Column, March 7, 2006

WHEN did we get so wimpy about the weather?
We live in a temperate country, one that is hardly Mediterranean, but then again, we’re a long, long way from the Arctic circle too.
One of the joys of living here is that we can watch the passage of the seasons, each differing markedly from its predecessor. Not for us the hot and wet, or hot and dry fluctuations of those from southern climes.
No, here, most of the time it is warm-ish, or cold-ish and it changes like, well, the wind, thus giving us a ready topic for polite conversation which goes thus (delete as appropriate):
"Hot/Cold enough for you?"
"They say it’s going to rain/snow/sleet/be a heatwave tomorrow."
"I blame global warming/the government/that John Ketley character."
Other nations share their innermost thoughts and personal demons with each other, we share the weather.
You would have thought then that, as a nation so obsessed with it, we might have a bit of a grown-up attitude towards it and when it’s a bit too hot or cold for us we’d take the long view, knowing that a couple of minutes/hours/days/weeks/months down the line it would all be so different.
But oh no, we’ve become weather wimps and I blame the media. Well I blame Sian Lloyd and her ilk and I blame us in the media from following them down the primrose path of meteorological nonsense.
I think it all stems from the night they failed to warn us - or rather southern England - that it was going to be a bit blowy - or rather it was going to be struck by a hurricane.
Sevenoaks in Kent became Oneoak overnight and you would think civilisation had ended the way they moaned about the lack of warnings. What exactly they woul;d have done with a warning I’m not sure, do they think they could have stopped it?
Anyhow, after that weathermen started hedging their bets a bit, embellishing the weather to make it sound a bit worse than it was.
But they were quite clever about it, so rather than being specific they use woolly nonsense phrases that sound like they’re telling you what the weather’s going to do, but really mean nothing at all.
Such as a classic last week in which a weatherwoman earnestly informed us that the snow would be ‘digging in’ for a couple of days. Just how in the name of Jack Frost does snow ‘dig’ into anything.
It’s little floaty crystals of water, it falls and it sticks or it melts. That’s it. It doesn’t dig.
Then we had the performance by one of the former Fleet Street papers that regularly puts the heeby-jeebies up its elderly matron readership by telling them asylum seekers are going to eat their pet poodles and sell them into sex-slavery, the matrons that is, not the poodles.
This time the bogey-man was not a bloke from Poland who’s come over here to work as a plumber - and who can blame them - come one come all I say, bring on the Krakow Plumbers’ Brigade, it might loosen the chokehold that the latterday pirates of the British plumbing industry have on our sumps.
No, this time this paper’s scare story was about a ‘Beast of a Storm’ that was headed for the UK. That’s right, not just a storm, a ‘beast’ of a storm. It had hit New York and now you could almost hear it growl as it headed across the Atlantic towards us.
You see, the problem is though, they can do scare stories about asylum seekers and no-one knows how much fabricated rubbish they are because no-one checks to see whether asylum seekers actually have all come over here to live a life of crime.
But if you do a scare story about the weather, then people can actually see if it’s true.
So the ‘Beast of a Storm’ turned out to be a bit of sleet and a couple of parky nights when you might have shoved an extra log on the fire.
You might think they had learned their lesson after that, but no, no, a mere two weeks later after the ‘Beast’ announced it presence with more if a whimper than a roar, they were at it again.
This time it was plummeting temperatures (and notice they always plummet, when they’re not soaring of course) that occupied their minds and they warned that at minus 15 it was going to be the coldest night since Biblical times. Alright, I might have made up the Biblical bit, but it was something like that. We were all going to freeze to death in our beds and so best say our goodbyes.
And, you know, it was a bit chilly, but then it warmed up. No harm done, move along, nothing to see here.
I remember winters when snow lay on the ground for weeks and a snowman became permanent resident.
Now a two-inch dusting is greeted by delirious headlines normally reserved for declarations of war and Royal deaths.
My Taid crawled to the outside world when Staylittle was snowed in, and then it lay as high as the tops of the telegraph poles. What would Fleet Street make of weather like that now? No doubt it would be eight-page snow chaos pull-outs and Taid would have been hailed for his pluck (always hailed and who uses the word pluck except for journalists struggling for another word for brave?)
And there’s a cruel irony to schools closing every time a single snowflake dares to drop on the Met Office roof. Because surely this is the one time all those Chelsea tractors used by mums to deliver their precious offspring to the school gates can come into their own. But no, school’s out for winter.
But if you’re shivering as your central heating burns your own personal hole in the ozone layer, comfort yourself with the thought that Spring is officially two weeks away and not long after that summer beckons.
But you know what will happen then don’t you - heatwave, phew what a scorcher and no doubt the Sun will be ‘digging in for days'. Just one more thing to moan about.

IT was inevitable that a burgher, I said burgher, from Gwyneed was going to set me straight about my views on the Asda planning permission and Coun Michael Sol own has been on to give his, forthright, view.
Here he is:
"Dear Mr Banks,
I read with interest your tub-thumping diatribe against Wal-Mart ASDA in the Daily Post today. I have no objection to you or anyone who wishes to bring to the notice of the general public the dubious practices of various international companies.
I do have a problem however when responsible journalists, such as yourself, try and 'sex up' the matter by placing the blame of a planning decision on the local authority without either doing the proper research or relaying the fact that it was a more complicated than 'keep ASDA out'.
I'm aware that some journalists adhere to the maxim 'dont let facts get in the way of a good story' -
Some facts:- This was not a new plannig application for a supermarket, planning permission was given in 1999 to Safeways, (the planning applcation on 20th February was for an REVISED application - construction of Supermarket...)
Safeways kept the planning consents alive, was sold to Morrison who subsiquently sold the whole scheme, consents and all to ASDA. (Planning consent is a land issue not an owner issue)
The Planning Committe had a difficult choice, which it took 2 hours to deliberate before voting 12 to 5 to pass the revised application.
The choice was either throw out the revised application, thus facing the almost inevitable appeal, going in front of the Assembly Planning Inspector and against ASDA with the principle of a supermarket already accepted since 1999.
Or pass the application with a number of strict conditions on the type of sale of goods etc.
Should ASDA appeal against some of these conditions, we would have a much stronger case to put in front of the Inspector as the conditions would have the backing of the Local Authority and be based on local and national precedents.
In the end the Councillors have to work inside the 'planning box', stray outside this arena and especially with big organisations one ends up trying to defend weak or unsound planning decisions in front of an Inspector, who knows that if he doesn’t stick to the 'planning script', will have a judicial review slapped on him by the likes of ASDA.
This planning application, like a complicated equation, had many variables, the shopkeepers, town council (by the way only 6 out of 15 of them voted - the rest stayed away! - too much heat in the kitchen!) , the general public and many more interested parties.
I believe that we arrived at an acceptable compromise, considering the circumstances.
As the local member on Cyngor Gwynedd Council where this development will take place, I went to the meeting arranged by the Chamber of Trade to listen to the arguments, to the Pwllheli Town Council (of which I am also a member) to listen to the debate, I also spoke to a great many people and asked their opinion of the proposed development. After deliberation, taking part in the 2 hour debate I (as the local member) proposed and voted for this revised plan. I have neither heard, read or been told of anything since the Planning Committee that would persuade me that we have made a wrong decision.
Sincerely,
Michael Sol Owen
(Cllr Pwllheli North Ward)"

Column, February 28, 2006

BRAVO to the burghers of Gwynedd.
I said burghers.
They are not ones to stand in the way of progress. They have seen the future and it has got a big green sign on it saying ‘Asda.’
They’ve given planning permission for an Asda store in Pwllheli, all 15,000 sq ft of it.
The town council didn’t want it. The chamber of trade didn’t want it. At a public meeting to discuss the application only one person could be found to speak up for it.
I dare say if you stopped people crossing the Cob onto the Llyn and asked them what they thought was missing from this beautiful area, few would pipe up: “It’s all very well having mountains and valleys and beaches – but why oh why haven’t you got a decent Asda for me to spend my time pushing a trolley in?”
I’m sorry, but Asda was not the missing piece of the jigsaw that would make the Llyn that perfect place to be.
Nevertheless, the burghers, I said burghers, of Gwynedd Council’s Dwyfor area planning committee have taken a different view on the matter than pretty much anybody except Asda themselves.
They are obviously just gagging to get into Pwllheli and Claire Irvine, Asda’s property communications manager said: “Our research has shown that people travel out of the town to do their main shop, so our store would keep people in the area.
“This development should be seen as a positive thing for the town.”
Yeeeees. Well, when she says, keep people in the area, perhaps you should read that as ‘keep people in Asda’, so any money spent ‘in the area’ doesn’t actually stay ‘in the area’ it goes back to Asda/Walmart shareholders, doesn’t it?
And as for Asda coming to town being ‘positive’, well, let’s just have a little look at that claim shall we?
Because if this Asda is the same Asda that offered workers in Tyne and Wear a 10 per cent pay rise if they gave up their union membership, some people might not share Ms Irvine’s view of what is ‘positive.’
It has to be said that the members of an industrial tribunal that the Tyne and Wear workers went to also took a similarly dim view of Asda’s tactics and ordered the company to pay a whopping £850,000 to the 340 workers there.
The GMB union, which represents some Asda staff, is also not too thrilled with a document leaked from the company which outlines tactics to be used to get more from the workforce.
The ‘chip-away’ strategy as the GMB calls it, includes managers cutting short, or not taking, breaks, to encourage hourly-paid staff to do likewise.
According to War in Want, an audit of 25,000 employees of Wal-Mart, Asda’s US parent company, found 1,371 violations of child labour laws, including children working too late, too many hours and during school hours. Nice.
The audit also found 60,000 instances of workers being forced to work through breaks and 16,000 instances of workers having to work through meal times.
All very, very positive, I’m sure you’ll agree.
But jobs are jobs, as the burghers, I said burghers, of Gwynedd will insist.
Yes they are, but not all jobs are equal. The United Food and Commercial Workers union in the USA has worked out that for every two low-wage jobs created at a Wal-Mart store, three jobs are lost in local businesses.
Over here the British Retail Forum has calculated that every Asda supermarket opening means the loss of 276 jobs on average.
Really, really positive, don’t you think?
And don’t get me started on bananas.
Well, alright then.
According to War on Want’s alternative company report for Wal-Mart/Asda, the company instituted a price-cutting strategy for bananas in 2002 which resulted in prices dropping by 25 per cent across the board.
To produce bananas at that price means employing the worst labour and environmental conditions in the world. Independent growers in countries such as Costa Rica, where there is protection for workers and the environment, can no longer sell to Asda or other British supermarkets without making a loss, says War on Want.
All the above information is available from War on Want at www.waronwant.org and, having read their report, I’m really struggling to find exactly what it is that is ‘positive’ about the arrival of Asda in Pwllheli.
Perhaps the burghers of Gwynedd can explain.

