Thursday, November 29, 2007

The One True Faith

We have been hearing in the news today about Gillian Gibbons, a middle-aged English woman living and working in the Sudan as a teacher, who has been arrested by the authorities for allowing her young charges to name a teddy bear Mohamed. This, according to Islam, is blasphemy.

For me this brings to mind all of the many objections that I have against religion, which when I boil them down amount to this. I believe that all religions are invented by men and are constantly altered by them, in order to suit the society around them, and that religions are nothing but an alternative seat of power; to the government, the monarch, or the tribal leader.

There are so many ways that you can legitimately and logically attack religions that it is hard to know where to begin, but the simplest thing to point out is that they are different to one another and this must make most of them wrong.

Consider some differences:
Christianity believes in one true god.
Islam believes that Jesus was not the son of god.
Hinduism believes in multiple deities.
Buddhism believes in re-incarnation.
And so on…

According to the last census, there are 135 different faiths in Great Britain (if we count Jedi). Most of these will be one of the major faiths, or a variation of them, others will be cults and sects, put together on the basis of somebody’s personal philosophies. Still others will be mumbo-jumbo, brought into being for the purpose of personal profit, or mischief.

Few of these belief systems seem to lack dedicated and ardent followers. In fact, some of these followers would be happy to blow you (and themselves) up if your behaviour does not accord with their own values. Values which, incidentally, the majority will have inherited as part of their cultural upbringing, as opposed to any personal journey to enlightment.

I would always defend the individual's right to believe in and worship whatever they want and discuss those beliefs openly, provided they do no harm to others in the process.

However, I don’t have to respect the things that people believe in and when I hear of another piece of lunacy transacted in the name of religion I always come back to the inescapable fact that of the 135 faiths currently practised in the UK, simple logic tells me that at least 134 of them must be wrong, inaccurate, misinformed, or misguided. Only one, or none at all, can be the one true faith.

And of those two bets you know where my money is.

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Footballers And Their Money

Since the England football team made their early, pre-finals exit from the European Nations competition the country’s journalists have been looking to work all the angles. Played just right, big sports news like this can provide at least a couple of week’s worth of material for them.

Years ago I did regular computer-related work for a local newspaper, the Hitchin Gazzette, and ‘Got any stories?’ was a regular refrain whenever I went into their offices.

The problem from the perspective of a journalist is that Joe Public has an insatiable appetite for news, but he’s heard it all before and nothing, no matter how momentous, dulls his hunger for very long.

The best example of this that I can think of was a story that ran internationally about a year ago, which informed us that scientists predicted that only 17 years from that time an asteroid which they were tracking would probably strike the Earth and obliterate life on the planet as we know it. This was a true story, though it was later downgraded by cosmologists to a likely near miss on the part of the asteroid. At the time, despite the clear portent of global devastation this news only had legs for about 2 days, after that they had to find something different to write about.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that journalists have a habit of returning to subjects that they know, or believe, exercise the public’s interest, or its ire. One such subject in the UK is footballers’ salaries and in the light of recent events there was yet another excuse to give it an airing.

The constant reference to what top soccer stars earn just has to be a class thing, doesn’t it? Rock stars, film stars, and entrepreneurs seem to get away relatively unscathed, but the working-class oiks who become elevated beyond their station by easy access to money are worthy of endless disapproval, and so is the sport that allowed it to happen, football. Both are, therefore, perennial easy targets for every crass politician, journalist and radio phone-in show that has become mired by a bankruptcy of ideas.

In actual fact, people who come from nothing and make themselves a fortune are the bedrock of the capitalist system. They are the ones who supply the evidence that it could be you; proof that wealth does not have to be conferred upon you by the privilege of high birth, but that it can be anybodies with the right degree of hard work, talent and luck.

There is no need to start a revolution and put all of the toffs up against a wall in a society where John Terry can earn £130,000 per week.

