When I say goodbye to people I often add some incoherent noise which sounds like “take care” or “lotsaluv”. It’s an automatic reflex; I’m not fully aware I’m saying or writing it, and although I always mean what I say — I want people to take care, and I do send my love to them — it’s not a special, individually crafted, personal connection with the person or people involved. I’m sure they think no less of me for saying it, and I doubt they often think about it at all.

Americans from the north and east greet each other with “Hey!” which if an Englishman were to use to call another Englishman would probably result in a bloody nose. It presumably derives from the Scandinavian “Hej!” and is not intended to carry any offensive connotations. Western and Southern Americans prefer “Hi!” which is easier to English ears. A typical Glaswegian greeting is “Hoo are yoo lookin’ at?” and it’s best not to reply.

Germans (in Hesse at least) call “Schüss!” when leaving a shop or bar. I’m not absolutely certain if that’s how it’s spelled. Austrians encountering each other on mountain passes and elsewhere hail with a hearty “Grüß Gott!”, while the Arabs counter with “Alhamdililah!”

Italians say “Ciao” whether coming or going and so as a result (Italians being über cool) does much of the rest of the world. It’s actually a Venetian word, along with ghetto, lido, imbroglio, casino and regatta, and is a dialect version of “schiavo”, meaning “I am your slave.” Think about that the next time you say it.

I also enjoy the way that every Italian, from street punk to international philanthropist, answers the phone with a careful “Pronto?” It sounds so funny to these Brit ears, a mournful “Hurry along now, I haven’t got all day!” but in fact all it stands for is “I am READY to receive your telephonic communication.”

I was on a bus this morning and a woman was saying goodbye to a friend on her mobile. “Have fun,” she said.

That’s nice.

The British satirical magazine Private Eye has for years run a column titled “Pseud’s Corner”, where pomposity, pretentiousness and pseudo-intellectualism in writing (hence Pseud’s Corner) is reprinted without comment for the reader to smile at and inwardly mock.

I was invited to an exhibition of photographs of battlefields in New York this weekend (sorry, can’t make it) but was delighted to read this pyrotechnic display of pseudery to describe the collection of empty fields:

Taken over a 10 year period, the featured photographic works, documentations of actual battlefields, call into question the autonomy of “place:” the disparity that exists between historical events and the geographic locations in which they occur. Apart from the occasional historic marker or didactic memorial plaque, little visual evidence remains to distinguish one site from another, a disconnect that evokes the transient nature of history, the arbitrary lines of the battlefield and the universality of the theaters of war.

What tosh. It’s so wonderful.

Americans have many faults, but they are seldom cynical, whereas the British are a nation of cynics. Perhaps it’s our media. There’s no real American equivalent of Private Eye or Le Canard Enchainé, traditionally taking the mick out of whatever party is in power. In Britain, the party in power always regards the BBC as an affront, suspects it is batting for the opposition, and tries its best to muzzle it. There’s no BBC in America.

So in the US, Democrats hate Republicans, Republicans hate Democrats, and both hate the Federal government. The Americans hate each other and are frightened of everyone else. Poor Obama, who does the best he can in an impossible job, has to contend with snappy slogans such as “The zoo has an African Lion, the White House has a Lyin’ African.”

Most of America’s hatred is directed inward, which leaves its pseuds free to concoct superbly crafted oceans of nonsense such as we see above. I think I might nick some of this to describe Aaron’s Time Machine: New York, which is being released soon. More strength to them. We all need summat to laff at.

When I were a little lad at prep school in North Wales, our headmaster and maths teacher was an ancient old codger called Charlie Rhodes. He was immensely pleased with himself. He drove a Mark II Jaguar and took holidays in Spain; we would have three consecutive days of slide shows in the autumn term. The first time I saw 100+ mph on a speedo was when he drove four of us along the beach in his Jag. He proudly informed us that he had a nine inch penis, and we looked at each other in wonder, wondering what a penis was. He woke us from our dormitories and took us down to the beach at night to see Sputnik I flying over.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the school no longer exists. Old Charlie (he must have been at least 30) was probably unsuited to today’s PC world. He would swagger into the classroom and announce “I’m the best bloody maths teacher you’ll ever see!”