CAN anyone explain to me what the blimminy-flip is going on with Plaid Cymru?
It seems to be going through the political equivalent of a middle-aged crisis with this rebranding.
The new emblem means that now, apparently, Plaid is not in favour of dragons, but it’s all for daffs drawn with a Spirograph.
Do you know they’ve even got a sonic logo? A sonic logo for God’s sake.
Other people might call it a jingle and think that it is beneath a party to waste brainpower devising such fatuous nonsense.
There are people living in Wales in abject poverty and they devote their time to a sonic logo.
That will get them flocking to the polling booths every time.
We’re told that party members will be able to download the sonic logo, which is a sort of harp-like trill, to use on their mobile phones.
Fantastic, they’ve managed to combine two of the most annoying aspects of modern life – muzak and mobile phones – and make it their unique selling point. What masterbrain is behind this electoral strategy?
Just when is the Labour party going to call this mole in from the cold after he has wreaked havoc with whatever electoral hopes Plaid had?
And now we also have the return of Dafydd Wigley, and some might say not entirely before time, given the above rebranding.
But, if he’s successful, isn’t that going to mean a plethora of past and present leaders washing about Cardiff Bay, what with Dafydd El presiding, Ieuan Wyn Jones at the Assembly helm and Dafydd Iwan leading whichever bit of the party he’s going to lead now.
Perhaps that’s their new rebranded version of democracy, everyone leading their own little bit. And the Lib Dems thought they had a leadership crisis.

PS, I'm told it's a Welsh poppy, not a daff, in which case they do not know what a Welsh poppy looks like. Time to get the Etch-a-Sketch back out methinks.

Column, February 21, 2006

I WAS a good kid.
This meant that I escaped the two fates that awaited the troublesome in my old school.
The only blot on an otherwise spotless copy book was a comment by Mr Hinks-Edwards, my art teacher, who gave me a D, and said simply that I was ‘slow, talkative and lacking direction.’
He was a fine judge of character, Hinksy. But other than my inability to take the drawing of an apple too seriously I was generally attentive and very occasionally hard working.
The educationally-challenged were sent for special lessons on the top floor of the school house. The other two floors were occupied by the school’s sixth form, surely an accidental cruelty to send those with such problems through the ranks of the more gifted.
For those who were bright but whose behaviour left something to be desired, the channel for their energy was drama lessons.
There was I, all these years, thinking they’d been sent to act out being a tree, or miming a bloke stuck in a box.
What was I missing?
Now we hear that drama can be a hotbed of passion egged on by peeping tom teachers who get their kicks watching their young charges re-enact the best bits from Last Tango in Paris.
If I’d known that back then I would have knocked technical drawing on the head and signed up to become a young Romeo, understudy for young Romeo, spear-carrier for young Romeo, I don’t care just let me in on the Romeo action.
But alas and alack (see, I’ve even got the lingo, what a loss to the Shakespearian stage I am, if only I could have given North Wales audiences my Bottom) I emerged from school able to draw a radiator valve, but unsnogged by the various female denizens of the drama class – one of whom ended up on The Bill – I’d have dined out on that for years.
Of course, it’s possible that the drama classes were not the sinkholes of depravity I have imagined. Maybe they were all pretending to be trees, or blokes trying to stand up in a strong wind.
Which rather makes one wonder why the Assembly has gone top the trouble of providing draft guidelines for the teaching of drama in school to stop teachers acting out their fantasies by getting their young actors to…well…act out their fantasies.
Well, actually we know why, it’s because one teacher at a school in South Wales was doing that and videoing the results for his own gratification. He was due to be tried for it but killed himself before the trial.
Let’s recap shall we, because if you’ve a scrap of common sense you might be wondering what the fuss is about.
One chap gets his jollies by watching his pupils act their socks off, and if only it had just been their socks. He gets caught, prosecuted and kills himself.
As a result of this the Welsh Assembly has produced draft guidance for all schools in Wales.
Never mind the fact that thousands upon thousands of hours have been devoted to the teaching of drama and not a whiff of scandal has there been. Ignore the fact that countless productions of Oklahoma have taken to the stage and, mysteriously, no nude scenes have been inserted by teacher.
Disregard the fact that in the vast majority of schools any teacher behaving as this one did would have been reported to the police and prosecuted.
No, what those with nothing better to do with their time have come up with is a set of guidelines that, whatever their intent, will make teachers think twice about doing anything with an adult theme.
So Shakespeare, forget it. One of the most enriching experiences of a child’s life, to be introduced to the works of the Bard, could be denied them, because one teacher was found wanting.
Where is the evidence to justify the need for this patent waste of time and money?
Where are then allegations of widespread abuse by drama teachers? And if there were, why hasn’t there been a public inquiry into that instead of coming up with national guidance that will hamstring all teachers because of the misdeeds of just one.
Because, make no mistake, what this guidance will be is a tap on the shoulder to teachers saying ‘We’re watching.’ At any moment they know the nanny state will want them to justify every last moment of every last scene that their children take part in.
So will they allow Romeo and Juliet to kiss? Well common sense would say yes, but if they’re conscious that Big Sister Jane Davidson is watching them then probably not.
Romeo will have to make do with an affectionate pat on the shoulder, or better still, a friendly wave from his Juliet, from across the stage – safety first.
No-one wants to make life easy for an abusive teacher, but unless someone can furnish me with evidence of drama teachers across Wales making use of the casting couch, then it smacks a bit of panic.
How many schools are going to err of the side of caution rather than put on productions that they wouldn’t have thought about twice in years gone by? But now they have to beware the phone call from some busy-body who sees abuse around every corner, or some knuckle-dragger who has already bricked his local paediatrician and is looking for another ‘paedo’ target.
This guidance is a waste of time, and the shame is it could lead to a waste of talent.

THE response to my suggestion that windfarms are not necessarily instruments of the Devil has been amusing to say the least.
Especially those who seem to think the fact the wind doesn’t blow all the time is a fatal flaw in their technology – please note, even the most tie-dyed-in-the-wool green hippy doesn’t suggest they’re the only answer, just part of it.
But if you only read the letters page of the Daily Post you might form the opinion that the majority of Welsh people are against such developments.
Nothing could be further from the truth, although well-organised letter-writers wouldn’t necessarily want you to know that.
An independent poll of Welsh people carried out by NOP, an authoritative and well-respected polling organisation, found that 75 per cent of people in Wales agreed that wind farms are necessary to meet the country’s current and future energy needs.
The NIMBYs who are against wind power generate a lot of hot air of their own. But those who make decisions, such as Conwy councillors, should remember that no matter how vocal they are, they don’t speak for all of us.

Hello Cambridge...and Baguley

The little counter thingy in the bottom right not only tells me how many visitors I've had, but where they come from.

A few recent arrivals show I've some avid readers in Cambridge and Baguley.

One Cambridge visitor appears to get in via the Kings College server.

Another reader who has been spending hours on here is from Baguley, which, if memory serves, is part of Manc-land.

Anyhow, you're perfectly welcome to remain anonymous, but by all means leave a hello if you wish, it would be nice to know who had spent so long here.

If not, thanks for improving my visit length stats.

Column, February 14, 2006

I HAVE, in my time, sat through more than my share of dull council meetings.
I’m sure they were interesting to those taking part, but for a young hack wooed to the job by Woodward and Bernstein, it was a bit of a let down to be writing about development control.
Try as I might, I didn’t think a breach of planning was going to bring down the government.
The councillors weren’t a bad bunch, some were a tad too fond of the sound of their own voice, but I’m drifting into pot and kettle territory there, so I’ll leave it at that.
There was the occasional ego-tripper for whom a seat on the council was clearly the first step to world domination – one parish, one borough, ein volk, ein reich – if you get my drift.
But I never came across one who thought he – because when it comes to little Hitlers it’s always a he – had the powers that Conwy councillors seem to think they have.
That is to hold back the tide.
Perhaps it was a power they snuck past us when they were allowing councils to charge us an arm and a leg to pay for building regs every time we want to change a fuse.
That’s the only rational explanation for Conwy Council’s opposition to a windfarm off the coast of North Wales at Llandudno.
They must believe that as the ice caps melt and as sea-levels rise, as coastal areas across the globe are inundated by the rising waters, the then chairman of Conwy will be able to stride into the surf and save this little corner of Wales.
I hope whoever it is will be a strong swimmer.
The Gwynt y Mor windfarm would mean putting up 200 turbines eight miles of the coast. The power they produce could supply 500,000 homes and it would provide 120 jobs.
But, according to some, it would spoil the view. One objector even went so far as to call it a ‘visual obscenity’. If he thinks a windfarm is an obscenity I think he’s led a bit of a sheltered life.
The fact is that global warming is with us and while Gwynt y Mor on its own will not hold back the rising tide, unless it and many more like it go ahead there will be no more view to enjoy full stop.
If there is one group who should be supporting offshore windfarm developments it is the coastal regions of the UK.
One of the main effects of sea-level rise will be erosion of coastal areas and that means Llandudno and all the other Welsh resorts that have a beach or sea front will suffer.
The council said no enough had been done to study the effect of windfarms and so the council is opposed to the scheme.
I would have liked the council to have come up with just a shred of evidence that wind farms actually put tourists off before they came to their decision.
But can they, or the other very vocal opponents of windfarms, have any suggestions where they should actually be sited. If we can’t have Gwynt y Mor, then where can we have it?
The problem is that all sorts of people comfortable with their view aren’t going to want to have wind turbines off their little patch of coastline.
So, do we have no windfarms at all? If so, what are we going to have and where?
Doing nothing might be an answer to those of you who are of advanced years and won’t be around to feel the seawaters lapping round your ankles. But if you have children or grandchildren you might think differently.
Unless we start dealing with this problem now then life will not be half as comfortable for those who come after us. They will wonder why we didn’t save their coastline because we pathetically ‘liked the view.’
A worst-case scenario where the ice caps melt will see sea-levels rise by 68 metres. If they don’t want windfarms in Conwy they’d better build a pretty high sea wall and start building it now.

