I'm Not Being Funny, But...

Anyone who starts a sentence with "I'm not  being funny," or "No offence," is likely to aggravate that by adding, "but" and then say something completely offensive. Same goes for "I'm not being racist, but," which more often than not is followed with an inflammatorily  racist remark which the speaker may think they are tempering by adding that they have many friends of whichever group of people they have just defamed. Not so the group of Chelsea supporters who, while travelling on the Paris Metro, were heard chanting  "We're racist, we're racist and that's the way we like it" and were caught on video refusing to let a black passenger on a train.

Now obviously this incident has caused much controversy, received much news coverage and the behaviour of these men has been roundly condemned by Chelsea Football Club  who  have threatened life bans and wasted no time in identifying and suspending the suspected culprits. Rio Ferdinand, a member of FA chairman Greg Dyke's commission looking at how to improve English football, has called for the game to do more to tackle the problem of racism and while it is true that work remains to be done, I am sure that clubs like Chelsea would argue that whatever work they do within stadiums, either when they are playing at home or away, what they can do while fans are outside the ground is limited.

One of the men involved in the incident has been reported to be a human rights official who is a director of World Human Rights Forum and, while acknowledging that he played a part in the incident says that he did not participate in the chanting and denies being a racist. Now I am unclear on exactly what level of participation this man was involved in, but the incident was undeniably one that was racially motivated and whether or not he chanted anything or not it is difficult to reconcile participation with not being racist. Indeed if he is not a racist and is a member of the World Human Rights Forum, should he have not been intervening on behalf of the man who was not allowed on the train? Interestingly, while Chelsea may well ban him from Stamford Bridge, his employers are supporting him.

This man is reported to have been travelling to Chelsea matches for over 20 years and travelled to Paris alone. He did not travel with an official club party and because the incident occurred away from the ground, and given his position with a human rights organisation you would not expect him to fit the profile of someone who would demonstrate racist behaviour. And there is the problem that Chelsea, and indeed any other football club, have. They can ban people from their ground and perhaps stop them getting tickets to away games once those people have behaved in a racist manner, but how can they prevent them from behaving that way in the first place? I have grave doubts that people behave in a racist fashion in football grounds but nowhere else, yet when they exhibit this sort of behaviour n any way that associates them with football, the media, politicians and the man on the Clapham omnibus demands that football does something about it. I reiterate that racist behaviour in the grounds is the responsibility of the clubs to deal with, but how far do we take the behaviour of fans away from the grounds and say the clubs must act?

If a man is racist and a supporter of a football team, where do we draw the line? Is the man who racially abuses someone while on holiday, during the close season but while wearing a replica shirt a racist football fan or just a common or garden racist? Is the man who racially abuses a shopkeeper or a bus driver on a Saturday morning a racist football fan or a common or garden racist if five hours later he watches a football match? If Chelsea are made to feel responsible for the behaviour of the men on the Paris Metro, why should clubs not be responsible in the circumstances I have just described?  Why are football clubs, with whom these people have only a tenuous connection, deemed responsible for their behaviour away from grounds to a greater extent than organisations with whom these persons are more closely associated, like their employers? Are we not, to some extent saying that football clubs are not doing enough by simply banning people because this does not stop them being racist in the first place, it just stops them being racist in football grounds.  Quite what football clubs can do that the government, local authorities, schools, parents and society at large cannot (apart from banning people from football grounds) to stop racism escapes me.

I don't believe that people suddenly become racist when they walk through the turnstile and onto the terraces, although I accept that there are some people who may be egged on by others to do something they would not otherwise have done, but because a person is just as likely to be racist outside the grounds it seems unreasonable for football to shoulder the responsibility for their behaviour. Just look at the recent behaviour of some West Ham fans in light of the incident in Paris. One group made a light hearted (if to my mind slightly patronising) video which was published on social media, showing a black man being helped onto a train by Hammers fans, while another have been threatened with bans from Upton Park after singing anti-Semitic songs on the Underground.

