Disreputable Behaviour

I'm currently watching Sky News in a London hotel prior to tomorrow's assessment conference and wondering how exactly Fred Goodwin has "brought the honours system into disrepute"? He didn't award himself the knighthood that the queen has just withdrawn; all he did was accept it. You could probably argue that he brought himself into disrepute by graceless behaviour and reckless management of the Royal Bank of Scotland. And you could also make a case that he brought the banking industry into disrepute (admittedly in conjunction with many other supposedly leading lights). But the honours system? That charge really ought to be levelled at those who recommended and confirmed the award for "services to banking" for someone who was effectively just gambling with someone else's money.

Now, it's not that I'm particularly advocating that (the now) Mr Goodwin deserves to keep his knighthood, but unlike previously dispossessed knights, he is not a criminal or a traitor, just someone who didn't turn out to have been quite so brilliant a banker as they thought him to be when bestowing the award in the first place. So it occurs to me that if you consider the many still-knighted leading bankers who must be grateful to Fred Goodwin for effectively taking the public flak on their behalf, you might conceivably say that he's performed his fellow money men a great service. And doesn't great service eventually lead to honours? A knighthood perhaps?....

Troweller in Error

Much as I agree that gardening is important, after all the Office for National Statistics has declared it to be one of the few activities which make people of all income levels and national origins happier, but television gardener Alan Titchmarsh has told this week's Radio Times that "Gardening is more important than politics [because] it has a consistent point of view".

No explanation is supplied as to how he considers domestic agriculture on any scale able to hold a viewpoint, consistent or otherwise, or why political variability is apparently undesirable (surely the point of democracy is that change can, and does, happen?), but those of us who thought the appeal of gardening to be creative joy, useful solitude or a connection to nature, are now aware that in addition to the pruning, planting and potting: there's philosophy!