I’M a little too young to remember the Tupenny Rush at the cinema of a Saturday morning.
But my father informed me that a regular, and somewhat tedious, plot device was to have the hero of that week’s tale of derring-do heading for a cliff on a runaway train/horse/car, over which he appeared to plummet in the final frames.
This ensured the return of the young cineastes the following week to establish whether their hero was dashed to pieces on the rocks below, or, as invariably happened, he had hurled himself from the train/horse/car in the nick of time.
The effectiveness of this device was limited in the cinema, but I don’t believe it’s ever been used in newspaper columns before – until last week when the last half of the last line vanished into the wild blue yonder.
Perhaps I was tempting divine intervention in a column about the right to print cartoons that depicted Muhammad.
In the grand traditions of Saturday morning cinema, I suppose I should do a quick recap: In last week’s episode, our hero (OK, I’m pushing the metaphor to its limits here, but cut me some slack) had wondered why we hadn’t been more vocal in our support of the Danes in their hour of need rather than pandering to the mob who threatened to behead anyone who so much as looked at Islam funny.
Anyway, for those who were left wondering what the last line was, and who are now sitting there with your choc-ices, full of expectation. Here it is:
“Because if the chips are down I suggest we side not with the baying mob, but with the country that gave us The Little Mermaid.”

AND while I’m on the subject, am I alone in spotting the crippling irony of the editor of Cardiff University’s student paper getting suspended for printing the ‘offending’ cartoons?
The title of his paper – Gair Rhydd – Free Word.
Only free-ish then.
As well as suspending the editor and barring him from all University property the Union scuttled round gathering up all 8,000 copies of it that had been distributed.
I studied at Cardiff when it was still UCC and I’ve got to say that I find their actions an affront to free speech.
Worst still are the mealy-mouthed apologies and tip-toeing round sensibilities which simply would not have happened if the cartoons had been aimed at Christian or Jewish deities.

Column, February 7, 2006

THE Danes have come a long way since their longboats pulled up on our shore for a little light pillaging.

The Viking scourge of Europe has settled down and is now best known for butter and bacon. But then having supplied the world with two-thirds of the requirements of a bacon sandwich is not a bad way to go down in history.

But you could see that newspaper editors were finding it a stretch at the weekend to come up with your typical Dane to defend their country against the ravages of reaction by Muslims around the world to a few cartoons.

One just about managed it by wheeling out Sandi Toksvig. You remember, yes you do, small blonde (well, she is Danish so that’s a bit of a given) used to be on Whose Line Is It Anyway? Still don’t remember, trust me she was famous-ish.

But at the weekend we discovered a game even more fiendishly difficult than Name 10 Famous Belgians – Come Up With Names of 10 Danes They Don’t Even Have To Be Famous.

But a quick dabble on Google sorts out my ignorance. So here are a few, as we should remind ourselves what the Danes have contributed to our civilisation before they all perish in the fires of Hell, which appear to have been commandeered by the followers of Islam, Christianity having long given up putting the willies up its adherents with tales of eternal damnation.

Viggo Mortensen – aka Aragorn, aka Strider – hacker and hewer of Orcs in Lord of the Rings.

Whigfield – pop singer, of sorts, and if they’d been burning copies of ‘Saturday Night’ in the streets I’d have been right there with them.

Nils Bohr – physicist who helped the world understand quantum theory, or rather helped quantum physicists understand quantum theory, it’s all Greek to me, or rather Danish.

King Canute – who tried to hold back the tide, or rather, who was told by sycophantic courtiers he could hold back the tide and who got his feet wet to prove them wrong.

Hans Christian Andersen – purveyor of fairy tales.

Alright, I might have been stretching a bit with Whigfield, but a for a little country they’ve punched above their weight in contributions to civilisation, after that is they stopped burning and pillaging civilisation. And we in Wales should recognise a little of ourselves in them.

Now they are persona non grata in the Muslim world, flags burning, embassies put to the torch and people parading in London pretending to be suicide bombers as a result of a few cartoons.

They may not have been well-drawn cartoons, they may not have been funny, they may have been deeply, deeply offensive – but they were just cartoons.

But from the reaction they have provoked anyone would gave thought Denmark had launched an illegal war on the basis of a pack of lies and invaded a sovereign nation without the backing of the UN to depose a head of state. Oops, no, that would be us.

But we haven’t published any cartoons, of no, no, no. That was them, the Danes, across the water. Red flag, white cross, burns well when soaked in petrol.

But instead of backing our European allies in their time of need – and let’s remember when we were up against it 65 years ago the Danes were on our side – we pussyfoot around the sensibilities of the mob with Jack Straw condemning the republication of the cartoons almost as much as the riots that greeted them as if there is some moral equivalence between drawing a cartoon and prancing around pretending to be a suicide bomber.

Yes freedom of speech has limitations. You can’t shout fire in a crowded theatre. But are we really saying that the sensibilities of the adherents to this or that religion are now so sacred that we cannot, in a free society, poke a little fun at them by way of a cartoon? And I don’t single out any one faith here – I’m just as happy seeing jokes about people of all faiths and none.

There is no point in having freedom of speech unless it is freedom to say things that sometimes people find offensive. And sometimes you might say something stupid, or insensitive to the feelings of one section of the community. As long as you are not inciting violence against them then they are only words, or pictures, feelings may be hurt but no harm is done.

Britain has a history of cartooning that goes back centuries and that was unrestrained in its savagery of public figures, and yes, the public figures have even on occasion included God and Jesus.

Are we now so lily-livered in our pandering to the sensitivities of a tiny, militant minority that we abandon freedom so lightly?

Last week we came within a whisker of passing a law that would make it an offence to have recklessly incited religious hatred. Wouldn’t have mattered whether you intended to or not – if you’d been reckless, and who knows how that would have been interpreted, you’d have been in clink.

So while protesters wave placards calling for beheadings and go unmolested by the forces of law and order, our MPs consider outlawing a vicar joke.

We could just muddle through this, which is what apparently our government was trying to do at the weekend, or we nail our colours to the mast over something as inconsequential, but crucial, as a poorly-drawn, not very funny, cartoon.

Because if the chips are down I suggest we side not with the baying mob, but with the country that gave us The Little Mermaid.



THERE was a rugby match on at the weekend.

I had pre-warned Mrs Banks that at 3.30pm I would be downing tools from the seemingly interminable effort to turn a ‘70s-converted Victorian schoolhouse into something that would grace the pages of Country Living.

She gave me a look that indicated that anything other than full-tilt DIY would not be acceptable – I wonder if there’s a secret aisle at B&Q where they learn to do that.

A concession was made though – I could do the aforementioned DIY within sight or sound of the TV.

Joy.

I wish I hadn’t bothered.

I’m not sure which gave me greater pain – watching Wales get exhausted and then pushed around by an English pack that had quite clearly been cheating at breakfast with their Weetabix-quotient – or assembling four flat-pack bookcases.

And Lawrence Dallaglio. That’s clearly not him, he’s obviously some sort of Robo-Dallaglio whose been enhanced with fiendish Soviet technology. He walked onto the pitch and eclipsed the sun.

It is clearly not fair playing against someone so big he has his own gravitational field.

Anyhow, there was one moment of unrestrained joy to be had in the whole painful 80 minutes – I found they had packed one screw too many with my bookcases – there’s a first.

If Wales carry on like this the house will be finished by Easter.

Column, January 31, 2006

YOU might have noticed an unusual quiet descend upon North Wales this morning.
Once the dawn chorus had sounded its final note, another chorus of whistles was strangely absent.
All over Gwynedd, the 28,000 kettles, from Bangor to Y Felinheli, that have been working overtime since last year making water drinkable were at last given a well-earned rest after Welsh Water sounded the all-clear.
It will come as a relief, I’m sure, to be able to turn the tap and have some confidence that what comes out is safe to drink without raising it to boiling point first. Though whether Welsh Water’s customers have that confidence immediately remains to be seen.
My bet is that quite a few people, particularly those with young children, will continue the routine of putting on the kettle before they risk drinking the water.
And for all the inconvenience, expense and worry of the last couple of months, customers are being offered the princely sum of £25.
Not that money means very much when your confidence in the very stuff of life has been undermined.
Not that it is the water supply that is to blame mind you. Oh, no, no. That hasn’t been proved as yet, you see. And now we’re told that it might be impossible to pinpoint the exact cause of the outbreak.
Hmm. This is what Sherlock Holmes would call a two-pipe problem. So let’s don our deerstalkers and stoke up the old Meerschaum with Golden Shag and see if our powers of deduction can solve this mystery.
Firstly what has happened? An outbreak of cryptosporidium.
How is cryptosporidium spread? Well, what do all 208 victims have in common? Either they all eat at the same café, share the same loo, or else, and I realise it’s a million-to-one shot, they share some product in common…such as…erm…water?
Where have investigators been concentrating their efforts? Llyn Cwellyn, a reservoir that serves the affected area.
What advice have people been given? Boil your water.
Who is paying out £25 to customers inconvenienced by the whole sorry mess? Welsh Water, but these are ex gratia payments, you understand, because there’s been no indication of a breach of water standards by Welsh Water
Hmm, so this is a tricky one isn’t it? Could it be the water supply, or is it the Cryptosporidium Fairy?
And yet, and yet, we hear the constant refrain that the water supply has not been proven to be the source. How very, very reassuring.
But it if it isn’t the water supply, then isn’t that a bit more worrying? Because if it isn’t the water supply, then cryptosporidium has found some new way to infect its victims.
And I think we would all have been a bit more reassured if those investigating the outbreak had been a bit more open about what had been happening and where, instead of hiding behind bogus concern for ‘confidentiality’ of individuals.
It insults the intelligence of the people of North Wales to claim that you cannot give out detailed information about what exactly in God’s name is going on without giving individuals a degree of privacy.
In fact, such actions can look distinctly like an attempt at news management of a situation which rapidly became unmanageable.
Did they think that victims of this nasty little infection wouldn’t contact the media of their own accord? Well they were wrong?
Did they think that any journalist with even half a brain wouldn’t be able to dig up that which they weren’t telling? Well they were wrong.
Once you tell 70,000 people to boil their water, you’ve got a PR disaster on your hands and it’s time to come clean, not use Data Protection as a smokescreen.
Of course some of the answers to the above may be provided by the findings of the Drinking Water Inspectorate investigation into the outbreak.
The findings of the DWI investigation will be made public we are told. But its proceedings will not.
Why is there no public inquiry into this matter? Anything else will leave customers, however unreasonably, suspecting a cover-up.
To restore public confidence the inquiry into what happened must be as transparent as, well, water.

