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As if having a baby wasn’t exhausting enough, the received wisdom on looking after the little blighter is a nightmarish minefield of theory and counter-theory. The chief debates are these:

1. ‘On demand’ vs ‘routine’. Theorists abound and create whole industries around their bestselling books. On the left, I give you attachment parenting: William Sears, Margot Sutherland et al. They say a baby should be given everything it needs when it wants it, and favour things such as co-sleeping (see below) and carrying them around everywhere in a sling. The debit side is that it can be very punishing on parents, and leaves their needs forgotten. On the right, the ‘controlled crying’ etc brigade, led by the dreaded Gina Ford, who advocates dividing your day into 10-minute chunks and forcing the baby to fit in with it, heedless of neurologists’ observations that night waking/feeding helps babies’ brain development.It’s notable that Sears has 8 children, and apparently Ford has… none. Tracy Hogg (‘the baby whisperer’) claims to tread a middle path, but is really a Fordite as far as I can discern.
2. Breast vs bottle. Paediatricians don’t seem to give a toss for the breast, and in hospital happily try to foist formula on anyone who isn’t producing milk, or whose baby is ill and needs extra feeding (we were lucky as Oxford has a ‘milk bank’ and a stern ward sister arranged for donated milk). Meanwhile midwives are ardent breastfeeding campaigners and it’s hard to get them to admit how miserable and gruelling it can be, or help you consider alternatives.
3. Dummy or no-dummy. Dummy use has been shown to be a preventative factor against cot death, but then again it can also lead to more ear infections, and in some babies seems to cause ‘nipple confusion’ making breastfeeding even more complicated than it already is.
4. Co-sleeping or separate room. Western cultures don’t like the former as it disrupts the mother-father relationship in bed, and there’s the fear of squashing the mite (though this is extremely rare unless alcohol or drugs are involved). There are potential cot death risks for either argument, and in practice most people have a cot next to their bed.

Oh, and a special note for Dunstan Baby Language, whose nice-little-earner-DVD identifies 5 different cries baby makes and claims that all their needs can be met by spotting them and responding appropriately. Yeah, right. (There does seem to be something in it – but babies need more than five things.)

There’s probably more I’ve temporarily forgotten, addled with sleeplessness as I am. Anyway: it’s all bloody depressing, and I suppose going with one’s intuition is as good as anything. Of all the books I’ve looked at so far, one called Fatherhood… The Truth, although somewhat melancholy, is by far the sanest I’ve read. It’s by Marcus Berkmann – yup, the one who used to write for Your Sinclair. Surely, surely, if you can program a Spectrum, you can raise a child.

has already broken the news (and spoilered my anecdote!), but I’m going to drone at you anyway…

The world won’t be the same without Ken Campbell’s drawling of the words ‘glossolalia’, ‘Neville Plashwit’ and ‘gastromancy’, and walking his dogs on the Walthamstow marshes.

Permit me to trot out a personal memory: and I were chatting to Ken (for it is he) in the bar before a show a few years ago and I speculated whether any of the material was the same as in the last show of his I’d seen. He replied in his remarkable nasal way: “As Newton said about Jesus, he was made of different stuff.”

As he said it, he was pathetically counting out dozens of pennies to see if he had enough for a drink, so I stepped in and got him one. It was, beloved readers, a coke. Ned Sherrin and Alan Coren never told stories like this, eh?

I can still remember some of Macbeth in Vanuatu pidgin thanks to Ken, and that’s a life skill to treasure – though remembers more than I do.

Actually, I’ve also stalked him along Green Lanes with another friend, but that’s another story.

I guess we’ll never get the History of Comedy Part Two now. Sniff.

Maybe if I keep working on my already prodigious eyebrows I can do the tribute act some day.

There’s an interesting article about G K Chesterton in the latest New Yorker (the article’s not online yet), which mentions in passing that GKC ‘must have influenced’ Borges – indeed he did. It sent me ferreting off to find some of the essays where Borges wrote about him, and I found one I hadn’t come across before, ‘The Labyrinths of the Detective Story and Chesterton’.

Anyway, what caught my eye was Borges listing what he took to be the rules of classic detective fiction. Here they are (his words in italics, my comments afterwards):

A. A discretional limit of six characters.
B. The declaration of all the terms of the problem. This is basically Dorothy L Sayers’ ‘fair play’ rule – I’m sure I saw an essay of hers with a list of principles once, but I can’t track it down.
C. An avaricious economy of means. I’m not totally certain what he’s on about here (he only gives counterexamples, eg Conan Doyle regularly breaks B), though I think there’s a tone of Occam’s razor about it.
D. The priority of how over who. ie what happened is more interesting to deduce than who actually did it.
E. A reticence concerning death. (He adds that detective fiction’s “glacial muses are hygieve, fallacy and order”. I think he means it should be an elegant puzzle rather than a gore-fest.
F. A solution that is both necessary and marvellous. There’s only one solution, which makes the reader boggle – but has no recourse to the supernatural. Chesterton’s Father Brown is his model.

