Knoxy

A lot of people I know are still apparently of the belief that, on the basis of what they have read in the news over the past days, weeks and years, they know whether or not Amanda Knox was guilty. Some people are saying "So if you're pretty and American you can get away with murder, it seems!". Others are saying "It was clear she didn't do it from the start!".

Let's be clear: we do not know the full facts of this case. So it is plain wrong, logically wrong, to speculate about it.

I hope the Kercher family gets some closure soon.

Trees with 'No to AV' written on them

I don't have much time to blog today - I've got too much admin to do - but I want to get this off my chest.

Does anyone honestly think that drawing a cartoon of Nick Clegg standing knock-kneed in a forest full of trees which have things like 'LOCAL ELECTIONS' and 'ALTERNATIVE VOTE' written on them is funny?

Does anyone honestly think meteors with 'SOVEREIGN DEBT' written on them hurtling towards dinosaurs with 'MONETARY UNION' written on them is funny?

No?

Then why do papers like the Times and the Telegraph keep on printing the fucking things?

Today's Grauniad has a cartoon of David Cameron and George Osborne dressed up as admirals, standing outside a load of pubs in a street full of empty wheelie bins. Liam Fox is kicking a Royal Navy guy up the arse, and all the pubs are called things like 'The Jolly Rogered' and 'Ye Olde Shameless Gimmick' and 'Ye Old Cynical Stunt'.

You might think "Oh, for fuck's sake", but shamefully, it's one of the better ones around.

The closed shop

No blog yesterday - too busy going to Rosh Hashanah morning services. Two and a half hours! Sorry about that.

I do, however, have something to blog about today, having seen this in the Indy. What was so interesting about it?

Please bear in mind that I find talking about smartphones and tablets and gizmos and 'functionality' about as interesting as having my teeth pulled out by accountants who retrained as dentists. Actually, that's kind of the point. 'Functionality'. Words like that. Can't stand them. And that's why I was pleasantly surprised by this article: because it was the first time I've ever seen a business commentator have a pop at someone for using words that only tossers use. David Prosser has Had A Right Old Go at Stephen Elop, Nokia's chief executive, for talking corporate buzzwank. And boy, am I pleased.

It's not that I have anything against Stephen Elop as an individual. He's just a Canadian guy - the first non-Finn ever to head up Nokia, I think - who gets paid quite a lot of money to revitalise a brand that's taken quite a hit of late with all the iDroids and KindlePods and whatnot, and he's changing the way his production line is structured. Fine. I don't really care. Mr Elop will not feature again in this blog.

What I have something against is what I'm going to call 'the closed shop': something which I think Prosser neatly, if unwittingly, sums up in his article.

A closed shop, in the traditional sense, is an organisation who will only employ you if you're a member of the relevant trade union (or at least that's what I think it means). This closed shop is different - there are no trade unions involved - but in a sense, it's exactly the same. It's exactly the same because, if you don't speak the language, you're out. No hope of getting jobs, nothing.

The language I'm talking about is like English, but it isn't, really. To call it corporate buzzwank is to be too flippant. It's sinister. It uses three words where one would do. It invents nuances where there aren't any. Worst of all, it simply doesn't resemble the way anyone I know communicates. Which means it's not a language of the people: it's the language of a clique. It's impossible to overstate quite how isolated it makes me feel. No, not just me: anyone who's bright, feels they're capable of doing more than they are, but just doesn't want to talk that way.


For example, I've hankered after a job in my industry for some time that means I can talk to clients. At the moment, I don't. But when I receive an email from someone who does, telling me that my client feels I should "be less granular" with what I'm producing, how does that make me feel? First of all, it makes me think "What the hell does my client mean by less granular?". Of course, I know what they mean - they mean they want me to go into less detail. But then it makes me think "What if I actually had to talk to these people?"

Could I do it? Would I end up having to use words like "granular" to sound convincing?

Would I end up sending e-mails to my colleagues telling them they needed to be less granular?

If I didn't, would I get laid off?