The Premiership is huge internationally, the recent Arsenal v Manchester United game was reputed to have picked up an audience of around a billion people and that generates massive TV revenue. Part of that revenue pays the wages of the best footballers on the planet and it does it via a system of supply and demand. Meaning that if you can do something better than anybody else and there is a demand for that something, then you will get paid top dollar.

And that really is the end of the story. People should either shut up about what footballers earn and stop boring us silly with it, or else they should come clean and proclaim the virtues of communism.

Friday, November 23, 2007

English football and the Football Association

Some years ago, when my sons were a bit younger, I was interested in running a boy’s football team and before I started I was concerned that I might not get enough boys interested in playing. As it turned out, one team rapidly burgeoned into 15, the club was very successful in every aspect and despite (or because of) the huge effort I put in the whole project was very worthwhile in many respects. To this day it was probably the single most satisfying thing that I have ever been involved in.

In the beginning, because I wanted to do everything properly, the first thing I wanted to learn about was modern coaching methods. This led me to do the old FA Preliminary coaching badge – equivalent to the newer UEFA ‘C’ certificate. On top of this I discovered the Dutch Coerver system of coaching and met one of my childhood heroes, Charlie Cooke, in the process. After that I spent a weekend in Leeds looking at Simon Clifford’s Brazilian system. It was all very interesting and eye-opening stuff at the time.

As I went along, absorbing and trying new ideas, what was often very noticeable was how the FA always lagged the trends, both in terms of coaching ideas and in its understanding of what was happening on the grass-roots touchlines. They tended to adopt new ideas only after first rejecting them and then by being persuaded of the value of them by dint of other people’s efforts.

Simon Clifford; a hugely impressive and persuasive individual, is a very good example of this. He took it upon himself to borrow money in order to go to Brazil and try to work out why the Brazilians produce so many excellent footballers, whilst the English do not. One of the stories that Simon recounts is the one about Stan Mortensen coming back from the 1958 World Cup and reporting to the FA exactly how advanced the Brazilians were in terms of technique, coaching, fitness, and every other aspect of preparedness for international football. The FA responded by immediately setting up a committee to look into Mortensen’s findings. They had one meeting and then called it a day.

In my experience the FA and its officers are reasonable administrators, but they are certainly not visionaries, they are not the kind of people you can rely upon to send a surge of fresh energy through the coaching structures in England. The smart ties and blazers image is not just a myth, it really is what they do best.

As a result of losing to Croatia, England, quite rightly, went out of the 2008 European Nations Cup competition a couple of nights ago. I say ‘quite rightly’ because, over the course of a competition, league results do not lie. And the results say that after 12 games and 36 points to be played for England were third best, and so deserve no place in the finals.

On this occasion the England players were not good enough and, perhaps, the now departed manager, Steve McLaren, was not good enough either. If things change in the future and the England side reaches the levels of performance that England supporters crave it will probably be because somebody, somewhere, maybe even Simon Clifford, changed football in England from the bottom upwards. I cannot believe that it will be the FA, though, they simply don’t have it in them. No imagination, no drive.

Anybody interested in the pioneering work of Simon Clifford might want to have a look here: http://www.icfds.com/

By the way, I am not the founder member of the Simon Clifford Supporters Club, it’s just a credit where credit is due thing.

Monday, November 19, 2007

Time for democratic remodelling in the UK?

Broadly speaking there are two models for a democracy; direct democracy, where everybody gets to vote on everything and representative democracy, where we choose individuals to act on our behalf.

Direct democracy is undoubtedly too unwieldy to work in practice and, as we are often reminded, there would be too many issues on which the majority of us would be too inexpert to make a well informed judgment. So, representative democracy is our best, most functional, option.

The problem is that such a system does not necessarily guarantee that we get represented in the way that we would like. Powerful cliques are apt to form within the party system and small groups end up wresting control from the majority and take the country in directions that would never be chosen under the direct democratic model. This was exactly the problem with unions in the 70’s and, in my view, it is the problem with government now.

In Great Britain we have seen mass immigration in the last few years, in which possibly millions have come to live amongst us from abroad, transforming some of our towns into places where foreign languages now almost seem as common as English.

