Honesty Is The Best Policy

It's a subject that provoked plenty of lively debate and discussions with colleagues in the past. When our Sales Co-Ordinator said that he had handed the waitress some gift tokens that she had absent mindedly not kept when he used them to settle his bill, some in the office thought him daft and implied that he should have booked another table and returned next week. Others like me and Marion applauded him for his honesty. When our then very young son Paul carelessly opened our car door in high winds and it slammed into an extremely expensive 4 x 4 we left a note on the windscreen and duly sorted out the damage via our insurers at the cost of an expensive excess. The office debate was divided on this one too with some saying that they would have driven away whilst others took the line that we took. But honesty is the best policy. Do as you would be done by. You reap what you sow. What goes around comes around and all that. 

So when we got back home and unpacked our shopping after a trip to Tesco the other day and found this damage to the rear bumper it was clear that not everybody lives up to the same maxims and those who surprised me in in our office debates were clearly not alone in their way of thinking. OK it doesn't look a great deal of damage in the photo. The bumper was dirty after a trip down a muddy farm track when visiting some friends but there are two distinctive bumps surrounded by star cracks in the paintwork and there is no way that the perpetrator could have been ignorant of the damage. The only way to return it to how it looked would be a whole new bumper protector which, with fitting, will be several hundred pounds. So you reap what you sow? I'll let you make your mind up on that one.

Copyright The Times. Sorry Mr Murdoch. 

On a happier note, one of our guilty pleasures is the weekend papers. We buy The Times and Guardian on Saturday and the Sunday Times on Sunday. We used to have The Observer too but it went downhill when Kate Flett left and we gave up on it recently. Spending a few hours with such great writing is a luxury. This week The Times had a fabulous Paul McCartney interview by the brilliant Caitlin Moran which ended with her genuinely urging Macca to add The Frog Chorus to his future sets on tour. This photo which accompanied the piece, captures the essence of Moran so beautifully and cheered me up for the day.


I don't know what it is about the women writers of the quality press but, whilst I read this morning that 80% of newspaper columnists are men I find myself enjoying women's writing far more. I follow my favourites on Twitter and I have just noticed that whilst I follow Caitlin Moran, Grace Dent, India Knight, Suzanne Moore, Kate Flett, Marina Hyde and Janice Turner the only blokes on my list are Barney Ronay and Tim Dowling. Perhaps I just don't have time for the alpha male pontifications of the likes of Clarkson and Rod Liddle or maybe Im just lacking in testosterone.

We are excitedly waiting to welcome our daughter Sarah and our granddaughter Rose on Thursday. Rose hasn't been to our house before so Marion has been busily babyfying the guest bedroom. And she's done a lovely job.

Her addition of Snoopy in the moon to the seascape above the bed was an inspiration. It's such a pity that it will be just four days before they head back to St Andrews but we hope to be in Scotland not long after Hogmanay.


And, if you aren't familiar with that Paul McCartney classic I mentioned, here it is. Tesco shoppers please take note.


 

Have You Checked Out The E-Petitions Yet?

With the Governments e-petitions initiative in the news I thought it was time to have a closer look at the site and see what it's all about. I've signed a couple of them in the past after receiving tweets and emails asking for support but I haven't really paid much attention to any of the content apart from the petitions in the links forwarded to me. You can check the site out for yourself by clicking here. At the moment there are some 468 pages of live petitions that you can sign. They are sorted in order of popularity and at about twenty per page that's almost ten thousand of them. I reckon there are over 1400 that have so far achieved just one signature and 6,400 (about 64%) have ten or less. You would have thought that anyone media savvy enough to set up a petition might also have a couple of Facebook friends or Twitter followers. Blimey, even I reckon I could drum up twenty or thirty signatures. 


When you think of all the millions using the internet (over thirty million are logged onto Skype as I write this) it's a sad indictment that for example only ten have taken the trouble to support a petition to prevent employers discriminating against diabetes sufferers whilst the same number support "No Dubstep To Be Played On The Radio Between 5am and 11 am". Spend ten minutes on the site and it appears to be pretty much an abject failure. Most of the popular petitions seem to be from Daily Mail territory (stop immigration, brig back capital punishment, tax travellers, and the like). I signed one to stop legal loan sharking and another to ban scrap metal merchants from making cash payments.


If you want five minutes amusement have a look through the rejected petitions. Pity the poor sod who has to read this sort of stuff for a living "THE TAZER IS BY THE UNTED NATIONS OWN COMITTEE ON TORTURE ,AN INSTREMENT OF TORTURE. IT WAS INTRODUCED INTO THE UK POLICE FORCE INITIALY AS A LAST RESORT AS AN ALTERNITIVE TO A BULLET FIERING GUN. NOW IT HAS BECOME THE POLICE FAVORITE MEANS OF COMPLIANCE. THE POLICE ARE NOW AUTHORISED BY THE HOME SECETARY ( TERESA MAY) TO USE TAZERS ON... CHILDREN, PREGNANT WOMEN, OLD AGE PENSIONERS, THE DISABLES AND THE VUNERABLE. YES ANYONE AND EVERYONE IS FAIR GAME ITS OPEN SEASON ON THE BRITISH PUBLIC. THESE EVIL TAZERS ARE NOT BEING USED FOR WHAT THAY WERE ORIGIONALY BROUGHT INTO SERVICE FOR, ONLY TO BE USED IN A SITUATION OF LIFE OR DEATH ............"

Don't forget to watch episode 3 of Josephine's Sorority Girls tonight at 9 on E4. If you haven't seen it yet it's a fun and light hearted show that highlights the differences between university culture for girls here and in the USA.

I see that Martin Kelner devoted almost his entire column in yesterday's Guardian to slagging off Paul's A League Of Their Own. He did pretty much the same hatchet job on the show when it launched two years ago but it is now in its fourth series and the ratings are strong. I sympathise with a lot of what Kelner says - Freddie Flintoff's recent response to another panelist "f*** off " is hardly Oscar Wilde - but it appeals to its target 10pm Friday night audience and that is paramount.It's an original format and long may it succeed.  Criticising the show in The Guardian is a bit like The Sun sending a reviewer to Covent Garden to report back on La Boheme.