Radio Free Stan

We Don't Need No ...

2010-01-05T20:27:00.003Z

Some children skip school and their parents are committing a criminal offence if they encourage it, allow it or don't seem to be trying terribly hard to stop it.

Middle-class parents taking exotic holidays in term-time definitely wouldn't agree, but they are every bit as guilty of this as the poor parents with chaotic lives who can't or won't stop their offspring bunking off.

In this Information Age, if the kid is AWOL once, the school will telephone, write, email, twitter, poke and/or text the parents to make sure they are aware.

If the truanting continues, the school's pastoral staff of teachers and civilians will get into the act and if necessary would work with the family to resolve any of the billion possible underlying reasons.

Eventually a face-to-face will be set up to discuss needs and responsibilities and agree a way forward. If that doesn't work out and the child keeps absenting themselves, the Local Education Authority can issue a Fixed Penalty Notice - almost identical to the one you would get for littering. They've tried the Carrot of social work and now it's time for the Stick of costing real money.

Guess where the parents who don't pay the fixed penalty end up?

Not a very pleasant experience for anyone involved. Not for the skint single mum who just wanted everyone to leave her alone. Not for the teachers called as witnesses. And certainly not for this Magistrate who suspected inadequacy rather than malice here and would much rather spend his time dealing with genuinely bad people rather than acting as some kind of school prefect.

But hey, there has to be a final sanction or else the system is toothless and this wonderful compulsory education system becomes optional and kids run around unsupervised. This lady's already meagre benefits will now be short by £5 for the next couple of years and I don't feel great about that, but she did have dozens of opportunities to sort this and she passed up every one.

I know my first instinct was that this was a waste of Magistrate time, but actually this couldn't be more crucial. After all, what are the best three ways of reducing crime ?

Education. Education. And Education.

Overheating

2009-12-29T10:25:00.003Z

Talk about niche publishing - the following post will only be relevant to the tiny percentage of my already tiny readership who own a Topfield 5800 Personal Video Recorder and are having problems with it.

I bought it from a small company (3wisemonkeys.co.uk) through Amazon earlier on in the year. Worked fine for a while but then we noticed that after a few hours the quality of the TV signal would fall away to 0%, even though the strength of the signal from Winter Hill was still coming through good and strong.

I engaged in a long-running set of emails with all three of the monkeys, during which we ruled out all the standard user-related ID10T errors e.g "Are you sure it's plugged in ? Have you tried switching it off and back on again ?" Speak to any techie - the worst thing you can do for their blood pressure is to treat them like just another user. 3monkeys were polite and thorough and eventually agreed to take the machine back to have a look - if they could replicate the error then they would send a replacement.

Guess which machine ran without error for days of stress-testing at 3monkeys HQ ?

I ended up taking the "defective" machine back - this was causing me some stress at a time I didn't need stress over a mere appliance. It then became something of a hobby for me to find out what was wrong with the thing. I had many theories and all of them were falsified by experiment over a period of months, during which time I learned a lot about digital TV broadcast, reception and storage.

Then at Christmas, when I had some spare time and was rested, I read a report of overheating in a different brand of recorder in Australia. They had cured the problem there by standing the unit up on its edge, with the power unit at the top so that heat would rise away from the sensitive electronics inside the box.

Bingo - works like a dream, but does look a little odd at that angle.

It seems that the current state of the art in these digital recorders is such that you have two choices

(a) A big fan, which cools but makes a racket
(b) A little or no fan, which is quiet but which can fry

Early adopters of this technology should beware. The Topfield is otherwise an excellent product and 3monkeys are the nicest, most patient people in electrical retailing - but even so this wasn't a pleasant experience.

Stan Awards

2009-12-28T17:51:00.005Z

I love the end of year lists that clutter up the newspapers and TV schedules at this time of year. It's a great opportunity to pick up out the stuff that actually has lasting importance from the flashy and the superficial. So much the better that we've got a whole decade to look back on.

The following are the Stan Awards for the twenty-noughties - beverage of their choice in my local coffee shop for any of the winners who fancy collecting the award in person.

Book of the Decade

Carol Ann Duffy - "Rapture" (2005)

So few words, all of them exquisite. Never has the arc of a passion been more skilfully evoked. You can read the poems in the book in an hour and that's one of the best uses of an hour I can think of. Set aside two or three hours though - you WILL want to read it over again when you finish.

Band of the Decade

Radiohead

Look, they had the album of the last decade with "OK Computer" and still somehow managed to follow it up with four great albums that bore little resemblance to their greatest hits and to each other:

2000: Kid A
2001: Amnesiac
2003: Hail to the Thief
2007: In Rainbows

Seemingly infinitely creative, even going so far as to offer "In Rainbows" as a download with a voluntary price tag.