That was written in 1935 – only a few years after Ronald Knox came up with his ten commandments for detective fiction (1929) and SS Van Dine formulated his twenty rules (1929). (Side note to self: ooh, I must track down The Sins of Father Knox.)

Anyway, er yeah, not sure why I’m posting this – just interested me. I wonder if there are similar principles that make games work?

It’s all been happening. On Sunday I played cricket for the first time in 20 years. It was advertised as ‘Rubbish Cricket’, so I took comfort from that, but was nevertheless the rubbishest player there (out of 11 in total, so only small teams). That said, I did have a moment of glory right at the very end when I took a wicket. The setting was glorious: the village cricket ground at Ewelme. On Monday I ached all over all bloody day, because clearly I are seriously unfit.

On Tuesday I went to some arts/business function at the BMW MINI plant at Cowley, avoiding the awards ceremony it was all about purely to go on a free tour of the plant afterwards – these are apparently much prized, and I just like being in places where I have no conceivable business.

It’s an extraordinary experience – well, after 90 minutes I was getting pretty bored, but before that it was more overwhelming. We visited two of the vast (and we’re talking about dozens of football pitches each here) ugly prefab buildings that grace that bit of Oxford’s ring road. The first was where loads of huge robots swing around in constant motion, grabbing parts and welding them together and so on. It’s the most dehumanised setting I’ve ever seen (there are very few actual meatware staff in there), like something out of an sf horror film really. The Matrix? You’re already in it, sunshine.

I only asked one question: “Are the robots made by robots?” They are. The whole place is an amazing monument to human technology – and utterly depressing. I couldn’t help but think our civilisation is totally fucked.

The second shed had lots more people, all of whom do 11-hour shifts on huge conveyors (they’re moving on them too), fitting all the twiddly bits to the cars. They make 50 Minis (sorry, MINIs) an hour, every single one to order and different from its shiny neighbour.

And fourthly (geddit?), on Wednesday we learnt something important – that’s a story for another day, but the good news is that all is well.

Here’s a great bit of journalism on the mysterious death of dolphins in Cornwall:

There are several theories, including that the dolphins may have been upset by some sort of underwater disturbance.

So, er, the underwater creatures may – though we have no idea – have been upset by something under water that upset them.

I’m always reminded at times like this of my favourite bit in How to Get Ahead in Advertising:

Businessman 1: I see the police have made another lightning raid… Paddington drug orgy.
Priest: I suppose young girls was involved?
Businessman 1: (reading the newspaper) One discovered naked in the kitchen…breasts smeared with peanut butter. The police took away a bag containing 15 grams of cannabis resin… it may also contain a quantity of heroin.
Bagley: Or a pork pie.
Businessman 1: I beg your pardon.
Bagley: I said the bag may also have contained a pork pie.
Businessman 1: I hardly see a pork pie’s got anything to do with it.
Bagley: Alright then, what about a large turnip. It might also have contained a big turnip.
Priest: The bag was full of drugs.
Bagley: Nonsense.
Priest: The bag was full of drugs, it says so.
Bagley: The bag could’ve been full of anything. Pork pies, turnips, oven parts… it’s the oldest trick in the book.
Priest: What book?
Bagley: The distortion of truth by association book. The word is “may.” You all believe heroin was in the bag because cannabis resin was in the bag. The bag may have contained heroin, but the chances are 100 to 1 certain that it didn’t.
Businessman 1: A lot more likely than what you say.
Bagley: About as likely as the tits spread with peanut butter.
Businessman 2: Do you mind?
Priest: The tits WERE spread with peanut butter!

Five years on from the Personality Declaration Act 2009, we are in a position to evaluate the indubitable changes it has wrought on society.

A reminder of the background to the legislation – which itself obliges me at this point to declare my red status. Towards the end of 2008, the general populace was growing restless against the use of call centres for businesses to manage their customer relations. There was also a rising tide of complaints against shop floor staff in many retail outlets having no clear interest in or knowledge of the products they were selling (in the cases where they had not been replaced by electronic information points and automated tills).

In a White Paper, communications analyst James McCully proposed that customer service, from both sides of the fence, would be rendered much more effective if the customer were able to determine the level of sincerity of the salesperson or support operative and their personal investment in the matter in hand. He further proposed the use of Myers-Briggs Type Indicators, then still in vogue with human resources professionals, and ran trials in a number of large utility companies where software was used to determine the broad emotional nature of a calling customer (their emotional state was indicated by detecting stress patterns in the voice). The operative then appointed to handle the enquiry was chosen according to their own MTBI profile and how likely it was that they could help the customer (or get rid of them) without further emotional escalation.