Gustav von Hertzen, the Finnish writer and philosopher, said that fundamentally we are all racist, that xenophobia is a survival factor, and to some extent he has a point. After all even Rio Ferdinand, the FA commissioner who has called for football to tackle racism, was himself fined £45,000 in 2012 for racist remarks when he referred to Ashley Cole as a "choc ice" after he had appeared as a witness for John Terry following the charge that Terry made racist comments to Ferdinand's younger brother Anton.

Like all right thinking people, I find racism abhorrent and I agree that football can play its part in dealing with it, but please don't let anyone think that eradicating racism among people who, among other things, are football supporters is the game's responsibility alone. The man who is racist on the terraces is just as likely to be racist in the pub or the supermarket and no one has yet asked Wetherspoons or Tescos to deal with it.

Tomorrow's World

In 1967, the BBC's science and technology show Tomorrow's World (TW) featured a businessman working in his own home. The show predicted that a time would come when "every home will have its own terminal plugged into a central brain." In other words they predicted the internet and home working...48 years ago. The programme also showcased things like ATM's, compact discs, personal stereos, barcodes and camcorders. They also predicted that by now we would all have personal robot assistants, flying cars and floating bicycles, which we haven't, but even when they got it wrong the gravitas of Raymond Baxter and the plausibility of James Burke made even their more outlandish predictions seem believable.

Raymond Baxter.

One thing that TW frequently returned to was how the world of work would change. Apart from the working from home, plugged into a central brain, which they got spot on, they often suggested that by now we would all be working fewer hours for the same sort of pay, that our leisure time would be enhanced and that our working lives would be made easier by technology. Well, yes and no. They were right to predict the increased presence and importance of technology and mechanisation in work, but they fell into the utopian trap of believing that this would allow people to work fewer hours. They predicted a sort of work-life balance that many employers believe they provide but few actually do. While TW predicted that people would work fewer hours it seems that many people are working longer hours and will retire later than they were when TW was being broadcast (1965-2003).

Tomorrow's World generally had a positive view of the future. The show looked at technology and assumed that it would be developed in a way that would benefit us. The reality is that for all of the benefits we may receive from technology, there is much that we do well to treat with some scepticism and suspicion. In 1965 Raymond Baxter introduced a feature on early CCTV cameras being introduced above jewellery shops in Hatton Garden. "Are there going to be any private lives left in tomorrow's world?" A quite prescient remark given the amount of CCTV cameras, speed cameras, congestion charge cameras and the like that infest our world today. As recent stories tell us, it isn't just cameras in the street, the shopping centre and the bank that are watching us, even our televisions are watching us rather than us just watching them. Well, actually not watching us, but they are listening to us as the story about Samsung's smart TVs collecting data about us showed. It was only when that story first surfaced that I realised that TVs could do that sort of thing; I was at first relieved that I don't own a Samsung, but then read that LG TVs can do it too, and guess what make I own?

But do I care if my TV is actually listening to me whitter on? Probably not and with a bit of luck the feedback it gets from our household about the paucity of good programmes to watch might just get the executives to get their acts together and produce some quality programming (but I doubt it). Equally do I care if my car is reporting where I am, where I've been and how long I was there? It isn't (at the moment) but we have seen that insurance companies already promote the "black box" recorder that provides data on how drivers drive, speed, braking, that sort of thing, with the stated aim of helping bring down your insurance premiums. Will that ever become compulsory? Certainly if driverless cars ever become a reality, and as the UK government has now given the go ahead for testing, maybe they will, sooner or later, then this sort of data is going to be collected whether we like it or not.

Of course our phones, our sat-navs and those cameras on the Dartford Crossing and the London congestion charge zone already know where we've been and when. Our credit and debit cards provide data on where we have shopped and when. Our Oyster cards extract data on what buses, tubes and trains we have used, what journeys we have made and when. In short there is little that we can do, at home, at work or between the two, at leisure and in employment that is not captured and which can therefore potentially be used. Many people say that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear, which is true up to a point. Where this data starts getting used in ways we would prefer it would not starts with apparently innocent things. Tailored advertising for instance. If systems know who you are, when you are in certain places and why, advertising can be customized to your habits. Imagine your smart TV, listening to you switch to Channel Four to watch Hollyoaks and say, when the sponsor's name (it is Domino's pizza at present) is announced, "Boy I fancy a pepperoni pizza," relays that information and suddenly your smartphone bleeps to announce an text from Pizza Hut offering discounted pizza. Unlikely? For all you know it is already happening, all those little coincidences, "Hey, we were just talking about getting a new dishwasher and what do you know, I just got an email from Currys; they have some great reductions on dishwashers" are not necessarily coincidences.

