2013 booklist

As the year comes to an end, it's time for the list of books I've read in the past 12 months again. I hope that no-one thinks I do this to show off (I'm not sure that my choice of reading matter is anything to boast about anyway!) it's just that I don't do 'clouds' or online 'wallets' so this is the most accessible way of finding out if I've read a book before I buy it - if I happen to find myself in an English language bookshop away from home. Well, it may happen one day!

I've read a massive amount of books in 2013, well, massive for me anyway - it works out at more than 3 a month which is a third more than I've ever managed before. Admittedly many of them are murder mysteries which don't take long to knock over, but still... Perhaps that hot summer where one found it too uncomfortable to do anything but lie around reading had something to do with it. Whatever the reason, 39 books flashed past my nose this year, but I'll be beggared if I can remember what was in any of them! That's not a sign of reading them too quickly, but of my innate stupidity.

1. Alan Garner "The weirdstone of Brisingamen" - re-read, not sure I understood it any better now than I did 35 years ago!
2. Ariane Sherine (ed) "The atheist's guide to Christmas" - hilarious collection of essays by people such as David Baddiel, etc.
3. Eric Newby "A short walk in the Hindu Kush"
4. John Lanchester "Whoops! Why everyone owes everyone and no-one can pay" - highly readable assessment of the credit crunch
5. Terry Pratchett "Eric"
6. Margery Allingham "Sweet danger"
7. Les Woodland "The crooked path to victory: drugs and cheating in professional bicycle racing" - wanted to read this for many years, since I first heard Mr Woodland on R4, seemed very apt to read it this year as professional road racing imploded. The book proves that old adage that there is nothing new under the sun...
8. John O'Farrell "An utterly exasperated history of Modern Britain: or Sixty Years of Making the Same Stupid Mistakes as Always"
9. Margery Allingham "The case of the late pig"
10. Ben Aaronovitch "Whispers underground"
11. Gladys Mitchell "The Saltmarsh murders"
12. Janet Street-Porter "Life's too fucking short"
13. Margery Allingham "A tiger in the smoke"
14. Rory Stewart "The places in between"
15. Rachel Johnson "Winter games"
16. Muriel Sparke "Girls of slender means"
17. Simon Armitage "Sir Gawain and the green knight"
18. Margery Allingham "The crime at Black Dudley"
19. George Orwell "Down and out in Paris and London"
20. Simon Brett "The body on the beach"
21. Peter Stanford "The devil: a biography"
22. Richard Templar "The rules of wealth"
23. Pete Brown "Man walks into a pub"
24. Terry Pratchett "Small gods"
25. Jonathan Tropper "This is where I leave you"
26. William Stephens Hayward "Revelations of a lady detective"
27. Eoin Colfer "Artemis Fowl: the Arctic incident"
28. Edward Marston "The railway detective"
29. Robert Peston "Who runs Britain?" - written on the eve of the credit crunch and therefore has an unwitting wistfulness about it
30. Terry Pratchett "Feet of clay"
31. Peter Lovesey "Cop to corpse"
32. David Crouch "William Marshal"
33. Piers Paul Read "The Templars"
34. P G Wodehouse "Full moon"
35. C S Lewis "The Screwtape letters"
36. Terry Pratchett "Dodger"
37. Dorothy L Sayers "Clouds of witness"
38. Andrew Taylor "The scent of death"
39. Edward Marston "The railway viaduct"

The highlight of 2014 for me will be the publication in paperback of the 3rd part of David Kynaston's fantastic history of post-war Britain, 'Modernity Britain, in June. Yes, I am that sad...

Happy New Year!

More books

Annual list of books I've read:

1. David Kynaston "Austerity Britain 1945-51" - think we've got it bad today? Think again!
2. Terry Pratchett "Wintersmith"
3. Andrew Martin "The Necropolis Railway"
4. Dorothy L Sayers "Whose Body?"
5. Terry Pratchett "Going Postal"
6. Tom Robb-Smith "Agent 6"
7. James Anderson "The Affair of the Boodstained Egg Cosy"
8. George Orwell "The Road to Wigan Pier" (Re-read)
9. A. W. Kinglake "Eothen"
10. James Anderson "The Affair of the Mutilated Mink"
11. E. R. Tobia "Jorge Lorenzo: The Story so Far"
12. Caitlin Moran "How to be a Woman" - love her journalism but actually found this book really rather depressing
13. Pete Comley "Monkey with a Pin"
14. James Anderson "The Affair of the Thirty-Nine Cufflinks"
15. Edward Said "Orientalism"
16. David Kynaston "Family Britain 1951-57"
17. Ben Aaronovitch "Rivers of London" - needing something to read on the train and thinking, 'I wonder if he's any relation to David?', I seem to have stumbled across a genre that's new to me: urban fantasy. And jolly good fun it is too, he's got me hooked (and it's hard to dislike an author who names one of his most alluring female characters 'Beverley' isn't it?)
18. Barry Hobson "Latrinae et Foricae: Toilets in the Roman World" - not only did they have indoor plumbing, they had upstairs loos!
19. Terry Pratchett "Snuff"
20. Hermione Ranfurly "To War with Whitaker"
21. Jon Ronson "The Psychopath Test"
22. Ben Aaronovitch "Moon Over Soho"
23. William Dalrymple "White Mughals"
24. David Sedaris "Holidays on Ice"

