Nick Jordan

ID cards ‘will not make us safer’. Well, duh.
Union blow to ID card scheme.

I was able to park in a shady spot last night, which meant that for the first time this week my bike’s centre stand hadn’t sunk into the tarmac when I left home in the morning. This warm weather is very nice but if it goes on too long the road surface near my place is going to be destroyed.

Yesterday morning I loaded up the bike with camping equipment and headed off to the Pissed & Confused MCC’s Midsummer Rally, which was held at a very nice pub in Steeple, a quiet little village in Essex, not too far from Southend. The beer was good and I met some really great people, who helped make sure I had a truly excellent time.

I’m home again now and recovering slowly. I’ve definitely caught the sun - my face and arms are bright red, but fortunately not too sore. Sun screen is a very handy thing, even in England.

I’m off work today as I have some people from a Japanese television company coming to interview me about my love of Sudoku puzzles. I’m still doing several a day, although I’ll admit that it’s become quite hard to find really challenging ones. The easier ones do pass the time quite nicely, however, and they’re good practice.

Update: The TV people came and went and were very charming and pleasant in between. They’ve asked me to ask you lot out there if you know of any schools that use Sudoku in their classes or old people’s homes/social clubs that use them to help keep their residents’/members’ minds sharp. If you can help you can email Andrew Foord at andrew@nhk.co.uk or phone him on 020-7393-8107.

The distance from my home to the office where I work is roughly seven miles. In that short distance I pass seven speed cameras, most of them on open, straight, wide sections of road with no side turnings or other hazards. I refuse to believe that all of these locations are accident black spots, so I can only assume that the main reason for having so many cameras is to generate revenue.

Now, I’m not given to excessive speed as I have a strong desire to live a long and unmangled life but I do find this over-zealous use of speed cameras irritating. The imbeciles who brake sharply as they enter the marked area despite the fact that they were already within the speed limit and the cameras can be seen for miles are also deeply annoying, not because they cause me to brake - I stay too far back for that to be a problem - but just because of the lack of attention it displays. If they’re not aware of the fact that they’re approaching a camera or of what the speed limit or their own speed are, it doesn’t seem to me that they’re driving safely.

I watched the first part of ITV’s new series, “The Real Good Life”, last night and it wasn’t half bad. Essentially, they’ve taken three families, given them a little bit of basic training and persuaded them to give up jobs etc. and attempt to become self-sufficient. Their mortgages are being paid for the year that the experiment runs and they’re also being given financial assistance until their first crops are ready but other than that they’re on their own.

So far, the couple most likely to succeed as far as I can tell are the pair who live in Hertford, whose names I have, alas, forgotten. They don’t have any children, whereas the other two couples do, and most of the kids are less than enthusiastic about giving up junk food and expensive luxuries in favour of hard graft and simplicity. They also didn’t seem to be frightened of hard work, the husband having shovelled four tons of manure onto the garden while his wife was out.

There was also the couple where the wife seemed pretty keen but the husband was more content to have his mates round to drink homebrew while she struggled in the garden. When he finally did make it outside he spent just twenty minutes with a rotavator, making a complete pig’s ear of things, before retiring for the day, claiming that the machine wasn’t the right one for the job. Lazy git.

Now I’ll freely confess that when I’ve lived in places where I had a garden I’ve been less than enthusiastic about getting out there and getting my hands dirty, but there’s a big difference between doing it for pleasure, which I really don’t understand, and doing it because it’s your living, which I do. I’d really like to see all three families succeed and I hope I will. I’ll certainly be watching.