Mince Pies

As most of us must know, mince pies are the point of Christmas. Admittedly Christmas has become tangled up with manic shopping and sentimental twaddle about a guy in a red suit, but that is merely fluff and nonsense. Mince pies are what Christmas is all about. Years ago there was some religious stuff too, but that seems to have given way to the powerful rationality of the mince pie.

Unfortunately our finest mince pie experience came via my late mother-in-law so now we have to make do with second best, but that does not invalidate the pie's primary role at this time of year. So far we have sampled the produce of Sainsbury, Tesco, Granddaughter's play centre and a Matlock cafe.

Obviously it is early in the mince pie season and we intend many more samplings but at this stage it is worth mentioning that Tesco Finest were not particularly fine. Too sweet and not enough spiciness.

Sainsbury's Taste the Difference were not bad. Good texture, not too sweet and moderately spicy. They were still supermarket pies though. 

Granddaughter's play centre pies were probably Mr Kipling with all that this implies. At least the coffee rinsed the gunk off my teeth.

The Matlock cafe pies looked as if they came from a local bakery and were pretty good. Good texture, not too sweet and quite spicy. They didn't look as perfect as machine-made pies which ought to be a good sign. 

So all in all not a bad early kick-off for the mince pie season, but it's a pity neither of us is an expert baker. Maybe we'll try Lidl next.

Could you cope?

It is not necessary to know anything about chess here, but the game is unusual in that even a strong international player can end up playing a very talented youngster. The embarrassment possibilities are obvious.

The video is an impromptu blitz game between Samuel Sevian and International Master Greg Shahade played about six years ago when Samuel was a ten year old chess prodigy. He went on to become the youngest ever United States Grandmaster.

Prisons and prisons

As we all know Jeremy Corbyn has triggered a controversy over his comments on the death of Fidel Castro. Shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry found it necessary to defend him.

Shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry has said it is "quite difficult" to get past allegations of brutality made against Fidel Castro after Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn praised the revolutionary leader for his "heroism".

Nine days of national mourning have been declared in Cuba after Castro's death at the age of 90.

Mr Corbyn said that "for all his flaws" Castro would be remembered as a "champion of social justice".

Human Rights Watch gives us an outline summary of Castro's "flaws". We are spared the details.

During his nearly five decades of rule in Cuba, Fidel Castro built a repressive system that punished virtually all forms of dissent, a dark legacy that lives on even after his death.

During Castro’s rule, thousands of Cubans were incarcerated in abysmal prisons, thousands more were harassed and intimidated, and entire generations were denied basic political freedoms. Cuba made improvements in health and education, though many of these gains were undermined by extended periods of economic hardship and by repressive policies.

Whatever one thinks of Jeremy Corbyn, his response to Castro's death is remarkably naive for such a senior politician. Naive to the point of weird because it is not far removed from the kind of response a callow sixth former might make.  

One could simply pour scorn on his hopeless inability to react in a way which acknowledges the lessons of recent history but there is something deeper. Corbyn has his flaws too and cannot escape them. We have learned about dictators but apparently he hasn't and it isn't rocket science - it is not difficult to see why Castro was a monster.

Yet Corbyn cannot quite escape the silliness of his radical past, his decades-old political raison d'être. The world has moved on, the old time Stalinist dictators are almost all gone and their appalling crimes are part of our history, but Corbyn doesn't appear to see it like that. He seems to be imprisoned by his own past to a weird degree. He can't adapt and doesn't even see the need to. What the Labour party will do with him I don't know, but it needs to do something.

Pink horse tale

The other day found me watching a kids’ TV show with Granddaughter. Not an uncommon activity. On the whole kids’ TV is politically correct but not aggressively so. It usually washes over me but one particular episode caught my attention for some reason.

The show was a typical CGI confection with two little girls drawing a picture of a horse. One drew a bog standard brown horse and the other a pink horse. I’ll call those girls Brownie and Pinkie. The third little girl was the heroine of the series – I’ll call her Goody.

When the drawings were finished Brownie pointed out to Pinkie that horses aren’t pink. She didn’t do this aggressively but in a fairly mild "my horse is better than yours" sense. Well Brownie's horse was better but unfortunately this upset Pinkie so Goody intervened to point out that Brownie’s criticism had made Pinkie sad. This is a bad thing to do was the suggestion. In fact it was the point of the whole episode.