To everyone’s surprise, the experiment was generally successful in terms of customer retention – but in practice around 80% of the work was allocated to only 20% of the customer service operatives. Only those with certain personality traits were likely to achieve a positive outcome.

The reader is likely to recall the next stage, a radical simplification of this process where all workers in a public-facing capacity – whether in person, online or as a skypist – were obliged to declare their ‘enthusiasm’, with the use of a statement such as ‘I am obliged to tell you I am personally invested in this company/product’, or its counterpart ‘NOT personally invested’. As with the MBTI experiment, the ratio of the former to the latter was something in the region of four to one. However, the new system threw up successful outcomes, even with the operatives ‘not invested’.

The simple reason was that customers could relate to an operative ‘just doing their job’ (as many were in the same situation in their own workplace) and forgive the lack of interest. To start with there were headlines along the lines of ‘STAFF URGED NOT TO BE BOVVERED’, but when the policy was enshrined in legislation, the journalists themselves were obliged to declare their motivation or lack thereof, and the threat of hypocrisy soon ironed out controversy.

The further simplification in 2012 of this system into a ‘traffic light’ system of ‘green’ and ‘red’ status (for enthusiasm or lack of it respectively) was even more popular and avoided the unwieldy jargon of ‘personal investment’ – although some foreign visitors for the Olympic Games were no doubt somewhat baffled.

Although ‘red’ staff achieved higher levels of customer satisfaction than hitherto, naturally the ‘greens’ remained more popular where detailed information or assistance was required, and they began to attract higher salaries. The occasional cases where members of the red group attempted to fake a green personality were soon weeded out with advances in the burgeoning field of neurorecruitment. Whether the minority of highly paid, ever-smiling and persistently helpful workers retains this popularity is for the future to tell.

This article was written largely with the assistance of Wal*Martopedia, “the free encyclopedia anyone green can edit” (TM). It took 20 minutes to compile and I have been paid 30 euros.

Somewhere on the web today a young graphic designer ranted about how they hate their clients and the work they have to do for them, and wanted to know how to earn money by doing things they love and respect (they had a startlingly high opinion of their own skills). Someone responded with Hugh McLeod’s wise Sex and Cash theory. Today I give you a restatement of this in the form of…

Hat’s Three-Step Plan for Fulfilment
1. Do things you don’t like for money.
2. Do things you like for free.
3. On the occasions when you get money for doing something you like, count yourself lucky.

Anyway, I’m off to the pub for lunch now.

So, when I was coaxed out of the house last night, little did I know I’d end up discussing Borat with climate change guru Mark Lynas in a village pub.

It was after a talk he gave in the same village hall (Ramsden) where I went to a previous talk on climate change (which I wrote about here and here). Lynas is an excellent speaker and very accomplished at effortlessly marshalling bucketloads of data, as well as fielding complex questions without pause. He provides an admirably sane view of the whole issue, very much from the perspective of a scientist rather than a campaigner. My only worry is that he is over-optimistic about human psychology, ie a reliance on co-operation between nations (though I don’t really doubt that his solutions are at least possible). To me the issue smacks heavily of the prisoner’s dilemma, and the evidence from studies of that doesn’t suggest co-operation is a likely strategy for people in a world where fighting habitually takes precedence over common sense.

He’s also an entertainingly sarcastic sod, and it was fun talking with him. (I’ve only just discovered he was two years below me at Edinburgh, too). My lingering memory of the evening – other than the talk itself – is of the crazy, beer-filled notion of turning his book Six Degrees (a documentary version is being broadcast by National Geographic next week) into a musical. I can’t help thinking about it. It’s horrible, but it could almost work. Mark, get your people to talk to my people. Or, better, get them to sing.

So, in today’s post I had a letter from John Lewis, offering me insurance for our dishwasher two years after we bought it for ongoing “peace of mind”. Naturally, that the dishwasher might not have been covered any more has been nagging at me like something from Edgar Allen Poe, and it was only a matter of time before I went out and MURDERED SOMEONE WITH A TEASPOON when the pressure built up to an unbearable point.

But of course, what would really give PEACE OF BLOODY MIND is for people never ever ever ever to offer me insurance – which, like religion and charity-giving, I’m perfectly capable of seeking out when I bloody well want to, thank you, peace be with you.

So out of curiosity I googled for associations with the phrase “peace of mind” and the word insurance.

“peace of mind” insurance gives 1.98 million hits
“peace of mind” -insurance (ie excluding the latter term) gives 2.21m
“peace of mind” alone gives me 2.28m

I learn two things from this:
1. Insurance companies (or their copywriters) demonstrate a breathtaking embrace of cliché. Sadly this comes as no surprise.
2. Google can’t count, so it’s advanced search delimiters can’t really be trusted.

If someone could maybe insure me against Google giving me misleading results, perhaps then I would truly have peace of mind.

I think what really makes me happiest is that I got Evan Davies to say “the viscera of kittens”. Back to the day job now.