Although I find it hard to forgive him for waving cheekily at the fourteen year old Kopite me (well it felt like it was directed solely at me) as he put Spurs one up against Liverpool at Anfield in April 1968, I was fascinated to read in yesterday's Antiques Trade Gazette that Jimmy Greaves has been an avid collector of Clarice Cliff art deco pottery since the seventies. The decorative arts are not something one normally associates with footballers (although I read recently that Manchester United's Nani has a life size marble statue in his lounge - mind you the fact that it is a statue of .......Nani dilutes the art association somewhat) and I can't imagine Wayne Rooney at an antiques fair - the words bull and china shop spring to mind. It seems that Greavsie is dispersing his collection at a Salisbury sale room on 9th March and it's estimated to fetch £30,000 (or about half an hour's work for the current Spurs striker) . I hope that he gets a decent price for it. I'll forgive him that wave because he was a quite fantastique (keep up at the back it's a Clarice Cliff reference) player.
A tent covers the murder scene as a body is discovered in the snow over the holiday period. Look familiar? But this is nothing to do with the tragic death of Joanna Yeates. 20 year old David Beet's body was discovered in Spring Hill Birmingham on 29th December and, although a young man was arrested later that day, as far as I can discover, nobody has been charged with his murder to date. I say "as far as I can discover" because, unlike Joanna, whose murder has been given wall to wall media coverage that even included the Daily Mail's lifestyle columnist Liz Jones snootily dismissing the wine bar the victim last drank at for misspelling Laurent Perrier, David's murder has met with near universal silence. There are over six hundred murders a year in the UK so by my calculations that's about fifty since mid December but anybody studying our press and TV would be forgiven for thinking that Joanne was the sole casualty.
I am not criticising the coverage of her murder. Were I one of her parents I would want nothing else on television or anywhere else until her killer was found but I wonder what singles her out to make her newsworthy whereas poor David and the other forty nine aren't. I could surmise on the answer to this but I don't want to be flippant or glib about a serious issue and will only say that maybe it would be good if news editors gave similar coverage to other, perhaps less middle class, murders and gave all victims' families an equal chance.
I often end my blog with a viral video that someone has tweeted about or is in Unruly Media or the Guardian's weekly top ten or YouTube's own most watched but now that I am retired I've got more time to trawl through recent uploads myself and see if I can find the ones that got away. At the time of writing I was the first to click on this interesting bit of driving although as the CCTV is almost a year old it may have been posted on YouTube before.
Later On second thoughts I've just deleted it. There were a couple of people on the bridge who might have been killed or badly injured. Sorry if you saw it. I missed them on the first viewing.
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