Oh, this is too worrying. I don't think I'm cut out for this client stuff. It's a foreign country. So I'll stay where I am, on a pittance. And God forbid if I ever wanted to get to be an executive. Then I'd have to start thinking strategically about strategic thinking. These aren't just plans: they're M&S strategic, synergistic, leveraged plans. STRATEGIC, SYNERGISTIC, LEVERAGED PLANS.

The situation is terrible. And I wish it would stop.

I mean, if what the Tories are saying is true and you have buffoons looting Nokia phones from burnt-out shops on the one hand, and wealth-creating suited booted people manufacturing and selling them on the other, and you have ppl who r illitrit and cnt reed or rite and r not in eudaction emplyment or trnaing on the one hand, and professional professionals leveraging their granular expertise synergistically on the other...

...can there be no-one in the middle? Is there no room? Is it really a case of polar opposites?

What happens to the rest of us, the ones who can read and write and construct a sentence and an argument and all that jazz, and have an idea, or even lots of ideas, but just don't want to spend the rest of their lives talking utter bobbins?

Is the economy that bad that those of us who value proper communication now have to compromise?

Or are we really all freelance writers?

And will David Prosser ever get to praise anyone for talking straight?

Any answers, anyone?

Crossword lesson 1 - anagrams

This morning's news hasn't brought much, only predictably mixed reviews for Ed Miliband and three more letters to the Express regretting Nick Clegg's existence, and I'm not going to riff off those two again, so today I'm stuck.

Which means I'm going to talk you through some of the cryptic crossword I did on the bus home. Not all of it. That would take ages. Bits of it.

Cryptic crosswords are a funny thing. They're very peculiarly British - the harder crosswords you find in the New York Times just aren't the same - and very few people my age will admit to doing them. For many people of any age they're a complete and utter mystery. But I'm sick of my hobbies being impenetrable mysteries to all and sundry, so I'm going to try to explain how they work, in a maybe misguided attempt to make them popular.

Let's get started, then. All those of you who are serious about learning how to do cryptic crosswords might want to open up today's Grauniad effort in a new tab. Done? Good.

First, the basics. The first thing you need to know about cryptic crosswords is that although the clues might seem like bollocks, they're mostly written in the same way. Every clue contains two ways of getting the answer: one part of the clue will be the definition of the answer, and the other part of the clue will be some wordplay that also leads to the answer. This wordplay can take loads and loads and loads of different forms, but we'll deal with anagrams first - they're always, pretty much without exception, the easiest type of clue to do.

Consider this quick crossword clue: Arse (8). 

The answer's BACKSIDE. If you got it, well done (not that you had to look far).

Now consider this cryptic crossword clue: A sickbed changed? Arse! (8)

The answer's still BACKSIDE, but there's a second route to the clue: the letters of 'a sickbed', changed around, also make BACKSIDE.

So yep. Two ways of getting the answer. Definition, and wordplay.

Now, if we look at today's Grauniad crossword (which I'm linking to again in case you didn't open it up in a new tab the first time), we'll see that there are five clues which work along the same lines. Those are:

No fab clues - as an anagram is apt to be misleading (10)

Loving Gordian knots (7)

One given top billing in England? I'm a stranger! (7,3)

This bean may be transformed into a drink (8)

Palace official troubling monarch with "Dear Bill" letters (4,11)

In each of those clues, there's an 'anagram indicator' word or phrase - or 'anagrind' as some people call it - that tells you to rearrange the letters of another word or phrase to get to the answer. And, of course, there's the definition of the answer too.

Now, if I stick the 'anagram indicators' in bold and underline the definitions, but leave you to choose which letters to rearrange - in most cases it'll be obvious - you should be able to get these clues:

No fab clues - as an anagram is apt to be misleading (10)

Loving Gordian knots (7)

One given top billing in England? I'm a stranger! (7,3)

This bean may be transformed into a drink (8)

Palace official troubling monarch with "Dear Bill" letters (4,11)

And lo, here are the answers:

1. 'No fab clues' rearranges to CONFUSABLE, or 'apt to be misleading'

2. 'Gordian' rearranges to ADORING, or 'loving'

3. 'England? I'm a' rearranges to LEADING MAN, or 'one given top billing'

4. 'This bean' rearranges to ABSINTHE, which is a drink

5. Trickier, this one: 'monarch', with the letters in 'Dear Bill', rearranges to LORD CHAMBERLAIN, a 'palace official'.

You should now be able to do the anagram clues in any cryptic crossword. And with that, I'm off to bed - see you tomorrow!

