Still alive and kicking!

It's all been a bit quiet on this blog recently, for which I apologise to my many thousands of followers. I'm not sure what the reason is really but one cause for non-blogging is that we've got the builders in. Well, I say got them in, waiting for them to come in is more like it. And what a wait it's been, like waiting for Godot (I'm sure he must have been a builder.)

We've had some bits and pieces done but the main work has still not started. I thought there was a recession on and people were desperate for work but not the trades people we know. They seem to have plenty of work and it's all more important than ours. Eventually they might deign to favour us with a few hours of their time,  probably doing 30% of the job before disappearing to another job (or their villa in Barbados) leaving us wailing and gnashing our teeth, stressed out of our gourds and back in en attendent Godot mode.

I've just been slapping a bit of paint on here and there in a kind of random fashion, this being the only fashion I know when it comes to painting. I am really bad at it and I hate it (not too sure which way round the cause and effect works here.) My wife is much better than me at painting and I am only too pleased to acknowledge this (quelle surprise!) My painting attempts usually last about 5 minutes until the paint goes somewhere it shouldn't and I start to panic and call for my other half to come running, howling with anguish like a 3 year-old with a wasp sting. I managed today's exercise without this performance but did get a bit of paint on a new t-shirt (yes I know I shouldn't have been wearing it) which drew withering comments from 'er indoors. So I guess I came out of all this roughly brownie-point neutral.

Anyway, onwards and upwards. Reading the above, I think I've just come up with a couple of acronyms which could sweep the net like IMHO and IANALB ("I am not a lawyer but", in case you were wondering.) So that's STROOOG (stressed out of our gourds) and BPN (brownie-point neutral). What do you think? Give it a few months and then check out the OED.

Must go - I hear a white van. Could it be that Godot est arrive? One lives in hope...

Don't mention the L word...

Bloody hell! This blog's still covered in adverts for lawyers. I am starting to get paranoid about this: have a bit of a dig at the legal eagles and they're all over you in a trice. Work continues to try and banish these forces of darkness and fill the blog with delightful and pointless fripperies.

By the way, what's the difference between "illicit" and "illegal"? One's against the law and the other's a sick bird...

Sex and holidays and cars and food. Oh, and the News of the World

Apologies for the misleading headline. This is a shameless attempt to get some better adverts on the blog. I've noticed that recently it's been liberally festooned with ads for lawyers, ironic given the nature of the posts but that's what happens when you're at the mercy of some cyber adman. So now you've finished clicking on ads for marital aids, weekends away in New York and you've bought yourself a car and booked a restaurant, let's get down to business.

And my word this News of the World lark is a business, eh? The whole thing feels like a box of fireworks thrown onto a bonfire: dangerous and unpredictable effects shooting out in dangerous and unpredictable directions at similarly unpredictable intervals. Unless you've got more time than I am inclined to spend poring through the detail of all this, it's very hard to assimilate the ins and outs of it all. Plus, at the end of the day, do we really care much and if we do, what exactly are we to care about? Personally, I wouldn't give two hoots if someone hacked into my voicemail. If they're really interested in messages like "If you're in ASDA, we're low on washing powder" or "It's me dad, please send money" then good luck to them. But of course I'd still be straight on the phone to Messrs Sue, Grabbit and Run for a quick bit of no-win-no-fee action against Murdoch and chums. Max Clifford got a cool £1m out of them apparently: it's an ill wind, eh readers?   

Perhaps poor old Gordie Brown could do with Max's services. Looking increasingly like a man who can't even win when backing a dead cert in a one horse race, he now has egg on his face as we learn that his son's medical details didn't find their way into print as a result of hacking or blagging (there's another law I didn't know about) at all. Talk about a lose/lose. No, never mind the mobile phone, I'd be far more worried that if it's that easy to hack a phone, how about a bank account? No one seems to have mentioned this.

The Murdoch organisation of course has always had a touch of the Milwall syndrome about it, you know, "no one likes us, we don't care." Indeed, so unloved are they that the whole of the House of Commons has agreed to gang up against them in some kind of "stop being so horrid or I'll get my dad on you" motion. But are they the real baddies? Is parliament just projecting onto Rupe its own failures properly to stop this kind of thing? And what about the likes of us news consumers? If there wasn't such a demand for reading tawdry tittle-tattle about so-called celebrities then the newspapers (and is it really only News International titles up to no good here?) wouldn't spend the money on the private dicks and their dirty tricks in the first place.

