Say you don’t know

Read The Economist’s article on The Future of Futurology (December 30, 2007), and in particular note the advice, “Think small, think short – and listen”. Some things don’t change: you will still (global warming notwithstanding) find Golden Plover on Dartmoor at this time of year. Other things you know will (more lap tops are sold now than desk top PCs). The difficulty is predicting what. The Economist’s third piece of advice, (the title to this post) is the one I use, even if it sounds somewhat negative when everyone else says they do! But as the Economist says, uncertainty looks smarter than ever before.

Historical error

Poor old David Starkey. Attributing a quotation to Goebbels, he has attracted a rash of letters in The Sunday Telegraph, castigating him both for his apparent criticism of the Sovereign (did Starkey really say, “I don’t think she’s at all comfortable with anybody intellectual. I think she’s got elements a bit like Goebbels in her attitude – you remember, he said: ‘Every time I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver’.”) and, worse for a historian, getting it wrong. It was said, apparently, either by Goering (I have always been told this) or by the German playwright Hanns Johst (who merely reached for the safety catch of his Browning). I have always rather liked the apparent retort, by whom I know not, “Everytime I hear the word gun, I reach for my culture”.

Opinion, not knowledge

Apparently, if experts are to be believed, coley tastes like cod (or so the Daily Telegraph reports today, ‘Cod diners to get a taste for Coley’). Quite how these experts arrived at this conclusion, and why we should take their word for it, I am not sure. Coley was a regular feature of school dinners when I was a child. That may have been quite a long time ago, but I can assure you that coley did not taste like cod then, and nothing will persuade me that it does now.

Why is Surrey so loathsome?

Perhaps not so much Surrey, as the people who choose to live there. First there was the furore in July over the purchase by an Armed Forces charity of a house close to the Headley Court Military Rehabilitation Centre, near Ashstead in Surrey. Now, if Boris Johnson is to be believed (The Spectator,15 – 29 December), a woman swimming at a public pool in Leatherhead berated 15 wounded soldiers and their trainers, because part of the pool had been roped off for them. This apparently prevented her from doing her daily laps. “I pay to come here, ” she is reported as shouting at them, “and you lot don’t”. Although one hopes that her problem was that she hadn’t engaged her brain before opening her mouth, I wouldn’t have money on it. There seems to be a deep current of hostility to the military, possibly because many people seem unable to separate their opposition to the war that the Blessed Tony took us into, and the men and women whose job it is to fight it for us. Thankfully the Surrey woman’s reaction contrasts vividly with the recent TV reports of the public lining the streets of Cardiff and other UK cities and towns, to welcome home returning troops.

Not now darling

From the FT today: “The latest debacle in the CGT saga lays bare the weakness and dysfunction at the heart of Gordon Brown’s government,” said George Osborne, shadow chancellor. Vince Cable, acting Liberal Democrat leader, added: “It’s a textbook example of how not to run the Treasury and make tax law.” And what was Gordon doing? Well, he was in Lisbon, late, signing the Treaty.