So many books, so little time...

'Ello, 'ello, 'ello...

I've never spoiled a ballot paper before. Indeed, I don't think that I've ever failed to vote, as I have too much respect for the men and women who fought and died to bring us universal suffrage in the first place and, later, to protect it from totalitarianism. But with the forthcoming elections for the police and crime commissioners I've made an exception.

If the government had a problem with the police authorities, why didn't it just change their powers? Why spend £75 million on a shambles of an election which is strongly predicted to have the lowest ever participation rate? Why spend up to £100,000 on salaries for each of these 41 posts? At a time when the government is supposed to be cutting publicly funded posts, when public employees from nurses to binmen have had their pay frozen for the last 5 years, do you honestly think that this is a good use of tax-payers' money? It will do nothing to improve accountability but will simply impose another expensive level of bureaucracy onto the system.

Why, Mr Cameron, have you stacked the dice against the independents who used to sit on the police authorities? You seem to have designed a system that will specifically lead to someone from a political party being elected. Do we really want our police run by political parties? Is the politicisation of the police really a good thing? The fact that Boris is the PCC for London should tell you all you need to know about the role's impartiality. The PCC will be able to hire and fire the chief constable, so what is there to stop a PCC of one political stripe hiring a chief constable who agrees with him – oh and it is going to be a 'him' because there are very few women standing for election. It's also very likely to be an ex-police or military person (or, God help us, a 'counter terrorism specialist' in our area) too given the large number of them who are standing – how 'independent' are they going to be? By contrast with the old police authorities, the police and crime panels what replace them will have limited powers of scrutiny: no more will we see the likes of the redoutable Gabrielle Cox who stood up to James Anderton during his worst excesses in Manchester - she'd now have to fight the PCC as well as the chief constable. At a time when boundary changes are leading to fewer MPs, are you trying to give a sop to them by creating another post that they can apply for? With a generous expenses system and pension package perhaps? Oh, hush my mouth for the cynical old tart that I am... Do you think that perhaps this massive case of 'jobs for the boys' could be seen as a kick in the face for the electorate who are already struggling with your austerity measures? (And lets not forget that the crash was caused by your mates in the global banking industry whose salaries have increased by 37% in the last 4 years – contrast to that pay freeze for us mere mortals mentioned above – but I digress...).

The government itself doesn't seem to want to take the elections seriously as, instead of offering candidates the free mailout to voters that is normal in real elections, it claims that it wants to save taxpayers' money (the mailout would have added £35m to the bill). Well, I think that the vessel named 'The Good Ship Waste of Money' has already sailed, don't you chaps? If you really believed that you were extending democracy you'd have had the courage of your convictions and taken the time to explain to people what they were voting for. Instead the government has just given us those bloody averts showing 'thugs' which are downright scary. Is that a valid electoral tactic these days, to terrify the vulnerable into voting in an election they don't understand? The adverts are also misleading by implying that voting for the PCC will make criminals think again. It won't. In theory, the PCC will have no role in day to day policing or 'operational decisions'.

Even the method of voting irritates me. The big parties despise electoral reform do they? They say that proportional representation isn't good enough for 'proper' elections but they're happy enough to use it in their tin-pot elections for mayors (set up by the Labour government) and the PCCs (set up by the Tories).

Will a voter turnout of under 20% really give any of the elected commissioners the legitimacy to hold the police to account? Home Secretary Teresa May thinks so, but that wasn't what the government were saying earlier in the year when Home Office staff voted to strike on a 20% turnout. Home Office Minister Damian Green blames us, the voters, in advance, just in case it all goes horribly wrong, and the gist of his comments are: 'if you don't go out and vote then the nutters will get in and you'll only have yourselves to blame'. But Mr Green, you've declined to inform the electroate about PCCs by refusing to sending them any information on the changes and making the boundaries so large that independents can't afford to canvass in them. Anyway why the fuck are we having these bloody elections in the first place? Because, Mr Cameron, in case you don't recall, it may have been a Conservative manifesto commitment but NOBODY VOTED FOR YOU. You're only in power 'cos Nick Clegg (and quite a few of the PLP) despised Gordon Brown more than you and Labour MPs were physically sick at the thought of having to cosy up to the SNP to make their coalition work.

