A TripAdvisor review

Like millions of others we often use TripAdvisor reviews as a guide to places and accommodation we haven’t visited or used before. Yet we find the reviews are only a guide and have to be used with some discretion.

For example, there is a strange TripAdvisor review against a cafe at the National Stone Centre which is an interesting and unusual place just off the High Peak Trail. We know it quite well. The cafe is just an out of the way cafe but the staff are friendly and work hard, it has a pleasant atmosphere and fine panoramic views over the hills around Wirksworth.

We have recently moved to the area, and decided to give the stone centre a visit.
We were enjoying a quiet walk round, with our dog, and found the place fascinating.
However shouting from one male individual to another, both with Lurchers, drew our attention that rabbits were being chased and killed by these dogs within this area.
I feel as this is a place where families visit, that this sort of thing should not be happening. Leaving aside the the enjoyment that this individual was getting from killing these innocent creatures, the fact that a child could quite easily have witnessed this is appalling.
If this was not authorised hunting, why was it not stopped, there were staff in the cafe!
For this reason alone, I would not recommend visiting here to families, not will we be returning!

Presumably the cafe staff should have rushed out and confronted those chaps with their lurchers. It’s odd how much weight people give to their emotions and how willing they are to share them. Very common but still odd.

Soap

I see another TV soap opera star has passed away. My favourite character from the early days of TV soap opera was Ida Scrummit, the dragon of the Street. I well remember the episode where she laid into Alf Nibbs after the lard factory burned to the ground and disturbing rumours began to circulate around the pub. What a drama that was.

Alf – It weren’t all bad what wi’ lard factory burnin’ down like that. Summat ‘ad to be done.

Ida – Wot d’yer mean Alf Nibbs? Why did summat ‘av to be done I’d like ter know.

Alf – Some of it were ‘orse lard.

Ida – ‘Orse lard? Where’d yer get that idea. They dunna make lard from ‘orses.

Alf – I know wot I know.

Ida – An’ yer can keep it t’ yerself cause nobody else wants ter know it. ‘Orse lard indeed.

Aye they don’t make soaps like that these days. Gritty, true to life drama about real lives lived by real folk.

Boris v Ball

Boris Johnson has been ordered to appear in court over claims he lied by saying the UK gave the EU £350m a week.

The Tory leadership candidate has been accused of misconduct in public office after making the claim during the 2016 EU referendum campaign.

It is a private prosecution launched by campaigner Marcus Ball, who crowdfunded £200,000 for the case.

Gosh - some people have a serious problem with free speech. Raises his profile for the Tory leadership race though. Strange how these things crop up.

The wrong valley

Townbrook valley - the right valley

We are on holiday at the moment and yesterday were out walking on Long Mynd. Very pleasant it was too but on the way back I took us down the wrong valley. An easy mistake to make and only a couple of miles out of our way, but we are fairly experienced walkers so whom should I blame? Brexit? Theresa May? Climate change?

Modern life can be difficult like that – when it comes to apportioning blame there are too many options. 

The sweet spot

Years ago I played in a local league table tennis team with two colleagues from work. Our team captain was understandably keen to improve his game so he bought an expensive super duper carbon fibre bat. According to the marketing hype of this wonder bat the entire blade was a single sweet spot. In a normal wooden bat of those days the sweet spot was supposed to be the centre of the blade from which the ball would go straight and true at enormous speed with almost no effort.

Of course none of us was actually good enough to gain anything from such a bat so it was no surprise when our optimistic captain sent even more balls than usual whizzing over the end of the table.

It’s an interesting idea though – the sweet spot. One could use it as an analogy to describe standpoints adopted to clarify political situations. For example, it is possible to analyse Brexit in enormous detail, particularly in relation to the tangle of EU regulations. It is also possible to stand back from the detail without losing sight of its implications.

The question then arises – where is the Brexit sweet spot? The sweet spot would be some standpoint where the issue is as clear as it can be without standing so far back that the whole thing becomes too simplified because none of the issues has been given sufficient focus. To my mind the Brexit sweet spot is to be found where the primary focus is on democracy. There is nothing wrong with doing mountains of analysis but that doesn’t alter the sweet spot standpoint. This doesn’t mean a sweet spot standpoint is all we need. What it does, if we find it, is clarify everything else.