The there's the police. I've been worried about them for a while. Now we learn that not only have some of them been taking money in return for juicy little titbits of info but through some combination of idleness, incompetence and, dare one suggest, an aversion to biting the hand that feeds them, their efforts to date to nail the hackers make Inspector Clouseau look like Sherlock Holmes (mind you, Sherlock bribed the police too.) One of the most senior of the coppers left the force a year or two back and now actually works for News International! Bloody hell! How convenient.

The police have, over the years, become quite literally a law unto themselves. One feels considerable sympathy for the honest rozzer trying to do his bit for society as he is constantly let down by the corruption, bungling and sheer laziness of so many of his colleagues. When we read that police policy guidelines have become infected by the rampant virus which is health and safety to such an extent that in some circumstances officers are told to avoid crimes rather than investigate them, we are entitled to wonder what madness has taken hold. And why does no government ever tackle the problem?

Governments have only two essential duties: to protect the country from its enemies and to protect the honest citizens from the dishonest. Everything else that governments do (and my goodness, don't they do a lot?) is either unnecessary or could be done by someone else.  It's about time that the UK government remembered this and got to grips with police failures. Elected chief constables would be a good start. And a bit more zero tolerance wouldn't go amiss. But that's another subject altogether.

So there you have it. It's not the Dirty Digger we need to be venting our anger at, it's either ourselves for buying this rubbish or the police for not doing their job. Or, ultimately, successive governments for not making sure the police do their job. I never bought the NOTW but I'm sorry it's gone. There's something sad (or wrong) that one man get get rid of a national institution - what next, the Times? Imagine if one man could get rid of other national institutions, like pubs. Or the House of Lords. Or fox hunting. Oh...hang on...

If you did buy the last edition of the NOTW, you will have been reminded of the many occasions when they were several steps ahead of the police in exposing serious wrong-doing. There's nothing to be gained here from the NOTW's demise. On the contrary, perhaps we need a few more fake sheiks and a few less bent and lazy coppers.

Goodnight all.

Get down with your baad self! The festival season is here!

It must be the time of year - I've bought a new guitar. It's a Fender Telecaster (left-handed, natch). I'll try and post a picture.

I think it must be seeing all these youngsters thrashing around with their mud-splattered six-strings that inspired me. Either that, or my dodgy back is making it increasingly hard to cope with holding  the very considerable weight of a Les Paul (a Tele is much lighter, as some of you may know.)

The number of music festivals these days is incredible and even us oldsters get sucked into the frenzy. last week we went to the Hop Farm do (just one day of it - can't go too mad you know) and this weekend it's a similar dabble with Lounge on the Farm. A slightly dangerous one this as it's close to home and is heavily populated by local teenagers determined to commence/continue their "experimentation" with drink/drugs/sex. As a responsible adult, does one report back to their not-entirely-unsuspecting parents or adopt a "what happens on the Farm stays on the Farm" approach? I think only if serious physical (or emotional) harm seems likely should one take the former line. We were once young too. Or so I'm told - I can't remember. And then in August we're off to Cropredy again, a slightly different kettle of fish where our presence actually reduces the average age.

In the old days, a lot of these festival things were free. How times change. You don't get much change out of £200 for a ticket for the full duration at a lot of these picnics and once there, it is very easy to get through eye-watering amounts of dosh on programmes, t-shirts, beer and organic vegeburgers (alright, not me personally on this last one but you take the point.) You could have a week on the Costas for this outlay, with cheaper beer and less mud.

In fact the whole economic model of the music business has been turned on its head in recent years. It used to be the case that the money was made out of records: playing live generally made a loss but was considered part of the marketing budget for the records. But now that recorded music is almost free, it's lucky for the music biz that they can make serious money out of live performance. This is because people are now prepared to pay huge sums for concert tickets. This is partly explained by the wider demographic of gig attendees nowadays. When I first started gig-going, you wouldn't see anyone over 21 in the audience whereas now those of us who are (much) closer to receiving our bus pass than our key to the door are a common sight, and we have more money than the kids. But then there's plenty of them too, aren't there? It's a bit strange.