TWO e-mails arrive in response to the piece I wrote last week on the mumps outbreak in North Wales.
The first from Nerys Lloyd-Pierce:
“I read your piece on MMR with great interest. I am working on the Welsh
Assembly Government MMR catch-up campaign, launched in response to the sharp
rise in mumps cases.
If your readers are worried about mumps they should contact their GP and
have the jab - it's never too late to receive protection.
Women of childbearing age need to make sure they are protected too, because
of the risk of rubella. Catching rubella in pregnancy can cause serious
problems for the baby - heart problems, sight defects etc.”
The other came from a mum who did all the right things, but to no avail:
“After reading your column in today's Daily Post I feel compelled to write regarding the mumps outbreak. It isn't only unvaccinated children who are suffering.
Two of my three daughters have now been infected with this unpleasant disease - despite having received the MMR vaccinations. My three year old had received one dose of the vaccine, which should have afforded her 90% immunisation, before contracting the disease. This was before she was due her second jab, which she has subsequently received.
Both my 7 year old and 10 year old daughters had received their jabs when offered by our surgery, but the eldest still got mumps. Quite a few of her classmates, who had also been immunised, also got the disease, although no other pupils in my youngest daughter's nursery class was infected.
What should we do now that measles is around? If their uptake of the mumps vaccine wasn't sufficient, how much protection have they got against measles and rubella?
Sandra”
I don’t think anyone would say that vaccinations are a total answer. But they do cut down the incidence of disease dramatically. Perhaps if more parents had taken up the MMR vaccine for their children, the pool of infection would not have existed to catch Sandra’s daughters.
As Ms Lloyd-Pierce pointed out, it’s never too late to get protection, so if you’re worried about your child, go to your GP and get the jab. You’ll be protecting them, and countless others too.

Column, January 24, 2005

EDWARD Jenner had it easy.
The discoverer of vaccination didn’t have to get his ideas past an ethics committee did he?
And it would have made for an interesting conversation if he had.
“Yes, Mr Jenner, and what exactly is your proposed experiment?”
“Well, I know this milkmaid, Sarah Nelmes, lovely girl, got cowpox though, and I’m going to get a bit of the nasty stuff from her pocks and deliberately infect a little lad called James Phipps.”
“Now here’s the good bit, because after James has had the cowpox, I’m going to deliberately try to infect him with smallpox, yes, I know it’s a known killer, but trust me, I know what I’m doing.”
Little James survived the experiment and vaccination was born. But even then, although it was proven that Jenner’s discovery would save countless lives, there was a Luddite minority that refused to allow their children to be immunised.
It was mainly a religious objection, as some clergy felt it was ungodly to inject people with material from a diseased animal.
Jenner only had to point to his results though, and the fact it saved so many lives soon won over objectors.
Fortunately for Jenner there was an incomplete knowledge of the immune system back then and he didn’t have to put up with suspicious parents claiming his new-fangled vaccination would ‘overload’ their child’s immune system and turn them autistic.
I wonder what Jenner would have made of the MMR controversy.
The ongoing refusal to take up a jab which saves lives and prevents suffering has now resulted in a mumps outbreak in North Wales.
More than 1,500 cases of the disease were reported in the region last month – a 25 per cent rise on the previous year.
So what, those of you who have decided to rely on luck rather than vaccination to protect your child from it, might think, mumps is a bit of a comedy disease isn’t it? Swollen cheeks, a few days off school and that’s it.
Well for most children maybe. Provided your child is one of the lucky ones that gets a mild infection.
There is no treatment for mumps. If there are complications it can leave boys infertile. Serious complications can mean meningitis.
Prior to 1988 mumps was the commonest cause of viral meningitis among children. You know what they introduced in 1988 don’t you? That’s right – MMR.
So there are now 1,500 people in North Wales infected with a disease that could, in a worst case, lead to an unvaccinated child developing meningitis.
I wonder what the parents of those children who have not had the jab are doing to prevent them coming into contact with those infected with mumps?
Not very much is my guess, they’re relying on luck because they don’t trust science. They did that in Jenner’s day and smallpox was killing one in three people it infected until he came up with a means of preventing it.
Now more people are getting mumps and if that’s happening more children will be getting measles and rubella as well.
Again, most of the time they’re not fatal, but the complicated cases can be and the effect of a pregnant woman coming into contact with a child infected with rubella can be terrible the unborn child can develop defects of the heart, eyes and brain as a result.
So your unvaccinated child might shrug off a case of rubella, but are you keeping him or her away from every pregnant woman? It’s an airborne disease so that means keeping them away from any public place where they might infect someone.
Again, my suspicion is not. Those who are prepared to take risks with their own children’s lives on the basis of pure suspicions are likely to display the same cavalier attitude to the health of those they do not even know.
And measles, well, we all know that measles kills don’t we? According to the World Health Organisation it is the leading cause of vaccine-preventable childhood mortality. There are 30 million cases every year and 875,000 deaths caused by this preventable disease.
And yet despite this fact the NHS has had to formally warn parents against the practice of ‘measles parties’ where they would deliberately put their children in contact with an infected child in order to infect them and so build a natural immunity to the disease.
This in spite of the fact that the complications to measles, which include pneumonia and encephalitis, are quite common and that the death rate, though low, is one per thousand. You wouldn’t want your child to be that one in a thousand would you, just for going to a party?
Parents have a right to choose not to give their children MMR. Sadly their children are too young to assert their right to be protected against these diseases.
But if you’ve chosen not to immunise your child, what are you doing to protect tem now there is a mumps outbreak in North Wales?
And what will you do when measles arrives? Trusting to luck might not be enough.

GIVEN the fact that it was reportedly Gordon Brown who scuppered our chances of having a national holiday on St David’s Day it’s a bit rich him now suggesting a day to celebrate Britishness.
It’s rather odd to prevent a special day for the Welsh, an identity which means something to people, and then promote a celebration of Britishness, which means very little.
The strength of Britain, and the reason its composite parts have not split much earlier in its history, is that being British always mean being Welsh, Scots or English. It has always been a composite identity.
When people are able to express what they like about being British, what they most often describe are the attributes of their particular corner of the UK.
And surely if the idea of being British is to survive, then that it its only hope, to celebrate its constituent parts in all their diversity rather than some fictitious lumpen identity which none of us recognise.
And Gordon could make a start by loosening his grip on his wallet and giving us a holiday on St David’s Day.

Column, January 17, 2005

I DON’T doubt that some bicycles lay idle this weekend.
Worried parents will have kept their kids indoors, or in cars, not wanting them to be claimed so randomly as the four cyclists killed near Abergele on Sunday.
And who could blame them for that?
After all, here was a group of cyclists on an organised ride, in large numbers, perfectly visible and riding sensibly. If they aren’t safe, then can it really be safe to cycle on the roads?
Investigations will continue, but this was no case of road rage or speeding. The driver hit black ice and skidded into the cyclists, as simple, and tragic, as that.
Whether anything could or should have been done beforehand
If the cyclists had set out a minute later all that would have happened is a near-miss, something anyone who goes out on a bike has a multitude of to tell you about.
But they didn’t, with imperfect timing they were in exactly the spot they needed to be to be hit by that car when it hit that ice. And so a father saw his son die, and other families have been left without fathers, brothers, sons as a result.
Almost immediately questions were asked about the safety of cycling – with the implication that anyone who indulges in it is clearly taking an unacceptable risk with their life.
And the statistics would seem to bear the critics out - with cyclists being the only category of road user where the death toll is rising.
But reliance on such figures ignores the fact that cycling is becoming more popular and even more kids will have had a bike sitting under the Christmas tree this year.
But before those bike are put away unused in the garage, or worse flogged on eBay, let us remember that the reason we are so shocked by this terrible accident is because of its rarity.
Thousands upon thousands of people go out every day on bicycles and do so perfectly safely.
The health benefits of cycling for the majority vastly outweigh the risk of injury or death. In fact cycling has probably saved many more lives through increased fitness than it has ever cost in crashes.
I know it is all too easy to say that when four families are grieving though. But this weekend cyclists still made the journey out onto the roads of North Wales.
Perhaps a little more cautiously, and certainly their thoughts turned to those who lost their lives doing just that a week before.
But why take the risk? Why go out on a bike in the face of such apparent danger.
Because, after the first lung-bursting minutes when your legs ache, your back aches, your ankles hurt, your fingers are numb and the cold penetrates the very marrow of your bones, all of a sudden that all stops.
You crest a hill, your breathing suddenly becomes easier, you hit your stride and it is just…joyous. When Radio 4 asked listeners what was the greatest invention ever, what did they vote for? Not the light bulb, or even radio – but the humble bicycle.
I used to drop down the flanks of vertiginous hills in Wales with nought but a polystyrene helmet between me and my demise.
Nowadays the pace is more sedate, due to the presence of my two-year-old son strapped to his child-seat on the back.
I hope our outings are the beginning of his lifelong love of cycling for him. And when the time comes for him to set out on his own, of course I will worry and warn and watch him like a hawk.
But cycling is a little bit of freedom, and we should not abandon such things easily.
What we need are not fewer cyclists on the roads, but more. In Holland, where bikes seem to outnumber their riders, drivers have to look out for cyclists because they have sheer weight of numbers on their side.
Here we’re still seen as slightly odd, eccentric even, to favour a mode of transport that actually involves our own effort.
The whole issue of cycling has become politicised, partly because of a vociferous and well-funded motoring lobby that sees any curtailment of motorists ‘rights’ as the equivalent of ripping up the Magna Carta.
But now is not the time to make political points on the part of cyclists. Firtsly there is a difference between a cyclist being killed in a road rage attack and one who dies because of a patch of black ice. Both could perhaps be prevented, but the nature of the problem is entirely different.
Those who seek to make drivers take more care should not use this case to prove their point until they are sure of what exactly happened here.
In the meantime the most fitting tribute to those who died is exactly what happened at the weekend – a legion of their friends and fellow cyclists taking to the roads to enjoy the sport they loved so much.