Album of the Decade

Florence + the Machine - "Lungs" (2009)

In a different mood I could have chosen :-

Radiohead - any of the four albums from the decade
Amy Winehouse - "Back to Black" (2006)
Arctic Monkeys - "Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not" (2006)
PJ Harvey - Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea (2000)

But I couldn't resist making a fuss about this amazing début album - warped lyrics, a fine voice, sound textures like no other, and an intoxicating sense that here is a performer with a future and I can't wait to hear her next five or six albums over the next decade.

TV Show of the Decade

The Wire

You've heard it all before, not least from me. Makes the best of the rest seem amateurish and lacking in ambition by comparison. Mrs Stan bought me the complete box set for Christmas.

Best. Present. Ever.

Film of the Decade

Shrek (2001)

Funny and imaginative, rewarding repeat viewing in a way that the sloppy sequels don't.

In a different mood I could have chosen one of these :-

Mulholland Drive (2001)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Children of Men (2006)
Man on Wire (2008)

Verbing

2009-12-24T11:43:00.003Z

There is a battle raging in the Stan household and poor Stanetta is caught in the middle, having to choose sides.

The dispute is around the use of the word "dialoguing", which Mrs Stan used in an essay recently and which gave me something akin to anaphylactic shock when I read it.

To me, there are valid situations where converting a noun to a verb just works. For example, I don't object to the use of "to oil" instead of "to apply oil" - nor do I whince when "chair" is used as a verb. Yet the use of "dialoguing", "medaling", "signaturing" and even "transitioning" can raise my blood pressure more than reading about a mere human rights abuse. What does that say about me ?

No, don't answer that.

In the case of "dialoguing", this was a perfectly acceptable verb form to Shakespeare, then it fell out of fashion for a few centuries before being enthusiastically adopted by the kind of management consultant that gets paid by the syllable. I'm sure it's this Bullshot Bingo association that provokes my response.

Mrs Stan and I agree to disagree on this, but really it's down to Stanetta - she inherits the English language from our generation and it will down to her lot to decide whether in future we will "dialogue our issues and language a response".

Troubled Visitor

2009-12-16T22:24:00.005Z

Some days the visitor statistics for this blog throw up a surprise - some people find themselves here for the strangest reasons.

For example, one recent visitor had found my posting on the various grades of Assault by asking Google the following question :-

"if i plead guilty to a section 20 gbh will i go to prison"

The short answer is "probably", but I have a few pieces of advice for them:-

(a) Don't rely on a Google search to make a life-changing decision like this. Get a lawyer - get one now.

(b) Pleading guilty is a smart move if you are guilty and you know you are guilty - it is likely to earn you a significant discount on your sentence or even improve your chances of escaping a prison sentence altogether. But check with a lawyer before you do.

(c) Pleading guilty is the right and proper thing to do if you know you are guilty. Not just for you, but for everyone affected by the incident and for everyone who cares for you. But check with a lawyer before you do.

(d) If you're Not Guilty then it's doubly vital that you start talking to a lawyer now.

Did I stress highly enough the wisdom to getting yourself a lawyer and getting one now ? Seriously, nobody on the Web knows enough about your position to help you out of the hole you find yourself in. Stop doing Google searches and start dialling numbers out of Yellow Pages for solicitors.

And if you find yourself back at this blog sometime, I'd love to know how you got on.

War Crimes and Bald Tyres

2009-12-15T20:29:00.004Z

There's a big tray of forms in the retiring room - I figured they were all sentencing decision proformas or biscuit requisitions. Now that I know that somehow it's possible for Magistrates to issue warrants for the arrest of foreign politicians, I will definitely pay a bit more attention.

This week's sitting didn't have nearly that amount of drama, which was just as well because the Chair didn't show up and two Magistrates with a combined total of three years experience had to take care of business.

Pick of the cases was that of a confused old man who had had two blow-outs on his trailer. His response ? Keep on driving.

Eventually a concerned citizen called the police to report a car and trailer bouncing diagonally through the town centre. The vehicle examiner's report read like an air accident report - he had absolutely wrecked the brakes, the axle, the lights. Worst of all the tyres were so far gone that he had probably carved tramlines in the road surface with the rims.

What made the case interesting to me was his utter inability to grasp that he had done anything wrong. His story when stopped by police had been that he was on the way to the garage to get the tyres fixed. Even if that was true (and the vehicle examiner was doubtful), how did he convince himself that driving a death-trap through a population centre wasn't any kind of problem ?

He was genuinely gob-smacked when we found him guilty and docked his benefits for the next two years or so. Guidelines allowed us only to put three points on his licence though, which sounds mightily lenient to me given the potential mayhem that he was risking - imagine if he had kangaroo'ed through a bus queue ?

The thought that haunts me is this : When I do my 30,000 miles per year, how many people like this am I sharing the road with ?

Consolidation

2009-12-13T22:29:00.004Z

At the end of your first year as a Magistrate (assuming you haven't run away screaming by then) you get a couple of days consolidation training to prepare you for your assessment.