No point me telling you that my first gig cost 8 shillings (that's 40p to you, spotty) as a lot of time and inflation has passed under the bridge since then. But think about this: when the Who headlined a one-day festival at Charlton in 1974, the tickets were £4. And it was a strong line-up. I can't remember exactly what an LP cost then but it was more than £2. For our one day at the Hop Farm, the tickets were £70 each and, with reasonable objectivity, I can say it was not such a strong line-up as the Charlton bash (e.g. the Who were at their peak in '74. The Hop Farm version of the Eagles are some way past theirs.) Let's say the average cost today of a CD (for those who actually still buy them) is £10. So a live:recorded ratio of less than 2:1 has become 7:1. And I bet you that this would be reflected, albeit to a lesser extent, in a comparison of concert ticket inflation vs. RPI over the period. Incredible, no?

And it's not just concerts: things like football matches have gone the same way. it seems that the nub of it is that "things" have become a lot cheaper but "people" a lot more expensive. The good news is that I can get a Telecaster for about the price of a family day out at the Hop Farm festival. The cost of a family day out to see the Who in 1974 would have paid for a couple of sets of strings and a plectrum or two. Seriously. It's a funny old world, isn't it?

See you at the beer tent and watch out for the brown acid!

A lawyer by any other name...

...would still stink. A deliciously apt paraphrase of the Bard given another story in the paper today about the "compensation culture", this time focusing on schools where, among other ludicrous wastes of taxpayer money, £3,000 was paid out because some little darling scratched themselves on a rose. We've read this sort of thing so much that we've become immune to it, which is dangerous. Here at Marshside we are not so blase. We will fearlessly investigate just what's going on here and see if we can find a solution. Gird yourselves!

The root of this is tort. That's not some kind of Germanic dessert but a branch of common law which, as you will all know, is that part of our law not written down anywhere but which has evolved over the centuries and is in effect made by judges as a consequence of their judgements which set precedents which must be taken into account in subsequent cases. There's about 13 torts (can't remember exactly), including assault, libel and slander. The one at issue here is negligence. A successful action against someone for negligence must show that the defendant owed the alleged victim a "duty of care", that the duty was breached and that the defendant suffered some real loss. A "real loss" normally means that it has a quantifiable monetary value. Not quite sure how a small child can lose money as a result of a scratch but the essence of a claim here would be that the school owed the child a duty of care (little doubt about that) and that it breached that duty by allowing children to come into too close proximity with those lethal rose thorns.

Now you might think this could easily be defended along the lines of: roses being a regular occurrence in the UK, including in the gardens of many children, not to mention public parks, etc., no "reasonable man" (a very important person in law) could regard the existence of unguarded roses as being in any way dangerous and thus this cannot be considered a breach of a duty of care. You might also add in that the child suffered no financial loss, neither immediately nor as a consequence of some kind of permanent disfigurement which could damage their future love life or modelling career (a lawyer acting for the claimant would suggest this might be the case. Well I would). No further witnesses, m'lud. So, having seen this off, how come we end up shelling out £3,000?

This is where the lawyers come in, not to mention the insurers. The school, having received a threateningly worded letter from someone at "ambulance chasing lawyers R us" they would have chucked it in the direction of their insurers. They in turn would have pushed it over to their own pet legal team who would have advised that although the ambulance chasers had a pretty feeble case, the costs of defending it, coupled to the costs in the event of losing it (even if a remote chance) meant that perhaps they should try and settle out of court and, having exchanged a letter or two with their brothers at law, advised that £3,000 would do the trick and that that seems like a sensible deal. Great. So the taxpayer (yes that's you, pay attention) has forked out £3,000 to these nasty little people plus the insurance premium paid by the school, out of which their own lawyers get a fee for their learned advice. Not to mention the insurance company's own costs and the time/cost of the school staff. Oh, and no doubt the school (i.e. you) then spent even more money by either removing or fencing off the offending roses. The net result is that a chunk of the money that comes out of your pocket to pay for our children's education has in fact gone on lawyers, insurers, school admin and fencing contractors. Educational benefit? Zero, unless you count the benefit of children learning what a rose looks like and that its stems are covered with sharp thorns. I don't know about you but I didn't have to go to school to learn that.

