I am exactly as smart (and knowledgeable) as an atheist

Some years ago some wag put up a poster in the office: “Meetings, a practical alternative to work”. It struck a chord with me at the time. I was going through my middle-management phase, battling to avoid infection with buzzword mania.

It was then I learned the real meaning of jargon, from “blue sky thinking outside the box” upwards into higher realms of meaninglessness. It’s a form of language, forever mutating, that exists solely to make the thinking-impaired seem relatively able-minded.

All that, thank goodness, is happily behind me now. I am no longer responsible for anyone’s output but my own, which is an under-rated freedom. But I have discovered another alternative to work. One which probably wastes even more time, though I haven’t dared calculate quite how much.

It’s called Facebook.

No doubt Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Snapchat and whatever this week’s social network of choice may be are just as dangerous but I have managed so far to avoid their siren call. For me, Facebook is enough. My social life has become almost entirely virtual. Which does cut down the booze bill.

The reason it’s so addictive is that my friends all share such interesting ideas. Amid all the snaps of cute cats of daft dogs (I can mostly resist the former, the latter are harder).

And then there are the quizzes. I’ve been a sucker for quizzes ever since the time when I started setting one every week for the regulars in my local. (I had a real-world social life back then, nearly 30 years ago.)

I got 20 out of 20 this week on one that purported to test how well I’d do on University Challenge. Which probably says more about the setters than it does about me or the show. Actual TV competitors don’t have the luxury of either a multiple-choice format or limitless time to ponder their answers.

More revealingly, I clicked the other day on a link headed: “Are you smarter than an atheist?”

The answer to this could only be “no”. I am an atheist.

I am also, according to this test, considerably more knowledgeable about religion than most people who profess to believe. I scored 94 per cent.

In this it seems I am pretty typical, atheists being the “religious group” who do best in the test. That is, of course, only those atheists who are interested enough to try it.

But in one way this test too was revealing mostly about the people who set it.

There were some questions about Christianity that most Christians, apparently, get wrong – which must say something in itself.

There were easier ones about Islam, Judaism and ancient Greek mythology. But there were more about US law and about one particular madcap American cult – Mormonism.

Nothing at all about paganism, Sikhism, the Baha’i faith, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Taoism, Shinto, Candomblé, Rastafarianism or Voodoo.

Which reveals clearly enough the bias inherent in pretty well all religious thinking – not least the blinkered, ignorant and arrogant species prevalent in the god-fearing US of A.

 

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I wrote here last week that I hoped Tony Benn and Bob Crow were not the last of their kind. And of course they weren’t.

One man who shares their warmth, humanity and principles – and has a better sense of humour – is the MP for Bolsover, Dennis Skinner. And, of course, he shares with them too the dubious honour of having been unfairly vilified by much of the national press throughout his career.

Now 82, Dennis is as sharp as ever and still one of the good guys.

In the wake of last week’s Budget, he drew attention to an advert emanating from Conservative Central Office that crowed: “Bingo! Cutting the bingo tax and beer duty – to help hardworking people do more of the things they enjoy”.

Could anything reveal more clearly or shamefully the patronising Tory attitude towards the people who actually do all the work? As Dennis asked: “What next? Tax breaks for whippets and flat caps?”

 

…

 

This question is going to sound like something from one of those irritating “personality quizzes” that used to reside in “lifestyle” magazines and now infest the internet. In this case, however, it’s a serious query, drawn from real life. Mine.

Your attention is distracted while you’re putting together the ingredients of a familiar, not to say routine, recipe for your daily bread. You can’t remember whether you’ve put in the correct two cups of water, or only one.

Do you:

a)      carry on as it is, risking ruining the loaf?

b)      put in another cup “just in case” – risking ruining the loaf?

or

c)      put in another half-cup, hoping it won’t be disastrous, but guaranteeing that it won’t be perfect?

And now a subsidiary question.

Having chosen option (c), you find your loaf turns out a bit better than usual, and you still don’t know whether it was over-watered or under-watered. So what do you do next time?

