New turn, old spin.

The DRS/bat tampering debate has taken an unexpected turn with the discovery that a well-known English batsman has played several Test matches with a large hole in the centre of his bat.  The hole is reported to be about the size and shape of a cricket ball.

The batsman, who has not been named, denied that the hole gave him an unfair advantage.  To begin with, there was no tape or linseed oil around the inside of the hole, so any impact from the ball in this area would not be concealed from Hotspot.  The existence of the hole, he went on, was against neither the rules nor the spirit of the game.  On the contrary, the absence of a large piece of wood from the middle of his bat could arguably assist the bowling side if, for example, the ball passed through the hole and onto the stumps.  No one, he continued, had complained until now.  Why should it suddenly be labelled wrong?  He knew of many other English batsmen who had played with holes in their bats over the last 30 or 40 years, especially in the ‘90s against Australia. 

Analysis has in fact revealed that the hole is scarcely large enough for a cricket ball to pass through.  In controlled experiments, nine times out of ten, a direct hit travelling under 50 mph lodged the ball tightly in the hole.  This news generated a whole new line of discussion on BBC Radio’s Test Match Special.  Would a batsman be out if the ball got stuck in a hole in his bat?  Was it a dead ball, was the batsman obstructing the game, or was it something else?  Would the batsman be caught by his own bat?

It is now clear that the hole offers no real assistance either to the batsman or to the bowler in relation to most types of dismissal, with or without the structural addition of the ball.  However, if a bat with a ball embedded in it struck the wicket, the batsman would technically have played the ball onto his wicket at the same time as he struck the wicket with his bat.  This point launched the commentators into further discussion about the possibility of getting out in more than one way from a single ball – in this case, played-on and hit-wicket.  Surely, one pundit lamented, after centuries of cricketing tradition, they could not suddenly introduce a new way of getting out. 

Via text message, a cricket fan reminded everybody, public and pundit alike, that umpires have been having enough trouble with the system as it is, and that giving not out for more than one reason for a single delivery in Durham produced enough heat on its own – in general discussion, if not on the surface of the bat – without the introduction of a new controversy.  

Welby, Wonga and the Money Factory

The other day, a woman complained to a local newspaper about the decline of the UK High Street.  Superstores and internet shopping have forced out many traditional businesses.  In their place we see rows of other kinds of shops: second-hand, betting, kebab and pawn, half a dozen of each on a short stretch of road.  But the poor still need to be fed and clothed. 

The grandiose old banks, like the grandiose old churches, have been boarded up or put to other use.  More popular, down-market versions – Pentecostal missions and loans-till-payday bureaux – have taken their place, sometimes literally.

Archbishop Welby of Canterbury, with a career in business behind him, not to mention a well-known Biblical precedent, now has it in for these money lenders.  He recently declared financial war in a very public way on a company called Wonga.  Unfortunately for him, it was straightaway discovered that the Church of England has itself been investing indirectly in the same company.  Naming Wonga, the Archbishop not only embarrassed himself beyond all understanding, but also offered to that business the heaven of free publicity.  We assume, rightly or wrongly, that he targeted Wonga before all the other companies because their business is the biggest, and that it is the biggest because it is the most efficient, which means it is the best place to go if we need some quick cash.  The heaven of free publicity.  If I irk the Archbishop, can he give it to me?

Mammon and God have long been twins.  The Virgins Money and Mary.  Not many businesses have property portfolios and multi-national interests as vast as those of the Church.  There have been shops in cathedrals for decades, but now you have to pay just to walk inside these great, stone monuments.  For Canterbury Cathedral, the entrance fee is £9.50.  At Salisbury Cathedral they charge £10 per adult, with a family ticket of £27 for “two adults and one, two, or three children.”  That’s right.  Unplanned charlie number four will have to empty out his piggy bank, or wait outside. 

Presumably, that other heavy monument nearby would not have fallen into ruin if, for the last five thousand years, visitors had been asked to pay the current £8 entrance fee.  Not quite so long ago, in a different temple, Christ overturned the tables of the money changers.  Perhaps someone pulled the same stunt at Stonehenge, but the authorities followed his advice, and things went downhill from there.

Sooner or later we all pass our solstice.  Things shut down.  Post offices now rent space in pharmacies. There is a plan to put police desks in post offices.  They’ll be dispensing more than justice soon.  To combat pay-day loans, the Archbishop is allowing user-friendly credit unions to operate on church premises.  Why not go further and open up branches of the Church inside the money lenders?  It’s true, one day some visionary capitalist might come along and overturn the altars, but companies like Wonga don’t need to put the Church of England out of business.  It’s performing that task very well by itself with a growing canon of controversies which now include the announcements of its leader. 

