Googling

There are, I must first admit, some positive things to say about Googling, or to ‘go ogling’ as my somewhat elderly spellchecker always insists may be what I really want to say – and, let’s face it, that’s probably not a bad description of what a high proportion of Googlers are intent on doing anyway. I had been considering writing something on Freemasonry, and I was taken back to the ‘secret signs’ we often had as children, for such vital and practical purposes as ensuring that the people we met every day really remained themselves and had not been replaced by alien doppelgangers. There was a children’s TV programme at the time which taught its adherents a ‘secret sign’ which they should use whenever they met another viewer of the show. The word ‘secret’ in this context was probably rather stretched in two respects. Firstly the programme was publicly broadcast every week to an audience which, given that there were only two TV channels, cannot have consisted of much less than 50% of British children. Secondly the nature of the signing was hardly inconspicuous. The first person was required to perform the normal, everyday action of rubbing their right palm, hand held vertically, vigourously up and down on their right cheek. The covert response required was to hold the right hand horizontally, palm down, and rub the edge of the forefinger back and forth in a sawing action in the valley formed between lower lip and chin. I had every intention of writing the following: “The programme was presented by Jeremy Sandford, son of the comedian Sandy Powell.” I was confident in my memory of this, but as a safeguard decided to Google it anyway. The following facts emerged in less than ten minutes. 1. Jeremy Sandford was a script writer famous for the semi-documentary TV plays Cathy Come Home and Edna the Inebriate Woman. 2. Sandy Powell had only one son, Peter, who had not worked in television. 3. There was an actor, singer and DJ called Chris Sandford (one of whose 45s I had owned at the time). 4. Chris Sandford was the son of the comedian Sandy Sandford. 5. Sandy Sandford was the presenter of the programme. Short of attributing it to Sandie Shaw, it is difficult to know how I could have got it more wrong; but it is even more difficult to know how, without Google, I could have even begun the task of tracking down the correct version. (To be fair, I should of course say, “without an Internet search engine”, since I am confident that Jeeves could have produced the same answer just as quickly had I overcome my dislike of Wodehouse’s politics enough to Ask him instead.) I am not even going to whinge at the fact that it was unable to come up with the name of the programme, though given all the other information, that is both surprising and mildly irritating. Goggle is a marvellous device for getting back half forgotten memories, checking dimly recalled facts, filling out incomplete quotations. But the memories, the facts, the quotations have to be there in your head to start with. If all you do is Google, “Please give me a moving quotation about Armistice Day”, you will get the same quote as everyone else who puts in the same key words. If you Google, “Secret signs on children’s television” you will get nothing; except that it will not say ‘nothing’; it will offer 15,300,000 answers which just happen to contain one or more of the key words. This is the mistake made by a whole generation which is growing up to believe that Knowledge is what it says in Google. You have to know something to get a sensible answer out. If I know nothing, all I get is a summary from Wikipedia. From there I can surf, but am I surfing shorewards or seawards? None of this is per se the fault of Google, but then this is not a whinge about Google, only about the act of Googling. The fault lies with the people not the engine. We fail to appreciate how much of the sum of human knowledge is not on the Internet. The fact is often hidden from us by the sheer volume of what is there. There are on the Net some tediously detailed facts about forgeries of telegraph stamps from 19th Century Kashmir. I know because at someone else’s request I was daft enough to put them there. Since I have no convenient way of getting them off (i.e. the owner of the site died a while ago, but the site appears immortal) they will probably still be there mocking my nerdishness when no one remembers not only what a telegraph was, but even what a stamp was. Twenty other stamp related articles I would be much prouder to be remembered for, and which would be much more useful to the albeit small stamp collecting community, are to be found only between the covers of magazines. There they will remain unless either I become so famous that a member of my fan site is willing to type every one of them onto the Web in my memory, or I become so bored and conceited that that I decide to do the job myself. I do not seriously anticipate either. Why is the quality of what I wrote for magazines so much better than what I wrote for the Net? Because the magazines have editors who read articles first, and reject the rubbish, or at least send it back to be upgraded from Rubbish to Tolerable. Most of the sites on the Net have no standards whatsoever, no editorial judgement, no warning message that what you are about to read may be entirely inaccurate or terminally boring. Nor does a pop-up pop up to tell you to get a life and go and read something printed on paper. All that happens is that the Net continues to accumulate more and more information. They once decided to ask a computer the question, “Is there a God?” They received the reply, “Insufficient information.” So they fed into it all the sacred texts of all the world’s religions and the complete works of the major humanists and atheists. Again they asked the question and received the same response. So they fed in all the major works of science, philosophy, theology, and psychical research. Still in answer to their question they received only “Insufficient information.” Finally they began an enormous thousand year project to feed into it the whole sum of human knowledge, from the beginning of printing to the most recent ephemeral publications. At the end, they asked, “Is there a God?” The reply came, “There is, now.”

