Kim Thomas

The two most predictable things you can say about the snowy weather

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:02:49 GMT

Based on a sample of comments on the Mail and Guardian websites -showing a rare unanimity - they are:

1. "One tiny bit of snow and the country grinds to a halt" - usually followed by a long rant. A variant on this is: "I live in Canada/Chicago/Switzerland and we can cope with the snow so why are the British so useless?"

2. "It must be global warming - LOL!"

Why do people bother writing this stuff? Why do I bother reading it? And where do these people come from anyway, these anonymous posters who want to share their deeply unoriginal thoughts with the world?

If only they could be persuaded to wear a t-shirt that reads: "I'm so stupid I think that a short spell of cold weather disproves the theory of man-mind climate change." Then you'd know who they were, so you could avoid them. Or shoot them.

So, farewell then Observer Woman…

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:42:53 GMT

I shall miss Observer Woman, even though I hated it while it was alive. I’ve never met anyone who liked Observer Woman, but we all used to read it avidly, presumably so we could enjoy the sensation of tsking and tutting and sighing over Sunday breakfast at what they’d come up with this time. (Is there, I wonder, a demographic that actively enjoys Observer Woman? Who thinks, “Oh good, just what I wanted – an article on whether it’s better to buy my jeans pre-ripped or not”? )

We all worry, those of us who couldn’t stand Observer Woman, about what will happen to Polly Vernon now. Is there any other publication that would tolerate a more-or-less endless stream of articles about drinking cocktails in bars? Among Polly fans (or detractors, as we’re also known), there were two articles that summed up the quintessential Polly: the one where she talked about how thin she was; the other about how she didn’t want children because women with children were such boring conversationalists. I know. It was tough, coming from Polly, whose ability to discourse on a vast range of subjects (thinness; fashion; cocktails) we all long to emulate.

So, farewell to Polly, and to Observer Music Magazine, and to Observer Sports Magazine – the latter a genuinely good read, to my mind, even though I have only the dimmest interest in sport.

But at least Observer Food Monthly remains, and so we’ll just have to sigh and tut at that instead, complaining about all the recipes we’ll never cook and the restaurants we’ll never go to and moaning about Alex James, the poor man’s Polly Vernon – someone who consistently manages to be slightly irritating on the subject of food but never truly makes you want to tear up the paper in rage.

Julie and Julia

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:41:50 GMT

I was trying to explain the plot of Julie and Julia to the OH over my latest cordon bleu offering (cheese baked potatoes): “It's about a woman who decides over the course of a year to cook every meal in Julia Child's book Mastering the Art of French Cooking and write about it every day in her blog.”

The look he gave me was probably best described as mid-way between bafflement and boredom. I can sort of see why: if you've never heard of Julia Child, or her book about cooking, and you're not interested in cooking yourself, and you're not a woman, then a story about a woman who does nothing more than cook the meals in a recipe book and write about them in her blog, probably sounds as compelling a plotline as one about a man who does nothing but go to Arsenal matches every weekend.

But I enjoyed Julie and Julia. It was a little arch, I suppose, but fun: I knew next to nothing about Julia Child before seeing it, so the storyline about her life was entertaining, and Meryl Streep, who played her, was at her finest and - in a very real sense - her Streepiest. Plus, there's always something gratifying about watching a complete beginner learn and perfect a skill, as fans of Strictly Come Dancing will testify.

The Julie plotline was more engaging than you might have expected, too; watching someone writing a blog rarely makes for gripping film, but her blog entries did go beyond (in the OH's words): "Blimey. Another rich meal". What bothered me a little was that the Julie character so precisely conformed to the prevalent Hollywood stereotype of modern young women: pretty, wide-eyed and slightly ditsy. (She has a particularly annoying habit of praising her husband for his “support”, when all he has to do is eat a delicious home-cooked French meal every evening. Surely not that onerous.) Now I don't know much about Julie Phillips, the original author of the blog the film is based on, but I'd bet my last dollar she's not ditsy. Ditsy people don't make good cooks, and in any case, after she finished her book, she went and trained as a butcher, which is surely not for the faint-hearted.

So here's the paradox: Julia Child, who lived in an era when women's lives were very restricted by social expectations, comes across as an independent-minded free-spirit: gauche, eccentric, and very much her own person; our modern woman, living at a time when women are free to do almost any job they choose, is portrayed as an identikit version of frothy girlishness that we've seen in almost every Hollywood romcom for the past 20 years. Odd.

iPhone excitement

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:21:47 GMT

From tomorrow, the iPhone will be available on Orange. I was terribly excited when this was announced, because I'd been anticipating it for ages. In fact, about 18 months ago, I was idly looking at the shelves in a branch of phones4u, when the assistant came over, and we had the following conversation:

Assistant: Can I help you?

Me: I'm just looking for now. I think I'll wait till the iPhone comes out on Orange.

Assistant: The iPhone will never come out on Orange.

Me: Oh really? Don't you think so?

Assistant: Definitely not. My colleague Tracey used to work for O2 and she can confirm it.

Tracey: Yes, that's right. Apple has renewed its contract with O2 and the iPhone will never be available on Orange.

Me: Hmmm. Oh well.

At this point, I smiled a knowing smile that aimed to convey the message, "But I am a technology journalist and have insider knowledge," even though this wasn't strictly true. It's just that anyone with a modicum of common sense could have worked out that O2 couldn't have exclusive rights to the iPhone for ever.

