The wonder of Sherlock Holmes

When one sees real detectives on television, they are rarely smiling. Usually they stand there in a reasonably smart suit and a tie the wife picked out for them because they were going on telly and read out a statement that means some family’s life has, or is about to be, shattered.

This is at odds with the other sorts of detectives we see on television. These ones have very good suits, drive fast cars and have complicated home lives, love lives and so on. They are often very good at their jobs (they must be to wrap up every case in an hour or so) but this professionalism comes at a cost, possibly they are divorced, possibly they drink too much.

Back in the seventies, complex character flaws were not as important as how quickly you could drive through a stack of cardboard boxes. Anyway, back then everyone was drinking, smoking and fooling around – if you had a character flaw back then it was that you were bald or fat. Never both.

Of course fictional detectives exist in other media, in films and books. They all share a common trait – they are all good at their job and solve crimes – this is because if you get to the end of the book and the detective is still doing door-to-doors and having conversations like ‘I haven’t got a fucking clue about this one’, then you might reasonably expect the reader to feel a little dischuffed.

The one place where books have the edge over film and teevee is fruity language. I toyed for a long time with the plot of a novel involving a detective with tourette’s, who was booted off the force after a particularly disastrous episode where he had to break some bad news to a grieving young widow and now lives on a barge (check) has a flirty relationship with his ex (check) and never has anything in his fridge when his spunky young daughter comes to stay (check). However, I abandoned it after a scene where he asked a bartender for some information ran to seventeen pages and involved 156 bloodys, 284 shits, 752 fucks and a monumental 7,000 cocksuckers. Predictably, it also ended in a bar brawl. Come to think of it, most scenes ended in a fight.

The greater the flaw, the greater the genius. This is why a cocaine using recreational sodomite who is lazy to the point of indolence is widely accepted as the greatest fictional detective of all time. Sherlock Homes is fantastic in print (where he doesn’t swear but by Christ, smokes and tokes like there’s no tomorrow), great on film (Rathbone and Bruce. Greatest Homes and Watson. Ever.) good on television (Brett is sublime) and marvellous on radio. Indeed, such are the strength of the stories that if they invented a new media experience which involved enjoying a story by shoving a chemically sodden sponge up your arse that released the story directly into your bloodstream, it’d probably be great on that too.

Homes is the most extreme example of the flawed detective. Detective who doesn’t have anything in his fridge? Fuck that, Homes doesn’t have a fridge, he has a landlady who makes him his meals…which he then doesn’t eat. He’s the perfect imperfect detective for the media age. Yet his imperfections mean that he can only be trusted to investigate the most unusual of cases. Had a run in with the red-headed league? Homes is your man. Relative savaged by an enormous spectral hound? Off to Baker Street. Suspect that people are conspiring to bump you off based on arrival of orange pips in the post? Send for the man in the deerstalker.

Which is why flawed detectives with genius in inverse proportion to their flaws are great in print but less so in the real world, if Homes were on Crimewatch being quizzed how he intended to tackle the Bromsgrove bullion job, then I’m not sure how well the response ‘I intend to take a seven percent solution of cocaine, smoke the very strongest Turkish tobacco, starve myself and scratch out a tune on my violin’ would go down with Scotland Yard.

This Government hates booze

The British summer has continued to thrill and frustrate at every turn. Thrill because anyone loving statistics will practically get a boner every time the weather forecast comes on and the forecaster explains that this is the dullest summer since 1882, or that we haven’t had a rain of frogs like this in Newton Abbot since records began. Frustrate because it would be pleasant to see the sun on a weekend occasionally.

Lack of rain has also had a profound effect upon my vine. Installed last year, I had great expectations of Jeremy, and he hasn’t disappointed. Earlier this ‘summer’ there were little bud things that I was assured would turn into grapes. This, I thought, was great! I would take the grapes, make my own wine and finally become self-sufficient in booze!

Thanks in part to the weather, the Gallo family don’t have to shut up shop just yet. I believe that vines, however hardy, really want to grow on the sun kissed slope of some Mediterranean country somewhere, with easy access to hours of sunshine and cheap labour during harvesting time as gang-masters beat the Eastern European pickers and gap-year students looking for an authentic travelling experience senseless if they don’t pick round the clock.

