulling men out of a hole in the ground?

It took four days for the lunar astronauts to reach the moon. It has taken 69 days to dig out the Chilean miners.

It's a big story. More than a thousand journalists are gathered around the mine shaft. The BBC alone has sent out 25 staff to cover the rescue and the miners have negotiated media agreements and image rights to ensure that they profit from their personal stories.

When the accident happened back in August it rated no more than a few column inches in the inside pages of newspapers. A mine disaster in Chile with 33 dead is not a big story for European or the US media. But when, after 17 days, it was discovered the men were alive, nearly half a mile underground, then the story began to grow.

Instead of 33 anonymous miners we had men with names and families who were not so much different from families anywhere. They were no longer Chileans. They were people and they were alive. And what's more, we were told that the mine had the technology to get them out. But it would take time. First reports suggested they might not be out until Christmas. The media would have liked that for the festive cheer angle.

But the journalists are not complaining even if, as one BBC commentator admitted, they are being carefully managed. This is a global news story. The Chilean president - what's his name again? - must be thinking all his Christmases have come at once. Even the Bolivian president is getting in on the act, flying over in his private jet to congratulate the one Bolivian among the rescued. You can imagine the presidents of Columbia, Peru and Ecuador, kicking their waste paper baskets, wishing that they had one of their boys down that mine.

Just like the first men on the moon, this is a good news story, a triumph of human endeavour and technology over potentially insurmountable barriers. It's not about a 100 people killed in a mosque by a suicide bomb. It's not down there with all the shootings and murders that fill our screens every day. It's a story packed with drama and with a happy ending - we hope (it's in the script).

Yes, of course, if this was a film, there would be a hitch and a rockfall with the air running out, leaving two miners flipping a coin for the one last rescue cage before everything collapsed. But there isn't going to be a hitch is there? They're coming up at the rate of about a miner per hour. We've had the youngest and one of the oldest so the miners in the middle bunch are possibly going to get a little less attention than the first one unless there is a particularly good human interest story. But there's bound to be some excitement and drama for the last one, before everyone can go home.

In 1969 the drama lasted a little longer for the flight home with all the excitement of the re-entry. Historically the two events simply don't compare. But this is 2010. We don't do moon shots anymore. Soon we'll be running out of the fuel that got us in to space. Today we're looking within ourselves and deep within the natural reserves of our planet. In a way the Chilean mine accident is a metaphor for our planet. We're all in a hole now and its going to take a little longer than 69 days to dig our way out.

A time to remember or time to forget?

2010-10-11T14:50:00.002Z

A couple of weeks ago we were driving on the outskirts of Bordeaux. I hadn't realised that Bordeaux's U-Boat pens had been captured near the end of the Second World War. As you can see in the photograph they remain almost as they were when they were built. But they stand empty and closed to visitors.

I would have thought the French would have turned something as historically significant as this in to a museum but even more than 60 years after the war, there are still sensitivities to doing anything that reminds people of France's capitulation. It's not a chapter of history that the French take pride in recalling.

Yet not far to the East of Bordeaux at Chasseneuil-sur-Bonnieure, there is a reminder of another, more noble page in that chapter in the French Resistance memorial and war cemetery. There were hundreds of resistance attacks in the region after D-Day June 6, 1944, mainly aimed at delaying the progress north of the SS tank division, Das Reich, seeking to join the fighting.

An imaginative marina development, alongside some restoration of the pens, with possibly the inclusion of a working U-Boat would help to remind future generations of the importance of this area for German naval operations in the Second World War - but perhaps that's the problem.

Yesterday's currency

2010-10-06T23:35:00.008Z

Back to the gym today. It's been a while and it was tough getting in to the routine again. I'd forgotten just how crass the radio sounds. Why do the gym people think we all want to listen to rap and pop stations? I'd also forgotten a 20p coin for the locker so carted my rain top around with me.

Walking the dog in the park afterwards, I bend over to pick up a conker. They're everywhere. When I was a little boy we had to search them out. A big, shiny new conker was a prized possession, like a gold coin. For today's children they're yesterday's worthless currency.

This conker is shiny too. It feels new, pristine, almost sensual. There's a lustre on the grained casing. Older, dull conkers settle in the gutter under newly fallen leaves. The air smells of wet wood, the smell of autumn.

The dog finds a puddle and starts to drink the water. He jumps with surprise when I throw the conker and make a splash beside him. He's getting old. I noticed he couldn't see me when he'd dropped about fifty yards behind. I'm getting old too. Two old dogs in the park, rooting among the leaves in the autumn of life, unnoticed and spent, like yesterday's currency.