Anyway, now it's here, I'm not so sure. I like the idea of gadgets, but I'm also good at talking myself out of them. I've only ever owned two mobile phones; I was given my first one in 1999, and by the time it was stolen in 2006, it had acquired the status of retro-chic (or so I told myself). The second one is slightly less basic but is still clunky and old-fashioned compared to the new models. On the other hand, it allows me to make phone calls and send texts, and I don't need a phone that does anything else.

My problem, really, is this: now that everyone has an iPhone, I like being the person with a rubbish phone, just as I rather liked being the person with the 14-year old Ford Escort held together with bits of black tape.

As for the Kindle - finally available in the UK after what feels like years of waiting - I'm not sure I want one of those any more either. I love the idea of a Kindle, but would I really use one if I had one? I know exactly what I'll do: put off buying one until the price comes down and the technical hitches have been smoothed out, and by the time that happens, everyone else will have one, and the moment will have passed.

11 ways to miss the point on the Internet

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:59:22 GMT

I spend quite a lot of time arguing with people on the Internet. You could say that this is a waste of time, though whether it’s more or less of a waste of time than playing 30 consecutive games of Freecell (which was how I used to avoid working before the Internet came along) is debatable.

If you spend vast amounts of time engaged in discussion online, one of the things that becomes all too apparent is that rather a lot of people have no idea how to argue. They’re irrational, they’re angry and, above all, they miss the point. Over the years, I’ve come to realise that there are lots of different ways of missing the point on the Internet, so I’ve compiled a handy guide to the main ones:

1. Not understanding the difference between an article and a blog post. Despite the fact that blogs have now been around for at least 10 years, some people still seem unable to grasp the distinction between a newspaper article, on the one hand, usually well-researched (or at least researched) and with some attempt at balance and a blog post, usually a few hundred words long, designed to provoke comment, and dashed off in the lunch-break. “This is a terrible article,” people will write on a newspaper blog site. “It is just one person’s opinion.” [Yes, that’s the point of a blog.] “I never thought I would see the day when The Times published this kind of rubbish.” And so on.

2. Arguing that the writer should have written about something else. This is a category error similar to the above. People on The Guardian’s Comment is Free blog site often get very angry about light-hearted articles. Why isn’t The Guardian publishing serious articles? they ask indignantly. Well, they are…but here they’re publishing a light-hearted one. Any article about a typically women’s issue, such as domestic violence, will invariably draw responses castigating the writer for writing about women and failing to realise that bad things happen to men too.

3. Not understanding the limitations of wordcount. Some commenters think that an 800-word column or blog should say everything there is to say about a subject. “Why haven’t you included x, y or z?” they ask. This is usually followed by “You clearly have no knowledge of the subject at all.”

4. Using ad hominem attacks. This is the most common debating tactic on the Internet, if you can describe it as such. The less clever someone is, the more aggressive they tend to be, and the more unaware of their own intellectual limitations. The distinguished academic AC Grayling, professor of philosophy at Birkbeck, regularly attracts comments on the Guardian site such as “Your an idiot” and is frequently scolded for not knowing anything about philosophy. Some commenters are even kind enough to suggest reading material to him – because, obviously, as a professor of philosophy, he isn’t at all well-read.

5. Blaming the government for everything. If I had a pound for every time a commenter on the Daily Mail wrote, “It’s the result of 12 years of brainwashing from the NuLab PC brigade” I’d be, well, several hundred pounds better off. It’s not just the Daily Mail, of course – all the papers seem to attract this kind of comment. It’s extraordinary that, given the number of detractors the government has, and the near-certainty that it will lose the next election, it has been apparently so successful in brainwashing people into “political correctness”. “Political correctness,” incidentally, is used to cover a multitude of sins, but that’s a whole other blog post.

6. Missing the joke. If you’re a witty, nuanced writer, you must rue the day people were allowed to comment on articles. Can there be anything more dispiriting than discovering that the vast majority of your readers don’t get your jokes? It’s not just irony – which, it goes without saying, hardly anyone gets – it’s any kind of humour at all. The Times’s Daniel Finkelstein recently wrote a tongue-in-cheek piece on the Jan Moir/Stephen Gateley debacle. Finkelstein took Moir to task for her article’s “extraordinary statistical flaws”, such as generalising from a sample of two and failing to use a control group. One of the many comments to miss the point entirely was one that read: “I am surprised you gave the article some sort of gravitas by arguing there were statistical flaws.” I was tempted for a moment to explain the joke – that Finkelstein was poking fun at the article’s silliness by pretending to treat it as if it was a serious academic work – but decided against it. If you spent all your times explaining jokes to people on the Internet, you’d never have time for anything else.

7. Confusing a newspaper’s editorial line with the articles or blog posts on its website. Commenters on Comment is Free often seem to get very angry or confused when the site publishes an article with a right-wing perspective. Oddly, this is true as much of the right-wing commenters as the left-wing ones - they seem offended that The Guardian isn’t conforming to stereotype, even though the paper has always published articles by people from across the political spectrum, and Comment is Free has a particularly diverse range of writers. On the Guardian site, some commenters assume that everyone else who posts must be a loyal Guardian reader, and so use the sneering ad hominem “guardianista” to attack anyone who disagrees with them – or, even, sometimes anyone who agrees with them, as in “Who’d have thought the guardianistas would take such a tough line on crime?” When you’re reduced to attacking people who agree with you, then you probably need to go back to secondary school.