If only Tony Benn had been more influential

Bob Crow and Tony Benn in the space of four days – it’s been a sad week. It’s tempting to reach for the cliché that “we’ll never see like their again”, but I hope that isn’t true.

Still more fervently, I hope the principles both men lived their lives by come to seem less “maverick” and more the common pattern.

After 35 years of British politics dominated by unbridled cynicism, it would be nice to think that real concern for the common weal of real people might have its turn.

I never met either man personally, though I heard Benn speak more than once and was always enthused by him. His honesty, compassion, integrity, fundamental decency always shone through.

His death feels like the loss of a favourite uncle.

His former leader, then Prime Minister Harold Wilson, once said of Benn that he “immatures with age”. 

Apart from it being a nice instance of Wilson’s under-rated wit, it’s not quite clear how he intended the remark. I’d like to think it was meant kindly and, at least in part, as a compliment.

It’s certainly true that Benn retained into old age a capacity to get on with people of all ages and backgrounds. And that he continued to dream, never succumbing to the dreary “realism” of accepting capitalist greed.

He was, all who knew him well or slightly seem to agree, an extremely nice man. Which may not be the most effective quality in a politician.

At the height of his fame, Tony Benn was routinely ridiculed in the mainstream media – a fate he shared with most on his wing of the political argument.

The only better speaker I’ve ever heard was Neil Kinnock, a man as committed to the cause as Benn and probably a sharper intellect.

I remember hearing Kinnock in the 1980s give an absolutely brilliant 80-minute speech – without notes – to a trade union rally. Even as we stood to applaud at the end, I remarked to the person with me: “They’ll pick out 20 seconds for the news tonight that will make him sound like a pillock.” And of course they did.

Labour politicians have always had a rougher ride from most of the media than their Tory counterparts. And Kinnock, like Benn, was a throwback to an earlier age, when genuine oratory counted for more than the soundbite.

The shift from intelligent speech to sloganeering has arguably dumbed down politics, giving us a succession of empty vessels.

Benn was not empty. He was a thinker, and he cared.

He never forgot his mother’s advice that every political question was also a moral question.

And he never wavered in his belief that politics should be about the issues, not the personalities – ironically, coming from one of the great characters.

Though at various times I have disagreed with him – on Europe, on nuclear power, on Julian Assange, for instance – he could always argue his case. And he was not too big to change his mind, and admit that he’d changed it – on Europe and nuclear power, for instance.

One obituary, less glowing than most, described him as an “ineffectual” politician. If that’s so – and perhaps it is – it’s more damning of politics than of him.

Others described him as “highly influential”. If only.

****

The first time I heard Bob Crow on the radio I could hardly believe my ears.

Here was a trade union leader sticking up for his members, apparently effectively, and using the term “socialism” as if it wasn’t a dirty word.

It was almost as if Margaret Thatcher and her prolonged savage assault on the working people of Britain had never happened.

Inevitably, the right-wing press tried to portray him as a dangerous nutter, but he was neither of those things.

A good friend of mine met him at the annual union rally at Burston in September 2012.

When Crow began to speak, Paul’s young daughter was transfixed.

Paul recalls: “When he had finished she came up to me and asked, ‘Where can I find Bob Crow? I want to talk with him.'

“She scuttled off and after a few minutes I thought it best to try and find her. There, by the RMT stand, was my girl and Bob Crow, nurturing a well-deserved bottle of Bulmer’s, deep in conversation.

“Thinking he’d want to unwind at this point and not hear how my daughter had taken on the Brownies and refused to pledge allegiance to the Queen, I asked if everything was OK and he said ‘She’s fine’ and on they carried chatting. She was thrilled.

“It says a lot about the quality of a man and his sense of shared humanity that, with everything else going on at Burston, he had the time to listen to a little girl he had never met before.”

Bob Crow will be missed.

GM, Ukraine... real life isn't as simple as a two-way choice

Reaction to my piece last week on genetically modified foods has been interestingly mixed.

Mostly the responses have come either from people who think GM is a threat to life as we know it, or those who declare themselves “all for it”.

