Flooded? Better call Saul!

Hi there folks - Saul Goodman, attorney at law, here. I know some of you have been dealt a rough hand by the recent weather in parts of the UK. As you try and salvage the pitiful remains of your possessions, tears adding to the flood waters as they splash onto that new TV you got for Christmas, or that photo of your late Auntie Hilda, you may be despairing at any chances of recompense. I'm here to tell you that you couldn't be more wrong.

 

OK, so you forgot to renew your insurance - that's assuming you can get any for a house on a flood plain but that's no reason you can't get your hands on the folding stuff. Hey, the reverse is the case; insurers always find a way to weasel out of paying up don't they? It's much harder to dodge your obligations when you've got the weight of the legal system bearing down on you.

 

 

 

 

Here in the US of A, we've had temperatures so low it gave another meaning to frozen assets, even down here in the Land of Enchantment (that's the state of New Mexico to you good people). But I'm happy to tell you I got my clients a bundle of $$$$$. How come Saul? I hear you ask. Well the possibilities are endless: you've got the negligent weather forecasters, and they're usually backed by those deep-pocketed TV stations; did your automobile vendor give you proper warning of snow hazards? How about the stores that failed to stock up properly on shovels, salt, grit, de-icer, sledges, to say nothing of their lack of sufficient canned food. Perhaps you have a young child? This lack of proper winter food might have led to malnutrition and consequent long-term bone and even brain damage. That's a mighty big claim there friends - but the likes of Walmart have a pile of cash and don't you think they'd rather part with a bit of this rather than having their good name mauled in the law courts? You're damn right they would.

 

So let me  give you the benefit of my experience. You may think floods are an act of God and you can't sue the Big Man, right? Wrong. The Lord has his representatives on earth and there's banks in Rome that are used to paying out to cleanse these people's consciences. Know what I'm saying?

 

So do yourself a favour. Put down that bucket for five minutes; strip off your waders and tie up that dinghy for just long enough to make that phone call which'll dry you out in no time, to say nothing of providing for that college education little Wayne never thought he'd get. Call me now!

 

Up to your waist in the watery brown stuff? Better call Saul!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interactive white board economics - an update

Keen readers will remember my exciting new economic forecasting tool based on the spread of interactive white boards in schools. Other items of dodgy gadgetry apply. Well I thought you'd be interested to hear that the school I mentioned as having dished out ipads to all its "students" (why is it never "pupils" any more?) had surpassed itself. GCSE results have collapsed (and they weren't great in the first place) and on this basis, it is apparently now the 43rd worst school in the whole country. Yes you read right - that's country not county.

 

I expect their response will be to spend more of our money on some new technological initiative...smart phones for all, perhaps.

 

After all, this level of failure doesn't come cheap. Did I mention that this school enjoys brand new buildings? And then there's the staffing. When you drive past, you're struck by the size of the car park and the number of cars. Clearly these don't belong to the kids, virtually none of whom are old enough to drive, so they must have staffing levels undreamed of when I was a lad. Not only that, but the car park is illuminated after dark (and long after the school's closed) and so is the flashy neon school name sign and logo thing.  Now our school had no lights in what passed for a car park and no neon sign. Why is it that schools nowadays need these things, and countless admin staff and how come we can afford this when the country is broke?

 

And why do we reward failure like this?

 

Damned if I know but much more of this and I can see another impending economic disaster on the horizon. Alert the Treasury!

Breaking Bad - Better call Saul! US TV can be very good

The flight to India is quite a long one. While waiting to attract the attention of a stewardess to get another free beer, we watched some stuff on these natty in-flight personal entertainment things you get nowadays.

 

I'd heard of the TV series Breaking Bad but had never seen it as it wasn't shown on a normal UK TV channel. I think actually it was in my mind as the final episode was not long before we went to India. But anyway, they had the first series on the plane. We were gripped. We don't normally go in for this box set business but Christmas was coming, and so...

 

There are in fact 5 series of Breaking Bad and since Christmas we have spent much of our free time ploughing through all 60 or so episodes. We've got 2 to go so for God's sake don't tell me how it ends!

 

One of our favourite characters in the show is dodgy lawyer Saul Goodman (not his real name but he thought people liked their lawyers to have Jewish names). It seems we're not the only ones to be Saul fans as the company who made Breaking Bad are to give Saul his own show, by way of a BB prequel. It should be great, even if you've never seen BB.

