There’s a debate on both sides of the Atlantic as to what we call the decade just passed.

The British tabloids have enthusiastically embraced “the Naughties”, irrespective of the fact that it has almost certainly been the least naughty decade of our lives.

A respected American magazine reports that there is grudging agreement to call it “the aughts” — an agreement so grudging it certainly hasn’t penetrated my, or any other Brit’s, consciousness, nor have I seen it in any American literature.

I suppose the next decade will be known as “the teens”, despite 2010, 2011 and 2012 not being teen years.

Pragmatically the French ignore such neologisms and simply call the last decade “les années 2000″ and the next decade “les années 2010″. When asked to name the Swinging Sixties they shrug and propose “les années 60″. Makes life easy, I guess.

Anyway, I’m going to call it The Noughts, when I have to refer to it. People will know what I mean. “Naughties” is far too nudge-nudge and prurient, and “Aughts” is simply baffling.

Discussing this in the office, I was picked up on my pronounciation. I’m perfectly happy with the way I speak — I have no accent at all, except perhaps a bit of London and a touch of Welsh — but I am aware I do pronounce some words differently to other people. SOSSpan instead of SORCEpan, for example, but that’s simply Welsh. PLARStic instead of PLASStic, and I have no idea where that comes from. Everyone else I know says PLASStic.

But up until today I had no idea I have spent my entire life mispronouncing the word Decade. Everyone else (that’s EVERYONE else) says DEKade, and I say DeKADE, as in Decayed. I am simply wrong. So the Decayed Decade from my mouth just sounds like repetition, or a lamentation.

I’m going to have to practice the new, more correct pronounciation.

Old dog, new trick.

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That was the answer England rugby coach Martin Johnson snarled at a reporter who had the temerity to ask about the nationality of one Shontayne Hape, who has just been selected in the English squad to face Wales on February 6th.

YES MR. JOHNSON, IT BLOODY WELL IS!

Hape is not an Englishman, so he should not be playing for the English team.

Johnson has picked three New Zealanders in the English squad: Shontayne Hape, Dylan Hartley and Rikki Flutey. Unbelievably, Hape has already been capped by New Zealand, and has played 14 internationals for them, albeit in rugby league not union.

I have no objection to clubs importing foreign players — one Premier League soccer match a week or so ago did not have a single Englishman in either team — but a team representing a country must be peopled with natives of that country. Otherwise the contest is meaningless. You might as well be playing the Barbarians or the Harlem Globetrotters.

The England cricket team currently playing South Africa is fielding four South African-born players. OK, Andrew Strauss moved to England when he was six, but Pieterson and Trott are unashamed mercenaries.

This is a Northern Hemisphere disease, and it must be eradicated. Players who can’t make the grade as All Blacks or Springboks wash up on these shores and find an easy berth in the national squads, armed with a Welsh grandmother or Scottish cousin or Irish great grandfather or simply a taste for Guinness. Yes, Wales has been guilty of this as well — Brett Sinkinson comes to mind. Even the French have used South African players.

To my mind the worst incident was when the Australian Brian Smith moved to Ireland, having played 6 times for Australia before winning 9 caps for Ireland and ending up captaining them. Cynical, unpatriotic and exploitative.

Australia runs State of Origin competitions in rugby league, and it’s not open to visiting Welshmen looking for more dosh or new experiences.

Three weeks tomorrow I want to see Wales beat a team of the 15 best Englishmen the country can provide, not a hotch potch of Kiwis and the odd Hessian mercenary.

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I walked through the snow to hospital for a blood test yesterday. I do it every year.

Britain is one of the most heavily taxed countries in the world. We’re taxed on our income, taxed on our expenditure, taxed on our savings, taxed locally, taxed nationally, taxed on capital gains, and for some purchases such as petrol and diesel there’s a tax on the tax.

A lot of the money thus raised is frittered away on cleaning moats, pointless wars in Afghanistan, Mr & Mrs Robinson, buying duck palaces, redecorating after elections, Dianne Abbott’s school fees and so on.

But some of it goes into the National Health Service. For those of you in other countries who attack our NHS — listen up, you guys: it works. And we’re not all sad pinko commie bastards for thinking so.

The NHS is perhaps the greatest achievement a Welshman has given the world.

I was born two years before its creation, so I have enjoyed health care paid through taxes almost all my life. I grew up on National Health orange juice, National Health dried milk, NHS this and that. I was reasonably healthy. I was in hospital for six months with polio when I was nine. I had my appendix and my tonsils torn out by an Army surgeon. And that’s about it.

My doctor calls me in for check-ups once or twice a year. It’s no real hardship because she looks like a more attractive version of Audrey Hepburn. She gives me pills for cholesterol, high blood pressure and various allergies. She tells me to lose weight, cut down on my drinking and stop smoking nasty little cigars. She gives me as much Cialis, Lipitor, Felodipine and Zaditen as I want. I haven’t asked her for methadone, but hey. I don’t have to pay a penny for anything. I’m pretty fit.

Of course it’s not perfect. The NHS spent £12 billion on a computerised system that doesn’t work, largely because the people who are left to actually press the keys are too stupid or not sufficiently trained. That is a very large sum of money. The dental service could be a lot better — there’s one aspect where Americans, for example, are streets ahead of us.

But anyone who has had a serious or chronic health problem and has had it dealt with by the NHS has come away praising it to the skies. The service and skill levels are astoundingly good.

I have no desire to put it to a real test at any time.

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This is a quiz show meme, but worth remembering.

