You Raise me up (only at high tide though)

They're really kind in Hull.

They even lift up the bridge to let the birds fly through.

I should explain that this opportunity arose from my position at the very front of the traffic queue  when the warning lights and barriers came down. The operation of the bridge was actually to allow a low barge through but the mast had been folded down to allow passage under the other bridges on this stretch of the river. There was none of the usual strange sight of a Red Duster Flag seemingly floating independently through the gap in the road.

I apologise for the soundtrack which is a Richard and Judy Show. Odd, you may say that I have a TV broadcast on a live video. The really geeky amongst you may spot that the windscreen wiper in the foreground is of a type fitted to a Volvo XC70 Lux which I owned for a couple of years and which had a pop-up television in the dashboard. Purely coincidental is the narrative by R & J on the subject of the release of the film about the MP and anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, himself a son of Hull and with his historic home just a few hundred metres away from this particular crossing point of the River Hull. The Amazing Grace film was relased in 2006 which makes me look a bit sad in my keeping of this mundane clip for all that time.  

The bridge is often out of action being a grand old installation but is a fine example of industrial design in civil engineering.

Dressed to Kill

There are some distinct advantages of being naked and a few social conventions and just plain legalities representing the down side of being unclothed, particularly in public.

One of the main positives of sporting the old birthday suit is the avoidance of injury or worse arising from the actual wearing of clothes.

The facts and statistics of clothing related accidents and incidents are well documented and in some instances make quite disturbing and gory reading. We, of course, take our clothes entirely for granted and throw on just about anything to cover up our naked forms. There is however no longer a satisfaction with just a loin cloth or prehistoric style bikini. Somehow you do get the impression that our ancestors were just patiently waiting for the invention of underwear and top clothes not otherwise a by-product of something they had just killed for food.

There are many forms of threat from clothes.

This may be from the use of hazardous materials in their manufacture, sustaining an injury from wearing inappropriate clothing for a particular situation or even down to the way we actually get dressed. Particular examples amongst these categories of hazard are not hard to find.

A lady was badly burned when her cocktail dress caught fire. The garment had, as a key constituent, nitrocellulose which is an ingredient in gunpowder. A small child was also injured when the chaps on his cowboy suit trousers caught fire because of the use of unsuitable and unstable chemicals in the vinyl. Clothes can also cause an outbreak of skin complaints and irritations amongst a minority of wearers more sensitive to certain substances. We may persist in wearing a favourite article of clothing because it makes us look good and stylish but in the full knowledge that it is a major source of discomfort. That is the price of fashion.

It is advisable to select appropriate clothing for the activity or environment in which you find yourself. This is plain common sense in, for example, Arctic or other inhospitabale weather regions when , you would hope and expect that individuals would attire themselves correctly. There have been many reports of Mountain Rescue Teams retrieving walkers and climbers from high ground upon the closing in of winter storms and blizzards and expressing their shock and surprise at finding the shivering and hypothermia suffering survivors in flip flops and shorts.

It is not only cape-clad Superheroes who run the risk of being dragged into the engine ports of their craft. I did have access to a dossier, a thick dossier, from the Health and Safety Executive listing the results of their enquiries into fatal accidents on farms and on industrial sites. Beware that lumberjack tweed shirt with the flappy sleeves when operating a power take off shaft on a tractor or a straw bailing machine. It may look the part for the job but it will make short work of helping to remove a body part in conjunction with a mechanical process. Flared trousers and inappropriate wearing of Kaftans close to revolving or linear belted production facilities can also impose some inconvenience if getting trapped and introducing flesh and bone to the industrial machinations.

A recent study of hunting accidents in the US made strong recommendations for those partaking in the sport to wear fluorescent coloured clothing, specifically 'Hunter Orange'. This was logical given the inability of gun-wielding types to differentiate between their colleagues taking a dump in the foliage where the flash of bleached toilet paper readily mimics the hippity hoppity action of a startled white tailed rabbit.

