My favourite sports show how very English I am – rugby union, and cricket.  There is a wealth of wonderful writing on cricket, but not much on rugby.  The Six Nations Championship started this weekend – a cracking match between England and Wales, a tense one in Paris between Scotland and France, and in Rome, the unrolling of an unsurprising script as the Irish wore down the Italians.  The TV channels have to pretend they were all equally and enormously exciting, which they weren’t.  Maybe I should start with a primer on rugby union, similar to the ‘American football for beginners’ guides that were around when Channel Four started broadcasting the NFL twenty or so years ago.

Start here. A rugby union side has 15 players.  They are divided into 8 forwards – the pack – and 7 backs.  Broadly, it is the job of the forwards – big, rumbling psychopaths – to get the ball, and the job of the backs – dainty, skilled athletes – to use it to score points.  As the old joke has it, the team is made up of the piano players and the piano shifters.  Actually, things have changed a bit in recent years.  The forwards now get to run with the ball a lot, aiming to exhaust the defence, not by running around them but by running over them.  Never used to be like that.  When I was playing (guess which group I belonged to. Clue – 17 stone and size 18 neck), I guess I received a pass a year.  The other change is that the backs are no longer dainty: it used to be said that the great asset of the game was that it was good for all physiques, short and fat, tall and thin.  Not any more.  There are some exceptions, but many of the backs have become the sort of six foot, seventeen stone bruisers who would have been sent into the pack in the past.  They are, however, different from the forwards in the fact that they can catch a ball off their toes, and do an even time 100 metres.  Much of the modern game involves teams trying to find a ‘mismatch’, where a sprinter from the backs is up against a bricklayer from the forwards he (or she) can run around.

The thing about rugby union that distinguishes it from American football and rugby league, is that the game carries on when a player is tackled to the ground.  This is the source of some awful tedium, as the ball disappears into a heaving mound of humanity; it is also a source of frustration, as the referee discovers some bizarre offence that no-one else can see as the forwards burrow and wrestle.  But this continuity is also the source of the most exciting events in any sport anywhere, as play follows play without interruption, with twenty or thirty uninterrupted passes and tackles, as the ball is ‘recycled’ from the breakdown, and spins first to one side of the field, then to the other.  When this is combined with the other unique feature of rugby – that the game cannot end until the ball is out of play – you can have extraordinary endings, with the losing side playing on for minute after minute, throwing passes left and right, in a desperate attempt to secure a score before being tackled off the field.

So, have a look at a match and see if you can seem the different roles play out.  Regrettably, you will not get much help from the press.  Rugby journalists tend to be impressed with forwards who can run around athletically, catch and throw extravagant passes, without realising that is not their job.  They are there to get the ball from the opposition, wrestling often in dark areas.  It is salutary to look after a match to see the ratings that different journalists give to various players.  Like TV talent shows, it seems you can’t get below 5 or above 8, no matter how good or bad you are.  Here are the ratings given by the Guardian (G), Times (T) and Sunday Times (S) on Friday’s match.

So, there you have it.  Billy Vinipuola was England’s best or worst forward, according to who you read.  But then, so was James Haskell (who really was outstanding).  In the Guardian, Gethin Jenkins gets the same marks as Dan Cole, who pushed him all over the field.  Ben Youngs, who ran the second half, gets marked below his opponent Rhys Webb.  Toby Faletau was the best or worst Welsh forward.  Dave Attwood was man-of-the-match, or pretty ordinary.  There you go, expertise in action.  Ho hum.

The idea that our Coalition Government (a) has to do unpleasant things because (b) things were left in a mess by their predecessors is just tosh. Sadly, it is tosh that I think will win the next election, but for those wishing to know the truth, there’s a fine article by Prof Simon Wren-Lewis in the current London Review of Books, debunking the austerity nonsense.  It is extraordinary that anyone is left arguing the austerity case – let alone the need to have further cuts in public provision – when there is not a respectable voice defending it any more.  By respectable, I exclude George Osborne or those that attended the Tory Black and White Ball last week.  Paul Krugman in America also points out the lack of any evidence that government cuts are expansionary, or higher borrowing will drive up interest rates.

