The problem I have with this is, how did they measure it? 60mm is a linear measurement. When you ‘re talking about a liquid it has no meaning whatsoever without knowing over which area the height of rain has fallen.

For example, let’s say I have a nice square bucket that has a base area of 100 sq. centimetres. Now let’s say I have a perfect cloud that only rains over this bucket. It rains for an hour and the height of the rainwater in the bucket after that time is 1cm. Now I know that 100 cubic centimetres of rain has fallen. Yes! no ambiguity. “It rained over Les’s bucket today and 100 cubic centimetres fell in 1 hour”. You see, I know exactly what happened. This is news. This, is information.

In reality of course it’s harder than that. What the weather folks actually mean is that “60mm of rain was recorded on average amongst our standard sized rain gauges over the approximate geographical area I shall conveniently refer to as Cornwall”.

Now, we can’t expect broadcasters to explain what the size of the gauges used are of course, but just one more piece of information I feel would remove any ambiguity and also give the listener or viewer something to grab hold of, something they can visualize and relate to. They should normalise the measurements so that the figure can be given in terms of mm per sq. metre. That’s it. That would help me (as I write this, the tv guys just said “30mm fell this morning” and another “60mm this afternoon” grrrr). I think it would help others too.

If you’re told that “we had rain over small town today of 60mm per square metre” then you can visualise that and think “Yep, that’s a lot”.

The eagle-eyed among you may be thinking that they may as well just say “over x,000 litres of rain fell” but few people I think knows what a litre of fluid looks like (be honest, that drinks bottle you’re visualising now you can’t remember whether it was one litre or two). On the other hand most of us can visualise a square of a given size and a height.

Is it me?

No madam, it is not. It is absolutely, NOT. It is YOUR job. Governments do not reproduce. The Government did not impregnate you. If you have been fortunate enough to decide on parenthood and succeed then you must accept that the responsibility for education your child is yours and yours alone. You are very fortunate to live in a country that provides free state schooling and because of this you and your offspring benefit from the privileged attention of trained and passionate professionals whose services few among us could otherwise afford. School is a place that fills in the gaps and broadens the scope of knowledge accessible to our children hopefully so that each generation has a wider knowledge of the world and greater access to it without being constricted by the cultural, emotional and financial limitations of their parents.

Your attitude is symptomatic of a wide ranging perception among parents today that the education of their children has little to do with them. So many seem happy to abdicate responsbility for their children to the education system. They could not be more wrong.

If your 5 year old begins school and cannot recognise and take a stab at writing his own name, it is you who has failed him. The School has not yet had a chance to fail. If you do not read books with your child, count things with your child, question and converse with him then you are failing him. You are are failing to equip him to take advantage of the opportunity that school offers. How often do you think your child can possibly be heard read in a class of 30 with one Teacher and a Teaching Assistant if you’re lucky? Do the maths (I assume you can) it’s not difficult. Your child will learn to read but he will waste time at school learning to read when he could be reading to learn. When is the last comment in your child’s home reading record that you share with School? yesterday? two days ago? a week? a month? If it’s not a few times a week (come on, it takes 10 minutes) then I say again, it is you who are failing your child, not the School.

Our education system is not perfect, far from it. But it doesn’t have to be. It is better than most. It provides you with free childcare from 9 to 3 5 days a week. It provides peace of mind that your child is with friends and in a safe place. For goodness sake, they even adopt a legal responsibility for your child during these times “In Loco Parentis“.

Come on people, wake up and smell the roses. They’re your kids. They deserve your time. Not one of them asked to be here. They are your creation, your legacy, your responsibility. Your Pupils.

Why am I recording this loathsome dross? Because, my 7 year-old Son is desperate to play football, to understand football, to partake of the playground football chatter etc. I did the same when I was his age. I distinctly remember a substantial collection of dog-eared cards featuring the likes of Ray Clemence and Kevin Keegan. No doubt I succumbed to the same peer pressure as my Son feels now. He just wants to belong and though he’s a keen and useful Rugby player, Rugby just doesn’t have the same “Opiate of The Masses” appeal.

Despite the cards though, I went only once to a football match. England vs Switzerland under 21s at Wembley. It cost the princely sum of £5 for the coach trip from Runcorn with Palacefields County Primary. I remember we had a great day. Wembley was the biggest place I’d ever seen but wandering round it (9 years old and we were told “Don’t wander off, straight to the toilet and back”! It fair gives my parental heart palpitations just recalling it). Well, of course we did not do as we were told which is why me and a friend whose name and face have long been supplanted in my memory banks by years of pointless trivia almost missed the coach. Can you imagine that? These days those Teachers would (unfairly) be publicly named and shamed. I presume the Teachers were frantic and very stressed out wondering where we were but I don’t recall any sign of that. Worryingly, I’m not even sure they knew were were missing until we weren’t.

Now, you may notice here that I don’t have much to say about the football which may seem a bit odd given it was at Wembley after all. Well, I did watch some but frankly from where we were sat the players may well have been Subbuteo (I had to look that word up, never had cause to write it before) figures and the ball but the merest speck of white. It was noisy. People were shouting endlessely about nothing. And so many of them. There were more people that I considered might exist on the whole planet at that time. I couldn’t share a joke with your mate because I couldn’t hear anything other than The Noise and I couldn’t join in with The Noise because it did seem to be just Noise; not words.  Being a self concious and nervous 9 year old the prospect of gently lurching in random directions and screaming very loudly “eeerer  aaahh sh olellee eeyyer” was frankly more terrifying than risking someone noticing that I wasn’t joining in.

