Recently in ranting and raving Category

It's not often I make a "serious" post on this blog, probably because I tend to spend most of my time just trying to stay afloat rather than form opinions on things, but this is something that's been bothering me for a while. So I thought I'd write about it. Here we go:

What's the point of religion? Do people who pray every day really believe that their lives are made better by the act of prayer? Or do they just believe that if they don't pray then their lives will be made much worse?

I know that people take comfort in the words of the bible. Is that because they can't think of a solution to their problems on their own? They have to turn to a "how to do it" manual?

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that there is a God. Only one God, and he is omnipresent, and omnipotent. He knows everything that we are thinking, everything that has ever happened and everything that will happen. So, by extension, he knows if you're inherently a good person, or inherently an evil person. He knows that good people can occasionally do bad things, and feel sorry about those things, and he knows that bad people can occasionally do good things (although I have no idea if they feel good about those things or not. But God knows. If he exists). Anyway, feeling good about yourself or feeling sorry for yourself does not change your inherent nature. So, given that God knows all this, and given that we are going to go to heaven or hell based on whether we are inherently good or evil, will praying make the slightest bit of difference?

Let's also say, for the sake of argument, that Bob Geldof does not believe in God. Does that mean that he is going to hell because he is a non-believer? But Bob is an inherently good person, he saw that something was wrong with the world and set about changing it, improving the lives of millions of people. So should he go to heaven because he is an inherently good person? (Actually I wrote this a while ago and chose Bob as an example here because he's pretty well-known as being a "good person". I had no idea if he believes in God or not - according to this interview, he doesn't).

I'm not sure if I believe in God, or heaven, or hell. I do know that it is better to be a good person than an evil person, that treating fellow human beings with respect and kindness will have its paybacks. What goes around, comes around. But just because I don't go to a specified building at a specified time of the week, and read specific words from a specific book, does that make me a bad person? You can teach children right from wrong without touching the bible (or any religious writings). They learn what they need to know from fairy tales, fables, ghost stories and all the other stuff that kids lap up. My son knew that lying was bad after he watched Pinocchio, we didn't have to quote the bible to him to teach him that.

The human brain is a remarkable thing. Given enough time, it will usually sort out its own problems. When we sleep, when we dream (or daydream), this is our brain making sense of the outside world. If you have a problem rattling about in your head, a moral issue or whatever, how do you go about solving it? Do you write out a list of pros and cons, an action plan? Do you go to church or wherever and ask God for guidance? Or do you sleep on it? I would wager that whichever option you chose, you'd come up with a solution to the problem within a few hours. Now, did you logically work out a solution? Did God answer your prayers? Or did your brain make sense of the problem while you were sleeping?

I have a feeling that people feel comfortable with prayer because it acts as a way of distracting the mind from the normal day-to-day problems, and gives it some space to sort things out on its own. Meditation does the same thing, I would imagine yoga does too. The brain also has time to think about the day's problems while you're at the gym. So if prayer is simply a means to distract the brain, why not go for a walk instead?

My parents are Jewish and although no-one in my family is observant I was sent to a Jewish school. I learned how to read hebrew and how to say the prayers. But I don't remember being taught all that much about what the prayers actually mean. So when I go to synagogue (about once every 10 years if current stats are anything to go by) I can still just about read the hebrew words and tell where the rabbi is up to, but the rest of it is like watching a foreign film with a blindfold on. And I get the impression that 98% of people that go to synagogue when I go (Jewish new year and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement) are only going so that other people can see that they went. I don't think anyone really goes to atone for their sins, because the most obvious sin is that they haven't set foot inside a synagogue for the last 12 months.

There are many different religions in the world, each believing different things. Some religions are more tolerant than others of people that either don't believe, or believe something different. Over the course of history, how many people have died as a result of religious fighting? If people are praying to God and calling for an end to war, do you think he's listening?