So, that's why I spoiled my ballot paper. It won't make any difference to the outcome but it made me feel a little better and it's a while since I've had a jolly good rant. But in my darker moments I remember the Peter Cook film The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer where, once he has become Prime Minister, the eponymous villain subjects the nation to constant ballots and referenda until the exausted voters willingly agree to him abolishing democracy and becoming dictator. You have been warned...

Some sources:
FT, 'Bankers’ salaries up 37% in four years', May 2012
Guardian, 'Police and crime commissioner elections: who, what and why – Q&A', Nov 2012
BBC, 'Home Office staff to strike on eve of Games', Jul 2012

My Hero

I don't have many heroes because most people in the public eye are as flawed as the rest of us, or more so. I suppose Clive Stafford-Smith comes close or Hester Stanhope, but I think Camila Batmanghelidjh probably encapsulates who I would like to be if I were a better person.

Brought up in an amazingly wealthy Iranian family, Ms Batmanghelidjh and her siblings were at school in England when the revolution happened and they lost touch with their parents. With the help of her school she managed to get asylum and then worked in nurseries to fund her way through university. For some reason she'd always wanted to work with disadvantaged children and did that as a psychotherapist, first working with the children the wealthy and then working with the sort of kids who get referred to Social Services.

In 1996 Ms Batmanghelidjh set up Kids Company to help the children we ignore until they get into the headlines of tabloid newspapers as the victims, or perpetrators, of violence. Around the same time one prominent comedian was developing his catch-phrase of, "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" and, whilst I remember him eventually slapping an asbo on anyone who couldn't run away fast enough, I recall him doing precious little about the last part of that phrase. Disadvantage (not just financial poverty, but poverty of expectation, a lack of family support, poverty of ambition) and the other myriad causes of crime and social disaffection, was not tackled on a national level. Throughout the period since 1996 social inequality got worse, with the richest and poorest moving further apart (IFS Report), whilst social mobility has also declined (Sutton Trust/Guardian) - so if you're born on a sink estate in Doncaster, you're more likely to remain there.

So, thank goodness someone decided to do what she could to help these children. When the crimes they commit reach the headlines we are rightly disgusted, but the backgrounds they come from should really turn our stomachs. She works with children who have been the subject of abuse and/or neglect since infancy, whose parents often have their own mental or substance dependency problems and cannot/will not care for them so that the parent-child relationship is either reversed, or the child goes 'feral'. One story: "She tells me of a boy who came to her aged 12. He had already stabbed his stepfather for attacking his mother. Both were crack addicts and the boy, always fearful, slept with knives under his pillow. He was a terrifying, angry child, she recalls. But she persisted: “I’d follow him around and sit next to him and say ‘You’re too cute to frighten me!’” Gradually his story unfolded, the beatings, neglect, the gun put in his mouth by a junkie. But what kept the boy coming to Kids Co was that it understood his mind, his urge to switch from victim of violence to perpetrator, how only torturing and persecuting others gave him mental relief." (Timesonline). Now aged 22 the young man is at college, studying for a professional qualification.

This story is by far not the worst: a quick Google will bring up the life-histories of other children that she's told to various newspapers. Is it any wonder that some of these children will turn to abusing others to re-capture a sense of power or respect that is missing from their lives; or will join a gang because it gives them a surrogate family that's probably less abusive than their own? Many years ago I read one report in which Ms Batmanghelidjh estimated that up to 40% of the children on some London housing estates were 'lost' - not in school, not contacted by Social Services, no GP, left to fend for themselves. What happens to these children as adults? What sort of families and relationships do they go on to have? Of course with many of them we know that they end up in the criminal justice system, or their children end up in care, but what about the rest? What effects is the abuse they suffered in childhood having on the next generation and on wider society?

The great thing is that many of the children themselves self-refer to Kids Company, or bring in friends that they think are in trouble. They realise that their lives shouldn't be like that and they find help. Of these, 96% return to education or employment and there's an 88% reduction in crime (Independent) - back to that phrase of "tough on the causes of crime" again. And that's why it's important that we don't leave the most disadvantaged in society to fend for themselves, because the effects end up permeating through society as a whole: your car gets broken into to support someone's drug habit; you're frightened to walk down a street because of the gang on the corner; crime ends up being the only job for the kid who can't read or write (illiteracy rates of those who end up in prison have changed little since the turn of the 19th century). With cuts in public spending which are going to hit services to the disadvantaged most, sadly, people like Camila Batmanghelidjh will become more important. Isn't it sad that in the 4th richest country on the planet we still have a level of people whose lives are so blighted, with a blight that infects future generations?

