Best in Show

Best in Show was a really funny Christopher Guest film, satirising the U.S. dog-lovers community. It is a phrase familiar to us also through Crufts and pet shows generally.

The phrase has been adapted to best of breed or best-in-breed to mean something quite different. I couldn't find it's origin or wider definition at all in The Phrase Finder. The Netlingo site itself tries to track new phrases and describes best-in-breed as '"the best" of something within its niche, such as a new company, a new application, or a new management.'

However widespread this term may become, I still think of the Best in Show film whenever I hear it - particularly difficult when best in breed is used to refer to an individual and not a dog.

Flintoff off the mark

I wasn't at all surprised by Andrew Flintoff's behaviour in the West Indies, nor that he was found out. The power of user-generated content in tandem with a vicious media machine is a powerful force where secrets are only secure in individuals' minds. Therein lies the problem. I don't believe Flintoff is bright enough to be a captain or vice captain. This is nothing to do with behaviour or irresponsibility, it is to due with mental agility. He simply doesn't have the mental capacity to do the job.

The media raises great sportsmen to platforms they stride on to then cling on to. Botham was never captain material but Brearley was. Unfortunately Brearley was dull and less good as a batsman. How unsurprising that Botham felt the establisment's response to Flintoff's actions was an 'over reaction.'

We all applauded Flintoff's cricketing abilities and his larger than life persona, but the meek and the bright can be thankful that they don't get dragged into this media rollercoaster of acclaim and derision

Gulliver's Family Diner

In a world of either poor or just disinterested management, it was a joy today to discover a family restaurant that really did cater for families and made them feel good about themselves.

Gulliver's Family Diner is situated in East Cambridgeshire on the A10, just below Stretham and about twenty minutes north of Cambridge. It is located on a former Little Chef site which, in turn, replaced AJ's.

My wife and I frequently called in at AJ's - often on cold and wintry afternoons - when we first house hunting in the area some fourteen years ago. The manager then was very hands-on with both staff and clients and fussed around us all to make sure 'his' restaurant delivered good food and good service. The Little Chef management was non-existent and visitors waited for the wrong food, poorly prepared and thrown on to dirty plates.

Gulliver's Family Diner is relatively new and run by a local man - Tom Robson - who decided against his original plan to just refurbish and re-let the site and turn it into a proper family diner. Our family visited it today and were welcomed like old family friends who weren't looking at us as part of their future inheritances. There is a fun atmosphere, with menu copy including: "Gammon: not some naff watery lump of processed ham..." and "If you have a favourite dinner, just let us know and we might well add it to our menu - with your name against it." Add in reasonable prices across the board and it makes for a feel-good offer. I also had the best cup of diner coffee since visiting a diner in Michigan some five years ago.

Tom regularly leaves the kitchen to walk around the diner. If there is a problem (and we had one with cheese!) he appears to sort it out instantly and personally checks that it has been sorted out. Not only that, his staff are mortified if anything should spoil their customers' experiences in any way.

You may well say that this is relatively early days and that the special customer service may wane and the site struggle as others have done. That may happen but I suspect it won't. People in our area value quality but also value for money; they also want to have fun. Tom Robson and his willing staff treated us like kings not little people: I've been in the company of enough Gullivers to know how easy it is to make customers feel very small in their giant Lilliputian sense of their own importance.

Risks about climate risks

I was reading an article on the BBC website this morning, whereby two eminent professors of the Royal Meteorological Society are claiming that using such language as 'catastrophe' or 'devastating' may actually damage the message. They are concerned that the theme may be overplayed.

On the one hand, though understanding their concern that freeloader 'consultants' may be making a great deal of money out of this whole issue, I wonder whether global warming's effects would not be trivialised were strong words not used? Secondly, isn't it precisely because of the emotive language used that the communication has engaged so many people across all demographic boundaries? Thirdly, is this message just a smokescreen and the conference (in Oxford, where else?) just a platform for reinforcing their own credentials as 'experts' in matters other than commanding very high speaking and research fees?

Holes in the road

I was driving home this morning, having dropped our son off at the stop for his high school bus, when I noticed several small holes or mini-craters in the road. Each had been ringed in a blue ink or paint to highlight their presence in the decaying tarmac.

I was immediately taken back to my childhood days when I would play for hours, digging holes and filling them in again. I was also minded of a comment from the economist, JM Keynes, who said that it didn't matter if people were paid to dig holes and then fill them again, providing they got paid for doing so.

I imagine someone will get paid for filling in these holes in the name of progress.

History of tea

I was reading an article about the history of tea today, both its origins and the many different types of fine tea available to us. It seems strange that people should need to evangelise about tea to the British but Starbucks coffee shops have, as we know, almost completely routed their Lyons tea shop predecessorts from the high street.

We used to import huge volumes of our tea from China (white, green and black variants) but the overall cost became such that we paid for it by trading tea, first for silver, then opium, which the Qing Emperor (Dao Guang) had banned, citing harmful effects (despite it being well known as a medicinal drug in China at the time). Two major opium wars in the 1800's ensued; the British colonised India and then began importing low-cost tea from Assam and Darjeeling.

Higher quality teas have been minority players in our tea drinking consumption ever since but a new head of steam appears to be building to reintroduce new generations to the kinds of teas once taken for granted. I believe the British public will embrace choice but only given favourable prices compared to staples such as PG Tips.

Animal facts of life

Someone sent me these animal 'facts of life' recently. I found the right versus left-handed issues strange:

The catfish has over 27,000 taste buds.