Doctors

Doctors

I recently watched a documentary about brain surgery. It opened with a surgeon cutting the crown off the patient’s skull, somewhat like removing the top of a soft boiled egg, and poking inside with a probe and scalpel, rather than bread soldiers. Up to this point it may not have been very aesthetic viewing, but it was not in any way worrying; this is after all what surgeons do. Then the surgeon turned to the person next to him and inquired, “Tell me, what is the problem we’re trying to sort out, exactly?” I have known teachers go out to face a class without having prepared a lesson, and it rarely works well; but at least it is unlikely to prove fatal, or massively debilitating.

I found this particularly disappointing since I have always exempted surgeons from my general antipathy to doctors. Doctors as a whole seem to me to operate mainly on the level of the shaman: ask a few questions and then wave Magic Pills over the patient until they admit that they are better, although there is now, presumably when the Drug Budget Event Horizon is looming, an increasing tendency to blame a virus which can’t be treated and advise just staying in bed. I never felt that this kind of treatment required a doctor; I could with the aid of a pharmaceutical handbook do it myself, were I allowed to. But of course any drug strong enough to have any actual effect now requires a prescription. I’m not old enough to remember the halcyon days when anyone wanting to feature on the last page of an Agatha Christie could go into a chemist’s, sign a false name in the poisons book and walk out with a pint and a half of arsenic and a bucket of strychnine “to get rid of moles in the lawn.” But I am sufficiently decrepit to be able to remember when chemists instead of meekly handing out triple-shrinkwrapped pills on a doctor’s order, spent much of their time making up ointments and potions from a collection of raw ingredients, to suit whatever symptoms the customer complained of.

I confess to not having too much luck with doctors. At University I took my splitting headache to visit the College doctor. He diagnosed dandruff in my ear. I was told afterwards that he was a total lunatic who continued to hold his position only because he was an alumnus of the College and consequently loved by the Dons, who probably took their own headaches and/or aural skin complaints to Harley Street. I eventually took mine to a dentist who became the first medical practitioner to cure dandruff pain by extracting a tooth. My next GP spent nearly a fortnight organizing tests to find out what was causing the crippling pain in my chest. When I turned up he refused to run the tests because I admitted the pain had stopped, and he said he was not going to waste time (and money?) looking for something that was clearly no longer there.

In fact the only real relief I got from a GP was when as a child one removed fully three kilos of wax by syringing my right ear with a jet spray which probably doubled for removing graffiti from the surgery wall. In fact the reason for so much coming out may have been that half of it had leapt from my left ear in sheer panic at the buffeting being passed through my skull. Years later, after another build up, I returned for a repeat dosage. The new and much younger doctor looked at me pityingly, and as if I had asked to have my blood let into a basin said, “We don’t do that any more.” Instead he gave me a prescription for a bottle of useless eardrop liquid, which was incapable of dissolving the sugar on a cheap biscuit.