If I were a better, braver, more patient person (or liked children) I'd volunteer for such work myself, but I'll have to content myself with making donations to charity and looking with awe at one of my heroes. I do also envy her dress sense, 'larger than life' character and the entrepreneurial spirit that enabled her to establish her various ventures. After all, (to misquote Caitlin Moran) someone with 'Batman' in her name can probably do just about anything!

This Sporting Life...



I've been away for 10 days...to Croydon. Not a holiday, you understand, but work. Thankfully, I didn't see a lot of Croydon but, from what I did see, the detenation of a thermo-nuclear device in the town centre could only improve it.

My employer was hosting an international event at a near-by world famous sporting venue and I was up there for 10 days in a hotel, all meals paid for, and in return I worked 14 hour days dealing with grumpy athletes. Simples...

Let me stress that the area around this sporting venue (and Croydon in general) is rough and the fun started the night before I arrived when the local yoofs set fire to the bedding and feed we'd got in for the horses. The fire brigade arrived within 6 minutes, but found that every fire hydrant on the site had been decommissioned and they had to run hoses from the road a quarter of a mile away. Took the them over an hour to put it out 'cos straw/hay bales can still be burning inside and they had to keep checking it with thermo-camera-thingies. The little gits stood in the tree line watching the fun. Luckily, no horses or staff had arrived at that point, so it was just an expensive lesson learned and we had 4 days to get better security, improve the fencing and buy in more hay. But the little buggers did try it again later in the week.

This fire hydrant SNAFU was ironic considering the attitude of the local council's health and safety nazis. They had insisted on a total road closure around the venue during the final two days of the competition, with cars escorted at walking pace by a man with a flag. Er...'hello', this is 2009 not 1889. You couldn't make it up, could you? They did eventually ditch the flag idea, but the man walking with the car remained. I must stress that the staff at the centre couldn't have been more helpful or nice, they really did go out of their way for us. But the local council of an extremely deprived area should, I thought, be doing more to bring in events rather than doing their best to put people off. But what do I know...

As I say, nice area, Croydon. There was a stabbing across from my hotel on the second day I was there. I looked out of my bedroom window to see 4 squad cars, a paramedic and an ambulance. Two of the police cars soon went, followed by the paramedic and (empty) ambulance, to be replaced by the scenes of crime lady with her camera and sample-taking box. Very exciting, very 'Taggart'...

My initial job was to meet the athletes and coaches as they arrived and deal with their accommodation and other accreditation formalities. Whilst all the countries were supposed to pay in advance, very few did, so me and our finance administrator ended up dealing with rather a lot of money. Some of this spent a short time in our waist packs and our favourite joke was, "Does this 60,000 euros make my bum look big?!" (well, you think of something funnier after working a 14 hour day!).

Many people I met were lovely. Some weren't. The president of our world governing body (thank Christ he isn't a Brit) come up to my colleague to complain about his swing tag. All the swing tags had on them was first- and surname and country, but this wasn't good enough: "When I go to an event everyone needs to know who I am: so my pass must have my job title on it, also my professional title and, as the governing body is neutral, my nationality must be removed". Not said quite so nicely as that though, leaving my colleague open-mouthed. I thought that a perma-tanned short-arse going round at the centre of a posse of butt-kissers would be fairly easy to spot as El Presidente, but obviously not. Strangely enough my boss over-ruled my suggestion that El Presidente's pass be changed to say, "Self-obsessed auto-eroticist with his head so far up his own backside that he can't see out". It probably wouldn't have fitted on anyway. But perhaps if you're the international head of a sport no-one has ever heard of, you have to do things like that to bolster your ego. Personally, I think it was just a hefty dose of 'short man syndrome'.

Everyone, from the CEO down to the local kids we had as volunteer runners (not to mention many of our own members who were using their annual leave to spend 1 or 2 weeks working unpaid behind the scenes) worked themselves into the ground to make the competition work; and many coaches and athletes told us how much they'd enjoyed the competition and how well-run it was - which made the late nights and the idiots a bit easier to bear!

Anyway, it was fascinating to see a sporting event from the inside and I had some experiences that I never expected to have: like running round a hotel at 11 at night with an arm full of guns, trying to re-patriate them to their owners before they flew out the following morning. I found it so wierd to be in corporate uniform for a week, it makes you anonymous but priviledged at the same time, but it was such a relief to get back into normal clothes again!