We make our own entertainment here you know

In a remote corner of the empire, under the fragile guise of an ancient apple tree blessing ceremony known as Wassailing, some hardy citizens prepare for enemy action...

It's good to keep these things alive I reckon although I have no idea why. For the uninitiated, wassailing is all about encouraging the apple trees to bring forth a good crop. It should take place on January 17th which used to be 12th night, so our local effort on the 14th was pretty close. The shooting, as I'm sure you've guessed, is to ward off the evil spirits: no pigeons were harmed in the making of this video (unfortunately - we're plagued by the bloody things.)

I think I've mentioned before that our local also hosts Morris dancing, mummers plays and hoodening. This last one is particularly interesting as it happens only in Kent, although it's not unrelated to rituals like the Padstow Hobby Horse (pronounced 'obby 'oss). In these days of globalisation, it's intriguing that some things stay stubbornly local. Another one to list in this category is the game of Bat and Trap which is so localised that it's only played within about a 10 mile radius of Canterbury. And if you think this is another esoteric pastime like wassailing, only dragged out once a year by a few anoraks, you're quite wrong: there are Bat and Trap leagues. Purely local pub games in other parts of the country are also available.

We all know how dull it is to go to different towns and see the same old shops and even travel round the world to some obscure location inhabited only by Neolithic pygmies, only to find a branch of McDs and adverts for Coke, so I think it's great that some things remain a truly local experience. Wassailing doesn't quite fit the bill as other apple-producing areas (e.g. Somerset) indulge in it but you won't find it in Yorkshire. The same goes for oast houses, which you will see everywhere in Kent but hardly at all anywhere else: our son's university friends were completely staggered that, in a quiz or something, he knew straight away what an oast house was - to them it was as obscure as a Tibetan monk's home.

So there you have it: now you know all about Wassailing and why your next holiday should be in Kent.  We may have our dodgy bits (I refer to Jeremy Clarkson's recent observations - provocative but accurate as ever) but you haven't lived until you've seen an oast house....or played Bat and Trap.

(I've got more video clips but it took an age to upload the one above so I may spare you these - for now...)

What-a mistake-a to make-a!

Fabio Cappelo, the world's most overpaid employee (discuss), has got himself into a piss-up in brewery situation. Apparently he can't go to his son's wedding because it clashes with the England friendly against Spain on Saturday.

Now, here's a bloke who is surrounded by minions and gophers of one sort or another, thereby freeing him to do nothing except watch football and meet with his financial advisers (difficult to know which must be the most time-consuming) and he can't even get his son's wedding to coincide with any of the gaping blank space in his diary. As well as being the most overpaid man on the planet, is he the most inept?

This reminds me of a previous suggestion of mine which is that the England football manager post should not be filled by appointment in the normal way but rather it should be given to the winner of a lottery. The argument is that it really doesn't matter who does the job (check out the performance in the last world cup), not least because there's so few top English players to choose from that a reasonably well-informed 10 year-old could do it just as well as a £6m p.a. Italian. The other advantages would be that the lottery would raise a lot of money for charity; you wouldn't have to pay the winner a tenth of what Fabio earns; it would give a huge boost to national morale and goodness knows we could do with that.

Excuse me if I'm repeating myself but this all begs the question, why stop at the England football manager job?  Next on my list for the Jobbo Lotto would be MEPs. These people do nothing of any value and are, in effect, completely unaccountable. But this doesn't stop them trousering large amounts of our money. An obvious case for job-by-scratch-card.

I'm sure you can think of other candidates. In the meantime, we now have the proof that, as we suspected, Capello doesn't even know what day it is. 

Cuts - what cuts?

You will recall that we solved the financial crisis months ago. The problem was too many people in the public sector doing non-jobs and more or less everyone in the public sector being paid too much. Especially when you include their pensions: if the private sector can't afford decent pensions, how come it has to shell out to pay for the gold-plated public sector ones? If you want to know where this ends,  check out Greece.