But in spite of these experiences with the medical profession I had retained my faith in the efficacy of surgeons, though it was slightly tested by a friend of mine at University who was reading Surgery in the short intervals available to him between parties and Rugby matches. He got a Third. A veritably charming young man, he would have a perfect bedside manner, but I always felt that, whilst I could cope with the country being run by someone with a Third in Politics, if lying on the table awaiting an operation, I would prefer the surgeon to be not my old rugby playing friend, but the one I never saw because he always stayed in cramming for a First.

Not of course that that will happen, because surgeons don’t do operations any more; they perform procedures. I suppose this may be a prestige thing, as in schools where the teaching of kitchen skills in my lifetime has advanced from Cookery through Domestic Science to Home Economics, and was last seen trying to earn an honest penny as Food Technology. But I think it more likely that it is another attempt to fool what used to be known as patients, but now are known officially as NHS Service Users, at least until they die - which of course they don’t do, only pass on, leaving a slight ambiguity as to whether they have ceased respiration or merely been transferred to a bigger hospital in the next town. No doubt a few elderly NHSSUs, terrified of the prospect of an operation, can have their blood pressure kept down by being told they are merely to undergo a procedure, which sounds rather like they may be about to have their toenails clipped. Until they find themselves in the Procedure Theatre. And in walks the man with a Third in Procedury.

Average

Life must be quite difficult for First Class cricket umpires. Lots of tricky judgments to be made as to whether batmen may or may not be out, and whether or not the light is suitable for play. But surely no decision can be trickier than the requirement of the England & Wales Cricket Board that they assess the pitches according to a six point scale: 6 very good, 5 good, 4 above average, 3 below average, 2 poor, and 1 unfit. That is correct – no ‘average’. I understand that it is just possible that an umpire, who as a child saw the Oval in its heyday, might decide that he never these days gets to see a pitch that he can in conscience describe as very good; I understand that it is just possible that the standard of groundsmanship may have improved to a point where he never sees an unfit one. But even with my limited statistical knowledge I find it difficult to envisage a situation where nothing is ever average. Surely, by definition, the majority of them will be average.

I’m sure my mathematical friends will point out that whilst this will be true of the modal average, the mean average will probably compute out to a non integer figure between 3 and 4, so that every pitch will indeed be either over or under that figure. But I cannot believe that human beings, which many umpires are, will read it in that way. Week after week they will see pitches that are, in every human sense of the word, average. Perhaps any pitch that is average must be graded as above average, rather than below, on the principle that the groundsman gets the benefit of the doubt.

This could easily be passed over if this were an example confined to cricket. But I have worked in a school where one was expected to assess students on the three point scale: excellent, good, unsatisfactory. The theory of management was that anyone who wasn’t good was letting the side down; my personal view was that that if someone wasn’t unsatisfactory that was good enough for me. But why the horror of the word average?

I was once asked by an educational psychologist to assess various pupil behaviours as to whether they were displayed less than average, average, or more than average by an individual. This is not too difficult in the case of behaviours such as “chatters in class” or “fiddles with pen”. But one of the behaviours was “attempts to strangle other pupils”. So what is the average for that behaviour?

Never having had a student attempt manual strangulation I assume the modal average is nought. So less than average must be a minus number. What does this represent? Making positive efforts to revive a pupil strangled by someone else?

The mean, assuming that this behaviour has occurred at some time in some place, is of course slightly above nought. So every non-strangler could be rated as less than average. You cannot however attempt to strangle someone on 0.0004 of an occasion. Either you do or you do not. So any actual strangler is going to rate as more than average. Therefore noone would rate as average.

Which brings us to First Class umpires….

Telephones

As a child I thought Button B in a public telephone box was a neat idea. After all, it held out a possibility of unexpected riches, which is why I always pressed it when I passed the box, in exactly the same way as I tried the handle of the chewing gum machine – just in case some individual had a brain so addled by constant chewing that he had put in the money, but forgotten to perform the simple mechanics required to issue the gum.

In fact, to the best of my recollection neither of these procedures ever yielded me anything. Certainly, when real money was required, one was much better off trawling the local ditches for discarded lemonade bottles which, however stagnant the water from which they had been rescued, would be redeemed for hard cash at the local shop, as surely as if they bore an endorsement from the Chief Cashier of the Bank of England saying “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of tuppence.” The bounty on Colorado beetles was beyond the dreams of avarice, but I never realistically expected to find them.