 

 

 

To get a flavour of this, Saul has his own web-site..the link is below. If like me, you think there is no better target for satire than lawyers then check it out...hilarious!

 

Remember: don't drink and drive but if you do, call Saul...

 

And if this makes you want to check out Breaking Bad, it'll be money well spent.

 

DUI? Dealing Drugs? Better Call Saul!

 

 

What we did on our holidays - part III

Despite the pressures of never-ending building works, we found time in early December to jet off to India. Yes India! What a place. I tell you, if you go to India you really know you're abroad; no Irish pubs, English newspapers, Starbucks, western chain shops, etc, etc. And not much in the way of western toilets either. Yep, India is definitely foreign. (Although we did come across a MacDonald's and a KFC but I am trying to  forget those cultural aberrations.)

 

Toilets are a big selling point in India

 

We did one of these escorted tour things, a first for us. I heartily recommend them. We were only there about 10 days but we packed in an enormous amount; as well as the usual stuff like the Taj Mahal, we went on a real Indian train (two WCs: one marked "Indian" the other "Western" - apartheid lives! Why not just make them both Western? Plus we learned that a 50p bribe will get you round the smoking restrictions); we rode a rickshaw round Delhi; we saw a tiger in the wild; we drank Kingfisher beer made in India and not, as all UK Kingfisher is, at the Shepherd Neame brewery in decidedly non-Indian Faversham. 

 

Not all Indian wiring would comply with UK building regulations

 

 

 

 

Tiger alert! Yes a real one! Not in a zoo!

 

We were a party of 34 among whom were a couple who recognised us as habitues of a pub not far from here: small world or what? We had an English (well Italian actually) guide to organise us plus a local guide to smooth out the dealings with the locals and to keep up a running commentary as our coach trundled along through the extraordinary Indian traffic. This included driving (deliberately) the wrong way up a dual carriageway for a stretch. As our guide said, in England we have traffic rules which don't really work; in India no one pays a blind bit of notice to traffic rules but somehow it seems to work - we never once saw an accident.

 

 

Some building or other shortly after dawn...sleep deprivation not pictured

 

Yes most Indians are very poor. But they are amazingly happy; they smiled and waved at us as we went by and they rushed to take our picture and have themselves photographed with us. We never felt threatened and while I'm sure that theft is not unknown, I never felt I was a likely victim. Given the wealth disparity between the average Indian and the average tourist, this is amazing.

 

So what did we learn? Among other things, the following:

 

• There are more than 300 million Hindu gods, including an Enfield motorbike.
• Nearly all Indian marriages are arranged but the divorce rate is tiny.
• It's hard to get a beer in India, they're not big drinkers. And although prices generally are, to us, very low, a beer in a top hotel can cost a fortune.

 

One reason why getting a beer can be a struggle?

• The most popular roadside snack seems to be not samosas or puris but peanuts in their shells.
• It's true: Indian food in the UK is generally better than Indian food in India
• If visiting India, do not even think of hiring a car.

 

 

Pimp my ride, India style

 

 

• Few Indians speak English and even fewer can read and write it but despite this, the driving test is in English. This is one reason why driving licences tend not to be acquired by what we would think of as conventional means.

 

 

What do you mean it only seats 4?

• MacDonald's in India have a special menu featuring spicy vegetarian burgers.

 

What's "go large!" in Hindi?

• Most Indians are vegetarian and it's best to adopt a "when in Rome..." policy when dining out.
• The local hawkers are persistence personified. But do buy something - the stuff is cheap and even cheaper when you haggle.
• Someone from a lower caste will not sit at the same level when with someone from a higher caste, even if invited to do so.
• It's the man who wears the trousers in Indian families. Most of them seem to sit around all day while the women work, even doing road repairs.

 

We learned a ton of other stuff but that'll do. I urge you to visit and see for yourself. Bring me back some more poppadoms as our stock is now running low...not to mention the duty free smokes which are so cheap they're almost free...

 

 

Some of the hotels are not at all bad. This beats a Travelodge

 

Economic boom - latest

Hi folks. I apologise for recent blog silence. Really there is no excuse but we were preoccupied for some time by our building works, which rapidly precipitated more works as we needed to tart up the room used as a music room and now largely emptied thanks to completion of new music room over the garage.

