Dickens and Drood

I enjoyed the first episode of BBC's The Mystery of Edwin Drood last night and am looking forward to the concluding part tonight.  Based on Charles Dickens' last novel, unfinished at his death in 1870, it also supplies an ending to the story.

Unlike most other TV adaptations of Dickens, I haven't actually read the book so don't know how close it is to the original but there is some top class acting in it, including from, amongst others, Alun Armstrong, Ron Cook and a particularly impressive Rory Kinnear as the good natured clergyman Rev. Crisparkle.

You can watch the first episode here.

Bingeing on units

The news that we seem to be moving away from daily limits for alcohol should be welcomed.  The reasoning behind daily units was that a small amount of alcohol every day was good for you.  The only problem was that if you multiply the number of recommended daily units (2-3 for women, 4 for men) by seven, it takes you over the weekly limits (14 units for women, 21 for men).

One of the unremarked upon uses of daily units was to define binge drinking as consuming more than twice that amount in a day, that is 4-6 units for a woman or 8 units for a man.  The last time I went to my local health centre for a men's health check, the nurse asked me if I ever (not regularly) drank more than 8 units in a day.  As I said Yes - like most men I do drink more than four pints of beer in a day occasionally - she ticked the box on the computer screen labelled "binge drinker".  So I guess I'm now included in the Government stats that newsreaders come out with when discussing this week's initiative to combat "binge drinking".

Someone I used to work with went for the same men's health check.  The nurse asked him how many pints he drank in a week.  He told her and she said "That's quite a lot, maybe you should cut down a bit" and he thought to himself "Actually, I've told her what I drink in the week, I didn't include weekends."

Plastic people

The news that forty thousand British women may have faulty breast implants, 95% of them fitted by private clinics for cosmetic reasons, highlights the extent to which plastic surgery has become a part of many people's lives.

As well as breast implants, facelifts, nose jobs and stomach reductions have become viewed not just as something self-obsessed Hollywood celebrities spend money on but as a treat that teenagers save up for and couples buy each other as wedding presents.

It's all a long way from the pioneering work done by surgeons in the Second World War on disfigured airmen.  The desire to look like people in film or on TV is of course not new but the ability to routinely turn that desire into reality clearly is.

The thousands of cosmetic procedures carried out every year are a huge waste of the medical expertise gained by surgeons over many years of training and professional experience, expertise which could and should be used for treating people with serious medical conditions.  Doctors can be struck off by the General Medical Council if they carry out medically unnecessary operations for personal profit.  That definition should be extended to plastic surgery which should be limited to post-operative or post-injury reconstruction rather than cosmetic enhancement to fit into the celebrity-obsessed media's model of what people should look like.

Pint to line?

The Oldham Evening Chronicle reports on yet another episode in the seemingly endless discussion on how much head there should be on a pint of beer.

The size of the head on a pint is not something that's really bothered me.  If there's too much, you can ask for a top up.  I even think that in principle you should be able to ask for a sparkler to be removed, although being a fan of this distinctly Northern style of dispense I never would myself. And of course a properly conditioned pint of cask beer will have a head even without a sparkler being used to serve it.

The obvious answer would be to introduce lined glasses with room for a head above the pint line.  But I'm not that bothered that I think pubs should be forced to use them. I would much rather have a proper head and a bit less liquid than a pint of liquid and no head.

Warehouses for the poor?

Neither of housing minister Grant Shapps' announcements on New Year's Day, that the Government intends to prosecute council house tenants who sub-let their homes as well as increasing rents for well-paid tenants, were that surprising.  What did bring me close to putting my fist through the TV screen though was the subsequent discussion on the BBC news channel.  Two journalists - neither of whom I'd guess has much experience of social housing - homed in on the twenty thousand or so council tenants who earn £100,000 and agreed with each other that "council houses weren't meant for people like that".

By "people like that" they meant skilled workers and they are completely wrong.  The idea that council houses were built only for jobless, poor people to live in is not only historically inaccurate but politically poisonous, implying that society has no responsibilty to provide housing for anyone but the most desperate and in doing so should spend as little as possible.

The two things that drove council housing building between the late 1930's and early 1950's were slum clearance and bomb damage in the Second World War.  When my own grandparents moved to the Wythenshawe estate in South Manchester, they saw it as moving to the countryside from inner city Old Trafford.  Manchester City Council even called what would eventually become the biggest housing estate in Europe its Garden Suburb.  My grandad worked as a toolmaker at the giant MetroVicks engineering factory in Trafford Park, my grandmother behind the bar in a pub and later on school dinners.  Like their neighbours in the full employment and increasing affluence of the 50's and 60's, they bought a car, a TV and a fridge and saw their children go on holiday abroad. The idea that they constituted a social underclass is a joke.

The idea that only unemployed or poor people should live in social housing has two roots.  One is the United States where public housing in cities like New York and Chicago was designed, as the poet Carl Sandburg put it, as "warehouses for the poor". The other dates from the Thatcher government of the early 1980's which simultaneously ran down manufacturing industry and sold off council houses so that in the end many estates did become largely peopled by deprived and jobless tenants.  The idea that that was the intention from the beginnning is far from the truth though and the BBC housing correspondent who claimed that it was should read about the history of what he purports to be an expert on before he speaks.

Vox pop vacuity

This week's shootings in County Durham led to a recurrence of the pointless media exercise where journalists hit the streets to ask people what they think of the incident and whether they were surprised by it.

The dialogue always runs as follows:

Journo: what's been the reaction in the town?

Local: we're all very shocked, this kind of thing doesn't normally happen here.

Journo: what about the killer?

Local: nice guy, kept himself to himself.

I'm genuinely bemused as to what news editors think they're adding to the story by broadcasting such banal guff.  If I were stopped in such a situation, I'd be tempted to answer "Pretty laid back, we have a massacre here most weeks." and "We all knew he was a nutter but no one would listen".

Death at the sales

Seydou Diarrassouba, the teenager from South London stabbed on Oxford Street on Boxing Day in what appears to have been an gang-related incident, and Anuj Bidve, the postgraduate student shot in Salford in the early hours of the same day and whose killing is being treated as racially motivated by the police, were as far apart as you can imagine. One a petty criminal awaiting trial for theft; the other a middle-class Indian with a well-paid career ahead of him.  But their deaths were united in one respect: consumerism.

Both men were killed as a result of the Boxing Day sales: Diarrassouba was stabbed after an argument broke out out in a trainer shop and Bidve at 1.30 a.m. while walking through the Ordsall estate in Salford in order to be at the front of the queue at a shop in Manchester city centre.

The BBC and other media outlets talked of the "traditional Boxing Day sales", despite them having only started in the last decade.  Politicians also seem confused about whether consumerism is a good thing or not.  Last summer, it was blamed as one of the factors that led to the looting of shops in riots across England. Now, the ability of the British economy to avoid recession is apparently dependent on the amount of money people spend in high street shops.  The supposedly liberal Guardian even ran an editorial blaming the train drivers' union ASLEF for putting "thousands of jobs at stake" after its members struck on Boxing Day over bank holiday pay.