Nevertheless, in spite of failure regularly experienced, I continued to try Button B, since though I personally may never have gained money from it, I always knew someone who said they had; and very recently; and in precisely that telephone box.

For younger readers who will have no notion of what the preceding means, I should say that Button B was the equivalent of the Returned Coins button on a modern vending machine. Whilst it is now as redundant as the word ‘tuppence’ which my word processor continues to underline in the hope that I will change it to ‘sapience’, it once performed a vital function. Should you chance to ring a number that was engaged, pressing Button B returned to you the fourpence (the word processor doesn’t even acknowledge that: I am tempted to annoy it even more by using ‘fuppence’!) that you had inserted to pay for your call.

And that is why as an adult I still believe that Button B was a neat idea. Imagine it. You ring a company all of whose employees (few firms would have known what to do with an operative) were busy with other calls. And you wasted no time – you knew immediately that there was no chance you would get through. No one played Vivaldi on a Stylophone. No one told you that you were in a queue without the information you get from seeing a real queue: that there are eight people in front of you, and the one three places ahead looks like the type that will take half an hour. No one lied that your call was important to them. You did not feel the need to scream at a disembodied voice that if they valued calls so much, why didn’t they hire some extra operatives?

Above all you hadn’t wasted goodness knows how much money hanging on through all this prevarication. And what is more you could prove to yourself that you hadn’t, because just a little push of Button B and there in your hand would be the actual four coins, totally unspent.

And should you forget to do so, at least the next passing schoolchild would be happy.

Timekeeping

I have met many people of my generation who claim that as children they disliked Punch and Judy shows. Some felt that the ‘swozzled’ voice and basic script were irritating or patronizing; others disliked the violence towards women, or towards children, or in one case towards crocodiles. I have no doubt that out there somewhere was an incipient vegetarian who abhorred the sausage fixation.

I however was much less politically precocious. I just could not stand the fact that they never started on time.

The procedure was this. On a board outside the seaside booth would be chalked “Next performance 2.30.” I would arrive at 2.15 and sit on the beach with a sprinkling of other early birds. We would sit patiently, even though we realized we were missing time which could be spent paddling or in crenellating sandcastles. I did not have a watch at that age, but even if the clock on some public building was not visible the bush telegraph would announce that it was 2.30. And immediately…nothing would happen.

I can now try to reconstruct the thought processes of the Professor, trying to maximize his audience – the more bodies, the more pennies. He presumably decided that the longer he could keep a crowd there, the more likely it was that others would join it; whereas once the show had started people would walk past muttering that there was no point going now since they had missed the start. Or it may have been that he was working alone and needed to collect the pennies before entering the booth, and anyone who joined from then on would be able to freeboot.

But all I knew at five years old was that a promise had been broken. Had my time been now and my nationality American I should have been straight off, struggling under the weight of the chalkboard, to consult my lawyer as to whether a contract might also have been broken.

I concede that in an age when only the rich or those who had retired after 50 years service would possess a watch, it was reasonable for a show to begin “when the sun is past overhead” or “in the cool of the early evening”; but in the 1950s, as now, what is the point of having a watch accurate to the nearest second if you are incapable of being punctual to the nearest fifteen minutes?

Worse still are those who attempt to manipulate time to suit their own deficiency. The lady who lived near me, in whose garden I used to play with her children, and whose clock I used to rely on to be home in time for tea, throughout her life kept it twenty minutes fast. I thought she was strangely eccentric. I have met too many since who do the same thing to continue with that delusion.

The old are much better at punctuality than the young. The truth of this was recognized by a friend of mine who, whenever we were waiting for the younger members of a committee to arrive even though starting time had long passed, would lugubriously announce: “Why did the October Revolution take place in November? Because they were waiting for the under 40s to turn up.” He had actually begun by saying “under 50s” but had made the concession to me – not because I was under 50, but because I pointed out that Lenin was 47 at the time of the revolution, and unlikely to have been tardy.