Predictably with such an influx, the NHS is being crushed by the added burden, as are schools, police forces, housing supply and now, according to the Monetary Policy Committee, certain groups of workers amongst the indigenous people.

All of this surprises nobody and yet our elected government sanctions it on our behalf. Do they allow it because they know something that the rest of us don’t? Is it because they have a great multi-cultural, multi-national vision that the majority would be unable to comprehend? Or is it utter incompetence; something that is happening because the government never predicted that it might? I really don’t know which of these three is the right answer, but I have to suspect that it is the last one. What I do know is that our elected representatives should come forward and explain to us, honestly, exactly how we have arrived at this situation and what exactly they plan next.

As a result of all that has happened and as a parent with teenage sons I look at our small island and see that there is clearly going to be vastly increased demand on our limited housing stock in future; a precious resource which this government, in particular (a so called labour government), has already allowed to become an investment tool. In addition to this, training places inside firms for young people will become even rarer than they already are due to the huge amount of low-cost skilled labour that is available to companies as a cheaper alternative.

These are not problems that will trouble the sons and daughters of government ministers. The Blairs left office with a £5m property portfolio, allegedly, and Tony is now earning a fortune on the lecture circuit. The Blairs, the Browns, the Mandelsons and Campbells and their respective children will all be OK, as will most of the tiny group that has presided over the almighty changes that have been delivered to us in the last few years. The rest of us will have to make the best of the new country that they have created.

The internet offers the possibility of an alternative democracy, perhaps a hybrid of the two models. If the power hungry little groups of people that come together to govern us cannot be relied upon to represent the people, then maybe it is time to change the constitution, the technology is alive and ready to make it happen,

Let the referenda commence.

P.S. If this kind of notion happens to float your boat, then there is an organisation that I have just heard about, which you might like to know about. It's called Unlock Democracy. Why not take a look, it sounds very interesting and credible: http://www.charter88.org.uk/

Saturday, November 17, 2007

My Chelsea Coat


Many years ago I would occasionally pick up a copy of the Daily Mail and see a column by a guy whose name I have long since forgotten, but whose enduring theme was his middle-age and middle-class. By my reckoning at the time he had to be the most boring bastard on Earth, but the Daily Mail employed him and gave him column inches, quite a lot of them as I recall. I seem to remember he used to write a lot about his children’s struggle with exams, I don’t think his offspring matched-up to his expectations with regard to attitude and performance.

Now, I have decided to try blogging and I find that I am mostly coming in with the same credentials as him, especially if we take my youngest son’s efforts as a student into account - he has that whole ‘can’t bear to stop playing on the computer thing’ going on.

My decision to become a blogger is all the more surprising given that I have barely ever read one, can’t imagine who does read one, or what bloggers have to offer that might make them do so. And, despite now signing-up to do a blog myself, I am not really sure how people go about finding one that they might want to read?

Some time ago I used to design web sites and I once knew a fair bit about search engines and, although my knowledge is dated, I am fairly sure my blog is going to be one of a zillion needles in the mother of all haystacks. On top of all this, I am not entirely convinced that I have anything interesting to say.

On the plus side, it seems to me that there are quite a few journalists who have never let the latter get in their way. I think that I am about to try blogging in case I am missing a trick and that’s about the only reason I can think of. I am going to base my blog on the guy from the Daily Mail’s trick of being a Mr. Middle England. That may sound naff, and it may be naff, but it’s a tested formula.

Anyway, with that kind of super-mundane theme in mind I thought that I would share with you the story of my Chelsea coat.

Three years ago (or was it 4?) when Roman Abramovich turned my fortunes as a football fan around by buying Chelsea FC, I decided that I would re-enlist as a real fan and start visiting Stamford Bridge again – a kind of old-nouveau Chelsea fan. To buy tickets for Chelsea games you have to sign-up as a member and once you do that the junk-mail starts.

