Even sitting in the garden one can still get stung

My attitude to gardening is similar to my attitude to rap music - I don't like it at all, but that's OK because I'm pretty sure it's not really aimed at people like me.

I'm rich enough to have a fairly significant garden but unfortunately I'm way too poor to just pay someone with talent to do something with it. The result is that after four years of relative neglect, the garden is ugly. I had a look out the other day and couldn't find one thing I liked about it. After a short discussion with Mrs Stan we came to the conclusion that everything should go.

And for the last week or so I've been demolishing anything woody with saw, crowbar and fork. Actually quite satisfying - tackling a large tree root is like solving a cryptic crossword - it takes you an age to work out how the root connects to the trunk, which other roots are supporting it and whether to use the saw or to bash it to pulp with the business-end of the crowbar. Nice feeling when you finally rip it out with your hands. Terrible feeling when you've spent hours cutting every visible side root and the thing still won't move.

Now we've got a big empty garden. Next-door are freaked out that we can see across the fence now and are building a trellis similar to the one Israel are building round the West Bank. I'm putting grass seed down everywhere until we can work out what we actual want.

And that's the last you'll hear from me about gardening for a while.

Nothing Like a Dame - No, really, nothing at all like one

In my interview to become a Magistrate, I was asked whether an assault by a man on a woman should be sentenced differently to an assault by a woman on a man. Instead of coming out with the answer I suspected they wanted, I actually said what I believed at the time.

Suspected Model Answer

"Heaven forbid ! An assault is an assault and all should be treated alike"

Actual Answer

"An attack by a strong person on a weak person is an abuse of power and the weaker person deserves some extra protection from the law".

I didn't say this was always the case with man-on-woman violence (could be big woman - little guy) and I pointed out that some relationships are same-sex and that I would have the same opinion if a big guy was knocking lumps out of his smaller male partner.

I did end up passing the interview, but knowing what I know now - what an idiotic argument. Just because someone is physically bigger, does the law give them an extra responsibility ?

I blame my upbringing - it really didn't prepare me for some of the women I've seen from the bench recently :-

Ms A - is longterm unemployed in her 30s, but looks more like 55. Alcohol and Class A drug history, with some thieving and prostitution to pay the bills. New boyfriend is a perfect match for her, except that sometimes she thinks he's stealing her drugs and she beats him, sometimes with the crutch he got the last time he "fell down the stairs".

Ms B - is a scientist in her 50s. She had an almost cartoonishly bad divorce last year from her ex, who is a respected doctor. She hates him. To the point where she closed the front door on his head and kicked him in the babymakers when he came round to talk about custody arrangements.

Ms C - is 20 and pregnant by a man twice her age and half her IQ. He's a big bloke, but with not a bit of violence in him. She likes to drink and when she does she falls out with him and attacks. I've seen the pictures of bruises and the marks made by her nails. He took this for years and stayed quiet until eventually his mother made a complaint to the police.

I'm not sure what the moral of this tale is. Mostly that anyone who makes simplistic statements about domestic violence is an idiot. Or a Daily Mail journalist. Most likely both.

Radio 4 - Sometimes Really Quite Good

Radio 4 gets it so terribly wrong a lot of the time. Atrocious sit-coms; history of the world in ten million bits of fluff; The Garlic, Olive Oil and Aga show. And as for that Agricultural Soap Opera - Grrr!

However it does excel often enough that I keep on coming back.

Take tonight's edition of "Front Row", their regular Arts programme. It would have been an interesting enough companion to chopping carrots for Sweet and Sour Chicken even with just the articles about Highgate Cemetery and the new Doctor Who online game. But it was the musical items that made it really special.

First off was a report on Derry's attempt to become Britain's next city of culture. Cue music from The Undertones, the most joyous and ballsy music there ever was. Guaranteed to make you smile, except it reminds me that the world has been without John Peel for nearly six years now, and that's a crying shame.

Second was a piece on how Rhianna's "Umbu-reller-reller-hay-hay" has become a modern classic that is being covered by an insane variety of bands from punk to indie to light jazz and onto (my favourite) Rockabilly. Listen to The Baseballs' version and I challenge you to have no emotion about it. Made me smile, made Stanetta stomp off in disgust. That's no mean trick.

A hand bag ??!!

"The Guardian" published a general paper from the All Souls, Oxford fellowship exam. It's a gruelling test that Keith Joseph passed and Hilaire Belloc failed, so it's not a perfect gauge of a person's worth.

You write an essay on three from a list of 34 topics. Here's my attempt, which probably shows I'm more suited to be a fellow at Ar Souls, rather than All Souls.

Q1 : "Is it immoral to buy a £10,000 handbag ?"

No. Not at all. As long as it's your ten grand, this is as close to a win-win situation as you will find in economics. The purchaser gets something that will impress other rich, selfish idiots and the seller gets £10,000. Selfish and stupid, but not actively immoral.

By the way, I love the choice of a handbag as an example here. Is it possible that most fellowship candidates will be male and unlikely to understand the utility of spending anything on a handbag ? And will they see that spending several billion on Trident and several tens of millions on a football player are much worthier subject for criticism ?

Wonder how many expensive paintings All Souls has on the walls, and yet they can only afford to sponsor two fellowships per year? Hmmm.

Q30 : Is string theory science ?

Yes - it's what scientist do, so it's science. Repeatable experiments are for wimps.

But I do think their time would be better spent working on a beetle that eats everything in a suburban garden that doesn't taste good in a pie.

Q29 : Why "hug a hoodie"?

(1) So his whole posse will laugh at him and call him a batty boy, innit.
(2) For warmth

I'm not drunk occifer, I've only had ti martwonis.

It has been illegal since 1925 in the UK to drive a vehicle while drunk. It wasn't until 1967 however that anyone bothered to say exactly how drunk.

The Road Safety Act of that year introduced the first legal maximum blood alcohol drink driving limit of 80mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood and there was some good science to suggest that, in the absence of something extraordinary, this equated to 35 microgrammes of alcohol in 100 millilitres of breath or 107 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of urine.

The breathalysers available in 1967 were pretty basic and involved crystals changing colour (see below), so they didn't provide an acceptable quality of evidence. There was also a lot of discussion of civil liberties and the pub landlords went ballistic. To cut a long story short, it wasn't until 1983 and the introduction of the Lion Intoximeter that we ended up with the procedure we know and love today.

As a sop to those who distrusted the breath tests, the Act of 1981 introduced an option that anyone who blew under 50 could ask for an allegedly more accurate blood or urine test. The police choose the method - either get a police doctor to come and take blood or measure the alcohol content of the second of two urine samples given within one hour.

All this is fine - but after a quarter century, surely we trust the breath technology enough by now to dispense with this ?

Can you guess what happens if the doctor can't find a vein and the accused can't wee twice in an hour ?

Let's just say that lawyers get rich and Magistrates lose the will to live and the accused still gets their ban.

Scientific Footnote

1967 breath test - Orange-yellow crystals of a mixture of sulphuric acid and potassium dichromate in a tube turn to blue-green chromium sulphate and colourless potassium sulphate when the mixture reacts with alcohol breath. Check the colour by eye - if blue then naughty; if very blue then very naughty.

Modern breath test - the breathalyser has a platinum anode which acts as a catalyst to cause the alcohol in the person's breath to oxidise into acetic acid. In the process, the alcohol molecules lose electrons, producing an electric current, which is proportional to the amount of alcohol in the breath.

An accurate ammeter will give you a more accurate reading than checking crystals against a colour chart.