Symbolic Forest

My mother is rushing around tonight in a bit of a panic. Being a regular churchgoer, and church organiser, Christmas is obviously a busy time of year for her. Tonight, though, the mother and all the other church organisers are all rushing round in a panic, searching all the cupboards at the church, searching each other’s houses and attics, searching and searching and saying to each other: “well, where did you last see them?”

Being a church, they have to have a nativity scene in one of the side chapels off the nave. It’s all set up already, with the stable and the animals. Mary and Joseph get added on Saturday, I think, and then the Baby Jesus on Sunday morning.^* At the moment, though, there’s a slight problem. Well, a major problem, when it comes to setting up your nativity scene. The Holy Family have gone missing.

* Or possibly at Midnight Mass – not being a believer myself I’m not sure on the details.

Keyword noise: Yuletide, Christmas, church, nativity, nativity scene, The Mother.

It’s the shortest day. From now on, things start to get warmer and lighter again.

I wish we could celebrate in the traditional way, by burning a Yule log to bring us health and happiness. Unfortunately, we don’t have a hearth, so that’s out of the window. We’ll have to make do with holly, mistletoe, friendship and over-eating. For me, the solstice is when the festive season properly starts.

Keyword noise: Yuletide, Yule log, celebration, Christmas, festive, seasons, solstice, winter.

The other day, Tim Boucher linked to Colleague M’s ghost story, in which M’s sister Lydia had a bit of trouble with a pair of argumentative ghosts apparently haunting her house. When I first heard about the ghosts, I was hoping I’d be able to post regular updates on the story; but there don’t seem to have been any updates recently. I asked M if anything had happened, and was told that everything has settled down quietly again. No more ghostly voices on the phone, no more things going missing, no more possibly-possessed cats. So, Lydia is able to sleep at night again.

It did get me thinking, though. There’s something I’m tempted to try, but it would be rather evil. I want to try to be a psychic myself.

Not a real one, you understand. However, it should be very easy to pretend to be one, if I want. I’ve still not met Lydia herself, but I do know rather a lot about her, and her family, from M. Secondly, Lydia’s job includes shifts on an enquiry-desk type of place. In other words, it’s easy to get to talk to her – all you have to do is think of a question. All I would then have to do is start telling her the things my intuition was telling me. “You seem to be a mother – I can see a lot of love in your household – but there’s a lot of strain too. Are you a single mother?” And all that sort of thing. The question is: how far would I be able to push this before she starts smelling something fishy? How much would I have to prove I know about her? Or would she just assume I could genuinely sense things about her?

Should I try this? Or would it just be too evil of me?

Keyword noise: Colleague M, fraud, ghosts, ghost stories, gullible, misleading, psychic.

The new Tory leader has jumped right in to the job, and is trying to persuade Liberal Democrats to cross the floor and join his party. Presumably he thinks that the Tory party itself has no hope of attracting new blood – or that politics itself is always a zero-sum game – so is trying to mind-meld. Maybe it’s working. Although there’s sometimes national-level talk of Labour and the Lib Dems working on a similar wavelength, out in the country they are usually fighting like rabid wolves, and Lib Dem-Tory alliances are far more common. In fact, my own local council – the worst local council in the country – is one.

Not only does Cameron’s plan imply he’s given up on attracting new people into politics; but it also makes it look as if he’s already given up on winning the next election outright. His current “I’m more liberal than the Liberals” positioning is paving the way for a hung parliament in 2009 or 2010. In case that happens, he wants to be first in line in the Lib Dems’ doorway. He seems to be hoping that modern politics is all about words, not deeds.^* If Cameron says: “I’m a liberal!” he hopes that the voters will all believe him, even though there is little evidence for it in his present and past policies.Mind you, there’s little evidence there for any sort of true conviction at all.

* to be fair, this is after all what governments have been getting away with for the past 25 years.

Keyword noise: alliance, coalition, David Cameron, government, Liberal Democrats, liberalism, local government, Tories.

The cruel hoax TV series Space Cadets, which I wrote about recently is due to finish tonight. The contestants have successfully been made to look like idiots; and sadly, no aliens have been caught on camera.

As nobody went into space, you might not expect aliens to be caught on camera. However, as it happens, a huge number of UFO enthusiasts do believe that aliens have visited the site of the *Space Cadets* set. Twenty-five years ago this month, in fact. The incident – which has become known as the Rendlesham Forest incident – is often described as a classic UFO sighting, by impeccable witnesses,^* even though it’s more likely to have been a sighting of a lighthouse, rather than a UFO. I’m slightly disappointed that, as far as I noticed, a mention of it wasn’t slipped into the programme.^** If nothing else, the Rendlesham Forest incident is a wonderful example of how eye-witness reports can change over time, and how rumours can be spread. And, of course, how some people will believe almost anything.

It’s a shame that no aliens – if there were aliens, which is rather unlikely – decided to come back for a 25th-anniversary visit just whilst a film crew was in the area. It’s also a shame that the Space Cadets contestants weren’t a bit more alert – and/or paranoid, of course. Personally, I’m hoping that at least one of them will go a bit mad when everything is revealed at the Live Finale. It really would be can’t-stop-watching TV.

Update: sadly, they didn’t. They all seemed, as you might expect, rather baffled and overcome.

* a group of USAF airmen on two successive nights.