IN Pwllheli, supermarket plans, it would seem, are like buses – just when you least expect it, two come along at once.
The traders of the town are already fighting tooth and nail to prevent a Walmart development. Sorry, did I say Walmart, silly me, that’s the vast US superstore giant name for it, I really mean Asda – much more cuddly.
At a packed public meeting – and try getting 113 people out on a cold January night for anything else and see how far you get – 108 were against the development, two were undecided and three were for it.
But just when they thought a two-story Asda was bad enough it’s rumoured that outline planning has been granted for a site at the opposite end of the town and word is that Tesco are interested.
Which would leave the independent traders of Pwllheli caught between two loss-leading, price-cutting, stack ‘em high and flog ‘em cheap even if they don’t want it, supermarket behemoths.
And what a fantastic experience for the shopper Pwllheli is going to be in 10 year’s time when every independent shop has gone to the wall.
Never mind, you’ll have Tesco or Asda to choose from, just like you have in every other benighted town in the UK.
Still, it seems Pwllheli Chamber of Trade is up for the fight and let’s hope the unstoppable tide of supermarket clones is turned back on the Llyn.

Column, January 10, 2006

WELL the Lib-Dems have showed just how different they are from the mainstream parties by the way they treated Charles Kennedy.
That is, not different at all. In fact, when it comes to backstabbing machinations I think Machiavelli would have trouble obtaining membership because he was too much of a bleeding-heart, erm, liberal.
Kennedy’s drink problem did not seem too much of an issue when he was effectively supporting the campaigns of those Lib-Dem MPs who queued up so readily to betray him over the weekend.
And what was truly nauseating was the way they couched it in terms of concern for him, while making it perfectly clear he had to go no, straight away, don’t look back, pack your bags and go.
You wouldn’t mind so much if he was being betrayed by people who had themselves contributed one iota to the fabric of British political life.
But half the time you were left saying “Who was that?” when yet another recently-arrived Lib-Dem MP bravely turned traitor now they knew it was safe to do so.
If they are the best the Lib-Dems have to offer then the political wilderness awaits because one thing Charles Kennedy did was give them a human face. Now we know he had some all too human frailties.
One person to come out of it with his reputation intact was Lembit Opik. He was consistently and vociferously loyal throughout and at a time when politically it would have been expedient to have been unavailable for comment. That was a brave thing to do.
He is the sort of man you would want as a friend, which is as good a reason as any for wanting him to be your MP. Or your party leader.

I HAD the misfortune to get stuck in Grantham on Friday.
Not a place I would recommend to spend on a railway platform on a cold January afternoon.
Fortunately the train was uncharacteristically punctual and whisked me away and as I left I caught sight of the town centre.
There dominating the skyline was the “Isaac Newton Centre”. What’s this, perhaps I’ve misjudged, is this some school of science dedicated to the great man’s memory.
Do those who would stand on his shoulders to see yet further than he did, toil away in its halls of academia?
Only if they shop at Asda.
Yes, Isaac Newton – the man who gave us calculus, gravity and showed us what light was made of, the man who unlocked the secrets of the Universe and set us on a path to the stars – is commemorated by a shopping centre. And an ugly one at that.
Is this how these town planners and the architects who work with them get away with it? “Look we know it’s an ugly concrete stump, but Florence Nightingale once stayed in the town so we’ll call it the Nightingale Centre, who could complain about that?”
My theory is the uglier the building – the more famous and beloved the figure they will name it after. So if you hear of plans to build the Princess Di centre next door to you, time to get the For Sale sign up.

Column, December 27, 2005

IT is time we bit the bullet and accepted that the right to name children needs to be taken off some people.
Not everyone, just a minority. The minority for whom inspiration is mere flick of a TV remote control away.
They hit the first soap they find and then the cast list is their oyster.
This can only explain the abomination revealed in the latest statistics for baby names revealed by the Office of National Statistics for England and Wales.
The ONS results showed that the number of people choosing to inflict the name Aleesha on their children had risen by 298 per cent.
What could possibly be the reason for deciding that your child should have a name like a dyslexic take on Alicia?
Step forward ‘Eastenders’, where, reportedly, this is the name of a baby born to a character rejoicing in the title of ‘Demi’. Don’t ask me what part these characters play in the circle of hell that is this particular soap, as even a minute spent watching that dross is a minute of your life you’ll never get back.
I say that it is a minority of people who choose such utterly appalling name for their children because the ONS figures reveal that the top 10 names are far more sensible options.
Boys, in general, get good solid names like Jack, Joshua, Thomas, James, Oliver, Daniel, Samuel, William, Harry and Joseph.
The girls’ top ten is Jessica, Emily, Sophie, Olivia, Chloe, Ellie, Grace, Lucy, Charlotte and Katie.
Alright, there’s a bit of movement for fashion in there. David used to top the chart regularly, but now, inexplicably, has fallen from favour. A gross injustice.
In Wales there is not as much variation at the top as you might think, with the Biblical, but not especially Welsh-sounding Joshua topping the boys’ chart. However, Dylan and Rhys both make the top 10.
The girls’ chart, however, was topped by Megan, and Ffion made an appearance there at number 5.
But they’re all good names, spelt conventionally and which do not seem to owe their popularity to the fact they’ve been applied to some Z-list celebrity who’s famous for five minutes before being discovered snorting cocaine in the company of a gaggle of call-girls.
In fact, that’s a good guide for choosing your child’s name. Do not pick a name that you are likely to see splashed in 160-point bold across the front page of the News of the World. You won’t go far wrong.
But while the top 10 for girls and boys are fine names, it is in the nether regions of the ONS chart that you find the eccentricities.
Keira, as in Knightley, comes in an number 38. Scarlett, as in Johansson, makes an appearance as does Sienna, as in Miller.
As well as inspiring Aleesha, Eastenders is, apparently, the reason that Alfie, as in Moon, has suddenly gained in popularity, climbing to number 21.
You have to wonder whether the vicar at the font is tempted to turn down some of these bizarre choices. “What, you want to name your precious child after a cockney wide-boy on a TV soap played by Shane Richie? Get out an don’t darken my door again until you’ve picked something from the Old Testament.”
Before you accuse me of snobbery though as you hide your beloved Chardonnay’s eyes from this cruel column, this is not a class thing. For while Aleesha may certainly have been the choice of those with a lot to TV-watching time on their hands, you know the sort, more likely than most to appear on Trisha, the upper classes are just as capable of inflicting dreadful names on their offspring.
A swift perusal of the Daily Telegraph’s births marriages and deaths columns shows the lengths to which they will go in pursuit of originality. One poor mite this week was lumbered with the name Hanover, destined to spend the rest of her life saying no, not Hannah, Hanover, yes like the place in Germany, yes it is unusual isn’t it?
The sole consolation for the child is that at least she has safety in numbers, with siblings rejoicing in names such as Hadrian, Brittany, Blaec and Donnchadh.
But, it would seem, that one particular naming foible has died the death it so richly deserves, and that is the practice by some parents of naming their children after entire football teams.
My how their offspring must have laughed as they filled in yet another official form with the entire Liverpool European cup-winning side’s names.
There are a couple of reasons for this I think. Firstly the squad system means you no longer have to pick 11 names, but you’ve got 20 or 30 to get in. Secondly, the insidious rise of the football agent and big-money transfers has meant that by the time you get to the registrar, your beloved child’s name no longer plays for your favourite team, they’ve signed for Inter Milan for £50m.


IN the past I have written somewhat scathingly of those who adorn their houses with as many Christmas lights as their overloaded fuse boxes can cope with.
I have not looked kindly on those whose homes flash away like a festive Chernobyl, illuminating the entire neighbourhood with their comedy climbing Santas and their luminous reindeer.
Bah, humbug, said I.
That is until I took my son past them. Now two and a half, he’s old enough to reaslise what’s going on and to him matters of taste, scale and decorum are just daddy being dull.
The bigger, brighter, more luridly-coloured, the better he likes it.
Driving down one particular street was like being on Sunset Strip, and he loved it. Pointing out each and every lit-up home where neighbours had clearly been trying to outdo each other in wattage, flash-rate and garish colours. Who would have thought you could buy and illuminated Santa descending from a roof…by a parachute.
I felt like Scrooge as he looked upon the crutch left behind by the departed Tiny Tim.
The lights chez Banks may remain minimalist white, but I’ll try not to be so snooty about those of you who entertain the children of the neighbourhood with every colour of the rainbow and a few extra too. And with that resolution I’ll wish you all a very happy, healthy and prosperous 2006.

