Former England Star Makes A Fool Of Himself

Flintoff questions Atherton's ability to commentate in expletive filled attack

Flintoff is wrong, just as Pieterson was wrong to have a go at Nick Knight.  The argument that only someone with equal or better skills to the person being criticised is illogical and fatuous.  I do not have children of my own, yet I can tell the difference between well behaved and badly behaved children.  I have never played football to a decent level, yet I can still see the difference between a really good team, Real Madrid for example, and a fairly average side, such as Bradford City. I do not need to have played Premiership football to be able to criticise Leeds United's defensive shortcomings last season, I just need a basic understanding of the game and some experience of watching it. Flintoff's argument is one that would preclude the overwhelming majority of us from being to talk about anything at all.

'Freddy' was a good cricketer, and had moments of glorious greatness on the field of play.  Off the field though his alcohol inspired buffoonery is as much a part of his reputation as his sporting prowess is. When it comes to criticising fellow players, whether ex or not, perhaps Flintoff should have kept a lower profile, in abusing the 37.69 test average Atherton for criticising the then form of the 48.54 average Cook, perhaps Freddy should kept in mind the fact that his own test average was only 31.77. Whatever Flintoff felt about Atherton's on-air comments, he should have presented his case in a much more measured and calm fashion, calling a former England captain a "fucking prick" at a public function is very poor form and does Flintoff's personal reputation no good at all.

Big Wages Ensures Best Performance

This is the argument that the sort of people who receive huge salaries and bonuses keep telling us, that they can only attract the best and most able candidates for a job if they are free to pay what they determine that the job is worth. So for the last couple of decades banks and financial institutions have been mostly free to pay their top executives what they will, and it has been a huge amount.

By their own reckoning then, the financiers and merchant bankers must have been able to employ the very best, the absolute cream of the crop, the finest and most astute minds available to the business fraternity. And yet the economy is a staggering shambles lurching from one financial disaster to the next.  How can they continually claim that their salary and bonus scheme argument holds water ? Or is it just the case that if we've got a bowl of rose scented water filled with gold flakes, then it doesn't matter if the rest of you are getting pissed on ?

Trickle Down Dries Up

Trickle down economics, I think that is just another way of saying "We're already quite rich and we'd like to keep it."

If you paid me £210,000 a year as opposed to what I get now then some of that money would trickle down and out into the general economy.  I would dine out more, I would go on more holidays and visit more galleries, museums and other places of interest. I might buy a newer car and other toys, a tablet computer, a new camera, whatever the new 'shiny thing make people happy' consumer item comes on the market. So yes indeed, some other people would see the benefit of my enormous wage.

If however you paid me £30,000 and paid another 6 people £30,000 each, then another 6 people and their families would be doing quite well.  I would think that a higher percentage of that £210,000 would be put into the general economy as seven people spending money are likely to consume more than one wealthy person.

Trickle down economics is therefore largely rubbish. What people need is jobs and a regular wage.

Stupid Ilkley People

I had gone to Golden Butts Recycling centre, my car filled with half a dozen bin bags of cans and plastic bottles and as I was unloading my car a black 4WD pulls up and a lady gets out with a carrier bag.  The lady stopped to read the instructions on the side of the plastics container, which clearly states "No yoghurt pots" and then proceeded to  post dozens of yoghurt pots into the skip. Stupid.

Just as stupid is the lady I once saw there pulling up in her Toyota Landcruiser Planetdestroyer, who then got a single empty bottle of Ty Nant from the boot to recycle.  1 trip to recycling centre in giant petrol guzzling 4WD to recycle a single bottle = stupid.

While I am having a general rant about the people who live in my town, how about Mums driving their children to school.  I often hear people say that the roads are far busier than they used to be and that consequently it isn't as safe as it used to be for children to walk to school.  Well, if you stand at the Dalesway traffic lights in a morning as all the Ilkley kids are being driven to school you will be able to see for yourself why the roads are so dangerous - it's Ilkley Mums talking on their hand held mobile phones while driving through town with a car load of kids.  Seriously folks, who can afford a Lexus RX450 but cannot afford a hands free kit to go with it ?

A Plague on Evangelical Vegetarians

Image by robpurdie via Flickr

I appreciate that almost all of us have things we believe in, or traditions we have carried on for years, or political or social goals that we believe, deep down, if the rest of the world thought and did the same the same as us then the rest of the world would be a far better place. Personally, I would like to see a much broader appreciation of hard rock music, the introduction of Neal Gaiman's Sandman as a compulsory part of all English literature courses and the police to be allowed to arrest any adult caught wearing a tracksuit in public when the wearing of said clothing is not immediately related to a sporting event. But that's just me.

I know a lot of people get upset at people who have faith, they hate proselytizing. The very worst single belief people though are the ardent vegetarians and associated animal rights folk. Theirs is the one and only true path, they have achieved perfection and nirvana in their views and all others, meat eaters and leather weathers in particular, are unthinking souls lost in the limbo of uncaring and harmful ways. Yet, they can be saved, especially if you bang on about it for long enough.

