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It was thinking about the new hospitals that prompted me to write this. Design is an art and comes in several forms, the architects, product designers, the visual arts and even music. It can be influenced as much by fashion as by aesthetic. Fashion being a product of advertising, of celebrity influence, and often a demonstration of status, has no true validity in determining the quality of design, but its influence is of great proportions in the design of the products that we buy. Civil Engineers and Structural Engineers are obviously designers also, but their work tends to be more prosaic. They design things like bridges, railway stations, sewage works; structures that are designed to perform a function rather than be decorative. For the sake of the world at large, we try to make the designs pleasing to the eye, and in some cases such as sewage works we actually hide them with specially selected trees. Occasionally the work is done in conjunction with an architect, such as a row of flats and shops, then we also have to accommodate the design flourishes of the architect.

If you think about the design of everyday products, buildings of all types, the visual arts and even music, there have been unbelievable changers in taste and presentation over the last 70 years. The problem in all these cases is down to the desire for recognition, the ego and the aspirations of those performing the designs. Up until the end of the Victorian era design was very much a prerogative of the well heeled, and it was their pleasure to search the world and collect artefacts from the past, or instigate elaborate designs for their houses and their objects. Even then there was an element of competition. Once the middle and working classes had more spare cash, manufacturers realised they had a growth industry, and with that growth came competition and the building of reputations. It was at this point that the designers were beginning to get a name for themselves and in consequence were in competition. Artists themselves have been in competition since the dawn of time, and one thing about competition is nobody wants a copy, so you have to be innovative to build a reputation. This philosophy has rubbed off into industrial design and architecture. Any work of reference will show you how designs of household products, houses, buildings, vehicles and even factories have changed as taste, and the desire of the designers to be different has also changed to keep up. Taste is transitory, dependent upon experience, as well as personal preference. This has been underlined over the years, in particular by the changes in taste in the pictorial arts, some of which are examples of promotional tactics rather than true artistry.

Innovation demands experiment, new methods and in some cases loss. If designers are given their head, rather than required to provide a simple traditional design, the client will inevitably be footing the larger expense, part of which is to bolster the reputation of the designer. Civil servants, handling our money, should think very carefully about whether particular features in a design submitted are actually necessary, or just an expensive ornamentation, or unnecessary innovation.

I write the following as a result of the boy being stabbed outside a youth club. At about ten, I visited a youth club, not of the quality of the one referred to in the press, but a miserable little room, in the loft of an old stables, dark and poorly equipped. I never went back

I have not written this before, because for the last 76 years, I have never thought of that night without shame. It happened during a very unhappy few years in my life, when my mother and I had been separated due to our financial situation, and now we were together. She had higher moral values, was highly intelligent, and was a fighter. Prior to that she had worked through the day, and at night attended an evening class to obtain a City and Guilds qualification as a pastry cook. She was now able to support us both, but this involved leaving the house early to walk, and travel by tube to Mayfair, where she demonstrated cooking for the Women’s Electrical Association. She returned any time after six o’clock. We lived in a two room flat, consisting of a joint bedroom and a kitchen. I had to prepare myself for school, was probably provided with lunch by my grandmother who lived more than a mile from the school, and from the time the school broke up in the afternoon, I was expected to go to the flat and do my homework, until my mother returned. Needless to say this was not always the case, in the summer months a group of us would play cricket on Clapham Common, but in the winter we tended to roam the streets.

I drifted into a gang, not entirely welcomed, because I had not grown up in the district, I believe I was merely tolerated, and I don’t think I had any real friends among the people I knocked about with. It was pitch dark, probably about five o’clock in the evening, when the caper started. I personally was not privy to all the facts, until the activity was well underway. The father of one of the boys had been sacked by a local entrepreneur and our gang was apparently going to extract retribution. A game was organised on the forecourt of a grocer’s shop which had a large number of boxes set out in the street, among them was a box of eggs. It turned out the game was to have two teams playing a game of catch using a large leather glove in lieu of a ball. The game went on until the glove landed, ‘accidentally’, on the egg-box and when it was retrieved eggs were stolen at the same time. The leaders then proceeded in a state of glee to the house of the entrepreneur, and his Rolls-Royce sitting in the street. They then ceremoniously broke the eggs over the radiator and smeared them as far as possible.

