Examples

Examples
Examples are normally just a simple illustration of some supposed truth and don't have a great deal of significance. However, the right example can have enormous importance in shedding light on an issue and I've recently come across a few instances of this. I'll try to substantiate my assertion with the following cases (examples).


Argument On Principle
I've mentioned before in this blog that I distrust people who insist on principles. I think I stated something along the lines that principles were in many cases simply bludgeons with which to beat opposing arguments over the head. An instance of this came when my son referred me to a series of comments around the John Terry trial on Facebook. Reading through the comments I was struck by two discrete trains of thought. One was pragmatic, offering various suggestions; the other was based on principle: if he uttered the words........then in principle.......which led to some apparently silly conclusions.

Given my stated position, I tried to think of an example against arguing on principle. It is this. Suppose you find a 10p piece on the ground; what do you do? You could pick it up and put in your pocket, which would be a practical solution, although against principles of honesty and legality. Or, you could ignore it, which would be to dodge the issue. The solution according to principles of honesty and legality would be to hand it in at the nearest police station, have the transaction recorded and the 10p piece kept somewhere safe to await a claimant. Common sense would suggest that was an unnecessary waste of time and resources but not what principles would dictate. Now suppose the money found was not 10p but a bundle of notes to the tune of £10, 000. Both principle and common sense would propose that this find should be handed in. The point of this example is that common sense can easily distinguish between these two cases but argument on principle never can.

The Year 2000 Problem
I spent years working, lecturing and consulting on the date problem affecting computers as the year 2000 approached and became probably the foremost commentator on it in Europe ( I was often called that). Yet during all that time I never came up with a single, simple, clinching example as to why the problem was not only real but had widespread implications. It is only recently that I have been able to formulate it, as follows.

One item of data that is used in countless transactions but never recorded in a computer system is a person's age. It is used frequently and widely in financial, medical and social applications. It is not recorded because it changes every day and would therefore need updating every day. When it is needed it is always calculated and it is calculated by subtracting the person's date of birth, which is recorded, from the current date, which the computer knows(?). Moreover, the result of this calculation is never signed (+ or -) because that is unnecessary; a person can't have a negative age if he/she already exists. So....let's take the situation of a woman born in 1980 in 2001. Her age would be calculated as 01 minus 80, giving -79 (but there would be no minus sign). This woman might be pregnant and looking for a mortgage to buy a house, at a calculated age of 79. It's not difficult to understand the implications of that, financial, medical and social. Why couldn't I have thought of that example in the 1990s?

The UK Postcode
I'm not sure why it has taken me so long to figure out what goes wrong in the use of UK postcodes on websites but I have finally got there. The Post Office created postcodes and so also, I reasonably infer, the code for generating possible addresses from a given postcode. I infer also that this has been made available to websites. The problem is that it has a logical flaw for any organisation that has contact outside the UK. This is an unnecessary consideration for the Post Office, since it is concerned with delivery only to buildings within the UK, so it has been omitted. Organisations that may require to recognise contact outside the UK (after all, the first two “w”s of www stand for worldwide) have slavishly incorporated the code without realising the logical flaw, which requires an escape (or “else”) clause.

It's taken me too long to realise how this has happened but it's clearly taken many UK organisations longer, as the flaw is still prevalent on many UK organisations' websites (government, utilities, hotels, you name it). And they should bloody well wake up and do something about it. In code, it's a simple IF, THEN, ELSE statement. IF UK, THEN Postcode; ELSE ignore Postcode. Please, please copy.

The Practicalities

The Practicalities
 The practicalities left few moments to grieve. My mother had so little that I was spared the hassle of probate; there were enough forms to complete without that. Sharing her few possessions as mementos with friends and family before numerous trips to charity shops and the municipal dump seemed to take ages. Nearly every official I had to deal with was kind and considerate, though.


The Tyranny Of The Postcode
The utilities I had to contact, apart from BT, were a different matter. Unable to hang on to the phone lines for Thames Water and Southern Electricity until, conceivably, my own death might be approaching, I resorted to online contact. Their websites had “moving house” forms, the nearest to my circumstances, but all wanted my contact details and none would allow the completed forms to be submitted without a valid UK postcode and telephone number. So I put in false ones. Fortunately they all also had questionnaires asking me, when the form was completed, to please tell them what I thought of their wonderful website. So I did. I told them about the false contact details, asked if they'd ever wondered what the first two “w”s of www stood for, asked also if they remembered geography lessons at school which suggested there might be other countries in the world than the UK. Do they never have customers who move abroad? But then, if they have any problems contacting me for a final settlement, the problems will be theirs, not mine.