It’s not as if you could even mime like in assembly when you knew the words but didn’t want to sing. Hellish. Truly hellish. And to think, some people grow up, work hard and spend some of their hard-earned to go and be in that crowd. You have my sympathies. I can’t imagine how awful the rest of your days must be that a saturday at a football stadium can be seen as a good thing.

Anyway, I digress. The thing is, despite my opinion on football I recognise that I am quite possibly the weird one and so accept that my Son may well find some joy in”The Beautiful Game” that I cannot. So, for that reason, I shall at least ensure he has the opportunity to witness professional football so he can join in with the rest of the mob. With any luck when we watch it back we can at least turn the sound down.

Strange after all these years that the TV coverage features the identical sound track to every game as the one they were playing at Wembley all those years ago. The Noise. Perhaps this is simply what you get when you put enough people who can’t form sentences in one place and the average IQ becomes the dominant force.

If you think this post is just whining from a miserable old bastard who doesn’t see much point having quite so many people on the planet doing pointless things you are, quite probably, right. A discourse on the recursive nature of musing on pointlessness which is, in itself, pointless is reserved for a later (pointless) post.

4 THINGS YOU PROBABLY NEVER KNEW YOUR MOBILE PHONE COULD DO
There are a few things that can be done in times of grave emergencies.
Your mobile phone can actually be a life saver or an emergency tool for survival.
Check out the things that you can do with it:
FIRST Emergency
The Emergency Number worldwide for Mobile is 112.
If you find yourself out of the coverage area of your mobile; network and there is an emergency, dial 112 and the mobile will search any existing network to establish the emergency number for you, and interestingly this number 112 can be dialled even if the key pad is locked. Try it out.
SECOND Have you locked your keys in the car?
Does your car have remote keyless entry?
This may come in handy someday.
Good reason to own a cell phone: If you lock your keys in the car and the spa re keys are at home, call someone at home on their mobile phone from your cell phone. Hold your cell phone about a foot from your car door and have the person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the mobile phone on their end. Your car will unlock. Saves someone from having to drive your keys to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has the other ‘remote’ for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the trunk).
Editor’s Note: It works fine! We tried it out and it unlocked our car over a mobile phone!’
THIRD Hidden Battery Power
Imagine your mobile battery is very low. To activate, press the keys *3370 #
Your mobile will restart with this reserve and the instrument will show a 50 % increase in battery.
This reserve will get charged when you charge your mobile next time.
FOURTH How to disable a STOLEN mobile phone?
To check your Mobile phone’s serial number, key in the following digits on your phone: * # 0 6 #
A 15 digit code will appear on the screen. This number is unique to your handset.
Write it down and keep it somewhere safe. When your phone gets stolen, you can phone your service provider and give them this code.
They will then be able to block your handset so even if the thief changes the SIM card, your phone will be totally useless.
You probably won’t get your phone back, but at least you know that whoever stole it can’t use/sell it either.
If everybody does this, there would be no point in people stealing mobile phones.
ATM – PIN Number Reversal – Good to Know
If you should ever be forced by a robber to withdraw money from an ATM machine, you can notify the police by entering your PIN # in reverse.
For example, if your pin number is 1234, then you would put in 4321.
The ATM system recognizes that your PIN number is backwards from the ATM card you placed in the machine.
The machine will still give you the money you requested, but unknown to the robber, the police will be immediately dispatched to the location.
This information was recently broadcast on CTV by Crime Stoppers however it is seldom used because people just don’t know about it.

The first three should be obviously bollocks to most people with enough IQ to actually use a mobile phone number but in case not, here is a link to some folks who did bother to research rather than mislead others into potentially dangerous beliefs.

On the crimestoppers mention, which has been subtly changed to be UK centric from a well known US hoax mail, the crime stoppers website contains a response about it.

The only one that is correct and useful is item 4. Everyone should record their IMEI number in case of phone theft. Calling your network to block your SIM will stop you getting call charges but blocking the handset itself makes it worthless to the thief. However, for an IMEI blocked by your network to become known to the police and all other networks takes up to 48 hours. If you simply goto Immobilise and register your details and your phones (you can do all the family’s phones and other property too and it’s FREE.) Then in the event of theft you can obtain the IMEI easily to report to your network. But you can also mark it as stolen on your account (in addition to calling the police of course) and this will mean that your details as the apparent owner and the fact that it is stolen will show up on the Police National Mobile Property Register INSTANTLY. Additionally, the phone will not be able to be traded in at most second hand stores because they use CheckMEND which is also notified instantly.

Please, do us all a favour folks and do not forward on warnings that you have not verified.

• Do you want a traveller to a foreign country to feel threatened and dialing some stupid number that they found out from you instead of finding out the REAL local emergency number before travel?
• Do you want a sick infant on holiday to die because the stupid ignorant unprepared parents assumed that what you forwarded was real instead of checking?
• Do you want to be responsible for the ATM holdup victim who gets stabbed because they entered their pin backwards 3 times and the assailant couldn’t get any money? They then bleed to death in the mistaken beliefe that the police or an ambulance is going to show up before they check out?

These are real situations with real dangers.

I’ve had email for 20 years just about and can honestly say that I have NEVER received an email like this one that was substantially real. These days, you can debunk these with 30 seconds effort on Google. If you can’t be arsed to do that, just keep them to yourselves.

Total time to do a little research and type the above? 15 minutes. Google found the crimestoppers and hoax debunk pages in a little under 1.3 seconds. You see? you could check before forwarding.

Declaration of Interest: I’m a director of Recipero Ltd that owns and runs Immobilise and CheckMEND and provides the National Mobile Property Register to the Police and other government agencies. This doesn’t colour my advice though, merely explains why I make it my job to know this stuff. Of course this blog and all the comments on it are my personal comments and views and not those of Recipero Ltd, as if you needed telling.