The Virtual Stoa

I was first told about dogging in 2002, when I was visiting Josephine in Rome, where she was living at the time. One of her archaeologist colleagues there — someone who has also, as it happens, told a lie to the Queen — explained the phenomenon to me. But I didn’t fully absorb what I was being told, so for quite a while afterwards I mistakenly thought that dogging was something that Italians did in autostrada lay-bys, even though dogging is, when you think about it, clearly a deeply, deeply English activity.

(So no good for Gordon Brown’s Britishness crusade. On the other hand, I see that googling “dogging Scotland” gets me 200,000 hits, and “dogging Wales” gets me 150,000, so perhaps a case could be made for “British values” teaching in schools to include a how-to module on dogging. I’d have thought it was far too cold and wet in Scotland and Wales. “Dogging Northern Ireland” nets you a mere 37,000 pages, so perhaps it never really took hold over there, or perhaps the internet hasn’t yet reached Ulster, or something.)

Anyway, for reasons I never began to understand, by about 2003 the Virtual Stoa had made it onto at least one list of “UK dogging websites”, and a surprising number of people would show up in the stats as coming to the Stoa in search of “dogging in Bedfordshire” and the like. (Also puzzling, since the VS isn’t known for its coverage of Life in Bedfordshire, but there we go.) And, over the years, I’ve kept half an eye on dogging in our national life, although I think the only sustained discussion we’ve had here at the Stoa was this one last year.

Fast forward now to 2008, and in February I was surprised to see in the site referral stats that someone had visited the Stoa looking for “daniel davies dogging”. (Back then it was the fourth hit; now it’s dropped to sixteenth.) I dropped blogland’s Daniel Davies (aka dsquared) a note to tell him that someone was onto him, and he said that he thought it might be something to do with this guy, “or at least I profoundly hope that’s what they were looking for”. And, yes, it turns out that another chap called Daniel Davies has written a state-of-the-nation novel about dogging, hence the title, The Isle of Dogs, which was published not so long ago. (And just as the person who came to the Stoa was presumably looking for the novelist but found the blogger, so over here there’s someone down in the comments who’s looking for the blogger on a page about the novelist.)

Anyway: I read The Isle of Dogs the other day, being generally in favour of the idea that people are writing novels about dogging, but unfortunately it was crap. (This bloke liked it, though. Where I thought it was a largely predictable string of clichés, he thought it was ” a near-flawless analysis of British society”. De gustibus, et cetera.)

I quite enjoyed reading the Max Mosley judgment. Favourite snippet:

Mr Thurlbeck [the NotW reporter] also relied upon the fact that the Claimant [Mr Mosley] was “shaved”. Concentration camp inmates were also shaved. Yet, as Mr Price [Mr Mosley's QC] pointed out, they had their heads shaved. The Claimant, for reasons best known to himself, enjoyed having his bottom shaved – apparently for its own sake rather than because of any supposed Nazi connotation. He explained to me that while this service was being performed he was (no doubt unwisely) “shaking with laughter”. I naturally could not check from the DVD, as it was not his face that was on display.

Just back from a week up an Alp, happily disconnected from the outside world. (Lots of mountain goats, but no marmots, alas.) Did I miss anything? I learned from French motorway service stations on the way home that England lost a Test Match and the Labour Party lost a by-election, both in rather embarrassing fashion. Anything else?

Were the duties upon foreign wines, and the excises upon malt, beer, and ale to be taken away all at once, it might, in the same manner, occasion in Great Britain a pretty general and temporary drunkenness among the middling and inferior ranks of people, which would probably be soon followed by a permanent and almost universal sobriety.

Wealth of Nations, IV.3.ii.

I’m so worried about what’s happening today, in the Middle East, you know / And I’m so worried about the baggage retrieval system they’ve got at Heathrow.

I’m currently sitting on a train just north of York, heading for Scotland, and pleasantly surprised to have a working internet connection. And this post is partly to see whether I can post to the Stoa from the comfort of seat 53 in coach B of the 1030 from King’s Cross, but also to record that the train was held up for 15 minutes between Doncaster and York because someone mistook the flushing toilet for the train being on fire.

Over here. I think this is splendid. For some suitable banter, go here.

(The Telegraph covers the story here in a bit more detail, but inexplicably omits the all-important Capt. W. E. Johns-related statistic.)

And here’s my friend Rick Muir, on the Winterval, vel sim.

Oliver Kamm makes the correct point that Paul Foot’s book on The Rise of Enoch Powell is really very good indeed; Mary Beard provides a classicist’s perspective on his notorious speech; and Simon has a very interesting discusison of West Midlands Toryism.

UPDATE [4.45pm]: So, here’s Hastilow’s article; here’s the transcript of the “rivers of blood” speech, and there’s some blog-discussion by Tories here, here, here [ConservativeHome] and here [Iain Dale]. Also Michael White and Sunder Katwala on CiF.

The BBC has just done a survey of family life in Britain, and both on the Today programme this morning (probably, I was half asleep) and on the webpage today they’ve been reporting the results as a “surprise”:

Compared with historical polling, people are more optimistic about their family’s future, more people describe their family as close and they are more likely to say their parents did their best for them. Despite all the changes, we remain remarkable happy with family life - 93% of us describing it as fairly or very happy.

I’m just puzzled as to what the surprise is supposed to be. There’s more to do at home than there once was; women have better exit options from bad marriages than ever used to be the case; parents have more control over reproduction; the food is better; more homes have decent heating; and today’s families are less likely to have been badly affected by war or childhood mortality. Why on earth shouldn’t we be happier?