Both points of view miss the essential thing I was trying to say. Which was that the term covers some very good things, some very bad, and some the jury is still out on.

This ought to be a pretty easy idea to grasp, even if it does leave room for a rather large grey area. But it seems people like to see every issue in simple black and white terms.

They are either “for” or “against” GM, in favour of immigration or passionately opposed, God-fearing or atheist, vegetarian or carnivorous.

Real grown-up life is more complex than that – but who wants real life when you can have the cartoon version?

People like to have heroes they can cheer and villains they can hiss. They don’t want characters, or situations, that demand more sophisticated analysis. Or which leave you harbouring honest unresolved doubts.

Take events currently unfolding in Ukraine – the gravest crisis in Europe since the end of the Cold War, we’re told.

That description seems to me to under-estimate with hindsight the horrors and perils of the ethnic conflicts that tore the former Yugoslavia into seven parts in the 1990s. But of course we don’t know yet how the Ukraine story will unfold.

 To most people here, including all the major political parties and pretty much all of the media, Russia is the bad guy. With Vladimir Putin a conveniently preposterous cut-out villain.

And that must mean that the government of Ukraine – a government, remember, which came into being less than three weeks ago – are the goodies.

Nobody here seems to pause and consider that on this occasion Putin might actually have some justification for his actions.

To hear an American Secretary of State, or a British Foreign Minister, exclaiming in horror at one country “invading” another is frankly breathtaking. Can they not see how hypocritical that makes them sound to most of the world?

Since 1945, US forces have invaded a staggering 69 different countries, nearly always with Britain cheerleading on the sidelines. And it’s seldom been as bloodless as Putin’s incursion into Ukraine has been so far.

Of course, just because they’re hypocritical doesn’t make them wrong on this occasion.

Putin’s claim that he is defending the Russian-speaking majority in the Crimea does sound uncomfortably like the excuse used by Hitler for his invasions of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. And there are chilling echoes too of the rumble of Soviet tanks into Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia (again) in 1968.

But Ukraine as it now exists is an invented country – invented as a part of the old Soviet Union. When the Crimea was added to it in 1954, it was merely an administrative decision in Moscow. No one then could have imagined it would have any consequences 60 years down the line in a republic that had become independent.

Historically, Ukraine is part of Russia – its very name is Russian for Border-land – and its eastern region, largely Russian-speaking, has a long history of industrial importance for Russia.

Considering all this, it’s by no means clear that Russia is entirely the bad guy.

And it’s even less obvious that the new regime in Kiev is composed of good guys. It is, as they say, complicated.

The fall of bad leaders in Egypt and Libya in 2011 didn’t mean the new men were all good.

Our politicians and press were eager to pin sheriff’s stars on the rebels, though – especially in Libya, where Colonel Gaddafi was such a satisfying pantomime baddie.

There has been the same simplistic tendency over the ghastly situation in Syria. The fact that President al-Assad is a nasty piece of work doesn’t make all his opponents paragons of virtue or beacons of hope.

It’s not just more complicated than that, it’s tragically much, much more complicated.

Some of this, no doubt, you know. But the urge to allocate black hats and white hats, to simplify every story into one in which you can take sides, is irrepressible.

To be fair, a couple of readers were more nuanced in their reactions to my remarks on GM, and my support for the Norwich-created blight-resistant potato.

Matthew Caton drew my attention to a Welsh-bred, non-GM blight-resistant spud.

“I grew a variety called Sarpo Mira last year on my allotment,” he told me. “They are very nice indeed, as well as being very versatile.”

Thank you, Matthew, I might try those.

Meanwhile, my brother Clive points out that I may have been too eager to simplify matters myself.

“One blight-resistant variety is just one new variety,” he says. “Unless it replaces every other variety, it’s not going to make much difference at all. And if it replaces every other variety, we’re into a different problem – loss of crop diversity.”

Like I said: real life is complex.

GM: it's more complicated than just good or bad

Scientists working in a lab in Norwich have produced a potato that would have prevented the lethal famine that devastated Ireland in the 1840s.