EXTRA BIT 1:

I should imagine you've noticed that all 'anagrinds' are words to do with change, confusion or weirdness. It's rare to get a clue as straightforward as the first one, which baldly says "I am an anagram!". Usually, you'll see words like 'stranger', 'troubling', 'knots', 'transformed', 'refurbished' and so on and so forth.

EXTRA BIT 2:

You'll have also noticed that definitions mainly, with a few exceptions - more on which later - come at the start or end of a cryptic crossword clue. If you have to hunt around in the middle of a clue for a definition, then the setter is doing it wrong.

That's really it this time. More crossword stuff next Wednesday!

Yeats

It was W.B. Yeats who said 'the centre cannot hold'.

I'm going to expand on Yeats and say 'the centre cannot hold more than one UK political party at a time'. People like Mary Ann Sieghart have been saying that, since the Tories have gone to the right and Sillyband has taken his party leftwards, now is the time for Nick Clegg to plonk the Liberal Democrats in the middle. But pronouncements from Sillyband like this one, on tuition fees, make me think Mary Ann and her ilk might not quite have it right.

I've talked about Clegg's strategy here before, and on his party, I think Sieghart et al are on the money - the Lib Dems certainly appear centrist when judged against Cameron's lot, and it's always a good sign when every day, every single day without fail, you see a letter in the Mail or the Express from 'J. Pus, Funtbury-on-Sea' decrying Clegg for reminding the Tories of his existence. But if you think Sillyband's pledge to cut the tuition fees cap to six grand is sign of a party inching towards the left, you must be kidding me. It is a sign of a party swaying on the spot. The words 'deckchairs', 'Titanic', 'no new policy ideas' and 'clueless dorks' come to mind.

I mean, seriously. Sillyband did it with the public sector strikes, too. This infamous exercise in AI simulation shows that, when he's faced with a choice between something unpalatable and something else unpalatable - in this case, swingeing reductions in our quality of life on the one side and the spectacle of Bob Crow sitting on your face forever and ever on the other - he'll take a moderate line that satisfies no-one. So it is with tuition fees: accepting on the one hand that the current plans will expose the country to a massive wodge of never-to-be-repaid graduate debt, but feeling on the other that to say 'No fees at all!' would prompt calls for him to be sent off to a darkened room somewhere, he's come up with the ludicrous suggestion of reducing student fees, erm, a little bit.

It doesn't wash. Ed - you're not leading a party of the left, you're leading a party of moderates so moderate that they only do moderation in moderation. And you must try harder. Harder and lefter. If the centre ground is Nick Clegg's - and I think it is - then get the hell off it.

And in that context, I'm afraid, today's thunderous (and admirable) pledge to go after shit bastards looks desperate, and seems like one of those proposals destined to hit the Great Policy Dustbin as soon as Labour get elected, which, on this evidence, will be never, despite their decent poll showings. The right wing does it too: witness Cameron's frothing about a British Bill of Rights. Again, completely unachievable.

*

Judaism again. It's Rosh Hashanah - Jewish New Year* - on Thursday, and at conversion class the rabbi passed round a moving passage on the need for reflection on past actions and positive change. 'Help us to turn from callousness to sensitivity; from hostility to love; from pettiness to purpose; from envy to contentment; from carelessness to discipline; from fear to faith'.

It is easy to absorb these lessons in a nice magnolia room that looks a bit like a village hall and smells a bit like an old book.

But barely ten minutes after reading the passage out in my best 'Book at Bedtime' Radio 4 rumble, I was on a bus and an arguing drunk man and his open can of Stella were shouting in my ear and ruining my night. Now, I'm sure galumphing off the bus and yelling "WANKERS" into the night sky is a sensitive, loving and contented thing to do in some universe somewhere, but at this time of year... come on, Spinks, have a bit of gumption.

Harrumph, then. Shana tova everyone.