Here in the UK we have what is supposed to be one of the best broadcasting corporations in the world, the BBC. In its time the BBC has produced some of the most compelling dramas, documentaries and news reporting ever seen. It is funded by a licence fee - everyone who owns a television set has to pay £120 a year for a licence that allows them to watch the BBC. It's the licence fee that allows the BBC to remain commercial-free, and you need one if your television set is capable of picking up the BBC's signal, regardless of whether or not you actually watch it.

In recent years the BBC has been accused of "dumbing-down", going for the lowest common denominator in the battle for ratings, and letting quality slide. The lineup is full of cookery shows, home makeover shows and quiz shows. If you switch on your tv set these days you can't tell if you're watching the BBC or some cheap tat cable channel.

This evening I watched a programme on BBC2 and I'm thinking of asking for my money back. It was called "Mechannibals" and the premise is that two families battle it out to build a contraption to achieve a particular goal. This is not exactly a completely new idea, shows like Scrapheap Challenge and The Great Egg Race have done similar things in the past - but the twist with this show is that they families have to use what they find in their own homes to make the contraptions. I bet some tv show commissioner was watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and when it came to the scene where Caractacus Potts came in to the living room and took out the back of the fireplace while Grandpa was reading the kids a story he thought "That's a good idea for a show!"

This week they had to build a machine to destroy a garden shed. In a rare show of generosity, the garden sheds were provided by the show's producers. The families set about making their shed-cushing-machines, cannibalising everything from washing machines, tumble dryers (a brand new one they've only had for two weeks in this case), the kitchen table and chairs, to the kids beds', toys and bicycles. The winners get all their cannibalised items replaced with new ones, the losers get a toolbox. And they have to replace everything they've trashed on their own.

This is voyeuristic television at its worst. We are invited to watch as the men of the house take their wives and children's belongings and rip them to pieces, just for an opportunity to appear in a tv programme. At various points in the "show" we were treated to seeing women and children reduced to tears as more and more of their possessions were broken up by the single-minded men. Here's a sample of a conversation between one of the men and a teenage girl (I can't remember now if the girl was his daughter or his niece):

Girl (on discovering that her bed had been taken to pieces): "Where am I going to sleep tonight?"
Man: "We'll find somewhere"
Girl: "I'm not sleeping on the floor! And I'm not sleeping on the camping bed!"
Man: "There is another option."
Girl: "What's that?"
Man: "You could move out...."

At another point in the show the presenter had to run round to the side of the house to comfort the wife after she's discovered that her pergola was being pulled apart to make a base for the crane (their idea was to winch the toilet high into the air and then drop it on the garden shed). I wouldn't have wanted to be the presenter in this case. What could she have said? "Cheer up love, it's only a game show. I know they're wrecking your entire house, but hey, you get to be on TV!"

I remember a similar show where people had to nominate their friends and partners most annoying possessions to be destroyed - the friends and partners had to fight to keep their stuff. There were no prizes, you either got to keep your property or you didn't. There was one show where a wife had nominated her husbands greenhouse. She hated the greenhouse because he spent more time in it than he spent with her. She was in her 50's I think and he was in his 60's or 70's. The greenhouse was his pride and joy. I think you can guess where this is leading - he lost and the greenhouse was chopped to pieces in front of his eyes. The crowd roared and cheered and the poor bloke was reduced to tears - it was truly awful to watch. I've spent the last hour trying to find the name of this godawful show, but I've drawn a blank. It may have been Beat the Crusher, but the description for that show only mentions cars getting destroyed.

I can't stand programmes like this. Even the "be a pop star" type of show, that seems to be so popular these days, I can't bear any of them. Where's the attraction in seeing someone else's hopes crushed? Yet millions of people tune in every week to hear some poor sap do his (or her) best, thinking they've got what it takes to become rich and famous, only for Simon Cowell to tell them that they're utter shite and they'd be better off under the wheels of a bus, or something. They burst into tears and go home (probably via the doctors for a shot of some anti-depressant) and the audience whoop and cheer.

And still we have to pay the television licence to watch.