More to the point, it could save modern farmers from having to spray their potato crop ten to 15 times a year with fungicide. Which would not only save time and money, but also significantly reduce chemical pollution.
As an added bonus, the new variety produces twice the yield of potatoes per plant.
Sounds like a win-win scenario. Except it isn’t.
And it isn’t for a reason that must have the researchers banging their heads against the wall.
It’s all down to two words: “genetically modified”. More specifically, it’s down to public perception of what those two words mean.
As usual when it comes to science, the public knows very little. And, as we do know, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Late potato blight destroys an awful lot of potatoes every year – £3.5billion worth worldwide. So you’d think farmers would be falling over themselves to plant the resistant variety developed at the Sainsbury Laboratory.
They probably would be if European regulations didn’t ban genetically modified crops.
The new potato isn’t exactly Franken-food, though.
Over three years, Jonathan Jones and his team have isolated a gene from a South American potato that makes it resistant to blight, and introduced it to their British Desiree potato.
It isn’t, in principle, any different from the processes that brought potatoes to this side of the Atlantic in the first place. Or produced all the varieties we know now, including the Desiree.
It’s just that the technique is quicker, more targeted, more accurate at doing what’s needed and nothing else.
As Professor Jones says: “Breeding from wild relatives is laborious and slow and by the time a gene is successfully introduced into a cultivated variety, the late blight pathogen may already have evolved the ability to overcome it.
“With new insights into both the pathogen and its potato host, we can use GM technology to tip the evolutionary balance in favour of potatoes and against late blight.”
Europe’s antagonism to GM means British farmers will be denied the opportunity to save the £72m per year they spend on anti-blight pesticides. While the potato created in Norwich will be cashed in on by a company in Idaho.
It’s a crazy outcome of an essentially well-meaning set of regulations.
There are genuine reasons for distrusting some kinds of genetic modification.
It’s not, as some people seem to believe, that GM foods are somehow “bad for you”. They aren’t.
Fears that GM crops might contaminate nearby traditional crops by cross-pollination have more basis in reality, though they are wildly exaggerated.
The biggest genuine reason for concern is about who owns the technology and what they want to use it for.
When a multi-national corporation tells you its concern is for people’s welfare, you know what it really cares about is profit. When it produces a “super-crop” that is super only because it needs a constant supply of the same corporation’s chemicals, you know it’s on a winner – and the poor farmer’s on a loser.
The idea that a company like the American giant Monsanto could effectively control the world market in grain, for example, is terrifying.
These are the things that have made GM a bad word.
They have as little in common with the Sainsbury Lab’s blight-free potato as your pedal-bike has with MotoGP champion Marc Márquez’s 1,000cc, 214mph Honda.
The fact that opposition to one prevents use of the other is just one more reason to curse companies like Monsanto.
And the public (and official) ignorance that can’t tell one type of bike (or GM) from another.

 

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Eve Muirhead, she of the intense blue-eyed stare, said winning Olympic curling bronze was “extra special” because it was for Team GB. She seems to have been expressing a view that’s widely held north of the border.

But I don’t think the outcome of the independence referendum is a foregone conclusion yet.
If anyone can persuade the Scots to vote to get out of the United Kingdom, it’s David Cameron.
Telling them their country (population 5.3million) is too small to profit from the oil off their shores was a shotgun blast through his own foot. Unless privately he really wants them to go their own way, leaving England as a Tory stronghold.
Would that be too small like Norway, whose 5.1m people have profited far more from their own North Sea oil bonanza than we have?
Like Qatar, whose 2m registered citizens are the richest in the world per capita, thanks to oil?
Or like Brunei (population less than twice that of Norwich), whose oil has made it the fifth richest country in the world?
If I lived in Scotland I reckon I’d vote to be freed from the oily moguls of Westminster.

 

 

Flood warning: politics is too shallow not to be overwhelmed

Ed Miliband is right: climate change and its effects are far, far too important to be left to the petty vagaries of party politics.

