I have always felt that there was something of the wailing siren about Richard Brunstrom. Not the police variety of siren you understand; rather that of Broadmoor when someone has gone AWOL.

Perhaps he is just the victim of a bad press.  If so, no doubt he will set the record straight in his new blog.

Brunstrom's Blog

Michael Horsnell's article in The Times

Association of British Drivers

BBC News - Brunstrom: Road to controversy

Jasper Gerrard meets Richard Brunstrom

For all lovers of the wider concept of freedom of expression, this should make us warm to Mr Moyles, for a start.  It is not the first time  he has been singled out and criticised for amongst other things, being allegedly homophobic.  In an article in The Guardian on 7^th June 2006 he was roundly condemned by a contemporary, Tim Lusher.  A cause of Mr Lusher’s angst appears to have arisen not so much by virtue Mr Moyles’ perceived homophobia but rather his use of the word gay to mean rubbish.  Apparently, to the under-twenty-eights, this is the current meaning of the word gay.  I can understand Mr Lusher’s irritation in this respect.  I was more than a little miffed when the meaning of gay transmuted from “full of or disposed to joy and mirth; light-hearted, exuberantly cheerful, sportive, merry”.  Mr Lusher’s Guardian article leads me to imagine him to be a rather po-faced, humourless, politically correct  individual.

By all accounts, our Mr Moyles behaves occasionally in a coarse, insulting and rude manner to all and sundry during his radio programme and worst of all, he swears.  This makes me like him even more. His target audience appear to think he is good and worth tuning into, insulted or no.  The ratings certainly prove it.  He is very popular.  Some people have felt constrained to complain about him, but not that many.  Curiously, the BBC has shown remarkably good sense and judgment by avoiding censuring Mr Moyles, but giving a general warning to all of its Radio 1 DJ’s concerning “watching their language”, as reported in The Times today.

There are numerous, vociferous minorities who are all too ready to tell us how to think and how we should behave, so as not to upset their sensitivities.  They should be told to grow up and get a life, whoever they are.

How ironic that whilst our servicemen and women were trying to help create a democratic Iraq, most were denied the chance to vote in our last General Election;

“…a damning indictment of the Government”

says Liam Fox, the Shadow Defence Secretary.  Quite.

My imaginary, regular reader cannot have failed to notice that of late my blog cupboard has been bare.  It is not a matter of "writers' block", because people who write drivel suffer no such condition.  It has been more a case of "War and Peace" syndrome, where what had been intended to be a short, incisive critique of something silly someone had done or said somewhere, turned into a ten thousand word thesis.  Frantic editing is now taking place, so something entirely worthless is bound to emerge sooner or later....very much later if that imaginary reader's luck holds.

I am given to understand that the Liberal Democrats have about 73,000 members.  As it appears likely that Michael Brown's £2.4 million donation might have to be repaid sooner or later, plans should be made to meet this liability, now.  Might I suggest that each and every party member contribute the sum of  £32.88 to party funds without delay?  That is all it takes to preserve a great party.  You know it is worth it.

It is curious how certain hypotheses gain currency and quickly become accepted as an established fact, sometimes against the weight of evidence.

In the mid nineteen eighties I happened upon a BBC television programme examining the matter of heart disease.  The earnest presenter, a doctor, adamantly asserted that the “fatty heart hypothesis” was not a hypothesis, but a proven fact.  If you eat a fatty diet and don’t do any exercise, your arteries clog up and you die of a heart attack - plain and simple. It seemed a fairly sound argument to me. On the other hand I found his stridency jarring.  Other experts thought they were possessed of evidence undermining the fatty heart “fact” and this irritated the presenter, who saw them as heretics.

A few years later, I happened upon another programme about a body that had been discovered in a glacier in the Alps.  The body had been frozen intact, with the remains of clothes and some belongings. After examination by an assortment of experts, it was established that the individual had died about four thousand years ago.  He had been almost certainly a nomadic shepherd.  Forensic examination showed that he had not died of any illness nor had he been killed.  It was believed that he had been caught in a sudden blizzard and died of exposure. Examination of his bones suggested that he was aged about forty years or so old. 

It was possible to make a number of assumptions about his life style.  The glacier in which his body was frozen and transported down to the lowlands over the course of four thousand years, started life high in the Alps, where until the last century there had still been a tradition of shepherds moving livestock up and down the mountains through the passing of the seasons.  Thus he had not enjoyed a sedentary life style – it was not possible for him to have done so.  He had never eaten processed or fatty foods.  He had not been afflicted by any of the vices of soft, lazy, easy late-twentieth century living.  Yet examination showed that his arteries had fatty deposits just like your average, overweight, unfit company executive.  Oh well, it's back to the drawing board.

I was reminded of this when a number of scientists[1], who had been routinely ignored for years, published an open letter challenging the orthodoxy of “global warming”.  It was then disclosed elsewhere that the purportedly inevitable, inexorable increase in global temperature had fizzled out in 1998.[2]  The global warming theorists may yet be proved to be right. Then again, they might be shown to be as misguided as flat earthers. 
 

[1]   Sixty-one experts, as it happens.  The letter was dated 6^th April 2006.

[2] Professor Bob Carter, a geologist at James Cook University, Queensland.  For a full report see The Daily Telegraph 9^th April 2006.

So, Brian Galvin, the new president of the National Union of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) would have us believe that Baroness Thatcher is to blame for our current social ills.  Unfortunately, he did not prepare his homework; I mean speech, quite as well as he should.  In addressing his union’s annual conference in Birmingham last week he confided that “over liberalised attitudes in the 1960s and 1970s had also contributed to social ills.”

Now, bearing in mind that the Milk Snatcher did not have “over liberalised” tendencies and that those over liberal attitudes complained of pre-dated her Government by up to twenty years, doesn’t Mr Galvin’s argument contain the seeds of its own destruction?

Oh, and by the way, which profession was at the vanguard of introducing “liberalised” ideas into our schools during the 1960’s and 1970’s and making them orthodoxy during the 1980’s and 1990’s?

Three out of ten, Mr Galvin.

She is by all accounts, one very lucky lady.

It would appear that from early in her relationship with her former fiancé Howard Johnston, "they were trying for a baby".  It was when she failed to conceive that she sought medical assistance and then was diagnosed with tumours in her ovaries.  In consequence, she required surgery that would result in her being unable to have children.  What followed has been well documented.

Now, let us just assume for one moment that Miss Evans had not met Mr Johnston nor any other partner who wanted children "from day one" (as she alleges, did Mr Johnston) at that particular point in time. Is it safe to assume her ovarian cancer might then have passed unnoticed for a longer, potentially fatal, period of time?

Too often we overlook or discount our good fortune as ours by right.  Perhaps Miss Evans should reflect upon the fact that she is still possessed of her own life.