A whole in my mind

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I have fragmented knowledge of bits of Oxford. The Wycliffe area. St Giles. Broad Street, the High Street … I very rarely travel from one to the other, though. I make each one my destination for whatever purpose, and go there and back again. So, how do all those fragments fit together?

I could look at a map, or, I could walk it.

Park the car at Wycliffe. Along Norham Gardens and then down through the University Parks to the High Street, via St Cross Road – a handy back-alley route I didn’t know and the first of the threads to link the different bits together. Past Magdalen and over the bridge, hanging a left to St Clements and the Islamic Centre, looking suitably Islamic as it towers over the leafy green trees.

Then turn left just before the Magdalen Sports Ground and you’re in Mesopotamia – a shaded walk between two streams of the Cherwell, a mill stream and the natural channel, named with impeccably accurate Oxonian clever-gitness as Mesopotamia means “between rivers”. The walk is along a concrete causeway with overgrown banks on either side. You join at the point where the two streams merge again and the upper one pours down in a weir, so the air blowing at you down the alley is cool and moist. After that, though, you begin to see that it rained quite heavily earlier in the weekend – not a sign of it now, but it’s all evaporating and the air hemmed in by the overhanging undergrowth is humid.

You follow this as far as the point where the two streams diverge in the first place. The slipway with rollers at top left is presumably for getting punts between the two levels, but to my fevered imagination I could see it being an emergency punt launching device, for those occasions when the punt has to be in the water now.

And then you’re back in the University Parks again, walking up the Cherwell, and a couple more fragments have been sewn together. But you’re only just starting the trip into terra incognita because now you cross the river again and strike out for points east, or Marston, whichever comes sooner. This is the flood plain of the Cherwell, completely flat, immaculate sports ground on one side and overgrown grazing-and-hay-making-meadow on the other. You cross fields and go down more leafy tracks, and even though it’s completely unknown you see things like the minarets and a cluster of trees in the middle of the sports ground and the roof of the JR – each line of sight a further thread to bind the whole. Then through Marston itself, deciding not to look at the inside of the 12th century church, round in a big anticlockwise circle via the Victoria Arms on the Cherwell, which you do decide to look inside. Oh, so that’s what this place is. I punted here on a company social once, but obviously I came by river. Anyway. Now you’re heading back down the Cherwell again and suddenly, presto, you’re back in the University Parks and on the way back to the car.

Then home, via Summertown and Wolvercote. A final binding thread around the top of the town.

Six miles, apart from the driving bit, according to the book of walks; lovely weather; and not one hayfevery sniffle. How a Sunday afternoon should be.

Misplaced childhood

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It’s lunchtime and the BBC newsfeed in the lobby still says “Breaking news: Michael Jackson is dead”. Well, it’s hardly going to change, is it? The news reveals the astonishing facts that (a) he’s dead and (b) his friends miss him. Well, did you ever.

Today I leaned a new word: Huxleyed. It means, roughly, to be reasonably famous such that your death should generate a few column inches, and then have that completely swamped by someone even more famous dying at the same time. The word originates from Aldous Huxley who carelessly died on 22 November 1963 shortly before JFK was shot. With slightly fewer knock-on effects for the future of planet Earth, Farrah Fawcett today found herself completely Huxleyed by the weird non-black guy.

I love the British sense of humour. During WW2, official Nazi news channels ranted about the alleged Jewishness and degeneracy of the royal family and Churchill. We retaliated by singing “Hitler has only got one ball”. We won. So it came as no surprise at all to log on first thing this morning and find a bulletin board already posting Jacko jokes. Now is not the time to repeat any, but some are quite funny.

What isn’t funny at all – in fact, heartbreakingly sad, once you’re past the vomiting – is this collection of memorabilia that he was selling off to pay his bills. A common theme, apart from the gag-retching awfulness of it all, is children having fun – rather, Jackson’s idea of what constituted children having fun, which isn’t necessarily the same thing at all. And it’s obvious he never had any at all. Fun, that is. Other interpretations will be up for discussion for a long time to come.

It’s not often you can genuinely say “I hope he’s at peace” but in this case I’ll give it a go. He was a hugely unhappy guy and the only people he really made happy himself were the ones who couldn’t get enough of him and therefore fed his unhappiness. I can’t say anything for his legacy, apart from making the Today programme presenters talk about him as if they cared and bringing high production values to the world of music videos. That latter is frankly a dead-end alley as far as the evolution of civilisation goes. All those videos today of hundreds of people dancing exactly the same way with joyless robotic precision probably come down to him. As for the actual music … well, “Billie Jean” had a certain toe-tapping something. I never could see the big deal about “Thriller”, and Lenny Henry’s version was much better.