You are shown 3 doors. Behind one door is a car, behind the others are goats. Choose one door to win the car.

You make your choice. One of the other two doors is then opened and reveals a goat.

You are now left with two closed doors. You KNOW that behind one of them is a car; behind the other is a goat.

Should you change your mind and choose the other door? Most people would say no, it’s 50/50.

But the original choice was 1 out of 3. So now the balance of probability is 2/3rds in favour of the other closed door.

So you are more likely to win the car if you change your mind and choose the other door.

This probably shows why I would never have been a successful gambler.

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Aaron’s Apps now has its own web site, so please check out http://aaronsapps.com to find out about the applications we’ve released (two) and the ones we have planned (eight at the moment).

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Clever of Dubai to name their monstrous erection after the leader of the neighbouring state who has had to bail them out after they overspent prodigally on ego trip architecture.

Now when people seek examples of unparalleled hubris poor Khalifa’s name will be remembered. I’m not sure that’s the association he was hoping for.

I know a bit about follies. They used to be built by one man, and they’d be named after him. Now they’re built by invisible, unanswerable committees who when they see the way the wind is blowing (”this is beginning to look a bit like a folly, chaps”) deftly link the burj to some fall guy in the next country. The folly is so tall that if it did fall it would probably crush houses in the next country anyway.

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At last it’s here.

It was complete and ready to go in September, but for some reason it’s taken until now to get Aaron’s Time Machine: London up on the iPhone Apps Store.

But now it’s here, and for only £1.79 you can download one of the most unusual apps ever written for the iPhone.

Basically it’s a huge, gigantic old map illustrating a non-linear ebook. It covers London from Primrose Hill to Chelsea, from Deptford to Victoria Park, and if it were printed out full size (as you can zoom into it on the iPhone) it would measure 8 feet by 6 feet.

It’s London as it used to be in the early nineteenth century — no Shaftesbury Avenue, no Charing Cross Road, no King’s Cross, Victoria, no Waterloo — in fact no railways at all, as they hadn’t been invented.

There’s more. Much more.

Wherever you scroll on the map, you’ll discover little red blobs. Click on them and the map will flip, giving you details of an event which happened right on that spot last year — or two thousand years ago. You just don’t know what you’re going to find out next.

There are over 160 of these Events, scattered all across London.

There’s more.

If you’re within the map area, the Locate Button on the bottom left of the screen will locate your position on the old map. You can walk down streets that no longer exist. 

There’s more.

The Google button shows you where the event happened on today’s map.

There’s more.

Click on the Info button on the bottom right and you can submit Events for consideration in future upgrades of the App. It’s a WikiApp.

There will be more.

We’ve almost completed New York. We’re working on San Francisco, Berlin, Rome, Paris, Chicago, Athens and maybe more. It depends how well you like it.

If you can’t afford £1.79 (what are you doing with an iPhone?) you can download the free version, Aaron’s Time Machine: London Lyte! from the iPhone Apps Store. It covers the City of London and only has 20 Events compared with the full version.

Even if you’ve lived in London all your life, you will discover something you never knew before.

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A feature in today’s Daily Telegraph ‘reveals the medicinal properties of the bounties of the season’, offering hints on what can be done with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, holly, mistletoe and the gifts of the wise men — Gold, Frankincense and Myrhh.

Sorry, make that Myhrr.

On third thoughts, Myrrh.

The Telegraph used the word Myrrh five times in the article, and managed to spell it three different ways:
2 x Myhrr
1 x Myrhh
2 x Myrrh

Two correct out of five, then. Not very impressive for a newspaper which regularly excoriates the government for falling educational standards, is it?

OK, admittedly it is a tricky word to spell, but Google offers 1,400,000 hits for MYRRH, 255,000 hits for MYHRR and 21,400 for MYRHH. For each of the last two it cautiously asks “Did you mean MYRRH?”

Not too hard to check it out, then.

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I see that poor simple girl with the golden voice has now been rechristened SuBo.

The Mayor of London is already referred to as BoJo, and it is clear that we Brits have enthusiastically embraced this strange American nomenclature.

It’s actually been around for years. London’s Soho district apparently got its name from an old hunting cry, but New York’s SoHo (note the camelcase ‘H’) derives from the geographical fact that it’s SOuth of HOuston Street (although Microsoft Word doesn’t like me typing that). TriBeCa is the TRIangle BElow CAnal Street. One rather desperate one is WaHi for Washington Heights, an obscure part of Manhattan where tourists seldom tread. There are many more examples, but the first time I heard it applied to a person was to the singer Jennifer López, who became J.Lo.

But what we benighted foreigners can’t quite figure out are the rules of engagement — what names are we allowed to truncate so brutally? It clearly helps if the second part rhymes with Joe. I don’t believe BarOb would get past the Académie Americaine.

And I don’t see the Mayor of New York referred to as MiBlo.

I guess it’s a NeYo state of mind.

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I’ve had a tooth out.

It doesn’t hurt — yet — because my mouth and tongue are still numb from the injection. I didn’t feel a thing when the dentist removed it, and it took about 2 to 3 seconds.

My mouth is bleeding copiously. I can only eat mush for the next 24 hours so Von is off to buy some semolina and is planning a cheese soufflé for this evening. Yes, I’m spoiled.

The cup of coffee I’ve just had dribbled helplessly out of the left hand corner of my mouth. I can only speak indistinctly so please don’t try and ring me. This is not elegant or dignified. I guess I’ll just have to get used to it.

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