It’s been pointed out to me recently that although the pubs in Britain smell a lot less smoky after the introduction of the smoking ban, they now smell much more of the other people in the pub, and that’s not obviously an improvement.

The Stoa has long been interested in universities, Fabians and beavers, so I’m interested to learn that the newspaper of the LSE student union is called The Beaver. But can anybody tell me why?

I’m delighted to say that someone is letting off fireworks in North Oxford, which I am assuming is in honour of Bastille Day. Vive la République!

I mocked Stephen Pollard below for his silly opinions about petitions on the 10 Downing St website, and now I find that perhaps, just perhaps, they can make a difference. I signed the petition against the proposed changes to the Highway Code that would make it an offence not to cycle in the cycle lane, if there was a cycle lane to cycle in, and now I read that the offending sentences have been removed from the new draft code that will come into force into September, all being well.

(In fact, while we’re on the subject of Stephen Pollard and bicycles, perhaps it’s a good time to catch up on his classic column from 2004 about why the Tour de France is boring, “because the team element is missing”.)

When my friend Katherine isn’t thinking about ideal theory, she’s training for a 100km in 24 hours journey across the South Downs, or somesuch, on foot, to raise money for Oxfam and the Gurkha Welfare Trust. Sponsor her! Blog over here (a must for foot fetishists! and blister fetishists — there must be some out there), and click on the “Sponsor Us!” link on the left-hand side. Highly recommended (unless you think, of course, that Oxfam is a bunch of neocolonialists).

Oh dear. I’ve just heard Ruth Kelly on the Today Programme, which is even more effective at making me want to get out of bed than the wretched Thought for the Day. She was wittering about British Values, and thinks they should have their own Day.

But I can’t decide whether it should be held each year on 5 November, in an attempt to reinvigorate national traditions of anti-Catholic bigotry — or whether a more appropriate way of celebrating British Values would be to have British Values Day on any other day of the year, and then for us to ignore it?

Stoa-readers! How would you like to celebrate British Values? (I’ve already had “throwing up in the street and having sex with someone inappropriate” suggested to me.) And on which day of the year?

Today’s tehgraun tells me that Ofcom says that 4% of adults in the UK aged 25-44 don’t have a mobile phone. I didn’t realise we were that unusual. Apparently I’m a “handset holdout”. Actually I just don’t like the telephone much, and don’t want to spend money to be able to use it any more than I have to.

And these days I don’t seem to use it much at all, which is very good. We don’t seem to be in the Oxford phonebook, a number I’ve never used has been printed next to my name in the University phonebook, and my own College keeps getting confused and listing at least one wrong number in its own internal directory. I think this is pretty much ideal.

UPDATE: And, as fellow refusnik Jamie says, “Anyway, I have a postal address, an e-mail address, a landline and a webpage. How much more do you want, you nosy bastards?”

The curious thing about this piece in yesterday’s tehgraun is how few of the pleasures these intellectuals list — country music, Elvis Presley, Trinny and pro-wrestling, baseball, and so on — ought to induce guilt in any way, shape or form. (The odd inclusion is James Wood’s nomination of car magazines, but that stands out because it’s hard to see how they could be pleasurable.) Still, I don’t suppose that this crowd was going confess an interest in horse-porn or dogging to a random journalist.

Thinking of dogging, as I suppose we all do from time to time, is this still something that the Great British Public pursues at night in motorway laybys, or was it very much an early-millennium fad? And if it has faded from the scene, did fashions just change, or did the police develop some effective anti-dogging strategies when they weren’t investigating cash-for-peerages? Or something else?

I’ve spent a small chunk of the morning setting up my first wormery. It’s only a small wormery (one of these), but it’s moderately exciting, nonetheless. And if anyone’s got any wormery do’s and don’ts, do share.

I’m not quite sure what my options are right now. I turn 34 in just over a couple of weeks time. Now according to the BBC, I’ve got a few days during which I can join the Army, as the MoD has, apparently, raised the recruitment age from 26 to 33. So I may have to make a decision in a hurry. (Advice, please.)

On the other hand, this army webpage seems to think that 30 is the cut-off, unless I want to be an officer, in which case it was 29, which seems like a very long time ago.

On the other, other hand, if I want to play the tuba in an Army band, I’ve still got a few years left in which to make up my mind. They’ll still take me up until the end of 2009, (though I suppose I’d also have to learn the tuba).

The news on the radio yesterday was full of stuff about Remembrance events. Now I thought we had Remembrance Sunday, and everyone else did their thing on 11 November (in roughly the way that the entire planet celebrates 1 May, except in the UK, where we get the first Monday in May as a holiday). So has Remembrance Day expanded to fill the whole weekend because there are a lot more troops than usual being killed around the world, and the media is sensitive about this kind of thing, or is this a sign that our distinctive, parochial Sunday observance is under threat from the forces of globalisation?

[via]

I don’t often have patriotic moments, but my British heart swelled with pride when I read these words:

Figures from Mintel reveal that we eat a tonne of crisps every three minutes in the UK.

I think that’s a tremendous (multi-) national achievement. I’m not sure, however, that this is the reaction I’m supposed to be having.

Article about crisps in tehgrauniad. I recently reintroduced a steady supply of ready salted crisps into my diet, and I am a happier man as a consequence, although I don’t think you get quite as many crisps in a bag of Walker’s crisps as perhaps is ideal.