** although, in last night’s show, I was quite pleased to notice a joke about Johnny Vaughan’s time in prison.

Keyword noise: alien, Bentwaters, game shows, gullible, hoax, Johnny Vaughan, lighthouse, RAF Bentwaters, reality tv, Rendlesham Forest, Space Cadets, Suffolk, television, UFO, Woodbridge.

Today’s big news: the Audit Commission has published the latest Comprehensive Performance Assessment, which sounds like a new teenage exam but is actually about local government. More specifically, how well each council is doing at standard local government stuff like mending potholes and emptying your bins.^*

Now, many councils didn’t do very well in the CPA. However, I felt a perverse pride in the fact that only one council in the country scored a nice round zero. *My* local council. Hurrah! If we can’t be good at something, we may as well be famous for being spectacularly bad at it.

The council themselves, of course, are saying that things are actually a lot better *now* than when the Auditors were doing the actual research, which is a handy thing for them to say because it’s almost entirely unprovable. If there’s one thing not many politicians will say, it’s: “well, yes, now you mention it, we are a bit rubbish at everything.”

* I might be simplifying a little here.

Keyword noise: audit, Audit Commission, Comprehensive Performance Assessment, council, CPA, local government, Grimsby, Lincolnshire, North East Lincolnshire, pride.

Well, I thought I was going to have a nice relaxing Christmas. It looks like I’m going to be going into work at least once over the holiday, though. Not just to do my own job, but to shift a load of desks around. The building is being Rearranged, and lots of people get to move. I’m not moving myself, but apparently I have to be there to help push desks, and re-patch the phone panel so everyone’s phone lines are properly rerouted.

“How is it going to work?” someone asked.

“I’m going to bring a stereo in,” I said, “and a few CDs. The first day back after Christmas, I’ll play the CDs, and you all run around the building. When the music stops, you grab the desk you want, and the last people left standing have to share with the annoying manager in Room Three.”

Keyword noise: moving, reorganisation, musical chairs.

I know it’s only a few hours since the Buncefield oil storage depot exploded, but I’d like to jump in already and hazard a guess as to what the primary cause was. The immediate cause will no doubt be something like a leaky joint and an unexpected spark; but the primary cause will probably end up being reactionary maintenance policies: engineers being instructed not to replace anything until after it’s already broken.

This is entirely a guess on my part, I must say. However, most of the fuel stored burning at Buncefield is piped there from the Lindsey refinery, owned and run by Total, the same company that runs Buncefield. And, coincidentally, just the other day I was chatting to a friend of mine who works there. Total had just been fined £12,500 for a serious oil leak at Lindsey, and we started talking about how it had been caused.

“We don’t do preventative maintenance any more,” he told me. “Lindsey’s idea of maintenance is: wait until something starts leaking, then patch it up.” Which, when you don’t catch it in time, leads to nasty leaks. Some of them, like the one at Lindsey, are just pollution problems; others go up in flames. If the sort of maintenance regime used at Lindsey is standard at Buncefield too, it’s easy to guess what the cause of today’s explosion may have been.

Keyword noise: Buncefield, explosion, Hemel Hempstead, Lindsey Oil Refinery, maintenance, news, oil spill, refinery, safety, Total.

Like, I imagine, many other people, I watched the first episode of the new Channel Four series Space Cadets with a slightly queasy feeling. If you’re foreign and haven’t heard about it – or if you’ve been in outer space, of course – it’s a show where former drug-dealer Johnny Vaughan^* makes fun of the gullible and easily fooled, by persuading them they’re going to be Britain’s first reality-TV astronauts.

It’s a rather nasty hoax to pull on someone, even if they are a bit gullible. It’s only going to work – I mean, it’s only going to draw the audience in – if the contestants are so stupid that we all feel sorry for them; or are so nasty that we want them all to look like pillocks. At the moment that’s impossible to tell, because episode one – which was all about the audition and selection of the contestants – barely featured the actual contestants at all. Instead, most of the screen time was given over to the production stooges, and their efforts to look like genuine applicants.

I’m going to keep watching, even though I’m doubtful about the entire ethics of the thing. For one thing – like nearly all “reality tv” game shows – the first episode looked as if it will be completely unrepresentative of the series. For another, I’m going to be rooting for the contestants to see through the hoax – even if that does mean they won’t win any of the prize money.

* Referring to him as the former drug-dealer Johnny Vaughan is a rather mean and childish thing to do; but then, Space Cadets is a rather mean and childish show.

Keyword noise: Channel 4, game shows, gullible, hoax, Johnny Vaughan, reality tv, Space Cadets, television.

(yes, this is the semi-regular political post. Feel free not to read it)

The Conservative Party have had a bit of a problem in the past few years. Apart from the big problem of not winning elections, they have a bit of a problem with credibility. That’s because they have two types of high-level politicians. The sort who were around in the last government, and are thus tarred with the memory of all sorts of bad decisions and dodgy policies. Or, alternatively, the fresh-faced new sort who you’ve never heard of.

So, to get around this, they have apparently come up with a Cunning Plan, and found a leader who is both at once! Hurrah! He isn’t just fresh-faced and youthful.^* He isn’t just somebody you’ve never heard of. He’s someone you’ve never heard of, who just happens to be closely associated with some of the Major government’s worst moments too! Jackpot! Clearly, this is an amazing election-winning strategy which will lead to unstoppable success.

* Fresh-faced and youthful in both political and Tory contexts, I mean. He’s not youthful in the real world.

Keyword noise: David Cameron, Tories.