I went to the shops and I bought...

...a ukelele! Isn't it a thing of beauty? Most importantly, it sounds beautiful and within a matter of weeks, I daresay I should be able to do this sort of thing.

The guy in the music shop tried to sell us a mandolin case to put it in. I suggested that having a ukelele in a mandolin case was a little like keeping your machine gun in a violin case. The guy looked kind of nervous.

We bought it in Cambridge where we also had a look the new clock at Corpus Christi. It is almost five feet wide and has an evil-looking grasshopper on top, which is munching up the time.

A lady who was standing by the clock said, "I'm sure the grasshopper is supposed to do something on the hour, like light up or wave its arm in the air."

To which [...] responded, "It climbs down and bites your leg off. At least that's what happened to her." and he nods towards the wheelchair.

Later I wheeled into a tree, although I was pretty knackered by that point and it was a tree coming out of the floor in a shopping centre. And I lost our parking ticket. And my computer died. But today I am too busy rearranging Linkin Park songs for ukelele to care!

The Goldfish Guide to Domestic Bookeeping

There are a lot of investment bankers and other pinstriped types who are suddenly finding themselves with a lot of time on their hands, and they shall undoubtedly turn to blogs like mine for tips on how to cope with their changed circumstances.

Right now, I feel ever so slightly smug about AJ's and my ability to manage money. Clearly some very clever and important people aren't nearly as good at this as we are. We have been very fortunate in some respects, but we have also worked hard such that we have never owed money and we have always had a small float to cope with unforeseen circumstances.

This post was going to be The Goldfish Guide to Living Within Your Means, but actually the most important thing that we do is proper bookeeping. And since this takes a bit of instruction and if you're not interested then it's going to be unreadably dull, I thought I would give it its own post.

Knowledge is power, and the most important step towards living within one's means is to know exactly how much money you have, how much is coming in, and how much you are spending. I am absolutely amazed that other people don't seem to do this, even when they are worried about money. What's the point in worrying when all the information is available to you, should you be bothered to put it together? Now we've all got computers, you don't even need to do the adding up.

Here is the way I do it, although there are other ways:

I have two spreadsheets; our Budget, our Accounts.

The Budget one involves four columns and two sections. The first column is the name of the item, then weekly amount, monthly amount and yearly amount. The first section is Income, which involves four different items because of our various benefits. The second contains all our Fixed Outgoings (rent or mortgage, utility bills, insurance, Council Tax, annual MOT etc.).

Different items come in or go out at varying frequencies, For example, rent is every month, contents insurance is once a year. To fill the three relevant columns, I enter the known figure and use the following formulae;

weekly sum = monthly x 12 / 52 or yearly / 52
monthly sum = weekly x 52 / 12 or yearly / 52
yearly sum = week x 52 or monthly x 12

At the bottom of each section, I find the total for each collumn and then at the bottom of the spreadsheet I find the differences between these totals. So I know how much money I have left over after my bills are paid each week, each month and each year. I thus know exactly how much I can afford to spend on food, clothes and sundry expenses without going into the read.

These are absolutely crucial figures. For example, if you know you have roughly £50 a week to spend, then you could be overspending if the real figure is £48 and worrying unnecessary if the real figure is £52.

Another very useful feature of having the Budget is to save up for the annual expenses. We pay contents and car insurance in two annual chunks, plus our heating is oil-fired and it is much cheaper to pay for the oil outright when the tank is filled (much cheaper being relative considering how dear the oil is). If the money is tight, one is unlikely to be able to accumulate enough of a float to cope with these.

So instead, I add up these one-off annual items and divide by twelve. I then have a standing order such that this amount goes out of our account each month and into another account (banking on-line this is a doddle to manage). This way, we are paying for everything on a monthly basis.



The other spreadsheet represents my Accounts. I have two accounts because we use a credit card which we pay off every month in full (we get dividend). The sheets for these are the same as one another.

Five columns; Date, Item, In, Out and Running Total. We used to have a column for cheque numbers but we only write cheques once in a blue moon now. You start your Running Total column with the balance at the end of your last bank statement. Then, assuming that you've started at the top left hand corner of the sheet, you put =D1+B2-C2 into D2. If that makes sense. You then drag it down the column.

You then put in everything you know is going to happen for the month, so all your fixed income and all you direct debits and so on, complete with the dates – it is vital to keep all the data in chronological order so that you know how much you'll have throughout the month (if things get messy, you should be able to sort the data by date (ascending) using the spreadsheet program).

