Cut The Crap

Mixed doubles in tennis is a curious concept. Indeed, so are all the other doubles combos. They seem to exist solely to provide a way for tennis rabbits to stay in a tournament longer than the first round. Or maybe they are there to let the real players have a rest.

Watching the mixed doubles final of the Australian Open (for as long as it took to finish my drink and go, having shown up at my favourite sports bar thinking that the proper tennis was going to start at 1.30), I was struck by an interesting innovation. (Maybe it's not new, but I don't normally watch joke tennis.)Whenever a game got to deuce, the next point was the deciding point, as if to say, enough is enough, we know no one really wants to watch this stuff, so let's just play one more point and move on. The real entertainment will be along shortly.

What a jolly good idea, I thought, and why not take it to its logical conclusion? Why not apply it to women's tennis and, instead of just having a deciding point when it is 40-40, why not do it at the very beginning of the match and make each women's match be decided on a single point? And we could get rid of the arguments about paying women tennis players the same as men because, as Charlie Sheen said when asked why he paid women for sex, we wouldn't be paying them to play, but to just go away.

It's Unofficial!

I am in receipt of the Hong Kong Bar Association circular number 113/12, sent by one Frederick Chan "to all members and associate members".

Aside from the adoption of American spelling when referring to an award to the "Honorable" Justice Bokhary (my copy of the Oxford dictionary clearly refers to this as the American version of "honourable" - when did the Bar change over, and was it covered by a circular?), I am intrigued by the announcement of a "joint" and "unofficial" religious service which will be organised "as with (sic) previous years" to mark the opening of the legal year 2103 2013.

The jointness remains unexplained (with whom is the service being jointly organised?) as does the phenomenon of an unofficial service being announced officially, to wit under cover of an official Bar Association circular. And despite the circular being addressed to all members and associate members, only full members, albeit all of them, are invited to the unofficial service. Why are associate members being advised of the service only to be told that they are not invited? So many questions - so little time.

Walk A Mail In My Shoes

Has the Daily Mail been reading this blog? Or did it just take them longer to cut through the crap?

Britain's Prime Minister, David Cameron, has got in on the act, saying, "She clearly loved her job, loved her work, cared deeply about the health of her patients ...".

Err ... how is all that so clear to you, Dave? Maybe she did (love her job, etc.) and maybe she didn't. Or maybe she ckufing hated it - looking after toffs, being underpaid for it, and being berated by the hospital for the supposed slip-up even though she wasn't the one to give away any information. Or maybe she just thought life as an immigrant in Britain was sh1t generally. Even worse than living there is anyway.

A Bit Rich

There's nothing like a good old British bandwagon to jump onto, is there, especially when it involves the royals, and even better if there can be a bit of colonial-bashing thrown in for good measure.

So ... a couple of Aussie radio chatshow hosts made a prank call to, shock, horror, the hospital where Catherine Middleclass, Britain's most famous social climber, was feeling a bit poorly. The expensive private hospital had, unfortunately, not spent its high fees on training with the result that the nurse on reception was somewhat less well prepared to filter calls than the average Hong Kong secretary (or nurse) is. She therefore put the call through to someone else who spilled the detailed beans about how poorly Ms Middlebrow was, and much hilarity ensued. Three days later, the switchboard girl (note: not the person who divulged all the information) topped herself and hilarity was replaced by finger-pointing.

Being better versed in PR than in staff training, the hospital, the King Edward VII Hospital for Privileged Cnuts, got its defence out quickest, in fact too quickly to get all its tenses and punctuation right, thus :

“It is with very deep sadness that we confirm the tragic death of a member of our nursing staff, Jacintha Saldanha. Jacintha has worked at the King Edward VII Hospital for more than four years, she was an excellent nurse and a well respected and popular member of staff with all her colleagues.
We can confirm that Jacintha was recently the victim of a hoax call to the hospital. The hospital had been supporting her throughout this difficult time.”

Note the cunning piece of linkage slipped in with the effect of suggesting the death was indeed caused by the hoax call (and not by, say, any lack of training by the hospital, or the hospital perhaps giving the nurse sh1t for the slip-up, or any personal factors that might have made the nurse take her life), and therefore, coincidentally, that the hospital was not to blame. Attack is the best form of defence, as they say.

Hmm... the hospital "had been supporting her throughout this difficult time". Clearly, they had been doing this about as well as they trained her in the first place. Or perhaps their support had consisted of telling her how badly she had screwed up and they were the ones to push her over the edge. We may never know.

Hello, Cheeky

Susan Boyle is making headlines again, with a fantastic new Twitter hashtag.

Well, you wouldn't want to look at the front, would you?

Old Bags

My avid reader has forwarded to me an electronic missive from the venerable Helena May hostel on Garden Road, otherwise known as the Virgins' Retreat.

Apparently, there is something known as the "Season of Goodwill" (must be one of those government-prescribed things for locals, like loving your family even as they suck the blood out of your veins). Somewhat more interestingly, at least at first glance, the Helena May has come up with something called the  “Love Bags Project”, for which they are asking for volunteers. Why is it that when I hear the words "love bags", I immediately think of Joycey?