My vine does have grapes, yes. They appear to be perfectly formed, yes, even though I had a nasty moment when I saw them turning a dark colour and thought I had vine-rot or something (I’d forgotten I’d bought a red grape variety vine) but as to the size? I actually think I’m the first man to successfully grow raisins.

I have, as a result, scaled back my expectations accordingly. Gone are the plans for a 400 gallon stainless steel tank to hold the end product, back in come the glass demijohns as the fermenting vessel of choice. I’m also trying to scrounge those little wine bottles that they give you on airplanes. On the plus side, my label-printing costs will be much less than expected.

All this makes me feel like an outlaw. I’m not sure what this Government hopes to achieve by clamping down on the more sensible aspects of enjoying alcohol. For an administration that appears to chase popularity the same way a fat kid chases an ice-cream van, it’s odd to make having a quiet pint in your local boozah more expensive and less convenient while at the same time letting giant supermarket chains sell blue alcohol to youths who drink it on street corners. Maybe the Government suspects that sedition, as well as hops, ferments in the taverns of England.

Drinkers today are getting that same feeling that smokers got twenty years ago, with ‘no drinking’ notices springing up about the place. In a couple of decades, the only place you’ll be able to drink is in your own home and the only stuff you’ll be able to afford to drink is stuff you’ve brewed yourself.

English men will love this. It will turn home brewing from a smelly pastime into a necessity and will mean that they never have to take their wives anywhere ever again. It will also mean that every home with space will have two sheds, one for keeping garden tools, compost and porn in, the other to be converted into a small brewery tap.

Along with home brewing, the home pub snacks industry will develop. God alone knows how they make pork scratching, but I suspect all you need is a pig and a giant pencil sharpener, how hard can it be?

Men love making stuff. Recently, there’s been no point in making stuff because men used to make things like shelves and, er, other stuff. These days the demands of domesticity are a little more elaborate and it’s harder to knock up a DVD player in your shed than it looks, especially when you can buy one from China for twenty quid. If the Government thinks it will drive men to virtue by depriving them of their pubs and brewery beer, they are sadly mistaken. Rather, men will gather in their sheds, sup their home-brew and talk dissent. Until summoned to the house by their wife for their dinner.

Fat girls

Obesity. There’s a fat word. That big round ‘Ooh’ at the beginning, and then the ‘bee’ which actually looks like the sort of people the word is describing in profile. The only way the word could better describe the condition was if it was longer and had an ‘oom-pah’ sound in the middle of it. In reality, this is not needed, as most people using the term ‘Obese’ follow through with the silent action of puffing their cheeks out like a startled fish and holding their hands two feet from their hips.

The newspapers recently made much of a decision by some school somewhere (I suspect the journalist was little better informed than I) to ensure that the word ‘Obese’ did not appear on any kids’ school report. This is, to a certain extent, a sensible move. After all, any parent irresponsible enough to let their kid get so fat that his size is appearing on a school report is unlikely to know what a word means; so better leave it at ‘tubby’ and move on. The question might well be; ‘what is a reference to the size of little Johnny’s arse doing on a school report in the first place?’.

Only two subjects have any real reason for addressing the subject, the first is physical fitness, where, let’s face it, anyone unable to commit themselves to playing football in blizzards, go into crunching rugby tackles with kids twice their size and three times their age, get to the top of the rope in the gym in under five seconds and achieve marksman standards of flicking arse with a wet towel is considered a ulist.

The second subject is home economics, where the report might explain that eating everyone else’s homework is unacceptable.

Why is size an issue? Unless the kid is actually so fat that his classmates can’t see round him to see the blackboard, or his mass has become a nuisance by attracting small objects into his orbit, then I don’t think a school report is the right place to inform parents that their kid is a fattie. This will already have been done in the caring environment of the school playground, where a (wide) circle of taunting kids will be chanting ‘porker’ around some quivering wretch. What the school, the parents and the fattie himself are unaware of is that these taunting kids are actually sponsored by the local corner shop in the sure knowledge that the kid will comfort eat his way through a dozen curlywurleys to get over this, thus assuring a healthy profit for the week.