Then you add everything else you spend as you spend it. This is a bit of a chore, but it is necessary if you have any concerns about going into the red. When the next bank statement arrives, the new balance should be exactly where you thought it would be. And at any given point in the month, you know exactly what you've got to spend.

This way you learn the pattern of the month, you know when your balance peaks and when it gets ropey. It's also a failsafe against fraud. This may sound melodramatic, but it does happen and if a penny goes out when it shouldn't, you know straight away.*

However, the most important thing is that you know where the money is going. It is very easy to loose track on spending – I'm not talking about excess, but buying a few bits and pieces at one end of the month and then wondering where your money went by the time you get to the other.


* Oddly enough, supermarkets frequently over or under charge us by a penny or two. Not that I'm so petty as to complain about it.

A happy ending

So I spoke to my folks towards the end of yesterday and managed to worry them. It is rather odd to have one leg so much worse than the other, and to have this level of pain on my current pain pills. My folks thought I might have a clot - and they weren't just being mean about AJ. I thought this unlikely in the extreme and I'm sure it was only in their minds because my sister's father-in-law had exactly that last weekend. Nevertheless, I was coerced into phoning the doctor out of hours.

The doctor diagnosed sciatica, which meant that I had a nerve trapped in my back and happened to be feeling it in my leg. This made me feel better straight away, because it could have been so much worse - pain in leg is much nicer than pain in back. Hooray for my arrangement of nerves! Plus it wasn't going to get any worse and knowledge almost always has a positive effect on pain.

But then this morning it is much much better and amputation has lost all appeal. I have decided to put this down to love-making, as it is the only notable event between then and now. There are other explanations, of course. I did eat a small amount of chocolate, which may have helped. I tend to think that sex and/ or chocolate can account for most positive health outcomes. Medical science can play a supportive role, but only that.

The doctor did suggest that the trapped nerve might have something to do with my barely-functioning bowels and there might have been some change there, but that's just not nice to think about.

Anyway, having had such a moan yesterday, we are still pretty worn out and still worried about AJ, but I am much more comfortable myself.

Oh life.

It has been a kind of crappy week here. It has not been terrible, at one point we struck upon a genius idea, which I can't possibly publish here in case someone nicks it and makes a small fortune (it's not that profitable an idea, but it still a very good one).

However, AJ has been ill. He has chronic digestive problems which were so under control as to be unnoticeable for years and years, but have become increasingly worse over the last ten months. This last week he's been in great pain and vomiting all night on three thankfully non-consecutive occasions. He has more effective medication now, but he has to it investigated. Which starts with an endoscopy. Which is gruesome.

So that's completely wrecked our sleep as well as being most unpleasant. AJ's problem is very unlikely to be anything too sinister, although I'd be lying if I said that all the morbid possibilities hadn't occurred to me. And it is going to be a rather stressful; I think I may be more upset at the thought of someone putting a tube down his throat than he is.

Meanwhile, my pain has edged up whilst I've been moving about more, trying to look after AJ. This is really depressing on the tablets I'm taking, which made me feel invincible over the summer (I acquired both sunburn and nettle-rash and didn't feel more than a tingle). One leg is so bad just now that if it hasn't improved by the afternoon I will cut it off with a bread-knife*. I know it would hurt so much less.

However, all this does read somewhat grimmer than it really is. We remain in good spirits, if rather fragile and weary. And now we're both going back to bed.

* I probably won't though; I don't think I have the strength.

Shivering and blog-pruning

I am under the weather just now and extremely cold, given that it isn't yet cold enough to have the heating on. I am wearing my woolly hat indoors.

I've been thinking about pruning my archives. I know some bloggers regularly delete old posts which weren't particularly interesting or even delete everything before the last six months, but I never have. At one point I deleted one or two posts which were less discrete than I would like to be – things I wrote before I figured out that people might actually read this. You didn't miss much, I promise.

However, I have always felt it might be a little... inauthentic to delete stuff that I actually blogged. Like keeping a diary and cutting out certain events. Almost rewriting history. Not that this is that kind of diary, not really.