In my opinion the reason for this can be summed up in one word; not ‘Punctuality’; not ‘Conscientiousness’; but ‘Buses’. My generation was reliant on public transport, which, without the aid of Mussolini, ran pretty much to timetable. To be one minute late and miss a bus was a major inconvenience. Indeed in rural areas it would almost inevitably mean not going anywhere at all. Buses were infrequent in country villages. In fact, the inhabitants of one village near to my own, where there was precious little entertainment at any time, would come to the gate, watch the bus go by, and go back in again, nothing else exciting being likely to happen for the next three hours.

Indeed my first experience of the cinema was being taken there because there was no bus back to the village for two hours, and we therefore had time to kill on a wet night in Bury St Edmunds after the shops had shut. Unfortunately to make sure we caught the next, quite probably last, bus home we needed to leave before the end of the film.

But I learnt punctuality.

Fish Eaters

“Would you like a cigarette?”

“No thanks. I don’t smoke.”

“Oh, fine. How about a cigar then?”

“No. I’m a non-smoker.”

“Yes. I understand. My grandfather was a non-smoker all his life. Only ever smoked a pipe. What about a beer?”

“Sorry. I’m teetotal.”

“No problem. There’s plenty of wine.”

Given that I have managed to live to fifty nine without having heard the above conversation, why do I so often have to have a similar dialogue based on the inability of my interlocutor to comprehend that vegetarians do not eat fish?

I have had the conversation with mortified hostesses, who, in spite of having been given warning that I was vegetarian, have trusted in Fate and salmon, only to be finally forced to conclude, “Don’t worry. It’s not a problem. Give me a couple of minutes and I’ll make you a lovely green salad.”

I have had the conversation with outraged restaurateurs who have insisted that only the previous weekend Linda McCartney, Gandhi and George Bernard Shaw had all been sitting at that very table tucking into Scampi à la Maison.

There is of course a word for those who eat fish but not the flesh of cow, pig, horse or gibbon. It is not Vegetarian. It is not Pesco-vegetarian. It is not Semi-vegetarian. It is Non-vegetarian. Any other terminology queers the pitch for us genuine vegetarians, who find the progress we were making in pushing restaurants to have at least the delights of the ubiquitous Vegetable Lasagna or the trendier Goat’s Cheese Something on offer, has gone into reverse, as we are told, “But all our other vegetarians eat fish!”

The truth is that we vegetarians have become victims of our own success. Everyone wants a slice of the Veggie action - but without the inconvenience of actually giving up food they like.

Apparently the King who had set before him the pie containing two dozen blackbirds now claims to be a Pollo-vegetarian; my only comfort is that the blackbird who took revenge by pecking off the nose of one of his servants is describing itself as a Maido-vegetarian.

Between the wars the film critic Ivor Montagu, was invited to dinner by the Shaws. Assuming that the food would be vegetarian, he did not bother to tell them that he too was a vegetarian. He arrived to find that they had bought and cooked for him a large steak. Too embarrassed to explain, he ate it. All might still have been well had Shaw not started to rehearse on him the arguments for vegetarianism. Montagu, in order not to look stupid, began to make up arguments against. It had, of course, no effect on Shaw; but he convinced himself and went back to eating meat. Can this possibly have made him the first Carno-vegetarian?

Toilet Rolls

I have always felt that it should be possible to devise a question which would enable the country to be divided roughly in half, but with absolute precision as to the camp to which you belong.

For example “Are you a cat person or a dog person” works quite well, but there remain hardcore elements who love or hate each equally.

Personally I believe “In Paul Ableman’s Green Julia do you identify with Bob or Jake?” is a brilliant distinguisher, but regrettably it only distinguishes within the tiny subset of people who have read the work concerned.

