A matter of scale

Do you want your name to still be known centuries hence?  In a good way?  That’s not used to frighten children?  Do you want to be an answer to a question asked in school?  A question that is not ‘who do we avoid if he’s hanging round the gates?’  Do you want to leave a lasting legacy of your time on the planet? 

If you do, then the solution is not, as you might think, to squeeze into a two-sizes-too-small sequinned costume made by your nan, polish up your sad story and humiliate yourself on a prime-time talent show, but to get yourself into the shed and start inventing a unit of measurement.

And here’s the really great part, it doesn’t even matter if there is already a unit of measurement for the thing you are trying to measure.  Distance and temperature for instance both have two different units of measurement, so surely there’s no bar to preventing you assigning a new unit of measurement for something that already has one.

For example, the heat of chillies is measured using the Scoville scale, which goes from ‘no significant heat’ (supermarket chilli con carne) to 2,000,000 (police pepper spray, any spicy food consumed on a first date).  So an alternative and possibly a more useful scale would be to go Beaufort and assign behaviours to the heat, all the way from ‘adding pepper to the dish to make it more exciting’, through ‘blowing out of cheeks’, ‘sweating’, ‘comically reaching for your neighbour’s beer and downing it in one’ to ‘shitting fire’.

A word of warning however.  Do not be tempted to go down the ‘more is better’ route and assign a third unit of measurement to something that already has two.  Nobody in the pub is going to be impressed that you ran twenty-eight Jamteks in half an Astard the other day, or helped by an instruction that for best results, cook at fifteen Quolons for eighty Parps.  Doing this will either leave people baffled, or thinking you are a twat rather than a guy so clever he looks like he’s smoking a pipe…even when he’s not.

So, basic rule of thumb*, try and avoid anything that sounds like it’s lifted from a crap science fiction novel.

For best results then, you need to quantify something that has yet to be attributed a scale.  By measuring the reaction of a cross section of the public to stimulus – let’s say, a BBC news broadcast - then monitoring the flush reaction to the ears, blood pressure, heart rate, frequency of composing furious letters to the editor and so on, it must be possible to clinically measure levels of indignation.

I propose that indignation be measured in units of Clarkson.  The maximum amount of indignation any one person is capable of is One Clarkson and the great thing about the Clarkson Scale is that it can not only measure specific points of indignity (Daily Mail reader learning that his tax money is spent subsidising opera – one eighth of a Clarkson) but is an effective measure of background indignation (Daily Mail reader alone with their crazy thoughts, one seventieth of a Clarkson).

Naturally, The Clarkson is an imperial measurement.  The metric equivalent is The Farage.  

There is a demand for this.  Society is increasingly demanding that, increasingly, things are increasingly quantified in an increasingly simple way for presentation in the media and, increasingly, on social networking sites.  How increasingly I have no idea, but somebody is, I hope, toiling in their shed right now to quantify that.

*You can, if you so wish, seek to quantify the rule of thumb or anything else that has so far gone unquantified.  For instance, while I would not be at all surprised if the perfume industry has a measurement of pungency of aroma (parts per million or something), this may work well for traditional scents like citrus or whatever but has yet, as far as I am aware, to be applied to celebrity scents.  What exactly is the amount of Beyonce in each bottle of ‘bouncy’ or whatever her celeb fragrance is called?  Lasting fame awaits the person who can nail that one.

Postcard from Winchester - the town (and the gowns)

Zoom! What's that? Zoom! There goes another! Looking out of the window of the pub as I wonder if my headache might be eased with the ingestion of a cheeky breakfast pint, I am occasionally distracted by a flitting figure charging past. The third such blur in motion gives a better chance of examination and the sprinting forms reveal themselves to be schoolboys, rushing either from or, given their haste, to, a lesson. Not to be outdone, the last of them is followed some minutes later by a loping master, his gown billowing out behind him in his wake.

Schoolboys and masters abound in Winchester, home of course of the famous school. I marvelled from my breakfast table that the boys seemed to have lessons on Saturdays and Sundays as well as no doubt in the week. Still, at around six grand a term, I'd bloody we'll expect a seven day a week timetable as well. The academics lend Winchester a certain chalky charm. The boys are typical public school types, tall, with good teeth and hair just short of the maximum permitted by the school rules. They seem to exist in a constant state of rush, with either a folder or some sort of sporting item under their arm. The masters, the loping one excepted, make much more stately progress along the street. Shaped by rather too many rather good dinners, with their gowns on they look like Batman after he has really, really let himself go.

There were schoolboys too in the shop across the road from the pub. An odd place. It was the sort of shop that you would expect to see in a small village where the posh second home owners arrive with their own shopping and only need to shop for either wine or recreation, and where the locals only do a top up shop occasionally, getting most of their stuff in the nearby big town. Thus it has one of everything when it comes to vegetables, a goodish selection of canned stuff and a whole room dedicated to very posh wines. Because of the schoolboys, it also has a selection of the sort of stuff that schoolboys love, sweets and pop and porn. OK, it doesn't have porn, but it has lots of sweets and pop and pot noodle.

