The Blogger Himself

But I\’m going to have to find a way of getting from here to there and here again that doesn\’t take two days of travelling each way for one day of meetings there.

Tamam?

And yes, of course the first Turkish word I said outloud turned out to be a swearword. What with the systems of cidillas and accents they have on the c and s, a word could be pronounced \”sekis\” or \”chekish\”. I went for the soft s and c and therefore said \”fuck\” instead of \”exit\”, which was the word I was actually reading out.

Finally, a general hint for travellers to new countries and continents. Read the \”general info\” section of the guidebook before you go, rather than while idly passing time in an airport on the way back.

That way you\’ll find out that the tap water isn\’t recommended before rather than after you\’ve been drinking it.

Oh, and the reason for the absence? We seem to be a stage closer to possibly, maybe, building my beloved and much desired scandium factory.

Another one of those things you find out when the wife\’s away.

I know that I sometimes make short planks look clever but I am struggling to believe that I\’m quite this dim.

I can\’t work out how to turn on the TV.

When she left she said, look, press this one on the Sky remote and this one on the TV remote and it\’ll work.

Which it did. But something\’s gone wrong with that and I cannot for the life of me work out what it is.

Using the TV remote I can get the TV to turn on. Get a blank blue screen, but at least I know electricity is going into it.

I can also get the little light on the front of the Sky box to go from green to red and back again by using the button on the Sky remote.

But absolutely nothing else at all seems to have any effect. I can\’t get what I\’m obviously try to get, which is the Sky menu.

What is the little secret here? What\’s the important but that I\’ve never found out?

Update: the solution is in the comments there.

The cat eats pizza.

Sirs,

The flight I was supposed to be on this morning, from Faro to Gatwick, was cancelled by your good selves. I am now rebooked which is great. However, there seems to be a further stage under EU rules which needs to be raised.

http://www.auc.org.uk/default.aspx?catid=306&pagetype=90&pageid=9367

From what I can see there the cancellation has led to a delay of more than 3 hours on a trip of 1,500 to 3,500 km (Faro to Gatwick is apparently 1,700 km or thereabouts). It seems therefore that you should be paying me €400 compensation within the next 7 days.

I look forward to this of course.

As the Air Transport Users Council makes plain here:

http://www.auc.org.uk/default.aspx?catid=306&pagetype=90&pageid=11011

\”One of the most common reasons for delays and cancellations is what airlines call \”technical problems\”.  And airlines took the view that technical problems were \”unexpected flight safety shortcomings\”.  So they did not pay compensation when disruptions were caused by technical problems.

However, in December 2008, the European Court of Justice made a ruling that, as a general rule, airlines should not refuse to pay compensation when a flight is disrupted due to technical problems.  They would only refuse to pay if the problem \”stems from events which, by their nature or origin, are not inherent in the normal exercise of the activity of the air carrier concerned and are beyond its actual control\”.\”

The technical problems on this morning\’s flight would seem to be included in that above definition as problems requiring such compensation.

I look forward to your speedy response.

While I am in contact with you, I\’d also like to raise the subject of this, our earlier contact with you:

Reference Number: 101218-002427

This is simply asking for the refund of the ticket cost of a flight which was cancelled due to the Spanish air traffic controller\’s industrial action towards the end of last year. It is now one month since you confirmed that you had received my email on the subject: that would appear to have been enough time for you to confirm that the flight was indeed cancelled and for you to have contacted me again.

Assuring you of our best attentions at all times,

Julie Cook

My inamorata would like to make it plain that, while she despises the EU quite as much as I do, if Easyjet had dealt with the first, entirely straightforward, refund, less fuss would be being made now about the EU rules on compensation. Indeed, no fuss might have been made at all.

Four monks in Somerset have been investigated over alleged sexual incidents.

One has been arrested, but no charges have been brought.

The four are monks at Downside Abbey, Stratton-on-the-Fosse. The allegations in some cases involve former pupils at Downside School, which the abbey runs.

Hmm.

Dom Antony Sutch has resigned as a contributor to Radio 4’s Thought For The Day and withdrawn from his parish after a complaint about his conduct while he was the headmaster of a top Catholic independent school.

The Benedictine monk, who was a spiritual mentor to the late Princess Diana and who preached at the marriage of the daughter of the Duchess of Cornwall, is now said to have returned to his community next to Downside School in Somerset.

According to Avon and Somerset police sources, an investigation was launched over allegations that he had indecently touched a young person aged over 16. The incident is said to have happened 14 years ago when he was head of the school, which charges boarders more than £25,000 a year.

Clearly, I cannot talk for all who went through the same schoool I did. But equally clearly, if that sort of sexual molestation is going on one would, with 5 years in the place, get some inkling of it. Even if it\’s only \”don\’t let that monk do the one on one tutoring\”.

A couple of us who were at the place, for example myself and Peter Briffa of blog fame, swapped emails when the news broke of the kiddy fiddling at Ampleforth (that story where Laurence Dallaglio indicated he had been a victim). No, we didn\’t recall anything like that going on at all. The culture at Ampleforth must have been significantly different from that of Downside (at A they were talking about groping on the junior dorms: no, that is something which we would all have known about).

Now I do indeed remember sexual scandals while I was there: there was the school prefect found to be shagging one of the housemaids: but that\’s heterosexual and adult on adult. Or the monk who set up house with the Maths teacher\’s wife: but she\’d had , what, 10 kids by then? Mutual prayer might be a relief at that point. And there was always great gossip about the monk who had been, before he was a monk, engaged to Joanna Lumley.

Anthony Sutch was there when I was….as a monk when I was a pupil, given our age differences.

