Blaming it on the baby

I had an interesting time on the Saturday before Christmas.

First, I got dinged by a speed camera. In ordinary circumstances this would be slightly unfortunate, but the camera in question is practically at the bottom of my road and I just forgot it was there.

Then, en route to darkest Shropshire, I got a slow puncture. Apparently the tyre died of old age, which means I had probably been told it would need replacing soon and had forgotten.

Between these two things, I drove out of a motorway service station with my mobile phone on the roof of my car. I last saw it bouncing under the wheels of the car behind me on the M40.

A number of my friends, upon learning of this, have said I can blame this on having become a father recently. Problem is, I didn't even have the baby in the car at the time. But if having a child is an excuse for any mistakes, I shall take him with me everywhere from now on.

Let The Game Begin

Imagine this. It is a couple of weeks before the start of a new Premiership season and David Beckham has been arrested, charged with animal cruelty. He says he didn't do it, but the four guys charged with him have confessed and implicated him. He faces a five year prison sentence and a huge fine.

Meanwhile, Rio Ferdinand has been arrested so often in the past few months, he has been banned from playing for a whole season, John Terry is suspended until October after serving a jail term for having an unlicensed firearm and the brightest young star in British football, the one everyone wanted to sign at the end of last season, is refusing to sign a deal until he is offered better terms by the club that thought they'd got him back in April.

It couldn't happen here, could it? You'd like to think not - even if I am writing this on the day that Lee Hughes got out of jail after serving half his sentence for causing death by dangerous driving. Now substitute the names of Michael Vick, Adam 'Pacman' Jones and Terry 'Tank' Johnson and you are just scratching the surface of the fun and games that has been the off-season in America's National Football League.

Of course, having an off season of 6 months does help when it comes to finding time to generate scandal, but in all of the above cases the player concerned managed to do the damage during the season itself and has spent his time fighting afterwards. Indeed Johnson, at the time a defensive lineman for the Chicago Bears, had to get permission from a judge to even play in the Superbowl in February - before nipping inside for two months, a consequence of the firearms offence and a parole violation. Jones, many think, has been harshly dealt with, as the Tennessee Titan's cornerback hasn't actually been convicted of any serious offence - he's just been arrested for a heck of a lot of minor ones.

But it is Vick who is in the biggest trouble. One of the finest quarterbacks of his generation, he has - again as I have been writing this - concluded a plea bargain in which he will admit breeding and training dogs for dogfighting, and allowing them to fight on his land. He faces 5 years in jail and a very big fine. Which is actually a lot better than the federal racketeering charges - basically, a charge that he funded the dogfighting operation and the betting on it - he would've faced without the plea bargain.

Moreover, having served his time, Vick is very unlikely to play football again. This is partly due to the stringent code of conduct brought in by the NFL and their new Commissioner Roger Goodall. Step out of line with Uncle Roger and you are looking at a 10 game suspension, minimum. Moderation has never been a big element of American sport, but I doubt anyone would have anticipated the Goodall revolution. No offense too trivial, no suspension too long, seems to be his motto. And that is for things which happen off the field.

Of course, if you take 1800 young men and pay them upwards of £1m each per year [on average] then you are bound to get one or two bits of misbehaviour. Goodall can never have expected someone to do something as grim as he did. At the same time, the other 1799 can hardly have anticipated a man so puritanical, they are expected to make Snow White look like a slut. Imagine the outcry here if a Premiership player got a 10 match ban if they were convicted of a motoring offence? Jermaine Pennant would just be an expensive footnote in football history, that's for sure.

All of which leaves the Atlanta Falcons without a quarterback, the Titans without their number one kick returner and the Bears without the cornerstone of their defensive line. Out in Cincinatti, no fewer than 9 players have been arrested in the last 12 months and the entire team must be on tenterhooks. The only team cheering will be the Oakland Raiders, who finally got number one draft pick JaMarcus Russell to sign his contract less than 48 hours before the pre-season games began.

With all of this buildup, this has to be one of the most exciting NFL seasons ever. I've not even considered the chances of the Indianapolis Colts retaining their title, of the Bears recovering from their SuperBowl humiliation, and the damage that may have been wrought upon perennial favourites Tampa Bay by their signing of the mercurial Randy Moss, but I can't wait for it all to start.

The Point George W. Jumped The Shark

For those of you not familiar with it, the phrase 'jumping the shark' refers to the point at which something or someone performs an act so far beyond the bounds of credibility that you can never take the seriously again. There's a fuller - although still incomplete - explanation here.