I spent the last night in England before returning to France in a Premier Inn right beside Southampton airport. On checking in I was asked for my name (obviously) and my address and postcode. The hotel's system wouldn't accept the foreign postcode, which had to be over-ridden by the girl at the desk with the help of a supervisor; at an airport?

Since I have already reported the same problem with the HMRC, it appears that the problem is widespread on UK websites. Are UK websites mindlessly copying one another's code and the same logical mistake? I have commented before on the supreme importance of the “else” clause in IT. The UK postcode is an extremely powerful location mechanism which is rightly widely used and which also illustrates beautifully the logical need for the “else” clause.

Thames Water did have the courtesy to reply with a helpful email. Southern Electricity seemed not to comprehend the problem and, in return, sent an email addressed to my dead mother.

Clearing Up
Clearing her small maisonette was a nightmare but, in the end, a fruitful one. She had pitifully few possessions but generally quality ones which should earn useful amounts for the charity shops in Godalming. It's what she would have wished. She also had objects of far greater sentimental value, some of which were adopted by members of the family. Among them were every letter I had written to her since the age of about 18. I even, by chance, came across a local gardening society that maintained the gardens in an old peoples' home and which gratefully took the many beautiful garden pots she had. What distressed me most was what still had simply to be thrown away even though it was still usable, particularly electrical goods, because of stupid restrictions; does “caveat emptor” no longer apply in England? Overall, I hope I did her memory justice. 

While I was in England, I came across two more idiocies. My mother's local council, Waverley, was one that had decided to reduce rubbish collections from weekly to fortnightly, to save costs. The resultant complaints about smell and rat infestations had caused a rethink. So a special collection of food waste had been instituted, weekly. Er......if there are to be weekly collections, why not.......?

The other idiocy concerned a report that passengers arriving at Heathrow had such prolonged waiting times to go through passport control that they had become unruly; so police had been drafted in to control the behaviour of the waiting passengers. So if, because of cost cuts and resultant staff shortages, extra expenditure is incurred and extra staff are drafted in, why not passport controllers rather than police? Because that would solve the problem? Better to keep the problem and, presumably, incur the extra costs on someone else's budget. Are there any brains left running the country or has that been reduced to a matter of political bun fights?

In Memoriam

In Memoriam

And so it's over. My mother died on Wednesday the 27^th of June. I had been forewarned in time and so was able to be at her home with her when she died. Her increasing weakness had long heralded the end. I would merely like to record here what I said at her funeral.

“As most of you here know, Mum looked after me or out for me for all my life. When I was young, she over-protected me, without meaning to. She would say to me then, and continued to say it until I was drawing my pension: have you got a clean handkerchief and have you combed your hair? Because, as she would say, suppose you had an accident and had to be taken to hospital; what would the doctors think if my hair wasn't straight or they found me with a dirty handkerchief? Perhaps there is an NHS warning out to doctors now: before brain surgery, check state of handkerchief. It was something I had to bear, but a token of her love for me, which I never doubted.

When I got to Bristol University I was told a story by one of my tutors there. He said that, a few years previously, he had received a letter from a student's mother asking him to watch over her son especially carefully. Because, she said, he had never been away from home before, apart from five years in the navy. That could have been my mother.

Mum meant the world to me. Not only did she bring me up single-handed, she supported me absolutely when I most needed it. She scrimped and saved to get me through university. After Doreen left, the help she gave me in making a home for Natalie and Carl was immeasurable; I don't know how I would have coped without it. She even, when she wanted to marry Bill, asked my permission; said she wouldn't do it if I didn't like him.

Not only did she support me, she delighted in my successes when I had them. My O level results brought her to tears of joy and she was similarly delighted when I got my degree. She loved my early success at ICL, even if she couldn't understand why I left such a good, safe company; what's a more challenging job and 50% hike in salary, after all?

Mum and I continued with our understandings and misunderstandings throughout her life. But it is to her that I owe my love of nature, the countryside and gardening, and good food and drink, things that have stayed with me throughout my life. That and much, much more. I owe her everything.