The point I’m making is that I, would not have joined in had I been in possession of the full facts, but I was an outsider tagging on for company. The scale of vandalism was relatively harmless, the eggs would have washed off, and a couple of eggs stolen was not in the upper ranks of criminality. What it does demonstrate is how easily an innocent member of the gang, permanently on the periphery, can be inveigled, unwittingly, to be party to a serious act of vandalism, or worse, that they would have had nothing to do with, or contemplated, if they had been in possession of all the facts. Gangs I believe generate their own momentum through the psychopathic tendencies of one or two strong-minded leaders within the group. It is loneliness that draws the remainder to the group. They have three choices, to join that group, or another, or spend their free time in miserable loneliness. Gangs once formed, if they have some form of glamour, will not only grow but they will persist through time. The interests of a computer will inevitably be short lived.

I’m not writing anything that the authorities don’t know, it is the way our society operates now, where we are more insular, the extended family is almost a thing of the past, we have less time for the social graces, and less facilities like parks, Commons, and well-run youth clubs, where the innocents can enjoy and pass their time.

To day for the second time since the scheme opened, my plastic and paper waste-bin has received a note of complaint due to ‘contamination’, this time by a tub. I am not an inveterate complainer, but I do expect logical, reasonable and courteous service, as I believe the residents to be the council’s employers.

The burning question in this case is when does a box become a tub, and what in fact constitutes a tub. Ice cream, and similar products come in tubs. I’m not entirely sure whether it was an empty egg box made of compressed paper, or the washed, bottom section of a plastic box that food is sent by carry-out establishments. Neither of these items would I have termed a tub. I found it interesting also that my neighbour had a tub that I couldn’t find when I looked in his bin.

The absurdity of this whole process is that the majority of us try to play by the rules, and if by some accident place on the very top of the bin, an article which is deemed to ‘contaminate’, itself an absurd phrase, when, if the offending article had been about four layers down in the bin it would never have been seen and had to be dealt with, and would have been dealt with at the receiving end. Nobody can convince me that the whole of a highly sophisticated recycling concept is going to come to a halt because somebody has placed, by accident, the bottom half of a plastic box. I can also understand that some people take advantage rather than play by the rules, and the council has to resist this, but I would not have thought it should be by a boorish note that does not make logical sense.

I believe the problem is to do more with the way that the men are paid, which I assume from everything I’ve seen of the way they work, is not by the hour but piecework. The only other time that the bin of mine was rejected was because lying on top was a piece of very light plastic film, half the size of a pocket-handkerchief, which presumably had blown in when the bin was open. To me this is a pettifogging rule, that a small piece of plastic, which could have been lifted out, and put in a container on the lorry specifically for that reason, causes rejection. I hardly think it would have represented a serious problem at the plant. . On one other occasion my green bin was rejected because, over the fortnight that it had been standing full, it had compacted to an extent that prevented it from being emptied in the conventional manner. As you know I’m in the late 80s, with serious spinal and hip problems, and having to empty that myself and refill it , after a fortnight of stagnation, was not only painful, it was unpleasant. The system takes no account of the householder’s condition or ability to empty and refill, when there is virtually no need

Instead of a blunt refusal, the piece of paper attached to a bin should say, even in their parlance, that the bin has been contaminated, with the reason given, but the bin had been emptied out of courtesy, but if this reoccurred the situation would have to be reviewed. I can’t see that it is all that difficult for the drivers to have a blacklist of repeated offenders, while at the same time aiding the householder who on an odd occasion has either misunderstood the terminology, or made a reasonable mistake. The fact that the operators do not hoke down through the bin looking for contamination, to me shows an element of unnecessary bureaucratic bias.

Several things have come to light in the last few days that I have found beat logic, that those involved seem to have got away with it. The biggest one of course is the question that we are all asking, where has the money gone that used to be swilling about in the financial world, and the banks lent to one another? My assumption is that places like Switzerland and the Seychelles are beginning to sink under the weight of it.

The big payout to the McCanns and their friends, by the press because they were libelled, seems to lend weight to an article in last Friday’s Daily Telegraph concerning statements made about the Blairs’ various meanderings away from the truth, and the legality concerning their financial dealings. I personally don’t care that they have been garnering a fortune with lecture tours in the US, because the audience could well afford to be duped. What I have found over the years to be so surprising is that when we have all been told repeatedly that Blair made decisions that have cost hundreds if not thousands of innocent lives in Iraq, while at the same time being responsible for the deaths of so many of our servicemen and women, I would have expected him to have been impeached, years ago.