8. Generalising on the basis of one’s own experience. Particularly prevalent in education debates, where people will write, “I went to a grammar/comprehensive/private/faith school and it was excellent/rubbish, therefore all grammar/comprehensive/private/faith schools are excellent/rubbish.”

9. Using “middle-class” as an insult. This is really a subset of point 4, but common enough to deserve a separate point. Accusing someone of being “middle-class” or claiming that they only hold their particular views because they are “middle-class” is the worst thing you can say to anyone on the Internet.

10. Insulting everyone else who has posted on an article. So, in the middle of an animated debate, someone will come along and say, “YOU GUYS ARE A BUNCH OF LOSERS. YOU HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO DO THAN CARRY ON WITH YOUR STUPID POINTLESS ARGUMENTS. GET A LIFE, LOSERS.” This is a curiously self-defeating argument since, if you think that commenting on this post is pointless, then why are you commenting on it? Quite often, this is a tactic deployed by American posters on British blogs: “Jeez, things are so bad in England now, you guys have a bunch of weird obsessions, so glad I don’t live over there.” This will usually be followed by an attack on Britain’s “socialist” health system, its policy of killing babies, its refusal to allow people to defend themselves by carrying weapons, and its utter capitulation to Muslim dominance.

11. Insulting everyone on the entire forum, not just this particular blog post. This is amusingly parodied by Nick Hornby in Juliet, Naked, in which an Internet forum dedicated to the music of (fictional) singer-songwriter Tucker Crowe is plagued by a commenter who keeps popping up to tell everyone that Tucker Crowe is rubbish and they should all listen to Morissey. I notice it most on The Times’s Alpha Mummy and SchoolGate blogs, where it’s surprisingly common for someone to turn up and say, “I’m so glad I’ve decided not to have children. I’d hate to end up like you lot.” Presumably they spend the rest of their day going onto chess blogs to insult chess players, golfing blogs to insult golfers, and so on.

So, that’s my 11 ways of missing the point. Have I forgotten anything?

Words that should be banned (4): infinitely

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:29:51 GMT

These days “infinitely” is generally used as an impressive-sounding synonym for “much”, as in “A is infinitely preferable to B” or “X is infinitely superior to Y.”

Here on earth, however, you’d be hard pushed to find something that really was infinitely better than something else. The Beatles are not infinitely better than the Rolling Stones. Deep-fried chips are not infinitely better than oven chips. Martin Amis is not infinitely better than Dan Brown.

A good example of how “infinitely” is misused can be found in last week’s review by The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis of a Robbie Williams concert. Petridis writes: “The tabloids, overlooking the point that his defiant oddness might be what makes Williams infinitely more interesting then your average pop star…”

Hmmm. I think the word he’s looking for there is slightly.

Teaching: not the job it once was

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:13:59 GMT

Yesterday, when I was reading the Times Educational Supplement, I had one of those “Is it just me?” moments.

If you read comments on the education stories in the Mail, or on the Times’s Schoolgate blog, it won’t take long to discover that lots of people regard teachers as lazy, feckless, ideologically-blinkered and only in the job for the long holidays.

Reading the TES provides an interesting counterbalance to that. A lot of it is taken up with education news and information about professional development, but every so often you get a hint of the darker side of teaching. One such comes in the form of a teacher-authored column entitled “My Worst Parent”: if you hadn’t already worked out that teaching isn’t quite the profession it was forty years ago, that would give you a big clue.

In this week’s column, the anonymous teacher recounts finishing his year group assembly to be greeted by his headteacher telling him, “Mr Wilson is here to see you about Justin.”

As the teacher walks up to Mr Wilson, the head whispers, “By the way, he’s armed.”

The headteacher then walks off, leaving the teacher to take Mr Wilson to his office. Mr Wilson, it turns out, has a large kitchen knife concealed up his sleeve. In the column, the teacher then recounts amusingly how he persuades Mr Wilson to put the knife down before engaging him in an amicable conversation about his son.

So here’s my question: is it just me, or is teaching the only profession where a senior manager would allow an armed person to walk onto the premises and have a one-on-one conversation with a member of staff? Is there any other profession where such an incident would be used as the basis for a humorous column rather than a reason to walk out of your job and sue for constructive dismissal? Because if there is, I’d love to know what it is.

A visit to Geel

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:58:39 GMT

After visiting Banneville-La-Campagne Cemetery in Normandy last year to see my Uncle Dai’s grave, I started thinking that it would be a good idea to visit the Belgian cemetery where his brother Cliff is buried. Cliff was killed five weeks after Dai and, as far as I’m aware, the only family members ever to have visited his grave were my parents, in 1981. (Cliff’s own parents could never have afforded to travel abroad.)

So last Saturday, my 10-year old and I made our journey. Geel is off the beaten track, as far as tourism goes. None of the guidebooks I consulted mentioned the town at all, and only one even made reference to Belgium’s Second World War cemeteries. The train ride, which involved a tranquil journey through miles of picturesque Belgian countryside, reminded me of what rail travel in Britain used to be like before overcrowding, mobile phones and endless delays. (Though I’m not really sure this time ever existed outside of my imagination.)

We arrived about mid-day. Geel station is a small, old-fashioned, two-platform affair, the sort of station that always reminds me of Edward Thomas’s poem, Adlestrop, and thus, inevitably, of Dannie Abse’s parody, Not Adlestrop. (A literary education can be a curse in this respect: there are times when I’d just rather think, “Oh, what a nice small station.”)