A bigger problem than fat kids are fat adults. That’s because, with fat adults, there’s no chanting circle of evil sods to tell you you’re fat – unless you’re a fat bloke. That leaves the problem of fat girls, where, without honest friends, the only signs of your size being a problem are the lack of a boyfriend and the fact you own all of ‘Sex and the City’ on VHS and DVD. And a three figure weekly grocery bill.

That’s because, unlike fat kids and their school reports, taunting and ritual humiliation by sadistic gym teachers, nobody is telling fat people that they are fat anymore. Fat people are being told that being fat is normal. This has led to fat girls dressing like thin girls…with disastrous results. It used to be that to be an evil genius, you had to live in an undersea volcano base and plot to destroy New York with a giant robot or something. Now to be an evil genius all you need to do is design hipster jeans for fat girls. These, worn in combination with a tee shirt, are truly a sight to behold.

You want to know when you’re fat? It’s when people start using your arse as a landmark; ‘yes, carry on, take a left at the Red Lion, then a right at that girl’s arse, then you can’t miss it’. Oddly, this means that fat people are more useful than thin people, who are mainly used as warnings of what happens when you go vegetarian.

Worried you’re fat? Try Google Earth. On it? Start slimming. Fatty.

Ping Pong

The only two sports that are called what they sound like are ping pong and canoeing. Ping pong isn’t even called ping pong, it’s called table tennis – what blatant crap, when was the last time you saw a table offer a choice of surfaces, grass, clay or that blue stuff that‘s probably made of rubber or something? It’s ping pong because that’s, sort of, the sound it makes.

Canoeing is so called because when you are rolled upside-down by a wave and are being swept towards some deadly rocks, the sound you hear when seventeen gallons of water are forced into your ears is: ‘canooooooooooo’

Problems present themselves. Many winter sports simply make that ‘shussshh’ sound.

But not when you listen closely. Skiing makes a ‘shush, shush, shush, shush, shush’ sound, speed skating makes a ‘shushshushshushshushshush’ sound. The four man bob sounds like this: ‘Aggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh’. The luge is quite different, not only is the pitch of the scream several decibels higher, it’s follow up with: ‘Fuuuuuuuuuucccccccckkkkkkkkk!’.

The great thing about renaming sports is that it pricks pretence. For instance, boxing. Boxing would be renamed ‘Oof!’. Boxing can be defined as two blokes knocking the hell out of one another, but the boxing federation spits people up by weight, so suddenly there’s bantam weight, seagull weight, vulture weight, heavy weight, yo momma weight and Of Course You Don’t Look Fat In That Outfit weight (women’s boxing). Still want weight classes? Okay, It’s called Oof! And you can differentiate by using different fonts and point sizes.

Formula 1 racing? Easy. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

To be good at sports you can’t rely on natural ability, or even magic boots. You can’t even rely on drugs anymore, not just because of the testing but because you just know that the bastard in lane two has managed to get some of the good stuff.

The situation is fast developing where just about everything we eat has some kind of banned substance in it, at least that’s how athletes facing a ban plead. Apparently their kebab, unknown to them, had ginsing root, steroids and some sort of horse stimulant in it. Unless they are able to pull a horse-shoe out of the chilli sauce bucket at the kebab van to substantiate this, it’s unlikely to get them off.

The argument that an athlete can accidentally take some sort of banned performance enhancing substance is, of course, complete tripe (100% steroid free tripe). If everyone is unknowingly chowing down on food adulterated with performance enhancing drugs, why is the news full of stories about everyone getting fatter? It should be about burger inhaling kids breaking the world record for the egg and spoon race on school sports day.* (Headline: ‘fast food!’).

Just about the only stimulant left to athletes is an iPod with some inspirational music on it (‘Gold’ by Spandau or the ‘Rocky’ theme), or a coach willing to stick a dab of mustard on the end of his finger and stick it up your arse at the start of the race. Even then the Japanese would have the edge: wasabi.

*A nostalgic aside, I recall that at my primary school the starter was always the caretaker, because he had a pistol. As a child I thought nothing of it but now realise that it was obviously some revolver he’d probably prised out of the hands of a Jap in Burmah after a machete fight, and that sports day organisation meetings probably went thus:

Deputy Headmistress: And for the position of Starter this year…
Caretaker: I have a gun.
Deputy Headmistress: Yesss, I’m not sure that’s appropriate.
Caretaker: I have a gun.
Deputy Headmistress: Maybe the children would prefer something less…
Caretaker: I have a gun.
Deputy Headmistress: Just because you have a starting pistol does not mean…
Headmaster: (Smiling benevolently, filling pipe) That’s not what he means Marjory.
Caretaker: I have a gun.
Deputy Headmistress: Oh.
Headmaster: Our Caretaker will be Starter. As usual. Next?