 

This second chunk of works entailed organising a plumber (to remove the old radiator then come back when all was finished to install new radiator); an electrician to sort out the electrical mess in the room; a plasterer to replaster the whole thing (which was especially important as the walls are kind of wattle and daub and were somewhat dodgy in places); a builder, to put an air brick in a blocked up chimney breast,  plus us two to strip off the woodchip wallpaper and to redecorate and also to put new ironmongery on the windows. This sounds easy but extracting those old screws was anything but, plus of course the new latches were not quite the right size, so...more work.

 

All this lot, which probably amounts to no more than a week's work in total, took around two months to complete. Why is it so hard to find someone who can come in for a week and do the whole thing? Not that we even tried as, luckily, we know a good plasterer, electrician, etc., etc. But once again I am made aware that there is plenty of work around for tradesmen.

 

Oh, and as well as the new building, we then had to replace some dilapidated fencing and get part of the many miles of paths which snake throughout Marshside Acres relaid.

 

Anyway, I now can sit and blog to you in refurbished luxury, toes warming on the shiny new radiator (well not at the moment - have you seen the price of heating oil?) and while so doing, I can gaze out at the new garage featuring the Marshside Hit Factory on the first floor. I know you're now wondering what exactly in the way of "hits" has emanated from this soon-to-be-legendary recording venue. Well if I can figure out the technology, I may well try and post something; watch (or rather listen to) this space... 

 

In the meantime, here's a photo of the new building, to compare with the previous one of cement and mud...

 

More blogging anon!

 

 

The Marshside Hit Factory. (Hits not pictured.)

Why do we invent laws?

God knows we have enough laws, rules, regulations don't we? I'm talking about the UK by the way - other countries may be more blessed. Perhaps you do live in that Utopia where there are but two laws: (1) don't hurt anybody and (2) don't steal their stuff. If so, do please let me know where it is.

 

Parliament is constantly passing new laws. If I could be bothered, I'd look up the figures for new laws passed each year but really it's too depressing. And what makes it even worse is that it's often not even parliament that's doing the legislating, at least not directly. What tends to happen is that a bit of "enabling" legislation is passed which then allows the government to enact dozens of subsidiary regulations at various points in the future without the tiresome need to have them actually approved by our glorious elected representatives. And worse again, they hardly ever repeal old laws so every year the towering mass of rules just gets bigger.

 

But despite this regulatory overkill that we find ourselves burdened with, we seem to love to invent non-existent laws. I can't be sure about this, but I reckon it's a peculiarly British hobby although I can't quite put my finger on the national trait that gives rise to it. Something to do with the orderly nature of our society, coupled with the general loss of autonomy (the "computer says no" generation) which makes us want to assert a position of power over others wherever possible. This latter facet of our character may be due precisely to this massive and recent rise in legislation as whenever there's a new law passed, that invariably means there's one more thing you can't do, hence your autonomy is chipped away and hence the need to invent a new power base for yourself.  So paradoxically, the more laws you have, the more people invent new ones, and vice versa.

 

Actually, when I say "power base" I'm making mountains out of molehills a little. The sort of fantasy laws I'm talking about are usually minor things but they just give the enforcer that little bit of a lift and make life just that little bit more annoying for the enforcee.

 

So what sort of things am I talking about then? Well this piece was partly inspired by a comment on another piece to the effect that people were fond of wrongly blaming "health and safety" for all sorts of mythical obligations. This is certainly true and the Health and Safety Executive actually have a "myth busters" page on their web-site I believe to combat this sort of thing. Well done them but unfortunately this category of invention is largely beyond their control. The problem here is the judges, and of course their best mates, the lawyers.

 

The judges are perhaps the best example of those who seek to over-assert themselves in the face of legislative wing-clipping. The more that the government says that there's no truth in such and such a rumour that you must do X or face the slammer, the more likely are the judges to award damages because someone tripped over a paving stone or ruined a blouse after spilling curry on it (the menu omitted to say "warning: some of this food may leave irremovable stains"). We used to have a good chuckle at how this sort of thing only happened in the USA (MacDonald's in hot coffee shock) but like most things American, we have imported it into the UK.

 

So thanks to our learned friends, insurance companies will put reams of stuff in the small print of their policies, compelling you to put warnings on your menus or coffee cups or whatever, failing which they will not pay out. Which could be very bad news indeed. This is what gives rise to the "got to do that, it's bloody health and safety" business, not the boys at the H&S Executive. Of course what people should really be saying is "got to do that, it's them bloody judges" but the effect's the same. 

