It's No Yoke!

This week-end has seen yet another shock-horror health story caused by contaminated eggs. These highly nutritious globes seem to get into trouble on a regular basis. Was it not the suggestion, some years ago, that almost all eggs were contaminated with salmonella that resulted in the then Health Minster, Edwina Currie, having to resign? This time the problem is seen as dioxins. These are very nasty chemicals present in small quantities almost everywhere but which should be kept out of the food chain. Dioxins are produced mainly from combustion processes and are poly-cyclic compounds made up of carbon/oxygen rings generally with chlorinated aromatic hydro-carbons attached. More and more research indicates that these are nasty compounds capable of causing cancer - most compounds with aromatic benzine rings in them will do this. It is thought also that they can cause diabetes skin diseases and reduce sperm counts. Their worst characteristic is that the compounds can accumulate in animal tissues - particularly in fat layers - and remain there for many years.

So, how did we get dioxins in eggs, specifically? The problem is associated with a range of processed foods - mainly sponge cakes and biscuits - sold by all the major supermarkets in this country. The manufacturers were Kensey Foods in Launceston, Cornwall and Memory Lane Cakes in Cardiff. Both make own brand products for Tesco, Sainsbury's et al. They have all made their products using liquid eggs supplied to them pasteurised by a company in Holland. They got the eggs from Germany where they had been produced from hens fed with foodstuff from North Germany - Schleswig-Holstein. Apart from the tortured route followed by the contaminant, why do we have to buy Germano-Dutch eggs from hens in South Germany. Can't we produce liquid eggs in the UK - preferably somewhere in the West Country so that they don't have to be carted half-way across Europe just to make sponge cakes. Although at this stage no one seems to know how much dioxin was in the liquid eggs, "an expert" was prepared to say that the amount did not constitute a risk to human health. Nevertheless, the supermarkets have withdrawn all the contaminated products from sale - at least those that have not already been purchased, taken home and eaten.

This saga has the ring of Bernard Matthews and the contaminated turkey meat from somewhere in Europe. Why does the Food Standards Agency let this sort of thing happen? We may need to import some food stuffs but surely we can produce enough poultry in the UK?

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Howzat?

Well, I am back in Crawley after my Christmas & New Year in the North of England. I think this was the first time that I had spent new Year in the North since I started working in 1963. As long as I had a job as well as the gym, no matter what, I had to be ready to work on New Year's Day.

Today is a good day - in the way that Sellar & Yeatman defined all things as good or bad in "1066 And All That" - comprising 105 good things, 5 bad kings and 2 genuine dates. The only genuine dates that anyone could remember - based on research conducted at an Eton & Harrow match - and you couldn't have anywhere more representative than that - were 1066 and 55 BC. My own research would suggest that 55 BC is falling out of memory - it is a long time ago, after all - and only 1066 and William the Conqueror survive. But, perhaps, 2011 will become a memorable date? Because today, the 7th January 2011, the England cricket team trounced Australia in Australia. You may think trounced is too strong a word but it is not. This Australian team lost comprehensively. They won in Perth but otherwise they were beaten in all departments by a united England team that was in another class. Four times England made over 500 runs in an innings and in Sidney they scored 644 to record the highest ever England total against Australia - exceeding, even, the 635 achieved in the timeless test 1928/29. In Sidney, three of the last five wickets accumulated over 100 runs - another record for any test match. The third highest England total against Australia was the 620 for 5 declared in Adelaide. Alistair Cook scored more runs in 7 innings that any man except Don Bradman and with an average on 127 again he exceeded every batsman except Bradman. He spent over 36 hours at the crease, which was a record for any batsman from any country in any 5 match test series. The England score of 517 for 1 declared in Brisbane was another record. And so it goes on. This series has turned over the record books and none of it to the advantage of Australia. England win the series 3 to 1 with one match drawn and each of those wins was achieved with a margin of an innings and plenty of runs. Everyone in the England camp must be very satisfied with they way that they have performed. They will enjoy their triumph and will be welcomed to 10 Downing Street when they return but there will be no bus tour - and that must be good.

