No geek
is an island

Not the last one, the one before the one before the one before the one before the one before that (if we’re counting Howard’s unchallenged ascension).

The meme du jour is earliest political memories. I’ve searched my brain through the haze that is the 1980s and while I may have been aware of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the release of Mandela and have a suspicion that my dad took me leafletting in the 1987 general election, my earliest clear memory is from the same month as Ryan’s.

I’d not long started secondary school and Heseltine’s challenge to Thatcher and the subsequent leadership election were covered at school (my memory is hazy about which class it was in). I recall predicting, with my 11-year-old’s naivety, that she would cling on - not knowing anything about politics and having spent my entire life under Her reign, it was hard to imagine anything different.

Ben Abbotts canvassing a couple of Cheeky Girls in Bromley.

Beyond an antediluvian pun in the title, words fail me.

theguardian Diary claimed on Tuesday that frivolous (and, indeed, non-frivolous) Early Day Motions each cost the taxpayer £290.

Wasn’t a larger figure than this - four figures, I think - quoted in the past? Surely the actual unit cost can’t be that high? If this is calculated by dividing the total cost of running the system by the number of EDMs, it’s quite possible that by proposing more EDMs, MPs actually serve to reduce this figure further (with the total cost increasing, but rising more slowly than the current average a time) and if they restrained themselves the average cost per EDM would actually go up even if the overall costs fell.

Seven lessons into my beginners’ Mandarin course, I was contemplating how the brain deals with different language. We were doing a role play of a fruit stall and as the shopkeeper I asked “hái yào?” (”Anything else?”). The customer wanted to say “Nothing.”

“Just say ‘rien’,” someone else suggested, and that desire to pluck a word from a different foreign language makes me wonder if the brain has one section for native language and another for all others.

It was the same when I was in Germany last year. If I didn’t know a word, it wasn’t the English that came straight to mind but, if I knew it, the French. Sometimes German words pop into my head when I don’t know the Chinese. Probably, though, on more occasions than not it’s the English word that I think of first, but I don’t notice myself doing it because it’s so natural. In that case, each word (as a concept) would have its own cubby-hole in my memory with a version in each language, including English, attached to it.

This is rather unscientific, of course. Is this psychology or linguistics? Either way I’m sure people with PhDs have investigated this in great depth.

Duncan is angry that some poor little Oliver Twist like urchins with barely a limb between them have been packed off to the World Cup after their school organised a particularly expensive school trip only for the money to go to some dodgy touts and no tickets to turn up. Fortunately, Mr Blair stepped in and saved the day and now the diddled kids can have a lovely time in Germany.

According to theguardian, the silver lining did have a cloud though:

Most of the children are to be flown out by British Airways

The LibDems have acquired another blogging Lord, and their first blogging hereditary peer, in the shape of Lord Avebury, aka Eric Lubbock, former MP for Orpington.

You can read about, amongst other thing, his exploits on the by-election trail in Bromley and his speeches in the House of Lords at http://ericavebury.blogspot.com/. I met him in Orpington during the General Election last year and a very good chap he is, with a strong track record on human rights. Hopefully he will join LibDem Blogs soon.