I won’t spend a lot of time repeating what the Prof puts so well, but it would be wonderful if the press and voters could agree:

• It is not possible for a country with its own currency to go bankrupt. The idea that Labour, or anyone, “nearly bankrupted the nation” is idiotic.
• The 2008 crash was caused by the behaviour of financial institutions, mostly in the US, and had a worldwide resonance. It was not caused by Gordon Brown*.
• The 1997-2010 government did not have a bad record on public spending, and the UK national debt to income ratio is no worse than international comparators, and better than many.

To which I would add

• Reducing the budget deficit is not the major economic issue at the moment. The issue is raising incomes and growth, and the way that is done is by increasing demand (fiscal policy) and by improving productivity (much harder, but basically more capital investment and raising vocational skill levels).

*I’m not a mindless Labourite. I resigned from the Party in January 2008 because Gordon Brown was cosying up to financiers and industrialists.

I’ve been attending funerals recently, too many, and it is a practice that makes someone in his seventieth year – the Psalmist’s “three score years and ten” – think rather more closely about death than one does earlier in life.  John Donne said no man is an island, and any man’s death diminishes me, but I hope we can agree some deaths diminish us more than others.  This is not to say that some dead people are worth less than others, but to reflect what we know, when we’re not feigning, to be the truth.  I hope that those involved in the events below can forgive me for using them as the basis of some thinking on an awkward area.

My mother-in-law died just before Christmas.  She was a quiet, organised woman, who picked up her life with dignity and calmness after being widowed.  She was always considerate, and got particular pleasure out of her family life: she’d sit in the corner of a family party and marvel that she was the start of so many and so much.  Her health began to fail this year – she was 88 – and she moved into a care home.  Just before Christmas, we had a small family get-together. She enjoyed a buffet snack and some wine, but said she was tired and wanted to rest.  She died in her sleep shortly afterwards without really waking.

My former Vice Principal died just after Christmas.  The family asked me for some remarks at her funeral, and I’ve posted them below.  Ruth was an extraordinarily capable person: we discovered at the funeral all the different areas where she took a lead.  It should have been no surprise, for example, that her local community bagged her as committee secretary.  Her family had a tradition of a New Year walk, and it was there that she had her brain haemorrhage.  She was in her mid 60s, and seemed fit as a fiddle – a tiny wisp of a woman, given to jeans and stout boots.  Her death was not just distressing to the family and friends who filled the crematorium, but bloody unfair – she was an inveterate traveller, and would have enjoyed the twenty years of globe-trotting she earned.

And then I met a former colleague who had lost her son last year – he committed suicide whilst suffering severe depression.  I think this must be one of the cruellest blows any parent is asked to endure.  My brother died in a road crash when he was 19, and that was awful, but in a way it is explicable.  Accidents happen, and sometimes they happen to people we know and love.  But they do not keep coming back with questions about what could have been done, and could we have done better.  There’s a view that ‘suicide is selfish’ because of the pain and distress left behind, but that seems to me self-centred:  the unhappiness (what an inadequate word for what must have been felt) which comes as the toll of depression must make us all generous in our judgements.

So, three deaths, and all of them different.  I could instance some more – the superb wife of a colleague, who worked tirelessly for opportunity and justice in Sheffield before and carried on, right through her terminal cancer.  What’s the message from all this ?  Nothing simple, I’m sure.  One is to be kind to people, and that’s not a bad piece of advice anyway. The things I most regret about my life are the times when I could have been kinder, and wasn’t.  The other message is carpe diem: enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.

