Red Adair

Remember him? Red Adair was the guy you sent for if you needed urgent action. Putting out oil well fires.

He came to prominence in the public eye in the 1960s and 70s as someone who - with his team - capped burning oil wells, particularly (to British attention) in the North Sea. The "go-to" guy of the oil industry, even appearing in Kuwait after the first Gulf War at the age of 75, putting out the oil well fires set by the retreating Iraqi army.

Today's go-to guy, in UK politics at least, is Michael Gove. Need someone to run a difficult government department? He's your man. Even after shafting his boss (now the PM) in the leadership election following David Cameron's resignation. Gove, thought of as a reformer who can think 'outside the box', fought the teachers in the Education Department, got rid of Chris Grayling's harebrained scheme for book limits for prisoners at Justice, jointly 'won' the EU referendum and told us we can't buy petrol or diesel cars after 2040. And was mates with Dominic Cummings.

He now has a new department. Previously called the Housing, Communities and Local Government department, it's now the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities department - possibly a prime candidate as the worst ever departmental name. 370 years after the original Levellers movement in the English Civil War, we're all going to level up. I think that means we can all become Queen, run Asda or buy a Caribbean island.

What next for Michael? Could he become King? The monarchy surely needs his reforming zeal; they've definitely been down-levelling of late. As a mercenary, maybe he could have a go at leading the Labour Party. Level them up and they might win an election in time to welcome electric cars in 2040. Mostly I'm thinking of Ipswich Town, though. Football is littered with go-to managers such as Sam Allardyce, who is  the person of choice when  your team is stuck in the relegation zone. Could Gove level us up to the Premier League? A win-win for Ipswich and the country, perhaps. Yes please.

The Queen's Remembrancer

Master Barbara Fontaine is in fact a mistress. A female Master. As the Queen's Remembrancer, it's her job to review for the monarch the annual plans for new trees in the Forest of Dean. With me so far?

The post was created in 1154 by King Henry II and the first King's Remembrancer was Richard of Ilchester, a senior servant of the Crown and later Bishop of Winchester. The position is nowadays held by the Senior Master of the Queen's Bench Division of the High Court. A Master is a level of judge in the High Court whose decisions are of equal standing to that of a High Court judge at first instance. At first instance? Not sure what that means.

You'll be pleased to know that the Trial of the Pyx is a ceremony dating from 1249, formerly held in the Exchequer Court, now in Goldsmiths' Hall. The Queen's Remembrancer swears in a jury of 26 Goldsmiths who then count, weigh and otherwise measure a sample of 88,000 gold coins produced by the Royal Mint. Don't know what a Pyx is? Don't worry; like the Schleswig-Holstein Question, there are only three people who do.

Given these exotic responsibilities, Babs must regard her involvement with Prince Andrew as tawdry, degrading and unworthy of her attention.

My non UK readers will surely be thinking "what strange people those Brits are".

The World's Most Complicated Sport

I've blogged before about my experiences as a rugby teacher.

That's actually a bit of a stretch since, as a rookie music teacher at a private school, I and the rest of the staff had to take rugby on a Saturday afternoon. Very much the blind leading the blind. As I said at https://usedtobecroquetman.blogspot.com/2020/06/why-are-arsenal-so-toothless-football.html "Each autumn, the whole staff would gather just before the start of term to be addressed by the head of PE, who told us the latest changes to rugby's offside laws". I never understood the old laws, let alone the new ones. Even today, watching rugby is an impenetrable experience for me. I invite any lover of sport to explain the myriad laws on rucks, mauls and scrums (also previously blogged).,

Not just offside laws, as I discovered yesterday that the perennial changes continue to this present day. These are the new laws this season.

50-22

If a player kicks the ball from their own half and it bounces into touch within the opposition's 22, then the attacking team will receive a lineout.

Goalline drop-out

In the in-goal area, if the ball is held up, or there is an attacking knock-on, or a kick from the attacking team is grounded by the defending side, then play restarts with a goalline drop-out.

Pre-bound pods of players

Outlawing the practice of pods of three or more players being pre-bound before receiving the ball. The one-player latch is still permitted but he must now stay on his feet and enter through the gate.

Sanctioning the lower limb clearout

Penalising players who target/drop their weight on to the lower limbs of a jackaler.

Pods? Latch? Gate? Jackaler?

See what I mean?

Tolstoy, Woolf, Fitzgerald, Rachmaninov

It's been a while. Less than two weeks since I last wrote a blog post; honestly I didn't think anyone would notice. But an outcry from my readers has motivated me to get my head down. I used the excuse that "I am sitting in the middle of some workmen replacing a gas boiler and associated building works." Which is both true and stressful. And ongoing. Of course, the new football season has begun and the TV is getting my full attention. I've also developed am obsession with the Times Quick Cryptic Crossword; not the full Cryptic, I have yet to graduate to that. Most days I can complete it, although yesterday's was full of Dickensian references and I simply didn't know that "women's hats" referred to Dolly Varden, a character in Barnaby Rudge, whose name was used to characterise various items of fashionable female clothing in Victorian England.

