Summer is here. There are burnt bits everywhere and open gardens, outdoor music, fetes and country fairs will be teasing people out to sample the culture of the Jurassic coast and countryside.
However, if you’re thinking of missing out on all the local entertainment on offer by watching tennis, you may want to take heed of a recent piece of advice from University of Greenwich scientists.
With Wimbledon almost upon us, budding tennis players are once again inspired to pick up their racquets and try to emulate their heroes. But by adopting the tennis style of professional players, amateurs may be laying themselves open to serious back and shoulder injuries. According to Karin Grabcova of the university’s Centre for Sports & Exercise Science, a faster game and lighter racquets has forced many players to change the way they play. Big hitters have caused them to alter the way they return the ball, especially on the forehand. “The situation is worse for amateur players who are mimicking (the) open-stance, pioneered by the professionals,” explains Karin, “as they have neither the body strength, fitness levels or skill of the professionals to cope with this more punishing technique.”
No such problems here – the forehand grip gently supports the tea cup, while the remote control in the other hand, adds poise and balance.

Just prior to the war in Iraq I bumped into a real life conspiracy theorist who was suffering from a cold and kept referring to the current Prime Minister as ‘old Toady’. By an extraordinary coincidence I found myself sitting next to him on a train recently, where he both entertained and frightened me with his latest theories. Like the Mel Gibson character in the Conspiracy Theory film, he had an opinion on everything. The recent Riyadh bombings were the result of a Jo Moore type distraction exercise to take the sting out of Clare Short’s resignation for example, and the fireman’s strike was actually orchestrated by George Galloway. Although his ramblings showed no particular political agenda, the really frightening thing was the potential for plausibility. Dressed up with a few choice quotes and a good political spin, some of his theories could easily find themselves the subject of in-depth feature articles in your Sunday broadsheets. They could quickly become ‘sensational findings’ that could trip national or even international rage. Before long they would be championed by politicians in need of a cause to help propel their careers or even save them. The resultant chaos and swell of public opinion could reverberate around the world causing untold misery through war, terrorism and racial or religious hatred. Of course that’s all just fiction and couldn’t happen in the real world. Thank goodness for that!

Eagle eyed readers may have spotted from the front cover that this is issue number 50.
Someone suggested we celebrate this momentous occasion. 50th birthdays are quite unique and we wondered how many people really celebrate them with any gusto? It’s quite a big number and you’re not really old but your children aren’t exactly going to say your young either. It’s the sort of age that is older than your mother was when you first asked her her age. Whatever way you look at it there are some great things about being fifty. For example, you’re not sixty! Without your glasses, that face in the mirror is as smooth and luminous as a baby’s and a real bonus is that your parents can’t remember why you’re such a disappointment any more. Someone suggested we have a party and invite a celebrity or two, so we looked to see who would be celebrating fifty this May. Jeb Bush, the Governor of Florida, credited with getting his brother into the White House, could be there. Benazir Bhutto might just accept an invite and Mike Oldfield could compose a special Marshwood Vale Tubular Bells. If it gets a little dull we could get Nigel Planer to do some Young Ones routines and if Jeb gets out of hand we can get Pierce Brosnan to do a James Bond number; unless of course he’s distracted by Kim Basinger, who is also celebrating fifty this May. We ached over who to invite and eventually decided ‘Hell let’s just do it!’ – so we didn’t.

There is a feeling of grim resignation now that war has begun. Although the inevitability of it seemed inescapable for so long, many hoped that the madness that seemed to have gripped leaders around the world would somehow, at the last minute, dissipate, and we would be pulled back from the brink. Now what seemed unthinkable is underway and we hold our breaths. Dissenters hold their tongues – silenced by fear of being branded unpatriotic or even traitors. Leaders dream of how history will describe their mighty deeds, while millions who protested are temporarily silenced – slowly coming to the realisation that in ‘the big picture’, they are powerless. One of the many emails I received in the run up to war highlighted a quote from someone convicted of war crimes during the Nuremberg Trials, “…voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
Whatever the rights and wrongs of this war and the resultant divisions in the UN, Europe and even at home, we now have to move forward, treat the emotional wounds and rebuild relationships with our neighbours. Division in Europe can only benefit the superpower and writing an epitaph for the UN may prove premature, when the problems ahead, brought about both by war and other causes, only highlight the need for shared action across even the most belligerent frontiers. How our leaders cope with these needs remains to be seen. In our house it looks as if we will be doing our rebuilding in pink, after the birth of our fourth little girl, Hebe Iona.