Where George Walker Bush is concerned, of course, there are many reasons to think that he lost the plot a long, long time ago. However, for the past 7 years or so he has at least been saying the sort of thing that his own people want to hear. If he wasn't, why the heck did they re-elect him? But his most recent piece of nonsense surely goes so far beyond intelligable that even the most gullible American must be raising an eyebrow at it. And for me, the point where even the idiots in your own country think you are an idiot is the point where nothing you can say or do, ever again, will get you my respect.

What, you may be wondering, has Dubbya done that even I will now agree that the only reason to keep him in office is the fear of what he might do without hundreds of minions watching his every move? Well, it is a simple thing. He's appointed Cal Ripken Jr as a Special Envoy to the State Department.

I have nothing against Cal Ripken Jr. He is a nice man, a very nice man. A man so nice that everyone cheered when he broke one of baseball's most coveted records, that for the most consecutive games. But that is also the point. He's a baseball player. Which, frankly, if you are looking for someone to go around the world spreading goodwill for your nation, is not the best place to start.

The only point in appointing a celebrity to any political - or, in this case, quasi-political - post, is the hope that they will use their celebrity as a form of endorsing you and your organisation. Which means that, if you are going to appoint someone most people have never heard of, you might as well appoint, well, me.

Baseball is a game which was invented by Americans (yes, I know that there are some disputes about its origins, because I've read this), which means that it tends to be played in places where there has at some point been a heavy American influence. Like North America, Latin America and Japan. Admittedly, in the latter case the influence was markedly different to the other two locations, but despite this, all of these places are by and large pretty friendly to the USA. Which means there is no point sending a celebrity Special Envoy there.

If there were other countries in the world that were big on baseball, but not friendly towards the USA, then appointing Ripken to this role might make sense. But the only country that is, is Cuba, with whom the USA has no formal ties with anyway, other than to occupy a corner of it as a glorified kipnappers hideout. They are hardly going to send one of their favourite sons out there.

Conversely, in the places where America does need a bit of celebrity product endorsement, no-one is going to have heard of Ripken. Or most baseballers. It's a bit like us sending a cricketer as a celebrity amassador to the States.

Ripken has been keen to stress that his role isn't political. But if it isn't, what is the point of doing it? He could be a fantastic envoy for baseball, spreading the word to countries that don't play the game, because then all he needs to do is say "Hey, it must be a great game, because I played 2,632 consecutive matches". Without the political element, his role is meaningless, but without being a celebrity in the countries he is going to, he might as well be another faceless politician.

Cal Ripken Jr doesn't need Special Envoy status, he'd be better able to do what he would be really good at without it. The man who gave him the role, though, really does need a special bus.

Spinning The Wheels That Spin The Wheels

So, yet another Tour de France has ended in farce and acrimony. Three riders failed drug tests during the race, another failed one before they even started and the one time leader was sacked by his own team for allegedly lying about why he missed two tests in the months before the race.

Arguably this is actually an improvement on last year, when the winner was disqualified for drug taking, but it is scant consolation to a race and a sport now vanishing under the weight of its own excrement. Someone needs to start digging their way out, and fast.

Unfortunately, the evidence of the past three weeks is that you can't rely upon the cyclists to wield the shovel, because they'll just dig down deeper. Consider the five dimwits referred to above:

• Cristian Moreni failed a drug test during the tour. In some ways he's been the most sensible about this, saying nothing of any substance and quietly crawling into a hole away from the spotlight. The guy gambled, lost and knows it;

• Iban Mayo is arguably the dimmest of the five. Having gotten away with a failed test during the Giro d'Italia he surely must have known that he, of all people, was going to be targeted this time, yet he still did it and was caught at the end of Stage 18;

• Patrik Sinkewitz was the rider who failed a test before the tour even started. He has now admitted that he used a testosterone cream on his arm. Accidentally. Which is like Prince Charles saying that he 'accidentally' screwed Camilla whilst married to Diana. You knew it was there, you knew you shouldn't have used it and there was no accidental about it. And why put testosterone on your arm anyway?

• Now for the big two on our ride of shame. Alexander Vinokourov and Michael Rasmussen. Vino, as he is known to the cognoscenti, had a bad fall early on, took illegal drugs to recover and when caught out came out with the most incredible excuse ever, claiming that he had too much blood in his thighs. One can only assume that this is the cycling equivalent of "Sorry darling, wrong hole". Rasmussen, on the other hand, did nothing wrong during the Tour itself. The problem is that he shouldn't have been in it anyway, having missed two tests in the 45 days before it started, so he should have been suspended, but for an administrative error. Having had a stroke of luck to be in it, he made the most of it and was the clear leader before being sacked by his own team, who claimed that he lied about his whereabouts for those tests. That the evidence on this is flimsy - a cycling journalist claims to have seen him in Italy when he said he was in Mexico - is probably irrelevant. The luck that got him into the Tour turned and saw him thrown out.

