Reluctant admiration

I suspect that we all of us have admiration for some crooks.  Let's be honest, Robin Hood was just a bandit even though he is an English folk hero, and many of us admire the exploits of Raffles.  Granted, Raffles is entirely fictitious and Robin Hood may well be the same.  But there is, just occasionally, a real-life crook who occasions admiration, even if the admiration is reluctant.  James McCormick is one such.

The day we left for France, the newspapers were reporting how McCormick had been found guilty of fraud and on Thursday it was announced that he had been sentenced to 10 years in jail for selling fake bomb detectors.  (I'm too bone idle to type all the details so I'll copy from the Daily Telegraph site.)

Millionaire James McCormick, 57, sold the useless devices, based on novelty golf-ball finders worth less than £13, for as much as £27,000 each to customers including the Iraqi government, the United Nations, Kenyan police, Hong Kong prison service, the Egyptian army, Thailand's border control and Saudi Arabia.

The ineffectual detectors were used by soldiers and peacekeepers out in the field, putting lives at risk, with McCormick thought to have made an estimated £50 million from sales of his three models to Iraq, Belgium and the UN for use in Lebanon.

Experts said the detectors lacked “any grounding in science, nor does it work in accordance with the known laws of physics”, adding that they were “completely ineffectual as a piece of detection equipment".

Brochures marketing the fake bomb detectors under the Advanced Detection Equipment brand promised that the devices could also pick up substances up to 30 metres underwater or 10 metres underground, and through walls.

The equipment consisted of a swivelling antenna connected to nothing except a plastic handgrip.  No battery or other power source was needed as the devices "came to life after the user had shuffled their feet".  Colour-coded cards could be inserted depending on the substance to be detected: explosives, drugs, ivory or even specified currencies.  Needless to say, the cards were simply different coloured pieces of plastic.

Granted, peoples lives were put at risk - but what chutzpah the guy had to sell these things at up to £27,000 each!  You have to admire that.  And whatever happened to caveat emptor?

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Another shot of the oil seed rape from our trip to France.

And all the world was yellow

And if that title isn't a quote from a song, well, it darned well should be!

As we moved further south into the Pays de la Loire so we saw more and more cowslips in the verges, masses and masses of them in some places.  Further north, fairly close to Calais, there were still primroses in bloom, but down in the Loire they had finished.

The last couple of years we have seen fields of sunflowers in the lanes around La Prévière but this year things were different.  Still yellow, but different.  There must be a subsidy available to farmers on rape oil this year as there is acre upon acre of the bright yellow plant in the fields.

Our standard routine on these wineracking trips is to stop at a supermarket on the way down to buy the essentials for the week - coffee, milk, butter and so on - and then, on the way home, do the big shop, have a meal at the nearby Buffalo Grill and then get the train for England.  This last time, however, the routine needed to be abandoned.  We realised, when we arranged the dates of our trip, that we would be returning on May Day, a bank holiday in France.  Our big shop would have to be done earlier in the week as all shops are shut on bank holidays.  But unfortunately, it was not until the Old Bat and I were washing up the breakfast things on the day of our return to England that we remembered.  So that was the end of the wineracking.

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I lied yesterday when I said that I was back to blogging in real time.  This is being written on Thursday and will be scheduled for Friday as I will do the supermarket shop on Friday (that is either tomorrow or today depending on your point of view) while the OB is in the diving bell as we will then be going on to the funeral of the friend who died last week.  Then I will be fetching the dog from kennels etc etc.

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I wrote - a long time ago it seems now - about winning the shove ha'penny competition and Suldog left a comment asking what shove ha'penny is.  Sorry to be so late answering, Jim, but here goes.

This is a traditional British pub game and is played on a wooden board divided into horizontal "beds", each bed being slightly wider than the old halfpenny coin.  A coin is placed at the near end of the board, slightly over-lapping the edge, and is propelled by striking it with the ball of the thumb (or other part of the hand as desired) so that it slides up the board with the aim of coming to rest cleanly in a bed.  As we play it, the players take turns to score as highly as possible over a set time, say 10 or 15 minutes.

Route Barrée

I'm back in Brighton once again and can resume posting on a real time basis rather than scheduling for a day or more ahead, which is what I did for the last week - including the post last Wednesday where I mentioned how frazzled I had been getting.  That post was written before things came completely unstuck.  Well, almost completely unstuck.

