A million words

A fantastic collection of pictures from the Egyptian Revolution on the Atlantic site here  -- if a picture is worth a thousand words then these must add up to well over a million!

Lizard brains

To the LSE for Paul Dolan's inaugural lecture. Ambitiously he aims to bring behavioural economics together with human happiness. It's a bravura performance to a house packed with people from across the political spectrum. This thinking is, after all, supposed to be one of the engines of the Big Society.

I rather like the fact that Dolan frames his lecture around a song from The Jam -- how young professors are getting, or am I simply getting old? But content wise I am most interested by the insights into how our ancient, instinctive limbic system, lizard brain to me, can be manipulated to any number of ends. He cites a study where a group of human guinea pigs were sent loan offers with randomised interest rates, additionally some of these offers were presented with the picture of an attractive woman. The results showed that people would give up a 1% interest rate advantage to sign up for the loan with the attractive woman. No they weren't all male respondents, nor lesbians, they were a properly balanced sample. The explanation? The lizard brains had taken over matching attractive human with attractive financial deal. So much for the rational decision making of Homo Economicus, much more Homer Economicus. I think this is all fascinating in its implications for economics, for the spurious sciences of consumer research and for the way (as Professor Dolan is working on just now) in which governments influence the public.

Spotted by the road in Kenya

I want to know what "crocodiles educational" are. Can we have them on the National Curriculum?

Meanwhile in Ambridge...

"Ohhh it's windy up on Lakey Hill, or has Joe Grundy been at the Bridge Farm organic pickled turnips again?"


Do I detect a weeny little bit of limelight envy ...? Is Camilla's forthcoming appearance on the Archers -- eating Ian's shortbread at Grey Gables -- a naughty shot across her stepson's bows before The Wedding??

Anyway full marks to her press team  -- Ambridge is the classiest of media ops and the Duchess has a great face for radio.

The straw that breaks the camel's back...

Poor old President Mubarak. His people are revolting, his army is mutineering, his coppers hiding, scoundrels are even attacking mummies in the Cairo Museum. Now we learn he has had to endure a stern telling-off in a phone call from David Cameron.....

30 minutes later

Pigeon now a handful of feathers.

Nature red in tooth and claw

Just watching a buzzard devour pigeon outside my French doors. Not sure whether pigeon pre-deceased its encounter with buzzard -- perhaps it froze to death last night. Anyway not much of it left. Buzzard seems to be supremely uninterested in my presence.

Mr Gove has been reading Dickens' Hard Times...

...which is strange because it's usually the novel Tories like to ignore. Anyway even if he hasn't, his speechwriters clearly have. This is the much admired opening, written in 1854:  

“NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!”


Hard Times, Charles Dickens

BBC Cult of Youth

Alan Yentob (63) has announced that, following a David and Goliath style humiliation over the Miriam O'Reilly case, the BBC will be ultra ultra careful about ageism in the future. There will be lots of special training for executives and monitoring and policies and probably a few layers of compliance management as well. Of course that's how the BBC always responds when it get gets caught out.

The real problem is that the BBC just doesn't get it. The Corporation already has a vast apparatus of "diversity" with tsars and enforcers and committees and monitoring groups; equality policies by the ton; a groaningly large Human Resources Empire -- headed by executives whose pay is in multiples of the Prime Minister's; and a Director General who leads the TV Industry's Cultural Diversity Network. If it still screws up after all this what good are a few more Diversity Awaydays going to do...?

Circa 1971

In the garden in Dartmouth Row, Blackheath. Just to prove I got there with the haircut over three decades before Justin Bieber.

Talent Show

Freya Salkeld on drums...

Chips II

I came across chips nearly as fine as those from the Hind in Bray at a roadside caff on the South Coast near Mombasa, Kenya. 30p a plate. Can't go wrong but quite a trek to satisfy the craving so Heston's number one slot is safe.

This Sporting Life

I am pleased to find that the Kenyans’ favourite cigarette is still called “Sportsman”. Recently in neighbouring Tanzania the name of that same smoke was changed to “Portsman”. The cigarettes remained unchanged as did the rest of the natty orange packaging with its equine branding. The fags are still universally known as “Sports” in both countries.

So what about a rather bizarre new name? Well of course it didn’t just happen. It was a victory for Western health busybodies. No doubt the name change will have been the “output” of some bossy master plan. Goals will have been achieved, targets surpassed, KPIs will be buzzing, a thousand dreary powerpoints will be launched across the development world. And the game won’t be over there, a year on business class to Africa will packed as more “consultants” jet in to justify their existence with evaluations and data gathering. Reports that no-one will ever read will be tapped out on expensive laptops. That’s where your aid money goes, banishing an “s”.

Meanwhile a weary Tanzanian will seek a moment’s solace after a day’s labour cleaning the consultant’s offices or wiping the consultant’s children’s arses or other such services to development, and reach for a “Sports”. What a difference an “s” makes.   

Africa at last

It is very difficult to avoid the Chinese in Africa. They have been there a long while. Graham Greene mentioned the British Intelligence Service’s neuroses over Chinese activity in Zanzibar in The Human Factor. I passed the faded TAZARA railhead in Dar this morning, a 1970s Chinese gift to the peoples of Zambia and Tanzania, or more strategically a route for copper exports out of landlocked Zambia that bypassed apartheid South Africa.

Now it’s business. Scarcely a development goes up without a Chinese name on the construction boards. Take an African flight and the chances are you will be sharing it with a posse of immaculately dressed Chinese businessmen or officials. They drive a bargain as sharp as their suits. The Chinese are here for very self-interested purposes, recognising the long term economic potential of “undiscovered” Africa.  They have of course drawn ire from the Western poverty lobby for their rampant commercialism. I wonder how things will look in fifty years’ time? The selfish Chinese would have to have done remarkably badly to match the disasters of half a century’s Western attempts at development in Africa. We may find that the inscrutable men in suits deliver a lot more to the average African than all the pampered, Land Cruisered poverty parasites we send. 

Alice Beatrice West 1913 - 2010

My grandmother Alice died on Saturday at the grand age of 97. She woke up as normal but faded and passed away in the arms of a carer mid morning.

She really was a link with a different era or indeed eras. Born before the Great War or the Russian Revloution, her parents were Victorians. She came of age during the Great Depression and joined the many setting up home in London's new metroland suburbs.

She saw the abdication crisis, the rule of the dictators and brought her own children up in the Blitz.

She lived through an incredible century. There were properous as well as impoverished times -- she never had it so good with Macmillan and enjoyed a Saga brochure retirement. She enthusiastically took to the new Jerusalem with its foreign holidays, night schools and patio doors but never lost her sense of thrift and self reliance -- she had witnessed the impermanence of civilisations and systems, she had seen them come and go.

I do wonder if we will expereince lifetimes like hers again.