Column, December 20, 2005

WELL what have we learnt from Sue Barker’s rib-tickling gag about Charlotte Church and Gavin Henson – or Churchgate as I’m going to christen it.
Churchgate – d’you see what I did there? Oh well, save it up till the end and give it me big.
Well, firstly we’ve learnt that some people should not tell jokes. Sue Barker is one of those people.
It’s like your aunty the church organist trying to do it, it just doesn’t work, you want to make them stop, but they insist on blundering on embarrassing all around them especially themselves when they realise that the punchline is X-rated and they’re talking to the vicar.
Secondly it’s about our attitude to the BBC and it’s probably a hangover from the days when its presenters would tell us the news from the Empire in full evening dress while being slowly strangled by their dicky bow.
You just don’t expect Auntie Beeb to deliver a gag as crude as ‘keeping Henson out of Church.’ As double entendres go it’s about as subtle as being hit from behind by the Pontypool front row.
The beauty of the double entendre, when it is well-crafted, is that it is on the face of it, entirely innocent, and it is only slowly that its dirty alternative meaning dawns on the listener.
And the true beauty is that the listener has to have a slightly dirty mind to even get it, so they can hardly complain can they?
None of this was the case with Sue’s not-so-funny at the Sports Personality of the Year Awards.
Firstly, for it to work, Henson would have to have a reputation as a church-goer in the truly Biblical sense. Which he hasn’t. He’s a nice lad, but it can’t be said that he’s chapel through and through can it?
He might be God-fearing, but he’s better known for wearing gel on his hair thatn his faith on his sleeve.
So keeping him out of Church is less of a double entendre and more a single entendre isn’t it?
Sue Barker may as well have just said to coach Mike Ruddock: “So, if you can make sure Henson doesn’t have too much rumpy-pumpy with Charlotte, what do you think your chances are of another Grand Slam.”
So it was a poor joke, and badly delivered by someone who really ought not to deliver jokes.
And that should have been the end of it really. It’s not the end of the world, just a bad joke on what has become a bit of a big, baggy monster of a year-end programme.
But no, we have to have the guaranteed, wind-up, shocked reaction after someone like Sue cracks a joke so crude don’t we?
I’m surprised questions weren’t asked in Parliament such was the moral outrage expressed the next day.
Apparently, we are told, Henson, though he wasn’t there when Sue expressed an interest in his sexual exploits, sat ‘stony-faced’ through the rest of the ceremony.
Stony-faced eh? How could they tell?
He will always be my hero for that kick and for that tackle on Matthew Tait, but I don’t look to Gavin for the whole gamut of emotions writ large upon his features.
I think he tries to keep his face as still as possible for fear that any seismic furrowing of his brow when he smiles might bring the whole edifice of his hair-do tumbling about his ears.
But really, come on, he’s a rugby player for heaven’s sake.
Now I know rugby has cleaned up its act ever so slightly in the days since the Lions knocked lumps out of the Springboks for looking at them funny, but you’re not telling me that a rugby dressing room is not the home of banter so near to the knuckle it would make an Ark Royal stoker blush.
What’s more I’m willing to bet that if Gavin is ever the target of such banter he gives as good as he gets and a bit more.
Furthermore if the worst anyone ever hears in a rugby dressing room and a rugby pitch for that matter is a minor crudity about Charlotte Church then rugby is not the game I used to play and love.
I could recite rugby songs that would make your hair curl and recount behaviour that would have its participants serving lifelong ASBOs. But this being a family newspaper, were I to repeat them here it would probably make this column my last.
Now, I’m guessing that while Gavin himself may never have participated in such behaviour, he was aware of it going on around him and front row forwards are not known to deploy the sort of wit made famous by Oscar Wilde.
In fact when it comes to crudity, they’d be far more at home with Sue.

LITTLE did I know what a raw nerve I’d be touching when I suggested yet another supermarket was not the answer to North Wales’s problems.
Christine Price is the latest to set me straight and she writes:

“David,David,David what a short-sighted article in todays paper re Prestatyn.
On your own admission you do not live in the town- if you DID you would be on your knees praying for the arrival of Tesco.
How many peope in what is virtually a retirement town have the transport to travel out of town to shop,the physical ability to carry the shopping home on the bus or a decent enough pension to pay top prices.
Tesco would address all of these problems, not just for old codgers but for young families on limited incomes too.
We could actually shop at reasonable prices and either afford a taxi home or - glory be - have home delivery.
When was the last time you walked up Prestatyn High Street?
The bottom of the town looks like a scud missile has hit it,Ethel Austen have been forced to close their doors ( supposedly a temporary measure but I have serious doubts about that),shops all the way up have closed and are boarded up precious few true shops remain.
There are plenty of charity shops and multitudes of "visitors" gift shops but you can count on two hands the shops which locals use.
If (please God ) Tesco do come I and others will not abandon our butcher, fruit shop or chemist(the local one).
We will have CHOICE and hopefully be able to purchase it and get it to our homes with the minimum of effort.
I enjoy your column - especially the caustic comments - but please consider the whole community when writing on such an emotive subject,we are not all still working,we are not all in the best of health,we don`t all have cars.the low skill,low paid jobs ARE STILL JOBS FOR SOMEONE !"

Column, December 13, or rather the lack of it

Yes, well, due a series of technical hitches too tiresome to go into here - even for a blog. I had to write my column on my wife's laptop - rather a natty little iBook - tangerine.

Anyhoo, I had to send it from her e-mail and here's the thing, I forgot to send a copy to myself. Quelle dommage.

So here's the abridged version.

Wrexham is as in love with the motor car as LA, so a survey of European cities has revealed.

It is the most motored up place in Europe for commuters.

That's because, I said, it has a public transport system that is a bag of bobbins.

Oh and I had a funny letter from a bloke called Charlie Roberts about panto. He remembers one in 1946 allegedly starring Issy Bonn (singer, comic, was one of the images on Sgt Pepper album apparently)

The panto, Sleeping Beauty, went on - no Issy, until ten minutes from the end, when the Good Fairy asked Beauty what she would wish for.

"I'd like to hear Issy Bonn sing 'The little Boy Santa Claus Forgot'" replied Beauty.

One comes Issy in full evening dress, belts out four numbers, and exits. Crowd loved it.

On reflection, Charlie's letter was the best bit of the column.

Column, December 6, 2005

HOW will suing Alder Hey get justice for Luke?
Luke’s life was cruelly short, the hand life dealt him meant he was never out of hospital and that’s where he died after just 10 months.
When Luke’s mother Ruth was battling in the courts for her son’s right to life, I wrote in support of her fight.
I thought it was wrong for doctors, who had developed the means to keep gravely ill children alive, to wash their hands of the decision not to use those skills.
By asking the courts what to do they were essentially passing the buck, making it the courts responsibility, not their own.
But now I’m afraid I don’t see any purpose in suing Alder Hey for what happened.
Ruth Winston-Jones says it is not about money, and I’m sure that is the case. No mother would ever argue that mere money could compensate for the loss of a child.
And anyway, the figures handed out by the courts for the loss of children – unlike those for, say, the loss of a wage-earning parent – are always so shockingly small as to be insulting to the memory of those who have been lost.
But I’m afraid that even though the family insist that it is justice for Luke, not money, that this is about, money is what it will become about.
Because to sue a hospital requires lawyers, and they need money. And once a hospital is sued it will need lawyers to defend itself, and they will need money too.
In the end you will have two sets of lawyers making money hand over fist from a case between two sides who want absolutely nothing to do with money.
And what if Mrs Winston-Jones wins, what then? Where will a compensation award come from? Presumably from health authority coffers or at least from their insurers.
Then what will happen? Their insurance premiums go up and there will be less money to spend on what they should be spending it on – children’s care.
Is that a fitting memorial for Luke?
This is not an argument that hospitals should never be sued, but I certainly don’t think they should be sued as often as they are.
All too frequently a hospital is hauled before the court because a grieving relative believes that to do so is the only way they will achieve some recognition for the errors that were made in their loved one’s treatment.
Money is the last thing on their mind, but, if they win, they succeed in taking money off the hospital. And of the errors in care were caused by underfunding then money is the last thing they can afford.
I know it’s not possible to make hospitals immune from prosecution, but if parents aren’t interested in money and yet the only way they have of seeking redress is to ask a court for money, surely it’s not beyond the wit of man to come up with a better way of acknowledging fault.
If all a family want is a public statement of responsibility and an apology, isn’t there a way of them getting that without employing horrendously expensive lawyers?
And the fact is that, if all a family wants is an apology, very often that is exactly what they don’t get, as out of court settlements usually bring civil actions to an end with no admission of responsibility.
But is this really a case of negligence? At his inquest Ruth said life-saving equipment was removed from his room moments before his death.
But, given the fact that the court had said the doctors had the right to refuse aggressive treatment of Luke if his condition worsened, does that amount to negligence?
The inquest decided not, Merseyside Police never brought any charges. I can understand a parent’s pain and desire to have someone answer for what happened, but is that someone the doctors, nurses and management of Alder Hey?
Is anyone responsible for the death of Luke other than whatever genetic fluke caused his condition – fate, chance, or God.
But then it’s easier to blame a hospital than to blame God I suppose.

SOMEONE out there shares my almost obsessive dislike of pantos, particularly those whose cast-list is made up of former soap stars and reality TV cast-offs.
Someone calling himself ‘Pantodame’ left me this message: “Anyone wanting an entertaining time on a cold, miserable Manchester evening must try the Palace Theatre's festive offering – 'Peter Pan' – featuring that excellent 'Eastenders' japester Steve McFadden paired with another comic giant, ex-Eastenders actress Sophie Lawrence!
“My wife and I are about to get our house repossessed but we won't mind putting ourselves further in debt for the potential hilarity that this union promises.”
My advice to you pantodame, and I’ll put it in charming Eastenders patois is to “Leeeve it, it’s not worf it.”

NICE work if you can get it – being a Gwynedd councillor that is.
Especially now that you can rely on the council tax payers of the county to pitch in with £30,000 to a special pension fund being set up for departing councilors.
It’s been defended by those who claim it will attract younger people into local politics.
I’m not entirely sure I want someone coming into local politics, which after all, should be about public service, on the basis if how well they can feather their nest.
After all they get very healthy allowances, plenty of foreign junkets and now they can expect a pension for the privilege as well.
And it does leave you with a bit of a dilemma at the ballot box too – if you can’t stand your councilor you might want to vote against him, but now by doing so you’re just putting a pension in his pocket.

