20 September 2004
Concern about effects of not smoking
I don’t smoke. I never have smoked, unless you count the time I was at Birkbeck College, London, and was friendly with a girl named Jane.
After evening lectures we used to walk down to the Embankment, sit by the murky river and discuss German noun declensions, and she gave me one or two of her cigarettes.
So I have only smoked for a short time in a well-intentioned cause – and probably not all that convincingly. But I understand that some people feel compelled to do it, and can’t go very far without it.
It was with mixed feelings, therefore, that I heard the dulcet-toned One-Anglia announcer say he was introducing a brave new era – I paraphrase – in which no smoking would be allowed on his trains, even the minty new long-distance ones that go through tunnels.
On one level I was quite glad: stale smoke is unpleasant and lingers. I know this well, having accepted – late at night and with little option – an American hotel room designated mysteriously as “optional smoking”. (I drew the line at the compulsory smoking ones.)
On another level, I did wonder what all those railway smokers were going to do. Could they possibly last from Norwich to Liverpool Street without a drag, or would Ipswich station’s Platform 2 become a haven for puffers bursting from their pristine carriages for a short break?
Worse, might they all switch to cars, making the A140 even more hazardous, with drivers not only watching their speedometers instead of the road, but taking one hand off the wheel to pollute their lungs every minute or so?
And that’s without the coughing, which hardly bears thinking about. Ah, well, if disaster should befall, it will be because they were going too fast. That often happens when you smoke, I understand.
Reassuring statements about speed and rape
Revealing comments of the past week include one by the former manager of the apparently faultless Norfolk camera speed trap partnership, which seems likely to reinstate the ludicrous Grapes Hill camera in Norwich.
While recognising that the camera is unpopular, he adds: “Whether we believe the speed limit is the correct one or not is immaterial.”
Call me unreasonable, but I would have thought that believing the speed limit was incorrect would be a good reason for an organisation with integrity not to put a camera there. Of course that would mean getting rid of a few others too, and we all know how likely that is to happen while the money rolls in.
Meanwhile a statement that was almost as reassuring came jointly from a Westminster school and its local education authority following the rape of a newly qualified 28-year-old teacher by a 15-year-old boy. It read: “The school regards this as an unacceptable but isolated incident.”
Well, that’s obviously a timely and hard-hitting reminder to everyone who thought it was acceptable for a pupil to rape a teacher. But if raping a teacher is just unacceptable, what in the scale of anti-social behaviour is acceptable? Mugging, grievous bodily harm, everyday sexual assault?
And what would be outrageous? Fiddling the league tables, I suppose.
Snatch harvests and early hurricanes
Suddenly, in the middle of that bright week of late summer, there was a cooler, overcast afternoon with quite an uppity wind.
The weather woman had forecast another sunny, warm day. Glorious, I think she said. So I checked the BBC’s weather website for Norwich.
Strangely, it was still sunny and warm. Was this an attempt to fool me, or a flat refusal to look out of the window or get up on that roof?
Weather people sometimes prefer not to look. Once, when I had more time, I e-mailed the BBC, asking in my innocent way why they bothered giving a five-day forecast when it was always wrong.
They responded briskly, pointing out that they changed the forecast as it got nearer the day, to make it more accurate. And that’s what worried me. They didn’t seem to realise that this was not an answer, but a restatement of the question in another form.
Forecasts are tricky, of course. But sometimes our memory of weather gone by – especially bad weather – is equally inaccurate, as demonstrated by the panicky reaction to adverse weather this year and a remarkable ability to forget the appalling hurricanes of the 1940s. A reader with a better memory than most writes: “Bad summers are not new. In the early fifties I worked for a local firm of agricultural engineers specialising in harvest machinery – self-binders and later combine harvesters.
“Many times during these harvests I got home at the end of the day soaking wet through where I had been caught in thunderstorms. It was not unusual to get wet harvests and have to use grain lifters to get the combines to lift the straw which had been flattened by heavy rains. “We used to refer to these wet times as ‘snatch harvests’, as you had to wait until the standing crop was dry enough to be able to ‘snatch’ a few hours’ cutting time.
“Needless to say you never heard a mention of ‘global warming’.”
Council loses plot by targeting cyclists
A south coast council has completely lost the plot by introducing a mobile camera to catch cyclists speeding down its promenade and endangering pedestrians.
First, it is warning them and not fining them: so that’s one of the main objectives of speed cameras up the spout.
Second, cyclists are goodies and not evil monsters, like car drivers. They must therefore be allowed to do what they like, even if everyone else is put at risk.
Someone should put Bournemouth right. I suggest the council gets a visit from Transport 1650, who can show them how to put speed cameras to good uses, like stopping earthquakes. More revealing statistics from Transport 1650 at www.transport2k.com.