On Saturday night there was a feature on British television concerning the early years of Queen Victoria, when she was virtually in solitary confinement, as a result of her mother’s personal ambitions. The fact that Victoria’s mother got away with it for 18 years says a lot about the Victorian public’s relationship with the monarchy. She would not have got away with it, with the sort of press that we have today. The article made me think about affection in all its forms, and affectation and its effect on affectation. I have found that affectation is corrosive when it comes to affection. Affection has to be nurtured because it comes in so many different ways, and in so many degrees. There is our love for a child, the affection and indeed love, we feel for close friends and relatives, and the affection that we receive. In the case of men, especially between men, any affection is rarely signalled overtly. We tend to take affection for granted, generally without question, and it is only when that affection is withdrawn, either in fact or we have inferred it, that we really notice it is missing. Affection or the lack of it, is what moulds our characters from our early days, and as the programme on Victoria underlined, if there is hostility, or even merely disregard, it can have a serious effect on the responses of the individual in later life. I believe the speed of living today, the necessity in a lot of cases for two incomes, is the root cause of a of lot the problems that we have with our youth today. I believe that many want and really need the affection in their early years, this often demands time that is not available

Do I believe any more, the things that our politicians are telling us? Either yes or no! For starters, while they were assuring us of how well they were managing the economy, they, nor their highly paid advisers, saw what was happening in the world stock exchanges. Surely it is unfair for David Cameron to be criticising, when the whole purpose of the Opposition is to check the weaknesses in government, and the Tories missed the big one. The USA is allegedly the world leader, do I trust its leader or his inexperienced successor? The answer in my case is no to all, so I question the statement made by a Cabinet member on television, that, in spite of the credit crunch, we are going to increase our spending to save the world. I thought about it. We have been wrecking the world since the dawn of time. Just take the number of trees the Spaniards felled to build the Armada, the trees we felled for duckboards in World War I, and the incredible clouds of exhaust by the Industrial Revolution. The Yanks never do anything by halves, they got rid of the indigenous population, then got rid of the bison, and subsequently built dustbowls and wide plains which must have had some effect on the weather also.

I am unconvinced of what the scientists tell me about global warming. As they do the testing over the poles, and cold air falls and is replaced by warm air, carrying any other gases with it, I suggest the testing over the poles could give a higher concentration of carbon etc., not the mean. I am unconvinced that these recent Globwarm changes are solely due to carbon emission etc. I believe there is a wider explanation related to the world as a whole. We have been emitting carbon as long as I remember, with the fogs in London every November, and Manchester was famed for them. The changes have been too quick and too extensive, to be placed at the door of global warming, which by its very nature is a slow process

Let it be clear, I am not a scientist, nor a mathematician, just a bloke seeing if the politicians are getting it wrong yet again. I made a table setting out 20 countries who allegedly have a carbon emission greater than 1,000,000 tonnes. I took their emission as a percentage of the whole, and divided it by the country’s population as a percentage of the world population. This gave me a series of figures for the CO2 percentage per head of population, varying from about 5% in the USA to 0.3% for India. Unsurprisingly China was about 1%, but surprisingly Canada and Australia were in the 4% range. We supply 2.4%, or a 40th, per head of population.

The question that I’m asking myself is, if we are giving off 2.4% currently, and are ordered to halve this by some date in the future, I just have no idea of what this will cost in the course of a generation, but believe that our gang want to lead the world yet again at our expense, when they personally haven’t a clue of what they’re really talking about. I believe it is just political claptrap, a sop to the green lobby. I would want a lot more hard proof of exactly what is causing climate change, of how much other countries were going to subscribe, as a common problem, which should be tackled universally. The range in the figures is a clear indication that some countries are bound to increase their percentages as their innovation and wealth increases, others may not change but will not bother reducing them, and there will be few if any that do reduce them to the extent our government is proposing.

All those who think I’m wrong, raise their hands!

I read a piece in the UK News section of Google, which gave the league tables of the first hundred universities of the world, starting at the top with America. It was noticeable how few British universities appeared on the list. The comment accompanying this list was a verbal wringing of hands. To me, who has been wittering on for a long time about the poor standards required for entry to, and the quality of the degrees at the end of the day, it came as no surprise. You probably get sick of me harping back, but when I see the level of dropout that we are paying for with our taxes, and think back to what university life was like in the late 40s, some obvious lessons just jump at you. There was a fair cross-section of educated humanity which made up the average Year in any faculty, but in those days it was rare to find someone who didn’t appreciate that he or she had been selected for an experience that few enjoyed, with the result that the majority of us worked consistently and even in the Vacs, to make sure that we passed our exams at the end of each year. A university education is as much to do with the social and sports side of the year, with societies, educational trips, and above all the interchange of ideas in the union over a coffee. There were some who wasted the opportunity and had to resit, but most of us, especially the older ones like myself on an ex-service grant, worked hard, and if we had time played hard. Those like me with a young family were at a disadvantage where it came to the out of hours activities, which was something that I regretted losing, but I had my responsibilities.