And now,I have got over seven hundred posts up here and I am beginning to feel some sense of responsibility for clogging up the internet. No, I know, I'm not, but there are lots and lots of posts in which I don't really say anything. And I don't blog in the way I used to and I suppose I am a little embarrassed about some of those little nothingnesses. I'm only talking about taking out the total crud, not deleting a whole year's worth or anything like that.

So what do you think? Given that I might go ahead anyway, I'd still be interested in your thoughts.

Morality without God

John Locke was a very clever man who made an excellent and influential argument for religious toleration in the middle of the seventeenth century. This followed a over century of violence in Europe between the old and new denominations of Christianity and a much longer period of resentment and ill treatment of European Jews and Muslims. Locke said that you can't and shouldn't try to make people believe something they don't, because true faith is something an individual must come to by themselves; if they convert to the “right” religion under torture or because they were persecuted, then it doesn't count. What's more, it is sinful to torture or persecute one another so you'll have buggered things up for your own immortal soul in the process.

But despite all this, he didn't trust non-believers. If you didn't believe in God at all, he said, then there was no disincentive (i.e. the threat of eternal damnation) to stop you being naughty.

And this view persists among some people of faith; a different kind of faith is okay, but no faith at all is not. Religious ethics are privileged, in the law, in education and the media above non-religious ethical frameworks such as Humanism. And the really sad thing is when atheists buy into this, and conclude that there are no absolutes and everything is relative. So...

We know that morality exists without the Abrahamic God. We have had many great civilisations who, whilst believing in supernatural entities, did not have anything like the benevolent Father who wants everyone to behave themselves. You might negotiate with the gods, spirits, ancestors or whatever, make sacrifices and give thanks, but there was no one divine law to which everyone had to adhere. What there always has been is a set of social rules to which everyone has to adhere. It is only for certain periods in our history where they have been completely inextricable from religious doctrine.

Of course, not all cultures are equal, but there is no evil unique to societies without God. Nor do monotheistic cultures have the monopoly on freedom, compassion, social cohesion or anything else we might value. So where does goodness come from?

Nephew Alexander has a dreadful book he asked me to read to him, full of religious poems (there's nothing wrong with religious poems, but these were all dreadful). I had to read a poem where a child misbehaves in all sorts of ways. Among other offenses, the child thumps his sister. But in the end he stoped because his mother explains that this is not the way that God wants the child to behave. The poem doesn't explain that misbehaviour harms other people, but merely God.

Now clearly, that's not where morality comes from. Christians don't refrain from assaulting one another simply because they're frightened of the wrath of God. A good Christian refrains from assaulting other people because other people are valuable; their feelings matter. Also, justice matters and violence is unjust. A Christian may add that God loves and feels for all people and justice is God's will, but that merely supports the decision they have already made not to thump a person. I hope.

I don't think you can describe a two year-old as a Christian, but Alexander is most certainly a moral person. His interactive play is very much concerned with working this stuff out. One of his earliest games involved giving and taking. It doesn't really matter what the object is, but he wants to give it to you and take it from you and give it back and so on. Sometimes he offers a thing, but doesn't give it. Sometimes he snatches a thing away. He is very interested in objects that are forbidden; he might attempt a swap or get upset if you won't hand over the thing he wants.

And he exhibits kindness and appreciation for others. He feeds his friend and teddies, he shares thing out. He gives hugs and kisses and says Peas when he wants something – something we've interpreted as please (although quite possibly, he just likes peas). Not yet two years old, Alexander already has a rudimentary grasp of that fundamental rule of all human morality, the Golden Rule, do as you would be done by. *

A small child is in an extreme version of the position we all share; he is dependent on other people. If he was to mess up in a big way, and everyone walked away from him, he could not survive. So his interest in co-operation is as deep-rooted as his fear of loud noises and his pleasure in sweet food. He cannot afford to be neglected or abandoned.

This is not to suggest that we are all born good. Small children must manipulate those around them to meet their needs, whatever that takes. Alexander is learning by example, experience and experiment. He is very fortunate to be finding that kindness is met with kindness, but he has to keep testing. He pushes at the boundaries, he tests patience. He has to find out what's possible. Other children learn other strategies, some not nearly so nice.

We are excellent adaptive organisms in this respect; our instincts are at once selfish and altruistic. There isn't always even a clear dichotomy between altruistic and selfish motives – nor should these be necessarily be associated with good and bad. Someone once pointed out that true altruism, in evolutionary terms, might be to go round pricking holes in condoms, thus facilitating other people to pass on their genes far more often than they would otherwise. But passing on one's genes is not the goal of the individual. It is merely side effect of other instincts we have (sexual desire and the love of children); it doesn't actually make people happy just to be a biological parent.