Personalised advertising, like that suggested in Minority Report, may become the norm.

In theory, and on the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" basis, this is all pretty harmless stuff. So what if advertisers tailor their commercials to your needs, less irrelevant stuff to ignore and who knows, perhaps it will put sellers and buyers together on a more efficient foundation, but there are likely to be more insidious things going on, things that you and I have not dreamt of, which we will be influenced by and affected by without our even being aware. We are now so reliant on technology in general and the internet in general that the influence of these has become so all pervasive that we are in danger of both taking it for granted and becoming totally reliant upon it. Stephen Hawking told the BBC just last December that, "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race" and while I am sure he wasn't considering the possibility of Terminator style machines wiping out the human race (at least I hope not), his point that machines, once they achieve genuine artificial intelligence would out-evolve humanity is plausible and worrying.

The point about machine intelligence is that, unlike Skynet, it would not be necessary for it to start a nuclear war to subjugate mankind, all it would need to do is switch off the internet. On second thoughts it wouldn't need to do even that, just use the internet to manipulate us. And who is to say that isn't already happening; if it is subliminal the point is that we would be blissfully unaware. Pizza anyone?

Two Wheels Good, or Two Wheels Bad?

I reckon that cyclists are simultaneously the most endangered and the most dangerous of all road users. Not all of them, just a significant proportion of them.  It seems an almost daily occurrence to find, on Facebook or Twitter, or a news site, some video showing a cyclist being overtaken by a car, or often, a white van and for harsh words to be exchanged between driver (or passenger) and cyclist. The majority of these show the cyclist being cut up, or the driver getting too close, in short that the cyclist was not at fault (what would you expect, these are normally from the cyclist's headcam), but despite which the driver feels obliged to hurl abuse at the apparently innocent cyclist. What we haven't seen may be an earlier incident in which the cyclist was at fault and which enraged the motorist, albeit that they may have over-reacted.

This is a situation where there are at least three sides to the story. There are thousands of cyclists who are perfectly normal, law abiding road users and they have my respect, nay admiration, for putting themselves in such a vulnerable position and actually behaving like normal human beings on the road. Some of these overlap into the group of cyclists who are abused, verbally and sometimes physically, by motorists. Sometimes because the cyclist was on a particular occasion, behaving like a complete idiot and sometimes because the motorist is an even bigger idiot. These cyclists tend to be generally competent but given to moments of madness or recklessness (quite like most people if we are being honest). When this group of cyclists make a mistake on the road they are at first sight indistinguishable from our third group, except that their actions do tend to be down to an error of judgement rather than a deliberate act. The third group are those to whom The Highway Code is either a mystery, or if they are aware of its existence, firmly believe themselves to be exempt from it.

Anyone who has worked in the City of London will have encountered cyclists who pay scant regard to their own safety or the safety of others on a daily basis. Crossing Cannon Street for instance has always been fraught with danger for the innocent pedestrian. Wait at the crossing, wait for the little green man to appear, and wait (not very long) for the rush of air and stream of invective from a cyclist too impatient and too ignorant to stop despite the red light, who whizzes within a hairsbreadth of your face. For this group of cyclists, red lights are presumably considered a mere decoration and not any form of traffic signal, and this is particularly true of the junction of Bishopsgate and Leadenhall Street. The number of cyclists who zoom through this junction irrespective of the colour of the traffic light is (or was when I used to walk through there), phenomenal. It was not uncommon to see one stopped by a policeman, but apart from a brief lecture, they were soon on their way without penalty or disincentive to repeat the act at the next set of lights.

An all too common sight.

And just last week I saw two cyclists cross a mini-roundabout where traffic, approaching from the right, had right of way. Only the prompt braking by the car driver prevented a collision, while the cyclists poodled merrily along, apparently unaware of the rules of the road and oblivious to the danger they had caused to themselves and other road users. These two ladies were quite different from the class of cyclist in the City; these ladies appeared to be genuinely unaware of the need to give way, the lycra clad couriers who cause such fear in City of London pedestrians are probably sprinting to their next drop or collection and don't feel that they have the time to stop.