The quality of the teaching in any university reflects the quality of the teachers. A man who has spent years arriving to a point where he has a PhD, is not going to be satisfied with just being a schoolmarm, his main drive is to do the sort of research that has been his main objective all along, to catch the eye of industry who will subsidise this research, and in the end to produce papers in technical journals that will enhance his reputation, and inevitably that of the University. The life of a university lecturer is what he cares to make it. There are those who are glorified teachers, but there are those who are specialists of a very high quality, and it is these that we need in our universities to raise the standards to those we had years ago. If you have that level of expertise and innovation on the teaching staff, you will inevitably improve the quality of the degrees, but this also can only be effected if the intellectual quality and enthusiasm of the students is commensurate. It is clear from what I have written that you either have an upward or downward spiral, nothing in this life stays still and remains the same. Even years ago when I was working, and I had graduates joining my staff straight from university, while there were some who were extremely bright, I felt in many cases that the standard had dropped since my day, and that was years ago. I believe the spiral has been winding down ever since.

The answer is to pump more money into the salaries of the teaching staff, in order to raise the standards of teaching, and research, so that industry subsidises the research in the universities, and consequently increases the income to the University, instead of dropping the standards in order to increase the income by increasing the student population. I am told that overseas students pay a lot more for their education here in university than ours. The only way you’re going to attract overseas income is to raise the standards across the board

Forgive me for plagiarism but I believe the phrase fits the bill. I’m referring to Peter Mandelson’s return to British politics from his role as Trade Commissioner to the EU. I find it surprising in view of the fact that he resigned twice from the Cabinet in his days with Tony Blair. What astonishes me is his right to receive roughly half a million pounds per year, for two years, while at the same time receiving approximately £180,000 for his services to our government. I assume he will also qualify for expenses during his service. In addition he will qualify for a 30,000 a year pension for services as a commissioner. My astonishment is on a number of levels, firstly he only worked there for four years, which shows you the incredible cost Brussels entails, when you consider the number of people there and the grades at which they work, not to mention their expenses for travel, accommodation, entertaining, lunches and pensions’. Another level of astonishment is that our government, in spite of his history, is having to bring him back. This would seem to indicate a paucity of people who would agree to, and are able enough, to fulfil the post that Mandelson is taking up, which itself I find extraordinary, because I believe that apart from someone like Einstein, there are few of us who are unique. I wonder what the public as a whole thinks of this in the light of the credit crunch, in the light of the Blair aftermath, and the possibility of Peter copying the Blairs’ incredibley lucrative lecture tours.

Another surprise this week was the theft of David Beckham’s memorabilia. I have considerable sympathy for him and his wife, and this is yet another twist in the change in morality that we think we can rely upon. I inevitably wonder if eBay, as an intermediary, should not ensure that the products they are advertising have not been stolen. The purchasers have no way of vetting the source of the products yet they are receiving stolen goods, which is against the law. Surely, if a series of articles whose value was increased by being once the property of the Beckham’s, suddenly appears on the market, it must raise questions?

Some councils are proposing to turn off the street lights at some time in the night to save costs and save the world. The criminal fraternity must be rubbing their hands, and the elderly will be vulnerable. Joy-riders will be harder to catch and girls will be afraid to stay out late. The irony is that everybody will be buying their own street lights in the form of spotlights, so once again the ratepayers will be paying twice, and the world won’t be saved at all. They do of course mean well – these councillors.

In one part of the United Kingdom there is a senior official who is being taken to task by some of the public and the media, for not having sufficient isolation wards attached to a hospital with a sudden and recent large outbreak of one of these killing viruses. I personally don’t blame him, it would be far too expensive to have vacant wards in every hospital just in case there is an outbreak. I would have thought that it would not be difficult to modify mobile homes, by using additional strutting in lieu of the internal walls, to provide torsional strength, and design in such a way that four of them could be bolted together, with additions, in short order, to supply an isolation ward, suitable for the 20 beds, plus a sluice plus also an area for serving meals. These could be set in place very quickly and moved from hospital to hospital as required. These days with all the advances that have been made in the mobile holiday home industry, toilets, washing facilities and all else, could be accommodated, with just a little thought and co-operation from the mobile home industry. If the police can set up incident rooms on a similar basis, why not wards within the DHSS