Doug Kelly for the LHWs

I have not said anything much about bodybuilding for some time. Although we, in The Forest Gym, have had a reduction in members willing to compete - credit crunch and all that - we have had an increase in actual members. At the same time, our manager has been getting many visitors asking for his help in contest preparation and we have seen some impressive physiques visiting us throughout the year. None has impressed me more than Doug Kelly and I predict a definite top three finish in the Light Heavyweight Class at the British Finals next month.

I remember Doug Kelly from the first time I saw him at the Leamington Qualifier in 2004. This was the first time that I had seen Troy Brown as well. Both were entered in the U80 kg Class. Only a few weeks before, Troy had signed up with Big H to get help in his contest preparations. At that stage, there was not much that could be done other than to get into best condition for the show. Troy hardened up and came in 3rd. The winner was Michell Gosling and 2nd spot went to Doug Kelly. I said then that Troy should build some more mass and go into the U90 kg Class. In fact, he built a lot more mass - no longer inhibited by his attempts to stay below 80Kg. He became a HW and at 103 Kgs became overall British Champion in 2006.

Now Doug Kelly is going down the same road. At the moment he is a superb looking U90 Kg competitor and we will have to watch how he develops. I would not be surprised if he won his class in Nottigham and challenged for the overall spot. I hope to post a picture or two of him in his present condition - spot on - but we will wait until he has done the job at the finals.

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How Many Cubits In A Metre?

The answer to the above question is 2.187226597 and not a lot of people know that!

I don't know if I have mentioned it before but I am becoming increasingly annoyed by the slow, back-door metrication of Britain. The BBC and the politically correct newspapers are the chief culprits. Is it it a bit of under-hand government policy to soften us up for our accepting the Lisbon Treaty that we will not be allowed to vote on? They talk of km/h, not mph - which everyone uses. Fuel consumptions are given in km/litre - normal people use mpg - roughly speaking you can divide mpg by 3 and get km/litre with only a small error - again, not a lot of people know that.

Last night Charlie Boorman started another of his odd journeys, leaving Sidney to go to Tokyo - by any means. Again we were given distances in km as he travelled up the east coast of Australia. I know Australia has gone metric years ago - I think they did this just to spite Britain and get rid of the Imperial system - but, again, I found myself doing the mental conversion to miles.

On Time Team - not the BBC, I know - they also give us sizes and distances using metric units. Why? No one used metres on a single one of the sites they investigate. One loony on one TV channel doing a cricket commentary told us that a cricket pitch was 20 metres long. Of course it has always been 20 metres - or 22 yards - to be exact. We all know that 22 yards = 1 chain and 10 chains = 1 furlong and 8 furlongs = 1 mile. What can be simpler than that?

We could note also that 2 spans = 1 cubit and 2 cubits = 1 yard. There is no end of practical units that have stood the test of time. The cubit had its origins in Egypt 4500 years ago.

Newspapers like The Guardian and The Observer go metric - also to demonstrate their political correctness, to spite Britain and show their support for every nation on earth - except Britain. In my days working for a well-known international company in Crawley, we - the engineers and scientists employed in Crawley - noted how hard it was to get the senior management to take on any of our ideas but, "Come through the front door with a few sketches on the back of a fag packet and a foreign accent and we would buy it at once." It's the same with measurement. The old Imperial system was developed out of common sense measuring. The metric system was developed out of French bureaucratic thinking - and we all know where that can lead.

Which brings us back to the Lisbon Treaty.

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Question Time

Yesterday Question Time returned to BBC One TV after its summer rest. This autumn this programme is celebrating 30 years continuous broadcasting [excluding the annual holidays, etc]. It still has a long way to go before it approaches Any Questions, the similar programme on radio hosted by another of the Dimblebies [or is it Dimblebys] and which started in 1947 with Freddie Grisewood as the chairman. I used to enjoy watching Question Time but in recent years the programme has often been a bore because of the declining quality of the participants. It is not that high level politicians are missing; it is that too many of them are not much good. Last night was dragged to the lowest levels by the presence of Harriet Harman who is, I believe, deputy Leader of the Labour Party. Moulded by Blair, she sounds like the sort of person from whom you would not buy a second-hand car. She oozes insincerity, self-righteous arrogance, hypocrisy and vacuous party-political waffle - all at the same time. After 5 minutes listening to her I have to give up. Digby Jones was on the panel as well as Frazer Nelson [Ed of Spectator], David Laws [Lib-Dem MP] and Michael Heseltine. Michael Heseltine, at 76 much the oldest panel member was much the most impressive, since he could make valid points that rose above a lot of political point scoring - in his day, he was an excellent speaker. Indeed, it was easy to score political points here because that was all that the discussion amounted to. And this is what is wrong so much of the time. Harriet Harman was committed to defending the indefensible [her government] but Michael Heseltine was the only other participant with serious ministerial experience. I will discount the short period when Digby Jones was a trade minister.