So what's to be done? One obvious problem is the cost of lawyers. It's a mystery as to what it is that keeps their fees so high. Of course the Law Society and the Bar Council do their best in this respect, plus the government does its bit by constantly passing new laws (every new law creates more work for the lawyers, if it does nothing else, and often it doesn't.) Perhaps most importantly, what's considered "reasonable" in terms of legal fees is ultimately decided by the judges who are...lawyers. So it's a cosy clique but it's still strange that the laws of supply and demand don't seem to apply to legal costs.

Then there's the evils of insurance. A former employer of mine, a very large UK company, decided some years ago not to have any insurance at all, except where it was legally obliged to. The logic is that over time, the costs of insurance will be equal to the costs of any claims plus the costs of the insurance company. So deal with the claims yourself and cut out the latter (this has become known euphemistically as "self-insuring". It sounds more professional than "not insuring"). More recently, another employer of mine forked out a six figure sum every year for insurance but virtually never made a claim. A colossal waste of money it could ill afford. How many of us have, over the years, received more in claims than we've paid in insurance premiums? Bad luck if your house burned down, you probably answered yes but you're the only one. As insurers can bung the cost of claims on premiums and as all insurers are likely to face similar levels of claims, there's little incentive for them to battle against high legal fees and do whatever else would seem sensible to keep claims costs down. (Something else which contributes to the maintenance of excessive legal fees). Plus, you may have discovered that if you do make a claim, the combination of your excess and the small print probably means they don't pay out and if they do, watch your premium rise next year! It's a lose/lose.

It sounds like I'm arguing that all insurance is a waste of time and money. Most of the time it is, exceptions being of the house burning down variety. Translate that to our rose-infested school and what that means is that they should only have insurance against major claims (e.g. roses turn out to be concealing triffids which eat child). Or more to the point, as they are part of the state and the state is obviously big enough to self-insure, they should have no insurance at all.

Given that the state is covering the school's backside, the school should nonetheless take any claims as a hit to their budget. In this scenario, they might have a different way of looking at solicitors' letters and would have an incentive to fight them. They need to understand the facts of the world as outlined above and especially, that the law is nothing like as complicated as lawyers would have you believe. Let common sense be your friend. take a leaf out of the book of that most sued entity, Private Eye. In the now legendary case of Arkell vs. Pressdram (Pressdram being the company that publishes Private Eye),  Arkell's lawyers wrote a letter which concluded: "His attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of your reply." Did Private Eye make panic-stricken calls to their insurers or lawyers? They did not. They wrote back, saying: "We acknowledge your letter of 29th April referring to Mr J. Arkell. We note that Mr Arkell's attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: fuck off."

Problem solved!

Whatever happened to freedom of speech?

"I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." (Voltaire)

If you asked people in western liberal democracies what they valued most, I'm guessing that freedom of speech would be pretty high up the list. So why do we treat this cherished right with so little respect? When I say "we", I'm talking about the UK. In some places, like the US, they have this enshrined in their constitution. Maybe we should do the same. In fact the whole issue as to whether we need a written constitution has become a much hotter topic in recent years and will be the subject of future blogging. But in the meantime, let's just think about why even humble bloggers like yours truly have to be careful what we say.

Of course the attacks on freedom of speech are nothing new, as can be demonstrated by number 2 in my series of undergraduate reminiscences. One of the first things that struck me as a wide-eyed 18 year-old was how politicised the students union seemed to be. Politics came well down my list of priorities after girls, beer, rock music, etc. (and I speak as someone who'd studied politics at A level and was just about to study a fair bit more of the stuff) and ditto for all my friends, so why were the walls covered in posters advertising political societies? Get out more, for God's sake!

