Words, Wide Night

The title is my favourite poem by Carol Ann Duffy, who is very much in the news at the moment.

She wrote a poem "Education for Leisure" about a sad, broken boy having murderous thoughts and heading out into the world with a knife "to play God".

This didn't go down well with a small number of teachers. They kicked up a stink and it has now been removed from the exam syllabus and books containing it are to be destroyed.

If I started a Google search, how long do you think it would take me to find a case of murder caused by good poetry ? Duffy's poem doesn't glorify, encourage or excuse violence. She reports a state of mind and the only rational response to it is pity for the deluded boy/girl. It wouldn't make you think "A knife rampage! What an excellent idea ..."

Duffy has had bad luck with tiny vocal minorities. She was considered for nomination as Poet Laureate but the story is that Tony Blair thought that a homosexual Laureate would upset Middle England.

Andrew Motion got the gig instead. Know any good poems by Andrew Motion ? Thought not. Neither do I.

Anyway, "Words, Wide Night" isn't at all controversial. It's all about how words don't do the job when you're trying to express love. In other words, love poetry is all very well and good, but it's not to be confused with the real thing.

Words, Wide Night - by Carol Ann Duffy

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine
the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you and this

is what it is like or what it is like in words.

Get Your Torches and Pitchforks

According to their website, The Metro Hotel in Woking "is a highly successful budget hotel that has been open for 4 years and can boast a year round occupancy in excess of 85%".

I have a feeling that they will have less to boast about next year after they refused entry to an injured British Army Corporal visiting an injured colleague (and didn't get away with it).

I'd love to have been a fly-on-the-wall today as the management tarred-and-feathered the receptionist concerned and begged for mercy under an onslaught of hate mail, cancelled bookings, abusive phone calls, tabloid snappers and purple-faced politicians. For a good and rather amusing cross-section of reaction, see the unreliably brilliant ARRS (ARmy Rumour Service).

I hope this incident will convince workers in the leisure industry that discriminating against soldiers is a career-limiting decision.

Corporal Stringer is now back in Helmand Province doing a nasty job that I'm SO glad I'm not doing. I wonder how much the Receptionist would fancy a spell of facing-off to the Taliban ?

Next time the Corporal comes home, here's hoping the country will have changed ever so slightly for the better and he won't be in any danger of having to spend the night in his car.

Update 1 - later that day : The hotel are being flamed to a crisp on blogs and news sites across the planet. The Armed Forces and Defence ministers have written stiffly worded letters. The owners of the hotel, American Amusements, are not answering their phones and are hopefully cowering behind the reception desk wanting their collective mummies. Every conceivable travel agency website has acquired several unflattering reviews of the hotel today. The Sun are pestering Michael Appleton, a director, "at his £2million home".

Update 2 - the morning after : I didn't believe that a jobsworth receptionist would just make up such a policy on the spot. They hadn't - here's the BBC coverage of a the response received to letter written by the soldier's mum's MP, Hywel Williams :-

A manager in the letter said the hotel had in recent months "experienced some rather serious incidents" resulting from the stay of personnel from a local barracks and staff had been requested to be "cautious" in taking future bookings from the armed forces.

Managers were asked to assess cases.

"In almost every case the booking is accepted. This process does not appear to have happened in this case, for which I sincerely apologise. We also fully recognise and appreciate the tremendous courage and sacrifices made by member of our armed services".

Just how much damage did they think one tired squaddie with a broken wrist was going to do to their hotel ? I still want heads on sticks.

Update 3 : The evening after : a couple of hundred people visited Radio Free Stan thanks to the above article - wish I had something to sell to all these good people.

It's interesting to see on other blogs how in their versions of the story, Corporal Stringer was going to a funeral. According to all the sources I trust, the mate he was visiting was alive but recovering from wounds (extent unknown). I guess somewhere along the way, someone sexed the story up for additional impact. Shame : it's a strong enough story without turning it into an urban myth.

Another common trick I saw in other blogs was to imply that the hotel "hated the military". I really can't see the evidence for this. There is definitely evidence of stupidity, lack of tact and casual discrimination - but hate seems unlikely.

And I don't condone the threats that have been made against the hotel staff - I think this battle has already been won - it's not good form to bayonet the survivors.

Ranger Justin James Cupples died in an explosion near Sangin in Helmand Province while this hotel nonsense was going on bringing the total of British casualties in Afghanistan to 117. Soldiers have given so much - it's surely not out of line to treat them well when they get home ?

Just Browsing

How much of a geek are you ? A good rule of thumb is to look at your attitude to web browsers.

Class Zero Geeks (a.k.a dumb people) don't even know what one is - which probably means that they aren't reading this page and won't be insulted by me calling them "dumb people".

Class One Geeks (a.k.a Civilians) are still using the web browser that was installed when they got the machine - usually the small blue "e" of Internet Explorer.

Class Two Geeks (a.k.a "The Slightly Geeky") have played around with the competitor web browsers, either out of pure curiousity or because Internet Explorer is driving them mad with all the crashing, advertising spam and unexpected behaviour.

