Not About Lady Godiva!

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Now and again I look up some of the websites recording notable events on a day-by-day basis to see whether there is something interesting to chat about.

According to a number of websites, today is the day on which in 1678 Lady Godiva made her famous horse-ride though Coventry wearing just her long hair. I set about looking at some of the fables about this lady who, by her ride, persuaded her husband to remit some of the oppressive taxes he had levied on his tenants. I was going to ponder whether many of our lady MPs would do the same thing to relieve us of some of our tax burdens.

But it was a pointless exercise since I quickly found that Lady Godiva was, in fact, an 11th-century noblewoman and had been dead for over five hundred years by the date postulated by some of these websites.

I guess that the mistake was made by one website and then copied by some of the others. It demonstrated to me the need to check facts.

So as I couldn’t write about the Lady Godiva and her naked ride through Coventry, I looked around for something else to ponder on. In truth, there wasn’t much to interest me on another day dominated by politics, taxes, the economy and other such dire stories.

However, there was one; about Big Ben, the clock standing at the top of the 360-foot high St. Stephen’s Tower above the Houses of Parliament. For today is the day in 1859 when the clock struck the hours for the first time.

Big Ben featured large in my working life for one of its clock-faces could be seen from the flat we lived in after we got married, and I was to see it many times afterwards when working in London. For years I was to drive past it twice a day, checking my watch against it and noting when Parliament was sitting by the light atop its tower.

The original Palace of Westminster was destroyed by fire in 1834 and a new building was erected in the Perpendicular Gothic style. The architect was Charles Barry who was assisted by Augustus Pugin. Construction commenced in 1840 and continued for the next thirty years.

St. Stephen’s Tower was completed in 1859 and soon became known as Big Ben after its principal bell, a massive thing weighing 13.5 tons, cast by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. Two months after it was first struck, the bell cracked and a lighter hammer was ultimately designed, the bell rotated and put back into use again three years later. Curiously, the bell was never repaired.

The clock itself was built by Dent & Co. to a design by a barrister and amateur horologer, Edmund Dennison, and the Astronomy Royal, Sir George Airy, and is renowned for its accuracy. Since it was put into service, it has suffered only one serious breakdown.

There are no conclusions to be drawn from this little essay, but I thought it might be interesting seeing that I couldn’t write about Lady Godiva!
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Groan!

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The Dissolution Honours List has now been published and so we learn that, along with a number of other oddballs, ‘Two Jags’ is to be elevated to the House of Lords.

That one piece of news screams out to me for the need of a radical reform of the Upper House!
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If Only ...

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The Chief Treasury Secretary, David Laws, has fallen on his sword and resigned after been caught out fiddling the MPs expense system by renting rooms owned by his partner.

Perhaps, if Mr Laws had come clean over his expenses when other MPs were queuing up to regularise their own positions, all might have been well. But he did not and he has now paid the price for his failure.

It is a great shame for undoubtedly the new government has, for the moment at least, lost a first class brain.
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One Way Out!

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I have often wondered why fortune-tellers and clairvoyants never seem to win the football pools or the lottery. What use then are these facilities, I ask myself?

One answer might be that they could let you off jury duty.

Such was the case last week at Livingston Sheriff’s Court when a television mindreading celebrity turned up for jury duty. The clerk of the court recognised him as ‘the human lie detector’ on a television chat show, decided that it would not be appropriate to use him and sent him home.

Well, it’s one way of getting out of jury service!
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Benefit Reform

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The Department for Work and Pensions has admitted that the benefits system was ‘breaking’ and in need of urgent attention. I think we all knew that!

The department has disclosed that almost five million people were on unemployment benefits, 1.4 million of whom had been receiving support for nine or more of the last ten years and that, in addition, 1.4 million under-25s were neither working nor in full-time education.

Nearly 700,000 families receive more than £15,000 a year in benefits and around 50,000 households receive annual benefits of more than £26,000, As this last is more than the average pre-tax wage for full-time workers, it is no wonder that so many benefit recipients are reluctant to get out and seek work. The annual cost of all this is £13 billions.

When you also learn that housing benefit has risen by 40 per cent under Labour to more than £14 billion, with some families receiving an absurd £93,000 a year, you have to agree with the new Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, that something needs to be done. So the government proposes to introduce a new ‘work programme’ which will offer help to get the unemployed into work – with sanctions if they refuse.

The 2.6 million people on Incapacity Benefit will also be subject to new assessments of their ability to work. It is interesting that since new assessment standards were introduced at the end of 2008, nine out of ten people who claimed to be too sick to work were found to be actually fit to take a job!

It must be clear to everyone that the country cannot afford rising benefit costs and that those who are able to work should be encouraged to do so when work is available. At the same time, those who do attempt to return to work should somehow not be penalised financially by doing so.

It will be a difficult thing to arrange and the draft proposals have already drawn forth angry protest. On the other hand, the former Work and Pensions Secretary, John Hutton, welcomed the ‘exciting’ reform plans.

And he should know!
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Gone!

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Perhaps few government proposals in recent years, other than the hated Poll Tax which bought about the downfall of Margaret Thatcher, have aroused so much hostility as the last government’s introduction of identity cards.

The introduction of these cards elicited claims that they were an intrusion and that the country was moving closer to a police state. Others took the view that many countries used identity cards and that their citizens didn’t seem to mind having them. Indeed, when living in America I had to have an ID card and it came in very handy when cashing cheques and making some purchases.

Anyway, the Home Secretary has now announced that the first bill of this new parliament, the Identity Documents Bill, will abolish identity cards within one hundred days. For many, this will be good news. But, perhaps, those who had lashed out £30 on a shiny new ID card won’t be too happy to learn that they will not be getting a refund.

What has come out of yesterday’s announcement is the news that the ID card scheme has so far cost the country £250 millions and that scrapping it will save £800 millions over the next ten years.

That’s some saving!
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Crop Circle Season

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Some of the morning newspapers show the latest crop circle which has appeared in a Wiltshire rape seed field. It is said that the complex spherical design is a ‘tantalising approximation’ of a mathematical formula called Euler’s Identity which is thought to be the ‘most beautiful and profound mathematical equation in the world’.

Mathematics bore me to tears, so I can’t make any comment on whether this crop circle does what the experts say it does. However, many of the crop circles I’ve seen are quite beautiful to look at even though you might need a helicopter to see them in their full splendour.

Are crop circles made by aliens trying to give us messages, the result of natural forces acting on the crops, or just elaborate hoaxes? The arguments for and against are endless and, except for those rare instances where the perpetrators of hoaxes own up to them, we may never know.

The one thing that the newspapers and television news teams very rarely comment upon is what the farmers affected by these circles feel about their crops being damaged.

What is certain is that the crop circle season is definitely upon us!
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