Is this a good time to mention that my brother and sister-in-law will be on televison tomorrow night, as two of their biker friends (who just live round the corner from me, actually) are being featured on Wife Swap? Don't miss it, it'll be riveting, and not at all voyeuristic, oh no. Channel 4, Monday night, 9pm. Followed by Wife Swap - The Aftermath, E4, 10pm.

Last night I upgraded my Yahoo Messenger to the latest version, version 7. Admittedly it was very late in the day and I was trying to write my review of the Heaton Park show at the time, so I wasn't in the best mood to be doing two things at once. However there are some features in Messenger 7 I like, and some features I don't like. One of the things I didn't like about it was that it wanted to install lots of extra features by default, so I had to go in to the install routine and tell it no, I didn't want to pop-up blocker (I already have one in Firefox) and no, I didn't want the yahoo toolbar and no, I didn't want to change my home page. What is it with some companies that they feel they have to take over your computer, to give you a "complete browsing experience". I can live without all that.

They've also introduced this new thing called Yahoo 360. It gives you a blog, a link to photo albums, a friend network, links to RSS feeds and so on. It's actually quite impressive, provided you want to do things the Yahoo way, and you're prepared to limit your readership to people with Yahoo accounts. Again, I don't want to do that, I want my blog to be read by anyone, and I want to customise the way it looks. So I can live without that as well.

There are two features we tried out in Messenger 7 last night that I did like, though. The voice communication part of it is better than before, the sound came through clear as a bell, and you don't have to press to talk. Depending on how sensitive your microphone is, the person you're talking to may be able to hear you typing, but that's not the end of the world. They've also improved the file sending capabilities. I share a lot of photos with other members of my family, and before we used to use ICQ to send the pics forwards and backwards. I tried to get everyone to use hello, but for some reason that didn't catch on. With the older version of Messenger you had to send files one at a time, with this one you can drag and drop a whole bunch of files onto the chat window and it will send them all.

But for a little Instant Messaging program I think it's now getting too big for its boots. It's got a radio player, games, weather links, a calendar, a link to 360 so you can blog from your IM program..... it's all too much. Some people may like the idea of having everything in one place, heck, even I like the idea of having everything in one place, but I don't like the idea of having one program or one company providing all my content or deciding how I go about doing things. Who knows what they're keeping tabs on. It's like a supermarket giving out loyalty cards so they can monitor what you're buying. Ok, so you may get some targeted money-off vouchers every quarter, but I like to keep myself to myself thank you very much. I don't want people monitoring what i do online, where I drive, what I buy, what films and music I like and so on. If I want to give out some information about myself, I'll give it freely, but I don't want someone spying on me thank you very much.

Sometimes I wish we could go back to the good old days when you used a browser for the web, a chat program for chatting, a search engine for searching, a music program for music...... the edges are all getting blurred now and you end up with Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ, mIRC, Yahoo toolbar, Google toolbar, IE, Firefox, Windows Media Player, WinAmp and so on and do forth. No wonder hard drives are getting bigger and bigger and processors are getting faster and faster. They need to in order to keep up with all this bloat that people keep ramming down our throats.

I was must more in the mood for ranting and raving last night. I've slept since then and calmed down a bit now. Try Messenger if you want (be careful what you choose to install though - I've no idea how well some the features like the toolbar will uninstall afterwards) and if I'm on you can try talking to me. My ID is daniel_freedman2002. Guess when I set up my Yahoo ID?

According to this news story, as many as 1000 people were killed in a stampede when panic spread over rumours of suicide bombers. If there were actually any suicide bombers in the crowd, and they had managed to blow themselves up, there's no way they'd have been able to take this many people with them.

Let's hope this is not the start of a worrying new trend.

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And in a follow-up to a story I commented on a couple of weeks ago, I present these links
Original story
Follow-up 1
Follow-up 2

This just beggars belief. He doesn't need a community order and a drug rehabilitation order. He'll ignore those. Just as he'll ignore the order to pay compensation to the shop owner. He needs a short sharp shock. As I said in my original post, he should be put into solitary for 20 days (one day for each year of his life) and then after that I reckon he should be put on army basic training. That should get him off the drugs and knock some sense into him. I'm not in favour of just locking people away and letting them fester in their own stupidity, I'm in favour of rehabilitation. Give people an opportunity to shine, and they will. This kid just hasn't had any opportunities yet.

