Curly Sceptic (anag, 7,5)

1. A reminder that ‘social distancing’ needs to be policed

            Deal with some backsliding males in a group (8)

by first-prize winner, Jane Ainsworth, in The Telegraph monthly clueing competition.

2. Another reminder, this time of the change of leadership in the British Labour party:

            Bad mistake, error ousting old Labour leader (4,7)

from a Paul Bringloe crossword in The Telegraph.

3. And finally this double definition, which has nothing to do with the cladding on New England houses:

Old boarding (7.2)

A ‘double definition’ means that the solution is synonymous with both ‘old’ and ‘boarding’.

Safe Bet

Take three dice A, B and C and change the numbers on two faces of each as follows:

A: 1, 1, 3, 5, 5, 6       B: 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5      C: 1, 2, 2, 4, 6, 6

Find someone who enjoys a wager, ask them to choose a die. Then choose your die to be the one to the right of theirs in the sequence ABCA. Bet them a pound that if you both roll different numbers, your roll will higher than theirs. After 100 rolls you can expect to be around six pounds up on average! (For more information see the Wikipedia article Nontransitive Dice.)

Update: Since posting the above, I have written a short program to simulate the game. The average profit over a 1000 games of 100 rolls each was £6.76 per game, reasonably close to the theoretical figure of £6.25. Averaged over 100,000 games the simulation's predicted profit per game was even closer at six pounds and 24.84 pence. But be warned, there were significant deviations from the mean, with the 100-roll games occasionally showing a negative profit!

Jude the Obscure

This is the title of the last of Thomas Hardy’s twelve or so published novels, depending how you count them. He also published many short stories and volumes of verse, and regarded himself principally as a poet. Among the major themes in his writing is a sense of loss for the old traditions and the devaluation of the rural ways of life as many moved from the countryside to the towns and cities. In Jude the Obscure, Hardy offers a biting critique of the rigidity of the law and social attitudes on marriage and the obstacles to social mobility due to poor education and snobbery. Jude went to a village primary school and learnt to read and write (as did I), but after that he was on his own. He was ambitious, nevertheless, and knew that a key to bettering himself was a knowledge of the Classics (see previous post), an insurmountable hurdle devised by the higher social classes to ensure their offspring didn’t end up working down a mine. Jude had his sights on Oxford (called “Christminster” in the novel) and was able to purchase cheap or second-hand editions of the books he needed, from Latin primers to Anglican tracts. He kept these books by his bedside and dreamt of joining the “great thinkers” while burning the midnight oil in private study even after a long day’s labour as a stonemason. But when he arrived in Oxford, his only way into the colleges was to repair their crumbling masonry. When Jude writes a letter to five heads of college, only one bothers to reply, and his curt advice that Jude should be content to stick to his trade.

I read the novel only recently for a book group and confess that I was disappointed in it. Having admired Hardy over the years and having been prepared to put up with the pessimistic endings to many of his stories, I felt this one verged on the melodramatic and that Jude’s decline into obscurity offered too bleak a vision of the future. In personal terms I have been better treated in life than Jude. I got a decent education, including some Latin, despite the bookless social class I was born into. Moreover, no-fault divorce became British law earlier this year. Hardy might be smiling quietly to himself in his tomb in Westminster Abbey that his hope for a fairer world has come to pass. Jude got some vicious critical reviews and Hardy never wrote another novel. In a postscript to the original preface, written 16 years later, he indicated that he had been creatively wounded by the hostility of the response to what one critic called "the most indecent book ever written". But I have a suspicion that perhaps Hardy felt he had written himself out and was secretly happy to call it a day.

Classical, Classics and Class

The word “class” has an interesting etymology, as I learnt recently from Edith Hall in an episode of Start the Week on BBC Radio 4 (on 25th May). The Latin word “classicum” meant, among other things, a war-trumpet or a military trumpet call - the word also had nautical associations - and it was used, so legend has it, by Servius Tullius. the sixth king of Rome, to announce roll-calls of Roman citizens in their separate groups according to their social status and wealth for voting and taxation purposes. So the word “class” became associated with Rome’s six taxation ‘classes’, especially with the highest class. Modern usage the word can mean a teaching group (as in ‘‘ top of the class’), a social stratum (as in ‘working class’), or a quality of distinction (as in ‘class act’); ‘class’ also has technical meanings in taxonomy and mathematics. While ‘classification’ retains just the division-into-categories meaning, the words ‘classical’ and ‘classic’ have overtones of something of quality with a gilded past, although when applied to music, ‘classical’ has a narrower meaning. Finally, the word “Classics’ has come to mean the study of the languages, literature and history of ancient Rome and Greece as well the wider culture of their associated civilizations, which flourished during the last six centuries BCE and beyond. In more recent British history the acquisition of a ‘classical education’, typically involving 8 years of swotting up Greek and Latin, was the unique passport to wealth and the power, and separated the ruling class from the hoi polloi. But more about that in my next post.

Cummings Comes Clean?