“Old Toady”, a man with a very pronounced cold explained to me in a shop recently, “should be applauded for bringing the country together!” A vision of a character from Wind in the Willows morphed quickly into the face of the Prime Minister, when the man went on to explain: “Just when you thought he could do no good, he infuriates so many people that they all join hands and march through the capital. Nationalities joined together; races and creeds walked arm in arm; and even that classic scourge of middle England, the feuding family, put their bickering and petty jealousies aside to stand and be counted.” He paused to be sure I was concentrating, and then carried on with his piece d’ resistance. “Millions walked the streets and loudly declared their Prime Minister to be a dictatorial git! Amazing what one man can do when he really puts his mind to it!” He went on to explain his theory that the man (whom he admitted he had voted for) was now aligning himself with leaders who had a history of rule bending to get their own way. “And they all have last names beginning with B!” he exclaimed. “Right and wrong is now irrelevant, they’ve even taken religion out of the equation by claiming that their moral high ground is above that of most church leaders!” As he paid for his bread and shuffled out of the shop muttering “…Bush, Blair Berlusconi…baffling… absolutely baffling,” I couldn’t help wondering who on earth any of us could vote for – if voting is allowed – in future elections.

When I was young my mother used to express her anger in an old fashioned way. When she came across an injustice or something she thought was very unfair she would say, “It makes me want to spit!” As a race we’ve obviously moved on somewhat in our methods of anger expression. Nowadays people are more likely to say, “I could do a Guy Fawkes!” or in Rap slang they might threaten to, “pop a cap in`” the subject of their irritation. If Dipsey of the West carries out his current threat, we can probably add a new expression, “I’m so angry I could do a Dubya!” And since the voting public in this country became a misty memory to the current Prime Minister, our surviving children may express their anger by threatening to, “do a Tone!”
When speaking on the subject of Globalisation to some of his constituents recently, Oliver Letwin was asked a question not quite on the evening’s agenda, but one that we all knew was going to come up. “Is it not better for inspectors to play hide and seek for as long as it takes, than to go heavy handed into a war that will undoubtedly cause huge suffering amongst innocent people?” he was asked. Like the skilled politician he is, he skirted the question and animatedly pointed out that if Iraq is not dealt with now, London is likely to be a target for a nuclear warhead with Saddam’s name on it at some time in the future.
I hope he’s wrong – but presumably that’s not for the voting public to decide.

It’s that time of year again. Dean Martin is crooning about Rudolph in the sitting room, Slade are making merry in the kitchen and S club Juniors are stirring up an awful racket upstairs. The occasional shriek bounces from a bedroom as sellotape and little fingers do battle with Christmas wrapping paper. Homemade decorations hang from midway between the ceiling and the floor – the perfect height for those that made them. A wood fire crackles in the fireplace and shadows dance across the wall, as fairy lights twinkle on the Christmas tree. Lists – some more than a little optimistic – have been sent up the fireplace to Father Christmas and there is still the occasional furtive scurry with a strange plastic bag – the one that mysteriously appeared on top of the wardrobe recently. Someone mentions Christmas Eve and the place erupts into a blur of squealing children, bouncing around the kitchen at breakneck speed, sporting an extraordinary collection of glitter and tinsel. It seems that all the preparations are made, well mostly – amazing that someone forgot the Brussels sprouts! Can’t think how that happened… Anyway, it’s Christmas time and all is well with the world. Well it’s not really but we can wish can’t we. So we’d like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and hope that Dipsy, LaLa and all the other great teletubbies around the world, make some sensible New Year’s resolutions this year.

I knew someone year’s ago – in fact many, many years ago – who once gave his best friend a Perry Como record for Christmas as a joke. The following year the recipient carefully broke the record in half, repackaged it in glossy Christmas wrapping and gave it back. The re-trading of the same Christmas present went on for several years, with the piece of ‘lovely black vinyl’ morphing into many guises over time. The record was shredded into tiny pieces, reassembled into the shape of a reindeer, pasted around a cornflakes packet, and one year it was even melted down and handed over in a badly burnt saucepan. The methods of re-assembly became more and more ingenious as the years went by. One of them managed to recreate the shape of the record and glue fifteen different pizza toppings to it, while the following year the resulting mess was placed in a wooden picture frame and delivered inside a redundant washing machine! I lost touch somewhere around the washing machine episode but did hear a story about a digger arriving at my friends house one Christmas day with a pristine Perry Como CD inside the remains of a lawn mower.
We’re not exactly far off Christmas now and as the Father Christmas letter becomes more coherent, more expensive and more like a toy company brand manager’s desert island wish list, I can’t help hoping that we can instil enough of a sense of the ridiculous into our children, to ensure a more interesting life for them and a much more amusing retirement for us.