Column, November 29, 2005

WINTER draws on (drum roll, cymbals, I thank you) and once again we are breathless with excitement as panto season is upon us.
Excuse me while I’m away to a darkened room with a bottle of whisky and a loaded revolver, I know what I have to do.
I know complaining about panto is akin to shooting Santa from his sleigh, or taking an axe to your Christmas tree, but it’s not all pantos I’m against, just modern panto.
I’m as keen as the next man on your traditional panto, who can complain about a thigh-slapping principal boy winning the heart of his true love. As long, that is, as the principal boy, is a girl.
That’s one of the problems with modern panto, they cast men in the role of principal boy, usually some outcast from a recently defunct boy band.
They can’t do this to panto, to have a boy kiss a girl in the final scene is against nature. In its traditional form it is the only moment in a panto that you can rely upon the dads in the audience paying any attention whatsoever.
But that’s not my main objection. My big problem with present-day panto is the tinkering with the plot and cast that the ‘writers’, for want of a better word, seem to feel they have a right to do.
Here are stories which can trace back their origins for centuries and now you get some jumped-up impresario who thinks he can improve on a plotline that has entertained millions.
They do this in a vain attempt to keep the adult audience engaged and in the foolish belief that it somehow makes panto ‘relevant’ to modern audiences.
And so my predictions for this year’s panto season are as follows:
· Some character somewhere will do a ‘yeah but, no, but’ line a la Vicky Pollard of Little Britain
· Another one will do a Ricky Gervais-style dance routine, thinking that it’s still current, and worse still, that it’s funny when someone other than Gervais does it
· Someone will use the line ‘Am I Bothered Though?’ to utter silence as the youth of the audience and the age of their parents leaves them blissfully unaware of Catherine Tate
· Were it not for the eagle-eyed lawyers protecting the Harry Potter brand he would be swooping on his broomstick into every panto in the land as all pretence of a traditional plot flew out of the window

Hilarious no?
No.
If you are one of those writers slaving over a last draft of your script save yourself the time, stick to the original plot and characters.
But then for many of the writers, tinkering with the plot is unavoidable because of the cast they have to accommodate.
And this brings me to the other affliction of modern-day panto.
Local radio DJs.
What it is that makes them think a few minutes of inconsequential twitter every day between the pop pap they play gives them any stage presence I’m not entirely sure, but there they are, top of the bill every Christmas.
And there’s so many of them, panto writers are left with no option other than to invent characters with daft names like Razzmatazz, just so local DJ Zak Moron can slap on the greasepaint and puff a little more hot air into his already over-inflated ego.
I have a little experience of these characters and my theory is that somewhere back along the evolutionary tree, just after we came down from the trees, one particularly vain set of monkeys started fiddling with a record deck and stopped developing around about there.
But, Lord help us, at least local DJs have a day job and there are only so many hours a day they can take to the stage.
But they are not the worst thing to appear on the panto stage, oh no, not by a long chalk.
That title belongs firmly to former reality TV contestants.
How did that happen? A bunch of people who have excelled at revealing just how nasty, brutish and thick they really are, get to entertain our kids at Christmas.
You may as well stand outside Walton Prison and wait for the next inmate out and give him a pixie suit and invite him into your home.
The only consolation is that when these buffoons fail in a third-rate theatre, with half an audience, on a rainy January night, perhaps it might just penetrate their numb skulls as to just how talentless they really are.

WHY all the howls of indignation at the prospect of an all-Wales police force?
There are lots of reasons why you need local accountability of your police service – individual communities will have differing crime problems that they will want to raise with local commanders.
But who has suggested that an all-Wales force would change that? You will still have local divisions with senior officers who are answerable to the communities they police.
One senior officer I was talking to about this last week was all for the idea because he was a detective involved in cracking serious crime.
As far as he was concerned the regionalisation could not come soon enough.
He explained that while there are plenty of officers who can pound the beat, ther are fewer detectives who have the mental resources and the experience to deal with serious crime like murder, rape, armed robbery and drug dealing.
Big regional forces, he said, would have access to more of those specialised resources to deal with serious crimes.
As for the rest of the objections, all I can see so far is petty North-South rivalries. It’s also true that an all-Wales force might involve fewer committees overseeing the force and perhaps that might explain some of the squeals of protest.

IT wasn’t long before I was set right by a supermarket worker after I blamed them (supermarkets, not their workers) for society’s ills last week.
One, Miss CJ, wrote in saying: “I have been working in Tesco for just over a year and a half now, I started off in the cafe and now I’m a semi-skilled baker earning £6.15 per hour, time and a half on a Sunday, plus on a bank holiday I’d get time and time and a half, which to me is a good wage.
“Prior to Tesco I was working in hotels earning around £4.50 an hour, no extra pay for working Sundays, bank holidays and Christmas time.
“I look back now and think how did I survive? The North Wales coast is an area in which a lot of jobs do pay the minimum wage, but thanks to Tesco I can take home a decent wage each month and gain more experience.
“I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels the same and could I just remind you that Tesco actually pay the most wage out of the supermarkets.
“I hope they do get to build a store in Prestatyn as this would help a lot of people who are on the minimum wage to gain more experience and have a better wage.”

Hello Sweden

Someone from Sweden, using the Bostaden-net ISP, has spent a staggering 3 hours 14 minutes here, apparently after searching for 'Banksy' and 'napalm' on Google.

That's three hours 14 minutes of your life you'll never get back, so perhaps it's time to meander to pastures new. But thanks for improving my visit length stats.

Column, November 22, 2005

ON hearing of a battle between Somerfield and Tesco for dominance of a North Wales town you might see little to choose between the contestants.
“A plague on both their houses,” the Shakespearian scholars among you might be tempted to say, if it were not such an appalling analogy.
The Montagues and Capulets at least gave birth to the beautiful couple of Romeo and Juliet.
Tesco and Somerfield cannot lay claim to such beautiful connections, the closest they got to beauty is three for one on the cosmetics aisle.
Instead of Shakespeare we have to look to pantomime for a more apt comparison – two ugly sisters, and they are fighting to win the heart of Prestatyn’s shoppers.
Tesco wants to build a grand store there, Somerfield didn’t want them to and lost a legal battle to stop them.
But Tesco’s plans have been delayed because they need some land owned by Somerfield if they are to proceed.
The dispute is grinding on like a Jarndyce and Jarndyce of planning applications and now Tesco wants the start date to be put back to 2007.
If I were living in Prestatyn I’d be backing Tesco all the way – put it back to 2007, no better still, all the way back to 2012, in fact, why not never come here at all?
Can anyone say that their life has been infinitely improved by the arrival of a supermarket on their doorstep?
I’ll accept that they bring a slew of jobs with them when they arrive in town. Set against that is the fact that the majority are relatively low-paid, low-skilled jobs. And you also have to weigh against them the numbers of jobs lost from shops that have to tighten their belts or close in the face of overwhelming competition.
A truly depressing statistic that came out this year was that one pound in every three that is spent at a supermarket is spent at Tesco. This accounts for the fact that they posted profits of £2bn this year.
“Every little helps” they claim on the advert. How would they know, there’s nothing little about them.
And I know that Tesco, Somerfield and the rest will claim to save you money,. But do they really?
Of course they’ll sell you a tin of beans for less that you would pay at the local shop, but who goes to a supermarket for just a tin of beans. More to the point, who goes to a supermarket for just a tin of beans and manages to come out with just a tin of beans.
They’re not really saving you money if you go in for a tin of beans, but come out with a tin of beans, a pair of jeans and two CDs that you didn’t really need but couldn’t resist at the price they were charging.
And another thing, those loyalty cards they make so much of are a marketing scam. They keep a record of each and every thing you buy and then they target you with more and more offers. Offers that will all, of course, save you money. Except for the money you use to buy them that is.
You might not mind so much if supermarkets just sold groceries, but now they sell you everything from nappies to pension plans – and the Co-Op will even sort out your funeral.
They are a malign influence killing our high streets and convincing us that all our needs can be catered for under one roof.
I haven’t got time to get into their effect on the price of food. But consider how expensive lamb is in supermarkets and how little farmers get paid for it at market. Somewhere in between someone is making a mint out of lamb, and sorry for the unpardonable pun.
Everyone supplying them has to dance to their tune whether it is farmers growing veg in Kenya, or raising sheep in Wales, if their product isn’t up to supermarket standard then they’re scuppered.
They are also a malign influence on the way we shop. Shopping was once a sociable experience, where a relationship was struck up between the shopper and the butcher, baker, fishmonger.
Supermarket shopping is a solitary almost hostile affair to be endured rather than enjoyed. A Saturday morning ordeal spent marching up and down soulless aisles which sell the same no matter which store you are in.
They recruit their celebrities to charm us in whether it’s Jamie Oliver, Prunella Scales or, God help us, Sharon Osbourne. I’m sorry, but just how demented do you have to be to decide where you’ll do your weekly shop on the basis of a recommendation from Ozzy’s missus?
Prestatyn’s economic well-being is depended on the arrival of Tesco, according to the town council. And that is the saddest comment of the lot, that the future of yet another Welsh community is dependent on it becoming yet another town, with yet another Tesco.

“JP” writes in with a few remarks about my column last week, in which I bemoaned plans to extend the national curriculum to newborn children and the headlong rush to shove them into nursery so parents could get back to work.

“My last job was working for the NHS and they had a scheme called Career Break, the employee could take a break for anything from six months to - it was either 5 or 10 years. Of course this would be without pay but the employee would be guaranteed a similar job when they decided to return to work. Out of approximately seven women with children only one took up the option.
“If you ask any woman working whether they would rather be at home looking after the children, the answer might be "yes" but if they are perfectly honest the answer would be "no". It's hard work being a housewife and mother and you can get very bored. A lot of the modern generation are aware of this and hand over the reins to the Grandparents. We haven't got Grandchildren at the moment but I would not want the responsibility of looking after a young child five days a week. Been there done that!
“The opportunities for women in the work place are manifold and quite rightly too. And in my own experience older women in the workplace are valued far more than in the past. That has got to be an improvement even if along the way hard decisions must be taken, it was ever thus.”