There was a taxi rank but, it turned out, no taxis. The clerk in the ticket office didn’t speak English, I don’t speak Dutch, and when I said “taxi?” to him, he simply pointed at a phone number on the wall. I’d already established from a phone call to the tourist office that there were no buses to the cemetery, so we had to walk.

Luckily, this was an eventuality I’d prepared for, with a little help from Google Maps. It seems amazing to me that, sitting at a computer in Hertfordshire, you can print out precise, accurate directions from Geel station to Geel war cemetery – directions that give you the length and time it takes to walk each stage of the journey, with a little map to accompany each stage.

And so we walked, in the warm mid-day sun, for half-an-hour, until we arrived at the cemetery. It’s a low-key affair, cited incongruously in a quiet residential area, with no sign to announce its status as a war cemetery. There’s not even a wall, or a gate: you just walk in, off the pavement.

There are only 400 men buried at Geel, and we found Cliff’s grave easily enough. To my surprise, it had no inscription on it, just his name, age (30), regiment and date of death. Almost all the war graves have a few words, chosen by relatives, on the headstone. But Cliff’s headstone was blank, and I’ve been wondering ever since why his parents hadn’t written anything for him – whether, perhaps, they just didn’t have the words.

While we were there, we looked at the other graves. The men buried at Banneville had all died between June and August 1944; in Geel, they all died in September and October. Each war cemetery, I realised, represents a stage in the Allies’ progress as they marched through France, then through Belgium and into Holland.

A look at the visitors’ book showed that Geel cemetery is largely left alone by the outside world. Banneville receives visitors most days, and in the summer it sees several visitors a day. But in the period from August 2008 to now, there were only about 60 entries in the Geel visitors’ book – just one or two a week.

The idea behind the war cemeteries was that men should be buried alongside their fallen comrades, rather than brought home (though no doubt the cost would have been a factor too). But I felt sad that in 65 years, Cliff, who died unmarried and childless, has been visited only twice, and that in this tiny corner of Belgium, he lies almost, but not quite, forgotten.

What's the point of hardbacks?

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:05:47 GMT

A bit stuck for something to read, I went into town today to visit our local bookshop. There’s never a great range to choose from, but today was particularly frustrating. There were several books I’m keen to read – Juliet, Naked (the new Nick Hornby, published yesterday), Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel and The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, among them.

But they’re all in hardback. And the price is ridiculous – the Hornby book is £18.99, and though our bookshop is offering it at a £3 discount, that’s still pretty steep. The others were similarly priced. The paperbacks will cost less than £10, but The Little Stranger, for example, doesn’t come out in paperback until April next year – 10 months after first publication.

It isn’t just the price, it’s the format. You can carry a paperback around in your handbag or read it in bed. Hardbacks are much too heavy to carry anywhere and are awkward to hold – my copy of the 600-page-long Austerity Britain is a hardback, and it’s taken me several weeks to complete the first volume because my opportunities for reading it are limited.

What’s the point? I understand that publishers get two lots of publicity for their books, but I can’t believe it makes that much difference. If you’re that excited by the reviews of the hardback, you’ll be more tempted to take the book out from the library. And if you’re just mildly interested, then you might have forgotten all about it by the time the paperback comes out.

It’s not even as if hardbacks sell that well – most will only sell a few hundred copies. Admittedly, if the book is shortlisted for a major prize, that will change: Wolf Hall has apparently sold 20,000 copies while the Little Stranger has sold 33,000. But imagine how much better sales would be if publishers capitalised on that shortlist position now, and published in paperback.

And now I’m off to the library…

Do they mean us?

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 09:56:29 GMT

Much of the debate on healthcare reform in the US has focused on the supposed failings of the NHS – as opposed to the real failings, that is. Most people who live in Britain have a grumpy story about the NHS, but it comes as a surprise to find, for example, that it refuses to treat elderly people with serious illnesses on the grounds that it’s not worth the cost. The NHS stands accused by its critics of being both a socialist organisation, treating everyone equally regardless of their financial standing, and a Nazi one, ruthlessly denying treatment to certain groups on eugenicist grounds. Quite a feat.

But it’s worth remembering that not everyone greeted the NHS with delight when it was founded. David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain provides a snapshot of people’s feelings at the time, through the observations of JG Ballard, visiting Britain in 1946 after spending the war in a Japanese civilian camp:

“All these middle-class people, my parents, friends and relations and the like, were seething with a sort of repressed rage at the world around them. And what they were raging against was the post-war Labour government. It was impossible to have any kind of dialogue about the rights and wrongs of the National Health Service, which was about to come in, they talked as if this Labour government was an occupying power, that the Bolsheviks had arrived and were to strip them of everything they owned.”

In the face of so much opposition (from doctors too, of course), it seems astonishing that the NHS ever came into being, let alone that it worked so well. I wish President Obama luck in pushing his reforms through: he will certainly need it.

Top tip for staying sane

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 19:30:55 GMT

This is my number one tip: never ever read the online comments on a Daily Mail article.

Sadly, this tip is no use to me because I am drawn to online comments as a moth to the flame. Today's particular gem was a story about the fact that Lloyds TSB runs special bank accounts for Muslims. The story says that if you go overdrawn on a normal Lloyds TSB current account, you pay £200. If you go overdrawn on the sharia-compliant one, you only pay a management fee of £15.