Butterflies taste with their feet.

The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue

Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than
left-handed people.

Polar bears are left-handed

Elephants are the only animals that cannot jump.

An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.

Starfish have no brains

So how do we explain the right versus left-handed thing? Is it that the world caters more widely for the more common right-handed human, or is it that left-handedness is often associated with creativity and perhaps a more volatile lifestyle?

Spring

It was beautiful in Cambridgeshire today and gave us real hope that speing is just around the corner. It's amazing how much more cheerful people are in the sunshine, talking about possibilities rather than problems; opportunities rather than obstructions. Perhaps it's the very nature of our Northern Europe geography that we turn in on ourselves during the dark winter months? Perhaps that famous English reserve is not just a product of the cold and wind and rain but of the lack of light for long periods. Depression is strongly linked to lack of daylight in Scandinavian countries. Perhaps we should stop doing our usual divide and rule by assigning Seasonal Affective Disorder to an unfortunate few. The SAD fact is that we all need light at the end of our respective tunnels and spring is usually its herald.

Maggots

I read recently about the use of maggots in hospitals to clean wounds. Apparently a group of MPs are urging the NHS to use them more extensively, both because of their proven effectiveness in treatment of wounds and because it could save a fortune on the expensive 'sophisticated' treatments that we have cleverly developed and which don't work so effectively. It seems that maggots are especially effective, through the killing of bacteria and eating of rotting flesh, at dealing with the MRSA superbug which or clever and sophisticated hospitals have introduced across the land to patients unfortunate enough to be ill in the first place.

It seems that soldiers in the Napoleonic wars discovered the healing capabilities of maggots, like so many medical discoveries in history first discovered during warfare. In an ironic way, it is refreshing to see that no matter how far we convince and congratulate ourselves on our progress in medicine, the humble maggot - long used to depict grisly death and rotting flesh (for humans and fish) could actually come to our aid once again.

Second Life virtually real

I read with interest in Metro last week about the virtual bombing campaign being carried out on the virtual world that is Second Life. It seems that The Second Life Liberation Army is 'detonating' bombs on-screen in an attempt to gain universal suffrage for all residents on the site. They claim the owner and proprietor of Second Life is acting in a dictatorial way and wants users to share in its success.

This does tend to ape reality in that such movements often want a slice of the action once all of the hard work has been put in place. Asked to invest in the infrastructure and start-up costs, presumably these virtual terrorists would be happy for the dictators to pay?

Or is it all just an elaborate ruse from Linden Labs themselves? Are they drawing attention to the success of their product such that the tipping point or final proof of its importance in people's lives is for it to be 'attacked?' Is this a carefully orchestrated publicity campaign by Linden Labs themselves to entice more users to join in this 'virtual world.?'

Keyboard shortcuts

I've been on an Excel training course all day today and, throughout the course, we've been referred to keyboard equivalents of mouse functions e.g. CTRL C for Copy, CTRL N for New.

I remember these from when I first discovered Windows 3.1 many years ago and they've stayed with me. Apart from Ctrl C, V and X I can't recall using any of the others, yet tthey're obviously all there. I'm not sure if it's because my spatial awareness leads me to be more comfortable using the graphical interface or is it just easier? a surprising number of people on the course preferred to use the keyboard.

As someone who loves to write, I suppose it is strange that my fingers aren't as wedded to the shortcuts as they are the characters at my disposal - but they're not!

Paralympic great

I love watching sport. I play tennis and golf badly but view superbly and am a keen commentator as readers of my Soccer Special blog will know.

Like so many of my generation, great Olympians from David Hemery, through Mary Peters and Brendan Foster to Linford Christie are permanently etched in the memory: Classic sporting moments in massive arenas, packed to capacity and beamed to hundreds of millions worldwide, replayed on satellite channels and DVD players daily. Truly they represent a long tail that will only lengthen over time.

I read in Metro recently about Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson's retirement at the age of thirty seven. From her wheelchair she became our most successful Paralympian ever, winning eleven Gold, four Silver and one Bronze medals. She also won six London Marathons. Her's is one of the few Paralympians I suspect that people would be able to name and her recognition is to be applauded.

But do we really elevate her fantastic achivements to the iconic status of Olympians? Of course we don't. We should look at our own physical and mental capabilities and take a look at someone so disadvantaged who rose way beyond the tools she was given and finished the job where so many of us would have literally fallen by the wayside. But we don't. Perhaps we don't like to think about disability still? It makes us feel uncomfortable, apart from at celebratory events such as Sports Personality of the year, because we fatalists don't like to think of the possibilities of what could happen to any one of us at any time. For some, it just makes us feel squeamish.

Courage and determination are not words that can ever be dilluted in phrases that include disability or para... Unfortunately we are trained to see phrases first and words second. Thankfully this great sportswoman focused on 'first' while almost all of us languish way behind in 'second.'

Child Poverty

I was reading in thelondonpaper yesterday about how two out of every five children in London are officially living in poverty. These were the findings of the Child Poverty Action Group. In fact 26 constituencies across the UK experience similarly high levels of child poverty. These are obviously appalling statistics for any country - certainly for any 'developed' society. They obviously reflect such realities as cheap housing, poor quality of health and poor transport which also manages to be unacceptably expensive. Clearly too many people are locked out from Blair's shiny, happy Britain of new builds, medical choices and a transport network that talks about customers rather than people, services rather than trains or buses.

As Shelley said: "The seeds ye sow, another reaps."