Injuries arising from what can be an everyday action of putting on your clothes are also widespread and were reported on in detail recently by an Association representing Chiropractors. The wrestling action of getting into that Christmas jumper, perhaps a bit tighter than remembered 12 or 24 months ago, can easily throw out a shoulder or cause a muscle-pull. Apparently bra's are responsible for much front pain and back pain and it is my understanding that the proper measuring up for a brassiere can have wonderful benefits for health, well-being and posture. Of comparative significance for the male of the species is certainly that millisecond in time and micron in space that determines if your foreskin gets trapped in the zipper or does not.

The ultimate in cautionary tales aound clothing came from my Gran. She regularly told the story of the demise of the American Dancer, Isadora Duncan in 1927 caused by her (not my Gran I emphasise) casual discarding of a long scarf out of a moving motor vehicle. The subsequent action of the no doubt stylish and chic silk garment catching around the rear wheel and axle caused her neck to break.

I have ever since my Gran first and then repeatedly scared us all with this fact, refused to wear my expansive Doctor Who scarf whilst riding in any convertible vehicle.

Cow Pie is off the menu

They all sound, when lumped in together like they have all the necessary attributes for a gang of modern day Superheroes.

One of them has a phenomenal appetite, another with intimidatory tendencies, a wonder dog, an aurally enhanced law enforcer, chaotic primates and a cat skilled in impersonating human traits. (answers later on in the text).

Yet, these characters have, as of yesterday, lost their place in the hierarchy of paper publications in the very sad, but somewhat inevitable demise of the printed Dandy Comic.

There may be some consolation and perhaps a little bit of hope in the transition of The Dandy to an on-line effort but to many the loss of a beloved ink based comic is the ultimate death knell. There is something very special about a comic. For many it represented the first real purchase when eligible for pocket money. A collection of comics stored under the bed or in a special box was a prized and cherished possession. You could hide away in the pages of a comic from relatives as though it were an invisibility cloak, responsibilities and domestic chores. There was always something new and fresh in the pen strokes and coloured cartoons strips even after many hundreds of times the comic had been opened and studied meticulously. You regretted a moment of tantrum or neglect that meant that the neat and flat comic became creased or worse.

It is not really a case of allocating blame for this state of affairs to a single source. You could as easily attribute the factors behind the decision to a cost cutting exercise by the publishers D C Thomson as to a complete failure of British parents to encourage their offspring to value and appreciate the written word as presented in a comic strip. 

The launch of The Dandy was not only now in a different century but also in a very different period of comparative innocence in and acceptance by children of what they were expected to do, how to behave and where their place was in the hierarchy of the family unit.

The first edition appeared in 1937 and at the peak of its popularity in the 1950's it had a circulation of 2 million a week.There was a certain reliability and consistency in the appearance of the weekly comic that could only serve to reassure young children at a time of great upheaval in the wartime and post war years. The formula of familiar characters, plot lines and antics was well tried and tested and did in fact vary very little over 75 years.

Notable deviations included the depiction of two Nasty Nazis known as Addie and Hermy during the war years, the withdrawal of meat pie from the menu of a certain mainstay character during the peak of the BSE Mad Cow crisis and even the elopement of key figures with The Spice Girls as a stunt to mark the 60th anniversary of The Dandy in 1997.

By the time of the last ever printed comic yesterday it had reached a position of the third longest running publication of its type in the world.

On reflection, the fact that it managed to hold out until 2012 is a minor miracle given that the circulation numbers had plummeted to around 8000 loyal readers a week.

I have to admit that I was not personally a Dandy reader but in your younger years there are always hard choices to make such as a preference for Marmite or Bovril, watching Blue Peter or Magpie, Slade or The Sweet, Smoking or not and these are often set in stone for the rest of your adult lives.

I was more a fan of The Beano and later on the Topper Comic but did flirt in between with the likes of Whizzer and Chips or even a closet interest , or actually reading it in the gas cupboard, in my younger sisters Twinkle Magazine. The main characters to whom I attributed mega powers are of course , in the aforementined order, Desperate Dan, Bully Beef and Chips, Black Bob, PC Big Ears, Monkey Bizness and Korky the Cat, amongst other notables.

