Genocidal Bosnian Serb War Criminals who look like Archbishops of Canterbury (Part.1)

Radovan Karadzic and Rowan Willams.

Tom Henderson, New Office Manager

Prompted by an outburst in the office this afternoon, this Big Train sketch immediately sprang to mind:

A special delivery?

An American woman has given birth to twins!

It’s amazing, incredible and so rare as to be asolutely astounding!

This isn’t an every day event, only several hundred thousand sets of twins are born every year all over the planet, but what makes these two new-borns into an even rarer phenomenon is the fact that their parents have decided to givem really stupid fucking names as well. Not only will they be singled out for being the children of famous parents and for being twins, they will also be saddled with daft celebrity-kid monikers for the rest of their lives.

The miracle of birth, as it’s often called, is really only interesting if it’s your own kids. I mean, everbody likes to show off their pre-natal scans and cute baby snaps, but the rest of us really are just being indulgent. Be honest, everyone elses kids are pretty ugly aren’t they - especially when they are babies. So what makes Brad and Angelina’s so bloody special?

Other than their photogenic appearance (for that, read dull and conventional!), there isn’t really a whole lot to say about these two, other than the fact that you’d be hard-pushed to find another celebrity couple out there with less acting talent between them. OK, so Brad was sort of alright in Legends of the Fall, and Angelina was sort of alright in…no, sorry, I can’t think of one decent film. But other than that, these two are famous simply for being famous - for climbing in and out of relationships with other famous people and for being photographed by tacky magazines and the tabloid press.

No, it’s not really worthy of comment, but the media seem to have gone potty about the whole affair and the level of interest in this sort of thing just baffles the hell out of me.

Currently…

Reading The Mad Ship by Robin Hobb.

Listening to The Dark Third by Pure Reason Revolution.

This week…

I saw a woman at the train station who was so obese that she actually had a cleavage on her back. She was wearing a summer dress that was very low at the rear. As I followed her through the ticket barrier I did a double-take as I fought to clarify whether she was going through backwards or whether her head was on the wrong way around. Fleeting scrutiny revealed the huge rolls of fat around her shoulders that were pushing together as she waddled her way out.

I had to give a presentation at work. It was part of a planning ‘away day’ and I had to talk about the results of some stakeholder surveys. I don’t like public speaking and dread giving presentations, but I was asked to do it and thought it would be good aversion therapy. Needless to say, may hands were shaking so much as I held my notes that I had to come clean and make a joke of it to the audience. I think I got the sympathy vote and people were understanding and supportive.

About halfway into things I started to calm down a bit and even started to enjoy myself. And then my legs started shaking and I thought I was going to fall over. I didn’t actually succumb, but the adrenalin feeding the ‘fight or flight’ impulse was definitely doing strange things to my body. The strange thing is that I had lots of encouraging comments from colleagues afterwards to say how well it had gone, and how they would never have known I was nervous if I hadn’t said anything about it.

All that drama and no one would have known if I’d kept my mouth shut…

My credit card company sent me an interesting letter. Apparently for just £10 I can visit their website to upload a picture and they will send me a customised card based on my image. I really don’t want to give them any more money, but I was tempted to send them my Windows logon picture which shows me with a pair of underpants on my head. Unfortunatly, in this age of self-service and chip and pin transactions, I don’t think that I’ll get the chance to get too many laughs out of it with sales assistants.

I finally managed to get hold of a Wii Fit board. Mrs A had been after one for a while but none of the usual online stores have had any in stock for a while. As was the case with the intital Wii console shortages, Game seemed to have plenty in stock as long as you were prepared to pay extra for bundled games that you don’t want. In fact I think it’s going to become policy not to shop there anymore.

Anyway, eBay came to the rescue. I had to pay £20 over the odds but I kept seeing this as a positive thing that I was buying into - something that is meant to make physical activity into something a bit more fun. The thing is, that after watching Mrs A on it for an hour, I’m not so sure of the benefits for someone like me. I do an hour on the treadmill every night and give myself a good workout. The Wii Fit exercises do seem a bit gentle in comparison. I’ll hold back on giving an opinion on the yogo exercises and the benefits that they may bring, but everything else seems a bit too light weight. Undoubtedly its all good stuff if you have a completely sedentry lifestyle, in which case any increase in activity is going to bring some benefit.

We shall see…

I’ve just seen on the breakfast news that apparently Margaret Thatcher is to receive a state funeral upon her rapidly approaching demise. Now the thought of her being cold and dead does lift my spirits slightly, but the idea of the nation turning out in order to give her a royal send-off turns my stomach. If you believe Andrew Marr’s recent retrospective, we are all ‘Thatcher’s children’, but many of us are not so by choice and many of us still resent the things that she did to this country. I remember when she stepped down after that bloodless coup at number ten. Mrs A phoned me at work to tell me that she’d gone. I worked in an open plan office at the time and stood up to announce it to the whole floor. Everyone cheered for what seemed like ages and ‘Good fucking riddance!’ was the only thing that most people wanted to say in response.

Many gloss over the ‘greed is good’ culture fostered by Thatcher and her cronies and point to the economic ’successes’ that her reforms brought. But at what cost to the rest of society? Personally, I’m going to throw a party when the old cow finally pops her clogs.

I don’t like tennis…

I used to really love tennis. I even played for my school on one occasion. Then again, going to school in Wimbledon probably meant that there was a bit of extra interest in the sport.