Am I simply lacking motivation? I think not, except that lethargy brought on by an inability to find a way to expand items of news which I found interesting into full-blown essays. Here are some examples:

Scientists have concluded that a duck in Australia has learned to speak English. Addressing the scientist directly, the duck says "you bloody fool".

Speaks for itself. Which effectively stopped that potential blog post in its tracks.

Apparently all US states have official songs. For instance, Georgia's is ... obviously ... Ray Charles' Georgia on My Mind. New Jersey is the only exception because the Governor in 1972 vetoed the "I'm From New Jersey" proposal. I think he thought it was too prosaic. You can see a list of all the US state songs on Wikipedia. It lead me to wonder what song my English county - Cornwall - should adopt. And that's the point at which inspiration - and enthusiasm for the topic - ran out.

Maybe I have been suffering from some form of Writer's Block. Pretentiously putting me on a pedestal alongside the eponymous Leo, Virginia, Scottie and Sergei.

You may be pleased to know that I'm trying. Works on the subjects of the Canterbury and Whitstable Railway, replacement-level fertility, spoken poetry and pooh sticks are on the production line. Amongst other drafts in progress.

For the moment, though, there's footy on the telly.

Suburban wild life

Son #1 and his family live in suburban New South Wales, Australia. Which is obviously a scary place, by the look of this recent visitor:

It's a diamond python. Not poisonous, kills its prey (small lizards, birds, possums) by constriction and suffocation. From the look of it, scared out of its wits by young Australian children. Males twice as large as the females (the snake not the children), so we'd need another for comparison to discern this one's sex. I probably shouldn't scare my grandkids by saying that they (the snakes) typically lay 25 eggs at a time and are "known to occupy the roof space of suburban homes", according to Mr Wiki. Thank goodness they (the grandkids) don't read this blog.

Australia is home to around 100 species of poisonous snake and large numbers of very scary spiders, although only two of the latter - redbacks and funnel webs -  are potentially lethal to humans. Antivenoms are apparently widely available in this calm and peaceful country.

Just to prove this blog post hasn't been sponsored by Tourism Australia, I should mention the box jellyfish - danger rating 10/10 by australiangeographic.com.au - the honey bee (9/10), the bull shark and of course the infamous saltwater crocodile (only 8/10; they need to up their game). I encountered one of the latter in Alice Springs in 2007:

I was invited to feed Terry but decided to watch instead.

In contrast, in Cornwall we avoid the sea when the jellyfish and occasional (harmless, we are told) basking sharks are around, avoid bulls and rams in the mating season and generally curse the behaviour and noise of the seagulls. That's it. Thankfully.

Tagalog

Botham - we'll call him that rather than Sir Ian or, more recently, Lord Botham - has been appointed the UK's trade envoy to Australia. If anything is designed to get up the noses of the Aussies, it's shoving Botham down their throats. How this will influence the prospects of a free trade deal, who knows?

Trade envoys are parliamentarians - yes people, Botham is a member of our revered Upper House - appointed, unpaid, by the Prime Minister of the day. There are currently 36 trade envoys covering 76 countries/regions. Most of them - in fact, all of them other than Botham - are people you've never heard of. One imagines that they have some connection with, or experience of, their target territories. Richard Graham, MP for Gloucester, for instance, speaks Indonesian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Tagalog, French, Malay and Swahili; so a decent enough fit as trade envoy to the ASEAN Economic Community of Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Philippines, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand. Not sure where they speak Tagalog; could it be a fictional language like Dothraki or Klingon? Nope, it's a Filipino language. I picked it up quite quickly:

The trade envoy programme only began in 2012. It's aims are to "support the drive for economic growth by building on the UK’s existing relations with these markets and maximising bilateral trade, thereby generating real and long term benefits for the UK." It's fair to assume there will be more trade envoys appointed in due course. If they follow the example of sending a cricketer to the country that he battered into submission with his determination, we might see the following:

Geoff Hurst (hat-trick in the World Cup Final victory over West Germany 1966) as envoy to Germany.

Andy Murray (beat Novak Djokovic to win Wimbledon singles final 2013) as envoy to Serbia.

Trina Gulliver (beat Francis Hoenselaar to win the darts world championships in 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007) as envoy to The Netherlands.

Laura Davies (US Women's Open Golf champion 1987, beating Ayako Okamoto and JoAnne Carner) as envoy to Japan and the USA.

Stand by your phones, people!