The reason Lloyds TSB offers a special account for Muslims (which is also open to non-Muslims) is that charging interest on loans is not allowed under Islam. Lots of banks offer a similar service. The story is followed by howls of outrage of the "political correctness gone mad" variety:

"all lloyds tsb customers should close there accounts and leave this stupid bank, their should not be rules for one relgion and a different one for everyone else. what is this country coming to. if i was a customer i would be so angry"

"It is time that there is true EQUALITY in England and that everyone was subject to the same terms and conditions. This is a DISASTER WAITING TO HAPPEN. Equality means just that, everyone should be treated equally."

"If this is true and this bank is discriminating against me as a non Muslim I will close my account, and I hope millions of others do the same."

And my favourite:

"Another example of the crazy PC system which NuLabour has introduced and encouraged."

(I missed the moment when the government introduced a "crazy PC system".)

All this righteous anger turns out to be over a story that isn't really a story at all. A point that the Mail reporter curiously neglected to mention (surely by oversight) is that interest is not paid when the account is in credit. So anyone who wants to open an "Islamic" account at Lloyds TSB can do so, as long as they don't mind never receiving interest.

I am sure Lloyds TSB will be delighted by the rush: from the point of view of a bank, a customer who doesn't want to be paid interest is probably the very best kind of customer to have.

A-level results: the surprising truth

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 12:43:48 GMT

It's a startling fact, but true: although more and more people pass A-levels every year, they're all female and all attractive, as evidenced by the pictures in these reports from the BBC , the Independent, The Guardian, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph.

Astonishing, when you think about it.

Why I accepted my OBE

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:17:30 GMT

Every now and then, Comment is Free produces a thread that is a joy from start to finish. One such follows an article by the self-styled Marxist feminist republican Beatrix Campbell entitled Why I Accepted My OBE.

There, I probably don't need to tell you anything more. Read, and enjoy.

This Thing of Darkness

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:53:12 GMT

Not for the first time, I find myself at odds with the general view of a book. If you look at the Amazon reviews This Thing of Darkness by the late Harry Thompson, they’re mostly five-star raves – “the best book I have ever read” is a typical comment.

What puzzles me is the unanimity. This Thing of Darkness is 700 pages, a length to tax the most dedicated reader. And usually, I am that reader. I can persist where others fail – Daniel Deronda held no fears for me. But I appear to have been the only person completely bored by This Thing of Darkness, the only person to have heaved a huge sigh of relief as I put it down for the last time.

On the face of it, This Thing of Darkness has a fascinating subject: three fascinating subjects, in fact. It deals principally with the career of Robert Fitzroy, a remarkable man who, while still in his 20s, captained the Beagle on the voyage that took Charles Darwin to the Galapagos Islands and elsewhere. Not only that, but Fitzroy was also a brilliant mapmaker and the man who invented the shipping forecast (an innovation for which he was mocked and derided while alive, even though it was ultimately to save thousands of lives).

The second subject, of course, is that of Darwin himself, and the process by which he came to develop the theory of evolution by natural selection. Large chunks of the novel are taken up with arguments between him and Fitzroy about subjects such as whether the Biblical Flood really happened, and whether acquired characteristics can be passed to the next generation.

The third subject is British colonialism: a shocking, depressing and yet potentially engrossing story about how the British destroyed native populations – either intentionally, by shooting every man, woman and child; or unintentionally, by sending out missionaries who introduced diseases such as measles, which could wipe out every single inhabitant of a region.

The book fails (to my mind), principally because it can’t do justice to three big subjects in one volume. But it also fails because it lacks the key ingredient of a good novel, namely suspense: This Thing of Darkness merely recounts one event after another, at tedious length. Thompson must have done masses of research – on naval conditions in the 19^th century, on Darwin, on Fitzroy, on social history, on evolutionary debate, on the history of British imperialism – and he seems to have included every bit of it in the book.

And then there’s the characterisation and dialogue, which is unbelievably clunky and unconvincing. I’m sure Darwin and Fitzroy did have long conversations about evolution but I can’t believe they both kept to fixed, unchanging positions: the same argument is repeated again and again, and it’s particularly dull if you happen to know the answer (which, surely most readers would) to the question of why different countries are inhabited by different species.

I consulted the reviews from the time of publication, and discovered that Ruth Padel wrote in The Times that This Thing of Darkness “doesn’t work as a novel”. That was exactly my view. But I’m still mystified as to what everyone else saw in it.

Thank you, Darling

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:23:47 GMT

I’ve been driving the same car for 10 years now. It was four years old when I bought it, which in car years means it’s the equivalent of about 89.

We’d been thinking about getting rid of it for a while, and replacing it with something a bit swisher, maybe two or three years old. The distance between thinking about something, and deciding to do it, and then between deciding to do it, and actually doing it, is quite long in this household, so by March, we were still in the vague “must get another car” stage. Happily, this coincided with Alastair Darling announcing in his budget that anyone who scrapped a car that was more than 10 years old would be given £2000 to buy a new one.

Imagine it! The government handing out free money. More particularly, imagine the government handing out money to a very small, select group of people, one of whom is me. It’s as if he’d announced he was giving £2,000 to Welsh people with short brown hair and Ph.Ds in the social sciences.

The upshot is that for the first time in my life, I’m getting a brand new car. It’s a Toyota Yaris TR3 (I have no idea what that means either) and I’m going to take delivery of it in about six weeks’ time. I’m not really one to get excited about cars, but after 10 years of driving the Escort, preceded by eight years of driving a very basic Fiesta*, it feels, well, quite nice. And how kind of the chancellor to think of me when he had so many other pressing issues on his mind.