I thought all school sports days had a caretaker with a WWII sidearm starting races. To this day I can’t really run unless I have the smell of gunpowder and the screams of an accidentally shot badger to encourage me,

Superhuman

In the build up to these 2008 Olympics, the tele viewer was left in no doubt whatsoever that China was a very naughty country. Worse than battering monks (God alone knows how they managed that when everyone knows you never fuck with a bald guy (have these people not SEEN Westworld?)), worse even than rolling tanks over shoppers, China has stopped journalists accessing the entire internet!

That’s right, journalists can’t download porn where a girl sits on a cake (have you seen that?) so the most sophisticated criticism of China was of the county being the equivalent of a moustache-twirling villain tying a girl to some railway tracks. That’s not the outrage, the outrage is that the oncoming steam train, yea, burns fossil fuel yea? Yea? Will nobody think of the penguins?

The opening ceremony was, to be fair, a terrifying endorsement of all we had feared. Note to all superpowers: if you want to make yourself look non-threatening and cuddly, don’t have thousands of your citizens doing the same thing simultaneously, flawlessly. The last time westerners saw footage like those drummers all beating together in time was of soldiers goose-stepping in B&W newsreels. However, if the message is: ‘even our percussionists are terrifying’, then job done.

The build-up and the opening ceremony were all about making regimes look good. This did not work. Politicians never look good, not standing next to normal people and never, ever, standing next to fit people. Politicians have suits that don’t quite fit them and have shiny arses to their trousers and shiny elbows to their jackets – that’s because they spend all day sat at their desk with their head in their hands thinking ‘what the is going on with the economy?’ or ‘why the fuck did I pay that hooker with my visa?’.

Then the games started.

The Olympics is sport broadcasting for people who hate sport – no, correction, the Olympics is when sports other than football make it onto television and the world is reminded that sport can be thrilling and athletes can defy belief.

Russia’s territorial ambitions are as nothing compared to BBC sport, which has annexed just about every digital channel it owns to provide saturation coverage the way that Bomber Harris arranged for saturation coverage of many German cities at the end of the War. You’re never more than a click away from watching somebody do something incredibly dangerous at high speed. Have you seen the canoeing? The only way they could make that sport more exciting is to let lose sharks and crocodiles into the stream and have the canoeists beat them to death with their paddles.

The athletes are amazing. All those mornings of getting up in the dark to go training. All those evenings of going to bed early when all you want to do is get off your tits and party. It all pays off, because suddenly you’re having the time of your life. Win a medal? Great! Get knocked out in the first round? Great – you can now spend two weeks getting pissed, eating chips and cheering on your team-mates!

What’s really cheering is how all the team GB athletes are such ambassadors for their sport and their country. And the teens – bloody hell. First of all you have to check your perving credentials at the door when you remember that the girls doing synchronised diving are in their teens – and also because their Dad has probably spent the last few years of his life really getting into shape to beat the hell out of perverts.

Most of the teens you see on telly are hoodie rat-children, carrying knives, talking jive and looking like there are well on their way to evolving into morlocks. These people are anti-chavs. Bright and enthusiastic. No wonder we never see them though – they do their training before it gets light and they are in bed by eight.

Best of all are the BBC commentators. Just as you sit at home, thinking ‘how can she do a somersault and land on that beam?’, the commentator screams ‘that’s AMAZING, how does she do that? Magic leotard?’ Possibly, or steroids if it’s a foreigner.

Ill

Men get different strains of illness than the rest of humanity and so have a different relationship with sickness. I blame moisturiser marketed at men. Before men were told they had to be sensitive, we had three varieties of illness; viral, industrial accident, death – and sometimes a chap would pass off death as ‘just a bit of a cold’.