Taking the analogy further, it is possible to be too close to complex social and political issues such that the sweet spot becomes obscured. This can occur when experts try assemble enough evidence to clarify an issue when the issue cannot be clarified by evidence alone. There is too much of it, human judgement is involved and as a result cherry picking the evidence has become too prevalent.

Climate change obviously has a severe case of the cherry picking problem. Yet one might suggest that it also has a sweet spot where such complexities come into some kind of focus. Such a clarifying standpoint might claim that the climate change story is unscientific because it is not falsifiable. In that case it violates Karl Popper’s dictum that scientific theories must in principle be falsifiable.

Popper’s dictum is about as close as we get to defining good science. Move away from it and we encounter the killer question - if even in principle a theory cannot be falsified then what practical difference does it make whether it is valid or invalid?

The key words here are in principle. In principle it is possible to imagine how the climate change story could be falsified but falsification is not part of the official narrative and this is where we spot the unscientific nature of it. Hostility towards falsification is easily observed within the ranks of the climate faithful so maybe this gives us the sweet spot – the narrative is unscientific.

This is not to claim that analysis and factual investigation are not worthwhile. Of course they are enormously worthwhile. But in spite of the complexities in human affairs there appear to be sweet spots where the value of any analysis becomes clearer and misleading analysis becomes more obviously misleading. 

The sweet spot is merely an analogy though. It is still possible to send the conceptual ball whizzing over the end of the table.

Plebeian trousers

All the commotion over Theresa May's decision to quit as Conservative leader has reminded me of a much more important subject - trousers.

Trousers with a crease were considered plebeian; the crease proved that the garment had lain upon a shelf, and hence was “ready-made”; these betraying trousers were called “hand-me-downs,” in allusion to the shelf. 

Booth Tarkington - The Magnificent Ambersons (1918)

I always thought hand me downs were items passed on from one person to another, usually clothes. I wasn't aware of the second meaning - ready-made and usually cheap and shoddy. Fortunately I've never been keen on trousers with a crease apart from weddings and funerals so maybe I never betrayed myself too much.

Hand me downs - it's an interesting term because one of our modern problems is the prevalence of hand me down politics - essentially what the EU peddles. Shoddy too - but not cheap. It's a thought isn't it? A UK Prime Minister brought down by hand me down politics.

Theresa May's managerial approach

Andrew Gimson has a piece in CAPX on Theresa May's failed managerialism. To my mind the argument doesn't quite work but is interesting nonetheless. 

Theresa May has discredited the managerial approach to politics: the idea that you can find your way through a difficult problem by mastering the detail and working out a sensible compromise. She thought her Brexit compromise was sensible, but it infuriated people on both sides of the argument, who reckoned it fell far short of what they wanted, and that it broke the various assurances she had given them.

Maybe so but I don't think voters say to themselves - strewth I'm fed up with all this managerialism. I certainly don't.

To my mind these two paragraphs are closer but not quite there -

Unfortunately for her, she could not impart the faintest trace of romance to her plan. The voters were right to detect that she had no emotional commitment to it. Her heart was not engaged, which made it impossible for her to engage anyone else’s heart. She was promoting her deal as a matter of duty, calculation, conscientious self-interest. For MPs and voters, that was not enough.

All this is beyond the comprehension of the managerial mind, with its distrust of the spontaneous, the unexpected, the gesture or feeling which takes everyone by surprise and makes us laugh or reduces us to tears. Brexit for most of the time is discussed in an unbearably dry, technocratic, managerial manner, as a series of pragmatic trade-offs which we have all got to be grown-up enough to accept. The present Prime Minister could never quite transcend that grimly reductive approach. The Conservatives now need to find someone who can.

The missing link here is honesty, particularly honesty about the series of pragmatic trade-offs. Voters would probably put up with a dry, technocratic, managerial manner if presented honestly and if the trade-offs were in the open. 

Yet as everyone knows, vested interests have few problems in corrupting the technical aspects and the trade-offs in any political debate. That's the core of it - dishonesty. That dry, technocratic, managerial manner cannot easily hide dishonesty in our digital world.