* The Fiesta model was called the Fiesta Popular Plus. It had a 950cc engine, three doors, a manual choke, manual windows, no reversing lights, no central locking and no passenger wing mirror. We often used to wonder what the “Plus” referred to.

Britain's Got Talent. Allegedly.

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 13:14:33 GMT

Until last Thursday, I was one of the few people in the country who had never seen Britain’s Got Talent. I’ve never seen The X-Factor or The Apprentice either – as the newspapers are always stuffed to the gills with stories about reality tv, I feel you don’t need to watch these programmes to know what’s going on in them. And in any case, I just can’t be bothered – my preferred method of wasting my time is to argue with complete strangers on the Internet.

But the mysteries of genetics are such that, whereas I struggle to watch three hours of tv a week, my daughter can watch that much before breakfast. And so it was that last Thursday, while we were enjoying a brief break at a hotel in Brighton, my daughter asked to watch BGT, and, for want of anything better to do, I agreed.

The first thing that surprised me was how dismal some of the acts were. A septuagenarian breakdancer? A grandfather/granddaughter singing act, only one half of which could sing in tune? A dancing dog? I knew BGT had a reputation for novelty acts, but this was the semi-final, for goodness’ sake.

The second surprising thing was how generous the judges were. I kept waiting for Simon Cowell to be mean to someone, and he wasn’t. Compared with Mickie Most in his New Faces heyday, the judges were pussycats (especially the bland-faced Amanda Holden who, puzzlingly, seems to be modelling herself on Betty Draper from Mad Men).

The whole business struck me as rather sad. It rapidly became clear that no self-respecting adult with an ounce of genuine talent would want anything to do with the show, which means that the acts fall into three categories:

Novelties and freaks
Children (for whom self-respect is largely an alien concept, bless 'em)
Adults who are long past the age when they might have expected to become successful and are therefore desperate enough to throw all self-respect to the wind

Suggestions that you should therefore ban children or vulnerable people from taking part miss the point: if you excluded the very young and the psychologically damaged, all you’d have left is the dancing dog and the 73 year old breakdancer. And who’s going to watch that?*

* Lots of people, obviously. But not me.

On the Internet, nobody has a sense of humour

Fri, 22 May 2009 11:23:57 GMT

It’s true, though, isn’t it? I’ve kind of got used to the fact that most people who post comments on Internet forums or newspaper articles can’t spell, or punctuate, or construct a grammatically correct sentence, or follow a logical argument. But I’m still constantly amazed by the number of people who don’t get even simple jokes.

I long ago realised that most people don’t get irony. Joe Queenan regularly writes heavily ironical comment pieces for The Guardian, which are generally met with bafflement and outrage by posters on Comment is Free. His biggest failure in this regard was an article called How satire changed the course of history – a satirical piece that argues that the role of satire in influencing political opinion is overstated, an argument that fell on resolutely stony ground. In fairness you could argue that the entire article is self-defeating and Queenan deserved what he got (mostly abuse).

It’s Caitlin Moran I feel sorry for. In addition to her very funny column in The Times, she writes occasionally posts for AlphaMummy, an ironically-titled (I hope, anyway), blog aimed at working mothers. Her posts are generally amusing snippets of family life, and they are actually funny in a true-to-life way, as opposed to the “Oh, look at ditsy old me, I’ve gone out in my business suit with baby sick on my shoulder” kind of humour that tends to pervade the working mummy genre of journalism.

But hardly any of the people who post comments get the jokes. This week she wrote a short piece called “The worst thing I ever heard a child say” , about a girl in the school playground who wouldn’t let the other children join in a game unless they had Sky Plus. Caitlin refers to the girl as “Barbara” (“I like to refer to all bad children as 'Barbara’”) and says that after her daughter related the incident to her, she “sat both the kids down, read them the entire works of Marx, and then made them say ‘Barbara is a pitiful, corrupt, running dog of capitalism’ nine times before bed.”

This prompted a series of comments on the following lines:

This is very unfair to people called Barbara. What have you got against the name “Barbara”?
You are just a Murdoch lackey trying to promote Sky Plus.
Only working-class people have Sky Plus, so you/Barbara have got it all wrong.
Socialism is evil.

My favourite comment, I think, was “I assume the bit about Marx is a joke. How sad would you be if you were indoctrinating marxism to carefree children.”

Oh yes, indeed. Either it’s a joke or Caitlin Moran really read the entire works of Marx – including the three volumes of Das Kapital, the Communist Manifesto, the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and the rest – to her two primary age children. In one evening.

So, poor Caitlin Moran. It must be really dispiriting to write something you think hits exactly the right note – light, funny, mildly self-deprecating – only to discover that no-one gets the joke.

Failing the reasonableness test

Fri, 15 May 2009 14:01:13 GMT

Which is your favourite MPs’ expenses story? Is it the moat, the tennis court, the Aga or the payments for the non-existent mortgage?

Let’s face it, we’re spoilt for choice. But my favourite so far, for sheer chutzpah, is that of husband-and-wife team Andrew McKay and Julie Kirkbride. lHe said that his family home in Redditch was his main place of residence, and so claimed for mortgage payments on his London flat. She said the London flat was her main place of residence, and claimed for mortgage payments on the Redditch house. Not just mortgage payments of course, but beds, carpets, cleaners, curtains and food.