 

But that's just one area. What else is there? Well I'm going to list a few things that pop into my head and will try and update in future posts. Do please add your own. In fact I feel a whole new web-site coming on! Let's hope someone's not got there first. Here goes:

 

1.  Tenancy agreements: I know a letting agency whose agreements provide for a witness signature but this is not required in the vast majority of cases. They know this but won't change it as they feel compelled to use a standard form provided by some trade association or other. Or perhaps they're just too lazy. Also, they think that landlords have to have insurance (they don't); that they have to provide copies of insurance documents to tenants (they don't) and that all electrical appliances have to be regularly tested (they don't).

 

2. I was once told by a work "colleague" that people were legally obliged to attend and pass some council-run course before they could drive a minibus. Not true. What makes it worse is that it's the nature of your licence which determines this but the person trying to boss me around didn't know this so could well have been sanctioning illegal minibus drivers.

 

3. Smoking in hotel rooms is illegal: not true. Hotel rooms are one place you can still smoke. Now, the hotel may impose its own smoking ban but that's a different matter - they shouldn't hide this behind those annoying "smoking in these premises is illegal" stickers they put up. Take a marker pen with you and write "not true" on them.

 

4. Pubs: one or two things here. "Kids under 18 can't drink alcohol". Not true. They can't legally be served alcohol but when you're 16 you can drink various alcoholic things with a meal. Also: "kids under 14 not allowed in pubs". Not true any more, although it used to be and some of us think it might be a good idea if it was again!

 

5. Smoking again: the smoking ban is an EU thing and applies across Europe. Not true. The rules vary from country to country. You can smoke in pubs in Belgium, under the very eyes of those swarming Eurocrats who hang out there. Maybe that's why.

 

6. You can't kill foxes: yes you can: they're a bloody nuisance. Just not with dogs.

 

7. All buildings which might be used by the public must have full disabled access, etc. Nope. The Disability Discrimination Act provides all sorts of get out clauses. We had premises used by the "public" for many years and we never did anything about disabled access nor, in fairness, did any council jobsworth ever tell us to.

 

Well that's enough to be going on with, more fantasy laws anon. In the meantime, I must get to work on that web-site and watch the £millions roll in... 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Festival report: Cropredy - Nik Kershaw

Hello there you in your denim shorts and wellies uniform - how's the festival season for you this year? Ours has been limited to Cropedy, thanks for asking. The Hop Farm is no more; there was no one worth shelling out for at Lounge on the Farm; V and Reading simply too much like a war zone for the more mature festival goer; failed once again to get tickets for Glastonbury. On this last point, what's the secret here? Our boy and many of his friends got them as did a number of people one reads about who claim to go every year. But for us, despite being welded to the Internet and phone with military precision from 5 minutes before the allotted time for Glasto ticket sales - nowt. Not a sausage. Again. Is there some cunning filter in the ticket sales process which, via cutting edge artificial intelligence, determines that you're too old/fat/boring for Glasto? Or perhaps our rural telephone wires, having been nibbled by badgers and entangled with the roots of various crops, are just not up to competing with those equipped with this super-mega-speed fibre optic whatnot.  

 

So anyway, we made do with Cropredy last weekend. The weather was great (again) which was just as well as the musical line-up was thin in places: Romeo's Daughter anyone? How about Martin Barre, the Dunwells or Brooks Williams? Thought not. The reason for this may be that they blew the budget on Alice Cooper. A spectacular coup and the old snake charmer didn't disappoint. And I must mention 10cc. Despite having only Graham Gouldman left from the original line-up they are just wonderful; do not write them off as washed-up has-beens - go and see them if you have the chance. But the act I really wanted to bring to your attention was Nik Kershaw.

 

 

"Little" Nik Kershaw goes large at Cropredy

 

I guess you've got to be the wrong side of 40 to remember little Nik's heyday which was in the early '80s when he had a decently long string of hits. He was marketed as a spiky-haired pretty boy Duran-a-like which may have done the trick for his chart success but didn't do much for his long term credibility rating. Consequently, those of us who were snobbishly into more weightier sounds took little notice. Until, that is, I heard the song Human Racing on the radio. My first thought was that it was Stevie Wonder, partly because of the sound of his voice (and maybe the sonic limitations of my radio) but also because of the strength of the melody which was, and remains, absolutely beautiful. 