My regular reader(s) will know that I spend some of the year in France, and at least some of that time is spent drinking wine.  Which involves me in visiting the local supermarket or off-licence to select my evening tipple.  One thing I have noticed is that it is almost impossible to buy a wine that is not award winning.  I used to leap on bottles that offered gold, silver or bronze medal performance at a … what’s the word the market men use … yes, budget price.  It took me a while to realise that (a) almost every bottle had such an award and (b) they didn’t seem to be any better than the ones that didn’t.  In brief, the awards were not there to raise quality, but to raise sales. My wife and I like rosé wines, so I had a look at the web-site of a rosé wine competition.  The award of gold or silver medal does not go to just one wine – they go to a vast range, almost everyone that enters.  Talk about ‘all shall have prizes’ !

The awards industry spreads far beyond wine, of course.  We are daily offered award winning products, from the best savings account to the winning family car.  The award that drew my attention recently, however, was the award-winning flatulence underwear.  Think for a moment about the process of selecting the very best fart-pants in the UK.  Presumably this must involve drawing up a shortlist of underwear with claims to filtration, and then some sort of comparative trials.  Men and women with the ability of at-will gaseous release  would need to be recruited, and then some poor devil would have to walk up and down and see how well the competing products were meeting the challenge.  The verdict would be argued over by the panel, and secreted in a posh envelope.  Then, the great night would come, where a C list comedian or impressionist or regional news-presenter would be the master of ceremonies.  I say “C list” as I don’t see Stephen Fry competing for the gig.  The marketing managers of the various firms will be at their tables, awaiting the announcement.  “And the award for best filter pants of the year goes to …” (insert the obligatory reality show ten second pause) “Sniffytrunks” (storm of applause, gracious nods from the losers).

Anyway, I’m on the lookout for any more implausible awards.  All help welcome.

Last night I went to see “The Imitation Game”, the film about Alan Turing and the Bletchley code-breakers.  It was OK in a sort of “Foyle’s War” way, but I wonder whether the reviewers were a little dazzled by the Cumberbatch reputation so that they did not see the weaknesses of the film.  The story of the code-breakers is well-known now, and it is truly extraordinary.  By 1945, we were reading German messages more quickly than the German recipients were reading them.  The Turing breakthrough of using a machine to cut through all the options of Enigma was clearly vital, but the achievements of Bletchley were a team effort by a vast army of service people, administrators, mathematicians and other academics, many of them women.  I guess it is good for the drama to have a few people – usually arguing and occasionally punching each other in a very un-English, very un-1940s sort of way – because group work is not very cinematic.  But still …

The film had a few easily eliminated anachronisms.  I’m not talking about the right vintage of buses or trains (though there were no King George V class battleships in 1939), nor the claim that the real Joan Clarke wasn’t as pretty as Keira Knightley (who bloody is ?), as much as the dialogue.  The use of the word “smart” rather than “clever” is American, and is even now not used a lot in UK conversation except in technology applications.  Did Turing ever use the word ‘digital computer’ ?  In passing, the programmable computer was built by one of his colleagues, a Post Office engineer called Tommy Flowers.  The practice of throwing arms around another man in joy is (see above) not very British, and not very upper-class 1940s.  To describe Turing’s hormone treatment in the 1950s as ‘government-mandated’ is a stretch (the court offered it to him as a way of avoiding imprisonment for indecency. Crap, but not a government plot).  The end credits, which spoke of Turing being regarded with ‘honor’ (rather than honour) maybe gives a clue to the crudeness of the storylines that does not need to be expertly decrypted.

I’m not sure if there were any other historical inaccuracies in the film, but the emphasis on the Battle of the Atlantic missed the other uses of Ultra – outstandingly El Alamein (which was not mentioned, though Stalingrad was – eh ?).  There was indeed a dilemma about how much of the information could be used before the Germans knew we were reading their codes, but (unlike in the film) convoys were routinely steered away from U-boat packs.  And the soap opera scene when one code-breaker’s brother was on a ship being knowingly sent into danger was, well, soap opera.  And whilst the accusation that the film skated over Turing’s sexuality – it did not – Turing’s homosexuality was treated in a way that was so restrained and dignified that it missed the real anguish that must have been there.

