Liberal Burblings

Archive for September, 2006

I was half-listening to ‘Deal or no deal’ this afternoon as my wife watched it in the kitchen.

It has barely comprehensible rules, an apparently aimless sequence of moves and inane cheering at some apparently random point.

I’ve got it. The penny has finally dropped.

‘Deal or no deal’ is the televisual version of ‘Mornington Crescent’!

I was ready for a disappointment when I sat down to watch Who do you think you are? featuring David Tennant last night on BBC1. “Scotsman finds he is descended from Scots and a bit of Irish” didn’t seem to promise a rip-roaring programme.

However, the whole thing was unexpectedly fascinating. It was fascinating to hear that David Tennant is actually David MacDonald and chose his surname, as a sixteen year old aspiring actor, from the pages of Smash Hits magazine. Yes, he named himself after the bloke in the Pet Shop Boys!

It was when he travelled to Ireland in search of his mother’s ancestors that it got interesting. His grandfather was a popular football player for Derry City FC whose season scoring record still stands. His grandmother was a local beauty queen. One of his ancestors, James, was a Unionist Councillor in the same city who “was involved in the vote-rigging which maintained control of the council for the Protestant minority. Yet James also fought for social justice, and one of his daughters married a Catholic lad. His descendants were caught up in the Bloody Sunday march in 1972, the catalyst for the Troubles that have gripped the province ever since.”

First of all we saw Tennant, a self-professed “Guardian-reading liberal” coming to terms with holding the Orange sash of his ancestor. Then he was delighted to hear of James’ fight for better conditions for the poor. Then Tennant seemed more at ease to talk to his cousin who was a peaceful marcher in the Bloody Sunday protest.

Tennant’s family history covered quite a kaleidoscope of Irish history.

A few days ago, I asked ‘what are daddy long-legs for?’

As ever, the BBC is on the case, and they have found some terribly clever boffin to provide the answer:

They are an important source of food for creatures that eat insects, including birds and spiders, says ecology professor Guy Poppy, from the University of Southampton.

“Insect eaters will be feasting on all the daddy longlegs at this time of year, a spider web will be full of them.”

The larvae also eat decaying plant material and help to recycle nutrients back into the soil.

There you go.

He said he was mad, jokingly, as he exuberantly bought his seventeenth iPod on BBC2′s A Secret life of the manic depressive. Of course he isn’t (mad) and this two-part programme served enormously to help the public understand manic depressives. Stephen Fry is to be warmly congratulated. He even allowed the cameras to record him as he suffered from a bout of depression in Aberdeen. It was very brave of him to go to Aberdeen (joke!) and very brave to be filmed in such a state.

The programme explored “solutions” for what is sometimes called bipolar disorder. These included medicine and Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT). Stephen said that he thought CBT wasn’t for him.

But I do hope that he does follow up and have some CBT. It certainly won’t do him any harm. He is likely to find it a gentle, unintrusive series of chats that help him understand his personality and work towards ways of diminishing self-damaging extremes of mood in future.

A dark brooding beast sulking in the house next door.

A sparky wife telling him he’s too soft and should stand up to the dark brooding beast.

And he just sits there, caught between the two of them, with a saintly grin on his face.

Don’t you feel just an iota of sympathy for Tony Blair?

I was just enjoying the early Autumn warm weather with a lie-down in Stroud Green, Newbury, while my daughter played with her friend. After a while I realised that I was surrounded by thousands of daddy long-legs which seem to be swarming around the park.

It seems it is a good year for them. Their other name is “crane flies”.

Fortunately they are harmless and seem to spread themselves out so thinly that they don’t even cause a nuisance.