The governor of the Bank of England, clearly a Marshside blog follower, put it even more succinctly the other day. The problem, he said, was governments spending too much. The "governments" to which he was referring are those of the western democracies. If we ask why it is that so many governments like spending money they don't have, the clue could be in the word "democracy". With an election always round the corner, there's nothing like splashing out some cash to buy a few votes. Don't have the money? Never mind, we'll borrow some more and worry about it after the election, or not at all if the other lot get in.

It's a bit different in China, where they continue to pile up the loot and lend it back to the rest of us. Could the fact that China is not a democracy have anything to do with this? Would you rather live under the Chinese system of government, with their piles of cash or under ours, with our piles of debt? Hmmm....this is one for the campers at St Paul's to think about. And Michael Moore, the US documentary film maker who gave an asinine performance on Newsnight the other day with a totally incoherent justification for the equally incoherent protests going on at St Paul's, Wall Street and elsewhere. He thinks that capitalism has failed. Or is it democracy that's failed? I blame the baseball cap - why do otherwise sensible Americans feel such a strong need to wear one?

Anyway, I'm rambling. The point of all this is....you would think that the "cuts" which everyone is moaning about must be right to the bone. But in today's local paper, I see that one bit of the NHS around here employs not only an "assistant director of citizen engagement" but also a "citizen engagement manager"!! (They had the front to both appear in an unpixelated photo - that's very brave.) You will have spotted that if there's an "assistant" director, there must be someone who's plain "director" of this curious line of business known as citizen engagement (or probably "strategic director", my previous post refers). There might even be more than one "manager" and even people so lowly that they are not directors or managers at all. Plus they're bound to have a secretary or two and they all occupy office space, with computers, laptops, mobile phones, etc. Probably bloody iPads as well these days.

The public sector just doesn't get it. While they are shelling out huge sums on these people, they are probably cancelling operations and extending waiting lists. This is a sin. They should take a red pen in one hand, a list of all administrative jobs in the other and apply one to t'other.

Either the cuts are only skin deep or they're in the wrong places. Or both. Our government, like many others, is still spending far too much. Sorting this out is painful but not sorting it out is more painful. I wonder if the people at St Paul's would have been there when Jethro Tull's invention of the seed drill put thousands of agricultural workers out of a job (never mind the catastrophic effect of the combine harvester). Apparently, according to Michael Moore, they want the end of capitalism. So it's the Chinese way for them then. Good luck with that.

The medicine of change often has an unpleasant side effect but it's necessary, just like many other medicines. Just ask the people at your local NHS's Citizen Engagement division.

Marshside blog still alive! Light at end of building works tunnel!

Stop worrying dear reader - we are still here. I expect you thought we'd spent the latter part of the summer relaxing on our luxury yacht, bobbing gently on the waters of some tropical paradise, while celebrities were helicoptered in to share a cocktail or two. Surprisingly, you are wrong. We have continued to paint this, rub down that and rip up the other like nobody's business, with an endless succession of tradesmen coming and going, bashing things around and making serious dents in the Marshside balance sheet.

Here's a photo of our temporary vaulted ceiling feature, easily achieved by tearing down a couple of internal walls and the old ceiling. We thought of  leaving it like this but only for about 10 seconds. But now here's an "after" picture of the new front room. The "before" one's in the earlier post, the one with alarming holes in the walls.

Aha! Unrecognisable, eh? Having the carpets laid last week was a major event, as it signals the end. Or at least the end of the beginning: we now have to get some furniture and curtains, re-route the satellite cables, put in a hi-fi system and goodness knows what else. When will it end? In the meantime, there's a new ceiling in the other room, which has been re-plastered and painted. Next job there is to tile the floor (next week) and then it's carpenter time again, for skirtings and architraves. And then it's done? No it's not. We still have the big new window to worry about and we have to deal with the planners again before we can bash a hole in the wall and put that in. In the meantime, we're after a baby grand piano (we gave away the old joanna) and probably a new dining table.

Roll on Christmas!