The Manchester Evening News reported yesterday:

TODAY the Manchester Evening News appeals to our readers to help catch the city's dumbest hoodie.

The hapless hooded thief was well and truly caught on camera after he staged a raid in David Arathoon's CCTV camera shop.

The culprit was filmed from every possible angle as he posed as a customer and asked to look at some cameras before snatching a £700 laptop from the counter and running out of the shop in Dale Street.

Some of the comments at the end of the story are interesting. Here's my take on the story.

Like it or not, the clothes you wear tell people a lot about you. Bikers have a similar "bad image" with the leather jacket look that scares some people, and hoodies are also now getting a bad reputation. Front-page stories of a boy in a hoodie robbing a camera shop is going to do nothing whatsoever to repair that bad reputation.

Someone else commented that CCTV cameras are useless at preventing crime. With the youth of today absolutely nothing is going to stop them committing a crime, even the very real possibility of getting caught. However, that's not going to deter the "feral youth" of today. These kids treat prison as a holiday - a place where they get three meals a day and a bed for the night. The problem today is that the punishment does not fit the crime. Someone pointed out that all he's going to get is a slapped wrist. They're probably right - that's no deterrent at all. I'm not suggesting we go to the extreme of chopping hands off or anything like that, but a month in solitary confinement with basic food and a mattress in the floor should at least give him time to reflect on his actions. As an aside, there was a programme on TV earlier this week called Supernanny. In order to change the behaviour of a wayward nine-year-old, the nanny put her in a "reflection room" for nine minutes (one minute for each year of her age) so that she had time to think about what she'd done. This is solitary confinement in disguise, and the fact that it's in a dining room and not a prison cell doesn't make any difference. After a while, the child stopped sulking and started to think about what she'd done to get herself put away for a nine-minute stretch, and eventually she realised that being sent away on her own was no fun at all and so she started to behave herself.

If this hoodie is put away in a room on his own for a few days (one day for each year of his age) surely he'll decide that the punishment is no fun? Of course, he's got to get himself caught first....

Wow, it's been a hell of a week for London, hasn't it? Last weekend there was the flagship Live8 show in Hyde Park and the finals of the tennis at Wimbledon. On Wednesday it is announced that London will host the 2012 Olympics. And then on Thursday morning the terrorist bombings. I live 200 miles north of London, and the nearest big city to me was bombed by the IRA in 1996 (funnily enough, I was living near London at the time), so I can't speak from experience about how I would react if I had been near one of the attacks. I just received the following in an email, the sender says he found it on a livejournal post (although he doesn't say which one). I present it here as an overall view of the British reaction to the attacks yesterday. I've no idea how genuine these quotes are, but a lot of them do seem to echo my views on the matter, and some of them are far more eloquent and to the point that I could ever be. At the end, I've put a link to the a BBC news page showing photographs taken by people caught in the blasts. Read the quotes first, then look at the photos. You'll see what we're talking about.

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Coping with emergencies the British way: The nearest branch of Pret has sold out of chocolate cake.
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Photo of the statue of Edith Cavell, British nurse who was killed in the first world war:
"Patriotism is not enough: I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone".
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These terrorists are rubbish.

They'll be caught next week, having successfully demonstrated that the British react to terrorism with indifference. We grew up with it, you see. What with this being a civilised country, they will not receive the death penalty, but be locked up for the rest of their lives, to be regularly sodomised by other inmates while they slowly realise that their interpretation of their religion is a pile of old hokum. Whoops. Meanwhile, I'll be out in London, partying.
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On days like this, the music radio stations play sad music - if they play any music at all. I turned on the radio in the bathroom when I was taking my shower just now, and they were playing One by U2.