Class Three Geeks (a.k.a "Me") don't even know how many web browsers they have on their various machines. I would put myself in this category - as well as IE, Firefox and Safari I've got an old copy of Netscape on the main PC, on my mobile phone I've got Opera and on my Linux box ... well, there's SeaMonkey, Konqueror, Dillo .. er and a few dozen others I've never used.

Added to this list now is Google's Chrome browser which I've been trying out and,in brief, I don't get it.

It's quite similar to Firefox, except without its infinite customisability. It has an equivalent of Safari's "Private Browsing" called "Incognito Windows". It's supposed to fast, but I couldn't prove it was any faster than Safari, which is the fastest of the mainstream browsers. This is not a surprise as under the bonnet, the same WebKit HTML-rendering engine is being used by both.

I looked at their marketing literature and I test drove it myself and nowhere could I find a valid reason to make it my browser of choice. Presumably Google will be demonstrating how Chrome adds value to their suite of office applications and Google Earth in due course, but personally I'd say the responsibility was with the application developer to ensure their application runs well on any browser, rather than forcing us to use a particular browser.

By the way, just in case you think I'm one of the geekiest person in the world, there is a Class Four of Geeks, who despise and distrust all browsers and have either written their own in Assembler Code or are still using slide-rule technologies like Gopher. You're not likely to meet these people, as they don't tend to have friends and tend not to get out much.

Edge of Darkness

There is a village of a few thousand people near where I live which could put together the world's best five-a-side football team. And maybe the second and third best come to think of it. Football players are attracted to the place because of the obscenely splendid Victorian mansions originally built by the cotton barons. Not just footballers obviously, inhabitants of the village could also put together a legendary rock band, and should the actors that live in the village decide to act in the local pantomine, you'd have to postpone Coronation Street.

These are the big-names in the village living in the big houses, but the people who live in the smaller scale town houses and flats near the main street are pretty darned wealthy too.

It's a great place to go Charity Shop rummaging - the more-money-than-sense lot tend to buy good gear, wear it once and give it away. This means that it's possible to buy Hugo Boss for the price of George at Asda.

Which is why I was in their local Cancer Research shop looking at a pair of £60 FCUK jeans and thinking that £9.99 was a very good price - especially considering that there seemed to be a £10 note in one of the pockets.

One further investigation there was a wad of notes which I immediately brought to the attention of the the shop ladies who stuck the wad into a collection tin without counting it and made a big deal out of how honest I was. I suggested that most people would have done the same but they came out with a list of stories about how the people of this most blessed village would steal the CDs out of their cases and want to haggle over the prices when making a purchase.

I was stunned - there wasn't a single moment where I considered pocketing the money while I was in the changing room, or buying the jeans quietly. It would have been like walking into the shop and helping myself to the collecting tin. But you just know that a percentage of people would have done just that, even though they were stealing from people who needed the money and even though they really didn't "need" the money themselves.

So what is this percentage ? More than 50% ? Am I part of a quaint minority, or was I right when I said that most people would have done the right thing ?

Three Good Hiding Places

I love the Monty Python sketch "Hide And Seek Olympic Finals" where the hider can hide anywhere in the world and it takes years for the seeker to find him.

I mention this because I've been visiting some pretty obscure places in Northern England with Mrs Stan over the last few days and it occurs to me that these would make excellent hiding places. No-one would ever think of looking for you in any one of these hidden gems. Except if you opened a cafe that actually made a decent cup of coffee. Then you'd stick out a mile - each of these towns contains very attractive tea-rooms serving weak tea, instant coffee and plastic scones. Bring sandwiches.

(1) Bakewell, Derbyshire : this town is the inspiration for the Bakewell Tart; not a well known prostitute but a sort of cake. Like the cake, jam runs down the middle of the town, there is a thin layer of icing on all the roads and a glace cherry sits atop the church tower. Well, in a perfect world it would.

It's an attractive bustling place with all kinds of nice-smelling knick-knack shops and you must try the Bakewell Pudding which is unrecognisable from the muck that Mr Kipling puts into tin foil.

(2) Frodsham, Cheshire : an identikit Market Town, except one where the market has been taken over by Scousers selling forged brand-name sweets and CDs of uncertain provenance. On the bright side it has even more nice-smelling knick-knack shops than Bakewell, is the start of the "Sandstone Way" long distance path and has a name that I never tire of repeating in a variety of comedy voices.

I recommend the first section of the Sandstone Way - it takes you up to an amazing vantage point high above the Thelwall Viadiact where you can see Liverpool and even Mount Snowdon in the distance. If you squint you can pretend that Warrington and Runcorn aren't there.

(3) Whitchurch, Shropshire : the other end of the Sandstone Way After a few days of Market Towns it was all getting a bit same-y. We tried the last section of the Sandstone Way which goes along the canal to the three-level lock system at Grindley Brook. I wasn't well-disposed to the idea of a narrowboat holiday before, but after seeing a few families in action I'm even more anti now. It is basically caravaning (but without the glamour and style). It was amusing to watch as every single boat making their laborious way through the locks seemed to have a cross and bored teenaged boy on board who would get the honour of doing whatever the heck it is you do with the windy-thing.

Trivia : A native of Shropshire is traditionally called a Salopian. Their children are NOT called Salopettes.