This is Better

I bought a new phone. The old one - really old, i.e. about 4 years - produced truly awful photographs and I felt I was not giving my readers a good service in that respect. So I spent a few hundred pounds on a Samsung Galaxy S20 FE - just for you! Hope you're grateful.

I thought I'd better go out and give the new phone, and its multiple cameras, a bit of a run. Here are some of the results. I started in my Puzzle Room.

Went outdoors to my garden.

To Pentewan, a small village not far from me. Ranging from wide angle to telephoto:

 

Thence to Charlestown  Harbour.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Finally, as a reward, tea and cake.

The phone has a variety of camera modes.This is panorama: 

Other modes will require a great deal of patience of my part to figure out how to use them. And on your part, to see the results.

I'm very much a point and click guy. My previous phone was a simple phone for ... a simple man. My new model is a clever phone with a clever camera for ... a not so clever point and clicker.

The Wizard of Noz

New Zealand has an official Wizard. Until yesterday, when Ian Brackenbury Channell was given the sack by the city of Christchurch. 

You can understand NZ's desire to embrace wizardry; after all, their Australian neighbours have their very own Wizard - of Oz. In 1990, Prime Minister Mike Moore proclaimed Channell the Official Wizard of New Zealand, appointed to “protect the Government, cast out evil spirits and upset fanatics”. In other words, New Zealand's Alistair Campbell.

Channell describes himself as an "educator, comedian, illusionist and politician", although he basically travels the country casting spells and mixing potions. He must have cast a spell on the Christchurch city councillors, who decided to pay him $16,000 p.a. to "provide acts of wizardry and other wizard-like-services – as part of promotional work for the city of Christchurch".

Rod Liddle, that unreconstructed anti-wokeist and Sunday Times columnist, writes today that Chiristchurch's act has "aroused fury among occultists" although given Channell is 88 years old it could just as easily be his fellow octogenarians who are up in arms. One man who will surely be delighted is Ari Freeman, who is the Wizard's Apprentice and, with a bit of corporate smooching, could take over this lucrative contract. Freeman is known around Christchurch and beyond as the front man of the psychedelic funk band Rhomboid. Despite all this weirdness, their stuff has a certain magical [gettit?] charm:

I could find no record of any other country or city having a wizard on the payroll, although the Ku Klux Klan has its Grand Wizard. I'm willing to provide wizard services for St Austell, for a small fee of course.

Liberia

According to worldpopulationreview.com, only three countries in the world do not us the metric system of measurement. I'd have thought that the UK was one of those but no, it's the USA, Myanmar and ...

Liberia.

That's a strange mix of countries, wouldn't you agree? Add to your next pub quiz, if you're the quiz-setter. Do you know when the metric system was invented? Answer: 1789, the year of the French Revolution. No more cubits, rods, poles or perches.

Liberia is a West African coastal country, founded by the American Colonization Society. The  ACS was originally known as the Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, was founded in 1816 by Robert Finley to encourage and support the migration of free African Americans to the continent of Africa. Which sounds awfully like sending the slaves back where  they came from. Because of its American roots, the country used the American measurement units.

As for Myanmar, their measurement unit history followed a similar pattern, in this case from the Brits' colonisation of Burma (the Western name for Myanmar). After independence, however, they used their own system of measurement: the taung is two Imperial yards (also known as a fathom, as my retired naval officer readers will know - and probably pine for), a sa le is 1⅛ pints - I'll have a sa le of Burbrit Nevada Pale Ale, please, unless you have some zero alcohol. That'll be 8,000 Myanmar Kyat, please sir.

Both Liberia and Myanmar appear to be on the way to adopting the metric system so the good ole US of A will be out on a limb. Not for the first - or I imagine the last - time.

Somerset villages

Driving from Cornwall to Kent recently, I noted a couple of interesting place names. Both are Somerset villages.

Queen Camel is a strange name. ancestry.co,uk gives us this which, IMO, verges on gibberish:

Camel Name Meaning

English and French: from the word denoting the animal, Norman French came(i)l, Latin camelus, classical Greek kamelos. The surname may have arisen from a nickname denoting a clumsy or ill-tempered person. It may also be a habitational name for someone who lived at a house with a sign depicting a camel. English: from an assimilated pronunciation of Campbell. English: possibly a habitational name from Queen Camel and West Camel in Somerset, Camel(le) in Domesday Book (1086), possibly a Celtic name from canto- ‘border’, ‘district’ and mel ‘bare hill’. Probably an Americanized spelling of Kamel.

King Henry III's wife Eleanor of Provence apparently owned land in the area in the 13th century and perhaps she's the Queen in the name. If so, why not Queen's Camel? Or Camel Queen?

John Leland, a renowned 16th century English historian, apparently believed that the village was the site of King Arthur's final battle. Wasn't Arthur a legend? Could this be the origin of fake news? However, it appears that the village is in the electoral ward of Camelot. Who knew? I passed quickly by, in case I met any ill-tempered people. Or camels.

