Climate Change

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A new poll suggests that 50% of people in the UK are unconvinced about climate change and, if pressed, I’d probably side with them.

Like most other people, I know very little about the things that affect climate change, but it occurs to me that shipping hundreds of politicians and their entourages, along with a variety of so-called experts, to the Summit to be held in Copenhagen next week doesn’t seem to be very climate-friendly.

Among many other things, we are told to switch off unnecessary lights in our houses. Does my switching off a few lights help to compensate for shipping all these people to Copenhagen by first and club classes and then putting them up in expensive hotels? Does my using less electricity or gas help to compensate for the damage to the climate done by President Obama, worthy man though he is, who will use a couple of 747s to get there and be accompanied by hundreds of his own people as well as the presidential car?

I very much doubt it.
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Archie

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I used to give a lift to the City a former army officer who, after he retired from the military, took a job in the civil service.

During the hour-long run up to town, he would regale me with his various tales of life in the military and one day the subject of spiders came up, though I no longer recall why. It seems that he saw service in Uganda and was posted from there to Germany and, when he moved, his furniture went with him.

One evening he had some friends round for supper and they were relaxing afterwards with a drink when a terrified women guest jumped out of her chair and shouted that she had just seen a large hairy spider shoot across the room and dart back underneath the sofa on which her husband was sitting. It seemed that the arachnid in question was a wolf spider and it became seen so often around the living room that my chum and his wife came to regard it almost as a family pet. Indeed, they called it Archie.

From time to time, Archie with his eight eyes would shoot off into a corner of the room, grab another spider or a fly, and run back into his home underneath the sofa. And, much later when the couple moved back to England, Archie came with them and was seen now and again keeping the place free of other insects.

Some time after this conversation my wife and I were invited round for supper, but it was an invitation I declined on some pretext or another. The simple reason was that I just don’t like spiders since an unexpected encounter with a large hairy one as a child.

My chum, and his ‘pet’ wolf spider Archie, came to mind this morning when I read that a colony of cave spiders which had been ‘squatting’ in a disused building in the Yorkshire Dales had been returned to the nearby cave from which they had escaped ten years ago.

It seems that a team of archaeologists surveying their cave habitat near Chapel Fell managed to bring some of the insects back in their equipment. And from there the creatures made their home in this disused building.

They were lucky. Had I seen them, they were likely to have been squished!
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Another Cover-Up?

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The Ministry of Defence has moved to another job the man who ran its UFO Unit which has now been closed down.

After fifty years of collecting public sightings of UFOs, the Ministry say that none of them yielded any proof of extraterrestrial life. They say that in future, ‘Any legitimate threat to the UK's airspace will spotted by our 24/7 radar checks and dealt with by RAF fighter aircraft’.

They may well be right, but what’s the betting that others will say that closure of the unit is part of some sort of cover-up?

Me? I don’t have an opinion - even though I’m sure I’ve seen a UFO. Oh, and so has my wife who was with one of our sons at the time!
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Time To Change The Criminal Law

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A fundamental tenet of English law is that a defendant in a criminal court is presumed innocent until he or she has been found guilty, and I wouldn’t want to suggest that anyone tamper with this in the slightest.

Against this, some recent criminal trials seem to suggest to me that defendants often enter an innocent plea even though they may appear demonstrably guilty at the outset.

But I do think we could introduce one fundamental change in the criminal law which wouldn’t interfere with this basic tenet or with any appeals process.

The issue that arises in my mind is the sheer waste of time, effort and money that goes into some criminal trials which, if a guilty defendant had simply pleaded guilty at the beginning, could have been saved. Thus, such trials would be speedier since they would need only to consider the severity of the offences and the consequent sentences imposed.

The problem that arises is how to persuade a guilty defendant to plead guilty in the preliminary proceedings rather than waste everyone’s time in proving that a plea of innocence was untruthful.

The simple answer that comes into my mind is to disallow remission of sentences to all defendants who by pleading not guilty have thereby wasted the time of the courts and everyone else concerned.

Loss of remission in such cases might focus the minds of some guilty criminals while they still sit in police cells.
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Get A Life!

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We’ve had the Bishop who tells us that some Christmas carols contain nonsense, that we should be embarrassed singing them and that we’ve made something akin to fairy tales from the Christmas story. We’ve had the council who replaced their annual Christmas fir tree with a much more expensive artificial one that has since been vandalised. We’ve had other councils who have elected not to put up street decorations on the spurious grounds of health and safety.

Now we’ve heard from an outfit funded by the government - that means you and me! - who tell us not to eat our traditional Christmas puddings because the ingredients they use up damage the environment. They seriously expect us to eat more sprouts, cheese and cobnuts.

These people should get get a life and leave our Christmases alone!
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Bilingualism

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As anyone who has visited Canada will know, their signs are all bilingual; English and French. This might, just possibly might, make some sense in the predominantly French-speaking areas, but they seem wholly out of place in the others. On my visits to the west coast of Canada it always seemed a nonsense to me that official signage there was bilingual.

In our own country, signage in Wales has become bilingual even though the majority of residents there speak only English, and already bilingual signs are creeping in across Scotland even though only a minority speak Gaelic.

It is one thing to protect a language, but it is quite another to force it on the majority who don’t speak it. The cost of making bilingual signage and, in some cases official documents, must be phenomenal and is something that the Canadians found out years ago. Not only is the cost of bilingual signage expensive, it is often very confusing; the bilingual road signs in Wales are a good example of this.

Because the majority of folk don’t speak the language that is being forced on them, cock-ups can occur and they often take months to discover. Take the sign in Swansea which should have read, ‘No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only.’ The man responsible for making signs misread the email order he got for it and made a sign which said in Welsh, ‘I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.’

So I can’t say I have much sympathy for the Cornish folk, admirable people they may be, who have demanded the right to classify themselves as being of Cornish nationality on the 2011 census return. Those pressing for the change will be disappointed that MPs yesterday rejected the proposal. Which may dampen for a while any thought that signage in Cornwall should be bilingual.

It is a case, in my view at any rate, of permissum voluntas increbresco or, for those who don’t want their signs to be set out in Latin as well as English, ‘Let sense prevail’!
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How Sad

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The saddest news of the day is that of the death of a four-year-old boy in Liverpool who was mauled in his grandmother’s house by a dog which is now said to have been a ‘pitbull terrier-type’, a breed banned under the Dangerous Dogs Act.

The police are now investigating reports that they ignored a telephone call as long ago as February that dog breeding was being conducted at the house in question. Whether that is true will doubtless emerge in due course.

No amount of police investigation will return this little boy to his parents who, along with other members of the family, including the grandmother who was herself injured, must be suffering untold agonies and I deeply sympathise with them.

I do not join the debate as to the rights and wrongs of people owning what the law says are dangerous dogs, for this family have learned a lesson in the most terrible and tragic way.
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