How they will cope in cyber-space is yet to be seen but things will never be the same again and that is sad.

Unfortunately I have not been able to find a copy of the last ever printed Dandy in any of the local newsagents or supermarkets and not for want of trying . No doubt those resourceful members of the over 60's original readership have been crafty and quick off the mark to indulge their nostalgic tendencies or at least re-sell their multiple copies on E-Bay to supplement struggling savings and their pitiful winter fuel allowance.

Lunacy

The breaking news of last week was the revelation, after 45 years of being locked away in secret dossiers , that the US Air Force had, in the 1950's considered launching and exploding an atom bomb on the moon.

The period was at the height of the Cold War between the US and the USSR and both ideologies were determined to outdo the other in the quest for space, as a metaphor for their political posturing, and ultimate domination of it for military supremacy.

There was considerable hysteria and a culture of reckless propaganda based mis-information on both sides.

This was not helped, in the eyes and ego of the US, by the pioneering Sputnik launches of the Soviets and their crowning glory ,as hindsight shows, of the Gagarin space walk in 1961.

This rather ironic materialistic victory of communism over capitalism was very damaging and it was game on with just about anything worthy of consideration. It was time for the Cold War muscle of both superpowers to be flexed and with much gesturing and points scoring to be had.

The US approach was to stir up a sinister scenario around the involvement of the USSR in space and this took the form of a co-ordinated and syndicated press campaign. It was widely reported, in column fillers of local and regional newpapers in America and on a world wide circulation , that to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the Red Revolution there were plans by the Politburo to detonate a nuclear device on the dark side of the moon. This was intended to raise a large flash and subsequent dust cloud, to be clearly visible from the Earth and publicised as a sign of Soviet power and virility.

To some extent this feeding of selective information to the wary and fearful citizens of the US served to deflect attention away from the very same intentions of the American military.

The document, brought into the public domain recently, was innocently entitled 'A Study of Lunar Research Flights'.

On a mundane level and fantasy aside the whole idea of an atomic explosion on the moon was not in fact borne out of spite to deny the Soviets of further publicity coups but for scientific observation of dust cloud patterns and overall scientific curiosity.

To a large extent the Apollo 11 moon landing and subsequent missions established NASA in the forefront of space exploration and technological spin offs and left the USSR looking a bit amateur and at firework status.

The release of the 'blow up the moon' files has unfortunately been blown out of all proportion for the benefit of TV topical news , sensationalist and entertainment ratings. The futility of a sole missile launch at a very dense rock some 238,000 miles away has not been part of the logical analysis of yet another in a series of Cold War myths and plain nonsense.

The hare-brained proposals appear to have been withdrawn on the grounds that there was some concern over implications for affecting the trajectory of the moon (was this a source of the main story line for the 1970's TV series of Space 1999?) or that a missile launch would just slingshot around the dark side and catapult back to planet earth. Such excuses could just be another convenient exit strategy for the actual lack of technology or budgetary constraints at the time.

Personally, I like to think that a high level delegation of The Clangers were able to persuade the US against an act of aggression and war on them as sole inhabitants and custodians of the Moon. The Americans made them whistle for it.

Shaken and Stirred

A local hotel is advertising, amongst its seasonal events, for December 2012 what they call a 'James Bond Christmas'. Here goes........

Commander Bond lay under the duvet cover. The distant sounding of church bells reminded him that this was indeed Christmas Day.

He had got in at about 9.30pm from yet another of  'M's festive gatherings. It had not been that exciting. He had returned alone. Moneypenny had gone home even earlier, after all she was an old lady and no fun. M's quiche had made him a bit bilious and the dry martini's had not been enough to quell the acidity in his stomach.

He let one go under the heavy winter tog rated bedding and casually wafted it away into the gradually increasing natural light of his flat. What to do for Christmas Day?