So, go to the film if you want a well-acted drama with great sets and costumes, but not if you want more insight into the Ultra puzzle.  Or,  I suspect, the real world Alan Turing.

Footnote. One argument against conspiracy theory asks whether it is plausible that vast numbers of people can keep a secret (about 9/11, or the moon landings etc.) without it ever leaking out.  I don’t know of a single justified conspiracy theory (do you ?), but this particular rebuttal is weaker now we know that thousands – literally thousands – of people kept the Ultra secret for twenty or thirty years (from 1945 till the publication of  F.W. Winterbotham’s “The Ultra Secret” in 1974).

When I worked in north Manchester, I had a great friend from a local family of Irish extraction.  She explained to me the origin of the expression “the greatest thing since sliced bread”, which was as follows.  In large families with plenty of sons doing manual labour, the women of the household had to prepare the packed lunch.  The availability of consistent, wrapped, sliced bread removed much of the drudgery that had to be done late at night or first thing in the morning.  A great thing, for sure, for sure.

What modern inventions have matched this ?  Non-stick pans, of course – what an innovation for the lover of scrambled eggs !  Worth the cost of flying to the moon for that alone.  Another one that struck me the other day – wading through the Christmas cards for friends that are still alive and in touch – was the peel-off postage stamps.  No more foul glue sticking tongue and lips together.  Marvellous.

But now I’m scratching.  I was struck by recent articles that ask why the pace of innovation is so slow these days (even if Bill Gates disagrees).  It’s true.  Brainless executives and politicians talk about the unprecedented pace of change, but it is as nothing compared to my grandmother’s time.  She was born in 1870 and died in the 1960s. Forget Queen Victoria and the Wild West, she was alive to see the first aeroplanes, two world wars, the first antibiotics, the first artificial fibres, manufactures in stainless steel, telephones, machine guns, central heating for the masses, the first motor cars.  Beside this, the internet and the jet engine are comparatively slight matters.  And so much of our current innovation is of no moment.  What exactly are automatic wipers on cars for ?  And keyless ignition – the innovation that thieves like more than customers ?  If we concede that the ability to play Candy Crush on the 8.17 from Paddington is not a breakthrough for humanity, we can note that until smart phones came along, mobile phones just replaced phone boxes, and Uber minicabs.  Drip-dry shirts have come and gone, as have nylon sheets (thank goodness).

What improves lives is better quality things.  We have made great progress here – motorways are no longer littered with the open bonnets of steaming cars – but not as much as we would like.  Washing machines don’t last as long as they used to, because of the fierce price competition that drives down quality of white goods.  But if you try to buy one, you will be dazzled by the micro-chip operated wizardry that you are offered (and don’t need).  My roll of honour of great quality purchases includes:

• My golf trolley by GoKart is superb, and the after-sales service (the only component I needed was provided free by next-day service) faultless.
• I bought some stainless steel saucepans from Alders in Eltham when I moved to London in 1992.  I still have them, and they are spotless.  They are still going strong, which is more than can be said of Alders in Eltham.
• Clark’s leather trainers.  Wear them almost daily, and they are comfortable and last and last.  Mind you, I had some Rockports that did the same.
• The teapots on Brittany Ferries, which seem to be the only small metallic teapots that can dispense two cups of tea without drenching the table and the paper you’re reading

I then get into a debate about whether paying more gets you better quality.  In the case of washing machines, it seems you do.  Another recent discovery from your big-spending confidante: I pushed the boat out and bought some Ralph Lauren socks last week, and they are great.  However, in the case of golf trolleys and saucepans, it seems price is not always a guide to quality.  I can taste how much nicer a posh port is, but haven’t noticed this in wine.  Some Bordeauxs are so full of oak that they seem to come from a carpenter’s not a vintner.  Before you buy an expensive Burgundy white, try a Bourgogne Aligoté – cheaper and just as nice.  When it comes to cars, my most expensive purchase – a brand new Jaguar XJ – had endless faults, and couldn’t go anywhere safely in the snow.  Whilst my daughter’s 12 year old Ford Focus zoomed by.  Rats !

