Just walking without the dog

Fri, 6 Jan 2012 17:31:08 +0000

During one of my periodic bursts of activity, I walked in the countryside the other day. On my journey I met several people – all of them with dogs.

I became concerned about the obvious reluctance of people to walk without dogs. What could be putting them off? Perhaps it was the possibility of meeting dogs and not being able to deal with them. I have decided to reassure them.

Dogs in the countryside are not a problem. If they run up to you and jump at you, or place their mouths in the vicinity of tender parts of your anatomy, they are simply playing, or being friendly, in much the same way that lions or polar bears do. You can safely ignore them, or give them a poke with your walking pole, though this is probably illegal unless you are actually bleeding.

Dogs do leave marks of their passing, but the colour of this is not much different from certain types of mud. You should avoid smelling anything that looks like mud. You should not step in it either. If you take these simple precautions, what dogs leave behind is not a problem.

You may meet people carrying transparent plastic bags containing substances that are not entirely pleasing in an aesthetic way and contribute little to the experience of walking in the countryside. These people usually have dogs with them, but this may be a coincidence. Remember, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If you throw up, try to do so off the path.

I hope this is reassuring and encourages people to go walking without dogs. I would like to make it clear that no dogs were injured in the writing of this article.

Lost in translations

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 12:43:20 +0000

Don’t you love the King James Bible? And don’t you also love slagging off those awful modern translations that trendy churches use nowadays?

Well, you’re not alone. The 400th anniversary of the completion of the translation that King James I authorised to be read in churches has given opportunity for all lovers of tradition to come out of the woodwork and tell us how inferior and often awful any other version is.

Of course, their version of “any other version” – the one from which they take their toe-curling quotes – is usually the least satisfactory around, which almost no-one likes or uses. Yes, I’m talking about the New English Bible, which memorably opens the beautiful first chapter of John’s Gospel with the breathtaking and breath-removing “When all things began, the Word already was. The Word dwelt with God, and what God was, the Word was”.

All right, the search for accuracy when the original is carefully designed to indicate unfathomable mystery is bound to lead us up strange paths, but the NEB surely did not have to demonstrate it in such a ham-fisted way.

Why do these KJV-worshippers never mention the New International Version, which unlike the NEB, is frequently read in both churches and cathedrals. Perhaps because it is actually quite good. Straw men fall over so much more easily.

You can easily see this when the complainer strays from the safety of the NEB.The latest attack I have read complains (among much NEB-knocking) that the RSV replaces the KJV’s “giants” in Genesis with “nephilim”, but you can easily imagine that if the situation was reversed, and the KJV had plumped for nephilim, he would have complained about the banality of the RSV’s “giants”.

Of course I love the KJV. What’s not to love? I love Shakespeare too, for much the same reasons. It should continue to be read because its authors had an ear for poetry, and poetry is one of the best ways of approaching God. When it comes to accuracy and accessibility, its pedestal is not so high, or so secure, in these ungodly times.

Translation is an art rather than a science, and the KJV was not, as a good friend of mine once opined, verbally inspired by God. It was an attempt – as far as the New Testament is concerned – to convey something written in 1500-year-old Greek (which was itself in many cases a translation from the Aramaic) into something easy and familiar for those in another country, culture and time.

How could it succeed? Look at a translation – or preferably a paraphrase – of the Lord’s Prayer directly from the Aramaic and you will see how much you lose in the KJV, the NIV or any other easily available English version. It goes far beyond the rather obvious point that Jesus would hardly have asked his Father: “Lead us not into temptation.” And what about the Greek continuous present tense? What happened to that?

Ah, well. These are esoteric points, perhaps. Or perhaps not. The point is that the KJV is good. Some might say it’s damn fine coffee. (Another cultural nuance that would be pretty much impossible to translate.) But there are other good drinks out there. And they can be just as nourishing.

The long and short of it

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:01:37 +0100

To cut a long story short, some abbreviations just get on my nerves. Others, like Tim, or Dot, are perfectly OK.

Maybe the ones that annoy me are the ones used by aficionados who want to foist their familiarity on to people who are not in the least interested. Take Strictly, for instance.

I am probably the only person who attempted to watch Strictly Come Dancing but had to turn it off to avoid being physically ill (sic). It’s not the dancing; it’s the fawning and the insincerity. So when someone calls it Strictly, I feel like throwing them, paso doble style, into the audience. But while that might be PD, it certainly wouldn’t be PC. So I don’t.

It all started when I first went out to work, and one of my older colleagues talked incessantly about getting a divvy. That had something to do with sport, I think. Now sportsmen can’t speak without using esoteric abbreviations.

Jenson Button (a man I admire greatly) doesn’t do very well in F1 qually (or is it quali?), but often achieves P1 during the actual race – which in case anyone is interested is actually not an abbreviation, but takes longer to say than “first”.

In this it achieves something close to the wonderful American abbreviation “GSW” for “gunshot wound”. This is much used in ER, where they are very pushed for time, but no-one seems to have noticed that it’s quicker to say “gunshot wound” than “GSW”. Try it.

That wonderful British TV programme Outnumbered was in the same area when it introduced a character called Mia, who was called Mimi “for short”. As the outraged wife pointed out, Mimi is longer than Mia, so why? Well, quite. Because it’s more endearing? Because of something private and intriguing? A secret relationship?

Perhaps it’s that idea of a secret relationship that makes my toes curl. The abbreviation often implies that the speaker has some exclusive deal with the thing being abbreviated. I mean, everyone knows who Man U is, don’t they?