And you know what? He was right.

The reason, he cheerfully admitted, was because he was thick. As a child, he found maths incredibly hard. He just couldn’t work it out. Then, little by little, he began to see chinks of light. The mysteries unveiled themselves. And because he had struggled with the difficulties, so he understood the way to the answers. There was no intuitive understanding, no revelation, no flash of realisation. Light dawned slowly. He took us down the same path. We all learned.

By the age of 11, we were doing Maths ‘O’ Levels. By 12, we were doing differential calculus, quadratic equations and ‘A’ levels. Not sitting the actual exams of course, the education board wouldn’t allow it, but we did the papers with ease.

I was finally allowed to sit my Maths ‘O’ level and my Advanced Maths ‘O/A’ level the term before I went to my public school. I passed both with top marks, Grade 1. They were a doddle.

So I arrived at Haileybury & Imperial Service College with two O-levels under my belt. “Well, you’re only thirteen,” they reasoned, “so we can’t have you doing A-levels with 17 year olds. So you won’t be taking maths.”

End of that part of the story. I haven’t had a maths lesson since then. And now I have to take my socks off if I want to count up to twenty. What a stupid, unimaginative, inflexible school Haileybury was.

I write this on the 47th anniversary of the day at Haileybury & ISC that I was beaten by the Master, beaten by my Housemaster, then handed over to 47 gathered and slathering housemates with the injunction “Headley has Done Wrong. He has already been sufficiently punished by the Master and Myself.” And the door was discreetly shut.

When I came to, I was informed that I was to be gated for the rest of the term, then gated for the whole of the summer term, in which I was to take my ‘O’ levels, and then at the end of the summer I was to be expelled in disgrace.

The Saturday night film in Big School was “Kind Hearts and Coronets.” Naturally, I was forbidden to go. To this day I have never seen the film.

Being gated, I would obviously have no distractions, so I was put down to sit fourteen ‘O’ levels, which with the two I already had would have given me sixteen. 16 ‘O’ levels. Many more than the average Haileyburian’s 5 ‘O’s. Rather more than the Oxbridge entry level 10 ‘O’s and 3 ‘A’s. Naturally my father was invited to pay the plump fee per exam.

I won’t embarrass myself further by revealing the results. But two years later I was in a rock ‘n’ roll band on the King’s Road in Chelsea at the heart of the Swinging Sixties. There could not have been a greater differential of contentment.

Why am I writing this? I intended to write a note about pixels and dots per inch. I’ll now have to write that on the fotoLibra Pro Blog. And when I’ve done it I’ll post a link to it from here, so you can see the tenuous connection.

I can never forget what I did, and what happened to me as a result, on March 3rd.

I received an impressive appeal from the daughter of friends of ours in Switzerland. She is working for the reconstruction and restoration of  a school in Pacomit, southern Albania, and she was soliciting donations on behalf of International Project Aid.

I’m not a great fan of Albanians as they appear to be behind a lot of the crime in North London, but obviously this means they need more educating. I thought I’d send her £20, so I tried to arrange this with my English bank.

They were happy to help, and also to charge me £20 for the service.

So I thought: the charity gets £20, and the bank gets £20 for sending my £20 to Switzerland. Not very equitable.

Instead I’m sending cash in the post. The banks really ought to get their act together and realise that we humans live in a small, poor world and not all of us expect a seven figure bonus on top of our salaries every year.

A bonus would be nice, but it’s more than I can dream of.

Come to think of it, a salary would be good as well.

The four broadsheet newspapers in Britain in order of circulation are The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian and The Independent.

Mondays, I buy The Daily Telegraph.
Tuesday, The Times.
Wednesday, The Guardian.
Thursday, The Times.
Friday, The Independent.
Saturday, The Guardian.

On Sunday I usually buy The Observer, or occasionally The Sunday Times.

Each paper has its good points, but if it came to the crunch and I was only allowed one, I think it would probably be The Guardian — for the excellence of its graphic design more than its politics.

One thing where The Guardian and The Independent beat The Daily Telegraph and The Times hands down is that they’re not mealy-mouthed and prudish.