All too often in recent years, the only time there is decent discussion on this programme is when the panel includes a number old stagers - like Tony Benn, David Steel, Chris Patten, Kenneth Clark, Michael Howard and a few others. They can speak clearly and with some authority. Another good performer has been Nicholas Soames. He rarely tries to make cheap political points and has been willing to accept the merits of an idea even when it was put forward by an opposition party. I feel that, to some extent, he can adopt such a free approach because he has a pretty rock solid political pedigree. He is the grand-son of Winston Churchill and the son of Christopher Soames who was a very creditable minister during the 1960s.

There was much discussion yesterday about Gordon Brown being snubbed by President Obama because they did not have a specific one-to-one meeting. So what? The Americans want to show their fundamental objection to the ridiculous release of the Lockerbie bomber. It may be that he was not guilty of the terrorist offence but, if so, this should have been proved in an open court - or was it not "convenient" to hear the evidence in open court? In any case, surely, Gordon Brown has a relationship with President Obama that allows them to talk on the phone whenever they want to and they meet whenever they need to. He has had several short chats with Obama in new York and they even managed, bizarrely, to slide off for a quick chat in the UN kitchens. That sounds more like a "special relationship" - if such exists - than any formal meeting would ever suggest. There is a very considerable advantage in having a common language.

Watching Brown on TV at these major international get-togethers he seems much more the professional statesman than he ever does at home. He is not a bad speaker and he does create an impression of consummate professionalism. So what goes wrong at home? I don't know. This government is awful but how much is Brown's fault and how much is the dead wood in the parliamentary party plus the debris of New Labour left by the sickly and ultimately demented Blair?

Footnotes and Parenthesis

As many of you will know, I have been working for some time on the history of my family. It is my hope, eventually, to glue everything together into a book. During my research I have read many books on English and Irish social history and in doing so I have developed a particular aversion to footnotes* and brackets [of all kinds].

Footnotes* are particularly annoying. I don't mind paragraphs being marked with a superscript number which refers to a list of references at the back of the book which serve to confirm the sources of the information. I do not like long rambling footnotes on each page. If something needs to be said in a rambling footnote, it should be written into the main text. If it can be omitted, then omit it.

I have just been reading a book on mid-Victorian Britain that was rendered unintelligible by strings of brackets - or parenthesis to be accurate. The book explained about many social costs for Britain [including Ireland] and parts of Europe [at least those bits that could directly affect Britain] for a period from 1851 to 1875 [although with some references to earlier and later periods] and the changing attitudes of society [mainly the upper and middle classes] to the working classes [and those parts of other classes that sometimes over-reached into the working classes]. As you can see [at least most of you can see] the net result [in most circumstances] is gibberish, although I rather get the impression [and it is no more than that] that the writer is incapable of sorting out his thoughts [except on the matter of the over use of brackets] and he gives little consideration to the poor reader [or the rich reader for that matter] who [when he may well be over-tired] has to make sense of the stuff. There is many a writer who could gain from reading Fowler's "Modern English Usage" and Sir Ernest Gowers more entertaining "The Complete Plain Words". Sir Ernest is quite clear with his advice. Parenthesis should be used sparingly. He is quite scathing in his criticism. "They enable the writer to dodge the trouble of arranging his thoughts properly." Sometimes the phrases can become so convoluted that all meaning is lost

There is much to be said for short sentences with clear meanings. And I will try to keep this principle permanently in my mind.

* Do not ignore this footnote.