Meanwhile, let us venerate the miracle of interest.  Receiving it is just like a Virgin birth.  

Royal Blue

A decade or more of toil against gender stereotyping has been undone by a single birth. 

In Canada, they turned Niagara Falls blue (if you didn’t get it, the spray is normally white), and in New Zealand, Christchurch airport was also illumined with the colour for boys.  Prince William, said their Prime Minister, is held in high affection over there as he attended the opening of the Supreme Court.  They lit up the wrong building, then. 

The Australians, to their credit, didn’t show off any man-made or natural wonders.  In that gruff, endearing way, the PM simply spoke about the royal bub.  Like an eight-pound door knocker, or ceremonial barge.  You can’t picture a human, let alone a gender.    

Here in England, things didn’t turn out much better.  With Scottish independence in the air, we weren’t about to highlight the colour blue.  We wanted to celebrate the Union, and the London Eye was lit up in the colours of the Union Jack.  At least, it was meant to be.  What we got was blue, pink and indeterminate – the gender stereotypes again.  In the morning, we took extra care with our choice of tie. 

The sailors on HMS Lancaster celebrated in their own way.  They went on parade and formed the letters BOY.  Someone in a helicopter photographed them on deck.  They must have been hoping for a boy.  The extra letter in girl would have put some sailors too close to the edge, not to mention indeterminate. 

The baby’s name was never going to be Jack.  It was never going to be David, either.  Mr Cameron’s fiddle with the primogeniture law, like some of his other legislation, is now irrelevant.  Speaking of fiddling, how do we know it’s a boy?  Because certain people were paid to inspect the future monarch’s genitals and make a written report about what they saw.  We trust that this is the last time such liberty is taken.

BBC headlines showed the world reacting to news of the royal birth.  That may have pleased the audience here in Britain, but it was little more than a few best wishes from a few predictable presidents and Commonwealth countries.  Nonetheless, in their tradition of balanced reporting, the BBC website did quote a Pakistani journalist’s tweet that the royal arrival made no difference whatsoever to a great number of people. 

We can still celebrate our British-ness, though, even when we know that not everybody does, and that members of the Royal family are born and live and die exactly like the rest of us?  And we don’t need to travel to the sub-continent to witness such ennui.  After that car accident in Paris, anarchist graffiti like DEAD AS A DODI straightaway appeared on walls around London.  

Life is probably easier for anarchists.  They don’t wear ties for a start.   

What, are fish fingers made from children?

We keep getting these reports. 1 in 10 secondary pupils think tomatoes grow underground.  A third of primary kids think cheese is made from plants.  This ignorance should surprise no one, or just the ignorant, since many children also believe that their father is God, that policemen never tell lies, and that politicians, unlike prostitutes, don’t take money for favours.  Some children don’t know where babies come from, Mummy, let alone what prostitutes add to the equation.  Nor can they do maths.  They are clueless about how to use money itself.  No doubt there are children out there who don’t even know what money is.  

Children need to be told things.  Though please spare them, and us, the science of statistics.  The new study reveals that 25% of little learners think fish fingers come from chicken meat, or pig.  I confess this does surprise me.  I never imagined having to tell a fish the truth, let alone a child.

But why pick on children?  You old bullies.  Of course, most journalists are over 18.  Nonetheless, adults often know as little as, or less than, children.  We should ask some strapping grown-ups the same questions.  I suppose it’s much easier to get hold, so to speak, of large numbers of children.  They can’t escape the classroom, where peculiar questions are the norm, and where strapping, I should point out, remains illegal.    

By the time we’re adults, we shouldn’t still believe that adults know everything.  I myself am an adult.  I personally know a large number.  I admit that you can sometimes find knowledgeable ones, mature individuals with excellent taste.  In China, for example, customers at a rat restaurant complained when they were served lamb.  

In the UK, consumers are not always so discerning.  Until the recent meat-switching scandal, the retired couple next door used to eat entry-level, supermarket beef lasagna.  (Yes, you old bullies, lasagne is the plural form.)  At least, those two lovebirds thought it was beef.  When the wife went into hospital for an operation, the old chap asked if they could test her for horsemeat while she was there.  He was probably joking.  His mistake was to ask the question before the old girl was fully sedated.