INSTEAD of entertaining knee-jerk calls for the return of the death penalty after the murder of PC Sharon Beshenivsky we should note the fact that we are still shocked by such events.
The killing of a police officer is still one of those crimes that causes us all to pause and mark the sacrifice that they make as an unarmed service.
We are still, predominantly, a peaceful people and the reintroduction of the death penalty brings back a barbarity that we did well to consign to history.
To start executing murderers again, no matter how judicially sanctioned, brings us one step closer to the level of those who killed PC Beshenivsky.

Column, November 15, 2005

“IT is a wise child that knows its own father, and an unusual one that unreservedly approves of him,” according to Mark Twain.
Precious little chance of approval nowadays, when it would seem we spend most of our time disapproving of anyone under the age of 20.
Society’s ills can be laid at the door of anyone who has not yet had a hand in shaping that society. As long as they are young, they can bear the blame.
Unsurprisingly then, Wales’ children’s commissioner, Peter Clarke, has said that the nation’s youth are a bit cheesed off at being blamed for everything.
UK politicians, Mr Clarke said, should be ashamed of the way they have conducted the anti-social behaviour debate, which has marginalized young people and made them feel they are a problem.
Young people, he said, felt they were not respected by the adult community. And quite right too, the day you’re respected by your elders is that day any teenage coolness evaporates in a puff of cheap aftershave and breath mints. If I were a teenager again, respect if not what I’d be looking for, bewilderment tinged with fear is the effect I’d be after, it’s much more rock’n’roll.
But is it entirely surprising that adults have so little respect for their juniors when they hardly know them at all.
We are reaping the results of a decision by successive governments that when it comes to bringing up children the state knows best.
Mum and Dad can, no, not can, must. Go back to work, slinging their newborns into whatever childcare they can find or afford.
Some of that childcare is, I’m sure, very, very good, where children are given lots of stimulation and learn to play with their little friends.
Some of it will be indifferent and some of it will be very bad. Unfortunately, you put children in these places when they are too young to tell you what a miserable time they are having. Then parents wonder, after such an atrocious start in life, why their children grow up with problems.
In these days when everyone has a right to a career come hell of high water it is rather unfashionable to point out that the best person to look after a child is that child’s parent. Furthermore, the latest research into the subject suggests that the best parent to look after a child is its mother.
Now, before you unsheathe your pens, I know, I know, I know there will be plenty of men out there who are just as nurturing as their female partners, but the research shows that as a whole, a baby responds better in its very early years to its mother.
That might be unfair, misogynistic, chauvinistic, or just plain offensive. Hard luck, it’s nature. You can tell me all you like how much a six-month-old loves being left in a nursery full of strangers – if it could talk it would tell you you can stick your nursery where you put the dirty nappies, hand me back to mum.
We are told that it is our choice whether we go back to work or stay home to look after our kids, but how many families can afford that? And how many men or women relish the ‘choice’ of going back to a battery farm call centre job just to make ends meet when they would rather be at home with their kids?
The fact that children thrive in the care of their parents is no great secret, studies have shown this time and time again, as has, well, evolution. Our primate forebears did not manage to descend from the trees by abandoning their offspring to the nearest ape.
So what does government do with this knowledge? Encourage both parents back into full time work by providing them with a range of childcare ‘options’, that’s what. Because they want as many of us in work as possible, all paying tax, a tiny bit of which they’ll hand back in the form of child care options.
The problem is that once you create a market for childcare options you find some are very good and some are awful.
And you can’t really blame the parents when you have made it economically impossible for one of them to stay at home and look after the children can you?
So that’s why, last week, we had the farce of a Labour government extending the national curriculum to 0-3 year olds. They are just trying to get a grip of the mess they’ve created in the first place.
They literally want a say in how your child develops from the moment its head crowns.
You do have to wonder whether there is any aspect of our lives that they do not feel at ease tinkering with? What happened to children just playing?
The age of three should be a time of untrammelled joy, not a time to be weighed in the balance by the government inspector.
Why they’ve stopped there I don’t know. Earlier and earlier is obviously the way forward, not back, and can it be very long before the Home Secretary announces the first in utero asbo for an unborn baby they know is going to be trouble?
I am hoping that Wales’ education minister Jane Davidson will treat this piece of Westminster tripe with the contempt it deserves and refuse to foist it upon the children of Wales.
I have to say though the noises she is making are not promising. Launching ‘Flying Start’ recently she enthused about free, ‘high-quality’ childcare for two-year-olds.
“International evidence has shown that supporting our children when they are very young gives them a better start in life and helps their development in the longer term.”
Quite what ‘support’ means I’m not sure, but I’m willing to bet it’s not support for a parent to stay at home.
And then after a lifetime in childcare and school, we wonder why the teenage rebel scaring the wits out of us is such a stranger. We used to scoff at the upper classes who dispatched their children to boarding school at the earliest age, and look at us now, we’re all at it.
But if you’ve endured one more surly episode from a truculent teenager and despair of ever understanding them, remember what else Mark Twain had to say on the matter: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

Column, November 8, 2005

WHATEVER happened to Guy Fawkes?
Well, I know what happened to him, he was hung, drawn and quartered, a fate that would make gently roasting on a bonfire seem like a breeze. What I mean is whatever happened to guys?
Has the march of political correctness finally stormed the bastions of our national Catholic-baiting festival?
It’s just that I haven’t seen many of them recently. Time was that every year you could trot along to your local municipal display to see the original fall-guy burnt in effigy.
Happy that we had once again commemorated the knavish, Papist plot to blow up Parliament you could toddle home.
But suddenly it’s no longer Guy Fawkes’ Night is it. Now it’s just Bonfire Night and that’s all you get, a big bonfire, nothing else.
No overstuffed effigy sitting atop the motley collection of flotsam and jetsam whose head inevitable falls off when the first flames lick around his toes to the oohs and aahs of the crowd.
You can perhaps just about understand why your local council display has decided that burning a guy is as inflammatory as making the Satanic Verses compulsory reading in primary schools. So perhaps you can be charitable and forgive them their abandonment of tradition.
But now everyone’s at it. There were kids going round asking for a ‘penny for the guy’ last week – with no guy. Why not abandon all pretence of history and just say: “Give me money for fireworks.”
Even the village bonfire has abandoned its guy and was just a bonfire this year, not the recreation of the immolation of the nation’s most hated traitor.
But why? Everyone knows it was a set-up, Guy was just a patsy and it was orchestrated to foment anti-Catholic feeling.
If we burn a guy nowadays we’re doing it ironically aren’t we and no, we don’t really hate all Catholics and everything they stand for do we?
But I blame this abandonment of tradition for the two-month long expenditure of ordnance that follows what used to be Guy Fawkes’ Night.
There was a time when November 5th would be preceded by the occasional banger and then the whole lot would be expended in one glorious night filled with the smell of gunpowder.
After that Rover and Tiddles could be let out safe in the knowledge that high explosives would not illuminate the skies for another year.
Not now. Oh no. November 5th is just the first salvo in a display of rocketry that lasts until New Year’s Eve.
Either they are making more gunpowder nowadays or people have more money to send up in a puff of smoke because every evening is punctuated by explosions that would raise a few eyebrows in downtown Baghdad.
And while we’re about it can we have a word about people’s aim when they’re setting the damn things off?
There was a point on Saturday when the village bonfire resembled the closing scenes of Apocalypse Now. Banks Junior was fortunately too young to know the danger he was in as the incandescent phosphorus fell around us.
“Ears daddy, ears,” he said, complaining that my hands which had been hitherto protecting his delicate eardrums from the sound of the explosions, were now occupied carrying him out of No Man’s Land and to what we hoped would be a place of safety.
Can we return to the days when Bonfire Night meant just that – one night? Set off your fireworks now or keep them until next year. If you let off as much as a banger on November 6 you get locked up.
And if we’re not going to have a guy on the top of our bonfires can we at least have some acknowledgement of the historical significance of the day?
What about burning the Houses of Parliament in effigy? A neat reminder to its present occupants of what might have been.


IT is often said that barristers do not ask a question in court that they don’t already know the answer to.
The theory being they like to know where the questioning is going.
Perhaps AMs would do well to take a leaf from their book.
Conservative Mark Isherwood has asked for an independent review of AMs’ workload after remarks made by Peter Hain.
Be careful what you wish for Mr Isherwood, you just might get it.
As a soft-handed journalist I’ll cast no aspersions about workload, but voters might think that an AM’s workload compares very favourably to their own.
And come to think of it – you asked for the job and all you need to do is ask the voters to sack you if you don’t like it.


I’VE figured out why we lost to the All Blacks.
Too much singing.
Not in the game that is, you can never have enough while the match is on to raise the spirits and so on, and boy did they need raising on Saturday.
But all this singing at the start.
First you get the New Zealand national anthem, which is fair enough, then the Haka, which, again is part of the grand occasion.
I do think it’s got a bit testosterone-driven though. If you see archive footage of its origins it was no more threatening than a bout of pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man.
But I digress.
Then we get Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau and there can be no more rousing sound than the massed choirs of the Wales fans singing that.
But then, instead of getting on with it when everyone is fired up, we have yet another song. Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer, led from the stands.
Just get on with it.
The great beauty of ‘Bread of Heaven’ as a rugby anthem is, like You’ll Never Walk Alone at the Kop, the way you just catch the first hints of the melody spontaneously starting in the crowd. Usually it’s when Wales are at their lowest ebb and need all the encouragement they can get.
Then gradually the rest of the crowd pick up the theme until it is being roared around the ground. Now that is inspiring.
They shot their bolt on Saturday before the match had even kicked off.
The next Six Nations looms, next time we should keep our powder dry until we need our best songs.

Banksy and Graffiti

Apologies to those of you who have arrived at this site expecting to find the graffiti artist who also goes by the name of Banksy.

I'm not him.

The little counter thingy in the bottom right tells me what people have searched for to get here and lots of them appear to be trying to find him, but instead they pitch up at the site of an intemperate, middle-aged Welsh hack.

The latest viewers looking for my namesake arrived here from the Kent Institute of Art and Design. I'm guessing that Welsh blather was not what they were looking for, which might explain the 0 seconds they spent here.

Anyway, I'm sorry, but I'm older than him, and Banksy was my nickname first, so the site's name stays.

Oh, and I thought his stuff on the wall in Israel was very good.