Good to catch up with my peer group - lots of great war stories, but we did all promise confidentiality so I'll resist the temptation to pass any of them on. Suffice it to say that I got some reassurance that my experience of the criminal justice system I sporadically document here is not at all untypical.

We did some role-play scenarios of the type that were fascinating when we tackled them in basic training, but now we've actually experienced dozens of real cases they are completely unsatisfying. We've all seen how the outcome can depend on a number of subtle features that you won't see summarised in a one paragraph summary.

Another difference from last year was that the groups didn't get wildly different answers from the exercises. Which is reassuring - shows that the training and the guidelines actually do seem to do the job.

The biggest shock was working without an experienced Chair. You don't fully appreciate what they do until you try to replace them with a rookie and watch the process unravel.

At the end we were shown a short piece of propaganda to the effect that we should consider the effect on witnesses before agreeing to a postponement of a trial. A very laudable aim that I'll definite take note of, even though the production values of the video nearly gave me the giggles.

All in all, not nearly as blogworthy as the initial training I'm afraid.

Strange Days Indeed

2009-12-05T20:19:00.004Z

In my dreams I'd want to crash through the end of the decade sideways in a race car with bald tires, an empty tank and the brakes on fire shouting "BEGGAR ME ! WHAT A RIDE!"

What's actually happening is that I'm driving up a snow-covered hill in a 1966 Hillman Imp. My rusty 874cc engine is spluttering and my wheels are spinning as I slowly slide back into a ditch.

The run-up to the Christmas break has been so weird and warped. Stanetta has gone down with yet another ailment. Work has gotten strange in a way I'm neither enjoying nor understanding. I've got some Magistrate training and sittings to fit in. I'm tired, confused and short of patience and good humour. I've also acquired a Urologist.

Ho, ho flipping ho.

One recent task at work was to calculate the number of working days between two dates. Easy enough to say in English - actually quite difficult to write in an efficient piece of SQL. I found I kept testing it by calculating the number of working days between now and Christmas. I'd then run it again and again to see if I could get the number to fall.

Are we nearly there yet ?

And another thing ... why does "The Guardian" think I'd be interested in some free wrapping paper designed by Lily Allen ??? What's next - carpet tiles designed by Bamber Gascoigne ? Michael Palin's tiffin recipe ?

Becoming a Magistrate - The Case for the Prosecution

2009-11-22T11:09:00.006Z

When I ask a salesperson to tell me about their product, they usually give a long list of the advantages. When I ask them about the downsides, in my experience they either tell a joke and change the subject or fib their heads clean off and say that there are none.

My favourite way around this is to ask the question :

"What do you think [[insert name of competitor]] will say about your product when we talk to them?"

This usually prompts a little bit more openness - they start defending the perceived weak points of their product. This is great - because five minutes ago there were no potential weak points that needed defence.

Let's look at the sales job being done to recruit Magistrates. If you read the Government website and the Magistrates' Association public pages, it's all a warm fuzzy glow of public service and personal growth. Sounds as though everyone ought to apply, right ?

But :

"What would a bitter ex-Magistrate say if you asked them if you should apply to be a Magistrate?"

I don't have access to one of those at the moment, but please allow me to speculate:-

Imagine wanting to help your community and improve yourself. Now imagine you can't do it, because you're stuck in a crummy building applying narrowly defined government policy.

You want to help your community ? Great - there are dozens of charities that need people with your brains and energy. Thanks to the legal bureaucracy, you will spend a vanishingly small amount of your time doing anything helpful as a Magistrate. And even then - many of your decisions will help no-one. Your guidelines say you need to fine someone with no money, you fine them. You can't help an addict - you just need to keep fining or jailing them for the crimes they inevitably commit. Yes, once in a while you "win", but it's such an inefficient process - you'd be better off helping to run one or more of the charities in your area.

Want to improve yourself ? Get a better job - the one you're in obviously isn't stretching you. All you'll do by becoming a Magistrate is to make your job more stressful by taking away your free time and holidays. Retired ? See my section above on charities - they need you and you'll learn so much. Want to keep your mind active ? Crossword puzzles are excellent.

Think it'll look good on your CV ? I don't even mention it on mine - it just confuses people - makes me look like a part-time IT guy whereas the clients are looking for commitment. If you think it'll improve your chances of a political career, I suspect stuffing envelopes, making calls and generally being smarmy for a political party would be a better use of your time.

Being a Magistrate gets you little respect. Most people either don't know what you do or suspect your motives. You're tied up in Guidelines and squeezed between the police who dish out fixed penalties and cautions and the higher courts. Your powers are limited, but this doesn't stop the press getting personal when something goes wrong.

In short, what the salespeople tell you might be true - what they don't tell you is that there are more efficient ways of helping people and of improving yourself.