HAVEN'T WE SUFFERED ENOUGH?
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I'm watching the news, I do it occasionally, it seems like a good time to do so. And I'm seeing a guy who was blown off his feet by a bus going up, but basically he's okay and being interviewed. And, shock allowed, he's pretty much laughing it off. Another interview, a woman who was on the tube, just the same response but maybe a little more detailed. I love the UK sometimes, I really do. What happened is horrible, I don't diminish it and I hope those responsible are suitably punished, possibly with chainsaws ... but if they wanted terror well, they probably shouldn't have gone to London. Not because Londoners are particularly braver than anyone else (although they might be, have you seen the prices there?) but because they've walked through a helluva lot worse than that.

Nice try, no cigar.
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Was at Tavistock Square - close enough to get a nose-bleed, but not close enough to get showered by debris, which really did travel up high, and also, far enough to be otherwise absolutely fine. A bit shaken but feeling lucky.
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I called in sick with a migraine today. My psychic powers are awesome! [(I told him my girlfriend also called in sick).] She and I should form a psychic taskforce! Anywhere we don't want to go,
THERE BE BOMBS!
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All these explosions are rather scary. Don't suppose the French are that sore at losing the Olympics, are they?
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This doesn't look good, does it?
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People saying 'I've lived in London for four years, I'm sort of prepared for this sort of thing.'
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"Speaking on behalf of the people of Essex, we are standing by you the peoples of Londonia in these trying times. Mainly because Suffolk won't swap places with us."
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Gosh.
Probably not going up to Angel today then.
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God, I wish I'd brought my decent camera.
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Got back from a meeting to find 9 missed calls and 12 emails. Thanks for the concern :)
I'm fine, luckily I get the tube (through liverpool street) at about 7.10am...
Tavistock square is GODDAMN CLOSE TO MY HOUSE, dammit.
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As lithium_doll pointed out, the witnesses on the news seem to be very calm. Most of the Londoners are more concerned with how they're getting to work tomorrow, and act as though it's all a rather distateful inconvenience.
HURRAH!
The great British Spirit triumphs once again! Take that, Al Quaeda. You tried to spread panic with your terrorist ways, but you hadn't counted on a nation of repressed, stiff-upper-lip Brits who refuse to show unseemly emotion in public!
People are generally spooked, but quickly contacting their friends and making plans to deal with the disruption. Good on you!
Of course, as someone pointed out already, we're used to this sort of thing - we had the IRA going at London (and Brighton when I was there) for a while now. The novelty is gone for anyone over a certain age. (I have to be careful about saying "oh, we're used to terrorist scum being murderous bastards, we had the IRA do it" on the international political LJ's, it tends to offend some folks. Folks who can fuck off, clearly). And as someone else on my flist said (approximately): "Blimey, I didn't think the French would be THAT upset..."

UPDATE: stu_n just provided this, which is completely brilliant.
BBC Parliament internal email: NEWSFLASH:
There has been a widespread outbreak of grumbling and tutting today in London, along with a large number of people going home instead of to work, with a certain amount of guilty pleasure.
Sorry, bad guys. We've been bombed before, and we just adjust our day to account for it. This is London calling.
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"No, really, we're not scared. You can try and kill as many people as you want, you're still going to lose because we're just that damn British. Also? Notice those docks and airports? Still open to the freedom loving folk. Suck it, bitch."
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It was just announced that the queen is deeply shocked and that it has been decided that the Congestion charge (a toll to use a car in London) will not be in place today - how I love the British.
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"I'd like to congratulate today's terrorists for achieving nothing but instilling a fierce patriotism back into the British Isles, creating a rather wide-spread rash of Blitz Spirit, and giving me a day off work. I'm a bit pissed off that you nearly blew up some of my friends, but at the end of the day - you failed. We're still here, we're not scared of you."
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From the BBC website: statement from Al Qaeda:
"Britain is now burning with fear, terror and panic in its northern, southern, eastern, and western quarters".
Erm really... where? I think you will find that's a reaction to the winning the Olympics bid or perhaps just the effect Bush has on us when he visits?!
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The people of London have responded to all this exactly the way I always imagined we would; with humour, strength and defiance. I've never been more proud to be British, and never more proud to be a Londoner. Pip pip.
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During the second statement by Blair, he was surrounded by the various heads of state and representatives to the G-8 gathering. And there stood ol' W, with the usual confused look on this face - likely wondering who had his copy of "My Pet Goat".
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God I love the British...
Nobody does pissed off disdain like 'em...
This *rules*
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Ok folks, I'm going to lay it on the line here. If I'm hopping from one blog to another, seeing what's on other people's blogrolls and wondering if I'm missing out on any little gems, after all if it's good enough for them maybe it's good enough for me as well (admit it, you all do it) and I see a blog which has lots of bright text on a black background.... I'M NOT GOING TO READ IT.