But at last I thought I had the solution. “Do you prefer the toilet roll to be inserted onto the roller so that the loose end hangs forward over the top of the roll, or straight down behind?” Actually I doubt if the word ‘prefer’ does justice to feelings on this subject. More accurate might be: “Do you insist that whatever else happens in the universe, at least the toilet roll should be ….?”

Given that I regard myself as a reasonably tolerant person, it alarms me how angry it makes me to be a captive in a room where it has not been hung correctly. (Forward over, of course! It irks me that you should even ask.)

It appears however that there must be a few waverers or peacemakers in the world who actually avoid the problem by not using a roller. When I was a child the mother of two of my friends hosted every week the Methodist Ladies’ Knitting Circle. Week in, week out, come sun, come rain, come Suez, come Cuba, they sat and knitted, in a Wesleyan manner and a variety of colours, identical objects – vaguely cylindrical, with a small hole at the top and a large one at the bottom. For months I had no concept of what they might be, until one day I saw one with the top half of a plastic doll stuffed into the smaller hole, making the cylinder into a long dress. I turned it upside down and looked up the dress. Somewhere in the world is probably a ten year old boy who wouldn’t automatically do that, but I have yet to meet him. There were no legs. This did not so much solve the mystery as intensify it. The resolution came only on the day of the Methodist Ladies’ Knitting Circle Bring and Buy Sale. There on a trestle table, as though a bizarre Wargaming club had been influenced by Claes Oldenberg’s soft sculptures, was ranged a regiment of dressed doll torsos. One (for illustrative purposes only; tissue not included) sat demurely on top of a roll of toilet paper. There, in a single room, were enough toilet roll cozies to supply every toilet in the village with a fresh change for every day of the week.

I am of course aware that there is another major dichotomy in society regarding the smallest room, and that is what to call it. I have almost certainly already alienated much of my audience by referring to toilet rolls rather than loo rolls.

I was as a student appointed to our school council, a toothless body whose main privilege was to elect the sub-prefects. Or so we were told. Given the number of total bastards who seemed to get the job either a lot of councilors were open to corruption, or the staff just tore up the results and picked whom they wanted. Goodness knows, even I got elected at one point, and I never met anyone who had voted for me. Anyway, I soon gave it up on a point of very deep principle: the principle being that I’d never wanted the job in the first place.

However as well as our psephological activities, we occasionally had our opinions ignored on questions such as school uniform and alternative sports activities; and the state of the school toilets. At my first meeting the members were well into this last topic when the Head, who up until this point had given a good impression, if impression it was, of being asleep, suddenly jumped up and shouted, “There are no toilets in this school!” Some started to worry about his sanity. Others of us started to wonder what exactly it was that we had been urinating on throughout our school careers. After a long embarrassing silence he decided to elucidate: “There are only lavatories.” And so came my first experience of some people’s obsession with the nomenclature. Actually I thought we had done really well to call them toilets, since none of us would ever anywhere else in school have called them anything but The Bogs. I am sure any reader from the younger generation will now be saying, “Ok, Smartypants. So when you wanted a wee you asked the teacher if you could go to The Bogs, did you?” Of course we didn’t. We never asked. In the most unlikely event of the request being granted (only the newest and softest teachers would have even considered the proposal) the humiliation would have been too great to bear; there was every chance of spending the whole of your remaining school career being yclept Weakbladder.

Only in Primary School did we go to the toilet in lesson time. There, of course, you had to put up your hand and ask. I was taken aside by a teacher who explained all this to me after my first few days at school during which time I had on several occasions got up and walked out with the immortal words, “I won’t be long.” The teacher was clearly a very busy woman and I didn’t want to disturb her.  Besides, it’s what I did at home. Actually I thought I had done well to choose that phrase rather than the other one which I used domestically, in those days of outdoor privies, “I’m just going up the garden.” But the teacher told me to ask, “Please may I go to the toilet?” and toilet it remained with me.

What else do I find in the toilet to make me whinge? When someone has got the two plys of the two ply tissue out of sync and so the perforations don’t work. This is the fault of the manufacturers for sticking down the end of the roll. What useful function can this possibly serve?