He swung a leg out, feeling for the thick pile of the carpet. Pulling his heavy built form upright he found that his onesie had ridden up during the night with some constriction of his lower abdomen. It was a legitimate reason for a prolonged scratch and re-arrangement of his undercarriage.

The flat was cold and he cursed not mastering the central heating thermostat in the twenty years of his occupation. He had no time for manuals. 'Q' had been kind enough to show him the settings for instantaneous hot water and radiator heating. They had been very similar to the afterburner controls on Little Nelly and a nasty and expensive quarterly gas bill had been the consequence of a degree of confusion accordingly.

A light, healthy breakfast appealed to him. Those long sessions at the Casino in recent years had ruined his physique .He had contracted and only just recovered from a nasty virus from , he suspected, the sampled contents of a small bowl of mint imperials at the coat-check counter near the toilets in Monte Carlo.

He was disappointed by the contents of the fridge. The orange juice was 'with bits' which he had bought from M&S without checking. He infinitely preferred smooth. No yoghurt, no bran or porridge oats so he settled for a lump of cheese and half a packet of cream crackers. The onesie successfully captured any fragments of the flaky Lancashire and biscuit crumbs in its thick, luxurious velour giving the faux tiger-skin print the appearance of a dandruff outbreak.

Living the life of a bachelor, out of the normal hours of his regimented and disciplined professional assassin duties, the living room was a tip.

He stumbled over a collection of take-away cartons,pizza boxes and discarded clothing-all his. A pint glass full of the discarded shells of pistachio's fell and rolled across the parquet floor gradually decanting its contents. A few well place martial arts kicks cleared the rest of the debris under the DFS corner suite and Ikea wall unit. The DVD's would have to be sorted later from an unruly pile. The movie of 27 Dresses at the top caused him to pause and recall how he had enjoyed the plot and sentiment of such a well structured and acted rom-com.

As Commander Bond dragged the Dyson bagless around the room he made an instinctive check for any signs of intrusion whilst he had been at M's reception. Trip wires and carefully adhered strands of his chest hair were still in situ. It was disappointing not to be the subject of any nefarious intentions during the holiday season. How was he expected to keep his hand in?

The number of Christmas cards on the mantelpiece was well down this year. This was, he mused a combination of how convincing his manufactured death had been earlier in the year resulting in many deletions by Facebook friends and the trend amongst fellow assasins to occassionally have to kill each other.

The unsigned, oversized padded card depicting an alpine scene was definitely from that rascal Blofeld. He had a decent sense of humour under that serious visage of world dominating villainy.

The morning passed quickly. Feeling peckish after his exertions of a man's comprehension of cleaning and hoovering he chipped away at the slab of ice which had consumed his freezer compartment and recovered a couple of ready-meals which would do nicely for his Christmas dinner. The combination of Tikka Masalla and Hot Pot was novel but palatable. Dessert was a bit more of a challenge but the Angel Delight was soon whisked into a firm peak that briefly and erotically reminded him of past conquests.

The controllers at the 'Licenced to Kill' desk deep in the MI5 building received a text from Bond and they duly sent him the TV listings for the rest of the day . He did not expect HM The Queen to expand on their skydiving antics into the Olympic Stadium in her traditional address to the nation. He knew she had enjoyed it on an altogether private level by her whoops and screams and covert and playful cupping of his groin on the descent through the late July sky over London.

Next he knew, it was dark outside the flat. He had dozed off, sprawled across the settee, and with a dribble of spittle running down his chin, a faint tint of butterscotch discernible. Annoyingly he had missed the blockbuster film and no-one had availed him of the operational details of the i-player.

Strictly and Downton thrilled him for the rest of the evening. He would never be asked to participate on the dance floor because of the intricacies of his professional lifestyle.This was a life regret.  His enjoyment of the Period Drama had been tempered by his instinctive identification of access and escape roots in the stately home and the best place to set off a diversionary explosion for maximum mayhem amongst the sinister looking below stairs staff, all ex KGB without doubt.