Needless to say, these "socs" were invariably of the left-wing variety: CP, IMG, SWP and other acronyms too boring to recall (never mind to spell out - look them up if you don't know.) One of the most popular subjects for debate was "no platform for fascists". I use the word "debate" here very loosely. The obvious hypocrisy of this slogan was breathtaking. Surely one of the key characteristics of fascism is its totalitarian nature and its rejection of pluralism, implying a refusal to allow freedom of speech. So refusing to allow fascists to speak, is itself an act of fascism. Yes?! My young head was spinning: it was time to check out the bar/female talent/record shops.

If you put this accusation of hypocrisy to a member of one of these acronym-clad societies, the response ranges from "yeah, but fascists are bastards so..." (student from one of those universities that used to be a catering college) to a full-on exposition of Marxist historical inevitability (Russel Group student, probably ex public school). The whole thing was brilliantly parodied by Malcolm Bradbury in "the History Man" (check it out...plus the BBC dramatisation which was superb...a young Sir Anthony Sher in the lead role). But what it boils down to is the cunning use by some people of trendy (or these days, politically correct) ideas to impose their views and stifle the alternatives.

More recently, this kind of oppression has surfaced in other forms. Almost exactly a year ago, BP was in Big Poo following the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. There was some tragic loss of life but this was soon forgotten when apparently a couple of pelicans got a bit grubby and the local prawns tasted a bit off for a while. Tony Hayward, BP's head man at the time, tried to do the right thing of damping down the knee-jerk panic by saying that it was not that big a deal. Outrage! How dare he say that! What about the pelicans?! For this, he lost his job. If O'bama had had his way, he would have lost a lot more. But guess what? Hayward was right. But it seems that speaking the truth is not OK any more.

Here's another one. In November last year, a government adviser, "enterprise tsar" Lord Young, said that for many people the recession would be not be so bad and in fact for some it would be great news, as the reduction in interest rates meant they were saving a fortune on their mortgage repayments.  Quite obviously, and much more so than Tony Hayward's statements,  this is true. But it wasn't the sort of truth that the prevailing PC climate recognised, so he too lost his job. Similar fates have befallen drugs advisers Dr Hans-Christian Raabe and David Nutt who both dared to say things which while true or at least arguably true, the government didn't like.

Then there's Andy Gray and the other bloke on Sky who made a few sardonic remarks about female football officials. Never mind that these remarks were made in private, they had to go. Next up after defenestration for public comments and private comments, hard labour because of unacceptable thoughts: I'm sure the technology is not far away. The Brain Police are coming.

You can probably think up many more of these sorts of "just because it's true doesn't make it right" examples. The ones I've quoted may not seem so earth-shattering, especially in isolation but there's another much more worrying strain of oppression out there. There's a chap called Ben Goldacre who wrote a book called Bad Science (it's a must-read, believe me). In it, there's a chapter excluded from early editions as he was under attack from lawyers armed with obscure Latin phrases and powered by outrageous hourly charge-out rates, funded by someone called Matthias Rath. All Goldacre did was to state the facts about what Rath (a "nutritionist") had been up to, notably in South Africa where AIDS is a national disaster but one that Rath said could be alleviated, not by the accepted medical means but by vitamin pills. His vitamin pills. The fact that Rath and his lawyers could suppress Goldacre's writing is also a national disaster. Why can't we do something about it? Check out Goldacre's web-site or his book for fuller details. It will make you weep/squirm/write to your MP/furious.

I've not even mentioned super-injunctions. You may think that some footballer trying to prevent us knowing that he's been playing away while playing away is no big deal. But then there was the case of a company called Trafigura who tried and for a  time, succeeded, in stopping us knowing about the effects of its toxic waste-dumping in Africa. It's hard to know what other truths we are prevented from knowing by super-injunctions as, by definition, we're not allowed to know what the super-injunction is all about.

It's all gone much too far. "No platform for fascists" has become no platform for anyone to write or speak the truth if someone with enough money or power doesn't like the truth in question. Whether it's by changing the libel laws or by engraving important values like freedom of speech in tablets of stone, something needs to be done.

Marshside blog says: "Any platform for anyone!" Or as the Manic Street Preachers once put it, "this is my truth, show me yours."

"I'm a level 5 vegan...

