Overheard fragments of strangers’ conversations you're not sure you want to hear the rest of #81

“... unless they were sausages made out of Morecambe and Wise’s bodies.”

Won't someone not think about the children?

So there’s going to be this database. Meant to work alongside the national identity register, the Children’s Index will carry the details of every child born from 2008. This is, variously, a way of ensuring child tax credit is paid correctly, a method of monitoring for early signs of child abuse and a detection system for suitable recruits into the world military under the United Nations’ New World Order. All right, probably not the last one, but why, time and again, whenever New Labour cheerfully blurbles about its latest plans that are apparently entirely for our own good, are those plans really fucking creepy?

And oh God, it’s all so well-intentioned. The index is meant to flag up any confluence of warning signals, like “low birth weight, poor exam results and a parent’s depression or addiction. Two warning ‘flags’ on a child’s record may trigger an investigation”. That’s a lot of detailed information, and between 300,000 and 400,000 users will have access to it. How can that possibly go wrong?

Someone’s clearly been spending their summer holiday catching up on old Hansards, because yesterday the Telegraph's lead story, headed “Celebrity children will get database privacy”, was based on this quote from Lord Adonis, but didn't mention that he actually said it on 20 March:

“Children who have a reason for not being traced—for example, where there is a threat of domestic violence or where the child has a celebrity status—will be able to have their details concealed”.

We can sleep easy in the knowledge that not just anyone will have access to, for example, Rocco Ritchie’s most intimate details. However, everyone else’s will be freely available to—those numbers again—between 300,000 and 400,000 people.

So it turns out the only way to guarantee privacy is to become a celebrity. No longer a frivolous pursuit for its own sake, life in the public eye will, paradoxically, be the only guarantee in future of security from intrusion, as it will be the only way of ensuring your children’s most private information isn’t widely available. The only way to protect them from prying eyes will be to parade them in front of the paparazzi. Your kids will have to be brought up as spoilt, warped Beckhamlets to avoid the dumb, oblivious invasiveness of the British government. Hoik them onstage for a duet as you honk your way through your “X-Factor” audition. Make them take part in “Britain’s Next Top Model”. Bring back “Minipops”. They’ll thank you one day, or at least they would have done if you hadn't had to raise them to be such awful brats.

Pub minutes

1. There is dark genius in the idea of a charity record performed by a troupe of the most notable X-Factor (and Pop Idol etc) rejectees—its theme something long the lines of “Don’t let people put you down, follow your dream no matter how patently unsuited you are to it,” and all that.

2. The magazine Men’s Health is reportedly staffed almost exclusively by extremely non-healthy men, for whom a trip to the gym is as likely as sprouting wings out of their ears. Imagine the words “I’m not sure those abs on page 15 are suitably defined” mumbled through a mouthful of crisps, and you’ll probably be over-reaching, but still, you get the idea.

3. My friend consulted the Mystic Pig over whether she should opt for the expensive bathroom she craves or settle for an affordable refit. It advised her that she should go for the expensive option, but not yet. She is following its advice.

Cut-out-and-weep

Boston Globe, 30 August 2006

Maine National Guard members in Iraq and Afghanistan are never far from the thoughts of their loved ones. But now, thanks to a popular family-support program, they're even closer. Welcome to the “Flat Daddy” and “Flat Mommy” phenomenon, in which life-size cutouts of deployed service members are given by the Maine National Guard to spouses, children, and relatives back home. The Flat Daddies ride in cars, sit at the dinner table, visit the dentist, and even are brought to confession, according to their significant others on the home front.

“I prop him up in a chair, or sometimes put him on the couch and cover him up with a blanket,” said Kay Judkins of Caribou, whose husband, Jim, is a minesweeper mechanic in Afghanistan. “The cat will curl up on the blanket, and it looks kind of weird. I've tricked several people by that. They think he's home again.”

At the request of relatives, about 200 Flat Daddy and Flat Mommy photos have been enlarged and printed at the state National Guard headquarters in Augusta. The families cut out the photos, which show the Guard members from the waist up, and glue them to a $2 piece of foam board.

“It's a novel approach,” said John Goheen, spokesman for the National Guard Association of the United States, a Washington-based lobbying group. “It's to remind the kids that this guy and this woman is still part of your life, that this is what they look like, and this is how big they are.”

Judkins said the cutout has been a comfort since her husband was deployed in January. “He goes everywhere with me. Every day he comes to work with me,” said Judkins, who works in a dentist's office. “I just bought a new table from the Amish community, and he sits at the head of the table. Yes, he does.”

(no subject)

It’s all right. We made it. A fortnight without Tony at the tiller but we somehow muddled through. Now he’s back and raring to make it all better, again. Never mind that his own party, not to mention the rest of the country, is now openly staring at him and saying “Are you still here?”. He’s promising to rejuvenate a flagging administration with—wait for it—new policy initiatives. Because nothing says vision and purpose like a flurry of ill-conceived soundbites that everyone, including the people responsible for them, will have forgotten within two years.

Anyway, he knows full well that the only initiative anyone wants to see from him now is a sudden glance at his watch followed by the phrase “Heavens, is that the time?” and a hasty exit. Won’t happen, of course. Dislodging him as PM will probably take a Thatcher-style coup (Maggie or Mark, I’m not fussed).


Since I jotted that down a couple of days ago, idly intending to append something to it at some point, Tony has moved swiftly to exceed all my expectations, in so doing firmly reinforcing the link between the words “New Labour” and “creepy”:

Tomorrow's potential troublemakers can be identified even before they are born, Tony Blair has suggested.

Headline of the day

Science news: “Nigeria police to get arms boost”