The latter part of the day was now dragging. The invitations to a 'Christmas At Home' from a selection of gangsters, sociopaths and the criminally insane remained on his antique escritoire, opened but not responded to. A threat of menace and a long monologue about blah, blah, ransom, blah, blah, extortion, blah, blah, gold reserves and the prospect of a scorching of nether regions by a high powered laser was now of some attraction when in the past it had just been part and parcel of the job.

It was a pity that he had not forged better links with those he had collaborated with on his missions. That Felix Leiter was a personable chap but obviously had problems of self image based on his frequently radical changes in appearance and skin colour.

He poured himself a Baileys over ice (chipped from the freezer compartment) and gorged himself to the point of being nauseous on the After Eights, a raffle prize at 'M's with the proceeds going to support the families of disavowed agents.

James Bond contemplated starting a diplomatic incident to alleviate his boredom. A convincing non-nuclear conflagration of the Home Counties was well within his capabilities from just the contents of his lock up garage in Twickenham.  His life story, auctioned to the tabloids would keep him in the style in which the public percieved him to exist.

In reality and out of abject loneliness he found that crying himself to sleep on Christmas night was a form of light and therapeutic relief. As always, he firmly believed that it would be different next year....for sure.

Big foot print

I have every admiration for a creature such a Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch, who has been able to survive physically and also on an almost mythological level.

This has been in the face of human inquisitiveness, intrusion and a small minority who have sought to demonise it as justification behind many attempts to be the first to trap or kill and exhibit one for material gain and celebrity.

There are not many species left in their ever diminishing natural habitats and it becomes increasingly dangerous, challenging and stressful for those so endangered to maintain a viable existence.

Bigfoot must be a most intelligent and evolved creature in its evasion of direct conflict with man in more recent years. This is in spite of historic eye witness accounts of attacks by large ape-man like animals on hunters, campers and forest dwellings and of course those shaky, grainy and indecisive Super 8mm and video images of shapeless and hairy forms lolloping at quite a leisurely pace into the viewfinder and with a slow turn and disdainful glance at the petrified and traumatised camera-wielding person.

A latest development has once again brought the living legend into sharp focus.

This is not another sighting, oversized wide fit plaster cast footprint or a sequel to Harry and The Hendersons after a 25 year absence but the revelation by a Texas based Scientific team that Bigfoot is related to humans.

This is even more obvious than you may have thought based on the very close compatability of genetics of mankind and monkeys in our wider perception.

Bigfoot is reputed to be a crossbreed of a human female and an unknown primate in the mists of time, some 15,000 years ago. The DNA of Bigfoot through sequencing has brought forward this startling revelation which has stirred up a considerable amount of controversy.

The process by which this claim has to be verified is very prolonged through peer review and technically cannot yet be regarded as a true discovery. Here, as they say is the science bit.........

"20 whole mitochondrial genomes were sequenced through next generation techniques to obtain 3 whole nuclear genomes from purported Sasquatch hair samples" .

I thought as much myself.

Furthermore, this has indicated close identity to modern Homo Sapiens but with a novel unknown hominid, the result of a cross breeding. Comparison with existing DNA profiles has not produced a match. The morality and sexual tendencies of Neanderthal females is not questioned in this regard.

What are the implications for Bigfoot if this line of DNA investigation is in fact ratified?

There are already calls for Bigfoot to have human rights and inevitably this could lead to all the protection and status afforded an indigenous people.

I say, ingenious more like.

If I were Bigfoot, stuck up in the mountainous and forested wildernesses of the central and north west USA, a hostile environment and climate at the best of times and ever fearful of being hunted, trapped or killed I would certainly consider leaving a few strands of hair on tree trunks or picnic area tables for easy sampling and testing by scientists.

Just think of how human and constutitional rights would be, to this resourceful relative, such a big foot forward.

Sex and Scrabble

A recent commentary by a Domain Name Company indicated that, in the UK alone, there are 20 million word searches a month for websites containing the word "sex".

I was actually quite surprised that it was only that for the monthly tally.

