I mean, it’s just ghastly, isn’t it.
Of the alternatives I seen my favourite is this one - simple and stylish (and I’m not alone in thinking that - it won a BBC poll).
When I was at school, I wasn’t very good at sport and didn’t like it much either. Most games didn’t offer much in the way of get-outs, but as anyone who has ever watched a game of cricket knows, it generates a multitude of statistics, and so there is actually a role specially designed for academic and lazy boys who want to get out of physical activity, ie the scorer.
So as a result I got to sit at either (depending on how glamorous the school we were playing was) a table, or in a large scorebox, watching my school-fellows exhaust themselves running around the place.
The quid pro quo was that you did have to concentrate quite hard, not only watching intently everything that happened on the pitch so that you caught everything the batsmen were doing, at the same time as not taking your eyes off either umpire so as not to miss any casual signals, but also meticulously recording everything that happened in several places in the scorebook.
But I enjoyed the challenge and had a fun time doing it. I even - this will surprise some of my current colleagues - had a reputation for putting together a particularly neat and legible scorebook.
I know Freedom of Information is an important and serious topic and all that - but I did enjoy the news that one of the ‘vexatious’ questions that has been asked is “How much does the Foreign Office spend on Ferrero Rocher chocolates”!
I’ve often been challenged about what the actual purpose of Facebook is - for example by Duncan Brack and Jon Worth. Apart from the ability to take up lots of time, I’ve tended to scramble towards an answer something along the lines of it being a good way to keep vaguely in touch with people that you don’t want to speak to every day, and that I guess it could come into its own as a way of linking up with people you used to work with, go to university with, etc.
Well now it’s started - I was contacted a few weeks ago via Facebook by someone who I must have last seen when we were at school together in 1987. And then last week two people I knew at university but hadn’t seen since got in touch, and yesterday someone else I knew at school in the late eighties poked me. I don’t plan on revolutionising my life to incorporate these people into my circle of most intimate friends, but I’m glad to have heard from them.
Of course it does bring one of the perennial Facebook dilemmas closer. If people I used to get on with well ten years ago can track me down, then presumably so can those I didn’t”¦Of course there’s no reason why you have to sign people up as your friend if you don’t want to, but I find how to handle political antagonists a bit of a challenge. I don’t mean people in other parties, plenty of whom are my friends, but I have plenty of political acquaintances who I’d be quite happy to go for a drink with, but don’t particularly wish to share details of my latest status updates with. Social minefield, this social networking business”¦
It’s so unfair. There are some people in politics that I find comfort in not taking seriously - and then John Humphrys goes and gives me some reason to feel sorry for them.
He had Mr Cameron on his programme this morning to tackle him about his announcement about grammar schools (which the Today programme had decided - not necessarily wrongly, I suspect - was intended to be a deliberately-engineered “Clause 4″ moment. However if it is that then I think Cameron has mis-played it: Blair portrayed the change to clause 4 as a battle of principle and never attempted to belittle the depth of belief of those in his party he disagreed with; Cameron has been going round personally attacking his dinosaurs, for example saying this morning that they were “splashing around in the shallow end” of policy by supporting it).
But that wasn’t what annoyed me. Humphrys was on what he no doubt regards as fine form, ranting away, peppering his style of “neutral questioning” with side-digs at Cameron, with no attempt at a question or opportunity for DC to respond, and, of course, interrupting his interviewee constantly.
I really can’t stand Anne Atkins, and the rightwing nonsense drivel she comes out with on Thought for the Day on the Today programme. This morning her take on the Lucie Blackman case was, as far as I could tell, that the bloke accused should have been found guilty because (a) she was “young and beautiful” (her words) and (b) because her parents loved her very much.
I’m OK with the legal system displaying a bit of humanity where appropriate, but I am really not convinced that this a good solid basis for justice…
Last night I wandered out into the garden with my new camera - and right on cue, two robins came down to use the bird table (later joined by a couple of blue tits). So I was able to try out my new camera - while also proving that you can still find robins in a small urban garden not too far from the centre of London.
On Friday we went to see again Avenue Q - a great and curiously addictive musical which is quite different to your usual London musical! It rounds off a spring when I have for the first time in a very long time made the most of living in London to enjoy what’s available - other trips have included the Mousetrap (which I’d never seen before), La Boheme (again for the first time, at the ENO), the Gondoliers, the Marriage of Figaro, the very weird and depressing The Lighting Play at the Almeida theatre, Boeing Boeing, a great concert at the Barbican, and the really excellent and thought-provoking Frost/Nixon - and finally a very lively amateur performance of Anything Goes! in Cambridge.