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The Problems of Maradona

I have been a bit under the weather this week so I have not been keeping up-to-date with what's going on. I almost missed out on reports of the difficulties being faced by Diego Maradona who still has problems with the tax authorities in Italy. Perhaps Mr. Berlusconi could help him out? Maradona's problems relate to his time playing for Napoli between 1984 and 1991 and it is alleged that he still owes €37m of tax. In order to help him pay this small bill, the police have confiscated a pair of his ear-rings - valued at a about €4,000. On my reckoning, he needs to find another 9,250 pairs of ear-rings to be able to pay off the bill. Has he got so many? Who knows? Footballers do some odd things and I suppose that buying 9,000 or 10,000 pairs of ear-rings is not impossible.

But why does Maradona keep going to Italy. A few years ago, on a visit to the country, police took two Rolex watches - each worth €12,000. Common sense would suggest that it's a good idea to leave the jewellery at home whenever he visits. Apparently, he goes to Italy for treatment for his weight problems, drug use and stress. As coach of the Argentinian national team he is suffering a great deal of stress after a few less than brilliant results.

Can't he get treatment in some other country?

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What Is a Pension Worth?

There are signs that the government is coming round to acknowledging that after the next election [certainly not before] they will have to cut spending in order to try to balance the books. The Observer told us yesterday that one of the areas that will be looked at will be the cutting of handouts to rich pensioners. I am sure that I will be defined as a rich pensioner and, therefor, I will be able to look forward to a drastic cut in my very generous winter fuel allowance of £250 per year. Never mind, I will still have my even more generous state pension entitlement of £95.00 per week to help me get by. I am glad in a way that we have a state pension that is practically the worst in Europe because, if I had a decent pension, I would only waste the extra money on little luxuries. I say "practically the worst in Europe" because although Latvia [or is it Lithuania] and Malta provide lower pensions, the lower costs of living in those countries will get you more for your money.
As I was typing this, I have just realised that a banker who earns £1m per year and works 60 hours per week will "earn" £95.00 in 17 minutes; Frank Lampard at Chelsea F.C. will "earn" the same amount in less than 2½ minutes - assuming that he also slaves away for 60 hours per week. The picture above shows Frank celebrating the latest £95 contribution to his living wage.
If the government wants to cut spending they need a list of priorities and top of the list is the need to stop pointless legislation. This New Labour government has been suffering legislative diarrhoea for most of the last 12 years and many of the new regulations and laws are totally pointless. Socially and economically useless, they do nothing but funnel cash - our cash - down into the drains.
The next step will be to get rid of armies of advisers and quangos. We have in excess of 500,000 civil servants; why do we need to have quangos and consultants to advise them on everything from education to defence to law and order and etc, etc. There are even quangos that advise each other in self-perpetuating circles of paper pushing that require minimal input from anybody. One reason, of course, for all these quangos and consultants is to get rid of responsibility. Governments take credit for good weather but blame someone else for typhoons and hurricanes.
David "Call me Dave" Cameron has his own ideas, as well, starting with cutting the pay of ministers and MPs. Well, it's a gesture. Probably pointless and counter-productive but it will give him good headlines for a day or two.
Alex Salmond wants independence for Scotland. Who can blame him?
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Vetting

How many times can I say that the government of this country is absolutely useless and that the Blair/Brown incarnation is the worst in my lifetime? It is not just that they have been useless and incompetent but that they have been [and still are] expensively useless and incompetent. Not satisfied with the 3,500 new laws [it may have increased by now - that figure is a few months old] that they have introduced, they press on undeterred with yet more legislative rubbish. Now they want every adult, who gives the neighbour's kids a lift to a Saturday morning football game or daily to their school, to be vetted to confirm that they are not potential child abusers. Fail to register and transgressors could be subjected to a fine of £5,000. Presumably this fine will only be possible if we have government spies checking up on vetting evaders. This ludicrous idea will already have cost money via meetings in Whitehall, minutes of meetings, memos and draft documents and, if it goes ahead, it will cost millions to administer. The majority who are faced with this rubbish will just say "No" and many activities will disappear. Who will want to work with children in any capacity if we start from the assumption that we are a nation of child abusers. Already, I keep well away from children. I am a single man approaching 70 who in the minds of the idiots responsible for this current initiative will believe that I am but a dirty mac away from child abuse. So if anyone's child falls over in the street he or she will stay there untouched by my helping hand. Yesterday, we had an Open Day in our recreation centre in Tilgate Forest - on the south side of Crawley. Many organisations in the centre encourage young children to take part in martial arts, dancing, theatre etc. The picture above shows one group photographed with Crawley's Deputy Mayor last year. With the new proposals the numbers of people that will have to be registered and vetted to get children to and from these clubs and then to supervise and train them while they are there is quite incredible and many will just politely decline; much to the detriment of our society. Unlike overpaid bankers these people are all doing something socially very useful indeed.
Why does the government embark on these projects? They have enough really serious matters to exercise the mind without divesions of this kind
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Big Legs Are Good For You