*I should say that Judaism has four New Years according to the handout at conversion class: the calendar year, starting in March-ish, the fiscal year, starting in August-ish, Tu B'shvat, which is a new year for trees (awesome!), and Rosh Hashanah, which is in September-ish and is the one where the number of the year changes over. We're going into 5772, by the way.

Religion

Tonight, I go for my first Access to Judaism class.

This might be a revelation to some of you reading this who know me and think I'm an agnostic or a freethinker, or even an atheist. I'm none of those things: I'm an open-minded sceptic in need of a moral code. Lots of people look to externally-imposed structures - some of which are religions - for their moral code. Some people, maybe the sort of people who think externally-imposed structures remove the need to think, work out a moral code which is entirely specific to them. Usually it's some variation on "be excellent to each other", which is all very nice.

But I have two problems with doing that, problems which I think are interlinked. The first is that, right now, I can't really see many people being excellent to each other. We're either angry at the government for telling us we have to make do with less, angry at others who have more than we do by fair or unfair means, or just plain angry, taking it out on strangers who've done nothing. The second is that it's really difficult to make up your own moral code and stay true to it, especially in the climate of anger I've just mentioned - hence the link between the two. However, while coming up with my own code is very difficult for me, picking a religion seems like an overly easy way out. It isn't, though. I've done it before, and it isn't.

The first time around, I looked to Christianity. My father had died, I was hankering after some structure as I am now, and the religious community at my CofE school - strongly Anglo-Catholic leanings, though - welcomed me with open arms. Although the school had a Christian ethos, there weren't many of us there who were serious about it, and with a chaplain of a fustily academic bent shepherding us along we were a small but thoughtful group. I enjoyed it. We went on retreats. My quaint, parochial spirituality made me comfortable.

So when I got to university, I was full of whatever the religious version is of piss and vinegar. I couldn't wait to get involved. I started debates about God with atheist scientists who thought I was a tosser for doing so. But that wasn't the biggest mistake I made, because many of those people are now my friends. The biggest mistake I made was talking about God with other Christians. My version of Christianity was very 'lovely cheese, lovely wine, look at that picture of Cardinal Newman', but the Christians I encountered at the start of my university career were much more muscular. The speaker at the first talk I attended spoke about homosexuality in no uncertain terms. Elsewhere, at prayer group, a session leader was deeply rude to a Catholic friend I'd brought along for the ride, loudly stating that she couldn't accept the way he was praying. Although I found plenty of fellow travellers who were softer and shared my approach later on, these first Christians I came across scarred me in a way my observance never recovered from. Eventually, it got to the point where I decided I just wasn't interested.

In the end, I suppose there were two major issues I had with Christianity, or indeed missionary religion in general. The first is that I believe spiritual development should mainly be directed inward, that it should be a process of continuous self-examination and learning: I don't want to feel like a sales rep growing a business, like a door-to-door smile factory offering instant answers. To some extent, I feel that this is what missionary religion asks you to be.

The second problem I had was that I believe the prioritisation of the pursuit of the next life to be horribly, terribly wrong. An awful lot of bad things have been done in pursuit of that bus ticket to heaven, or in avoidance of that other bus ticket to hell. The promise of the next life seems to me, even at the optimistic end of the scale, to be a missionary's sales tactic, a pension brochure. Invest now, and when you die you'll get a good annuity rate and a decent income, and you'll get to go to heaven too. I'm sorry, but in my head, it doesn't work like that. It can't. There's too much going on here, now.

So that, then, was why I couldn't carry on - and why I left myself in the morally rudderless state I now find myself, a state where I'm fuzzy about my obligations and often rude to people I care about. That clearly needs to change. But why Judaism? Why go from Christianity to scepticism to Judaism? Isn't that a plainly stupid and frankly contradictory journey?

Well, I'm not going to beast anyone for answering 'yes'. But it is my journey, and this is why I'm taking it.

The first thing you should know is that my children will be Jewish. It is not fair to deny your children the chance to participate in their ancestral culture, so they will be raised Jewish, too. If they want to be observant, they can. If they don't, they don't have to be. But I want to be an active participant in that, not a pleased bystander - their Jewish education has to come from both of us.