Yes, I do, but is Manchester United that hard to say? Are we really that short of time? The man who reads the football results has now taken to using the phrase “Div One”. Oh, please. How ugly is that?

About as ugly as “hanky” for handkerchief. I would like to see that banned. But fridge is perfectly OK. I never said it was logical. And if you were going to ask, bus and phone are not abbreviations: they are words, which is why you never, never put apostrophes in front of them. Now don’t get me started on the pos.

Do not move: the way forward

Mon, 5 Sep 2011 19:57:59 +0100

5 September 2011

As I made myself comfortable in the hospital waiting room, my eye was caught by a notice directly in front of me: “Please do not move.” For a moment I thought I was on the road again, and all the dreams of Brake, the anti-motorist organisation, had come true.

Had I slipped into an alternative dimension? Or would “Do not move” be replacing 20mph signs in the near future, and all speed limits in the fulness of time?

Funny things, speed limits. They are the same whatever car you drive, whatever the time of day, whatever the road surface and whatever the weather conditions. They are the same if you are an expert driver or completely hopeless (and the driving test does little to weed out the hopeless, because it lets you keep trying until you scrape through).

Speed limits are the same whatever the capacity of your engine, however fast you can accelerate and however efficiently you can brake. They are the same however good your eyesight and however good or bad your reaction time, however well you concentrate, and however much you like talking to your passengers, changing the CD or adjusting the heater.

In other words, they take no account at all of the essential quality of driving. They just set an arbitrary speed beyond which you must not go – and this speed is not even decided by experts. They create an offence which is not subject to any kind of judgement as to the danger involved, because it is decided by a machine – and a machine whose accuracy you cannot rely on.

Why are some people determined to pin so many accidents on to speed? Partly because it’s so simple: you don’t have to think about it. And Einstein did say: “You should make everything as simple as possible.” However, he did add the vital three words “but not simpler”. Where speed limits are concerned, we have made things too simple. As a result we are criminalising good drivers, and making barely competent drivers think they are good.
But hasn’t it been shown that speed cameras stop accidents? No, the statistics are variable, in that while one area will show a fall in accidents if you choose the right time periods to focus on, another will seem to indicate - from a similarly arbitrary selection - that the cameras actually increase accidents.

How could that be? By taking drivers’ eyes away from the road. When I am checking my speedometer I am not looking at the road, and when I am looking out for cameras, other hazards – yes, I do mean other hazards – have a slightly lower priority, whether I mean them to or not.

Some will point to a continuing fall in serious accidents since cameras were introduced. But this decline was well under way before the introduction of cameras, and in fact slowed down in the years after cameras appeared.

Of course, like everything else, it comes down to money. Speed cameras bring in money, and they are often placed quite cynically to ensure the money is maximised – on a downhill, straight stretch of road after miles of tortuous bends, for instance. A former police driver friend received points and a fine in just such a situation because he slightly exceeded the limit when overtaking; if he had slowed down when spotting the camera (a natural reaction), he might now be dead.

Some people do drive dangerously fast, and they need to be stopped. That is what traffic police are for. But we have failed to distinguish between dangerously fast and over the limit. The fact is that most speed limits are too low. If the limits were right, the argument against cameras would be weak. But they are not right. Sometimes, they are nowhere near right.

When I started driving, in the 1960s, police advice was to drive as quickly as you safely could: they called it progressive driving. I believe this is good advice. Slow driving dulls the senses and slows reaction times. We are producing a mass of people who can follow rules but can’t drive well – who appear incapable of overtaking and who do not concentrate on the road. Worrying, at a time when so many accidents are caused by fatigue, boredom and lack of attention.

Highways authorities and road safety “experts” want us to go slowly. I want to go faster. Not ridiculously fast, but safely fast. Fast enough to be helpful to other road users.

I think there are excellent reasons for doing this. But the wrong people are in power. And as a much wiser writer said, “they would not be in power if they were not the wrong people”. So I guess there is no hope. “Please do not move” is the way forward. If you see what I mean.

Skid resistance

Thu, 4 Aug 2011 19:50:15 +0100

Never mind all this turning-on and turning-off of speed cameras. Most of the real advances in road safety seem to happen in Scotland.

A couple of months ago, for instance, road crashes at five Aberdeenshire blackspots were reduced by 100% through retexturing the road surface to improve skid resistance.

This would, I suspect, by regarded as a lost opportunity by English road safety-in-numbers partnerships, who would have slammed in speed humps, chicanes and cameras before you could say Banff.

Their solution would have had the twin advantages of bringing in cash (always a prime aim of road safety in England) and maintaining a solid accident rate to justify their own existence.

Understandable. Who doesn’t want to justify their own existence? Still, I prefer the Scottish approach on the grounds that it actually contributes to road safety. When it comes to contributing to the road safety industry, England is streets ahead.

Our northern neighbour should also be praised for its attempts to keep roads open, unlike my home city of Norwich, which closes as many roads as possible, either permanently or for an inordinately long time.

Scotland, meanwhile, has managed to put a Model T Ford on top of Ben Nevis – again. This was achieved originally a century ago, when apparently the roads in the Ben Nevis summit area were better and the car was driven to the top.

This time the car was driven successfully halfway up, but then deconstructed and reassembled at the top. I hesitate to mention this, because if the anti-motorist boys and girls at Brake get to hear of it, I suspect that they will recommend this method for all car journeys.

Could be useful in Norwich, I suppose.