There is more to say on the subject of legs. A Professor Berit Heitmann of Copenhagen University has uncovered the information that men with big legs have less heart disease than men with thin legs. What made him embark on this particular bizarre piece of research I have no idea. Who were the men whose legs were measured? Were they all hospital patients or where they all athletes or ... what were they? He does not seem to differentiate between men with fat legs against men with muscular legs. Is he saying that muscular legs are no better than fat legs in warding off heart disease? I think we should be told.
This research should show that Bodybuilders have negligible chance of suffering heart disease because they have very big legs and mostly made up of muscle. I have no evidence that Bodybuilders suffer heart disease any more or any less than other people. It may be that other factors become important but as long as Bodybuilders are going to the gym and keeping fit they will be OK. Eric's mum thinks big muscular legs look good and if, at the same time, the owners are less likely to be sick, it must be a good thing.

Now, is there anything else that we need to know?
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Lycra Over Your Sloggis

Our England Football Team seems, at last, to be discovering how to play football. Yesterday, they defeated Croatia 5 - 1, giving them a 100% track record in all their 8 qualifiers so fare for the World Cup. They can lose their last two matches and still end up at the top of the table. This is an extraordinary achievement; all too often we are struggling at the end.
It may be that their improved performance is down to keeping warm. More and more of our footballers are wearing Lycra bike shorts under their home and away football shorts and I assume that under these they will be wearing their Sloggi pants as well. The style of these pants is quite comprehensive - there is not much risk of anything slipping out - so what is it about all these layers of pants? Are they afraid of being interfered with? Or are they just, as I thought, feeling the cold. Perhaps they spend too much time standing about. It often seem like that when they are playing the more excitable teams from South America.
Football shorts have, for starters, gone back to the all enclosing Sanders of the River designs of the 1950s and yet they need all this stuff underneath. Back in the eighties, players wore much briefer stuff - see Gary Lineker [above] - and I don't remember them wearing double underpants. Of course there was no Lycra then. In these days when footballers have such glamorous images I would have expected them to have wanted to show off their legs. Or perhaps it is the higher profile now given to rugby, where the players have rather better legs to show off and the footballers may be feeling the pressure.
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Fishing For A Living

Last night I watched on TV the first edition of a new series about the trawlermen fishing around the seas off the northern coasts of Scotland. It was very clear just how hard life is aboard these trawlers; and a dangerous one. The Health & Safety Executive does not go out to seas with these men; they will only be involved after the event. I think that I was surprised at how small the trawlers actually are. I suppose if someone had asked me I would have said that a trawler was about 1,000 tons. It is much less. These boats were more like 250 tons and they took a battering from the seas. Weather forecasts could give an idea of what to expect from day to day but they would not tell the trawlermen the whole stories. Huge waves, 30 or 40 feet high could come from nowhere adding to a heavy swell and could swamp a boat in seconds. Men and machinery took a heavy pounding day after day and getting a satisfactory catch was a perpetual struggle. A good catch of the right fish and the men were well paid. A poor catch and they struggled at subsistence levels. Our seas have been over-fished and prices are squeezed but these men carry on doing their jobs and passing on their commitments from father to son over many generations.

Also, yesterday, we heard that some bankers in the city of London were about to go to court to sue Deutsche Bank for unpaid guaranteed bonuses. These hard done by men were demanding payments of the order of £1m for their efforts last year, a year when their company lost several billions of pounds - as a result of the expertise of their management and staff. I wonder how many, sitting down in some over-priced restaurant owned by an over-paid TV chef , will wonder how much was earned by the trawlermen who supplied them with the raw materials for their luxury lunch? And would they be prepared to consider that in comparison, perhaps investment bankers are rather ludicrously over-paid?

It's a funny old world.

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War With Germany

In recent days there has been an orgy of remembering WWII. I know that it is 70 years since Neville Chamberlain, at 11.15am on 3rd September 1939, made what must be the most famous broadcast ever made by any politician in the UK - and I include Winston Churchill. Of course, in those pictures from Downing Street Chamberlain suddenly looked a very old man - even though he was only 5 years older than Churchill - as he was forced to announce to the nation that all that he had striven for as Prime Minister was in ruins and that England was now at war with Germany. Perhaps so much fuss has been generated this year because there are still many people alive who were deeply involved in the war. This will not be the case in ten years time on the 80th anniversary.

