The Proverbials

"Many hands make light work!” chuckled George as he formed The Proverbials into a chain to ferry the rucksacks, hand to hand, from various car boots and into the back of the waiting minibus. “Steady away,” he reminded them: “More haste less speed and all that!” The team laughed heartily, joshing with each other as they swiftly transferred their day packs into the transport then trooped back into the Scout Hut kitchen to have a coffee and listen to the brief.

Seated in a loose semi-circle, the rambling club gazed upon a map Blu-tacked  to the wall as George outlined the routes and the programme for the day. Grid references were duly noted as were the locations of public telephones and villages with police stations. Emergency procedures were checked, mobile phone numbers were exchanged, team leaders appointed and first-aiders assigned. No possibility was left to chance as they planned their annual orienteering competition, concluding with their trademark slogan, ‘The Seven Pees’.

“Proper prior preparation…” said George, inviting the assembled throng to recite the response: “Prevents piss-poor performance!” They all replied, ending with a round of applause. Not for nothing were they known as The Proverbials among the rambling community. Shouting “All for one and one for all!” the aphorism-addicted companions piled into the transport and headed for the hills.

The weather was dreary and overcast, a pall of hill fog blanketing them as they drove higher into the Pennines before they finally arriving at the rendezvous point where they met the other teams and listened to the final site brief before disappearing off into the mist to complete their circuits against the clock. Even though the sun shone above them, all that penetrated the gloom was an eerie sodium-yellow gloom. The absence of shadows and boggy ground underfoot made getting ones bearings tricky and frequent route deviations compounded the sense of isolation.

Eventually, George’s five man team encountered another and with a few minute’s discussion both teams concluded they were lost. With no mobile phone signal and with GPS contact lost the leaders gathered round the map and consulted their two compasses. They were forty-five degrees different. After a moment’s panic among the group George took charge, “faint heart never won fair lady," he reminded them, adding, “and he who hesitates is lost.” The walkers murmured assent and duly fell into file behind him as he led the way.

Eventually they came to swampy ground in which George quickly became mired up to his knees. Bidding them to halt he struggled back to the tussocky dry grass and held a conference. “We could try and go round,” he said, “but it’s starting to get dark. I think we should risk it and carry on straight across.” After a brief discussion of who should go first they decided that if the lightest of the group could make it, they could assist progressively heavier members to beat the bog.

A groan was heard from the back of the party as “Five-foot-one Yvonne” heard the sound of her card being marked. Passing her rucksack to one of the others she gingerly stepped out onto the boggy ground and cautiously made her way out into the wet. After about ten steps, she turned round and grinned. With a big thumbs-up and declaring it safe to proceed she turned back, took another bold step forward… and promptly disappeared without trace into the bog. 

Rambling on...

Shocked, the rest of the group sombrely skirted the edge of the morass and eventually found a firm gravel track along which they made their way to the safety. Search parties subsequently failed to recover Yvonne's body despite the insistence that it would probably be in the last place they looked. The local newspaper later recorded her noble sacrifice in the only way she would have wanted, with the headline: “A titch in slime saves nine.”

Diagnosis Murder

Whatever you may think of the medical profession – saints or sinners – it is, undoubtedly, a profession; we pay for it. And as with any market when everybody owns a widget or a smart-widget or an ersatz widget the search is on to replace widgets with gizmos and create a new demand, more business, more profit. Diversify to thrive. The pedlars of quack cures for consumption and ague have long since gone to the big surgery in the sky and the relentless quest for the latest, on-trend, disease du jour continues. Whatever happened to Yuppie Flu?

Nobody wants to cure the faux epidemic, of course; the real money is in diagnosing it and treating it. Statins, anybody? And a little know perverse reality is that those much-lauded drug trials are skewed to favour the likes of GSK’s latest potion against yesterday’s miracle salve. Dare I say ‘side effects’? The reason they keep on tinkering with your old dad’s combination of meds is because those trials continue long after the medicine is licensed and nobody fully knows how any particular drug regime recipe is going to affect any individual in advance.

The real drug of choice for most people should simply be less. Less meat, less dairy, less alcohol, less nicotine, less fat, less salt, less sugar, less… more ‘less’. But less is difficult and we are so accustomed to having what we crave when we crave it that the idea of temperance is a bitter pill to swallow. Oh, if only they would invent that pinnacle of self-medication the fix-everything, after-everything pill. Until then we have to make do with deadly concoctions of dodgy chemicals and trust that our pushers – the GPs – are independently wealthy enough to resist the inducements to prescribe the latest silver bullet.