I suppose that I ought to order a very big well-cooked plate of humble pie. I thought, after Perth, that this test series was going to be a close fought struggle in the last two tests. I had history on my side. England have a long established propensity for batting collapses and this appeared to be the case in Perth. But I was wrong. They batted like never before in both Melbourne and Sidney. But the end for Australia must have been set when they were all out in the First Innings of the 4th Test for 98 - their lowest total ever in an Ashes Test in Australia. England did trounce Australia and both teams got exactly what they deserved. I hope that I will be wrong again in the future when I appear sceptical of the prospects of English [or British] teams and individuals in international competitions.

So, you can see that today really is a good day.

And Good Day to you, mate

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Vince Gets His Cables Cut

I am waiting; just waiting. Waiting to go to the North of England for Christmas. My original travel plan was to drive on Tuesday, 21st December but weather was bad in the Midlands and there were reports of blocked roads and long delays. We are not very good at coping with snow and the country has been gripped in an icy chaos during the last month. There has been little snow in most of England and Wales in the last couple of days but the BBC, RAC and AA were all warning us this morning that 14,000,000 motorists would be out on the roads today travelling from somewhere to somewhere, and advising them all to travel on the motorways. Sure enough, by lunch-time there were lots of traffic jams. I suspect that today will be the same so I am now intending to travel on Christmas Day. Hopefully the car will be OK and the roads are traditionally quiet on this day.

Meanwhile the Liberal part of the coalition government has got into trouble because of a scam by Daily Telegraph reporters posing as constituents of various MPs and ministers to get them to make unguarded remarks about their Tory colleagues. But the biggest gaff has been Vince Cable telling two reporters that he was at war with Rupert Murdoch and that he would see that Murdoch would not get 100% control of BSky B. Most people in the country believe that this would be the right result but after this gaff was revealed - not by the Torygraph but by the BBC's Robert Peston who had the story leaked to him via a mole in the Torygraph offices - Murdoch is looking like the wounded party. The newspaper, anxious to show us that it was revealing weaknesses and disputes inside the coalition stopped short of making the Cable gaff public because they too are against Murdoch. Now David Cameron has taken all responsibility for media matters away from Vince Cable and moved it to the Dept of Culture and Sport, where the Tory minister is more sympathetic to Murdoch. The result will be probably that Murdoch will get his way - as he usually does - and this is bad for Britain.

There have been many complaints to the Press Complaints Commission and it is to be hoped that they will come down strongly on the Daily Telegraph - but I am not optimistic.

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Count 'em In Again

I have been quiet for over two weeks; not because I had lost all interest in the world around me. No, it was simply a loss of internet connection. The modem went down and then the computer played up a bit. Everything seems to be working normally again now. You know what normal is? Periodic Windows crashes and lock-ups and unexplained deletions etc.

Well, having counted them all out, we will now have to count them back in again. I am talking cricket, of course. I did warn at the end of November that predicting an easy ride and an Ashes test series win in Australia was asking for trouble. So many articles in newspapers about how we were going to trounce the Aussies, etc. Now England are back to their usual form of dodgy bowling and batting collapses. They were over confident and dismissive. Aussies do not take well to that sort of treatment and came back with a vengeance to win this third test by 267 runs - and a day to spare. Mitchell Johnson took nine wickets in the match and scored a wild 62 for Australia in the first innings. England bowling was not superb but the batting was pathetic. In the 2nd innings when they were all out for 123, only Trott managed to score more than 18 runs. I don't think the wicket was that treacherous.
So now the England team need to either draw both of the last two games or win one of them. Ricky Ponting is looking happier, even if he has an itchy ear and a broken little finger. Now I think his team will come to the next test feeling far more confident. Hopefully England will play with a full squad available and no one away on paternity leave. Anderson and co nipping back to England for long week-ends because their wives are having babies is not acceptable. I am with Bob Willis on this. These are professional cricketers, well paid and playing for England against Australia. They are not part of a week-end team of part-timers playing for a team cobbled together by Social Services where political correctness is a greater priority than being able to do the job. The liberal do-gooders and the Guardianistas are the people that draw up regulations for maternity leave and keeping jobs open etc etc. Great for public sector non-jobs but not very good when you are part of a small team where what you are doing matters.
Anyway, i will still wish the England team well. They now know that they are going to have to work at it. They should be going out to win this series, not cobble together draws.
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FIFA Awards Russia World Cup 2018