My younger son plays regularly after schooI and I still like playing Virtua Tennis on my Xbox 360. But I can’t get on with the game myself anymore, in particular, Wimbledon irritates me. Even the ‘classic’ men’s final left me a bit cold yesterday. I watched the start and then the finish, but couldn’t take the bits in between. Maybe it’s just the curmudgeon in me, but the whole circus just irritates the hell out of me now.

For one thing, I don’t like the Wimbledon crowds. At the risk of accusations of inverse snobbery, I can’t stand all the middle-class mums with their huge waistlines, silly hats and contrived eccentricities. And I despise the horsey-looking posh ones with their straw-coloured hair, sun glasses and fixed expressions which seem to waver in between ‘Mummy’s just died and left me a fortune!’ and ‘That awful oik behind me has just farted!’. Either way, I hate their eternally misplaced optimism that we’ll have a British champion any time soon. Especially after seeing Nadal and Federer yesterday, it should be obvious how average the Brits are at tennis. It’s just not our sport and we should live with that and move on.

I don’t like that the whole world laughs at us because we still let the weather hold us to ransom at one of the biggest sporting events of the year. Why is there still no roof for either of the show courts and why is there no proper flood-lighting for games that run late? Oh, I know that they’re building one now, but why has it taken so long to get their shit together?

I despise the way in which the players are so pampered. I was trying to count the amount of people incolved in letting the finalists play yesterday: there were about ten line judges, a referee, an umpire and a small army of ball boys and girls. Then you have all the behind the scenes people sorting out the balls, operating the computer equipment watching the weather etc. I lost count of how many might have been involved just so that two blokes could hit a ball backward and forward to each other. I can see that twenty-two guys might need a referee, linesmen and some ball boys for a football match spread out over a large field, but tennis players just take the piss.

And what’s all this with making the ball boys and girls hold their sweaty towels for them now, just so that they can pat themselves down before, what seems like every point, is played. I can remember players at Wimbledon getting up to get their own drinks in between games. No wonder that can keep playing for four and a half hours now, they have to do fuck all for themselves apart from short staccato bursts of play as the each try to break the sound barrier with their shot speeds.

I don’t like that the BBC thinks that everyone is into tennis and makes the whole two weeks straddle both of their terrestrial channels. Did anyone but the hardcore really enjoy listening to Sue Barker and Boris Becker yesterday as they tried to fill the time with banter and bollocks while it rained?

Finally, I know that foreigners seem to love all the pomp and circumstance, but Wimbledon just screams stereotypical British tourist cheesiness. With the millitary band playing rumpty-tumpty type music, the strawberries and cream (do we really need the consumption figures every year?), the panama hats and club ties adorning all of the club members and the minor royalty trotted out for the final. The only things we’re missing are a red phonebox on the centre court and a Pearly King and Queen doing the umpiring.

Still, looking on the bright side, at least Cliff Richard didn’t sing, and at least it’s all done for another year…

The death of the physics teacher…

…or at least the dearth of them: Physics teachers dying out in some state schools, report says.

A new report has revealed that the shortage of physics teachers is becoming more acute. I know that we need good teachers in this area, but I can’t help but remember my own experience of this discipline at secondary school.

Physics was a compulsory subject at the comprehensive that I attended. It was taught by a humourless bastard called Dowdeswell. He was posh-spoken, couldn’t pronounce his ‘r’s and had silver hair, the style of which was shared by Geoffrey Howe, then Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Dowdeswell also had a wife who worked in the school office. She was at least ten years younger, had long brown hair and legs that seemed to go all the way up to her neck. She made every boy in the school deliver a priapic salute every time she wafted past on a breeze of perfume and warm print copy. She was one of those who partly inhabited the head teacher’s outer office and spent the rest of her time in our fantasies. We never could figure out what she was doing with her boring old bugger of a husband and why he didn’t have more of a positive attitude to life with such a goddess to share his bed.

In those days, physics was as much about maths as theory. I say this, because I’ve recently been told (by a physics teacher I met on a training course), that it is not so today; all of the equations and tough stuff have been stripped out. Always having struggled with maths, this of course made the subject a living hell for me. I’ve got a good memory for things; I can still remember that LASER stands for Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation, and I can remember the theory of Brownian motion, but I could never get the numbers to stack up. Dowdeswell’s lack of charisma, patience and understanding made this all even more traumatic and it has coloured my perception of the subject ever since.

It’s a shame, because I was quite into astronomy at the time as well - even harboured the thought that I wanted to pursue it as a career - but knew that maths would be an issue. I think it’s fair to say that he crushed the life out of that idea. Physics with him wasn’t about the wonder and magic of the universe, it was about shouting, keeping quiet at the back and embarrassing you in front of the rest of the class when your homework full of equations didn’t add up. As a result, his lessons were the low point of the week and, thanks to the school’s policy of putting everyone through physics o’level, added up to two years of misery.

I’m sort of over it now. I love to read about the big concepts, and to watch those Horizon programmes on things like black holes and time travel, but I still find most of the mathematical concepts baffling. What I do love is the sheer enthusiasm of the people that have followed their dream and who can see magic in a blackboard full of equations. Dowdeswell never seemed to be an enthusiast for his chosen subject and so there was nothing to rub off and kindle our desires to explore space, even if it would only be from the classroom.

We need physics teachers for all sorts of practical reasons. But I don’t think it’s enough to just have qualified teachers. We need passionate teachers who can impart the enchantment and delight of the world around us. A world where the most ordinary and everyday object becomes fascinating and where entire worlds inhabit spaces only visible through highly detailed computer models.

So Dowdeswell didn’t really kill the magic of it all but in his morose and charmless way, he did give it a bloody good kicking.