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This weekend the Guardian and Observer published a really lovely Guide to the night. My favourite piece without a doubt is Jeanette Winterson on why she adores the night. Just gorgeous:
Food, fire, walks, dreams, cold, sleep, love, slowness, time, quiet, books, seasons – all these things, which are not really things, but moments of life – take on a different quality at night-time, where the moon reflects the light of the sun, and we have time to reflect what life is to us, knowing that it passes, and that every bit of it, in its change and its difference, is the here and now of what we have."
The list of things I don't know is endless. I don't know how to fix my car. I don't know how to bake soda bread. I don't know how to fill a tooth.
If I need any of those things doing, I ask someone who knows how to do those things to help me. I ask someone who has some expertise. And then I listen to them and I take their advice.
It seems obvious to me that if you appoint a panel of experts to help you with something, it's probably useful to listen to them. It's less helpful to sack them when you say something they don't like. So I am rather baffled that Home Secretary Alan Johnson has sacked Professor David Nutt, Chairman of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). Professor Nutt's crime was to suggest that the classification of illegal drugs should be based on the harm that they do. He also highlighted how this is very far from being the case in the UK, where alcohol and tobacco are freely available, but ecstasy and cannabis are Class A and Class B drugs, respectively.
Whatever your opinion on illegal drugs, it seems to me to set an alarming precedent when the government sacks a scientific adviser for... talking sensibly about evidence-based science.
The setting of drugs policy has long been an emotive area, but I do find it incredible that the Home Secretary seems more or less happy to come out and say that when it comes to classifying drugs, public opinion is more important than scientific evidence.
It doesn't surprise me even a tiny bit that the Daily Mail would publish a piece calling for the banning of Lars von Trier's new film Antichrist. Why, they're not happy at Mail Towers unless they're being appalled, disgusted or worrying about the very fabric of society. It is, however, slightly more surprising to hear that the person calling for the ban is a film critic who... um... hasn't seen the film.
You do not need to see Lars von Trier's Antichrist (which is released later this week) to know how revolting it is.
I haven't seen it myself, nor shall I - and I speak as a broad-minded arts critic, strongly libertarian in tendency. But merely reading about Antichrist is stomach-turning, and enough to form a judgment."
Which did rather make me think, dude - film reviewing: you're doing it wrong.
I don't read the Mail very often, as it tends to induce in me a vein-throbbing, head-bursting rage that isn't altogether pleasant. However, I have started checking out the website every now and then, as against all the odds, many of the comments seem to come from sane, rational people rather than Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells. It somehow gladdens my heart that 1089 people have recommended a comment remarking how ridiculous it is to judge a film you haven't seen.
And if you fancy reading a far more eloquent take on it than mine, I'd recommend hopping over to Mailwatch, who tell it like this:
The Daily Mail resides in a terrifying alternate reality. In this dark and hopeless place, decent middle-class folk are surrounded by pernicious subliminal messages of hate designed to brainwash them into murdering, maiming, pillaging and setting fire to each other. The inhabitants of this world have no control over their actions; sinister forces fill their tiny minds with sex and violence and, inevitably, they succumb to the evils of the media induced orgy of societal destruction."
(via Bigmouth strikes again)
Unexpectedly I'm partial to what my friend Neil refers to as hippety hoppety music, but whether you share that view or not, this is just damn clever.
Is there anyone in the world as creative as kids trying to get out of something they don't want to do? The Mile End Centre for Sports and Exercise Medicine ran a study to measure activity levels in 200 East London children, but when they analysed the results they were baffled.
They asked the children to wear pedometers to measure their activity levels, and couldn't understand why some of the most active children were obese. Until they found out the children had attached their pedometers to their pet dogs.
Overweight? Apparently. Ingenious? Definitely.
Via the Radio 4 blog, what the editor rightly describes as a very lovely thing - Rebecca Dalzell is a New Yorker, writing about going about her life punctuated by the sound of Radio 4.
She perfectly sums us up by saying:
Listen to Radio 4 and the country that emerges is witty and engaging, well-read if parochial, always up for a walk to the pub down the lane. Watch Channel 5 on TV and you see a nation obsessed with home repairs, footballers, and the Botoxed winners of Big Brother. Radio gave me the England I’d gotten to know reading Evelyn Waugh, and that I half-expected to find.
There is no sensible way for me to explain this, so I will say only that if you are in need of some laughter, you must check out Antonia's video.
This is a clear example of not knowing that you wanted something until you get it - how could I have known that a woman and her daughter in hastily improvised beards, yearning for the sea, would be the thing to make me laugh til I cried?
Guardian readers can be a bolshy lot, so it's a brave company that submits to their ethical blog Q&A. Howies dealt with it pretty gracefully when they were turned over, but you'd have thought it would have given Neal's Yard Remedies some idea of what they might be in for. Apparently not...
It's impossible to say at what point they decided this had all been a terrible idea - was it when a reader asked:
Do you see no problem with trying to be 'ethical' while at the same time selling snake oil for a living?
or perhaps:
I was wondering what your policy was on dealing with the situation of one of your stocked alternative medicines actually being proven to work. Would you discontinue it? After all, it wouldn't be alternative any more, just medicine.
or maybe:
I've been soaking a £20 note in a bathfull of water for the last few days, is it ok to pay for an order using my new homeopathic money? I now seem to have rather a lot of it.
We'll never know.