And with that, the Prosecution rests.

If you are considering becoming a Magistrate, please consider carefully both sides of the story. It's not all good and it's not all bad. Consider the alternatives you have, and when you've arrived at a decision, act on it.

In other words, do exactly what a good Magistrate does.

Becoming a Magistrate - The Case for the Defence

2009-11-20T21:03:00.008Z

Most instruction manuals are written by experts who really can't remember what it was like to be a clueless newbie.

For example, an AA operator once asked me whether my fallen-off-into-the-road-car-exhaust had "snapped forward of the manifold". I almost wept, because despite my extended education, there wasn't anything about the question that I understood.

Similarly, if you try researching a question along the lines of "what's so great about being a Magistrate ?" you tend to get rather unsatisfying answers.

Take the following page from the Magistrates' Association website Why become a Magistrate ?". It answers many questions, but "Why?" is certainly not one of them. I suspect the author of the page takes it totally for granted that everyone in the world knows the many benefits and that it would be a waste of typing to list them all out.

Try the main UK government website here and you get some vague Human Resources jargon and an even vaguer appeal to some kind of patriotic selfless idealism.

What you really need are some practical, tested and selfish reasons why you would benefit from getting involved.

These are my personal reasons and they are in no particular order and there are no money-back guarantees if they don't work out for you :-

Really quite a few of your pre-conceptions will not survive direct contact with the reality of the criminal justice system. This is a good thing - it's called "learning".

In your outside life you will develop confidence to make and carry out decisions that don't make everybody happy. I sweat and fret a lot less these days before doing the right thing. Look back in your life - have there been times when your attempts to please everyone have pleased nobody ? Have you avoided doing what you knew was right and mentally beat yourself up for years afterwards ? Yeah, try not to do that so much.

You'll meet some remarkable people in the retiring room. One or two opinionated bores and space-wasters but there again, too few to mention.

Doing something worthwhile that isn't motivated by the need to pay the mortgage feels great.

Stepping out of your day-job gives you some real insight into what's important and who you are. You realise that you are not just your job title.

Stepping out of your day job allows you to flex some new muscles, and to give the usual overused ones some much-needed rest

There will be times when your decisions make a real difference. During your next day at the office, check how many times you make decisions and of those decisions, how many of them resulted in any material change. Unless you're a forward air-controller or a heart surgeon, I suspect the number will be low.

By grappling with seriously hard (and often impossible) questions, you'll find that you aren't as clever as you thought you were and that there's plenty more for you to learn. I find it useful to be reminded of this now and again.

There are other minor points, involving biscuits and improved listening and note-taking skills, but the points above are the main reasons why I'm going to continue into a second year.

A bit one-sided ? Surely there are negative issues ?

Coming soon : my top ten reasons why you would be better off not applying.

My Name is Stan, and I am ...

2009-11-16T22:42:00.003Z

... a snob.

Well, a recovering snob. Maybe.

There was a time when I'd turn my nose up at a film unless it was in some exotic language and consisted mostly of an old man smoking cigarettes for three hours and then moodily bouncing off on a spacehopper. Books with plots, dance performances that actually fitted the music, poems that scanned, paintings that looked like anything at all - how on earth could any of them possibly be any good?

"Mainstream" was my favourite four-letter word and damn you for a small-minded individual if you dared point out that it has ten letters.

The first piece of evidence that I'm changing is Miranda Hart's sitcom "Miranda" on BBC2. She is in no way tries to Subvert The Form or make us think and at no point am I tempted to rub my chin and murmur "Interesting ...." or "How True!". The physical humour is rather blatant, the language is simple and the situations far from complex.

But.

She makes me laugh. Out loud and often.

I've applied my analytical brain to the reason why, and all I've got is this:-

She's a funny person doing and saying funny things.

Look also at "Flash Forward" on Channel 5. The acting is wobbly and the dialogue is risible. But, you know what ? I couldn't care less. Because what it does have is a white-hot plot and insane amounts of pace. And sometimes that's enough to get you through an episode to the usually jaw-dropping cliffhanger at the end which makes you want to tune in next time.

In my snobby days, I'd have called it a "popcorn drama" - in fact, I still do, but nowadays I add " ... and could you please pass the popcorn".

Victim of Crime (but which one ?)

2009-11-11T20:08:00.003Z

Following on from my blog about assault recently (here) - can anyone tell me what the scumbag in the following incident should be charged with ?

"I was cycling along a main road, very much "in the zone" when a car overtook me and the passenger leaned out of the window and yelled in my ear - hoping to make me fall off and damage myself in a vaguely amusing way."

It seems clear to me that some kind of assault happened, even though no actual damage was done, but I'm not actually the right person to make sense of this because :

(a) I'm a Magistrate and not a legal expert

and

(b) Because I was that cyclist, and my instinct would be to sentence him to a good kicking by the roadside. This is not a something the Sentencing Guidelines would approve of.