Christian doctrine acknowledge this, although tends towards the view that all actions motivated by instinct are bad and sinful and good things can only come from spirituality (a rather scathing attack on the designer). In any case, both heathens and theists can at least agree that we are somewhat conflicted.

Morality is the answer to this conflict. I 'm not sure whether to steal your pretty stone; on the one hand I want it, on the other hand I don't want you to lose it. A moral code informs me that it is better not to steal so I refrain. And where does that moral code come from? Well, it's logical. The potential consequences of an action outweigh the potential gain.

Like maths, moral philosophy is partly instinctive; most of us would be naturally able to tell that a group of seven pebbles is greater than a group of six pebbles, but we get a lot further quicker when we are taught how to count and do arithmetic. At this point in history, we inherit a lot of knowledge about both maths and moral philosophy, but none of it is useful if we swallow it raw. We need to be able to understand and to argue for the the things we hold to be true.

If I assert that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two lengths in a right-angled triangle (breath), I don't need to claim this is true because Pythagorus said so and Pythagorus was magic; I can show you that it is the case (here, see). Similarly, if I assert that we should not murder one another, I don't need to justify this because it was written in the Bible and the Bible is magic. The validity of a moral argument lies in reason, not revelation.

And yet morality as arrived to by reason is by no means inconsistent with religious belief. The vast majority of moral philosophers in our history have had religious faith of some variety. God would be logical too, right? However, belief in God is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for knowing the difference between right and wrong.


Congratulations to anyone who read this far on a weekday. Here is a picture of a duck as a reward.


＊In her The Bible: The Biography, Karen Armstrong writes about a Pharisaic sage called Hillel,

It was said that one day a pagan had approached Hillel and promised to convert to Judaism if he could summarize the entire Torah while he stood on one leg. Standing on one leg, Hillel replied: 'What is hateful to yourself, do not to your fellow man. That is the whole of the Torah and the remainder is commentary. [...]'

Reporting of mental health stories "horrifying"

Not a revelation, I guess.

There were two important mental health stories on the BBC News website last week. One was a report from the Healthcare Commission on the treatment of people with mental illness, much of which was rather damning. Another was about how people with mental ill health were being routinely detained in police cells instead of being taken to hospital for assessment. But the only one that made a big headline – the lead story one morning – was a story entitled Mental care escapes 'horrifying'

Using the Freedom of Information Act, the Today programme had uncovered that 94 people had escaped from medium and low secure psychiatric hospitals during 2007. The word horrifying comes from Sir David Ramsbottom, former chief inspector of prisons. Not sure quite why he was asked about this subject, but he said;

"It is a horrifying figure of course, but not one that surprises me because the medium and low secure units in the NHS do not have same degree of security a prison does."

No, that's quite right. That's because secure psychiatric units do not serve the same purpose as a prison.

Your psycho-killers of myth and legend, your serious criminals with mental health problems end up in high security hospitals, such as Broadmoor or Carstairs. Of course, criminality is not the only reason why someone is detained in such circumstances, but those are the places for people who are considered highly dangerous. I don't know how many people escaped from high secure psychiatric units in 2007. Probably none at all.

The vast majority of people who wind up in secure units do so for their own protection. The purpose is not incarceration so much as constant supervision. Prison, on the other hand, is primarily about punishment. People in prison have broken the social contract and have forfeited their liberty. Most people detained because of their mental health haven't committed any crime. They need protecting. The general public do not need protecting from them.

Sometimes this goes wrong. Last year, a young man with autism escaped from hospital and went on to rape a young girl. This is a terrible story, a terrible crime. However, most people who commit rape are considered mentally healthy and neurotypical; just because a crime is committed by a person with mental illness, autism or an intellectual impairment, that doesn't mean that other people should have seen it coming a mile off. I mean, they maybe should have done for all I know, but this tragic case is not evidence that thousands of people need locking up.

And so, a few days later when there are concerns about people with mental illness being put in police cells rather than being taken to hospital, we wonder why police officers feel that it is appropriate to treat innocent and highly vulnerable people like criminals. Cause and effect, anyone? And how many people were subject to this horrifying experience in a year, compared to the 94 that got away? 11,500.