Another cruise diary — and pictures
Read a diary of a cruise on Arcadia, see some pictures and reconsider your prejudice against the cruise phenomenon [More >>>>]
Author: Brian
Ephems AFK* for three weeks
Ephems is away for the next three weeks and unable to reply to comments, however misguided.
Quibbling with the Guardian again
Taking up some more peccadillos with the Guardian, to encourage continued maintenance of its high standards [More >>>]
Take a pay cut and go to jail
Gordon Brown and Jack Straw impose a pay cut on prison officers (“pay discipline”) while vastly increasing their work burden, and refusing to act to curb the massive increases in income and wealth that city financiers are awarding themselves: a disgusting mess [More >>>]
Consular work overseas and what it tells us about ourselves
The FCO website publishes astonishing and shaming statistics about the huge number of demands by Brits abroad for consular assistance following e.g. deaths, arrests, hospitalisations and lost passports, with intriguing discrepancies between figures for different countries [More >>>]
Some media jottings
Some comments on a few good and rather more less good things collected recently from the print media [More >>>]
Slavery and persecution: who should apologise to whom?
My wife’s paper at https://barder.com/family/history/org_slavery2 reveals that while many of my ancestors were persecuted, at least one owned slaves. Who, then, she asks, should apologise to whom? [More >>>]
Indeterminate sentences: the double scandal
Indeterminate sentences are an abominable breach of natural justice, and not just because of the Kafkaesque situation in which prisoners who have served their tariffs can’t be released because the prison courses which are a condition of release aren’t made available to them [More >>>]
An Australian in Vietnam
Read the vivid description of an Australian’s visit to Vietnam in June 2007 by Jill Greenwell, sharp observer and writer of clarity and precision: https://barder.com/misc/vietnam.php
Ministerial language
Add your contribution to the discussion of recent ministerial linguistic solecisms at http://www.invisionplus.net/forums/index.php?mforum=languagegroup&act=ST&f=5&t=194&st=0, or in Ephems.