I'm going to hit the "back" button faster than you can say "Jack Rabbit Slim's". I might even send an email to the blogroll owner asking them to remove you from their blogroll on the grounds of incredibly bad site design. Surely, if you want people to read your blog - and there's no point writing it at all if you don't want anyone to read it - then you'll make sure that it's easy on the eye and pleasing to read. Don't you?

Or is making sure people want to stay longer than two seconds not a criteria for site design these days?

Honestly, reading reams and reams of small text on a black background just makes me dizzy. And when I leave the site the sudden and total colour change makes me even dizzier. So please people...... use some common sense when picking a colour scheme for your sites.

P.S. I'm going to let Tracy at Artsy Science off this one, because he posts lots of wonderful pictures and when he does post some text it's short and to the point. So his site doesn't make me dizzy. So he gets away with it. Just.

I'm becoming increasingly sickened by the news stories I'm reading these days about the behaviour of young people in this country. To be more specific, gangs of youths within, say, a 20-mile radius of my house. These stories have made the national press, and the more I read the more I'm convinced drastic action is needed.

For example, there's the story that a 16-year-old girl was beaten unconscious and the attack recorded on mobile phone cameras. Her brother was shown a video of the attack at school.

A father of two lies critically ill in hostpital after being attacked by a gang of youths who threw a stone at his car. A senior police officer describes these gangs as "feral" .

Last weekend 60 headstones at a cemetery were vandalised. And within walking distance of my home a man who was sleeping in a bus shelter after missing the last bus home was covered in cardboard and set on fire.

I'm worried about the kind of world we live in, the kind of world my son is growing up in. There seems to be more criminal support then victim support in this country. You can't fight back, because you're then the criminal. Recently a teacher fired an air gun near a gang of youths after suffering two years of vandalism at her home. She was jailed, then released after the story became political, then she lost her job.

However if someone breaks into our home, we are allowed to use reasonable force to defend our property, although what "reasonable force" actually means is still a matter of hot debate.

Last month a shopping centre banned people wearing hoodies and baseball caps, and saw an increase in the number of shoppers visiting the centre as a result.

All we need to do to make this country a better place to live in is to teach children to respect authority. If they don't respect authority, a short sharp shock should be applied. Now, what sort of short sharp shock? Here's my own (maybe rather extreme) idea. I reckon we should set up our own government-sponsored "brat camps", located on remote islands off the north cost of Scotland, and all the troublemakers would be rounded up and carted off to there. They'd be made to fend for themselves without the aid of drugs and alcohol. A few weeks of having to build their own shelter and hunt for their own food should sort them out.

But what if they still cause trouble when they return to society? Well, I think we should take one of the worst estates in the country, remove all the honest and decent people from it and put them in decent housing away from vandals and thugs, and build a big wall around the estate. Then we should fill it with seized drugs, seized alcohol, siezed firearms and cars that are no longer road-legal. In go the worst trouble-makers and their families. Each day a helicopter would drop in supplies of food and medicine. My guess is that they will either overdose on drugs or shoot each other. Anyone who is still alive after three months can come back into society.

And if they cause any trouble after that, if they fail to get themselves back into education or get themselves a job, then they should face a firing squad. Enough is enough.

There's not a lot that makes me want to stand up on my soapbox and do some ranting and raving. I've talked about a couple of things before, but those posts were an awful long time ago. Has nothing in the world annoyed me enough to write about it on here? Apparently not. However something happened on the way to work this morning that made me just a teeny bit annoyed, and for want of anything better to do I'll write about it here.