One was left with the notion that pointing out factual mistakes could make a person sad and that won’t do - it is tantamount to abuse. Brownie should have suggested that pink horses don’t quite exist but they jolly well ought to because they are such a vibrant improvement on the boring brown variety.

One might say that this tiny fragment of modern life teaches kids the virtue of kindness which it does, but why did Brownie have to be factually correct? One is left with the assumption that factual accuracy is not a mitigating factor when a person adopts a superior position. To display knowledge is to adopt a superior position and that's bad. Unless it is superior political knowledge presumably.

Kindness is good and promoting it is good but somehow the modern world has become adept at tacking on ulterior messages. The message here is that facts are liable to get you into all sorts of trouble and must be imparted with kindness or not imparted at all. A world beyond facts is okay too – that’s the other ulterior message.

Green Friday

As an alternative to Black Friday and the vulgar promotion of special offers, money off, two for the price of one and so forth, I'm opting for an ethical Green Friday on this blog.

Apart from a healthy dose of priggish satisfaction, Green Friday is a worthy attempt to roll back the tide of commercial excess. A number of ethical, save the planet alternatives suggest themselves.

• Old blog posts could be recycled instead of being left to rot away in the archive emitting all kinds of noxious possibilities into our already polluted interweb.
• Blog posts could be written using green energy, which means written in the dark and written in haste because the heating is turned off.
• Blog post readers could read them in the dark too, although in one sense I may have achieved that already.
• Blog post could be shorter, using fewer electrons. For example, a post criticising John Major for suggesting a second EU referendum could be shortened to "Oh do stop whingeing and give Edwina a nice Christmas present." Of course this example could be even shorter saving even more electrons.

Anyhow that's the general idea and it must be a good one because I'm feeling a little more priggish already. I may even buy a copy of the Guardian, although that could be too extreme for a trainee prig. I'll need to work down to it.

Solar fail

source

Yesterday I visited Carsington Water visitors’ centre with some old work colleagues. The idea was to have lunch there after a short walk but the area suffered a power cut just before we trooped into the restaurant.

One might have wondered if the centre's substantial array of solar panels would take over but no. No lights, no hot drinks, no hot food. No great surprise on a dull day in November but one is bound to wonder at sustainable power which isn’t sustainable and doesn’t deliver the power when you most need it.

Is anyone surprised? No - it hardly merits a shrug.

Trump v Clinton

Now the Trump v Clinton bout is finally over and pundits are just beginning to run out of reasons to be delighted or horrified it is worth ruminating on broader issues.

During the contest Clinton was obviously a shoo-in right up until she wasn’t. An interesting predictive failure but as far as I can tell nobody had the faintest idea which candidate would make the best president anyway. We’ll never know either, because only one of them is to be tested in the hot seat. The other slinks off into prosperous oblivion, that’s the tradition.

Some of the pre-match commentary was well written, some of it amusing, some silly, much of it abusive, some mildly persuasive and so on and so on. Yet nobody really knew if Clinton or Trump would turn out to be a competent or incompetent president. Nobody had the faintest idea because humans are not built like that. We’d like to think otherwise but it ain’t so.

We compare A with B and when there is nothing to compare or when the comparison will never be made then we are reduced to allegiances and guesswork and that is what we saw during the election. Vast deserts of foaming passion, outright lies and yet more foaming passion, some of it dressed up as analysis.

We saw allegiances and guesswork and that is what we’ll see throughout Trump’s presidency too. Unless he walks on water, cures cancer and ensures world peace he’ll be praised and cursed in roughly equal measure because that’s how we do things until memories fade, main actors retire or die and passions transfer themselves elsewhere.

In spite of numerous pundits trying to persuade us that they had arcane knowledge of each candidate plus a working crystal ball locked onto the political future of the USA, none of their output was worth a plugged nickel as they used to say in cowboy films. We’ll have to wait and see.

On the other hand I can’t convince myself that dumping Clinton wasn’t a bonus. It just feels like the right thing to do. I hope so but we’ll have to wait and see. Or rather we won’t see because that possibility has gone.