Never mind that the policies – or near non-policies – of the present government are following the disastrously negligent path taken by his own party when in power. The vital thing now is to learn from and avoid past mistakes, not to waste time in laying blame.

No party, no politician, can expect to govern for long enough to take the long view. Which leaves us with a succession of short-term tactics and no longer-term strategy.

Governments give all their attention to relatively unimportant things like money and fail to plan for such serious matters as rising sea levels or changing weather patterns.

If the present floods have taken them by surprise, they have no excuse for that. No previous generation has ever been so well informed by science.

The unpredictably of the weather was predicted, in some detail, years – no, decades – ago. But the politicians weren’t listening. They stuck their fingers in their ears because they didn’t know what to do.

Or rather, they did, because the experts were telling them – but they didn’t want to know because it was all too big, too difficult. Especially for people whose careers weren’t going to last that long. Especially if they took decisions that would be unpopular – in the short term.

My own profession hasn’t helped. Much of the press still keeps finding the odd crank to set up against the 95 per cent plus of rational scientists and pretending that is “balance”.

The reality is that there aren’t always two sides to every question. Sometimes one answer – such as that still being peddled by the climate-change “deniers” – is just plain wrong.

Perhaps the present flooding in southern Britain, the severe cold in North America, increasing episodes of “freak” weather everywhere, will make the head-in-the-sand brigade think again. Or perhaps not.

In the meantime, even if halting or reversing climate change is too big and hard – certainly for one government, or one country – can we at least do something to mitigate the effects of the next inevitable drenching winter?

Like not concreting over fields and gardens, ripping out trees and hedges, failing to maintain ditches, continuing to build homes on flood plains, and all the rest of it.

It’s not as if we weren’t warned, long ago, where all this behaviour would lead us.  

 

 

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I’ve never enjoyed a Winter Olympics this much before. But then, no Olympics before has included the slopestyle events.

And somehow I’ve never cottoned on before to the astonishing spectacle of aerodynamics that is the snowboard halfpipe.

Snowboarding may be a young sport for young people – surely nobody as old as me has ever ridden a board in contest – but the sheer exuberance of the competitors has been as enthralling as the skill with which they fly through the air nonchalantly performing near-impossible feats.

It wasn’t just the novelty value of a British winter medal that made Jenny Jones’s bronze-winning run in the snowboard slopestyle an occasion for joy. Her performance was a joy to watch – and so was her response, not just to her own medal but also to the gold-winning display of her friend and rival, the American Jamie Anderson.

That camaraderie between opponents, the obvious pleasure they have taken in each others’ achievements, has been one of the delightful aspects of the whole snow show.

In stark contrast to the exponents of certain other sports – mostly better-paid ones – these have looked like people it would be pleasant to know.

The intelligence, good sense and sheer niceness of Lizzy Yarnold, the gold-winning British skeleton racer, have been remarkable, but not exceptional. She will surely succeed admirably in her stated intention of being a role model for young girls, but she is not alone in that.

As for those glorious show-offs of the halfpipe – if I was 40-odd years younger I’d be inspired.

If not, perhaps, to try physical feats that would always have been far beyond me, but maybe by their sheer style. Are there, after all, any cooler dudes on the planet – except maybe the slopestyle skiers?

The Swedish skier Henrik Harlaut may have suffered the fate risked daily by teenage boys everywhere when his low-slung trousers slipped far enough to topple him on his face. But his style in the air, blond dreadlocks flowing from his helmet in every direction, was glorious.

The commentators on these events, un-BBC-ish as they are, have added ripely to my enjoyment of the past 10 days. Without their guidance, I might not have known how unlucky Harlaut was to be judged just outside the medal places.

Even from the comfort of my sofa, I found literally breathtaking his chutzpah in attempting – and bringing off – tricks whose very names were new to me. Nose butter triple cork 1620, anyone?

At risk of inducing cringes among those young and cool enough to have known before last week the meaning of such terms as truck-driver grab, pretzel 180 and switch triple rodeo, I’d say these Games have well and truly stomped it.

• Postscript: the curling has been unexpectedly riveting too...