The truth is that men do not think ‘how sick am I?’ but rather, ‘what will this stop me from doing?’ If a man has a cold and is faced with any situation that might require him to spend time loitering outside a changing room waiting for his wife, feeling uncomfortable and trying not to look like a pervert, worrying about giving the right opinion on the outfit and starting to sweat, sweat like a pervert - he pleads man-flu, makes himself a lemony drink and takes to the sofa.

If he has a temperature of 106, is sweating so much somebody wants to go over him in a barrel and is getting through more tissues than a teen who has disabled the parental controls on the family PC, this will not stop him going out for a quick drink.

That’s why men try to play down DIY accidents. A severed thumb might mean that you are never asked to put up shelves again, but it also means that you won’t be able to play with that brand new circular saw you’ve only used once.

A hundred years ago, there was a simple scale of health. If you were poor you didn’t get enough to eat. If you were rich then you were busy contracting some fashionable pox.

Standard issue healthy was upright, but afflicted by any number and combination of maladies that stunted your growth, gave you sores, caused you to walk funny, caused you to look at people funny or caused people to look funny at you, throw rocks at you and in extreme cases hound you out of the village with pitchforks.

If you were ‘poorly’ this normally meant that working eighteen hours a day in a factory or down a coal mine had left you with the sort of cough that would shake a lesser man apart at the seams and a talent for producing different coloured phlegm to order, including multi-coloured on bank holidays.

‘Badly’ was a description of the after-effects of a threshing accident. Today we would say ‘in a critical condition’ or ‘has anybody found his head yet?’ In the huge open plan mills of the industrial revolution, being caught in a loom and accidentally woven into the pattern of a carpet was so common that the drama was downplayed. Likewise, farming and industrial machinery consisted of overheated boilers and flywheels driving exposed belt-loops designed to catch bonnets, frilly shirts and other clothing of the age.


I would classify my own condition as ‘malingering’ today, but if you had asked me on Sunday I would probably have replied ‘oh Christ I think I’ve fucked my liver!’

Apparently you can’t drink two bottles of wine every night for two months without some sort of effect. I had thought the only effect was the increased frequency of visits to the bottle bank but the reality is that when you develop a sharp pain in the vicinity of your liver the actual effect of all that booze is extreme paranoia.

Deciding that hysteria was the only sensible option, I googled. First I found out where my liver was, then I had a panic attack and spent the weekend checking myself in the mirror against an old ‘buttercup dawn’ paint swatch card to see if I was turning yellow. Things were so bad I took myself off to the quacks.

Doctors take all the fun and drama out of being ill. She prodded my stomach and announced I had dyspepsia. As I didn’t actually have a can of Tenant’s Super in my hand at the time, she wasn’t buying my drinking to excess story leaving me not with the wasting disease of a romantic poet, but the sensitive stomach of somebody who eats too much spicy food!

Actually, that’s good news – time for a pint?

Tibbles ahoy!

Like farting scooterboys and discreet alcoholism, one of the features of suburban life is the feline felon poster. One sees these sad little adverts pinned on trees, announcing that a cat is missing, giving details and a picture. Once I saw a poster for a missing tortoise and was so struck by the sense of adventure the thing must have had that when I got home I was stirred to make a quick survey of the garden.

A couple of months ago the stakes were raised with a mailshot advertising a missing cat, with a picture. Cats never take good pictures. They always have that sly look that makes it hard to guess what they are thinking, although it’s a sure bet it’s either ‘I am about to lick my anus’, ‘I bet you can’t guess which of your shoes I’ve pooped in’, ‘I have nothing but contempt for you’, or simply ‘I am actually a demon from hell in cat form. And I’ve pooped in your shoe.’

Underneath was a mobile ‘phone number to ring if you spotted Mr Tibbles. I thought little of it; the cat had probably either been kidnapped by vivisectionists or was currently adorning the front bumper of a car like a very surprised Garfield doll. I put the poster down with the absent thought that I would send some crank text messages to the mobile while I was drunk and thought no more of it.

Normally, wild visitors to the Macnabbs estate are few. There are nocturnal foxes and during the day there are the plumpest pigeons to be found outside the pages of children’s books. So when I saw a cat skulking around, I remembered the poster. The problem with cats is that they all look alike and the damn thing was always gone before I could make a positive ID or pump up the pressure on the super-soaker.

