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As a bit of additional background to the story on the YouTube ban I posted on 2 January, I was reminded of a skiing holiday I went on in France some years ago.

You have to remember that mothers who have just had a kid are not a full shilling. Indeed, some of them remain a few pennies short for much of the rest of their lives. And these days, thanks to successive governments trying to warp nature, a lot of men appear to be more likely to opt for a frontal lobotomy before they start thinking about vasectomies once they get their first kid – in this way they can behave irrationally and inconsiderately in front of everyone else.

At work this doesn’t usually amount to anything other than minor irritations. I suppose the worst is the preamble to the start of any meeting – all the mummies and daddies exchanging details of their sprogs’ latest antics. Then, after a few years, you start getting the ‘paintings’ – swashes of colour stuck up on filing cabinets (“Jake – 3½”) – followed by the coloured egg-boxes and other constructions. Or the framed photos.

But a million times worse than this is the combined result of the genetic (women) and deliberate (new-age men)  stupidifying – I made that word up – when out in public. It doesn’t matter how old someone’s kids are, they allow them to get away with murder – and the parents  are oblivious to the effect it has on everyone else around them.

But anyway, back to that skiing holiday. A bunch of us were in a plush restaurant and we’d just started eating our main course. At the table next to us there was a family with a kid in a high chair (I remember they were eating a raclette). All of a sudden there was the most God-awful smell – you knew immediately what it was the smell of, and I nearly vomited there and then. I said to my friends “I think that baby has crapped itself”.

It had. They went and changed it, but the smell hung around for the rest of the meal.

Why should anyone have to put up with that? Changing a nappy is a lot more involved than cleaning yourself after you’ve been to the loo, so there’s no telling how well people clean themselves after they’ve changed junior. And because of the stupidifying they have undergone, being covered in baby poo is not seen as a problem to most parents…

You just have to hope the restaurant doesn’t use those open salt cellars, or hand the same bread basket around…

Hey, and don’t even think about the salad bar at Pizza Hut…

This is a very old story. A more recent one (January 2015) suggests that scientists have found a way to make the old-style bulb more energy efficient (better than LEDs). I should point out – since the Daily Mail skims over it – that it is only “proof of concept”. Such bulbs are not being manufactured yet, and I would suggest that they are years away – and they may not even make it to market. For one thing, they will still “burn out”, whereas LED bulbs don’t.

Not to be outdone by those Luddites at The Daily Mail , The Sun is giving away energy-efficient light bulbs. This particular story is from 3 January, but in today’s paper copy they’re advertising that tomorrow they’re giving a free one away in partnership with Asda .

Incidentally, I’m getting a lot of hits by people searcing for ‘ Pharox 240v light bulb ‘ or similar. The Pharox appears to be quite difficult to get hold of but you can easily buy equivalent models – take a look here and here.

A variation on the Prog Rock stuff the Beeb has been covering recently. This one features the BBC’s interpretation of what it calls ‘Guitar Heroes’ . It’s live on the BBC4 website at the moment, but you can’t watch it on their iPlayer unfortunately.

Some of the older clips are pretty much OK, but I don’t think I’d lump The Police or U2 in that heading – especially U2’s earlier stuff. It’s all jingly-jangly – OK to listen to, but not in the same class as Carlos Santana .

And missing out guitarists like Rush’s Alex Lifeson in favour of commercial lightweights just goes to show how subjective it all is.

The program is followed by a documentary about Les Paul .

After that repeat I mentioned there was a documentary about Pink Floyd on BBC 4 the other night – you can see it here (until 12 January).

Now, I was never into Pink Floyd that much and I’m still not – but it was interesting all the same. I still maintain that all they ever did until Dark Side Of The Moon was make a bloody noise, and that thing with the cows and the howling dog just back me up on that.

But the overriding thing which came out of it was how much of a shame it was that Roger Waters appeared to be such an egotistical prat (allegedly).

(The other overriding thing that came out of it is that Bob Geldof  also comes across as an egotistical prat (allegedly), but I don’t think this is really that much of a surprise to most people).

Last year I had a pupil who couldn’t afford her lessons and she cancelled a lot of them. In fact, between July and the beginning of October she cancelled six lessons – that’s about once a fortnight, or every other lesson (and there were cancellations before July, too). It’s also worth noting that because she was saving for a holiday, then went on that holiday, there was a period where she had no lessons anyway, which makes the cancellation rate even worse.

I knew she was strapped for cash and I never had a go at her about this. Even on the occasions when the cancellation was with less than 48 hours notice I didn’t charge her. She was a nice girl, good driver, nearly ready for test, etc.

At the start of October I got a text message cancelling yet another lesson. My mobile phone uses Outlook and text messages are shown as previews. I saw the usual ‘got to cancel’ and ‘sorry’ phrases and left it at that. What I hadn’t seen was the request lower down the message to book one for 25th October. Obviously, I didn’t reply.

On the morning of 25th October I got a text asking where I was. I replied that we had nothing booked… but later on it dawned on me to look at her previous texts to see if I’d missed anything, and that’s when I discovered this request at the end of her last cancellation. Although it wasn’t my fault I apologised profusely. But she refused to acknowledge my texts or phone calls, and I gave up.

Just to summarise for a moment:

• the pupil cancels lesson after lesson over a total of maybe 10 months
• this eventually creates a huge mix up resulting in her thinking she’s booked a new lesson and me not having any knowledge of such a booking
• this is all on top of the lost money (£140 between July-September, plus lost bookings with other pupils) and messed up diary her cancellations have caused me in that whole period

Well, I found out from another pupil this morning that her mother said I had ‘ let her daughter down ‘.