 

Fulminate Against Chiropractic Twaddle

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I love FACTS. Not the Federation Against Copyright Theft (though I don’t dislike it, apart from its irritatingly obtrusive and unavoidable adverts on my legally acquired DVDs) but actual facts. I love the presentation of information that is clearly, unavoidably and sometimes interestingly true.

Part of this I might put down to the headmaster I had at a formative age, and the hurt and misery oft caused by his fantasised, evidence-free declarations of reality. But most of it is just who I am. It’s why I like quizzes. It’s why I have been known to play Trivial Pursuit. It’s why I’m not a Creationist and believe in democracy and freedom of speech and have always preferred working in some form of scientific publishing. Science is the ultimate playground of fact. If something is true then scientific method and experimentation will show it to be so. It’s inevitable. It can’t help it.

Hold that thought.

I can personally testify to the purely physical benefits of chiropractic treatment, i.e. adjustment to the spine, curing backache, aiding posture etc. If however my chiropractor told me it could also cure my asthma, I’d demand proof. Okay, I don’t have asthma anyway. Hayfever? Yes. So if someone made the same claim about hayfever, I might ask why I’ve been having the treatment for over 7 years now and, while my back is fine, I still get the odd itchy sniffle. Does my back need adjusting in a different way? Surely a reasonable question to ask.

Hold that thought too, and combine it with the first one.

So when journalist Simon Singh cast doubt on the ability of chiropractic treatment to cure childhood diseases such as asthma, the British Chiropractic Association surely just had to wheel out the results of a few double blind trials to prove him wrong. No?

No. They took him to court for libel, and it’s still rumbling on.

Read Singh’s account here. Read much more authoritative accounts than I can give here and here. None of it is happy reading.

Why? Well, reading this lot, I’ve learnt interesting things about English libel law. Libel is the only kind of court case where the burden of proof is reversed – the defendant is guilty until proven innocent. The plaintiff has to convince the court they have a reputation to defend in the UK, but then simply say that X has sullied that reputation. X then has to prove that no, he hasn’t. Further, preliminary hearings can define the scope of the actual trial way beyond the original cause. In this case, the preliminary hearing by Mr Justice Eady has decided Singh was maliciously accusing the BCA of deliberate falsehood – which he wasn’t, but suddenly that is what he has to prove he wasn’t doing, rather than stand by his simple original assertion that there is no direct evidence for the BCA’s claims. To use a complex legal term coined by one of my godsons, Mr Eady is a poo-poo head (capitus excretus excretus).

I’ve also learnt from today’s reading that “chiropractic” is an anagram of “critic – oh, crap”.

I confess I’m still not entirely certain why the case can’t simply run as follows: chairman of BCA put on the stand; given copy of article to read out with instructions to put his hand up when he gets to the bit where he’s called a liar; gets to the end without putting his hand up; judge throws the case out. It’s all more complex than that. Apparently.

But that is grounds for a separate rant. Grounds for this one are as follows. Facts are facts. Dogma is dogma. The two are irreconcilable. When a fact contradicts dogma it is the dogma that is at fault. There is no reputation at stake. There is no libel to be had. And libel laws should not be used to suppress science.

Sense About Science has published a statement to this effect, to which all sorts of famous and non-famous (like me) people have added their signatures. Go thou and do likewise.

Let’s give the last word to Stephen Fry, another signatory:

“It may seem like a small thing to some when claims are made without evidence, but there are those of us who take this kind of thing very seriously because we believe that repeatable evidence-based science is the very foundation of our civilisation. Freedom in politics, in thought and in speech followed the rise of empirical science which refused to take anything on trust, on faith, on hope or even on reason. The simplicity and purity of evidence is all that stands between us and the wildest kinds of tyranny, superstition and fraudulent nonsense. When a powerful organisation tries to silence a man of Simon Singh’s reputation then anyone who believes in science, fairness and the truth should rise in indignation. All we ask for is proof. Reasoned proof according to the established protocols of medicine and science everywhere. It is not science that is arrogant: science can be defined as ‘humility before the facts’ – it is those who refuse to submit to testing and make unsubstantiated claims that are arrogant. Arrogant and unjust.”