We have been using the same kennels to look after our dogs when we have been unable (or unwilling) to take them away with us for something like 35 years.  Fern, our current dog, is a particular favourite of the kennel owners and I have become aware that she is rather spoiled when she stays there, being allowed out of her run to sit in the office for much of the day and even being taken into the owners' house at times.  You will realise, then, that I was astonished when I turned up at the kennels last Tuesday afternoon to be told that the kennels were closed.  Apparently I should have received a phone call telling me of this - but that left me in something of a quandary.  It was mid-afternoon and we were due to leave at 8 the following morning.  No way could we take the dog with us as it was by then far too late to make the necessary arrangements for anti-rabies jabs and so on even if we could find room in the car.  It was suggested to me that I should try more kennels some miles away.  Fortunately, they were able to take Fern in so we were able to get away ourselves the next morning, but I now had precious little time to finish all the odds and ends that needed doing.  (Luckily, the few things I forgot have proved not to matter.)

So we motored down through Picardy and Normandy to the Loire country, the weather seeming to get better and better as we progressed southwards.  We arrived in the village at about 9.30, just as it was getting dark, and were greeted by this sight.

Our house is about 300 yards further down the road, just at the other end of the village, and, I later discovered just few yards the wrong side of the "road closed" signs at the other end of the road works.  You might notice that the usual "sauf riverains" (except residents) part has been covered up, but it was pretty obvious that I would have to drive past this road block.  In fact, many drivers completely ignored the closure of the road and carried on as normal.  Except on Tuesday.

We had arrived on Wednesday last week and saw no sign of workmen on Thursday or Friday, but they came back on Monday and on Tuesday managed to dig a trench right across the road - just as I was about to drive into town to get the daily bread for lunch!  To get to the point in the picture, just 300 yards from our front gate, I had to drive 8 miles - and then 3 more into town for the bread.  That was an expensive loaf.

Bedtime stories

I mentioned yesterday - and I rather suspect that I have done so on at least a few earlier occasions - that I am an avid reader.  The so-called experts tell us that if parents want their children to enjoy reading, they (the parents) should read to their children.  Now, I most certainly make no claim to be an expert in this or, indeed, any other matter.  All the same, expert or not, I have an opinion. And you are going to be given the benefit of that opinion.  I think it is important that parents do read to their children, although whether or not children go on to enjoy books may not be influenced by the presence or absence of parental reading.  I really have no particular opinion on that part of the question.

I personally enjoy reading.  Did I say that before?  But what I don't know is how much my parents might have influenced that.  You see, I have no recollection whatsoever of my mother ever reading to my brother and I.  And, for the most part, it would have been my mother rather than my father who would have read to we boys as we were both war babies and our father was away at sea for most of the first five years of my life.  That said, I do remember my father reading to us.  We would pester him for ages before he would agree to do so, and our choice of book was always the story of Robin Hood.  This had some great colour illustrations and was our favourite book - but my father wasn't too happy with it.  For some reason, he always managed to mix up "bow" and in "bow and arrow" and "bow" as in "bow from the waist".  Through in a few "boughs" - as happened quite naturally since the story was set in Sherwood Forest - and poor Dad became totally confused.

Parental influence aside, I have always remembered the teacher who took my class for religious instruction, Mr Holly.  Yes, that really was his name, and he was no relation to Uncle Holly who appeared in Selfridges department store in London just before Christmas every year.  But to return to RI.  Mr Holly - was that really his name or is my memory playing tricks again? - was a great one for widening the scope of his lessons.  He seemed to think that just about everything on Earth was connected to religion in one way or another and any subject under the sun was appropriate for discussion.  But what I remember him for is his advice to read as much as possible about as many things as possible, even if it meant reading the corn flakes packet at breakfast.

I'm not at all sure that either of my sons is a great reader - I know my daughter is - and as either the Old Bat or I would read to the children every day, this might just point to the fact that the experts don't always know what they are talking about.

This one of my favourite family snaps - the Old Bat reading to the two boys.

What's in a name?

In a fairly recent posting I discussed what it took for a town to become a city and my mind, as usual, wandered into other territory.  Namely, the names of our towns and cities.  I believe that some of the place names in Australia and the USA, to take just two examples, are based on the names given by the earlier inhabitants.  But many of the other, anglicised names were simply copied from the settlers home country.  I'm completely ignorant of how places were named in other countries such as France, Italy or Spain, but I do know that many village, town and city names here in England are corruptions of names given by the invading hordes of Danes, Saxons, Angles and Romans.  Except in Cornwall.

Cornwall is something of an oddity.  The most south-westerly point of Great Britain, it was to this rocky promontory (and Wales) that the Celtic tribes were pushed by the invaders.  As a result, the place names in Cornwall tend to be different from those in any other part of England.  Many start with the letters "Tre" - Trevivian, Trelawney - or "Pol" - Polperro.  There is a distinct similarity between Cornwall and Brittany, in France.  Both were Celtic strongholds and as well as topographical similarities, there is the similarity of the ancient languages and the fact that Cornwall and Brittany have the world's only black and white flags.

But I'm digressing again.