 

So imagine my surprise when I discovered it wasn't penned by Little Stevie Wonder but by Little Nicky Kershaw (and he is little). This was about the same time that I used to bore anyone in earshot with my prediction that George Michael, then famous as a prancing spray tan disco boy with a shuttlecock down his shorts, would come to be known as a major talent. This was on the basis of a series of sensational melodies under the Wham brand. (Here's a conundrum for you: if Andrew Ridgley contributed nothing to Wham, how come that's when Georgie M made all his best records?) So on this basis, the same surely applied to Nik K who would one day shake off the shackles of the record company marketing boys and bestride Tin Pan Alley like a colossus, Ivor Novello and Grammy awards tumbling from his overburdened arms.

 

But it didn't quite work out like that (a big hit for Chesney Hawks aside). I wonder why not? I bet Nik does too. Funny old world, this pop music lark. How can you be demonstrably such a good songwriter and not clean up? Let me just bore you with a bit of detail on Human Racing. I've always liked to knock out the first few lines on the keyboard but only now have I sat down and worked out the whole thing. This in itself is saying something because, as anyone with a decent ear for music will attest, it normally takes about as long to work out how to play a song as it does to listen to it. But not in the case of Human Racing. It starts in A minor (but resolving on A major), moves swiftly to D before, after  a brief dalliance with A minor again, moving into the key of F, which is where the verse ends up. But not content with that, Nik modulates abruptly into Ab for the chorus and contrives to end it on a kind of Bb 9th chord, thereby giving him the basis for that semitone drop at the end of the chorus back down to the A, which is of course where we came in.

 

Yes alright, I know a series of tricky chords and unusual key changes does not of itself a good song make but believe me, all this stuff helps to explain just why Human Racing sounds so good. If you haven't heard it for a while (or ever), I urge you to head straight for Spotify. And if you play an instrument, get it out and work your way through it using the above scribblings as your guide (that weird chord at the end of the second line in the verse is F augmented by the way). I guarantee your life will be enhanced as a result!

 

So back to Cropredy. Nik's show was excellent, although this year he was tout seul (the Alice Copper budget issue again?), which was inevitably a bit limiting. But he made a valiant attempt at all his hits, except, guess what? He didn't play Human Racing.

 

 

"Do Human Racing Nik!"

"With all those tricky key changes mate? You're joking!"

 

Health, safety and pubs: there's a reason why cliches are cliches

And that reason is: because they're true. The cliche I'm thinking about is the one that runs something like "it's health and safety gone mad". The trouble with this and other such things is that they become cliches and are dismissed as such when actually the reverse is the correct response: don't dismiss them, embrace them! Cliches are true! That's why they're cliches, you dolt!

We all know that when a pub closes, an angel dies. As a result, heaven currently looks like the Somme on the morning after. I'm not sure what happens when a pub is desecrated; perhaps an angel loses the use of their wings for a period, or something. Anyway, it's bound to be something pretty nasty.

That being the case, there's one less angel flying around now following the horrific treatment suffered by a pub in Plymouth called the Minerva, this treatment meted out in the name of the dead hand of Health and Safety.

 

 

 

 

The ceiling of the Minerva, Plymouth: you won't see that again

 

 

The Minerva is more than 500 years old and was apparently the local of Sir Francis Drake. Many of its beams, and notably its staircase, are thought to have been taken from ships of the Spanish Armada. Its ceiling was covered with the scribbled messages of sailors about to set sail to do battle. Sounds like an important bit of history doesn't it, and one probably subject to all sorts of preservation orders, yes? No.

All this history has now been covered by several coats of paint. The reason? Apparently it was a fire risk. No matter that the place has stood for hundreds of years, unscathed by fire, despite for most of its life being full of smokers, inevitably often the worse for wear, warmed by open fires spitting sparks all over the place. 

How do we let this sort of thing happen and what can we do about it? A lot of these regulations stem from our membership of the EU so we could tell them to go to hell but I'm not sure that would make much difference. What I'm wondering is, if it was OK for Nelson Mandela to be involved in killing people in the interests of ending the evil of racial discrimination, maybe it's OK to be involved in killing H&S busy-bodies so as to protect our heritage. Just a thought...

 

And yes it most definitely is health and saftey gone mad. But not just health and safety - our society as a whole for allowing this to happen.

 

Raise a glass and toast the Minerva and its sailors. You won't be able to read their messages again.

How democracy works...or doesn't...part 2

What's the point of an MP then? All they do is fiddle their expenses, open a few village fetes and vote how their party tells them to. That's the received wisdom isn't it? The less cynical response is that they hold the executive to account, ask awkward question and scrutinise legislation. Plus they might occasionally do something to help their constituency.