With the exception of unconscionably large amounts of alcohol and the occasional paracetamol (although rarely for hangovers – I generally don’t get hangovers) my only regular weakness is gluttony. So, I’m definitely not going to the doctors because I’ve just learned that the latest on-trend diagnosis is ‘Pre-diabetic’. I believe we used to call it ‘being a bit overweight’, but my god what have we come to when in order to line its pockets the medi-scare industry has to stoop to crystal ball gazing?

Still, if this recent report into shortfalls on state pensionentitlement is true we might not all be able to afford any actual, proper, old-age diseases in the future at all. The greatest insult and irony, of course, is that it is the very people who have generally used the NHS the least while they worked most of their lives to pay into the system that may end up getting the least out. Meanwhile, those who have never worked and will have freely availed themselves of every medical trend on offer, if only as a way of passing the time, will have a ‘full stamp’ and ease seamlessly from working age benefits to a pension with barely a glitch.

Hey, I'm working to death here!

But hey, it has fuck-all to do with me. When the time comes I’d rather dress in a bin bag, hop in a skip and pop a cyanide pill than endure a slow demise as a lab rat for the drug companies. My 100% accurate terminal diagnosis was made at birth. Forget pre-diabetes, or even pre-pre-diabets; when you face up to it, we’re all suffering from pre-death anyway.

Spiked

Come on in pal, make yourself at home. The booze cabinet is always open and there’s ice in the freezer. I’m just nipping down the corner shop – do you want anything? There’s the paper, the telly remote, a bowl of peanuts and some hot snacks by the microwave… The car keys are on the hook by the front door if you need them and please do help yourself to the wife. This, I am imagining, is the logical conclusion to the whiny war on private property forever waged by certain elements of society who have never owned very much but have often not had to pay for a lot of it either.

The Guardian reports a flood of complaints about so-called ‘homeless spikes’ despite the fact that such defensive architecture has been in use for decades wherever unwanted intrusion is to be deterred. Pigeon spikes, razor wire atop perimeter fences and walls, anti-vandal paint and the like are all there for a purpose. And usually they only appear once a persistent problem has been identified and has resisted more benign campaigns to find resolution.

Really, The Guardian, a flood of complaints? Or just the usual suspects with nothing else to get outraged about today, mobilising their workshy mates to sign a totally pointless petition demanding that property owners be denied the exclusive use of what they have worked and are paying for. I’d be mighty pissed off to buy an expensive flat only to find that I had to step over a ringworm infested drug-addled drunk, smelling of vomit, piss and faeces just to get into my own home. And so would you. Oh yes you would.

The funniest thing, to my mind, were the numbers of tweeters taking to the ether to complain about how this ‘inhumane’ practice would do nothing to help solve the problem of homelessness. Well of course not, stupid… who even thinks for one moment that most people really give a toss? But it does help solve the problem of the location of the homeless themselves and if it drives them away from those who despise them and into the welcoming arms of those saints who would give up the shirts from their own back, surely that’s a good thing? Matching product to market is a lot more humane than driving them off with pitchforks and burning tar.

If all the people who moaned about more successful people being more successful were instead to emulate some of their zeal and tenacity they too would be able to experience the thrill of home ownership. Then together they could all spike up the place good and proper and the only place left for the genuinely and involuntarily homeless would be the hostels where they might get the very real help they might need. All paid for by the taxes this larger pool of happy, successful people would contribute and not by some self-indulgent war on ambition and good fortune. 

Oi, hop it! You cheeky fakir!

So, next time you see a piece of urban sculpture designed to dissuade the drifters, don’t get the hump, don’t be a prick but try to see the point of it. Sharpen up your thinking, pin down your concerns and take my tip: have a stab at seeing it from the other side of the palin fence. Seen from this boundary perspective tramp spikes are a palpable force for good in a sea of moral turpitude. Yes, I called them ‘tramp spikes’; no need to get all prickly about it.

I, Robot

The press were delighted over the weekend to announce that finally a computer has passed the Turing Test. The test, devised by Alan Turing in 1950 is a measure of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour indistinguishable from that of a human. If the human participant in a conversation between man and machine cannot reliably tell that he is not talking to another human being, the machine is said to have passed the test. And now a programme called Eugene has managed to convince a third of its human subjects that (while not necessarily representing humanity as we know it) they were conversing with a thirteen year old boy.

I don’t see what all the fuss is about. For a start, half the perverts on teenage internet chat rooms have been posing as thirteen-year-olds for years. But also it has come to my attention that such research has already gone way beyond a mere five-minute keyboard-based ‘chat’. I have recently been made aware of the findings of a Cambridge robotics laboratory’s work in producing a life-sized, human-emulating android. The robot has been involved in field trials under controlled conditions for a number of years now.