I had known for some time that her life was in danger, from at least four years ago when aortic stenosis was diagnosed. She was fully aware that her life might end at any moment but carried on regardless until old age finally weakened her, to the extent that she could no longer continue doing anything she loved. At the beginning of this year it became clear that she could not live much longer. I could not bear the thought of being with her and waiting for her to die but neither could I bear the thought of not being with her when she did die. In the end, I was lucky in coming over when I did. When I saw Mum on the Tuesday evening it was clear she was dying; I knew it and so did she. She couldn't even raise her eyes to watch the birds she so loved outside her window. We managed a little chat, between breaths and sometimes tearfully, about the good times and I got her some strawberries and cream before she went to sleep, apparently happy. The next morning we continued until, around 11 o'clock, she closed her eyes and said: “I'm going now son”. I held her hand and continued talking to her; she died ten hours later.

I was devastated when she finally stopped breathing. But, really, I'm happy, even if I don't look it. On my way across from France I had dreaded the thought of maybe having to persuade her to go into a home. That never happened. Mum had a life that was sometimes hard but she enjoyed it and was always upbeat, cheerful. Finally, she wanted the end and the end was as she wanted. She died peacefully, in her own home, and, I believe, in her own good time. She was totally exhausted and had simply had enough. She will be with me for the rest of my life.”

England And Back

England Again

The carers looking after my mother are calling me Rain Man, because of the weather I appear to bring to England when I come. The last time it rained all week. This time I came for a fortnight to try to get my mother eating properly and so increase her strength and there were, I believe, two days on which it didn't rain. Maybe I should wait for a drought before I go over again, then I would be more welcome.

On my return I had lunch with Daniel and his neighbour, Douglas, an Englishman over to spend a week in his holiday home. Douglas is a construction engineer involved in several water projects and reckons there is really no water shortage in the UK. According to him, the broken pipes are being fixed, slowly but surely, and the real problem is a lack of dams/reservoirs. The problem there is planning permission, which takes years. I mentioned to him my idea of a third water system and he said that that is now a requirement for new eco-buildings and the water companies are apparently offering free water butts to anyone who cares to claim one.

While in England I couldn't avoid the Queen's jubilee celebrations and have to admit I was pleasantly surprised. I had anticipated jingoistic “glories of the past” events and, whilst there was a great deal of flag-waving, the atmosphere did not seem jingoistic at all. The over-all impression I got was of people letting their hair down and having fun in an entirely unobjectionable way; and certainly, the flotilla of boats on the Thames was a sight to remember.

Whilst staying with my mother I got down to some more work on the website. On my previous visit Carl and I had cracked the multi-language problem as far as getting separate pages of text in different languages was concerned but it seems that that doesn't work for photo captions. So it's back to the documentation to sort that one out. I had played with the idea of ditching Word Express and creating pages myself in HTML and CSS, which I can do quite easily. I probably need only half-a-dozen different page formats, but Carl pointed out that every page would then have to be updated individually and manually, which runs counter to my goal of a site that can be maintained by people with essentially no IT knowledge, so I've decided to persist with Word Express. The problem is that a template can become unduly restrictive unless you know the software very well and I've no great interest in becoming a Word Express specialist. However, it seems I must try harder.

Anyway, I'm now back to the and of heat, sunshine and watering very day. Steve and Jo did a valiant job of keeping everything going while I was away but I can see that there is some dead-heading and clearing up at the back to do. In the sun, that won't be a problem.

I've also sorted out my wine for the summer. At this time of the year I'm usually out of rosé and white wine as I don't drink rosé in the winter and drink white only occasionally at any time. Lunch at Steve and Jo's decided the rosé issue; they had found a meaty rosé from Rieu Frais, the vineyard in St Jalle that makes good but expensive Viognier. So I shall buy that. And lunch with Daniel solved the white issue; he'd found a sauvignon blanc of uncertain origin stocked at the village store and it was very good, so I'll buy that. I'm getting my red this year from the Puy du Maupas vineyard.

I'm very pleased that Steve and Jo's vegetable garden, for which I've been a kind of occasional consultant (they've done all the hard work), is looking really good at the moment. In previous years some crops (tomatoes, courgettes, beans, peppers and aubergines) have done quite well but other crops have failed. And the tomatoes weren't very good last year. Over the winter they put in a lot of work (and manure) on the soil and it has definitely paid dividends. Salad, cauliflower and spinach crops are flourishing as well as the other crops so here's looking forward to a bumper harvest.  