I think, also, that we want to celebrate the war because we believe that we did something worthwhile that affected the whole of mankind. We fought on, even though the struggle seemed hopeless, because we thought that resisting tyranny mattered. It is probably true that we would never have won the war without the massive contributions of Russia and the USA, but, nevertheless, at that time we had a unity of purpose that brought together everyone in the land with few exceptions. All our efforts were directed towards the obvious objectives: first, survival: then second, defeat of the enemy. Winston Churchill may have made many mistakes but he inspired the nation even when things were going badly. He had commitment and fundamental objectives which never varied until the war was won. And he believed in democracy and the primacy of the House of Commons in a way that few have since. Compare him with the little men who demand to lead our country today. They have the leadership qualities of a suet pudding - leaden, full of saturated fats and bad for our health.

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An Eye For An Eye

On Thursday, there appeared in court in Yorkshire a pair of sadistic thugs who in April this year lured two young boys into an area near the village of Edlington outside Doncaster and over a period of 2 hours almost beat the boys to death, cut them with knives and burned them with cigarettes. One even had an old sink dropped on his head. The children were very lucky to survive and will suffer the memory of that day for years to come. The pitiless scumbags responsible, brothers aged 10 and 11, had been expelled from school 3 years ago and had well-established track records of violence and intimidation which had made the lives of many people on their estate a nightmare. The father of these monsters was an unemployed, violent drunk and the mother was a useless drug using drunk who sprinkled cannabis into the boys tea to calm them down. People had complained and complained about the behaviour of these wild brothers but little had been done. Of course Doncaster Social Services had been involved but their efforts had been totally inadequate. It seems incredible that so many social services departments perform so badly - and Doncaster has a very bad record - but the truth is that most of them are overwhelmed by the numbers of chaotic families that are totally out of control across the length and breadth of Britain. Huge amounts of money are spent on these vast hoards of the detritus of society; yet it is still insufficient. They contribute nothing positive to society and we have to spend, spend, spend on supporting them throughout their useless lives. The two brothers were told to plead guilty to lesser charges rather than face a trial for attempted murder - which would have required the two victims to come to court to give evidence. They will be examined by psychiatrists before sentencing next month.

Many people in this country would, like me, prefer to see these rubbish kids locked away for ever with minimal luxuries and left to rot - and put their useless parents in with them. But no! They will be treated with every luxury in prison, will be let out before they are 18 years old and we will then spend buckets more money on protecting their identifies for the rest of their pathetic lives. The Guardian and the liberal do-gooders will blame their behaviour on society and the rest of us, instead of the kids and their parents. I have no sympathy with any of them.

It is only 150 years since we would hang a child for stealing a sheep. Now we let feral kids get away with murder and pay them for it.

There is no discipline in schools or homes and the political correct, beans and sandals lobby prevents kids being subjected to violence to learn right from wrong. This is the result. But they will carry on promoting their softly softly approach until society finally collapses completely.

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Give Us A Job!

Yet another report and collection of statistics appeared during the week to confirm what many of us suspected - that a lot of university education was a waste of time. Apparently, 43% of students who graduated in 2005 have still not found a full-time job. Some are trying to get more qualifications to improve their prospects and are still in full-time education. Others have part-time jobs. And some are simply unemployed. Part-time jobs are, typically, shelf stacking in supermarkets. As we would expect a large proportion of these ex-students have degrees in useless subjects - media studies is top of the list. Students who qualified in engineering and technology have done much better - which, I suppose, is heartening in a way.

These figures were based on last year's conditions. Things are going to get worse as more pour out of the universities this year looking for work while unemployment rates are rising. Blair dreamt up the idea of sending everybody off to university to keep the unemployment statistics under control but, in the end, the chickens will come home to roost.

At the other end of the employment graph, we have been making middle-aged people unemployed but calling them retired so that, again, the unemployment figures could be kept low. Now we have too many pensioners. So what will the spin merchants do now? I think we need to encourage emigration. This will help change the figures and, an added advantage, it will balance the uncontrolled immigration that has been going on for the last few years.

You know it makes sense.

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