However, the love bags in question are being prepared by the Welsh Male Voice Choir (some  mistake there, surely), a different matter altogether. I think I'll give it a miss.

My Old Dutch

Jake van der Kamp, writing in the Sunday SCuM Post, has turned his sights on to the way the MPF system works here.

He asks "Why is it that bureacracies set up to serve the general public so often take the side of special interest groups against the public?" Then he goes on to mention two examples, bank and food regulators, in a list he descibes as "exhaustive", before discussing the MPF, which he describes as "prominent on the list".

"Exhaustive - examining, including or considering all elements or aspects, comprehensive." Do you see where I am going on this, Jake?

There Goes The Neighbourhood

The Rich Have More Money

I don't get the deification of Clare Hollingsworth, and now I don't get the vilification of Gloria Chor.

Ms. Chor seems like a decent person whose husband happens to have a lot of money. Yes, she spends it, why TF not?, and the YouTube (or ThouTube as is was called in Ulie's day) video linked above tries to send her up with mocking background music, and editing to make her look as superficial as possible. It is obvious that the producers misled her and ended up doing a hatchet job on her. But, aside from having a lot of spondoolies, she is ordinary and unassuming.

Unlike say a braying Hooray Henry (whether the generic UK variety, or the local Tang Dy-Nasty), born with a silver spoon up his arse, she and her hubby have worked their way up. Everything they have is the result of their own work and, as far as we can see, they are not making money either from a rigged market or from exploiting people's misery in finding a roof to put over their heads. And if you jump to 4.59 on the clip, her daughter is seriously racked. Ooh err, Missus Chor!

So, good luck to her, and good luck to her hubby in getting this underhand video removed from the Tube.

Savile Row

Now then, guys and very young gals, there's nothing like a good old British bandwagon to jump onto, is there. So make room on top for me. Ooh err, Missus!

As a child of the sixties (as opposed to one who is in his sixties), I never liked Savile as a DJ for the simple reason that he got in the way of the music with his laboured attempts at being eccentric, and I never followed him in his later career as a general entertainer. I don't believe I saw a single episode of Jim'll Fix It. His "getting in the way", was of course the self-same thing as his genius for self-publicity and the man's other achievements were undoubtedly remarkable. Not quite as remarkable as he claimed (he didn't invent the twin turntable, for example), but that is partly my point. He was someone who bigged himself up and grasped opportunities. He was also, in a sense that is the source of much of the current kerfuffle, a man of his time.

So, I neither liked nor disliked the guy, even in retrospect; I just didn't "get" him. But those who are taking the opportunity to judge Savile in retrospect include on the one hand Chris Patten, someone for whom I have an enormous respect, and on the other hand Esther Rantzen.

Chris Patten, Chairman of the BBC Trust, has stated that Savile's activities could not be excused as behaviour from a time when "attitudes were different", and gave his backing to inquiries by police and the corporation. Of course, he would be unlikely to say anything else in his position, but is it reasonable? I think it depends exactly what he means. By which I mean, of course, that it doesn't.

There is a range of alleged behavour by Savile, which is getting tarred with a single brush. There is having sex with under-age girls, having sex with young but not under-age girls, having sex with mentally disturbed girls, and having non-consensual sex. (There is also an implied offence of getting more nookie than anyone else. We'd better come up with a law outlawing rich, charismatic, physically impressive people from getting more than their fair share. But not till I've gone, eh?)

Certainly two of the first four activities are unlikely to be regarded differently now than in the 60s, perhaps three depending on whether you think the age of consent is a moral issue or a legal artifice and whether one particularly mature fifteen year-old might be less vulnerable than the next vulnerable eighteen year-old. Does Patten mean that whatever seems wrong now should be regarded as having been wrong then? If so, I disagree. Or is he talking about legalities, in which case I make the same point, though the age of consent law hasn't changed as far as I know. (In which case, Patten is surely suggesting that we impose today's morals on the previous century.)

 I do doubt whether, as a general proposition, if you are talking about morality, you can impose one generation's morals on another. The question must be, was what Savile did wrong when he did it?

(I am pleased by the way to advise my avid reader in this respect that my own taste is for ladies over 40 - hello, Joycey - or even 50. You know who you are.)

Esther Rantzen's judgement (or do I mean her chance to get some publicity out of all this?) is tempered by her embarrassment that she herself heard rumours of Savile's Travels (geddit?) at the time but did nothing. This from the founder of a charity, ChildLine, set up in order to protect children. According to Rantzen, until now it had 'only been one single child's word against the word of a television icon'. Now it was 'five adult women' who had come forward it was easier. They are 'cool, credible, sensible women', who are 'convincing' to Rantzen, and so she has "started" to believe there is some truth to it all. Isn't that exactly what Rantzen has been making career capital out of  campaigning against most of her professional life? Has Rantzen's charity work, mirroring so closely Savile's own charity work, been  just another exercise in self-publicity, and like Savile's is now revealed as a self-serving sham? In my book, that makes her as bad as Savile.

As she now says, 'How I long to turn the clock back'. Yes, and not set up that damn charity.