So, after all the efforts, the expenditure, the compliments and the expectations, England will not get the World Cup in 2018. Neither will they get it in 2022. They can try again for 2026 at the earliest. But why bother? They failed so resolutely in this case that we have to suspect that we will never get the World Cup unless either we are the only bidder or FIFA is drastically reorganised. There have been one or two hiccups along the way in getting our bid together but at the end of the day we presented a very professional proposal, generally acknowledge as the best "technical bid". In Zurich it was supported by the heir to the throne, the Prime Minister and David Beckham as well as many of the organising team. On the day of their final presentation all three of the final team leaders did a good job. We have all the stadiums necessary for the event; there is immense interest in football in the UK; and the country would have organised the event very professionally. But in the first round of voting we collect just two votes and we were immediately eliminated. In round 2 Russia got over 50% of the votes and they were awarded the contest. I have to admit that I am not heart-broken but I do believe we were screwed. FIFA is an odd autocracy that has had Ssep Blatter at its head for 30 years. There have been many accusations of corruption - some of them proven - and both the British press and the BBC have reported on serious concerns yet FIFA is too arrogant to even investigate. If any of the allegations are even half right, we have to wonder whether the British PM and the heir to the throne should be dealing with them at all. It has been suggested that the Panorama programme on Monday alleging corruption should have been suppressed. On what moral grounds can we sustain an argument that corruption should be suppressed in order that senior figures in the British establishment should be able to deal with any persons or organisation unrestricted by any suggestion of corruption - even when they may well suspect it to be true. It is ironic that the event has been awarded to Russia - a country, which has itself been accused of having a less than open and uncontaminated government. They may have done nothing wrong in this case but I am sure that I will not be the only one suspicious of some kind of collusion when England was eliminated so quickly. It may just be, of course, that the secretive group that is FIFA just did not want anyone suggesting that they were not entirely honest - no matter whether it were true or not.

I do hate these bidding processes. In many ways they are obscene. In this case four countries or groups of countries have wined, dined, courted and fawned over a group of officials while spending about £20 million each to put forward their proposals only to find that for all but one everything was a complete waste. Here we have a world with poverty, corruption, deprivation, starvation and disease and £60 million is casually thrown down the drain in order to persuade a group of highly paid carpet-baggers that this or that country is best able to organise a few football matches. The World Cup is a sports event that could take place in any relatively rich country - and in some cases the locals may even have a big interest in the Game. Still it is not so nonsensical - at least in England's case - as spending £35 million in order to be allowed to chuck £10 billion down the drain staging 2½ weeks of school sports known as the Olympic Games.

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Funny Old Game Cricket

One of the great things about cricket - at least for the mathematically minded - is the ease with which an unending list of statistics can be generated. This Ashes match in Brisbane is certainly no exception. First an Australian bowler takes 6 for 54, including a hat-trick. Do you know how many bowlers have achieved a hat-trick in Ashes tests? No? In fact in modern times there have been only two; Shane Warne [inevitably] and Darren Gough [surprisingly - I didn't think he was that good - and I am not disparaging a Yorkshireman]. Before them you have go to back to 1904, when the Australian Hugh Trumble did the deed for the second time - he achieved a hat-trick in 1902 on the same Melbourne cricket ground. To this day, he remains the only player to have achieved two hat-tricks in Ashes tests.

Moving on to the batting, Hussey and Haddin hammered England to score 307 for the sixth wicket - the highest score for any wicket ever in Brisbane. This record survived for only 24 hours before Cook and Trott achieved 329 [undefeated] for the 2nd wicket. Before this Strauss and Cook moved to a joint partnership total of 3,415, which [incredibly] betters the 3,249 achieved by Hobbs & Sutcliffe - an opening pair who have near mythical status.

This all interesting stuff for any cricket anorak but the most important thing is still the spectacle of Australia only managing to take one wicket after nearly 2 days of play. That will be keeping Ricky Ponting awake at nights - and that, surely, cannot help his batting.