Building works update - house still standing!

I know you're desperate to know how the work on the house is going, or has it even started yet? Well yes it has, as the noise of a drill wafting up the stairs attests. I'll bung in a couple of photos, showing alarming holes in walls, etc. I can reassure the anxious reader that work has moved on a bit since these photos were taken and the house is still standing.

The work we're having done is not really that major, despite what you might have inferred from the pictures, but it does involve a large number of people: a carpenter, a plumber, an electrician, a plasterer, a painter and bits and pieces from us. Now you can do these things by employing a builder, who will then contract in the various trades people leaving you free to let them get on with it and not worry (as if not worrying is possible under the circumstances.) But I seem to have ended up in the role of "builder/project manager" and it's a bit stressful.

So why didn't I just get a builder in to run the show? Well, if you do that, you have no control over the blokes he's going to use. In our house, the timber is vital so we have to be sure the chippie knows his stuff. And we happen to know a good chippie. We also happen to know a good plumber and electrician. The plastering and painting was a little harder to organise but not much and, touch wood (not too hard in case there's a bit of rot there), it's all going pretty well.

The chippie and plumber are about to go off on their hols so a bit more delay will happen but while they're away, we can get the plastering finished, paint it ourselves, get the outside painted (I'm not going that high up a ladder with my back - what were you thinking?) and get the electrics finished. Then in a week or two, the plumber can do his stuff and the chippie can finish off, hanging doors and the like. Then there's a sort of phase 2 to consider but can't worry too much about that just now.

The other reason for this self-managing lark is cost. If you get this putative builder chap in, he's going to add his not inconsiderable profit margin on top of what the blokes get paid. Plus, he's probably registered for VAT. Add these two things together and the cost can near enough double. As an example of this, we have just had a couple of quotes for the outside painting, one from a small firm and one from an individual. The former was nearly 3 times as much as the latter! Can you guess which one we're going to go for?

My point, if there is one, is that markets are funny things and it seems that the same product or service can be sold for two very different prices. This can only happen due to market imperfections, like lack of knowledge. Or VAT. Did you know that you can never get a true market equilibrium when you have indirect taxes? They should all be abolished. Campaign for this now and put builders on a level playing field (and make booze and fags much cheaper)! And if you're selling something to Joe Public, avoid registering for VAT if you can: it's hard to compete when you're suddenly 20% more expensive than the bloke down the road.

I refer the reader to my previous comments...

Just a couple of quickies. Conscientious readers will recall an earlier post about how "survey" results often tell you more if you switch them round. In this context, I read the other day that "40% of people are feeling worse off in August". Which means of course that 60% of people, i.e. the majority, are not feeling worse off. Given the way the world is at the moment, that strikes me as pretty remarkable.

This links nicely to another previous post which lamented the decline in freedom of speech. One of the examples given was a government advisor who'd had to resign after saying that, far from suffering from the current global economic woes, many people would actually be better off, due largely to the low cost of borrowing. If you needed any proof that he was right (but being clever, I'm sure you didn't) then this survey seems to provide it. Don't expect the advisor got his job back though.

Along the same lines, the historian David Starkey has come in for some serious flak for daring to suggest that there's a racial element, or at least a cultural element linked to race, to the recent riots. Who knows whether he's right but as he himself said, there are some things one is just not allowed to talk about these days, no matter that they may be correct and therefore of not inconsiderable help in solving problems.

I wonder if this happens in science? I do hope not. Can you imagine a situation where a particle physicist was simply unable to float an idea simply because the science world regarded it as taboo or not politically correct, for some obscure and/or misguided reason? Goodness knows what discoveries we might have missed: no chance of a cure for cancer becuase no one will fund the research due to it being contrary to the fashionable views of the day.  

That said, we are pretty much there when it comes to green stuff, aren't we? There's a huge amount of doubt about the nature of global warming but despite this, governments are taking far-reaching decisions based on the absolute, 100%, unchallengeable need to be green. There's got to be a good chance that one day we are going to wake up and realise that diverting massive resources into windmills and the like was a waste of time and money and has got us into a complete mess. How silly will we all feel then?