Don't ask me about my day - I might tell you

2009-11-09T19:26:00.003Z

Up at 05:00 to dig my car out of an ice-block. Mrs. Stan made me a sausage sarnie for the road last night, but I left it by the door thanks to my early-morning head-fog. Drove down the M6 mentally kicking myself and actively considering turning around to pick it up. Figured if I did, I'd likely be tempted to take it upstairs to my still-warm bed and eat it and then go back to sleep and to heck with making a living.

I resisted temptation and pressed on. A stale croissant and weak coffee at Warwick was no substitute for the sandwich which I was starting to hallucinate about. I could taste it, smell it in my mind. Soft sausage, crispy on the outside with plenty sharp English mustard in cotton-wool bread. Six, maybe seven feet long ...

There was some honest-to-goodness fog too, which made driving difficult - and an overturned lorry near Oxford that made driving impossible. The Sat-Nav shrugged her shoulders and took me laboriously through the car-hating centre of Oxford and onto a route that almost, but not quite, converged with my intended destination. For an hour and half my Sat-Nav told me that I was 65 minutes from my destination. If you want a vision of hell, imagine being perpetually 65 minutes away from a destination you're not particularly looking forward to reaching. And more - with every mile, you're a mile further away from the world's finest sausage sandwich.

I arrived at work to find the car-park overflowing - I had to drive around twice until I found a place even to double-park.

And then my working day started.

Next week if you hear of someone doing a handbrake turn and driving the wrong way up the M6, you'll know I've forgotten my sandwich again and this time I've decided to follow my inner voices.

Undercharged

2009-11-03T22:17:00.002Z

If you are beastly to one or more of your fellow humans, there is a spectrum of charges that can be laid against you, depending on the degree of your beastliness :-

1) War Crimes - for this you will be flown to the Hague to face a trial lasting years at the International Court of Justice. Although the way things are going, this may become the next offence deemed suitable for disposal by means of Fixed Penalty tickets and police cautions.

2) Murder and Manslaughter - I think we all know about these. Go to the Crown Court and spend a fair chunk of your remaining lifetime inside.

3) Grievous Bodily Harm (GBH) - almost as bad as murder if done with intent. The less severe cases (section 20) do occasionally arrive at the Magistrates' Court, but typically these deserve more jail-time than a Magistrate can impose.

4) Actual Bodily Harm (ABH) and Battery - two offences relating to hurting or injurying someone in a way calculated to interfere with the victim's health or comfort. In general this involves the victim sustaining at least some severe bruising. Severe cases can lead to sentences up to 5 years in prison.

5) Common Assault (section 39)- this is the most thumbed part of a Magistrate's guidelines. It includes all manner of "Did You Spill My Pint???!"/"What you lookin' at ??!" after-pub incidents involving minimal injury. At most this is 6 months in prison - but more usually it's a fine/community penalty.

One Common Assault case I dealt with involved a woman throwing a doner kebab at her ex - so we're not talking about hardcore criminal behaviour here.

But ... I saw a serious domestic violence case recently involving a sustained assault on multiple people in front of children. The injuries seemed easily to justify a charge of ABH but I was gobsmacked to see that the charge was only Common Assault.

The accused jumped at the chance to plead guilty - which reduces the maximum sentence to four months, which means in practice that they will spend at the very most 8 weeks in prison.

Pretty well any sentence we came out with under those circumstances was going to look candy-assed and totally unfitting to the crime.

But forgetting the Magistrates and the victims, this strategy would seem to be a winner for quite a number of interested parties:-

Offender : under-punished
Jails : less overcrowded
CPS : successful, quicker, cheaper prosecution
Government : statistics on serious assaults reduced

I've got a sinking feeling that undercharging assault will become increasingly irresistible, and that this won't be the last time I will have to hand down a kebab-thrower sentence for a wife-beater crime.

Every Night You Cry

2009-10-27T23:15:00.004Z

The Barnardo's report "Every Night You Cry" is difficult reading, especially for Magistrates. It contains some really heart-wrenching stories from the children of prisoners, showing how locking up their parents affects them.

The part where I stopped being quite so supportive is where they propose the following:-

" measures put in place for courts to have information on the impact on the children of a defendant of any sentence they may make"

To me this pushes the blame for the suffering of children onto the nasty Magistrates, when the blame properly belongs with the criminal parents, who should have thought about the effect on their families before doing the crime.

I've put a total of three people in prison in the course of my year so far, and in all of these cases the person had numerous warnings and last chances but still persisted in offending to the point where custody became inevitable. Should I really have thought "Hmmm - this one's got kids - she gets a curfew. But that one hasn't - he goes down" ?

Bad people should go to prison when they do bad enough things.

That's not something that should be changed - but I do hope that the State and charities like Barnardo's work out a way to cushion the blow for the kids.