Cycling through a red light is all too common too.

The funny thing is that all cyclists are, at one time or another, pedestrians and many are also car drivers. It appears though that once they mount their bikes many of them completely forget their obligations to other road users.

Cyclists are of course extremely vulnerable on the road.  In 2013 there were over 19,000 cyclists injured on Britain's roads, 3,143 of them seriously; 109 cyclists were killed[1]. A particular blackspot has  always been the junction of Lower Thames Street and Southwark Bridge, where cyclists have frequently been injured, and some killed, by lorries turning onto the bridge and being unable to see a cyclist on their left side. Interestingly the BBC recently took a group of lorry drivers, plonked them on bikes and let them loose on the roads to see what it was like from a cyclist's perspective. Without exception they came back with a greater understanding of the cyclist's problems and how better to interact with them on the road.  On the basis that we should all walk a mile in another's shoes, this struck me as really worthwhile in creating better understanding, because  understanding is key. [2]Motorists are implored to "Think Bike" and to look out for cyclists through various advertising campaigns, yet educating cyclists in how to make themselves safer and how to behave on the roads seems to have a much lower profile.

Cycle lanes...a good thing.

Riding on the pavement...a bad thing

Unlike the motorist, the cyclist is not governed by any licensing, tax or insurance issues. A motorist must tax and insure their vehicle and must pass a test of their driving proficiency and knowledge of The Highway Code and other theory of driving. A cyclist can go out, buy a bike for the first time in their life and ten minutes later be hurtling down a dual carriageway among cars, trucks and buses all travelling at up to 70 mph! I would not go so far as to propose that cyclists should be required to pay road tax, which is a bit of misnomer anyway, it is a tax on motor vehicles and the amount you pay is to some extent based on your vehicles emissions, so cycles would fall into the zero emission category and be exempt.  Insurance, on the other hand I believe should be required of cyclists. They are the only class of vehicular road user who do not have to pay it. They correctly have equal rights with other road users, they should bear equal responsibility. Cyclists ought also to be able to prove some sort of proficiency; if a cyclist has a licence to drive a car, then they will have passed a test proving their knowledge of how to negotiate traffic, so a bike test would be superfluous, but if they have no driver's licence, why should they not have to pass a test? When I was young, many schoolchildren took The Cycling Proficiency Test (superseded by the  National Standards for Cycle Training, or Bikeability). The problem is that it is voluntary and mainly aimed at children, although adults can participate, and in fact my wife did a year or so ago and she found it very useful.

Cycle training...another good thing

Britain's roads are a great deal safer today than they were years ago and this is not a car versus bike issue but a good road user versus bad road user issue. There are both good and bad drivers and cyclists, we need more of the good and fewer of the bad, whether they are on two wheels or four.

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[1] That represents 6% of all road deaths of which there were 1,713

[2] You will not get me on a bike however, as regular readers will recall my complete inability to ride one; see http://rulesfoolsandwisemen.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/badminton-big-toes-and-bikes.html for details of my incompetence on two wheels.

Count Your Murphies

Whether you believe that heredity or environment are more important in determining physical and behavioural traits, we all of us are influenced by our parents, for better and for worse. From my Mother I have inherited the ability to worry endlessly and often needlessly about just about everything, including things over which I have absolutely no influence or control, and an obsession with punctuality.

From my Father I have patently failed to inherit any talent for gardening or DIY, both of which he was very good at, but I have inherited an argumentative streak and a number of sayings and phrases, some of which I have had to Google to understand their provenance. Some appear to have been of Dad's own invention.

Anyone who has been in the armed forces will presumably be familiar with the expression, "Stand by your beds," which I understand  heralded the entry of an inspecting officer into a barrack room. My Dad would normally say this when someone, usually my Mum, entered the room, especially if it was apparent that the person, again usually my Mum, was in a bit of a bate[1]. This has entered the lexicon of Woods family expressions and is now customarily used when our younger daughter starts moving about upstairs preparatory to coming downstairs with a request or to have a bit of a whinge. Val and I use it to put one another on our guard!