When your lights go out because there's not enough power stations and all the money's been blown on a few becalmed windmills, and when you get that next thumping increase in your electricity bill, remember that it's all down to limitations on freedom of speech. Well that and the fear amongst so many of us to say things which are unfashionable.

Ah, yes - fashion. I feel another post coming on...

Cause of the riots revealed: it's the smoking ban!

I thought I ought to say something about the riots. An appalling business. I'm trying hard not to go into hanging and flogging mode, which is tough, and think creatively about causes.

One obvious thing is that if the police stand around and allow people to nick stuff then a lot of other people will want a piece of the action. Who wouldn't enjoy a night out watching fires and breaking glass with the bonus of coming home with a new TV and some upmarket threads? Sounds good to me. Of course most of us don't do that sort of thing but clearly there's a fair number of people who are less inhibited by those annoying moral scruple things. The original trouble was pretty obviously due to a local Tottenham gang trying to get some retribution from the police who'd gunned down one of their number. Unjustified, undesirable but understandable. But the way it spread was due to the kind of opportunism I've mentioned, no doubt also fuelled by gang culture and I expect some of those shady class war anarchist types who lurk about in society's dark corners and who would have seen the Tottenham troubles as a golden opportunity for giving "the man" a bloody nose.

Let's nail this idea that it had something to do with the oppressed "deprived underclass", desperate for a square meal and some shoes for their unshod urchin children. I'm not even going to give this argument the dignity of examination but what I will do is give you a kind of related hypothesis to mull over.

The basic premise is that people want to be free to do what they want. Now, if "what they want" involves stuff like violence and theft then it's hard to find a society anywhere where there's not a consensus which says this sort of behaviour should be discouraged and punished. But the laws in most countries go way beyond this and all sorts of minor freedoms are restricted in all sorts of ways which are not necessarily supported by consensus.

How about parking as a for instance? Continuing my series of undergraduate reminiscences, I often used to drive the couple of miles to university and I could park the car, completely legally and completely free, just a short stroll from the lecture theatre.  Just try doing that in Manchester today, or anywhere else for that matter. More pertinently, given recent events, I used to drive regularly to Tottenham to watch the might Spurs play and park just a stone's throw (excuse unfortunate metaphor) from the ground. You'd find it hard to park for free in the same borough these days.

I find this really annoying and I'm not at all sure it's justified. It has more to do with local authorities seeing parking charges as a revenue stream than merely a way of regulating supply and demand for parking spaces. I also find the smoking ban annoying and unjustified. I imagine that other people would say the same about any number of other restrictions on individual freedom.

If you try and squeeze an inflated balloon into a box, you will find that when you push one bit in, another bit will pop out, the volume of air in the balloon being a constant that no amount of squeezing will reduce. I'm suggesting that an individual's desire for freedom of action is also a constant and that if you restrict people in certain ways, this desire for freedom is likely to pop out, balloon-like, in other ways and those ways may be very unwelcome.

It may not be the complete answer but my recommendation is this: cut people a bit of slack. Get rid of a few laws, like the smoking ban. Make it easier to park the damn car. Abolish the hunting ban. Stop nagging people to death with all this green nonsense: having to shove different bits of waste into different bags is enough to make anyone want to start a riot. I'm not sure that all this would absolutely guarantee no rioting in the future, ever, but it would certainly help.

If people aren't on the streets, they won't riot. Want to get people off the streets? Let them smoke in pubs.

Festival update - Hayseed Dixie rule!

Well we survived Cropredy. Actually that's not saying much as this is one of the more genteel festivals, in keeping with the advanced age of most attendees. You park right next to your tent (no lugging of stuff across muddy fields, in deference to those of us with dodgy backs), the loos are a cut above the norm (they even have proper porcelain ones!), you can plonk your folding chairs on a prime spot first thing in the knowledge they will stay put all day and there's a special shop selling pipes and slippers. I'm joking on this last one of course - but only just. There is in fact always a surprisingly large number of youngsters there but they're probably the offspring of hardened Cropredy veterans (it's been going over 30 years) and are pre-programmed at birth to head, zombie-like, to this corner of Oxfordshire in the second weekend of August every year, come what may.