All of this happened despite the cyclists signing up to a charter against drug taking. Which means that if pro cycling wants to get drugs out of the sport, the last people they can rely upon to do it are the riders. The evidence clearly shows that, whatever is enhanced by EPO and the like, brain power isn't.

The solution to the problem surely lies in the reason why there is a problem. It is not that there is too much money in the sport, or that commercial teams need to be taken out of it, it is the way that the races are organised. There are three elements that every cycling fan loves about the Tour and its kin - the time trials, the sprints and the mountain climbs. Cycling teams consist - usually - of four distinct groups of riders. There are the leaders, the ones who are thought to have the best chance of winning and the best all round set of skills. At the other end of the spectrum are the domestiques, good riders in their own right but lacking the necessary quality to do much more than support their leaders, acting as windshields and basically sacrificing their own chances to promote the lead man. Alongside and often among these are the other two groups, the sprinters and the climbers, whose role is to try and win the sprinting and climbing elements of the race. This is, of necessity, a simplistic view, but it will suffice for now.

It shouldn't take too much imagination to realise that, on the sprint stages, the climbers are at a disadvantage, in the mountains the sprinters struggle and to cap it all everyone has to try and protect and keep up with the team leader. But, having established that everyone on each team is at a disadvantage compared to each other at some point in the race - save for the star, of course - the race organisers decide to make things even harder for them. First of all, the big sprints and mountain stages all either come at once, or come at the end of a 200km+ ride. Then, as a double whammy, any rider who finishes a certain time behind the stage winner is eliminated.

To summarise, if you are a rider in a major road race you are going to be tired, desperately trying to keep up with your team and to cap it all running the risk of elimination if you don't. IS IT ANY WONDER THEY TAKE DRUGS?

The people that run these things need to have a long hard look at how they organise them. Is it really necessary for cyclists to ride hundreds of kilometres through open countryside when the only interested spectator is the odd stray dog whose only desire is to end it all by hurling himself Emily Davidson-style under the wheels of a bike? Is it not better than one clean cyclist comes home hours before the rest than one doped up one finishes in the pack? Where does the entertainment in these things lie? Any half decent marketeer knows that if you have a major product, you sell it in the smallest chunks you can get away with - so why have four major climbs in a day when you can have two over two days?

At the moment, the money and the format of the racing are incentives to take drugs. Reduce the stamina and speed elements needed each day, and instead spread them over more days and what do you get? In theory, cleaner riders and more money. Is that really so hard to do?

The Maternity Bump

Some of you might have been wondering where I have been. In fact, those of you who did wonder had probably assumed that I had run out of things to write about and was about to do the very thing I had promised not to do - letting the blog die. Nothing could be further from the truth. The simple fact is that I knew I wanted to write about this next, but didn't know quite how to phrase this. I still don't. This post therefore comes to you with the caveat that I reserve the right to entirely change my mind about it in a couple of months.

The idea for this piece came at me from two directions. From one side, more vacuous nitwittery from our beloved government about what pregnant women should and should not do. From the other, a whole hour of prime time television devoted to one woman whinging about the standard of maternity care when she had her most recent baby back in April.

People whining about the NHS really, really annoys me. Yes, it isn't perfect, but it is full of hard working, dedicated people who could make a hell of a lot more money doing what they do somewhere else. And yes, there are far too many bureaucrats with far too much power and far too little financial acumen running it. But the whole point of the NHS was not that it would be a Rolls Royce service; the whole point of it was to provide a base standard of healthcare for all, something which didn't exist back in 1948 when it was founded.

You get the NHS that you pay for. If you want a better level of service, the only way it can be paid for is (a) cutting out the bureaucrats (which most people are in favour of) and (b) paying more taxes (which most people are against).

Applying all of this to the whinging reporter, what you get with NHS maternity services is therefore a whole load of women competing for the same few resources. You don't have any right to any better a service than the next woman. In that respect, it is almost a perfectly Utilitarian system - to each according to her needs, from each according to their means.

This doesn't mean that the system is perfectly balanced. Next time you are in a major shopping mall, or at a major train station, stop and look around you. Count the women aged 13-50. Each of them will, on average, produce a couple of kids during their lifetime. It's not an exact calculation - some will choose not to have them, some may sadly be unable to have them, one or two will die before they can have them and one or more (depending upon where you live) will become a nun - but it is a good starting point. Count them up, double it and then multiply that figure by every shopping mall or every railway station in the country. That is what the NHS is up against in funding maternity services. Men may all need to go to hospital a couple of times during their lifetime, too, but not all for the same thing.