...I don't eat anything that casts a shadow." One of the great lines from that best modern source for great lines, the Simpsons. As usual, they have hit the nail firmly on the head with their finely-honed satirical hammer. Just what is it with these faddy people who want to feel somehow better than others because of what they eat, or what they don't eat? Now I'm not talking about those who adhere to certain diets for religious reasons. Mind you, there may well have been very good health reasons for not eating pork many years ago - such good reasons in fact that Jews and Muslims agree on this point -  but surely not any more? Why not "modernise" (to use one of my most detested words...alongside "lager" and "Arsenal")?  But I'll leave that for another day. In fact maybe for ever. I don't particularly want to get into religious debate. The Marshside blog seeks to be non-denominational and even "inclusive" (there goes another of those hated words.)

But this business in Germany has made me wonder if the fact that the source of the illness was bean sprouts was not some kind of divine intervention. I don't know if they were "organic" bean sprouts but any kind of bean sprout seems to fit the bill here. My guess is that they were covered in some kind of organic fertiliser, i.e. feces of one sort or another, which was not terribly good for the old constitution. This is no laughing matter of course as a lot of people lost their lives but I think it just serves to prove what all right-thinking people already knew, that organic stuff is to be avoided.

I always steer clear of anything labelled organic like the plague, or like the e-coli. The reasons for this are that in the retail food trade, the word "organic" is a synonym for "high margins" which to you and me means "this way suckers" or "I saw you coming" (see earlier post). It isn't better for you health-wise, it just makes you feel superior. I guess it's maybe beneficial for your mental health but...

What we need is shops that guarantee to sell nothing organic and even better, everything genetically modified. I'm all for GM food. You've noticed that food prices have been rocketing. That's because the world is not producing enough. A lot of people in the world are hungry. They need cheap food that isn't going to poison them and non-organic GM food is the answer. The next time you're tempted by a few organic raspberries in Waitrose, ask yourself whether, by supporting the farmer who used his land to produce this over-priced delicacy, you are helping the world become a better place. Or are you just lining someone's pockets at the expense of those who are desperate for some GM grain at a price they can afford and don't give a stuff if it comes to them courtesy of a few vats of heavy-duty non-organic fertiliser?

Oh, and to return to our opening theme, here's my vote for the best comedy line of recent years, if not ever. It's from the Simpsons again and is in a letter to Homer from the New York parking authorities: "If you fail to remedy this malparkage immediately, your car will be thrown into the East River, at your expense." I think I could write an entire book on why this line is so funny. Other nominations? Leave a comment...

Pub update

I know you're all desperate for news of how our local's doing under the new management. Well last Friday we had the first day of food. They were inundated. Partly it was due to the novelty value plus I think I detected a few locals rarely seen in the place hitherto, probably because they were among those who'd fallen out with the old landlord at some time in the past, which was not a difficult thing to do. And one of his most endearing qualities.

The menu was largely based on the old one, with some slightly smaller portions and slightly higher prices (the price of beer's gone up too by the way, plus they've added a second -  "premium" -  lager!) And the food was kind of OK although it fell down in a few areas: the white bread surrounding my bacon and black pudding sandwich was very much of the supermarket sliced variety which is, frankly, just not good enough. But, to paraphrase Rupert Brooke (yes?) thank God there's black pudding still for tea!

The rumour is that the new tenants are both vegetarians which is a bit worrying when it comes to cooking meat. Also on the list of concerns, we know of one member of kitchen staff who lasted about a day, citing "personal differences" or words to that effect. There is pressure: last Friday they had to close the kitchen for a while, they were so swamped. I just hope they don't think it's going to be that busy all the time. In fact, there's a chance that that day will be the busiest in the kitchen that they'll ever have. Now there's a thought.

On the estates front, they've been dredging out the stream by the pub garden. Possibly looking for the bodies of long forgotten drunken farmhands or perhaps some kind of freshwater shellfish to add to the menu. They're also knocking out bits of the old "family room" which could certainly do with it. In recent years it's not seen too many families. All this is turning the car park into a tip, which won't help the passing trade. But it has to be the right thing to do so good luck to them.

I'm aware this blog doesn't have enough photos and the like, making it a rather "media poor" experience. So I'm going to whack on a picture of the recent Mummers play, as I know you're all keen to know more about this ancient and esoteric ritual. Wicker man not pictured.

British tennis rocks! Marshside blog in U-turn shock!