Mr McKay told the papers: “This was all transparent, it was all approved and until it was drawn to my attention, it did not occur to me that it didn’t pass the reasonableness test.”

Lovely, isn’t it? It didn’t occur to him. Perhaps at his school they didn’t learn the difference between right and wrong. Or perhaps he’s just not very bright.

McKay and Kirkbride aren’t the only husband-and-wife team to have difficulty understanding “reasonableness”, however. According to the Mail, other couples are struggling with the concept too. How strange that these people with their fine public school educations and Oxbridge degrees seem to have trouble with such a simple idea.

Misery, and yet more misery

Tue, 12 May 2009 13:08:15 GMT

Now must be one of the worst times ever to be a journalist. On Journobiz over the past few weeks, people have been sharing their horror stories, such as:

· Magazines closing

· Sections on The Guardian and other newspapers putting a freeze on freelance commissions

· Publications reducing their fees

The latest story was of someone receiving a freelance commission on a newspaper supplement, only to have it cancelled because the supplement hadn’t received enough advertising, and was therefore cutting some of its content.

So freelancers are suffering from a two-pronged attack: there are fewer commissions to be had, and because staffers are being made redundant, there are more journalists chasing them.

The interesting question is whether it’s all going to get better when the downturn ends, or whether it’s a long-term trend. Unfortunately, the problem predates the recession – the recession has simply made it worse. It probably seemed like a good idea for newspapers to make their content freely available online, but the subsequent drop in sales of, and advertising revenue from, print editions hasn’t been matched by an increase in advertising revenue from online editions. The decline in income might be reversed if newspapers decide to start charging for access to online content, as Rupert Murdoch has announced he plans to do with News International publications. Then again, it might not.

In the words of Private Frazer, WE’RE ALL DOOMED. And nice to see that someone has set up this blog in acknowledgement of the fact.

Jade Goody and the ill-informed cervical cancer campaign

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:27:36 GMT

The response to Jade Goody’s death has, predictably, been split between the mawkish and the cruel. So on the one hand, you have people who never knew her writing messages about angels in heaven and leaving flowers outside her house (why? why?); and on the other, you have other people who also didn’t know her lining up to tell you that they don’t care one iota and she was a nasty piece of work, anyway. What kind of person is it who feels such a need to speak ill of the dead that they go onto the Internet to broadcast their feelings to the world? Both responses are two sides of the same coin: an inability to distinguish between reality and soap opera. Goody’s illness and death have been treated as if they belonged to a character in EastEnders, not a real 27-year old woman.

The worst aspect of all this, though, is the way that, as usual, the media has seized on an atypical occurrence to whip up support for a cause of dubious value – in this case, the idea that regular cervical screening should be made available on the NHS to women under 25.

It sounds so good, doesn’t it? We can all tut in outrage at the failure of the NHS to save lives by refusing to screen under-25s. Yet another example of this penny-pinching government’s desire to save money, we moan. In fact, the truth is much more complicated – as it is with virtually every kind of screening you care to name, including screening for breast cancer and prostate cancer.

Cervical cancer is relatively rare: it kills 1000 women a year in the UK. (That compares with 12,000 breast cancer deaths and 35,000 lung cancer deaths annually.) Fewer than 10 of those are women under the age of 25. About 20 of those are women aged between 25 and 30. The group that has most deaths (more than 100) is the over-85s.

Think about how much it would cost to screen all those thousands of young women, and the needless treatment of abnormalities that would never have developed into cancer (young women are much more likely to have “false positive” outcomes than older women from screening) – all in order to save 10 lives. Then think of all the other ways that money could be spent, whether it’s educating people about how to protect themselves against the risk of cancer, or providing better care for people who are genuinely sick. It’s a no-brainer, isn’t it?

Sign of the times?

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 09:38:37 GMT

Went into the town centre on Saturday for the usual weekly shop. As I was walking over to John Lewis to buy a birthday present, my attention was caught by a long queue of people lined up in the street. In Hertfordshire town I live in, events that are interesting enough to attract a queue are rare. Indeed, the last time I remember seeing a queue of any length round here was in 2002 when the refurbished Early Learning Centre was opened by someone wearing a Bob the Builder outfit.

So what was it? Perhaps a new shop had opened? Perhaps Bob the Builder had returned?

No. The queue, of about 30 or 40 people, was outside the recruitment agency – a place so small and unobtrusive that most of the time you’d barely register its existence.

Half an hour later, when I walked back from John Lewis, the queue was still there.

The Myerson family: oh dear

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:13:16 GMT

They’re a rum bunch, aren’t they, the Myersons? It beats me why anyone would think it’s a good idea to publish a book about their teenage son’s drug problem. Or why they would be surprised when the son tells his side of the story to the papers. Perhaps Julie Myerson has been writing about her children for so long without any consequences that she didn’t realise that when they reached adulthood, they would bite back.

Ignoring the famous advice of Denis Healey – “When you’re in a hole, stop digging” – the Myersons have continued to make it worse for themselves. Yesterday, in The Guardian, Jonathan Myerson told us he published the book because it was an “emergency”. It’s a train of reasoning you’d only ever find in the liberal middle classes: “It’s an emergency – write a book!”