How we could do with a Thomas Paine right now

He has a statue and a hotel named after him in the town where he was born, but how many Thetford people really know who Thomas Paine was? It’s a question a few of those who do know have been asking, with some justification.

And it’s not just in Thetford that the author of The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason is less well known than he should be.

A dozen years ago, in a poll run by the BBC, Paine was placed 34^th in a list of the 100 “greatest Britons”. Just above him were a so-so footballer, David Beckham, and a slightly better than so-so comedian, Eric Morecambe, which says everything about how seriously that poll should be taken.

Of course, it’s impossible to name the greatest Briton with anything resembling scientific objectivity. But if it could be done, Paine would be a contender for the title, alongside Shakespeare, Darwin and Newton.

In its day (it was published in 1791), The Rights of Man was a million-seller, probably the most widely read book in the world after the Bible and Koran.

Paine can’t really be said to be responsible for either the American or French revolutions, but he provided the intellectual justification for them.

And since it’s hard to imagine Karl Marx without the giant shoulders of Paine for him to stand on, you might say he had a big hand in the Russian revolution too.

Not that Paine (or Marx) should be blamed for all the horrors the revolutions wrought. His concern was always to make life better for the common man (and woman).

His writing, and his thinking, were clearer than Marx’s too.

Broadly speaking, he was against monarchy and for democracy. Against the private ownership of land. For factory workers and against factory owners. Against capital punishment (which he twice came close to suffering himself). For liberty, equality and fraternity.

His ideas made him popular, and then unpopular, in both America and France, in both of which countries he became an honorary citizen.

His claim of American nationality almost certainly saved him from execution in England as a traitor for his polemic against the “tyranny” of George III – and for encouraging the idea of a French invasion to spread the revolution.

By the time the invasion came close to reality, France was under the rule of Napoleon – a tyrant Paine regarded, rightly, as a traitor to the revolution. (Much as Stalin would be to the Russian revolution, but that is another story.)

Understandably unpopular with the ruling and property-owning classes, Paine – the son of a corsetmaker and educated at Thetford Grammar School – was never a traitor to the working class of this or any country.

The fact that he eventually fell out of favour in America, whose independence he had done so much to encourage, was largely due to his opposition to two things the new Americans held dear – slavery and religion.

Not that Paine was non-religious. He believed in God, just not in church.

“All national institutions of churches,” he wrote, “whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” And amen, say I, to that.

Once one of the most popular men in America and the friend of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, he had just six mourners at his funeral in New York in 1809.

Back in 1776, one of Paine’s American opponents, James Chalmers, had argued that if the colony rejected the British monarchy, the country would “degenerate into democracy”. It would take the clear thinking of a Thomas Paine to untangle all the ironies in that.

 

 

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Knocking down the Mail (can’t really call it Royal any more) at a fraction of its real value. Piecemeal privatising, de-professionalising and de-skilling of teaching. Is there anything this tawdry government won’t sell?

Now there is talk that the next vital thing to go under the hammer could be access to NHS care records.

Had a drug problem? A sexually transmitted disease? A mental health issue? An abortion? Heart trouble? Cancer? Until now, these things were private matters between you and your GP.

But soon private companies may be able to buy all this information from the new universal patient database.

What they get shouldn’t include your name and address (though NHS staff can already put it all together with a few clicks of a mouse). But it will all be linked to your postcode, gender and ethnicity, so a little automated cross-checking against other databases could make it very personal indeed.

You can imagine how insurance companies might take advantage of such knowledge. And how that might work in a future where health care is increasingly placed in private hands.

Well, it works in America, doesn’t it?

Does it?

Before you settle happily for an increasingly Americanised, post-NHS future, just consider these figures:

• 62 per cent of US bankruptcies are the result of medical bills
• 75 pc of those bankrupted had health insurance before they became sick.

They say you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Let’s hope against hope that doesn’t come to apply any time soon to the National Health.

Lots of local lovelies just dying to meet me... (it says here)

It’s not all cute kitties and phone-snaps of people’s dinners, though you do have to tune those things out – posted by some intelligent people too.