The other day, there was a break in the clouds and the rain stopped for a short while. This called for a sacrifice of the choicest cuts of meat to the weather gods and so I fired up the barbeque.

One of the many great things about barbequing is that the barbeque grill is one of the few cooking surfaces that is not so much cleaned as occasionally scraped off. This is because the first thing you cook when you fire up a barbeque is the bacteria that have managed to get a foothold there since the last time you cooked. This means that my barbeque, when heated, smells of the ghosts of feasts past. Mainly chicken and fish.

Which is probably what attracted Mr Tibbles. Returning to the barbeque to see if it was ready to cook on yet (gauged by the amount of smoke coming off it – boy scouts camp fire level for fish, Vatican scale for chicken and ‘oh my Christ evacuate the town the chemical works is alight!’ for meat) I saw Mr Tibbles himself taking a close interest. Fearing that I was about to see the phrase ‘scalded cat’ brought to life in front of me, I shooed him off and made the call. ‘Have you got your cat back’?

It turns out that Mr Tibbles has been leading a double life. His owner explained that he was dividing his time between her and another family a dozen or so houses along and that my back garden was part of his cat parcourt route between houses. The owner spoke as one betrayed. I gathered from our short conversation that Mr Tibbles had had quite a lot of money spent on him at the vets and was on a strict macrobiotic diet at home. This is probably what drove him to a life of being tickled and living off tasty kitchen scraps down the road. It appeared that the two families now operated a sort of cat-share but I got the impression the owner was confident that her approach to cat rearing was going to win the permanent affection of Mr Tibbles.

Unlikely, from the way he was sniffing my chicken scented smoke, I’d say that cat has not ruled out the possibility of three dinners a day.

Man’s best friend in show

Hats, gloves and vest-tops off to whoever commissioned the apogee of reality cop show; ‘send in the dogs’. As with previous shows featuring the long arm of the law (spraying a crim with pepper spray while simultaneously tasering his ass one hopes), the title says it all. Tune into ‘Cops’ and you know it’s not going to be another freaking cookery programme. ‘Chopper coppers’ had cops and ‘copters. ‘Worlds wackiest police chases’ had hey-ho so-so footage of rednecks being chased, but was redeemed by the occasional fatal shooting at the end. ‘Send in the dogs’ is about coppers with mutts (not WPCs).

It’s sensational! If your idea of entertainment is an hour of footage of some scumbag criminal trying to back up against a brick wall so hard his buttocks are in danger of actually burrowing into it, while a barely-restrained German Shepard snarls and snaps at him inches from his throat, then this is the show for you. I watch it with the sound down and the Rolling Stones playing loud!

Now and again they show the cuddlier side of things, with spaniels brought into houses full of chavscum. The scene goes something like this:

Police: are there any drugs in the house?
Chav mum, surrounded by rainbow chav brood, smoking: Naw!
Dog: Woof! (Searches house in seven seconds, wags tail at kids cuddly toy.)
Police: There’s a half kilo of heroin in this teddy bear. Care to explain?

Suffice to say, there’s a reason that these criminal geniuses reside in dilapidated council flats and not in secret underwater volcano lairs complete with henchmen and monorails. Likewise when they do a search at a tube station and the dog goes wild when some random bloke walks through the turnstile.

Police: Any drugs on you?
Bloke: No.
Police turns out blokes pockets. Drugs are found.
Bloke: Oh, yea.

Which begs the question does smoking pot make you criminally stupid, or are pot smokers dumb to begin with and just toke a little to quell the feelings of inadequacy – for instance being outsmarted by a dog.

And while some dogs are smart, most are, lets face it, just about what you’d expect from an animal. The other morning I saw a sausage dog on the train platform, waddling along with its owner on a leash. It gave me one of those little surges of joy that you experience when you see such things, like seeing a flower pushing through concrete. It’s the opposite of that feeling of useless sorrow that one feels every time one turns on the news.