As I meandered through the pages of cricketing statistics I came across a remarkable bowling and batting performance. At the First Test between new Zealand and England in the winter 1932-33 series, Dennis Smith of New Zealand bowled Eddie Paynter of England for a duck with the first ball of the second over, reducing England to 4 for 2. England recovered to 568 for 8 with Wally Hammond scoring 227. Dennis Smith finished with 1 for 113, was dropped for the next test and never played for New Zealand ever again. So, he achieved the ridiculous record of taking a wicket with the first ball of his first over in test cricket and never took another. As Jimmy Greaves may have said, "Funny old game is cricket!"

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Big Numbers In The Ashes

Well, I was half wrong. I said in my last posting that I thought few people would have put much faith in the England cricket team doing well enough to make the Australians bat again in Brisbane. In fact the top three batsmen confounded all the Cassandras. They declared their second innings closed at 517 - 1. It turned the match into a fairly convincing draw and even though the Australians made 107 - 1 in their second innings, it will be England who go away from this match with the most encouragement. The Australian bowlers succeeded in taking just one wicket in the best part of two days as England posted their impressive total and how long is it since that happened? The pitch has to be considered the most dead pan of all dead-pan batting surfaces and getting a result here could take several weeks but the England batsmen must be given a lot of credit for destroying the heart on the Australian side. It is widely acknowledge that this Australian side is not the best ever but Aussies do not give in without a fight and this test series will be a struggle for both sides. Unless there is rather more life in the pitches at other grounds the series could be drawn.

Cook and Trott put on 329 for a still untaken second wicket exceeding the previous best on this ground of 307 set one day earlier. It was also the highest partnership by any England batsmen on Australian soil. Further, Cook's 235 NO was the sixth highest score by an England batsman in Ashes tests and exceeds the previous highest test score on this ground by any batsman - previously held by Don Bradman. And so on and on. How often have England scored over 500 runs for the loss of only one wicket? I don't know the answer but I am sure that a simple answer would be "Not very often!"

So now we look forward to the 2nd test with a rather more optimistic feeling. I hope it is not more misguided optimism. Let's just wish them luck.

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Winning the Ashes in Australia

I just knew that it was going to happen. If I had said as much a week or two back, I would have been considered a Casandra; a profit of gloom, doom and despondency. It's not the first time and as sure as eggs are eggs, it will happen again. It has actually happened at least six times this year alone. But still no one sounds the alarm. I am talking, of course, about expectations of sporting success. It is like politicians who ultimately come to believe that their own propaganda is the truth. We have so many ready to predict sporting success that the whole population comes to accept its inevitability. it seems inevitable - until we actually take to the field. We thought that the England football team would win the World Cup - it was almost a certainty. In practice, the team performance was abysmal and these over-paid prima-donas were out in the early stages. Then it was suggested that Andy Murray would be the first British winner at Wimbledon since 1936 - or was it 1836. Of course, he failed. We will gloss over the rugby team[s]. In the search for the player of the year not a single one of those on the shortlist plays for a team from the Northern Hemisphere!! All the candidates play for South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. Why?

But, the latest is the cricket team. This was the team that would win the Ashes in Australia for the first time since Mike Gatting was in charge. It started off well. Andrew Strauss was out to the third ball of the first over of the series. After that things went downhill. The Aussie bowler, Siddle, achieved his best ever bowling figures in first class cricket when he took six wickets - including a hat-trick. In the modern game, only Shane Warne and Darren Gough have achieved that. Previous to those two requires a search back to 1904. At the end of Day 2 the Australians were on 220 for 5 and the match evenly balanced. But most of Day 3 was to elapse before England took another wicket. Hussey and Haddin put on 307 for the 6th wicket. This was a record for the ground. It was well below the world record for a 6th wicket partnership; that was George Headley and Clarence Passailaigue at Kingston, Jamaica in 1931-32. But all this does not augur well for England's chances. It looks like they will lose this test unless there is a superhuman effort to [a] score some runs and [b] take some wickets very quickly. First of all they have to score 221 to make Australia bat again and that is not something anyone would put a lot of money on at this stage.

Still, I will wish them luck. They are going to need it.

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Bolton Wanderers in Champions League?