Second, Judaism is precisely the opposite of a missionary religion. While the perception that Jews are somehow wary of converts is false, you do get symbolically denied three times by the Beth Din - the conversion panel, if you will - before you're actually accepted. And you don't just go to a couple of weeks of conversion classes and then boom, you're Jewish. You learn a lot over a long period, and you're expected to make a full contribution to the community, too.

Third, Judaism is a religion of thought. Serious thought. There's the Torah, then there's commentary on the Torah, then there's commentary on the commentary, and there's any number of different opinions about any one point of religious practice. There's no easily accessible saviour and no be-all and end-all. There's no big shiny heaven waiting at the end, either: Judaism doesn't go into a lot of detail about the afterlife.

But finally, and most importantly, Judaism is the context I live in now. It's not just my children who will be Jewish - half my family already are. The person I love most in the whole world is. So if I find it hard to make up my own rules and want to use another set of rules to guide me on a new journey, I'm not just plucking that journey out of thin air: it's already there. So I might as well use it.

The very last thing is, that, as an open-minded sceptic - some of you will have been wondering where the scepticism went - I'm not quite sold on it yet. For the moment, I just want to learn.

Tonight, I go for my first Access to Judaism class. I'm sure it'll be a blast. (Well, it's more likely to be an hour of honest conversation - but that's a blast in my book).




(DISCLAIMER: To any Christians who read this, the views expressed above are a reflection on how I believe Christianity now applies to the way I think, rather than a reflection on your personal faith. Your personal faith is your thing and your thing alone, and I've got nothing but good will for you all. Unless you're Michael Phelps. And he's not Christian anyway.)

Shrug

OK, it's only been three days, but I'm going to have to give in to temptation. I'm going to write about the Liberal Democrats, because it's their conference and I've been reading such a lot - no, seriously, you have no idea, such a lot - about it.

Back in the early days of the Coalition, I was deeply suspicious of the Lib Dems. Like many people, my trust in them had been dented. It wasn't tuition fees. Tuition fees made me roll my eyes, for sure, but rather than finding the move spiteful, I just found it moronic, because it's not as if tripling the already dreadful debt problem we have under the current shitty arrangement will get any more money out of our chronically underemployed grad population than it does at the moment. No, my trust of the Lib Dems was dented because of the apparent zeal with which the Lib Dems were prepared to accept the government's cuts agenda. This isn't because I believe, for definite, that current levels of public spending can be sustained. I don't. It's just that I have trouble with anyone accepting a government line with zeal. It suggests they haven't looked at the details properly.

So I'm glad that, in the end, the Lib Dems have chosen the line they have: staying liberal on a few key issues, being the spanner in the works. Andrew Lansley's startling attempts to cock up the NHS needed a spanner. George Osborne's relentless drive to place the needs of 300,000 rich people over those of 60 million of the rest of us needed a spanner too. With the current line they're taking, it seems that while the Lib Dems are in favour of cuts, they are at least in favour of cuts that don't privilege the predators at the expense of those of us at or near the bottom of the food chain.

Where I think the Lib Dems are most impressive, though, is in proving that you don't have to be in hock to the media to have an effective career in government these days - something I hated about Blair and hate, hate, hate about Cameron. The urge to oversimplify matters for the sake of a soundbite. The urge to 'take a line'. The urge to be seen to be acceptable. The urge to chuck away the long-term because it's better to do something cheap, easy and right now.

Clegg doesn't have this urge, or at least, not outside the Westminster village. His position with the media and the public is now such that, although he has to be politically savvy and play games within Whitehall, it just doesn't matter what he does. The media and the public already hate him, and they make that hatred quite clear. Cameron, meanwhile, is a darling of both the media and Joe Bloggs, meaning he does everything he can to maintain that reputation. What does this mean? It means that while Clegg can silently adopt a cunning long-term strategy, Cameron stands accused, by Patrick O'Flynn of all people, of governing by the seat of his pants.

Nick Clegg. He may not be popular, and he'll certainly lose heavily at the next election - but he's good in government, he's doing his best to stop the wilder elements of the Tories from shitting all over our heads, and for that, frankly, he deserves my respect.