Joke ?

2009-10-26T22:32:00.005Z

"Say what you like about servicemen amputees from Iraq and Afghanistan, but we're going to have a f***ing good paralympic team in 2012."

I was going to have a bash at commenting on Jimmy Carr's recent attempt to squeeze humour from the plight of limbless squaddies, but the guys 'n' gals at ARRSE (the Army Rumour Service) have more right to comment and they do it much better than I ever could. Follow their link here.

Oh, what the heck, I'm a blogger, so I have a licence to rant about stuff I don't fully understand:-

The only problem I have with the joke is that it's lazy. It's very obvious and not particularly incisive - Oscar Wilde it aint.

The comment on ARRSE that he probably got it from a squaddie at Selly Oak hospital is probably not far from the truth. In fact he was probably told much worse while he was there - far too near-the-knuckle for public consumption. For example, there's a squaddie on ARRSE who adds the line "Can you imagine the scene when the starting gun goes off?". Now that would have dug him a properly deep hole.

You see, people who work in dark places have dark humour, and that humour no longer works when an outsider lifts that humour from its proper context and plonks it down into a happy Manchester Apollo.

If a wounded soldier had told the joke, it would have been a killer - it would have been their show of defiance and courage. But when a millionaire comedian squeezes it in between the knob-gags, then no wonder the joke falls flat.

And anyway, today a soldier from the Black Watch died from his wounds six weeks after being blown to pieces in Kandahar. As far as I know Jimmy Carr didn't send him out there and Jimmy Carr didn't plant an improvised explosive device by the roadside. So why is it that people seem to be more cross with Jimmy Carr than with the whole range of people more deserving of our rage?

To BNP or to not BNP - that is the Question Time

2009-10-22T19:04:00.004+01:00

Yes, let's allow the potato-faced fascist onto Question Time.

But, let's choose the rest of the panel carefully :-

(1) Al Murray's "Pub Landlord" character ("Where would we be if we had no rules? France! And if we had too many? Germany!")
(2) Ali G ("... is it cos I is black ?")
(3) Sam Kelly's character Captain Hans Geering from "'Allo ' Allo" ("Heil Hitler ! .... Clop !")

HIghs and Lows

2009-10-20T16:08:00.003+01:00

You get to see the best and the worst of human behaviour as a Magistrate.

Take today for example.

"The best" was an experienced Magistrate who glossed over his high-flying career, his charity work and his twenty years on the bench. What he really wanted to talk about was his severely disabled foster-child who is about to start semi-independent living after years of struggling against multiple disabilities and bone-headed bureaucracy. He was so proud of her, and wouldn't hear of it that he and his wife had done something phenomenal to get her to this stage.

"It's just what you do", he said.

Then we left the retiring room and we met his polar opposite.

Slack-jawed and slouching, she had never held down a job in her forty-something years. She had, however, seemingly made a career of accumulating just about every variety of fine, from TV licence evasion via drunk and disorderly to a mediumly-shocking driving offence which also required that she pay compensation to her victim. There were probably a few overdue library books too.

She had been allowed to pay off her dues at £10 per week and in the last eight years she had paid a massive total of £20 out of £2,000. When she was pursued by the Fines Office, she had dropped off the radar and moved house and binned her mobile. She probably thought that that was that, but eventually she was picked up by police on another matter, all these outstanding warrants against her came to light, and she was bundled unwillingly into our courtroom.

You and I, if we were ever in the situation of being unable to pay a fine would have made contact with the court, told them what was happening and would have tried to negotiate some alternative. We would certainly have given up drinking, smoking, partying until we were quits. And the Fines Office and the Courts do fall over themselves to be flexible in cases of genuine hardship and where honest attempts are being made to discharge the debt.

However, going on the run while sticking your fingers in your ears singing la-la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you is a completely different matter. In my pre-magistrate days, I was convinced that short prison sentences were useless and that only violent offenders should go into custody. But you tell me what else you're supposed to do with someone unsuitable for a community sentence who has persistently defaulted on fines. Fine them again ?? Yeah, right.

She was led away, crying exaggerated tears of self-pity. In my previous life this would have affected me, but not now. My overwhelming emotion in her case was of relief that an eight-year overdue debt to society had finally been settled.

Like I say, it was an eye-opener for me to see such a contrast. To be reminded one minute that there are still heights of humanity to which I can aspire and then to see how far it is possible for someone to fall.

P.S Please note that I do try to avoid the above analysis when it comes to sentencing. The oath I took was to deal with everyone in a consistent manner, "without fear or favour, affection or ill-will." So, everyone gets the same treatment, regardless of my (imperfect) judgement of a particular individual's moral fibre.

Who is Jan Moir and How Can I Persuade Her to Give Up Writing?

2009-10-16T17:45:00.006+01:00

Thanks to the brilliantly unreliable Charlie Brooker for setting my blood thermostat to "boil" this morning.