For those who don't spend all day dozing or pottering around in their caravan, there's some music of course. Given that Cropredy is run by Fairport Convention, it's known as a folk festival but anyone expecting fingers firmly placed in ears, wall to wall beards and Arran sweaters would be surprised at the eclectic mix on offer. Last year we even had Status Quo and they don't come much more non-folky than that. Unless you count the Buzzcocks and Nick Kershaw, other recent beat combos to appear. This year's equivalents were UB40 and the Blockheads. The final headliners are Fairport (natch) who always do a 3 hour set on the Saturday night. Yes you read right: 3 hours. It's quite an endurance test, for all concerned. The saving grace is supposed to be the "special guests" who come on to do a turn. A couple of years ago we had Cat Stevens/Yusaf plus Richard Thompson ("or God, as he's known around here") and before that, Robert Plant, no less.

 But things are going downhill. Last year we were treated (I use the word not just loosely but incorrectly) to a large chunk of some rock opera-type thing called Excalibur. I won't bore you but when I say the creator of this magnum opus is a French bloke you will be thinking, quite rightly, that we are slipping rapidly into Spinal Tap territory. This year wasn't too much better with Fairport doing the whole of their 1971 album Babacombe Lee (it's not great) and the closest we came to a special guest was Ralph McTell. With all due respect to good old Ralphy, he's no Robert Plant. At the end of this 3 hour marathon, Fairport always finish with Meet on the Ledge. It's the law. Everyone holds hands or waves their arms about and sings along, fireworks go off and we try and forget that the writer of this excellent song (yes it's Richard Thompson again) left the band about 40 years ago, since when they've done nothing new that comes close. Then we head off for one last night under canvas in a state of bliss...or something.

Never mind this though, Cropredy remains a great few days in the country. Cropredy's a super village, with a shop, a cricket club, two pubs and a canal. Or is it a river? There's narrow boats anyway, oh, and a canoe club. You know you're at the right place when the huge tarpaulins in front of the PA either side of the stage are not advertising a mobile phone but real beer: Wadworth's 6X to be precise. Tanker loads of the stuff are sold at what is apparently the largest outside bar in the universe. There is no backstage bar so you get to hobnob with the stars, even if the best we did was "whispering" Bob Harris and Steve Gibbons. But Robert Plant was spotted too, only spectating this year. Oh, and one of the blokes from the Coral.

The Coral were excellent by the way. But the real stars of the 3 days were Hayseed Dixie. They were absolutely fantastic: not only very funny patter plus of course their trademark bluegrass versions of hard rock songs (e.g. Highway to Hell, Ace of Spades and...Bohemian Rhapsody!) but boy can these blokes play. I may not be a bluegrass expert but I've never seen playing like it. I didn't know it was possible to play a Mandolin that fast. They finished with Duelling Banjos, which went very well with a T-shirt I saw someone wearing which carried the exhortation "paddle faster, I hear banjo music". No point me waffling any more - I'm sure there's plenty of Hayseed Dixie videos on Youtube. Check 'em out and if you get a chance to see them, GO.

Our festival season's not quite over. The boy is dragging his girlfriend off to the Green Man festival in Wales tomorrow. Rain guaranteed. Let's hope it's not the end of a beautiful friendship and let's hope he drives safely. But as for us oldsters, one dose of camping is enough. So until next year, it's...."meet on the ledge, we're going to meet on the ledge, if you really mean it, it all comes round again..."

See you on the ledge. By which I mean the bar.

