X Rated

And continuing the subject of lardiness... There are certain things which I would prefer not to even contemplate. One of these emphatically is what John Prescott does with the parts of his body which are below his stomach and above his knees. I concede that the story of his two year affair with his secretary is, just about, in the public interest. I see how it contributes to the general picture of a government in moral and political decline. But please, in the name of God, no more details. I haven't been this revolted, or this amused, since the John Major-Edwina Currie story broke.

Fatheads

Apologies for turning this into a regional newspaper for a moment, but here goes. One of the lengthier rows rumbling about York has concerned the Barbican Centre. Originally this was a perfectly decent public baths. Then they put a god-awful 'leisure centre' around it, mainly a place for archaic rock bands to strut their creaking limbs. The process was like a pearl being created in reverse - the precious stone emerging first then the shit building up around it. The whole mess understandably went bust a few years ago. Now they've decided to revive the leisure centre but leave the baths closed. There are still two public baths left in York. But as one was poorly built in the 1960's and the other has been around since the 1900's, they may have to be closed at least temporarily to stop bits of their ceilings occasionally dropping into the pools.

There's one consequence to York having no public baths left. Children are going to get fatter. Swimming is wonderful for children because, unlike most forms of excercise, it's actually fun for them. You get to fart around and pretend to drown your friends. If you ever run out of ideas most pools have notices of prohibited actions - ducking, bombing etc. - to work through. And you lose calories at the same time.

There's a lot of fuss about fat kids at the moment. They're fatter than ever, apparently, and getting even fatter every second. The usual dire warnings about diabetes and heart disease are issued. And the usual culprits are found - junk food and computer games. Basically, the solutions are to stop children eating and doing things they enjoy. It's about controlling them even more. But children, unlike most adults, will actually do healthy - if not necessarily safe - things out of choice as long as they're enjoyable. They just need access to the opportunities, and those are vanishing more and more.

Football is another example. Not the creepy organised leagues where parents bawl their frustrations at their offspring but spontaneous, unsupervised games, a cross between sport, gang fight and shouting contest. Most school yards and fields in the country are, each morning, still taken over by our allegedly Gameboy-devoted generation kicking tennis balls at each other's heads. After school, though, they're a bit stuck. I used to play on the street a fair bit. It probably wasn't safe then and certainly isn't now, with even the quietest lane taken over by rat-runners. I used to break into waste ground too and it's hard to see any waste ground left any more. Playing fields are the only option left. And with councils and schools merrily selling them all off to balance their budgets and feed the housing boom, that's not really much of an option either. Near York's 1900's baths there's a scout hut. There used to be a playing field behind it. Now there's yet another housing estate. Called, in what must be a deliberate wind-up, 'Greenfields.' 'Greenfields' where there used to be a green field. Ha bloody ha.

Children rarely walk to school any more. Their parents, either paranoid about paedophiles or having enrolled them to a school on the other side of town because it has fractionally better grades, all drive them. They can't swim. They can't play football. And now the moral panic has decreed they can't engage in their only other pleasures - dicking about on the Nintendo, stuffing chips in their face and growing monumentally obese. It isn't much of a life.

There Is No Title

I was going to start this by apologising for not posting any entries for a week or so. Then I realised the comment would be addressed to my regular readers. And, of course, there aren't any. The only people who ever glance at this journal are those idly hitting the 'Next Blog' button, and they will only be scanning it to decide that theirs is much superior. Which, judging by my own research, it will be. The girl writing from Prince Edward Island, Canada, lost a lot of points by using a yellow font on a pink background, while this has a much classier template. But then she could offer in-depth reports on the state of the discos on Prince Edward Island, Canada. All I can manage is snide comments about stories I've read in The Guardian.

Or in this case, nothing. If I'd been a bit more organised I could have done a piece on Easter weekend. There would have been a hi-larious stint on the two dominant themes of Easter - chocolate and crucifixions - and how they might be combined. A little bit about staying the weekend with my grandad, who is not going quite as strong at 87 as we'd like him to be but still getting around quite well without a stick. And something on the dreadfulness of Luton, the town where he lives, and how he used to travel the world seeing beautiful sights and always had Luton waiting for him at the end of it all. But Easter is, as they say, so last week now. And I've nothing else to offer. So this has to be another blog entry about writing, or failing to write, a blog entry.

OK, I promise: In a day or so's time I'll try to get round to slagging off the Queen like any normal Englishman.

Arrivederci Silvio

It's times like this that I knew Latin. Silvio Berlusconi, who turned virtually all Italian media into his private messengers, who wound webs of scandal around himself so thick that they've even trapped Tessa Jowell, who undermined Italy's crusading anti-Mafia magistrates because they went after his friends, who allied himself with neo-fascists to keep himself in power, who basically built a fiefdom in the style of a Renaissance prince with patronage even thrown in (Paulo Maldini v Raphael , the Sistine Chapel roof v the 1994 European Cup winners - it's a close call)... Yes, that Silvio Berlusconi is out on his arse. By the slenderest of margins. And he's claiming dirty tricks have been perpetrated. It's like the 2000 US elections but with the good guys winning. It's also incredibly funny.