More obscure is the expression " Meredith, we're in!" The origin of this is phrase is a 1907 music hall sketch called The Bailiffs performed by Fred Kitchen. I have no idea what the sketch entailed, nor the reason for the line, although I assume it relates to the bailiff in question gaining entry somewhere. Whatever the derivation, my Dad was commonly heard to utter "We're in Meredith!" when something he was attempting was successful, such as removing a stubborn nail from a piece of wood, or on completion of a piece of DIY. I cannot say I have ever heard anyone else utter these words, which I have appropriated myself and use now and again, normally having completed some task that seemed like it could not be completed, like getting Task Manager to work on a PC running Vista. It may be that I am now one of  very select band of people using this expression; if you know anyone else who does, please let me know, otherwise I expect the phrase will cease being used when I eventually shuffle off this mortal coil.

Fred Kitchen

While the two phrases above can be found in various places on the internet, the next one which my Dad used appears to be original and not borrowed from elsewhere (if you know differently, I'd love to know where it comes from), and that is "Count your Murphies." This is not an instruction to go out and calculate the number of Irishman in the vicinity, but as a variation on the expression, "Count your blessings." Somewhere, somehow, in the manner that Cockney rhyming slang transmogrifies words like deaf into Mutton (Mutt and Jeff), perhaps blessings became Murphies, although how I have absolutely no idea.  I suppose it could refer to Murphy's Law, but I'm not sure how. If anyone can enlighten me, I'd be grateful, otherwise I will assume that "Count your Murphies" was an original.

Like most people in this country, my Dad was fond of a cup of tea. This is not something I have inherited so much as assumed as normal behaviour; I am rarely without a cup on the go when I'm at home (I have one with me as I write), and like me my Dad liked his tea strong enough to stand a spoon up in. With monotonous regularity, Dad making a cup of tea would be prefaced by him saying, "I'm making tea...you're not getting any." I find, to my chagrin, that I now do the same, usually when I get up and make the first cup of the day.

A proper cuppa.

Other expressions that received regular airings included dead lumber, as in "I'm in dead lumber" to indicate that he was in trouble, usually with my Mum, or occasionally at work. Like counting one's Murphies, I cannot find this on the internet. Then there was the oft expressed desire, usually on rainy evenings, to refrain from any physical exercise, as in "I think I'll give the jogging a miss tonight." This might have made some sense had he ever gone jogging, but he didn't, not once in all his life (well not just for exercise anyway). It was just an oblique way of referencing the fact that the weather was horrid.

Whenever we watched a TV series, the end of each week's episode would be met with Dad saying, "It wasn't as good as last week." Looking back I'm not sure if he actually meant that or whether it was said in jest or just through habit. Had it been true, the last episode in a season of Alias Smith and Jones, or Star Trek (two series we watched  together), must have been pretty appalling!

Finally we come to an expression that my Dad did not use himself, but got me to use. Picture the scene. It is Sunday morning and Mum is in the kitchen slaving over the roast, Dad is in the lounge reading the paper and he says to me, "Go out and ask your Mum what the holdup is." So off I toddle, (I'm about eight at the time) into the kitchen. "What's the hold up?" I announce (not, "Dad says, what's the holdup" you notice) whereupon Mum glares at me and Dad chuckles behind his paper.

Dad was also wont to make apparently bizarre or daft statements with a completely straight face that would totally disarm other people. For instance we were once in a shop where he was buying tea bags. "These are good, aren't they?" said the shop assistant, making conversation. "Yes," replied Dad, "but isn't it a pain unpicking the stitching to get the tea out?" resulting in a very confused shop girl who wonders if she should explain that that was not the intention of the manufacturers. My poor long suffering Mum said that on many occasions she had to explain to people that Dad wasn't serious when he made similar remarks.

Deconstructing the tea bag.

So there we have it, a few of the aphorisms that my Dad was given to and which I have picked up through years of exposure to them. Doubtless you have some that you have acquired from your parents and which sometimes you wonder why, and possibly how you can stop using them!

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[1] For those of you unfamiliar with this, "bate" means in a bad mood or angry.