 

And so it comes to pass that one way MPs can make themselves useful is by sitting on parliamentary committees. But then how useful is that? This blog has already had a go at the Public Accounts Committee for its dumb approach to the tax affairs of the likes of Google, Starbucks, etc., etc. Now this bunch of financial wizards has been lambasted by BT for a similarly idiotic approach to Internet infrastructure upgrades. The BT head honcho accused them of rudely interrupting answers and being far more interested in generating headlines for themselves than getting at the facts. One reason for this is that, just as with the tax business, they're too thick to understand the facts. Another reason is that these things are often televised these days so playing to the gallery ensues.

 

So what's to be done? God only knows but it's clear that many of our MPs are just not up to the job. Perhaps there should be rigorous testing of prospective candidates rather than just some local big mouth or whoever's flavour of the month with the party and is parachuted in.

 

You get who you vote for but you can only vote for who you get given. IQ tests for prospective MPs now! And less of this stuff on TV.

How democracy works...or not...the pub quiz angle...

Do you go in for pub quizzes? We do, quite a bit as it happens. I'm not sure it's because we're quiz fanatics or whether it's just a good excuse to go to the pub, as if one were needed. But the dynamics of your average pub quiz team are often fascinating and can teach us a lot about the democratic process and especially the failings thereof.

 

The weaknesses of our old friend democracy have been something of a theme on this blog. We've seen how the poor souls in Greece, who gave us the word democracy for goodness' sake, have been sold up the river as a consequence, not to mention the general economic mess that much of the so-called developed world continues to thrash around in. But nothing demonstrates so clearly how democracy can lead to sub-optimal outcomes like a pub quiz team.

 

"Come on - you're the bloody geography teacher - what's the capital of Bhutan?"

Anyone who's been in a pub quiz team knows how it works. You get half a dozen or so "friends" together, some of whom are dead keen and some of whom have been dragged along under protest by their other halves. The problem is that some of the dead keen ones may also be dead thick and some of the reluctants may know a lot of stuff but are probably staring into space or acting the shrinking violet and not speaking up. So you get situations where one of the keanos loudly asserts "I'm 100% sure Everton won the cup in 1961...I remember my old dad telling me and he was there" whereas a shrinking violet is pretty sure the answer's Tottenham but is unwilling to contradict Mr 100% Certain. All the while the bloke with the pen in his hand is wavering, pen poised; he knows nothing about football but experience tells him that when Mr 100% Certain is in uber assertive mode, he's very often wrong. Finally, with the question master now spouting forth with the next question, Mrs S. Violet mutters almost inaudibly into her pinot grigio something about thinking it might be Tottenham but it's too late - the man-with-the-pen has to write something and with Mr Certain now almost purple with rage that his answer's still not been taken as gospel, he scribbles down Everton. The correct answer, inevitably, is Tottenham. The team lose by one point and several of them never speak again.

 

Our recent equivalent of this scenario concerned the number of motorways in the UK. Someone (OK, it was me) surmised that there's bound to be more than you think...ooh, say around 50? Everybody else thought it was a lot less. A minute or two of canvassing ensued with yours truly on the hustings, trying to convince the team of the infallibility of my logic while some team members (teachers of course) tried to do a list. In the end we went for the usual British compromise and stuck down a figure of about 35. Now this was actually quite an important question as there was a round of drinks on it. In due course, with the tension rising to fever pitch the question master gave us the answer: 50. Not about 50 but exactly 50. One round of drinks evaporated.

 

Luckily, being mature adults, this failure did not result in blood on the carpet, noisy exits with the words "you never listen to me you bastard!" hanging in the air or the end of friendships; only a deeper hole in someone's wallet (probably mine, just to rub it in.)

 

So what does it tell us about democracy? That the majority view is often the wrong one. It also tells us that squeaky wheels get the most oil, i.e. those who make the most noise get the most attention. Neither of these things is ideal and leads to career politicians often cocking things up, where our beloved but elusive benign dictator might make a much better job of it. Whatever, one can conclude that just because a decision's been reached democratically, this does not necessarily make it better than one which hasn't.

 

Anyway, there's a music quiz at our local tonight so let me leave you with a little musical teaser. This one I think is obscure enough that even Google won't help you (and I knew you were going to cheat). The teaser is: Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love", aside from being a rip off from some old bluesman, is very heavily based on a version (recorded in about 1965) of the old blues song in question by which British recording artist?

 

Get those answers flooding in!