But kiddies? Monks on boys? Can\’t say I ever saw it, heard about it or even in the vaguest sense thought it was happening.

BTW, perhaps we could really get the Daily Mail interested: Emma Rees Mogg (yes, daughter of, sister of Jacob who was sent to Eton as the first son) was Assistant to the Head Boy the same year I was the other assistant to the head boy….that head boy having gone on to be a pillar of Lloyd\’s.

Can we get a month or two\’s mortgage payments out of this story?

Was this afternoon: lovely sunny day, slight north wind.

Not very far, only 20 km, as haven\’t been out for a couple of months what with the rain etc.

Strange, doesn\’t hurt as much as I thought it would: then again, morning still to come, eh?

We\’re looking for a way to print membership cards to an organisation.

We need to go a step up from cardboard printed then laminated. But we don\’t need to go as far as chip and pin, magnetic strips or even raised/indented lettering.

Just a flat card, credit card sized and plastic, which is printed in bulk with a nice colourful design, upon which we can then print minor details like name, date of validity of membership, that sort of thing.

That prinint should be done by us, through a PC and what I assume would be some special type of printer.

So, anyone know lots about this sort of thing? Even anything?

The first cold of the New Year is coming in….and it might just be a right stinker……

Sirs,

Might I suggest an intensive, remedial, course in numbers for your columnists and (sub) editors?

Peter Wilby informs us that Britons donate 0.7% of GDP to charities and also that the income of charities is some £35 million a year. This implies that GDP is of the order of £5 billion a year: rather than the true figure of near £1,400 billion. If the 0.7% figure is correct, then this means that charitable donations are more like £10 billion a year.

It isn\’t that such numbers, used purely to illustrate his point, have to be all that accurate, but to be out by more than two orders of magnitude displays a rather cavalier attitude towards sums.

You would not employ someone who butchered the language so: might I suggest that basic numeracy is as important as the literacy you so rightly already prize?

yours etc.

Tim Worstall
Casa Joao,
Bernarda
Messines, Portugal

From our quite lovely 14 hour power cut.

What fun it is to be in one of Europe\’s leading producers of renewable energy!

From the soon to become less Tiny Tim as he gets his belly around the feast.

Some hae meat and cannae eat
Some would eat that want it
But we hae meat and we can eat
Sae let the Lord be thankit

Yes, more adventures!

All Easyjet flights to Portugal and Spain cancelled today.

I\’m now in a terribly exciting Ramada Inn in Hemel Hempstead, booked on the 07.45 flight tomorrow.

Inquiring minds want to know: what\’s going to go wrong next?

Update: And Katie wins! 03:17 am someone set off the fire alarm.

Only a minor alarm, turned itself off after four or five whoops. So sleep was unbroken other than that: once the Christmas Party disco closed down at 1 am and before the 4 am alarm to catch the 04.30 bus back to the airport.

And I certainly don\’t mind that the Ramada Jarvis is miles out from anywhere and that they\’ve recently decided to stop having a cigarette machine on the premises……

So Gatwick was closed for two days and thus my Wednesday flight turned out to be a Friday afternoon one.

And we were on the plane, all buckled in and ready to roll when…..the Spanish air traffic controllers went on strike.

So I\’m now about to potter off to Luton to see whether the 3 ish flight this afternoon is going to take off.

We can see that some flights are getting into Portugal (the Spanish have essentially threatened to shoot the air traffic controllers by declaring something akin to an state of emergency and putting them under military discipline) and maybe this one will.

Not long now and the delay in getting home will be greater than the trip itself was supposed to be.

This blog\’s interesting hiatus from normal service will continue it appears.

Gatwick is closed because, well, because it can\’t deal with weather that the Russians would take to be a balmy spring day.

So instead of sleeping soundly in my own bed tonight, along with wifey, various dogs and cats and so on I shall be imposing myself upon the hospitality of a friend and his couch again.

Good friend and very hospitable but, you know, hopme is calling.

Grr, grr.

Play nicely among yourselves: I\’m on planes and trains today.

Bugger.

Just had to put the heating on (erm, fire up the pot bellied stove in the office) for the first time this year.

Lovely, clear, sunny day. But cold.

(Err, yes, cold is a relative thing….it\’s 17C outside but the office is cooler than that).

Perhaps not:

Let’s hope this coming winter is less of a trial than the last; its impact – the coldest in 30 years – is only now being realised, with a 10% increase in the local birth-rate during September and October.

My siblings were born in Oct and Dec. Myself, in March….in Devon.

Was summer 1962 particularly cold?

I shall be at the Cass Business School in EC 1 from 6.30 pm to, umm, well, throwing out time.

Title: Chasing Rainbows: How the Green agenda defeats its aims
Speaker: Tim Worstall
Date: 30th November 2010
Time: 6.30pm to 8.00pm
Location: Cass Business School, 106 Bunhill Row, London EC1Y 8TZ
RSVP: [email protected] This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

This event is to launch the latest work of our ASI fellow Tim Worstall.

The environmentalists have won: we all agree that we should be green. Now it\’s the revenge of the economists: how should we be green?

…..

This is no knee-jerk, reactionary counterblast that denies we need to be environmentally conscious, but rather a compelling and utterly necessary plea to examine our environmental activities with due accuracy and thought.

The popular and globally esteemed science writer and columnist, Matt Ridley, has called this book: ‘Fearless, fresh, forensic and funny’, while Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist, says: ‘Jaw-droppingly rude he may be, but he’s smart, and this book is quite an education.’

Be there or be square as they say.

Yes, I am a little grumpy, as the language I\’ve been using shows.

No particular reason other than that I\’m just fed up with witless idiocy and the lying that seems to accompany it.

More so than usual apparently…..