I sometimes think that my campaigns for the authenticity of the English language are a lost cause, and cast myself in the role of a dying warrior defending the old order, a sort of Hereward the Wake of grammar and meaning.  There is a rearguard action to save ‘literally’ which gives commentators a giggle now and again. But this is not the general picture.  Some things have gone already – I think Arthur Scargill killed off ‘refute’ so that it now means ‘unconvincingly deny’ rather than its proper meaning, to provide evidence that disproves a contention.  ‘Incredible’ and ‘unbelievable’ go their appalling way, now meaning ‘vaguely interesting’.  I got some fans when I described Stephen Twigg MP calling the achievements of academies as ‘unbelievable’ (others agreed he was unknowingly using the word in its original meaning), and protested when David Cameron wanted to make the Imperial War Museum ‘more incredible than ever’ – which struck me as not perhaps the right thing to say about a museum.  Similarly, Adam Rutherford described research on medieval persecution of the Jews as “incredible” when he, sadly, meant the reverse. But generally, it seems a battle that has been lost, and maybe a war.

Where I think the tide may have turned is in respect of the emotionally incontinent word used routinely by politicians and business leaders.  Some years ago, if a friend said they had a passion, you would wait to get over it.  If they had an obsession, you would seek help.  And if they saw visions, then a session as an in-patient was called for.

No longer.  Every sports commentator describes a team’s ‘passion’.  David Cameron is passionate about …well … high speed trains, the union with Scotland, public safety, renewable energy, the environment, minimizing EU legislation, overseas aid goals, and … well, I could go on.   I remember Ruth Kelly coming to a college conference when she had been made Education Secretary, telling of her ‘passion for education’, a passion she had concealed in her previous careers as journalist, civil servant and politician, and her subsequent time as a banker.  Any crummy company with an MBA in charge will tell you of their obsession with quality.  Every plan for a public or private body has to have a ‘vision’ – just doing things better or cheaper doesn’t hit the spot.  And to deliver – or worse, ‘deliver on’ – these emotions, you have to be determined, with no ifs and no buts, rather as the Tory cabinet is determined to reduce immigration or the national debt (but fails).  But now, now we are beginning to get a backlash.  Journalists are noticing the nonsense.   It’s even getting as far as ‘awesome’, that bastard child of a Californian high school that slipped in whilst everyone else was saying ”Oh, my God !”.

One of George Orwell’s most memorable essays was “Politics and the English Language”, which he started by saying the language was in a bad way.  He described the meaning of phrases being hidden as phrases fell on the landscape like snow, first obscuring and then hiding reality.  He actually took the mickey out of ‘radical transformation’ sixty years ago, and politicians and CEOs are still bloody doing it.  What we need is a new Orwell to expose the rubbish.  I will do it when I have a moment.

Last week, the Sunday Times published a letter from a group of concerned individuals – it included Chris Woodhead, the former Chief Inspector, so you know where they are coming from – advocating the reintroduction of grammar schools.  This is a recurring piece of educational nonsense (no one pledges themselves to lead the fight for new secondary moderns), to which I wrote a letter of reply:

The idea of re-establishing grammar schools is (as Tim Vine said of crime in multi-storey car-parks) wrong on so many levels. There is no evidence that it would raise quality.  The leading international systems are all nonselective.  Northern Ireland, which has retained selection, falls behind England in PISA ranking; indeed, selective areas of England perform to a mediocre standard, and have a particularly poor record in staying-on rates.  The idea that grammar schools favour working class children has been disproved.  Research from the Institute of Education shows grammar schools increase inequality, and  in selective areas, poor children do particularly badly at GCSE.  The idea that creating selective schools aids choice is plainly nonsense: the moment selection is introduced, parents who wish their children to go together to a local comprehensive school have that choice removed. And they can’t choose a grammar school if they’ve ‘failed’ the 11+.