In the interests of "balance" (not that blogs need to be balanced - isn't that the whole point?) I thought I ought to say congrats to James Ward who beat Wawrinka at Queen's yesterday. A great result but I'm afraid still in the long tradition of unknown Brits getting one over a big name player at Queen's or Wimbledon. It's filed under "one swallow doesn't make a summer but one good win does make a British tennis season."

Before we start thinking that James Ward is the new future of British tennis, we have to remember that he's not a youngster like poor sacrificial Ollie Golding but, at 24 and the same age as Murray, Nadal and Djokovic, at his peak in tennis-life terms. So well-done James but one feels he is destined to be another Bogdanovic who's still slogging away and getting nowhere after all these years.

On a positive note, my tennis team had a crushing victory yesterday with me and my partner winning 6-0 6-0 and 6-1 6-2. We now expect the LTA to offer us huge sums for sponsorship and for us soon to be heralded as the future of British Tennis. Unfortunately, we are even older, by some way, than James Ward.

Anyway it's Andy Murray on in a minute. As usual, if he wins, he's British and if he loses, Scottish.

Give it some welly Andy!

New balls please

It's the tennis season again. Well it is if you live in the UK where the whole season apparently lasts only four weeks. The BBC puts enough resources into two weeks of Wimbledon coverage to televise a whole world war while ignoring the sport for the rest of the year. To be fair, the old red button had a lot of the French Open this year but you know what I mean. The problem has always been that we all go mad and dig out our dusty old raquets in late June and after a bit of a bash down the park, forget all about it again until next year. Those cheating foreigners, on the other hand, play all year round! No wonder the Brits are so bad at the game.

Of course we also see a fair bit of the annual Pimms-drinking fest over in West Kensington at Queen's Club, a social (and corporate) event that can be spoiled, it the weather's good, by a few blokes huffing and puffing around the grass. Most attendees though are able to cope with this without being distracted from their free lunch (at least it was free when I went! Plus a free tea in the clubhouse courtesy of some friends who are members. Can't remember the tennis at all.) This year we've already had the latest of our brave young hopefulls come and go. For poor young Ollie Golding it was a bit like watching a Christian against the lions or some kind of freak show, put on as an entertainment for the lunching classes. We all knew he hadn't a hope of winning but it makes us feel good to see a plucky young Brit sacrificed in the interests of proving that for us, it's playing the game and not the winning that counts. Which is a great justification for our habitually dismal results.

For the next few weeks, there is a law that says that all papers must run several articles on why the UK is rubbish at tennis, so I thought I'd get in first. The usual reasons given are: not enough of us play the game, especially at school; poor facilities; elitist tennis clubs that exclude you if you're not the "right sort"; too much dominance of British sport by football, etc., etc. While all these have an element of truth in them, they don't stand up to serious examination. So I've got two other answers for you.

First, we in GB regard sport as a hobby, not a profession. Nearly all sports were invented here, by newly time (and money) rich Victorians who wanted something to do on their lawns except drink tea. This idea lives on deep down in the British psyche and affects our performance in all sports, not just tennis, which is by no means the only sport in which we are woeful under-achievers. Johnny Foreigner has always been the underdog playing catch up and seeking to give us imperialists a bloody nose. Having been duly bloodied, we refrain from trying to compete and rise above all that ghastly winning business, congratulating the little chaps from the colonies and retiring to the marquee for a drink and a chat.

But the other problem is the LTA. Yes I know the poor old LTA is an easy target but there's a reason for this: it's the right target.   It is simply incredible that the LTA can pour about £30m a year into the sport and produce no one capable of seeing off those pesky colonials. In no other country does tennis benefit from the kind of cash that flies around in British tennis and in no other country is there such a history of failure. It's time to face facts and admit that there is an inverse relationship between money and results and for the LTA to stop chucking the stuff around.

Let the LTA give its money to charity and let our tennis youngsters devleop a bit of hunger, just like all those Eastern Europeans who have to practice in disused swimming pools (true) using fly swatters for racquets (or something). It is surely no coincidence that it's the Olavs and Novaks who dominate the tennis world and not the Olivers and Nigels. Still at least we beat them all at football. Hang on a minute...