This is based on the impression perpetuated by the media that we are a nation completely obsessed and voyeuristic on the matter of sex, sexual antics of the great and infamous and things to titillate and thrill.

There is no disputing that sex is a good selling tool for anything from perfume to beer, cars to yoghurt breakfast cereal to shampoo and hence the current initiative by the marketeers of the Internet Company to release their infographic to promote the new .sx domain name series. These are specifically targeted at those with websites with an adult content.

I took it upon myself to analyse this figure of 20 million UK searches per month.

The appearance of 'sex' in an internet search, and inevitably included in the count, can arise from an entirely innocent perspective.

For example, followers of anything to do with the reality TV show The Only Way is Es-sex will be hitting the keyboard on a very regular basis. The viewing figures for the first few series were regularly above one million per show and ,with a typical audience profile of social media savvy under 30's. even a fifty percent inquisitiveness over what the main protagonists get up to out of the camera focus can account for about two million 'es-sex' searches a month.

The current estimated population of the counties of Middlesex, Sussex and Essex (again) is in aggregate in the region of 6.37 million.

It is reasonable to assume that on any one day there will be a measurable volume of internet searches along the lines of "builders in Middle-sex", "plumbers in Middle-sex", "yoga classes in Middle-sex", "Child day care in Middle-sex" and similarly throughout Sus-sex and Es-sex.

If I were to warrant a guess on numbers I would for a starter exclude the under 5's age group for not being able to reach a computer (unless Leap-Pad has progressed since my children had one), those too old or nervous to have access to the internet, tenants with no responsibility for contacting a tradesperson and the childless. I have been careful not to double count a household where either spouse could take it upon themselves to make that search to get someone to sort out that hanging-off guttering or that leaky tap.

By my reckoning the net figure would be around 2 million eligible persons. If diligent about home maintenance, the welfare of their kids and the suppleness of their bodies they could, feasibly, make one internet search per week, therefore 8 million monthly searches including the three letters of "sex".

I feel some sympathy for those searching the internet in pursuit of a hobby or interest who unwittingly become a 'sex' word statistic.

Those who look after Church premises, a valued but ever diminishing band of faithful and loyal parishoners, may want to extend their experience and knowledge by making an internet search for the opinions and recommendations of other sextons.

What I anticipate to be a small minority of Master Mariners may feel in the mood to treat themselves to a new navigational apparatus and search accordingly for sextants.

Couples desperate to have their own family may have some apprehensions over fertility treatment in case they end up, as a result of the IVF procedure, with sextuplets.

I have not personally felt any compulsion to do so but those contemplating a soiree, function or other entertainment may wish to enquire, via the internet, about the availability of a sextette in their local area or willing to travel.

A solitary mathematician may have temporarily forgotten how many zero's there are in a sextillion. 21 to be exact.

These, I admit, minority groups would only add a small number to my running total but must be considered in the big picture of sex word accounting.

I would like to acknowledge the contribution to the minority sex words by the Scrabble Word Finder.

A further source of sex searches would come from those challenged by just spelling or plain stupidity and I have attempted to guesstimate a figure for those searching for types of a) insex commonly found in the UK, b) sextional concrete garages , c) those interested in vivisextion, and not forgetting d) the apparently increasing number of motorists reliant on sat-nav systems and concerned about congestion and delays at key traffic intersextions.

Of course, there are those who are actually intent on accessing a pornographic website, apparently ,from the same infographic source being 12% of all websites ,and do this blatantly with just the word 'sex' and with or without any prefixes or suffixes dependant on any particular penchants or tendencies that they may have.

The grand total, in my broad minded research therefore indicates a more realistic participation of 33 million per month. That accounts for about half the UK population engaged in what can only be described as 'sex' word games and on a regular basis. I do make an exception for, and exclude, regular players of Scrabble in this statistic.

I will next be contemplating the correlation between this fact and the persistence of the depressed economy and double dip recession in this country. I do find this surprising given the level of apparent stimulation in other parts of the population at large.