So I wish I knew Latin because there has to be some pithy phrase which sums up. All I can think of is et tu Brutus which means something else, though may be a sentence heard amongst the Italian right in the bitter coming weeks. I'll just have to content myself with saying 'he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.' And laughing a great deal.

The Dying Swan

I know, I should have written about the dead swan earlier. By now it's probably been buried with full military honours and the unfortunate Scots close to where it crashed to earth let out of quarantine. But my own medical problems (epilepsy and idleness) have hindered me. Better late than never then: Bird Flu Is In Britain (da da daaaah!)

Perhaps I should be frightened. The next time a duck even looks at me I should rush out and buy the masks and pills and respirators being sold by the usual snake oil merchants. Several things have stopped me, however. One is that like Prof Nof, who I sneered at last week, the medical panic reports have a heavy reliance on 'might' and 'if'. At the moment avian flu can be contracted by avians themselves and those in direct contact with their innards. Ah but if, we are told constantly. If the germ mutates it might be spread by any contact with birds, it might fly from human to human, it might make the Spanish Flu look like hayfever!!! 'If' is an elastic word, however. If the germ carries on mutating further it might grow a little hat and booties and look really cute under a microscope. If the Queen grows gonads, to adapt the old phrase, she'll become a King.

Another thing stopping my absolute terror is a refrain running through my head: 'Sars, Sars, Sars.' Because three years ago we were told we'd be lucky to even make it this far. And we were lucky to even get to the Sars scare, really, given that we should have been slain by the anthrax revival a few years before that. Bird flu ought to just be another horseman of the apocalypse, dimly registered as we dodge between the tidal waves and the terrorist dirty bombs. Sars, admittedly, was contained rather than fizzling out. The alertness which various governments showed was impressive; prevention is always better than cure. But the number of lives saved by press hysteria is the same as the number lost to Sars thus far in Britain. None.

Another mortality count: How many people, between the discovery of avian flu and its arrival in Britain, have died from maleria, HIV/AIDS, pneumonia and TB? How many more until the first life in Britain is taken by the flu, if any are? Those diseases don't get the hysterical headlines, though, and not simply because they've been killing for centuries. You can be almost certain of avoiding them by being relatively wealthy inside a relatively country. Not AIDS originally, and it caused an almighty panic when it first emerged. But since drugs were found to keep sufferers alive it's dropped off the headlines; and activists and aid organisations have to constantly remind us that it is actually eating up a whole continent. Many diseases are lifestyle ones in a way. People catch them by living in terrible conditions or doing terrible jobs, they die from them through a lack of food and medical treatment. They can be negated by wealth. Some new super-germ, though, which skips across class and national boundaries, which can get you whoever you are... that's always been one of the great terrors of the rich. It's us relatively rich who the journalists write for, after all. The ones with the income to respond to the adverts which keep the papers going. And fear, even more than sex, shifts copy.

I might be wrong about the bird flu menace. Maybe it will indeed sweep the world. One day one of the few survivors could read my scepticism and laugh sardonically. That at least will prove the society that we know really has been overthrown: someone reading this damn blog.

Thin Ice

Jesus, apparently, was walking on ice rather than water when he took his famous stroll across the Sea of Galilee. Or so says Professor Doron Nof at least. The Middle East was seemingly plagued by cold spells during Biblical times. And the Sea has salty springs which can stop water circulating at low temperatures and create a localised patch of ice. "A person... walking on it may appear to an observor... some distance away to be 'walking on water'" says Prof Nof, which "might have provided an origin to the story."

Note the heavy use of 'may' and 'might' in Nof's language. He doesn't have a clue really, just as he didn't when he said the Red Sea was parted by strong winds rather than Moses. I thought of this when reading another aquatic story in the Guardian today. The remains of a creature called the Tiktaalik has been found in Canada. A rather unpleasant looking predator, fortunately extinct for quite some time, it had gills and fins but also bones similiar to early creatures with limbs. Excited scientists are saying the Tiktaalik is a missing link and proves all land life evolved from sea-dwelling animals.

Now, OK. But I thought this was already, as the Americans say, a done deal. Text book after text books state categorically that life started in the ocean and eventually struggled onto the beach. And we accepted this assuming that the people saying it actually knew. But they didn't, apparently, until now. They were winging it. Or were, to use a phrase from what is supposed to be a fundementally opposed profession to theirs, making a leap of faith.

My point is that maybe scientists should test the validity of their own dogmas a little more carefully before attacking other people's. Search for incontrovertable facts, build empirical ideas on them... It's a little dull sometimes and won't get them in the papers so often but is supposed to be what they do. If they just want to go on flights of fancy or wind people up then I suppose that's fine. But they shouldn't call themselves scientists or complain about receiving nasty emails (Prof Nof's getting about one a minute) if they do.