The Prime Minister's chief advisor, Domenic Cummings, gave an hour-long press conference in the garden of 10 Downing Street yesterday afternoon (25th May). He answered many of the questions that Johnson had failed to answer the day before (see my previous post). Some were convinced by Cummings's defence of his actions, especially the Cabinet Ministers, but many were not, including 40 MPs of the governing Conservative Party. This afternoon a retired police chief was bold enough to advise the Government that "When you have dug yourself in a hole, you should stop digging." My view is that Cummings made a serious error of judgement when he took the risk of blatantly breaking the spirit of the official advice to stay at home and not to travel, especially if there is a suspected case of covid in your family. Through that error, and its subsequent failure to acknowledge it, the Government has squandered much political capital; the story continues to run and to distract it from the vital task of keeping Covid-19 under control as it moves to restore Britain's economic and social well-being.

Cummings not going

The British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has shown us a way to save our country many £billions, money which would certainly come in useful at this time of astronomical borrowing by his Government. His solution would render the whole legal system superfluous: the judiciary could be pensioned off, the lawyers sent on permanent unpaid furlough. There would be no further need for courts, juries (already under threat during lock-down), clerks, bailiffs, chambers, or any of the elaborate paraphernalia of the law. It might bring temporary hardship to the makers of barristers’ wigs but the more enterprising among them could surely find new openings with the closure of barbers shops by offering wigs to cover the shaven pates of the general public. Who needs hair-dressers anyway?

On 27-28th March Johnson’s main political advisor, Domenic Cummings. (mentioned in an earlier post on this blog), travelled with his wife and 4-year-old son from London to his parents’ home near Durham in north-east England, a journey of some 250 miles. This act appears to have broken the Government's lock-down rules to stay at home and self-isolate if a family member (e.g. his wife, the journalist Mary Wakefield in this case) has coronavirus symptoms. Cummings’s excuse was their need to find child care in case they both fell sick. Since this story broke in The Guardian newspaper, Cummings has been under heavy fire with calls for his head from his many opponents -- you can’t be a radical reformer of the British political system without making enemies.

Yesterday afternoon the Prime Minister appeared on TV to defend his right-hand man against charges that he broke the lockdown laws. During the broadcast Johnson told his now less-than-admiring public that he had spoken to Cummings and had come to the unequivocal conclusion that Cummings had acted “responsibly, legally and with integrity” by ignoring the rules, while the overwhelming majority of his viewers had made significant, even heroic, sacrifices by following them. There are many unanswered questions surrounding Cummings’s movements during the lock-down -- nineteen of them according to Amy Jones in the Daily Telegraph, a broadsheet that usually supports conservative administrations -- and Johnson patently failed to answer any of them. He simply pronounced the defendant innocent by personal diktat. There was no need to investigate further, no need to hear the allegations or cross-question the witnesses, no need to examine the evidence or invoke the law. Johnson’s version of summary justice could certainly help to deal with the backlog of 46,000 criminal cases presently awaiting trial. He just needs to have a quick chat with the defendants and pronounce them guilty as charged or, in the case of his friends, innocent and set them free. Silence in court and no legal fees!

Pandemic Progress

Congratulations to South Korea and New Zealand. They appear to have the virus SARS-CoV-2 firmly under control, with days when new cases are in single digits, often zero. They are smallish countries that were well prepared, have trust in their political leadership and respect for scientific evidence, as well as social discipline and a sense of national purpose. That's one kind of progress.

Meanwhile the virus itself makes its relentless progress through Europe, Russia, the USA, and increasingly through the poorer countries in Africa and South America. The United Kingdom, where I live, has not been doing well, with over 28,000 deaths by 5th May. We made a slow start, with poor supplies of protective equipment and little testing capacity. Care homes have been particularly poorly served with many covid deaths not included in the official figures.

This must be a particularly hard time for right-thinking people. For those who scorn science and believe in intelligent design, this must present a real philosophical challenge when they are constantly confronted with epidemiological evidence and the value genetic analysis, not to mention the fact that SARS-CoV-2 is constantly mutating and evolving. Speaking truth to power is also tough when those in power regard imparting unpalatable information as an act of disloyalty. When safe and effective vaccines are available, there will be further uncomfortable decisions for those who believe vaccination is a wicked government conspiracy. 

Today the UK Government announced a trial launch of its track-and-trace mobile phone app. This pilot is restricted initially to the approximately 140,000 inhabitants of the Isle of Wight, which sits close to south coast of the English mainland and was once a favoured holiday resort for Queen Victoria. As predicted in an earlier post, this app has been developed by the NHSX digital team and will be centrally managed. As such, there are already criticisms of its weak privacy safeguards and the questionable background of some recently-hired team members. This contrasts with the app being developed jointly by Apple and Google in the USA, which operates locally and has more stringent protection against the misuse of the information gathered. To be really effective it will need to be adopted by at least 50% of the population. Since it cannot be made mandatory, it seems an ambitious aspiration that so many will be prepared to sacrifice their privacy for the sake of the greater good. I hope to be proved wrong.