He pointed me to a barely literate hack on the Daily GuessWho called Jan Moir, who wrote a particularly hateful article this morning about the death of Stephen Gately that was barely worthy of a BNP blog entry, never mind a national newspaper.

If you were to follow Charlie Brooker's advice and complain on the Press Complaints Commission website, you'd see

(a) that the site is running extremely slowly due to the sheer weight of outrage
and
(b) they've had to set up a separate section specifically to handle complaints about Jan Moir

If you check out the article on the Mail's online service, you'll see that it's currently running without adverts, because Marks and Spencer have asked that their advert be removed - it seems unsubstantiated homophobic innuendo doesn't sit well with their brand values. You can imagine the voice-over : "It's not just any gay-bashing; it's Marks and Spencer gay-bashing ..."

Look, Stephen Gately was not a giant in his field. He was one of the least talented, but most ornamental members of one of the most insipid boy bands of all time. But he died without warning, aged 33 and his partner, his friends, his family and his fans are in mourning. The last thing they need is some gossip-monger incorrectly joining the dots between "Gay", "Pop Star" and "Early Death".

The overwhelming medical evidence is that Stephen died from the pulmonary oedema he inherited from his father, rather than any kind of gay debauchery.

But the truth is rarely interesting enough for the Daily Mail these days. Their readers deserve better.

PCC Code of Conduct (extracts)

Section 1 : "The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information"

Section 5 (i) : "In cases involving personal grief or shock, enquiries and approaches must be made with sympathy and discretion and publication handled sensitively"

and especially :-

Section 12 :

i) The press must avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual's race, colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or to any physical or mental illness or disability.

ii) Details of an individual's race, colour, religion, sexual orientation, physical or mental illness or disability must be avoided unless genuinely relevant to the story.

*** UPDATE ***

If you do complain to the Press Complaints Commission, you get the following email back :-

Dear Stan
Thank you for sending us your complaint about the Daily Mail article on the subject of the death of Stephen Gately. We have received numerous complaints about this matter.

I should first make clear that the Commission generally requires the involvement of directly affected parties before it can begin an investigation into an article. On this occasion, it may be a matter for the family of Mr Gately to raise a complaint about how his death has been treated by the Daily Mail. I can inform you that we have made ourselves available to the family and Mr Gately's bandmates, in order that they can use our services if they wish.

We require the direct involvement of affected parties because the PCC process can have a public outcome and it would be discourteous for the Commission to publish information relating to individuals without their knowledge or consent. Indeed, doing so might unwittingly add to any intrusion. Additionally, one of the PCC's roles is dispute resolution, and we would need contact with the affected party in order to determine what would be an acceptable means of settling a complaint.

On initial examination, it would appear that you are, therefore, a third party to the complaint, and we may not be able to pursue your concerns further. However, if you feel that your complaint touches on claims that do not relate directly to Mr Gately or his family, please let us know, making clear how they raise a breach of the Code of Practice. If you feel that the Commission should waive its third party rules, please make clear why you believe this.

Press Complaints Commission

The Benefits of a Scientific Education

2009-10-15T22:55:00.005+01:00

Morning in my Travelodge pod-room, and I discover that there's no plug in my bath. I don't want to run down to reception, all angry and naked, and so I improvise.

I take the standard-issue plastic cup, invert it over the plughole and hold it in place until the water covers it completely.

At this point, a combination of air pressure and water pressure hold it in place and I can wash my bits and pieces, leaving me clean, fragrant, and not a little smug.

And yes, I spent some of this morning naked, taking pictures of a plastic cup in my bath and posting them on the Internet. Just be grateful the camera wasn't pointing the other way.

Back Home

2009-10-14T19:11:00.005+01:00

It's unusual for our court to see simple traffic cases. By and large, people tend to grudgingly pay the fixed penalty rather than to take on the inconvenience of defending themselves and to risk the possibility of receiving a much bigger fine.

Which was why it was a shock to see Private X the other day, fighting a minor traffic ticket (£60 fine plus 3 points).

He had actually flown back from his unit abroad at his own expense to defend the charge, had rented a decent lawyer, and had compiled a big thick dossier of photos and text (most of it of dubious relevance).

We heard the police evidence, were easily convinced by it, and fined the soldier more than twice the amount of the original ticket plus a contribution to the sizeable prosecution costs plus the blessed victims' surcharge.

Afterwards, off the record, the prosecutor shook her head and said she couldn't understand why he fancied his chances. She was plainly annoyed, saying that her department was run off its feet, and that the man-days devoted to this case were man-days that couldn't be spent on, for example, making a successful prosecution in a murder case.

Obviously that's just too bad - Private X has an absolute right to his day in court and the people our prosecutor should be angry with are the ones who are underfunding her department.

