Cereal Killing

In a little under 2 hours, I'm going to be running a scholarly activity workshop in a rural conference centre which is in the middle of many villages looking just like Causton, the setting for the Midsomer Murders television programme. This fictional location, with a murder rate higher than South Central LA during gangland shooting season, was in the news last week when one of the producers said that to include some black faces would detract from its Englishness, even though nobody could possibly think it truly indicative of country life anyway.

If Midsomer was to be representative of the daily lives of the people I passed on the twenty minute journey from Oxford station, then its characters wouldn't be committing ever-more inventive murders, they'd be getting embroiled in bitter planning disputes with farmers wanting to convert maize fields into industrial estates or trying to evict traveller families laying tarmac parking areas where the corn used to grow...

The times they aren't a changing...

With apologies to Bob Dylan

I've just taken a short detour through Trafalgar Square on the way to King's Cross (which is where I am now) to join the crowd which had gathered to look at a faulty clock!

This particular malfunctioning time piece is the OMEGA London 2012 countdown clock which is (or was an hour ago) stuck on 500 days and 7:06:56 less than a day after it was unveiled to commemorate the 500th day before next year's Games, and that tickets for the event(s) are now on sale.

Is this matter of national embarassment or an innovative and unique way of publicising that we're going to host next year's Olympics by inventing a stopped clock that isn't right twice a day?