Compton Paucefoot is even more odd. The only thing I found about Pauncefoot was Wikipedia telling us of "a Norman knight called Pauncefote ('Fat-bellied')" but there's nothing I could discover to corroborate that. There is also a Bentley Pauncefoot in Worcestershire so maybe quite a few fat-bellied knights roamed the English countryside in medieval times. A Compton is thought to refer to a farmstead in a narrow valley and it seems there are lots of those in this part of the world: Compton Martin, Compton Dundon, Compton Dando and Compton Bishop are all in Somerset.

I grew up reading about and following the exploits of the great Middlesex and England cricketer Denis Compton. Anyone as old as me will remember his exuberant, dashing and fleet-footed batting. He was the Mikhail Baryshnikov of cricket. He scored 5,807 runs (18 centuries) in 78 Test matches for England at an average of 50.1. In all first class matches he scored 38,942 runs (123 centuries) at an average of 51.0. Anyone with a knowledge of cricket will know that these are outstanding figures. He was also a very serviceable left arm spinner, available as an option when the regular bowlers were struggling to take wickets. As was common in the 1930s and 1940s, many full-time cricketers played cricket in the summer and football in the winter. Compton did so and won a League title and FA Cup winners medal with Arsenal. Argentina has a reasonable cricket team so maybe you'll see Lionel Messi turning out for them in between belting in goals for his new club.

Compton was a Player. That seems an odd thing to say but, until 1962, there were two categories of cricketer in England. The Players were the professionals and their names were shown on the scorecards with their initials following their surname, e.g  Compton D.C.S. The Gentlemen were amateurs and their initials preceded their surname, as in M.J.K. Smith (himself a double international for England at cricket and rugby union).

Denis had a brother, Leslie, who also played for Middlesex (although not for England) at cricket and Arsenal at football - with two caps for England. As I recall, he was what is known these days as a "no nonsense" centre half. Meaning basically "you might get the ball past me; you might get yourself past me, but certainly not both".

Those were the days.

Speaking of strange place names, any guesses at the origins of Cuckoo-Down-Lane, a footpath in Whitstable in Kent? I walked along it and saw no cuckoos, down or otherwise.

It's in Africa

Be honest, dear reader. If I put an unannotated map of Africa in front of you, would you be able to accurately locate Rwanda? Try it:

Were you correct? Me neither. Here's a quiz question: what percentage of UK asylum seekers are granted asylum (including various resettlement schemes)? I didn't know and guessed at 75%. The most recent confirmed figures show that in 2019 there were 35,566 asylum applications and in 20,703 cases asylum was granted: 58.2%.

The UK has a population of 67.8 million. The 14,863 rejected asylum seekers represent 0.22% of the population.

Denmark has a population of 5.8 million. They had 1,008 asylum seekers in the last three quarters of 2020, of which 357 were granted asylum: 35.4%. The 651 rejected asylum seekers represent 0.11% of the population.

In May, Denmark signed an agreement with the government of Rwanda; the agreement refers to the UNHCR-sponsored Emergency Transit Mechanism (ETM) in Rwanda, a transit/processing resettlement centre designed primarily to deal with an influx of refugees from Libya to other African countries. You can read the full agreement here. A few weeks later, the Danish government passed a law enabling it to process asylum seekers outside Europe.

“External processing of asylum claims raises fundamental questions about both the access to asylum procedures and effective access to protection,” said Adalbert Jahnz, an EU Commission spokesperson. “It is not possible under existing EU rules or proposals under the new pact for migration and asylum.”

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees urged the Danish government to refrain from externalizing their asylum obligations. Such practices "frustrate access to international protection, are inconsistent with global solidarity and responsibility sharing, regularly undermine the rights of asylum seekers and refugees and thus violate international obligations of States."

The Guardian quotes Rasmus Stoklund, the Danish government party’s immigration spokesman, as saying “If you apply for asylum in Denmark you know that you will be sent back to a country outside Europe, and therefore we hope that people will stop seeking asylum in Denmark.”

All this to deal with a few people who together represent 0.11% of the population. It's likely that most - perhaps all - of these are not genuine asylum seekers but is that reason enough to subject legitimate asylum seekers to an arduous journey of 6,500 miles to live for days, probably weeks, maybe months, in a probably over-populated equatorial camp? Not to mention the economics of it.

By now you may well be asking why I am so interested in Denmark's immigration policies.

Reports in UK newspapers today suggest that the Home Office is keen on replicating Denmark's outsourcing of asylum seeker processing and has had discussions with the Danes about their agreement with Rwanda. Next week, the government will introduce the Nationality and Borders Bill into the House of Commons; today's Times reports that the bill will "include a provision to create an offshore immigration processing centre for asylum seekers" The chief executive of the Refugee Council charity is quoted as saying "For generations men, women and children seeking protection in the UK have been given a fair hearing on British soil. Most have rebuilt their lives as law-abiding citizens making a huge contribution to our communities. Offshore processing is an act of cruel and brutal hostility towards vulnerable people who through no fault of their own have had to flee war, oppression and terror."

What kind of country are we? Whether or not people agree on immigration policy as applied to asylum seekers, surely we should treat all of these people with compassion and decency while their applications are being assessed.

Oh, and here is the answer to the original question:

Images courtesy of freeworldmaps.net