Come find us

A leaflet arrives saying "Come find us to get your ...."

I assume it's an Americanism. But to check,

"Come and find", American English, has mostly been 0, five zeroes
"Come and find", British English, has mostly been 0, five zeroes

"Come find", American English, has mostly been 0, five zeroes
"Come find", British English, has mostly been 0, six zeroes

So, yes, it is.

On Leonard Cohen

I was introduced to Leonard Cohen during a summer that, if it had been a David Mitchell novel or a Richard Curtis film, might have been termed a rite of passage. Except for me it wasn’t a rite of passage. I don’t think I’ve ever been through a rite of passage, at least not yet. Liz was our boss, was older than we were, and knew Bryan Ferry, at least two of which made her glamorous in our eyes. She introduced us to Leonard Cohen, and of course it appealed to the maudlin teenager. She had several albums, so we taped them, and listened to them in the long car journeys that we had to make to get, well, pretty much anywhere. My own favourite was the last song on Songs of Leonard Cohen, where, if you turn it up really loud, you can hear him screaming at the end. It’s a song about a woman so devastatingly beautiful that she drove men mad, to suicide, etc, etc. I learnt it by heart, and found it very consoling, in that annoyingly self-pitying way that teenagers do. For me, Cohen was the best, most poetic lyricist. He eclipsed Dylan in my eyes, because I always thought that if Dylan was short of a rhyme or two, he’d chuck in a bit of surrealist nonsense to make you bask in his greatness. Cohen, by contrast, told it like it was. Always. Sometimes this was too honest for me, particularly sexually, but his bitter dissection of relationships was never bettered in my eyes. And his flights of fancy were always real “I was with Washington at Valley Forge, shivering in the rain, I said how come men here suffer like they do, Men may suffer men may fight, even die for what is right, we’re all one road and we’re only passing through”. I don’t listen to Cohen so much now, as I need an outbreak of melody, and a bright light to shine in the darkness, but he’s still on shuffle.

The wisdom of crowds

In The Times yesterday, Matt Ridley argued that crowds are better at making decisions than experts or elites. It seems a fairly obvious thing to say, but this does rather depend on the level of knowledge of the crowd. My taxi driver this morning insisted that he supported only two charities – Help for Heroes and Guide Dogs for the Blind – because these were the only ones that weren’t run by the government. Help for Heroes, he insisted, was run by the armed forces rather than the government. Where to start? I’m not an argumentative person, so all I felt able to do was to make gentle nudges in a particular direction. Children in Need had raised so much money, he said, that everyone should now have clean water. It was, I pointed out, quite a big place. In any case that, for me, is the secret of an informed democracy – information; education. And unfortunately we seem to be moving towards a culture, particularly on the internet, that is making that more difficult. Extreme positions attract clicks (10 incredible things you won’t believe about foreign aid). People make their social media names not from reasonable assertion of the facts but from extreme positions. The standard of journalism is declining, whether from the mainstream media or the citizen alternative. Gimme the facts ma’am.

There has been much hand wringing in the UK following the election of Donald Trump as US president. At the time of writing, it’s still not clear exactly what he wants to do or whether he is going to be able to achieve it. What interests me, though, is the lack of any clear reporting of this during the election coverage. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the US election, but clearly Trump was a potentially frightening character and it seemed best to check him out. I looked at his campaign website and his Wikipedia page – hardly a forensic examination – but what was immediately apparent from both was that there was almost no substance behind what he was saying. There were a few headline policies (such as the wall and scrapping trade agreements) but very little detail on foreign policy, education, etc. And where there were policies, they were mostly random snippets rather than a coherent, thought-through approach. In addition there were a number of areas where his policies were vague, or even contradictory. This was never really picked up by the UK media. I know it’s hopelessly naïve of me, but could we not have had coverage of, say, a Trump policy announcement or, failing that, a report on the lack of policy. Instead, day after day of coverage focused on the latest revelations about what he’d said or done to women over the previous years. In other words, it focused on his character, rather than his policies. It seems to me that his character was rarely in doubt, whereas his policies frequently were. Also, it hardly helps an electorate to make an informed choice, if the information presented to them is in increasingly frantic soundbites.

A different world

I'm unsettled by an episode of Gardeners' World. This in itself seems like a ridiculous sentence to write, as Gardeners' World is surely the definition of benign Englishness. But perhaps it turns out that such a thing doesn't exist.

It featured a segment on the

private garden of Lord Rothschild and his family

so keep out, you proles, it's not for the likes of you. I like the "and his family" too, as if that makes it more like us. The garden, we are told,

prides itself on being completely self-sufficient all of the time

which makes it sound like some Utopian Good Life. Yet this is achieved by the employment of eight gardeners. (Although we aren't told if they are paid, so they may be victims of slavery.) So it's probably self-sufficient provided you give a large injection of cash each year.
Renowned garden designer Molly Keen^{[citation needed]} tells us that when she was first involved

It was in quite a run-down state, it was semi-market garden

as if growing fruit and vegetables for sale is beneath us, whereas a garden supported by the profits from banking and usury is somehow noble and pure.