Yesterday was a cool and grey day with the weather struggling to drop some more rain on our sodden island. In Edinburgh Scotland's rugby union team managed to defeat World Champions South Africa while Ireland again failed to beat the NZ All Blacks in Dublin - a game mared by heavy rain which made the ball difficult to hold onto. But at the Reebock Stadium, Bolton Wanderers were hard at work thrashing Newcastle united 5 - 1. If they carry on like this, not only could they gain a place playing in the Champions League but they could build a creditable goal difference. Today they stand in 4th place in the Premier League. If Manchester City win today at Fulham - something which should be expected were it not for the fact that they have failed to score in their last two Premier League games - then they will move above Bolton. But lets us not ignore the achievements of Bolton in rising so high. The three teams above them are three of the established top four in the English league - the fourth, Liverpool, are languishing in ninth spot having clawed their way up from the relegation zone - and all of them awash with money compared with Bolton Wanderers - one of the poor relations in this league. Bolton now has debts of £93 million - after suffering a loss of £35 million last year - but that could disappear if Bolton did actually end the season in the top four - and hence would play in the hugely lucrative Champions League next season. Bolton Chairman Phil Gartside has said this month that they may have to sell two of their best players in order to balance the books. That would be a pity. They have the advantage that most of the debt is owed to the owner Eddie Davies. I hope he will tolerate the debt for a bit longer to see how the team progresses.

Let's wish them the very best of luck; not just because they are Bolton Wanderers but because they will have done it without spending trillions of pounds on buying players. They have big debts but it is impossible to be solvent in the present Premier League. Manchester United and Liverpool have huge debts and Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester City rely on having owners with limitless supplies of money. Things will get worse before they get better now that Wayne Rooney has been allowed to raise the bar for wages to £200,000 per week [or more].

It's a funny old game is football.

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A Royal Wedding

So we are to have another Royal Wedding? Who cares? I certainly don't. I wish the couple well and that as far as I am concerned is an end of it. Eventually William will be king but he may have to wait another 30 or 40 years, like his father has had to. By that time many things will have changed and the monarchy may be on the way out. One group of crystal ball gazers have suggested that by then immigrants will have changed the face of Britain so much - they will already be in a majority - that the country will no longer be the country that I and millions of others grew up in. There will still be people in industry and commerce telling the nation that they need yet more immigrants to fill the job vacancies that cannot be satisfied from within. It will be rubbish then just as it is rubbish now but they will get their way. There must always be a supply of cheap labour. The new society will be some kind of homogeneous monstrosity which oozes political correctness but is characterless, ignorant - in the sense of ill informed - and divided by ethnicity even more than it is now. It is not a place where I will want to live but without the divisions there will be no peace.

But coming back to this Royal Wedding, we are already being subjected to a tsunami of mush, of sickly meringue covered pronouncements, of boring platitudinous trivia of no interest, surely, to either man or woman in this nation of ours? The Daily Mail on Wednesday had 30 pages of vomit inducing guff that surely was a waste of paper and printing ink. And it will go on and on until the wedding finally takes place some time next May [perhaps]. There will be souvenir mugs and tea towels and shirts and scarfs and socks and rock and etc. etc. All that stuff will have to be made - in China.

Why do we have to have all this stuff? Do they think that a Royal Wedding of two extremely rich individuals cut off from ordinary life will somehow make up for the mess that is our economy and persuade us not to question the incompetence of government nor the exploitation of the poor? It seems that the parents of Kate Middleton tried to engineer a meeting of the prince and their daughter by sending her via public school to St Andrew's. It seems that the couple did meet almost by accident at the University up in Fife and they have had some sort of relationship for about seven years. Neither has done anything particularly scandalous during that time and no doubt Prince Charles and HM Queen will be hoping for an uncontroversial partnership.

It does seem to be the case that in spite of comprehensive schools designed to give equal education to all, more and more of our institutions and government is in the hands of millionaires with public school educations. At least back in the days of Harold Wilson, Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher the people in charge were more likely to have come from the middle classes via the grammar schools. But grammar schools are a bad thing because they are selective. At least they selected on the basis of academic potential and not just on the basis of wealth!

Right, that's it I have nothing more to say. Good luck to the two of them.

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