At one stage in the last US election Senator John McCain turned and spoke to his ever-loving wife, one middle finger on each hand extended into the air. I don’t know if The Daily Telegraph or The Times reported it, but had they done so, this is what would have appeared in both those esteemed journals:  “**** you! ****, ****, ****, ****, ****, ****, ****, ****, ****!!!”

I hope The Guardian and The Independent were more precise.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission is a Non Departmental Public Body (NDPB), established under the Equality Act 2006. Their sponsor department is the Government Equalities Office.  They have a board of commissioners who steer the commission’s work and direction.

Many of those who worked in the previous equality commissions — the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) and the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC)  — joined the new Commission, creating “a body with an enormous wealth of experience and knowledge about race, sex and disability equality and discrimination.”  Many more people have since joined the gravy train — sorry, Commission; — experts in sexual orientation, age, religion and belief and human rights and people with skills and experience in all relevant functions.

Much of this data is taken from their website. It doesn’t say that the “experts” who work at the Equality and Human Rights Commission have to be barking mad, and I am sure that some of them might actually be sane, but the members of their Board of Commissioners are clearly deranged.

They have permitted the publication of a document which claims that body scanners at airport security gates might infringe human rights.

The Commission has expressed concerns about the apparent absence of safeguards to ensure the body scanners are operated in a lawful, fair and non-discriminatory manner. It also has serious doubts that the decision to roll this out in all UK airports complies with the law.

An absence of safeguards, such as monitoring who is being scanned and how those scans are carried out, means that authorities are unable to check if in practice people are being unfairly selected on the basis of their race, religion, gender, age, sexual orientation or disability.

These last two paragraphs have been lifted verbatim from their web site. Fantastic, isn’t it?

Far better that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s rights remain uncompromised than worry about the possibility of 400 innocent people falling screaming to their deaths.

My taxes pay for this Equality and Human Rights Commission to deliver tosh like this. Instead of reporting it, why doesn’t the media treat it with the derision it deserves? What is the purpose or function of an organisation with such a laughably tenuous grasp on reality?

Why doesn’t it do the decent thing and quietly disband itself, and let its experts in sexual orientation and other highly paid professionals try and make a living in the real world — which has to pay for these bureaucratic follies?

What is an expert in sexual orientation anyway?

It’s frightfully old-fashioned to talk about it, but most of us who share a culture (i.e. who were educated in the country they now live in) have a basic idea of how to behave in public.

Yes, it differs from country to country, and what is common practice in some parts of the world is abhorrent to others.

I stepped out of a shop the other day and as I did so an old man of Mediterranean appearance — Greek, I’d guess — delivered a gob of such mighty proportions and mucilaginous integrity that there was a loud crack when it hit the pavement right between my shoes.

I stared at him in horror and revulsion but he didn’t even notice. He just shuffled past with his unconcerned headscarved wife.

He came from a country (or culture, or era) where or when spitting in public was acceptable, I guess. He thought nothing of it. I was disgusted and offended. He was totally unaware.

Then I went to the hole in the wall to draw cash. As I was hunched over, secretively typing in my PIN number, a black lad came right up to my side, shoved some papers under my nose and asked something like “Do I pay this in here?”

I was outraged. I rounded on him and shouted “Get away from me! Stand back when I’m using the ATM!”

Startled, he fell back a couple of paces. “Right back! Stand behind the line!” I yelled. People were beginning to stop and stare.

“Don’t you understand?” I went on. “Don’t talk to people when they’re using a cash machine. It’s not …” — and here I paused, searching for the word — “it’s not POLITE.”

He stared at me as if I were a dinosaur, which to him I probably was. Polite? What was polite about a transaction with a hole in the wall?

Yet keeping your distance from someone who is using a cash machine must be the most universal basic modern courtesy. He was a Brit; how can he not have known that?

When I’d finished, I turned and he was still there. I stared at him, and he sauntered slowly off, eyeballing me.

An innocent query, misinterpreted by me? Or malicious intent?

I think I was right to react the way I did, because the only way in my culture that I could interpret his actions was to see them as potentially threatening.

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.

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.

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.