Now, though, it was an obscene riot of fruit and vegetables. The cabbage square contained around a thousand cabbages. Most, if not all, looked nearly mature. So how long will they last, and who will eat them? As a house of four we wouldn't want much more than one cabbage a week. Being generous and saying that they will last for three months, that's ten cabbages a week that the Rothschilds need to get through. How big is his family? I wonder how much waste there is.

It all harks back to a bygone age, the idea of the big country house with its sea of forelock-tugging servants

That self-sufficiency which all estates I think before the First World [...] is (sic) simply ceased to exist. This is unique.

Well arguably it's not, since it looked very similar to The Lost Gardens of Heligan, which you can look around if you pay your shilling. So I'm not sure what this garden is for.

Lord Rothschild likes things quite over scale, so the paths are huge so that seven people can walk down then and it all seems quite grand

It all seems vain and spoiled, in the sense of a spoiled child, rather than the soon-to-be spoiled cabbages.

Speaking of the Head Gardener, she says

Sue was incredibly quick to see what the point, what the spirit of this place was.

I don't that she did. It said nothing to me.

a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

It made me think about the way that my family down the generations has seen gardening, not as acquisition and possession, but as something connected with nurturing and life and love and hope. After the segment, Monty Don commented

I think anybody who grows any veg at all is going to feel some envy there.

No, Monty, not at all.

Schools in Tadcaster

A shared mistake, published recently in the Yorkshire Post and the Daily Mail.

Published on 14 January in the Daily Mail, Robert Hardman, in an article that includes a photograph of him in Tadcaster, writes:

Meanwhile, all the banks and schools are on the west bank, meaning serious disruption for those on the east.

The following day, Grant Woodward wrote an article for the Yorkshire Post. He also visited the town, and in the article he quotes local resident Irene Bulmer:

“The supermarket and medical centre are on one side and the pharmacy, banks and everything else on the other. All the schools are there too, it must be horrendous for parents.”

The point is, it's not true. Tadcaster East Community Primary School is definitely on the east side of town. It must just be an unlikely coincidence that both articles make exactly the same mistake.

A few reasons why I am not keen on Spectre (contains spoilers)

M: We've got 20 minutes to save the world.
Bond girl: James, could I have a quick word?
Bond: Of course.
Bond girl: Look, I love you, but it's really not working out, so I'm off.
Bond: Oh, okay. What are you going to do?
Bond girl: I'm just going to wander off and walk the streets of London late at night.
Bond: With all the baddies around?
Bond girl: Yeah, pretty sure that will be fine.
Bond: Yeah, I think so too.

Sam Mendes: Where did you get the idea for this stunt?
Stunt Co-ordinator: Ninja Warrior UK.
Sam Mendes: Cool.

Bond: How did you escape from the baddies?
Q: I hid in the cleaners' cupboard.
Bond: Yeah, I must try that sometime.

M: We've got 10 minutes before the system goes live.
Q: Although we could always take it down after that.
M: We could, yeah.

Psychiatrist: So you're not the main villain.
Moriarty: No.
Psychiatrist: So who is?
Moriarty: Some European guy who wears shoes without socks.
Psychiatrist: How does that make you feel?
Moriarty: How do you think that makes me feel?

Moriarty: Don't worry, we'll soon get the South Africans to vote for us. Then we'll have the nine best intelligence agencies in the world working together.
M: South Africa?
Moriarty: Yeah, oh, good point.

Sam Mendes: Where did you get the idea for this stunt?
Stunt Co-ordinator: Jaws.
Sam Mendes: Cool.

Builder: So we've finished your giant secret server warehouse in the desert.
Blofeld: That's great.
Builder: And we've surrounded it with an oil and gas refinery.
Blofeld: Because...
Builder: It's the classic combination. You know, cut keys, mend shoes; server warehouse, oil and gas refinery.

Bond: Go and find out what you know about this ring.
Q: Where?
Bond: Oh, I don't know, how about on a ski lift, with your laptop. Pretty sure that will be secure.

Q: I'm injecting you with secret smart blood that'll track you anywhere.
Bond: Wait a minute. Consent!

Subject: Baddie I forgot to tell you about.

Hi James

Just FYI, there's a super secret baddie that I forgot to tell you to kill. Lol, so forgetful. Anyway

Love you

Dead M

Bond girl: Why do you keep looking at those old photographs?
Bond: Because they're all so badly photoshopped. It must mean something.

Precision tortoise

The latest in our occasional series on odd measurements. Thursday's Metro featured an advertising wraparound, and the story of a tortoise called Bertie who completed a 5.48m race in 19.59 seconds. It's not the precision of the time that is odd, but the precision in the length of the race. If you're running a 5.48m race, why not round it up to 5.5m? The answer, of course is it was an 18ft long course, as an original story from the time of the record-breaking event makes clear. The source of this daft conversion is probably this press release from Guinness World Records, which includes the 5.48m measurement, although not the 18ft one, which is even more odd because it includes his speed in ft/s.