To be fair, most of the stuff the club sends out is acceptable toilet-style reading and you get an annual mail order catalogue showing all the things that you can buy from them with Chelsea written on. Which, by the way, is a lot of things. The catalogue is worth a glance when birthdays and Christmas come around. My oldest son supports Chelsea as well, so I mainly have him in mind when I flick through. My wife looks at the catalogue too, only she has my son and me in mind.

It must have been a good year ago that she first spotted a thick, quilted coaches coat that she earmarked for me. She even asked me if I liked it, apparently, and I am on record as stating that I did, but what I probably said was ‘mmm’. At the time they didn’t have my size in stock on the web site, so she put the idea on hold, almost forgot all about it, until recently when we were in JJB Sports and she pipes up with, ‘Oh look, there’s that jacket you wanted and it’s only half price. And they’ve got your size.’

Now, I actually do like the jacket and I have supported Chelsea since I was 7, so there should be no problem, but the key thing to understand about a coat like that is that it has a badge on it. And a badge is a badge, something of a statement. In this case it says to people, ‘I support Chelsea Football Club and I want you to know it.’ I hadn’t thought of that when I let my wife go ahead and buy it.

Normally I am easily discernible enough to work this kind of thing out, my lower middle-class upbringing tells me to avoid this kind of thing, but somehow, perhaps because of the protracted nature of the purchase, it slipped under my radar. It was a bit like getting a tattoo whilst under the influence.

Although I allowed the purchase to go ahead without detecting the defining logo that is emblazoned upon it, others manage to spot it very easily.

On my first day out in it I was in a cake shop, totally oblivious to my surroundings, when a bloke sidled up and engaged me. ‘Played well last night,’ he said.
‘Who did?’ I replied, totally clueless as to what he was talking about. I warmed up a little as I rapidly recalled that Chelsea had played in a European fixture the night before, and we carried on from there, eventually covering such issues as Drogba’s likely departure in the January transfer window and John Terry’s injured knee. When the bloke left the shop and I sat down for a cup of coffee and a cheesecake with my wife she wanted to know how I knew him.

Since then I have worn the coat twice more. On the second time out, I walked past a wall with a herd of teenagers perched on it, like Hitchcock’s birds. Once again I had forgotten all about the coat until a couple of them started chanting ‘Chelsea, Chelsea’ and another muttered ‘cunt’ in a stage whisper. I hesitated, momentarily wondering if I should go and threaten him, maybe even slip into my ‘be careful, because I am a right lunatic’ act, but I was well past them when I caught his comment and I realised that I had probably asked for it anyway; subconsciously projecting onto them, using my badge to amplify my tribal affiliation.

On the last occasion an attractive thirty-something shop assistant (a young chick to me), who was busy serving a customer, stopped mid-schpeel when she realised she was staring at me. ‘Sorry, just admiring your coat,’ she said smiling sweetly.
‘You can have it if you want,’ I told her. I muttered it like a badly drawn, stock character from a low-grade sitcom, one of those guys who has to spend his time in the garden shed because he’s afraid of his wife.

Later on in the same outing a young mother pointed me out to her 6 year-old son. The boy was wearing a Chelsea shirt and I think that she was asking him if he wanted to play with me. Luckily he didn’t, he just looked away in total disinterest, which I very much appreciated.

I have a friend the same age as me who has a Chelsea jacket. It’s a lightweight version, more suitable to coaching in the summer than for sitting in the dugout at a winter away game at Dynamo Kiev. He’s a beer hound and wears it into pubs a lot. I bumped into him a couple of days back and asked how he got on with his Chelsea jacket. I was expecting a torrent of hilarious anecdotes. ‘Fine,’ he said, ‘no problems.’
‘They don’t call you a cunt, or anything?’ I enquired.
‘No, nothing,’ he replied sounding genuinely perplexed.

So, now I have developed a vision of dying. In my mind I see my wife talking to other family members. She has just had me buried in the Chelsea coat as a last act of kindness. ‘I had to have him buried in his Chelsea coat,’ she tells them, ’he loved that coat.’

And why shouldn’t I love it, every winter’s day is going to be a new adventure. I see that now.