Beans And Nature

A Bean By Any Other Name.....

After all these years I'm still learning a significant amount of French. Having lunch with Daniel and Marie today, when we got to the coffee stage, it occurred to me to ask what a coffee bean was in French. I couldn't believe that the obvious “haricot de café” could be right but couldn't think what else to call it. The answer was “grain de café”. So I said: “Why not “graine de café”, since a “graine” is a seed? The answer was that “graines” are for sowing and “grains” are for eating, a nice distinction. Then I thought what bags of haricot beans were called in the shops and remembered they were called “haricots secs”. So why not “grains de haricots”? Because you wouldn't say that; you could say “haricots en grains”. Why? Don't ask.

Nature Red In Tooth And Claw

I've learned that it is dangerous to drive with the car window down. I much prefer that when driving around the countryside to keeping the window shut and using the air conditioning. However, driving back from Carpentras on Friday I was hit in he face by a wasp, bee or some other flying insect. Instinctively protecting my face, I swerved off the road and into a ditch. That would have been bad enough but a few yards from were I went off the road was a concrete pipe continuing the ditch under a driveway, which I duly hit at around 40mph. I escaped with a few cuts and bruises but the car is written off. That was an expensive flying insect.

Chelsea

I've not often mentioned my life-long and fanatical support for Chelsea football club (great restraint!) but have to say something now.  I'm tempted to say that what the team achieved in the last third of the season defied all belief (even mine) were it not for the fact that it was sheer belief, doggedness, obstinacy or what you will that enabled the team to achieve it.  Chelsea now have the ultimate European crown and, whilst the team won't be remembered for their elegant play in winning it, it will be long remembered for repeatedly defying all the odds.

My Mother

My mother is not eating and so is increasingly weak. So I shall go back to England on Thursday to see if I can improve matters. Is this nature's way of saying that when you've had enough you've had enough? 

Government Changes

A Change

Holland has been promising changes and we got the first of these on Sunday: himself as President. Since his electoral programme called for change without specifying what, when, how or where, we have to wait to see what other changes there will be. He has precious little room for manoeuvre and Merkel is already making noises to the effect that the agreed fiscal straightjacket is sacrosanct, so they are likely to be minimal. No doubt there will be some small concessions to be made as a thank-you to the electorate but the only large change I've seen suggested (from outside France), freeing up sections of the economy from government ownership/control, is completely alien to the French psyche.

Whatever measures Hollande decides on he will probably be able to enact quite easily. Parliamentary elections are due in a month and the polls point to a sizable majority for the centre-left parties. The Senate (equivalent to the House of Lords) already has a centre-left majority. Members of the Senate, incidentally, are all elected, by people who hold elected positions (mayors, councillors, etc). Now there's a thought for House of Lords reformists.

It turned out there were enough people who simply wanted to get rid of Sarkozy to do just that, just: a majority of a mere ~3%. Sarkozy's crime was not his handling of the economy, which generally met with favourable comments, nor his despicable swerve towards extreme right racism when the polls turned against him. It was rather his lack of taste. Outside France it is difficult to appreciate just how important “le bon goût” is to the French. It pervades the whole of life. Perceptions of food, drink, dress, relationships, public behaviour and just about everything else are governed by it. What matters is not so much what you eat or drink but always taking a little at a time, not piling up your plate or overfilling your glass. It is not what you wear but the cut of it, not whether you are faithful domestically or have a string of lovers but how you go about it. Style is all and Sakozy lacked style. He was generally perceived as brash and vulgar. He might have got away with it in more affluent times, if the economy had been booming and there was little unemployment. But ostentatious displays of enjoying a celebrity life-style when most of the population was having to tighten belts wasn't a bright move by any standards. However, it was the perceived vulgarity of his life-style that seems to have done for him. It is no accident that the “modesty” of Hollande's celebrations of his victory has been highlighted in the press.

Language

It wasn't necessary to know much French to follow what was going on pre-election. There were a number of “interviews” and we also had “le talk” and "un talk-show", in particular about the possibility of the socialists making “un come-back”.


 Which takes me more humorously to names.  I have to admit not being able to repress a giggle when my attention was drawn to an actor playing in a musical in Paris called Yvan Le Bolloc'h.  The French get their own back, of course, with Sean Connery (connerie = stupidity).