Many English place names end in "chester" or similar - Chester itself, Rochester, Winchester, Chichester, Gloucester, Worcester, Leicester to name but a few.  That is because these were Roman fortified sites and the names are based on the Old English, from the Latin castra, a camp.

"Ham" is a common ending in town names, as in Chatham, Nottingham, Tottenham, Oldham.
This comes from the Saxon for farm or homestead.  In some instances the prefix refers to the situation of the homestead (the Chat of Chatham could refer to the valley in which the farm was situated) while others refer to the name of the homestead owner.  The insertion of "ing" as in Gillingham means the family or people of the person named, so Gillingham means a homestead of Gylla's family, from Old English ham (village, homestead) and ingas (family, followers).

Then there are many "tons" - Crediton, Honiton, Northampton, Southampton.  "Ton" meant a place surrounded by a hedge or palisade.

"Borough" - Edinburgh, Middlesbrough, Peterborough, Canterbury - comes from the Anglo-Saxon "beorgan", to shelter. An earthwork, and hence a fortified town.

And what of Brighton?  Well, it was at one time Brighthelmstone and was abbreviated a couple of hundred years ago,  There are various suggestions about the source and meaning of this name, such as these I have copied from www.mikeperris.com:

The origin of the name of Brighton is somewhat contentious. It has been translated as "a sea town with a bright or burning watchtower", or named in reference to the brightly decorated helms of the local ships, or "the divided town" (Brist meaning divided in ancient British, with the old river Wellesbourne doing the dividing), but the following seems to be the most common account:

Within the small area of North, West, East and South Streets, the invading Saxons built a group of villages, one of which was called Bristelmestune, named after Brighthelm, who was either a Saxon priest (in France) or a Saxon warrior (killed on the South Downs), or possibly a Saxon farmer, depending on which account you read, although the warrior angle crops up more often than the others. According to a number of sources, including an article in the Daily Telegraph, Brighthelm is said to mean Bright Helmet, although I can only guess whether the words "bright" and "helmet" would have had any meaning to Saxons. Anyway, a shiny helmet appears prominently, if unofficially, in Brighton's coat of arms.

Oh well, you pays your money and makes your choice.

Intimations of mortality

Wordsworth might have had his intimations of immortality but for the Old Bat and me the opposite has been the case.  A couple of days before we left for France, we received the news that one of the OB's oldest friends had died.  The funeral is to be on Friday after we return so we will at least manage to be there.

When we were first married all those years ago - getting on now for half a century! - there was a group of six young ladies who kept alive a friendship formed at school and, chiefly, at Guides.  They met regularly, one evening a month, taking it in turns to host the "girls' night", those girls' nights generally lasting until the early hours.  Through marriage, childbirth, in one case divorce and later remarriage (which is a story all on its own), the meetings continued.  One of the girls moved away.  She didn't drive but once or twice a year her husband would drive her down to Brighton and she would spend the night with us so the girls could all get together again.

Then, about five years ago, one died.  An embolism, I think.

Two years ago a second developed a brain tumour and died.

Now a third member of that group has died - again, a tumour.

I don't know the figures for life expectancy in this country for women born in the 1940s, but I do find it quite surprising that all three died in their 60s.  I think 68 was the oldest.

It makes me think.

If it isn't fun, don't do it

(Just a brief introduction for those readers who are unfamiliar with the set up of Lions Clubs.  These clubs are grouped together in areas called districts, each district being led by a District Governor.  Many DGs select a motto for their year in office. Each district holds an annual meeting known as a convention.)

Several years ago, the District Governor for Lions in south-east England adopted as his motto, "If it isn't fun, don't do it".  It was his opinion that although the objects or Lions Clubs are serious, achieving those objects did not necessarily exclude having fun and enjoying ourselves.  I think that his motto may perhaps have been something of an overstatement although it is surprising just how often even the apparently dreary jobs can be capable of enjoyment and the odd moment of hilarity.

I said above how each district holds an annual convention.  These, at least in England, are held over a weekend with a "host night" party on Friday evening, business sessions all day on Saturday, a banquet and ball Saturday evening, and frequently something else on Sunday morning.  I have been to many conventions but have generally restricted myself to the Saturday business sessions.  I don't do host nights.  And the reason for that is that they usually involve fancy dress.

There was one occasion when I was persuaded to go to an evening function in fancy dress.  the do was held at a seafront hotel here in Brighton and my embarrassment riding there in a taxi and then walking the last few yards was excruciating.  And that in Brighton where anything goes!

No, that's not me in the picture.  That's the current president of Brighton Lions Club and her husband at this year's host night.  They seem quite happy to make fools of themselves in this way - as, indeed, do many others.  But I see no fun in it at all.  And as the man said, if it ain't fun, I won't do it!