Factor in that most maternity professionals are female (and will therefore require the service at some point themselves) and most NHS managers are middle aged men and you start to see the real reason why government policy on this is cock-eyed. You can't get more people into the profession without funding it properly, because you are trying to increase the service using the people who actually use the service themselves.

It isn't even a difficult equation. If the birth rate rises, the number of females in the population will rise. Assume that each of those females needs a service twice in their lifetime and you have a very high and increasing demand for something very specific with no way of paying for more people to be trained to do it. Unless you shed some extraneous paper pushers, some unwanted external consultants (not the medical kind, of course) and divert those resources to the very area where you have a growing demand.

Make babies, not bureaucrats.

The Cycle of Friendship

Life, as Bob Cratchit said, is made up of meetings and partings. Over the course of it, you probably befriend and lose touch with several times the number of people you stay friends with. I have photographs going back almost three decades and I remember vividly everyone in them, but there's no more than a handful of people in the early shots that I am still in contact with.

Losing friends is easy to do. Over the past five months I have lost three friends who I thought were good, close, mates and I expected to have them for the rest of my life. One of them was entirely my own fault and I have only myself to blame. The second actually came about as a result of the first. We had an argument about what happend and are, I think, both too proud to make the first move towards a reconcilliation.

It is the third one which is a total puzzle. I have no idea what I may have said or done. All I know is that I went on holiday for a fortnight and when I came back they were gone. Moreover, they won't talk to me, so I don't know what I might have done wrong.

Balanced against this is the wonderful fact that no fewer than five friends I thought I had lost touch with have contacted me recently and I have met up with two of them for the first time in years; the other three now live abroad, which might explain why we lost touch in the first place. Hearing from them actually came as something of a shock to me. I'm not the sort of person that I would expect someone would want to track down, at least not for any pleasant reason. Just getting an email from each of these people was enough to make me feel good for the rest of the day.

Even as I have been drafting this (you might have noticed that each entry takes a while for me to finish) something else wonderful has happened. The second person I was referring to above contacted me. It was strange, because they sent me a message to say that they were near my office, which I received shortly after I walked past their office. It's early days yet, but let us hope that we can rebuild that friendship.

Making friends is hard. Keeping them is harder. Losing them is the easiest thing in the world. It's a very hard line to tread without making mistakes.

The Property Ladder Scam

In the beginning there was Changing Rooms. And Changing Rooms begat The House Doctor and the House Doctor begat both Location, Location, Location and Property Ladder, which in turn begat Grand Designs and DIY SOS and whilst all this was going on Changing Rooms spawned Home Front and some of the others produced bastard offspring like Relocation, Relocation, Relocation, A Place In The Country and a whole host of very similar yet subtly different television shows.

Across these televisual generations, a subtle shift took place, from Changing Rooms to Home Front to Property Ladder. Changing Rooms – apart from introducing the nation to the luxuriantly hyphenated Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen and Anna Ryder-Richardson – was all about sending designers into other people’s houses and giving them a swift lick of paint, a light dosing of wallpaper and even some less uncoordinated furniture. (Americans have their own version of this, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition , fronted by Ty Pennington, a man so hyperactive there isn’t enough Ritalin in the world to make me allow him into my home.)

Home Front paired LL-B with the Irish landscape designer Diarmuid Gavin and let the pair of them loose on slightly larger houses with slightly larger budgets and, as the series went on, slightly larger egos. The sight of Llewelyn-Bowen being almost reduced to tears by a woman who he had already reduced to tears with his design was a sight to behold.

I have already written about Property Ladder once this month and I make no apologies for doing so again, as people doing houses up themselves was merely the logical extension of people having designers do their houses up.

Even more subtly, the producers of these shows found a way to save money. In Changing Rooms, the designers each had £500 with which to do a legendarily shoddy job on redoing one room of a house. In Home Front, the budget ran to thousands, but the work was one a grander scale and took much longer. And on Changing Rooms, the budget is simply…nonexistent. Yes, it is one thing to stand back, have your house invaded by film crew and workmen, yet know that the BBC are paying for it, but it takes a special degree of desperation to allow yourself to be filmed spending your own money.

Admittedly, this might be the closest that some people get to being Victoria Beckham, but I doff my cap to whichever genius realised just how cheaply you could make television when given enough property owning nitwits desperate for their time in the spotlight.