In fact, though I undoubtedly spend (waste) too much time on it, Facebook has been good to me. How good it is depends, I suppose, on the quality of your friends.
Mine have introduced me to some worthwhile ideas, good writing and good music, and invited me to events I might not have known about. Through it I’ve met up again with old friends from years ago – some of them in the real world too.
Facebook is, like life, what you make of it. And, to an uncontrollable and often unknown degree, what other people make of it for you.
I knew, of course, that those irritating little ads that pop up down the side of your page were cleverly (or not so cleverly) targeted. What I didn’t know was that the targetting is based not just on your own details and online behaviour, but also on that of your friends.
I assumed it was just my age and gender that led to the nature of “personal” ads I received.
The claims that “Suzy” just “liked” my page. No, she didn’t. And if she did, she doesn’t look like that.
The promise that there are “lots of over-50 women” just dying to meet me. Or alternatively that “my area” is full of young lovelies desperate to get their hands on an older guy.
Now I’m wondering which of my friends opened the virtual door that let this stuff in to my page.
Whoever it was may merely have succumbed to a moment’s idle curiosity. As I did myself the other day – or shall I say it was done in the spirit of journalistic research?
Either way, I clicked. Just one click on a tiny picture of an alluring smile.
Had I ever really fancied, or believed, that stuff about “girls in your area”, I’d have been disappointed to discover that my area, in this case, seemed to be somewhere in the Far East.
Which makes the tantalising statement (or, rather, “warning”) that follows particularly hard to believe. “This site” (it says) “contains explicit pictures of someone you know.” Yeah, right.
Brief chuckle, close down browser window and that’s that. Except it isn’t.
Now, to my surprise – I thought Facebook had a bit more class – the ads have changed. The women in the little pictures appear to have lost their clothes.
Quite how these ads get past Facebook’s much-trumpeted anti-nudity algorithms, I’m not sure.
Where my home page used to be brightened by cheerful, pretty faces it is now sullied with body parts of the kind most people prefer to keep private. Much less appealing somehow, even if more honest about what they’re selling.
Well, they’re not selling it to me. A little later, after a trawl through my settings, I have found how to specify my preferences more clearly.
Sadly there seems to be no setting that eliminates advertising altogether. But I have passed up my “chance to Chat w/ Sexxy”.
Now I just have to find a way to get rid of ads for pension calculators, life insurance, disability aids and old people’s holidays. Just because I don’t want a life of unmitigated sexual adventure doesn’t mean I’m ready for incontinence pads or a stair-lift. Not just yet.

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The twitterati of America appears to have broken into a froth of semi-informed wrath over an article that appeared in the New York Times. An article which, for legal reasons, could not have appeared in a British paper.

The piece in question was an accusation by Dylan Farrow, stepdaughter of the film director Woody Allen, that he sexually abused her when she was seven.
After 20 years there is no way of proving or disproving the allegation. It’s her word against his. Which makes it very strange to see people leaping to take sides.
Either he’s a liar and a pervert, or she’s a liar and a vindictive fantasist – or so most of the outraged seem to assume. There is a third possibility – that she is not lying, but mistaken.
There are various reasons why she might be. Such as, for example, the theory advanced by Allen’s lawyer, that for most of her life she has been “poisoned” against Allen by her mother, Mia Farrow.
For what it’s worth, this third possibility is the one I’m most inclined to believe. But what it’s worth isn’t very much. Because – just like all those people rushing eagerly and angrily either to condemn Allen or defend him – I simply don’t have enough evidence to base an opinion on.
Do you believe him, because he’s famous (and a man)? Or her, because you’re predisposed in favour of self-proclaimed victims (and she’s a woman)?
About the only sensible comment I’ve seen on the matter was that of the actor Alec Baldwin.
Responding on Twitter to one of the many side-takers, he said: “So you know who’s guilty? Who’s lying? You, personally, know that? You are mistaken if you think there is a place for me, or any outsider, in this family’s issue.”
Let’s leave it there.