I was really pissed off on hearing this. What made it worse was that I was out with another pupil yesterday and I saw this girl walking down the street with her friend. Young people are extremely bad at hiding their feelings or behaving in a mature way: it was obvious she had seen me and even more obvious she was pretending she hadn’t. Better still, her friend turned round to have a look after they’d walked by. So it couldn’t have been plainer that she was behaving like a spoiled brat.

This is one of the downsides to the job, unfortunately.

Just watching a 1974 performance of Tubular Bells , by Mike Oldfield on BBC 4. It looks like it’ll be available here on the BBC site soon, but it isn’t there yet (EDIT: It is now! Until 13 January, so get it while it’s hot! )

There’s more Prog Rock on after it, as well. Not sure what that is yet. Might be repeats (yes, it is. Same show as the one I mentioned in that last post).

I watched a couple of shows on BBC 4 (satellite) last week. Prog Rock At The BBC has some brilliant performances on it – especially from the likes of Wishbone Ash , The Nice , and Caravan . It was just a shame that the spotty-faced oik responsible for the captions for each performance were focused on taking the piss out of the whole Prog Rock phenomenon.

Some of the best rock bands ever came out of the Prog Rock movement – try to imagine saying the same of today’s lame offerings in 40 years time: it just won’t happen. So it is annoying when 18 year olds with ADHD are allowed to comment on something which they are incapable of understanding, and which was musically capable of producing 43 minute long tracks with almost no repetition. Your average Hip Hop act can’t go 5 seconds without repetition – it’s the only thing they can do.

There was a follow-up show – Prog Rock Britannia. This was typical BBC – basic summary: Prog Rock was the direct result of the Beatles and The Sex Pistols, just like all musical genres. End of matter . Time has no meaning to those at the Beeb (well, they make Doctor Who and hype it into the stratosphere, after all), and justifying the past using more recent history is one of its favoured ways of misleading the public.

It was even irritating to see some of the Prog Rock pioneers half taking the piss or criticising what they did back then – especially when you consider that some of them still tour and make a passable living out of it now!

But the only real problem with these shows was that they specifically made out that Prog Rock was a quintiessentially English phenomenon. Anyone at the Beeb heard of Frank Zappa ?

Most annoying of all, though, was the omission of the best Prog Rock band ever: Rush. And they’re still going strong…

Well, I wrote the other day about an  anomaly at a school in Kent who had banned his teachers from using red pen to mark pupils’ work. But another story in yesterday’s press has quickly put headmistress – sorry, headteacher – Linda Kingdon on the 2009 Total & Utter Prat contenders list.

She has banned the use of the word ‘school’ to describe her… school. It has ‘negative connotations’, you see.

Instead it is to be known as ‘a place for learning’. Its head hopes the change will help ‘de-institutionalise’ the school.

She sounds a right laugh, doesn’t she. Having worked in industry for many years, I can imagine the off-site meetings her teachers will have been involved in, the reams flipchart paper (all in nice pen colours – except red: we don’t want any negative connotations), presentations by ‘groups’ (they’ll naturally have all been split into groups), and so on.

‘We decided from an early stage we didn’t want to use the word “school”,’ she said yesterday. ‘This is Watercliffe Meadow, a place for learning. One reason was many of the parents of the children here had very negative connotations of school.

‘We wanted to de-institutionalise the place and bring the school closer to real life.’ Watercliffe Meadow, which was named after Watermead, Shirecliffe and Busk Meadow schools, is described as a 2,000 sq m learning environment for 481 children, from nursery stage through to Year 6.

There’s a photograph of her, as well. She has the kind of irritatingly smug countenance which, when you consider the crap it spouts, is rather more to be expected at the rear end of a farm animal than on the shoulders of someone charged with teaching future generations.

Fortunately, Ms Kingdon – and possibly her eager-to-please teachers – are the only people on the planet who think it is a good idea. Parents aren’t impressed, neither is the Campaign for Plain English .

Settle is a small town in North Yorkshire, on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales.

Yesterday, there was a story in the press telling how on Boxing Day the owner of a hardware store decided he wanted to spend the day with his family so he rigged up a funnel into a bucket (an ‘honesty box’), put up a sign telling customers to pay for whatever they wanted, and duly left the shop unattended.

When he returned there was £187.66 (and two Euros – even Settle would appear to have people who aren’t completely honest) in the box. The various stories are not totally clear on whether anything was taken without being paid for, but it appears that nothing was stolen.

It was a nice gesture, I suppose, but one many of us would have trouble getting our heads around based on the scum we know live around us.

But I can’t help think it is being blown so much out of proportion that Settle might be storing up trouble for itself.

On BBC National News this morning they had the guy in the studio. He seems completely genuine, although it all comes across as a bit naïve out here in the real world. However, they also had cameras in Settle and were interviewing some of the residents. One said:

This is typical of Settle. I leave my door unlocked all the time.

You’d be lucky to get any change out of £300,000 for a 3-bedroom house in Settle, so you can imagine the ‘wealth’ that lives there. And Settle is uncomfortably close to places like Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, Liverpool, and Newcastle (places specifically referred to in the Book Of Revelation) – the less salubrious inhabitants of which probably all got 50″ Plasma TVs for Christmas and were watching the news this morning.

Yes, they’re very trusting in Settle. Just not very bright.

Well done to GP for passing his test yesterday afternoon – the last test of the year for me and the test centre – with just 9 driver faults.