The following are quotations from the papers I have been privileged to have access to and summarise some of the group’s findings:

“25/09/2010: Android first trialled on unsuspecting public. General reaction was muted acceptance, although the jerky and sometimes spasmodic physical articulation soon gave away non-human core and more work is needed to model a more realistic and believable head. Speech somewhat stilted and the lack of fluency and focus needs to be tweaked. Conclusion of observers: Not human.”

“30/06/2011: New, smoother voice software installed and physical movement toned down. It was decided to reduce emotion facsimile to a minimum and have the machine sitting down and stable while answering a series of questions. First responses good, but on entering a verbal feedback loop it became impossible to exit; the robot began to repeat answers and very quickly its interviewer expressed doubts about dealing with an autonomously cognitive entity. Some difficulty in switching off and terminating the experiment. Still need more work on facial prosthetics? Conclusion: Not human.”

“17/04/2013: Tried exhibiting machine on small dais in Cambridge market, using a scripted speech with crowd-interactive opportunities. Robot successfully engaged small gathering for several minutes with detached monologue but was not so convincing when attempting to respond to questions in a human manner. Some odd answers resulted, often unconnected to actual queries, so experiment was terminated as crowd drifted away. Some educationally challenged participants and juveniles were taken in for a while but a number of parents complained about the strange grimaces and nasal whine frightening small children. Conclusion: Not human.”

One of these humanoids isn't really human...

“21/05/2014: After much work on physical presentation, movements are still somewhat spasmodic and unconvincing. However, determined to push on, we embarked on a last ditch nationwide tour, in order to try and fool as many people as we could by only allowing brief exposure to the latest prototype and limiting its speech to meaningless sound bites. Robot lasted less than twenty-four hours before the frankly embarrassing bacon sandwich incident, after which the team is seriously considering ‘recycling’ it or melting it down for scrap. Conclusion: Project Ed Miliband is unlikely to ever fool anybody.”

A whiter shade of pale

It was really only a matter of time. When you examine how Britain has been deliberately changed over the last few decades it can come as little surprise that in the very week we are remembering the sacrifices made for freedom seventy years ago the Daily Mail reports that a school in Devon has been downgraded by Ofsted for being too white. I would just LOVE to be a fly on the wall when the same inspectorate tells an exclusively Pakistani state school in Birmingham that they are ‘too brown’. Fuck me, but there’d be some lefty liberal outrage to behold.

Diane Abbott and Lee Jasper rail against whitey, while simultaneously contending that blacks can’t be racist, and the astonishing Ugandan agitator Yasmin Alibhai Brown openly longs for the death of the white race yet frequently also denigrates those with darker skin than hers - so what is the correct shade, Yasmin? Must we mingle until we are all mocha?

And what is the response to the Trojan Horse affair and the sense that finally, too little too late, the authorities are opening their eyes to the threat of a deliberate infiltration and islamification of our institutions, long warned about by ordinary ‘bigots’? Why, it’s a call to 'do more for ethnic minorities'. That, by the way, is code for making white people feel ever more ashamed of their heritage. In future history lessons will Winston Churchill be a Jamaican and Michael Faraday a Moor, or will all our past achievements simply be overwritten by a multicultural mélange of mediocrity?

On the Sunday Politics yesterday Maajid Nawaz co-founder of Quilliam pulled no punches in confirming the truth of the islamic mission in Europe and the French warned us long ago that all this would come to pass. The liberty and tolerance that we enjoy thanks to men like Bernard Jordan has been systematically used against us for years as calls for integration into British society fell on deaf ears; no, they said, it is we who must accommodate them. Even David Cameron, to his shame, recently called for greater and greater insertion of islam into Britain’s governing structures.

So, what are the Devon schoolchildren going to learn? How will they be made to feel? Inferior for their skin colour, is that the plan? Intolerant for a lack of ‘diversity’ they have had no hand in bringing about? Will they return ‘enriched’ by the vibrant cultural heritage of islamic civilisation and the many colourful shades of grey it wears? Will the girls be made to don burkas and will they all be ‘invited’ to learn koranic verses and bow to the bingo hall, so they can debase their kafir origins?  None of this would surprise me.

The ideal school?

While I am a reasonably gregarious person and have no great difficulty in meeting new people I have always resisted being forced to do so. Unless you have common interests, values, views, etc, it can be a great chore. It’s one thing gritting your teeth and doing it as an adult, but it’s quite another – and quite a trial – to be a child shoved into an alien environment. I hope they learn from this visit and adopt the practices of their host school, returning home with all their natural prejudices reinforced and resolving to keep Devon as monocultural as they possibly can.

Racist? Hell yes; who wouldn't be in the black face of all this?