My views on vegetarianism and its ultra orthodox relative veganism are the same as my views on religion. I am quite happy for you to hold whatever view you want, but once you have stated your view and someone else has stated they are not in agreement you should not persevere with explaining your viewpoint until the cows come home – of their own accord, only if they wish to spend the night in a barn, and not to be cruelly exploited for the purposes of extracting the precious gift that is mother’s milk.

Militant vegetarians always try to claim a moral high ground by continually pointing out the various cruelties involved in meat production. They do so though by always taking the most extreme examples they can find. Whilst engaged in a rather one sided ‘discussion’ recently I was repeatedly informed that if I would only watch a particular YouTube video showing chicken factory workers being cruel to their flock then I would never want to eat chicken again. This is false and fuzzy logic, I have in fact seen the footage in question and what I desire after seeing it is for nasty people to stop being unnecessarily cruel to chickens and using them as footballs. Not for a moment does this sort of thing turn me off from being a meat eater; a ‘lovely roast hen with Yorkshires and gravy’ is still on the menu for me.

If you wanted to show the health and farming benefits of being wholly or partly vegetarianism I would be much more willing to listen. I think the Meat Free Monday movement is quite a decent idea, there are lots of us who should perhaps eat less meat and less extensive and intensive animal rearing would be beneficial in parts of the world. Perhaps the idea could be extended into Fish Only Friday and Tofu Thursday, but only if people want to join in.

I dislike the way some vegetarians try to demonise meat eating, the whole Meat Is Murder moral high ground thinking is rubbish. People are not evil because they enjoy a bacon butty or Big Mac. They might not be particularly well educated about the meat they eat though, so there is always room for education.

People should be allowed to eat meat, meat is wonderful. Last night chef Rob and myself made some slow honey and chilli slow braised belly pork with crackling and it was truly wonderful. As some fundamentalist vegans would have it though, this was the act of two evil men; an innocent animal lost its life just to provide a family with a meal.

I will be quite honest here, and this is the bit that might upset some people. I hold that animals and people are two different things. Animals are not people, they do not have to be accorded the same rights and respect that I would grant to any human. However, I see no reason at all why any food animal should be put to any unnecessary suffering. Beasts farmed for food should live decent lives free from pain and suffering and the killing should be accomplished in the most humane manner possible.

Many of us should perhaps eat less meat, bought from less intensive farming styles. Yorkshire Dales lamb would be an example of a good choice due to its non-intensive farming methods, while artificially fattened beef is less good. Neither of these, nor hardly any other meat choice is evil. The moral high ground claimed by the militant vegetarians is not a high ground at all; they have taken a value judgement and made a decision based on their own moral standards, as I have done. Neither of us stands above the other in moral terms, it only looks that way from your narrow point of view.

British Schools Becoming More Risk Averse

Image via WikipediaBritish bulldog 'vanishing from schools'

We played bulldog at school, and at cubs and scouts.  We went on long hikes up steep mountains, we did potholing, climbing, parascending and chess.  We read books and we went on cross country runs where we were out of sight of the teachers.  We built fires safely with the Scout leaders, and unsafely on our own.  We ran and vaulted walls and fences, and sometimes we fell and hurt ourselves but mostly we did not and we learned to judge what was safe and what was risky.

What we did though, through a process of trial and error, was to learn to understand and accept a certain level of risk in our lives.  As Scouts on a camp in the Lake District, we all understood that it was fairly dangerous to go scree bombing (running full tilt downhill on a loose scree slope), but at the same time it was all the more fun because of that edge of danger, and although Mike Lambert ended up in casualty getting stitches in a cut hand, the rest of us still did it again on the following day.

I have broken my hand by falling down a hill, I've injured my back and my knee when out hill walking, but I am 43 and in a lifetime of hiking these small hurts are far outweighed by the pleasure I have gained from day after day on the hills and peaks.  I solo walk, sometimes in weather conditions that some people would consider dangerous, but starting as a young child I was encouraged to learn the skills and gain the experiences that enable me now to judge the boundaries of what is safe for me and what is not.

Every time I go walking there is a risk that I could slip and injure myself, should this prevent me hiking ? Of course not.  There is a young girl in my town who is paralyzed from the neck down after falling from a climbing frame, should this mean that we ban climbing frames for children ? Absolutely not.  We need children to have a certain level of freedom and risk in their lives in order that they may make informed decisions for themselves as they grow up.

Of course it is painful for a parent to see their child hurt in any way, but the point of rearing children is that they eventually become adults, children mustn't become fearful and timid as adults, afraid of everything that contains a potential risk.  As adults you need to know that yes, breaking an arm is fairly painful, but 30 years on I cannot feel the pain, but I can remember that day we hiked up Whernside in the snow and slid and fell on our bums all the way down.  It was a risky and potentially dangerous day, but it was also great fun.