In the Mail, meanwhile, Jake Myerson has been laying his mother’s faults bare. One of the diversions of this sorry business has been the transformation of the drug-addled Jake, in the columns of the Mail, into a vulnerable youth, the innocent victim of his liberal mother’s bad parenting. (Presumably this is because the broadsheets had already bagged Julie’s side of the story, leaving the Mail to fill the unlikely role of drug addicts' champion.)

The only reason this has all got out of hand is the Internet. Years ago, the book would have been published, there would have been a tut-tutting column or two and a couple of letters to the paper. Now it all drags on, with hundreds of comments on the Guardian blogs, the Mail site, the Times’s AlphaMummy site, the Mumsnet forum (the Mumsnet discussion is quite glorious) and so on. Jake Myerson apparently has a supporters’ group on Facebook, while someone is gleefully parodying Julie on Twitter.

I have to confess that I have long harboured a very mild dislike for Julie Myerson, mainly because I once went to see her give a book reading with Esther Freud. I’d read the first two of Myerson’s novels, which I thought were OK, if a bit insipid and bloodless. Someone asked Myerson to name her favourite authors, and she said, “I tend to like writers girls aren’t supposed to like – people like John Updike and Philip Roth.” It was that fey use of the word “girls” that did it for me – she must have been in her late 30s at the time. Also, I didn’t see why she couldn’t just have said “Margaret Atwood and Anne Tyler”, like any normal woman.

I can see now that it wasn’t quite enough to justify a 10-year antipathy towards someone. But I at least I can bask in the feeling that I've been proved right all along.

Bridgend: a year on

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:55:14 GMT

An excellent article by Carole Cadwalladr in yesterday's Observer about the reporting of the Bridgend suicides. She made all the points I've been banging on about: the confusion of Bridgend the town with Bridgend the county borough; the lurid and inaccurate claims that the suicides were linked to an Internet death cult; the unnecessary details given about the method by which people chose to kill themselves, which almost certainly led to more copycat suicides. More worryingly, she also suggests that the reporting may have had a wider impact beyond Bridgend. Here's the relevant paragraph:

'Perhaps the most disquieting thing about the Bridgend cluster, and the aspect of it that has so far been ignored, is that it is unlikely to have been confined to Bridgend. "People have a greater understanding of what a cluster is now," says Anne Parry of Papyrus. "But they misunderstand it. They think it's a collection of people in a geographical area over a finite period of time. Whereas in fact it can travel across every form of barrier. We know from celebrity copycat suicides that geography is no boundary, or even time."'

If true, it's chilling. The press have a lot to answer for.

I love Lucy Kellaway

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 12:50:03 GMT

The FT's Lucy Kellaway is probably my favourite columnist. This is because of two simple virtues:

a. She knows what she's talking about
b. She writes very nicely

Her column on a Monday comes as such a relief if you've spent the previous day sighing and tutting at the columnists in the Sundays (as I usually have).

Her piece today is on a subject she excels at: business language. Entitled "Management metaphors are out for the count", it takes apart all those ridiculous metaphors beloved by management gurus: management as sport, management as music, management as animal behaviour. Of a recent article in the Harvard Business Review that adopts boxing as a metaphor for management, she writes:

"The HBR doesn’t mention any of the things about boxing that immediately come to my mind when I think of it. In boxing, you get beaten to a pulp – which must ring a bell with anyone who is now working on the economic front line. In boxing, you are quite likely to wind up with brain damage if you go on doing it for long enough – and, if things get much worse in the economy, this too may come to ring a bell."

The rest is just as good. Read it here.

How much do journalists write?

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 13:45:08 GMT

Someone started an amusing thread on Journobiz the other day about fictional journalists and how they never seem to write anything. (My Journobiz colleague Sally Whittle has already blogged about this, but I suppose there’s no rule saying two people shouldn’t blog about the same subject. If only.)

Carrie Bradshaw inhabits a fabulous Manhattan apartment on the earnings apparently derived from one column a week. Sarah-Jane Smith in The Sarah-Jane Adventures carries out the occasional investigation but never files any copy. George Clooney as a foreign correspondent in The Good German isn’t seen writing anything at all. In fact, nobody came up with an example of a fictional journalist who has anything like a realistic workload.

I suspect this leads people to underestimate how much work journalists do, and therefore overestimate how much they get paid. I don’t have any evidence for this (I don’t go round asking my friends “how much work do you think I do?”) but from occasional remarks I think people imagine journalists writing a couple of leisurely features a month. (People assume, for example, that when you complain you have a deadline pressing down on you, it’s because you’ve left the work until the last minute, when in fact it’s because you’ve had deadlines stacked up next to each other for several weeks.)

So, if you’re interested, I reckon the average freelance journalist (by average, I mean “me”) writes about 2,000 to 3,000 words a week. That covers a multitude of sins, of course, such as feature-writing, news-writing and corporate copywriting. Some weeks you write much less, because you’re interviewing for one piece or setting up interviews for the piece after that, but equally there are weeks you write more.

For staff journalists on a weekly or daily publication, it can be much more pressured: you may be expected to knock something out in a couple of hours, often on a subject you know nothing about. (A staff writer on The Independent told me she was expected to write 1000 words a day.) When readers complain that a journalist hasn’t done their research properly, the reason is usually because the journalist has had to produce a 1000 words in the short space available between writing two other 1000-word features on completely different subjects.

You can see why representations of fictional journalists are so unrealistic, though. A tv programme based around someone sitting at their desk all day, eating biscuits, making phone calls and typing furiously as the clock makes its way towards 5pm (in my case, 3pm) just wouldn’t be very gripping.