Grombles

I have a son who went to a well known preparatory school (7-13) in Surrey. He came home one day clutching a leaflet for fun activity holidays that the school promoted every summer. The Titus Trust operate several camps around the UK where they organise fun outdoor activities for youngsters. Something caught my eye in the leaflet hidden in a paragraph in one of the sections describing the holidays. They used the word Christian. It was the only place in the whole leaflet that the word was used. My suspicions raised, I hunted around the leaflet for more clues and found the imprint which said something like 'A Titus Trust Charity' (the name of the camps was on the title of the leaflet). I dug deeper and found some disturbing evidence of who was behind these 'fun' camps. This is what I wrote at the time to the headmaster: Dear Headmaster XXXX came home the other day extremely excited about an outward bound camp next summer that he and his friends had been told about by a r...

It keeps rearing its head. Tax the rich! Make them pay their 'fair share'. It's the rich that got us into this mess. And all those other 'make them pay' soundbites designed to grab votes from our ever more squeezed population. The net effect is that wealthy people are pouring money into the Conservative party to help them fight off the scary wealth taxing parties. But all wealthy people aren't the same. What's important is not what they have, but what they spend their money on. And what the UK badly needs is for the people who know how to create jobs and wealth, to do more of it. I've written previously about why mansion or wealth taxes are both impractical and counter-productive in terms of helping the economy to recover. They are also unlikely to reap vast rewards for the treasury, but popular soundbites put left-wing parties into power. It's not about whether it actually makes money for the country, it's about whether it's popular and s...

Every time I plug it in, my iJobs insists I upgrade its operating system. It requires about 1GB of download to install. After weeks of nagging pop-ups I finally decided to let it run - despite the fact my iJobs has been performing 'normally' up to this point. How easily we forget the countless times in the past when we've 'upgraded' only to discover that we've unleashed system clash hell on our increasingly confused hardware, only to bitterly regret the decision, again and again. But we always hope that this upgrade will solve all our problems - like my iJobs not picking up a mobile or wifi signal perhaps - and delight us with something new and amazing. Make it a better telephone would be top of my wishlist Mr JobsV2.0 if you're reading this. So I finally give in and click 'OK'. I need to leave it running overnight since our internet bandwidth into the house only permits the occasional lonely passing byte to squeeze down the phone line every now a...

Here we go again. Killing Mali tribesmen to prevent them creating safe-havens for Al Qaeda - all dressed up as defending villagers from the imposition of Sharia law - as if we cared. Easy to get involved, difficult to withdraw - and leaving what? Countless fathers and brothers grateful to you for killing their sons and relatives? Genius chum-making tactics. Let's get rid of a hornets' nest by kicking it. They'll be ever-so grateful - especially the bit where we say "Right, we've got rid of all the baddies, so we're off. Now here's a piece of paper for something called voting which means you'll get them back shortly when you can't find a bunch of blokes prepared to abandon their tribal demands and work out how to build a country not driven by corruption, greed and ignorance. Cheerio then, and thanks for the oil." So assuming it is a good idea to stop fanatics becoming jihadists, but that shooting them is not such a good idea, what should we be...

I have just spent a fascinating 10 days in Northern India - Taj Mahal (dimly spotted through the fog), tiger safari (no tigers), Jaipur etc. Lasting impression was of small oases surrounded by unbelievable squalor and relentless poverty. Don't expect India to emerge as a first world superpower any time soon. Huge social welfare problems to be solved first. One of the penalties Western tourists suffer by booking packaged tours (and there's no other way of sensibly and safely exploring the maelstrom that is India) is the dreaded but inescapable 'visit to the craft shop'. You never ask for these to be put on your tour schedule, but they always appear on it. One of our ever-so-friendly-hope-I-get-a-ridiculous-tip guide even cancelled some temple visit or other (mercifully perhaps) to make sure we had enough time to be assailed by his commission-paying chum in the decorated marble plate / carpet / pashmina / carved elephant / sari / jewellery or whatever flavour of 'so...