Ambulance chasers 0 - Common sense 1

Result! A woman who suffered appalling injuries after diving into a neighbour's pool has lost her case against them. In a previous post I suggested that it was reasonable to expect children to know that roses had thorns. Following the same line of reasoning, the judge in this case has decided that it's reasonable to expect adults to know that diving into swimming pools is potentially dangerous.

I said previously that these cases are brought under the common law tort of negligence. Although the judge in the pool case seems to have applied the same tests, this case was apparently brought under something called the Occupiers' Liability Act. I'm not familiar with this myself but it's gratifying that despite (or perhaps because) some of this stuff has now been written down by parliament, no liability was found.

We need a few more judges to produce sensible rulings like this and a few more people prepared to defend themselves against Messrs Sue, Grabbit and Runne. Our local parish council is apparently agonising over the risks of taking ownership of a pond, despite no such risks having bothered the existing and previous owners for however many centuries this pond has been in existence. Perhaps this latest ruling will persuade them to stop being such a bunch of uber-risk-averse so and so's. But whether it does or not, it's a move in the right direction. Well done m'lud.

PS None of the above should be taken to sound like rejoicing at somebody else's suffering and one's heart goes out to the lady in question. It's just that we need to get a grip and get out of this "where there's blame there's a claim" culture. Unfortunately, as the judge decided in this case, the blame often lies with no one but the claimant themselves. It is to be hoped that the claimant's lawyers (and not the claimant herself) got stung with a hefty bill for the defence's costs...a case of pour encourager les autres, one hopes. That rare occasion when I'm in favour of outrageous legal fees.

Expand your mind with runner beans - not the TV

I've just carried out the first runner bean harvest of the year here at Marshside Acres. Yes, a major task involving a lengthy journey across the rolling fields in an expensive 4x4 but someone's got to do it and I'm afraid the recession and the immigration authorities did for the asylum-seekers we laughingly referred to as gardeners.

I've been picking runner beans since I was knee high to, well, to a runner bean stalk and it's a fascinating experience. Why? Because you soon discover that planting runner beans will solve the world's food shortage problems because the supply of runner beans is infinite. Blimey! I hear you say, that's a far-fetched notion if ever I heard one, and that's putting it politely. But let me explain. The thing is that however many you pick and however long you spend doing it, you never pick them all: go back again and there's always more. Ergo, there is no end to the supply of runner beans. QED.

I appreciate this may be wasted on those of you without a runner bean plantation but I urge you next spring to get some these little marvels in the ground and see for yourselves that I am right. Making this discovery will raise you to a higher level of consciousness and bring you closer to a more complete understanding of the universe than even Professor Brian Cox could ever hope to achieve. Never mind the Large Hadron Collider, just reach for the large bean colander!

Speaking of the mighty PBC brings me on to TV. Just to be clear, Marshside blog is a big fan of the Oldham Oracle but there was another scientist type on the box the other day who let the side down badly. Can't remember his name (and too lazy to look it up) but the programme in question was called "the Code". It was all about numbers and purported to show us how the world is held together by extraordinary mathematical patterns. I'm a big fan of numbers so was looking forward to this but it really was poor.

The programme lasted an hour I think but I could be wrong as it felt like days and in any case could have been condensed into 5 minutes. I won't bore you but it included such tosh as trying to suggest that the proportions of Chartres cathedral were based on the ratios between the frequencies represented by musical notes. This rather ignores the fact that in the 13th century they would have had no idea what a sound wave was, what a frequency was or that an octave sounds the way it does because the frequency exactly doubles each time you go up an octave. Plus, I'm pretty sure they used different musical scales in those days and that terms like "perfect fourth" and "major third" hadn't been invented.

So what am I saying? It's more evidence of dumbing down, is what. We read today that a worryingly large proportion of children leave primary school without mastering the 3Rs. What they've been taught for those 6 years or so is a mystery but they probably go on to make TV programmes like "the Code". I suggest that they could do worse than a lesson on "examine the Marshside blog hypothesis on the runner bean: is it true or is the writer a blogging idiot?"

Think about it over lunch and eat up your runner beans while you're about it - there's plenty more where they came from!