There is an increasing consensus that educational policy should be guided by evidence rather than by passing enthusiasms or saloon-bar wisdom.  In this case, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests re-introducing selection would be a mistake.

This was not published.  I don’t mind about that – I am not the country’s leading educational thinker, and there are fine organisations working to defend and develop state education in better ways than I can.  What I was upset about was that there was no reply at all on the grammar school theme, apart from a minor squib about the success of Indian kids getting in to them.  I am sure that the editor will have received a substantial number of letters of response, yet not one was chosen for publication.  In my view, a serious paper – especially one with claims to be the national paper of record – should not be setting hares off and then allowing no space for rebuttal.  It’s not quite at the same thing as a personal right of reply, but in some ways it is more important.  We’re talking here about the future of generations of children, rather than the reputation of one individual, and that shouldn’t be left to the unchallenged rambles of saloon-bar reactionaries.

There’s a bit of a phoney war going on about the extraordinary Sea of Red memorial at the Tower of London.  It’s an art construction that plants one poppy for every British and Commonwealth person who died in the First World War – over 800,000 of them.  I rather like it, and so do the public: there are reports of queues across Tower Bridge to see it.  This has not stopped the Daily Mail from taking the opportunity of a rather precious review to do its normal ‘right is patriotic, left is treacherous’ rant.

Hmmm.  Let’s just remind ourselves that the owner of the Daily Mail was a great admirer of Hitler, and that the Daily Mail published articles in favour of the fascist Mosley.  Let’s remember, too, that when those who fought in the Second World War were asked to vote on the country’s future, they gave a resounding victory to the Labour Party.   And can I add a small footnote of my own.  Checking through the bookshelf of an aging relative, I came across a reproduction of a 1941 edition of Picture Post, a historic magazine.  It reports the following:

“Tom Hopkinson, the editor of Picture Post in 1941, wrote later ‘Early in the war a dispute arose between those who said Britain should have war aims, and those who said “get on with the fighting and think about that afterwards”.  Churchill was against talking about war aims, fearing the argument might breach national unity.  But papers such as Picture Post, which was receiving hundreds of letters from men and women in the armed forces, knew what they were thinking. They were ready to fight, but wanted to know what they were fighting for.  One of the things they were not fighting for was two million unemployed living on £2 a week or less (the situation at the outbreak of war in 1939).’

Now then.  You can go on the web to discover that £2 in 1939 was worth £117.40 in today’s money.  Today, Job Seekers’ Allowance will yield “up to” £72.40.  And, even using the flaky official figures, there are still 2m unemployed.  So it may be worth remembering not just those who were killed and injured in the war, but the hopes they were fighting for.  And still haven’t got.

Just a brief note to widen an amusing exchange between me and some old school mates.  Sharing the normal geriatric distaste for media and managerial cant, we competed to name the introduction to a TV or radio show that would make us reach for the off-switch in the fastest time.

My early entry – which I actually heard a few years back – was “And now, live from Slough …”.  I don’t know what the programme was, because I had switched off/over before it became evident.

The actor Chris Addison tweeted a good example – “In this show, I’m on a mission … “  –  which is a fair warning to  you that some semi celeb with not the slightest claim to expertise in anything apart from drawing attention to themselves is about to mess up a history or geography programme. “I’m on a journey …” is another nominee for awfulness.

Another pal suggests that the most depressing words on television are.. “and my Special Guests tonight are Gwyneth Paltrow, David Beckham, and Billy Connolly”.   But he reports a local contact who believes – probably out of wicked bias – that “the most depressing thing on television is any news item introduced by the words “David Cameron today joined the debate on …”, asking “whether there’s anything this shiny-faced spiv doesn’t have some fatuous or populist opinion on?”.

And then there is “On FM, the Daily Service”.

What would make you leap for the zapper ?  Any entries ?