Sportsmanlike?

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Perhaps I am old-fashioned (of course, I am!), but some of the etiquette in play and spirit of sportsmanship seems to have gone out of some of our sports these days.

Consider the frequent grimaces and clenched, waved fists made by Andy Murray in his tennis matches. What does that tell you about the man? Or his mother who was also seen to be clenching and waving her fists.

Sportsmanship? I don’t think so!
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Funny ‘ain’t it?

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Britain is a great country to live in and I wouldn’t have it any other way. But in some respects we are unprepared for, or maybe ignore, what Mother Nature throws at us.

High winds bring down the leaves in autumn and the railways slither to a halt. In winter the entire country comes to a standstill at the slightest snowfall. In summer any temperature over thirty degrees and the newspapers immediately shout ‘Phew! What a Scorcher!’, and the government bombards us with ways of keeping cool. We are currently enjoying good weather but I wonder how long it will be before the water companies, who are wasting millions of gallons of water every year, tell us that a drought is on its way.

Of course, we are not geared up to handle extremes of weather and there are sound economic reasons for this. We can’t expect the authorities, for example, to stock up on enough snowploughs to clear every single road in the country.

But I do wonder sometimes why it is that speculators are allowed to build houses on known flood plains and not be penalised when those houses are flooded.

Or why the water companies cannot get together and build pipelines to move water from the watery north to the needy south. The Romans managed it and, after all, so do the oil companies!

Funny ‘ain’t it?

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I mean ... You know!

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One of the many things that irritate me (and my wife says it doesn’t take much to irritate me) is the banal and meaningless words some folk often insert into their conversations. It is particularly irritating when listening to interviews on the radio or the television.

I was listening on the radio recently to someone who inserted into every sentence the words ‘you know’ and ‘I mean’ and 'like'. They occurred during pauses and I assume they subconsciously filled the gaps while the person concerned thought about what she was going to say next. And, again this morning, listening to someone being interviewed during a television news item, the same words seemed to fill the gaps while the interviewer was either drawing breath or wondering what he was going to say next. He was also pausing and inserting those gaps with ‘er’.

It’s a bit like the boil on the end of someone’s nose that you’ve never noticed until someone else points it out to you. Once you notice these meaningless words inserted into conversations and interviews, you began to notice them all the time.

And now ... you know ... the chances are ... er ... you will ... I mean ... notice them ... like ... all the time ... er ... yourselves!

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Michael Jackson’s Death

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Michael Jackson’s untimely death is a tragedy for his family and for his many fans. There is no doubt that he was the King of Pop and popular throughout the world as has been demonstrated by the outpouring of grief that has taken place.

I suppose that there was an inevitability, just days after his death, for the media to start speculating on the cause of his death, his financial troubles and who will now be after his assets and future royalties, the status of his family and what could generally be described as the various eccentricities in his private life. These and other matters will doubtless keep the media occupied for many weeks to come.

I do wonder, however, whether the media ought to concentrate more on the many tragedies taking place around the world on a daily basis; Darfur to quote just one example. Without demeaning the effect of the pop star’s sudden death on his family and fans, these would seem to me to be of far more importance.

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I repeat, we are not cutting spending!

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On Thursday I commented on the spat between Gordon Brown and David Cameron over government spending plans for the next few years.

Brown had announced that government spending would increase each year up to the Olympics and Cameron, waving the official government budget, pointed out that in fact government spending was set to be reduced over that period. He asked Brown if he would like to amend what he had previously told Parliament, and Brown foolishly continued to insist that spending would increase. The best he could do was to lamely accuse the Conservatives of planning spending cuts themselves.

Perhaps that little spat would have died the death and been forgotten were it not for an honest admission from Hilary Benn, a much respected minister, during BBC4’s Any Questions programme last night. In this he admitted that cuts in public spending will be unavoidable after the next general election. Mr Benn said the government faced ‘real choices’ ahead and ‘when times are tough you need to tighten your belt’. He got that right.

Isn’t this a case about the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing?

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Who Turns U-Turns?

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Yesterday the government announced that public funds will not now be used to further shore up MPs pension funds. Given the public’s anger over MPs expenses, that news didn’t come as much of a surprise!

This morning, they announced that they were dropping some of their education policies. That reminded me that the government has done a considerable number of u-turns. Think of their changed positions on Gurkha soldiers, the Inquiry into the Iraq war, the 10% tax rate, free postage of parcels to soldiers serving abroad, the scaling back of plans to build new warships ...

The list culled from memory seemed endless as, indeed, this turned out to be when out of interest I Googled ‘government u-turns’ on my computer. I was confronted with a choice of 871,000 pages (yes, that's 871,000 pages!) of information about issues on which this government has changed its mind and performed a u-turn.

The number of pages to be found on the subject of government u-turns speaks for itself. Boy, do we need an election!

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Full Marks!

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Whatever you say about the politics of David Cameron, you have to give him credit for reacting swiftly and firmly to the scandal about MPs expenses.

It has been announced that a number of Tory MPs will repay inappropriate expense claims to the tune of £125,000; this in addition to the £130,000 that has already been repaid since the scandal broke.

Cameron has demonstrated that this sort of action can be taken in a short space of time, and it is a pity that our ponderous Prime Minister couldn’t have done the same thing. True, he has set up yet another wretched inquiry panel to look at Labour’s expense claims but, by jingo, Cameron has beaten him to it.

Again!

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