The town itself is lovely. Lots of tourists mean a big tourist information centre, where you can get a map of the town in case you get lost on its one high street. The tourist information centre also sells books about the area and I was tempted by 'Haunted Winchester'. However, flipping through I saw that the Wykeham Arms wasn't mentioned. This is probably a good thing as, while of course I love a good ghost story, the only spirits I want to see when I'm staying in a pub are the ones sloshing about in my glass. Poltergeist activity does not make for a restful night, and when one tries to explain away snoring and trumping in the dark, or the loo seat being left up as paranormal activity, one tends to run into the sort of scepticism that would make Richard Dawkins blink.

Postcard from Oxford

Oxford has a reputation for being car-unfriendly. It’s not. It’s driver un-friendly. The city has adopted, in the city centre at least, a Dutch traffic model where they remove all of the street furniture and drop the kerbs so that the pavements and pedestrians are at the same level as the road and traffic, with no bars, railings or other rational safety features to protect people from cars, or cars from bloody tourists too intent on photographing and gawking to watch where they are bloody going.

The theory is that this makes the driver more cautious, slower and safer. In practice the result was a bloody terrifying experience, not just because after a day being buzzed by acrobatic aircraft and weaving round airshow entrance fee-dodgers lining the rural roads of Oxford I was a little wary of pedestrians, but because while there is no street furniture or kerbs in the centre of Oxford, what they do have is a plethora of the sort of road signs that you normally only see right in the back of the Highway Code, the ones you don’t even memorise for the test and you only ever expect to see again in a waggishly photoshopped picture with the caption ‘Evel Keneveal ahead’ attached to that one of a motorbike on top of a car.

These signs had circles, times, cars, busses, lorries and confusing arrows on them. I wasn’t worried about hitting a pedestrian, I was worried about driving into a sixty quid, three point street that I should not have entered between three thirty and the end of Michalmas term.


Once I had safely parked and stopped shaking, sweating and sobbing, a quick shower, some jazz and a decent meal, and a nap, and I was ready for a walk round Oxford. It is, without doubt, a beautiful city. I suppose this is one of the benefits of the colleges owning a lot of the land here, they can actually make more money from the fees from their foreign students, and operating a meth lab in the chemical tutorials, than they can from flogging the estate and relocating to Milton Keynes. What you have as a result is a series of fantastic buildings that rise tall on either side of the street, allowing plenty of room for intimidating architectural features and looming.


It was a night-time walk around the city, possibly the best way to avoid all the tourists. Two things were apparent, that there is enough money in the surrounding area to support the short of shops that sell cashmere shorts and that Oxford likes to hide their pubs up narrow alleys, with twists and turns in them. While elitism, obvious wealth and looking down on anyone without their own large haydron collider might me acceptable, the consumption of pork scratching and a decent brew apparently is not.


I wandered around soaking up the rich cultureal heritage of the city; Morse and Lewis.

Oxford has an odd high streeet. It’s from 2008. They have Oddbins, they have a Waterstones with a Costa in it (why never a Costa with a bookshelf sized bookshop in it to return the favour). I was expecting to see a Woolworths.

Stayed at the Old Bank Hotel. Great staff, great rooms, free wi fi and jazz floating up from the courtyard.

Scooter Park

Off to the village school summer fete. I thought that it was a joke when I was informed that there was a bar there. In fact, it wasn’t true. There were two bars, one flogging Pimms and lemonade, the other doing a roaring trade in beers. These already very popular refreshment tents (nobody drinks like a parent, want to know why? Spend ten minutes in the company of a child who has access to haribo) became even more popular when the rain came on. Naturally, as the school fete was being held on an English summer’s day, the rain was biblical.

It was, on the whole, cathartic.

‘Wet play’ at school was something of a drag, playtime traditionally being the time where there would be a tremendous release of all that energy that had been pent up daydreaming through a maths class. Not being able to tear round the playground pretending to be a Spitfire and instead being confined to a classroom with two dozen other fusty kids who smelled mostly of kids parka, but in an enclosed space, watching the windows steam up, is hardly the sort of stuff that is going to make it into the pages of ‘First period at Chalet School’.

More like misery lit.

But standing in a school playground watching the deluge while drinking beer…ahhhhh, this was much more enjoyable. Suddenly it became clear why so many teachers drink, it’s not just because they have a shit job, it’s because they had a shit time at school the first time round and by encountering it all again but amiably hammered, certain ghosts are laid.


Many of the kids had obviously come on that popular kiddie form of transport, the scooter. I was particularly pleased to see them parked up near a rail in the schools scooter park, looking for all the world like tiny tot versions of cowboy horses tethered at the saloon rail.

What I really liked was that I noted the same number of scooters coming out of the fete as I noticed going in there. Scooter theft from schoolkids must be one of the lowest crimes, and typified by a fat chav bending the board of a scooter, shooting sparks from the pavement, as he tries to make off with it.

This must go beyond a simple social compact not to steal a kids’ toys, I think this has to symbolise a recognition about the sort of thing that happens to people in prison who are convicted of scooter theft. Nonces and peados are one thing but somebody who is banged up in Strangeways for stealing a scooter, possibly from a disabled kiddy, has invited a special kind of hell.

So, you can leave your scooter in confidence that the nonces, the peados and the scooter sniffers will not touch it, all you have to worry about is another kid making off with your bespoke Barbie pink or Action man Camoflage scooter when the temptation becomes too much.