Don’t mind the neighbours.  You can come across mistakes anywhere.  There is a blue baby on your Facebook Profile page, and you know that babies are not normally blue, not properly-breathing, human ones, anyway.  It’s ridiculous.  A blue baby and a white nappy.  But it doesn’t make the headlines.  The designer’s an adult, isn’t he?  Either a Krishna devotee who thinks that nappies only come in one colour, or a bluestocking who knows that, while most people don’t care what colour nappies are as long as they are clean, they might object to an earth baby of a regulation colour if it doesn’t match their own.  Some mistakes are a good idea.  Some make it into schoolbooks.  Who writes the schoolbooks?  Adults.

Serving the nation

It was quite a coup.  Andy Murray’s victory at Wimbledon, I mean.  If Scotland was already independent, Britain would still be waiting for its first Wimbledon champion since 1936.  The Scots will get their vote in the end.  And if democracy doesn’t give you what you want, there is the other sort of coup.  The youth of Egypt delighted the world with their Twitter revolution.  The Army did nothing.  We saw the power of technology in the hands of fresh-faced democrats.  The Muslim Brotherhood did nothing.  Let the youngsters take the credit.  We’ll take power later through legitimate elections.  Mubarak went.  The fresh-faced democrats stayed in the Square for months until the Army allowed elections, then took to the Square again until the Army overthrew the party that won them. 

A stunning victory

So, Mrs May has got what she wanted.  Abu Qatada has gone.  But who exactly won?  Like millions of other law-abiding UK residents, he had wanted to stay.  The government feels it can claim victory as it got him to do something which he hadn’t wanted to do.  But his deportation was possible only because it is now illegal for the courts in Jordan to use evidence which has been extracted under torture.  And he did drop his old objection to going.... That’s some victory for any Home Secretary.

The problem is Mrs May wanted to get rid of him well before the legal safeguards for his fair trial were put in place.  His human rights didn’t matter because she had decided he was a dangerous man.  The Human Rights lobby irritated the government.  She tried to wash her hands of him and the lobby, but the courts wouldn’t allow it.  If she has her way, this so-called victory will now be used as an excuse to withdraw altogether from the European Convention on Human Rights.  That would be some victory for any Home Secretary.  

The Human Rights lobby should, in fact, be applauded for making governments respect the need for a fair trial and the rule of law.  If Mrs May was tortured into confessing to a crime she did not commit, or implicating an innocent person in a crime, she would look to a fair trial and the rule of law.  If Mrs May was tortured into confessing to a crime she did commit, or implicating a guilty person in a crime, she would look to a fair trial and the rule of law.  This is everybody’s right, although some people, such as Mrs May’s supporters in the battle over Abu Qatada, might think a dangerous woman did not deserve it.

There is, of course, no guarantee that Abu Qatada will be found guilty in a trial in Jordan.  In fact, if he has a fair trial, there is every chance that he will be acquitted.  There is no guarantee, either, that the British Government will not disregard the basic human rights of other individuals.  If this happens, sooner or later an innocent person will suffer.     

Do you find the innocent guilty or accused?

It should surprise no one if police have sought information to incriminate the law-abiding family of a murdered boy.

  

In a criminal investigation, when evidence of wrong-doing is found, we congratulate our constabulary on a job well done. A crime has been committed.  The gathering of evidence is designed to enhance public safety.  The criminals deserve it.  When a conviction is achieved in court, a few careers in policing are enhanced as well.  However, when the same careers are threatened by bad publicity, it is human nature – and a logical further step – for police to investigate those responsible for this publicity in order to discredit them.  We need to watch our own backs.  All that training and manpower, and all those resources, are meant to be used, aren’t they?

   

The Lawrence family and their supporters embarrassed police with their criticism.  Although they had not committed an offence, or been accused of any crime at all, an undercover agent now says that he was assigned to spy on them.  So, police resources, which are often portrayed as scarce, were allegedly diverted away from the investigation of real crime – the murder of boys, for example – and marshalled against the private lives of an innocent, grieving family.  When real criminals walk free, this same scarcity of resources is one of the excuses that are given.

In 1993, the reflex action to bungle by an institutionally-racist police force made the guilty look innocent, while the reflex urge to sniff and spy, in this case, we are told, to make the innocent look guilty, has remained a secret until now.  None of this should surprise anyone.  Considering what happens to whistle-blowers, it is a wonder such allegations are made at all.  What will they be saying in 2033?  Very little.  The police are so much better at it now.