I had a theory why Private X came to court, but I kept quiet. You see, I had noticed that their first-born was in the back seat of the car at the time of the offence, and that Mrs Private X had been heavily pregnant. Was it possible that he just fancied a few days away from his unit at home with his wife and toddler and brand-new baby ? Would it have been worth risking a few hundred pounds to make it happen ?

In fact, would I be tempted, in his shoes, to do exactly that myself ?

I will, for once, take advantage of my right to silence.

Oppression

2009-10-13T16:01:00.002+01:00

A group of people in this country are being oppressed, and I can't get Amnesty or any human-rights organisation to take an interest.

I'm talking about MPs. Apparently they are being forced to pay out of their own pockets for any cleaning fees beyound £2,000 per year and gradening beyond £1,000.

The Prime Minister spent £64 per week on cleaning a house that was hardly ever used, and this seems seems totally reasonable. You can imagine how dirty a house that is not occupied can become. And if his garden in Fife is under-pruned, you can imagine how badly it would affect his ability to do his job in London.

But seriously folks, the whining of our elected representatives (all parties) is repulsive. They've been caught behaving badly and the least they can do is to be adult about it and take their lumps. We have more to worry about than MP's private gardens. Maybe they could learn how to use a hoover and a lawnmower ?

"We're all in this together".

Ha.

Ha ha.

Ha.

Why? Because !

2009-10-12T13:53:00.004+01:00

One of the hardest questions that non-parents ask parents is "Why did you want children ?"

You see, to a non-parent the downside is all too evident : expense, sleep-deprivation, worry, sudden absence of free-time, weight gain, possibility of death, labour pain, excrement. All the bad stuff is measurable and obvious : what is there that's non-measurable and subtle that could possibly compensate ?

I was listening to Nelly Furtado's "Turn Off The Light" in the car on the gridlocked M40 this morning and it reminded me of a time sometime last century when Stanetta was little. I was showing her how you could play an mp3 file on a computer, which was a quite a new concept back then. At the time I was working away a lot and this was one of my rare trips home.

I played "Turn Off the Light" in an early version of Windows Media Player, which interpreted the music on the screen with a visualisation composed of a swirling pattern of coloured lines, which seemed to please her and then slowly seemed to hypnotise her and she fell into a very untypically deep sleep on my knee. I let the music and the animation loop round as she slept and I snuggled my little girl for seeming hours, not just to stop her falling off.

If I could ever put that feeling into words, then that would be my answer to the question.

Saturday Night

2009-10-10T19:14:00.006+01:00

I usually flee from the lounge as the title theme of "Strictly Come Dancing" plays, but today I stuck around long enough to boo Anton du Berk's entrance. Call me cynical, but I think the media storm may have turned him from being a racist to being a slightly more careful racist. I do hope in six months time, nobody will remember who the heck he was. Plenty of other good dancers can be employed with my licence fee money - why be stuck with this one ?

I'm now in my home office watching Channel 4 News on Channel 4 +1, surrounded by a lot of wires. I've been experimenting with a new database technology called "Hadoop", which involves connecting a whole bunch of machines together to work on hard sums. So, I've got it installed on any old, broken computers I've got lying around the place, and they are all running in one small room, connected by a pasta of wires. These are seriously outdated machines and they make one heck of a lot of noise. How did we ever put up with it ? I would have suggested installing it on every one of my kitchen appliances, but that's too much like the plot of the animated 3-D car-crash of a movie, G-Force.

Hadoop has enormous potential - if I were one of the big database vendors, I would be extremely worried. It's free, it holds the current record for sorting data, it's used for the biggest computing challenges on earth, and it will run on any hardware at all - down to my headless laptop and superannuated Pentium Zero tower.

It's not trivial to install - having tried it a few ways, I would definitely recommend going with Cloudera's distribution - although you do still need to make sure you've got the right version of Sun's JDK - if it doesn't have "rpm" in the file name, it's the wrong version.

I do not have the slightest idea how to end this posting - I'm actually keen to get back to my playing with my computer cloud, so I'll just suddenly stop typi...

Taken Down

2009-10-06T20:49:00.003+01:00

When the nice police officer tells you that "anything you say will be taken down and may be used in evidence", they aren't just clearing the throat.

Maybe a better wording would be :-

"Any smart-alec statement you make really is likely to end up being repeated in court by a very smug prosecutor and nobody will find it the least bit charming.

You will want to die of embarrassment, your brief will want to strangle you, and the magistrates may have a collective coughing fit."

For example, I bet the young man I saw recently for drug-impaired driving really regrets telling the policeman "I drive better on cannabis".

There's not much a defence lawyer can do with that - in a nice snappy sentence he showed himself to be without remorse and a regular offender. Even "it's a fair cop, guv - you got me bang to rights" would have been better.

Incidentally, I doubt anybody does anything better on cannabis. Least of all something requiring reflexes and concentration like driving. Or talking to the police.