Some are more equal than others...

I'm currently in Westminster, London (at the Institute of Directors), where just down the road our PM has today announced that he wants to end the 300-year-old law of royal succession which gives the eldest male child (if there is one) the right to become Monarch of the Realm.

Well, much as I agree with ridding society of unjust discrimination and antiquarian irrelevances, the leader of a government which introduced the £9,000 a year tuition fees that will probably exclude the poor from the Establishment for at least a generation, should surely be targeting something else if his often-stated claims to desire "social mobility" are to be taken seriously?

That the currently underprivileged may now have no way to lift themselves out of their deprivation for decades, it's not in any way reassuring to be told that our country's leader is working hard towards making sure that the as-yet-unborn offspring of our most pampered couple can enter the world knowing that its gender won't prevent it becoming the next unelected Head of State.

Beyond the Pale..

The BBC today reports that Fulham have become the latest football club to erect a statue outside. This famous old institution has joined the likes of Liverpool, with Bill Shankly outside Anfield, Ipswich who've got Sir Bobby Robson standing proud outside Portman Road and Leeds with Billy Bremner's arms forever raised in triumph at Elland Road by putting Michael Jackson on a pedestal.

Yep, you read that right, Wacko Jacko, the "King of Pop", a man with a history of extremely questionable behaviour, who according to the club's owner and chairman Mohammed Al Fayed, "loved Fulham and wanted to attend all of the matches". Although he only actually managed to turn up once (for a match against Wigan in 1999), Mr Al Fayed apparently thinks "it is something that I and everybody else should be proud of".

Proud?
Will the Jackson statue become more plastic as the years go by; just like the real thing?
Will it lighten over time; just like the real thing?
And will children be allowed to touch it; just like the ...

Wanted: Party Organiser for Charlie Sheen!

Many of you will do something nice for your mum this weekend, but I very much doubt that you think it qualifies as deserving of a medal. Unless of course, you're Prince Andrew. He, like me, has just spent a day in Northern Ireland. Whereas I was running a series of college workshops and visiting the HEA ICS Subject Centre, he was there as part of his role as unpaid trade ambassador, something for which he's received his latest honour for personal service to the Queen, the Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order to add to his earlier honours for the same thing, the Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order and the Royal Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter.

Now I don't want to sound churlish, but how often has he been in the crush to get a seat on a north-bound train out of King's Cross, or spent the night in a Travelodge/Premier/Holiday Inn? His "business", as far as I can see, is all first-class and five-star, and while he might not receive a salary, he's unlikely to have paid for anything either.

Ten years travelling the world "representing British interests abroad", whatever that means, is not something most people outside of unelected dictatorships would consider worthy of a chest-full of medals, and is for most us, something we'd have preferred to have been an April Fool joke.

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?

Flowerpotty

Returning from South London where I've spent the last two days running critical & reflective thinking workshops, I shared a table on the train back into the capital with three women debating the effect of a children's character called Rastamouse on their impressionable youngsters' speech patterns.

Typical comments included such pearls of wisdom as "I’m struggling to help my two children learn to speak English and it doesn’t help when programmes such as Rastamouse are aired on CBeebies," and "I'll be proper angry if my children start beginning every sentence with the word “me”."

I'd like to have had the social skills to join in and point out that there are different dialects on TV all the time, none of which can compete with the influence of a child's home environment, but having been brought up with Bill and Ben, I'm one of a generation that's been held back because none of us can start a sentence without going "flobbleswobbledobbledeplob"....

It'll be all Rite on the night

I'm just back from two weeks in the USA where the current box office number one film is a horror movie called The Rite starring Anthony Hopkins who's been given the job of training a sceptical young priest in the casting out of demons, a role which US Airway's in-flight magazine says is based on a Californian priest called Father Gary Thomas.

Reproducing a Catholic World interview with the "Official Exorcist for the Diocese of San Jose", we get to know that there are about 500,000 exorcisms annually in Italy (yes, you read that right: 10, 000 a week ! ), that there's been an increase in demonic possessions lately and it's all the fault of the Internet, and the utterly bizarre claim that the Catholic Church has "a rite that’s recognized, even by the demons, as legitimate", with no explanation as to why (or how) they'd agree to any sort of framework.

Now I don't know about you, but I just love the idea of Beelzebub's hordes examining the rites of the Catholic Church, assessing them, and agreeing that: yes, those are indeed legitimate.

Got me wondering whether these nasty old demons are supposed to have appointed representatives, simply taken a majority vote, or if the Church got feedback as part of some iterative process until the final version was sanctioned as binding?