Moving Department

Mollans administratively is a kind of peninsula at the lower end of the Drôme Department, surrounded on most sides by the Vaucluse. The road signs have always amused me in that going almost anywhere means leaving the Drôme (Merci de votre visite), going into the Vaucluse (Bienvenu) and then coming back into the Drôme (Bienvenu again). Well, that's about to change.

For one thing, Departments, which have been a major part of the French administrative infrastructure for some 200 years, are being phased out. Within Departments there have been “communities of communes”, collectives that pool the resources of several communes to provide services that it doesn't make sense for communes to provide individually. Garbage collection, water and school facilities are examples. In future, these collectives will assume many of the powers currently invested in Departments.

Well, Mollans village council has decided to jump ship, leaving a collective centred on Buis (in the Drôme) and joining one centred on Vaison (in the Vaucluse). The main difference I can discern is that the former collective had a more or less low-rates, low-spend ethic and the new one has the opposite. The obvious attraction for village council is that it will get a bigger budget but there is some dissent among villagers at the prospect of garbage collection and water bills rising. It's probably the cost of changing all the road signs.

Reflections From England

Water, Water Everywhere......

I've just spent 10 days in England visiting my mother for her 95^th birthday and, of course, had to arrive in the middle of the wetest April for over a century. England must be the only country in Europe that can have a drought and floods simultaneously. I suppose that is unlikely to change until more leaky pipes are repaired. It's becoming clearer to me that infrastructure cannot be successfully privatised. This is something the UK has got wrong and the rest of Europe right. It's hard enough to get a government to focus on infrastructure, given 5-year tenures; private industry will always see more profit in short-term fixes.

I read an article while in England noting that some places have three water systems: added to the usual drinking water and foul sewer systems is a dirty water system, essentially a rain run-off system. Cleaned of sediment and debris, it provides a supply suitable for most purposes other than drinking and reduces the risk of floods at the same time. Given the amount of concrete now covering much of England, there must be numerous opportunities to put this in place. It's definitely needed and will be more so in future; but whether it makes economic sense for privatised water companies is another matter.

There seems to have been a mood swing generally in Europe away from focusing primarily on reducing deficits and towards a focus on growth. The big financial authorities seem to concur. Unless some measure can impel the banks to open their purses the obvious action is a touch of Keynesian government injection. But in what, if infrastructure is privatised?

The Countryside

Needless to say, the English countryside looked only mournful in the rain, which was a pity as I think it looks at its best in the spring. I was a bit late for daffodils and narcissi but caught some bluebells on my perambulations.  One thing that struck me was that the roadsides were covered in yellow, as here. But in England the yellow was gorse in bloom, not coronilla and broom. On reflection I'm surprised that gorse does not grow here. It's made for a harsher climate and should thrive in the garrigue undergrowth, yet I've never seen any.

Back here, it's poppies, euphorbia and purple salvias along all the roadsides; and the asparagus and strawberry season is in full flood, not just in shops but in small-holdings all around the village.

My Mother

My mother had a fall, not a serious one, but one that entailed a short spell in hospital and which has weakened her further; she now weighs just 4.5 stone (33 kgms). That, and her increasing loss of short-term memory, have made me wonder how long she can continue in her own home. It hurts me to see her exhausted making the small slow movements necessary even in a little well-designed maisonette. Although I now go over for a week every couple of months, I feel guilty about not spending more time with her, the more so in that she is so delighted and grateful when she sees me. Yet she remains cheerful much of the time, taking pleasure in the birds that flock to her feeding tables and the stocks and freesias I bought for her sitting room.

The rain did stop for enough hours for me to plant flowers in the pots on her patio and to re-arrange the pots to allow for a garden chair. I bought two, one for the front and one for the back, in the hope that some warm sunny spells will arrive to allow her to sit outside.

Website

My son, Carl, came on the Saturday and we started to get to grips with WordPress. Carl installed the incipient site on his server in the “cloud” and we had time to upload some of the text I had prepared. The software is powerful and it's clearly going to take me some time to become familiar with it. Also, the multi-language facility is more complicated than I had anticipated. I'm going to have to consider the design of the site carefully if potential third and possibly fourth languages are to be added easily, without having to change the structure of the site.

Fortunately Carl is very adept and friend Steve provided some useful comments on my original text, so I'm confident that more progress will be made soon. In the meantime I can send the improved text to Claudine to get it translated into French.