This sausage dog was wagging its tail so hard it was in danger of doing damage to its spine – what makes a dog so happy? Perhaps it’s just the positive attitude of an animal living its life at ankle level has to have to survive – maybe there’s things to be experienced at street level that we have no ken of, and certainly dogs are well equipped to experience it, being in my experience strangers to disgust. ‘Hey, what’s that, it’s, yes, I believe it’s a fresh turd – I wonder if it tastes any good, hummmn, munch munch. No, that’s quite disgusting – better sick it up. Retchhhhhhhhh! Ah, that’s better. You know, it tasted just like the last hundred turds I ate, disgusting, but you never know…hey, there’s another one, now this one might taste lovely. Let’s see.’ You have to admire that kind of enthusiasm, seen only in the animal kingdom and the singles scene.

Of course some people rely on animal intelligence. The other week I saw a guy with his guide dog – nothing unusual there, except he was telling it off by swearing at it. Telling your adorable looking labrador that he’s ‘being a fucking pain’ is a pretty bold move, especially in a train station, where his next conversation with his dog might go something like ‘okay boy, are you sure this is platform 4, because it feels awful funny underfoot, almost like a rail, and if I didn’t know better I’d say that sounds exactly like a goods train locking breaks at 90mph and heading right towards me. Boy? Boy?’

I’ll be the judge of that

Judges may only work from ten to two with a break for a lunchtime visit to an S&M parlour, but they get a lot done. Or rather, their predecessors did. The law is built on precedent. A judge’s job is to flick through one of the books you always see behind lawyers until he finds a case roughly similar to the one being tried, then copy the judgement. Hey presto! Not only is the establishment maintained but he can knock off early and be first in line at the canteen and/or flagetoruium.

I don’t think that a lot of judicial insight was required last week in New Zealand when a judge ruled that a young girl named ‘Talula does the Hula from Hawaii’ could change her name. He probably just looked up the case law on ‘stupid names’ and the book fell open at the most popular ruling, ‘change the name, stone the parents to death’.

No matter the rights and wrongs of the ruling and how it affected the rest of the Does-The-Hula-From-Hawaii family, there’s no question that Talula is a silly name and that it’s right to change it, and I hope that Kate Does The Hula From Hawaii is happy with her new name.

The judge considered that one of the reasons for allowing the change in name was that children taunt and can be cruel. This must be the same judge that made the landmark ‘bears and woods’ ruling in 1996. But I think he’s missing the point. Of course children taunt other children, but that’s not because the victim has a silly name, it’s because that children are little sods.

Children do not need a reason to poke fun at another child. They can simply make a reason up. These are people who live in the land of imagination, it doesn’t take much for them to take one look at a kid, decide his hair is cut by gypsies and start the chant of ‘pikey-top’. This they then escalate to the dreaded rhyme, such as ‘pikey top, lives in a bog in a bog, stinks of poo and eats hedgehog’.

Unhappily the world of education is basically just one long opportunity to set yourself for a career as taunt-fodder and if, by some miracle, you manage to go through school without embarrassing yourself don’t worry, your family are always there to take up the slack.

Almost everyone gets teased at school. You may be kid normal for almost the entirety of your education but everyone will remember that time in gym where, despite not feeling too good since lunch, you were keen to show off your handstanding skills, farted and accidentally defecated appalling steaming dihorrea all down your back.

After enduring a few months of humiliation, the circus moves on, possibly to the kid who ate a whole box of crayons for a bet in art class and, after throwing up onto a canvas, was known as ‘Rolf’ for the rest of term.

Rest assured though, your torture is somebody else’s nostalgia. Logging onto Friends Reunited for the first time, look at the message board for your primary school and see for yourself the posting: ‘whatever happened to poo nape?’ (Hint, don’t e mail that person asking if they are single).

So kids can be cruel, in the sense of a group of pre-adolescent girls chanting ‘Debby has nits’ at some poor unfortunate in the corner of the school playground? But let’s not forget that adults can be cruel too. Deciding to felt tip ‘special needs’ on a kids locker can be cruel, but it’s hardly making a pyramid of naked prisoners and then taking a photograph of yourself giving the thumbs up in front of them, is it? I somehow doubt that the crew-cutted torturers at Guantanemo look in at their orange boiler suited victims and have a conversation along the lines of ‘okay, so we’ve tried electrodes on the goolies, sensory depravation and wake-boarding or whatever it’s called and he still insists he’s actually just a school kid from Darlington who was on an exchange visit to Afghanastan. I’ve got a great idea, why don’t we chant ‘spaz’ at him until he starts crying’.