I was travelling up the motorway, running a little bit later than usual (only by about 5 or 10 minutes) and not wanting to be too late for work was in the mood to put my foot down and make up for lost time. However I was prevented from doing this by a van in the outside lane 5 or 6 cars in front of me. This van was trying to overtake another van in the inside lane and failing dismally. Both vehicles were travelling at about 50 to 55 miles per hour.

Now for those of you non-Brits I should explain some things. British readers can skip along to the next paragraph if you wish. The speed limit on motorways (freeways) here is 70 miles per hour, which is a perfectly reasonable speed to do on a long straight road. Travelling at 55-60 is acceptable, and anything slower than that is as much of a hazard as traffic moving at 100. You are also not allowed to overtake on the inside, you have to pull out to overtake, then pull in again afterwards. Most motorways here have three lanes, some of the busier ones have four, but the one I was travelling on only has two.

So there I am, in a queue of (admittedly moving) traffic, watching this van up ahead try to get past the van on the inside lane. The van on the inside wasn't slowing down to let him move in ahead, and the van overtaking wasn't slowing down to pull in behind. And the rest of us are stuck behind the pair of them just waiting for a bit of flat or downhill road so that one of them could get some speed up. Three miles this went on for. Three interminable miles during which I was thinking, white-rabbit-style, "I'm going to be late, I'm going to be late".

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind traffic going a bit slower on the motorways if it has to. I don't mind traffic travelling slowly if there's too much of it on the road. What I object to is someone travelling too slowly in the outside lane, preventing the people behind from getting on with their journey, when all he has to do is swallow a bit of pride and move back in behind the vehicle he's trying to overtake in the first place.

I've not mentioned white-van-man so far, and the only reason I haven't mentioned him is because the van holding everyone up was blue. I wish it had been white, and I could have used artistic licence to make it white, but I decided to stick to the truth of the situation today.

I wonder, do these vans have a little needle in the seat that injects the driver with testosterone as soon as he sits down? Something that turns him into an aggressor who always has to win, without giving any regard to anyone else caught in the battle?

Let's say you own a railway network, and the trains that run on it. You decide to sell it to make some money. You sell the track to one company, and you sell the trains to lots of different companies to run their own services. The company that takes over the tracks sub-contracts the maintenance of those tracks to a third party. So far so governmental.

A few years later there is a derailment. An inquiry finds that some bolts were left by the side of the points. The inquiry shows that the maintenance company is not totally responsible for the crash because they were following maintenance procedures that were put into place before they were given the contract.

I'm sorry? Did I miss something here? Did it not occur to anyone to check what the procedures were, and that everyone understood the procedures completely. According to the BBC News website, "The Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB) said since the type of points was introduced in the 1980s, their maintenance was "not fully understood". " How can anyone introduce something onto a national rail network, and expect trains weighing several tons and travelling at high speeds, carring thousands of passengers per day, and not "fully understand" how to maintain it? This is just absolutely mind-boggling. Did they not think to find out how to maintain the points? Did it not occur to them to replace the points with something they could maintain? Or to find out who commissioned that type of installation in the first place and ask them how to maintain it? Did the bolts work their way loose or did the engineer(s) simply forget to replace them? Or did they finish the job, look down, and see a couple of nuts and bolts seemingly spare and think "ah fuck it. I've had enough for the day. Who's up for a pint?"

Someone somewhere is responsible for this. It may be the engineer who last maintained that set of points. It may be the foreman, or the site supervisor, or the area manager, or even the chairman of the board. Seven people lost their lives in that derailment, and a report stating that no "conclusive evidence of any one cause" is to blame for the crash is totally unacceptable. I find it unacceptable, I daren't even think what the families of the deceased must be thinking. No-one has categorically stated that it will never happen again. I get the impression they're saying it's "just one of those things" and "we're working on tightening our procedures". They should have started by tightening the nuts and bolts.