More of the same old garbage

One of the perks of churning out the column in the Bath Chronicle every week is writing the headline to go on the top of it.

Now headline writing is a noble and time-honoured skill, somewhere between an art and a craft.

The headline has to fit the width of the column neatly, without changing the font size or the spacing between the letters.

It has to be punchy, it has to make sense, and it has to make the reader want to read whatever follows.

Normally, the headline is the last thing to get committed to paper. But this week's was written before even a word of the column itself was penned (or word-processed, to be strictly accurate – there are some concessions to modernity at Chronicle Towers).

Because even before it was started, there was only one possible subject that could be aired this week: garbage.

Or, to be slightly more accurate, garbage disposal.

It's been hitting the headlines big time over the last couple of weeks.

First off, there's a suggestion doing the rounds that "civic chiefs" – or B&NES as we know them – could soon be issuing us all with gull-proof rubbish bags.

What a splendid idea. The sturdy receptacles are a hit in other towns where gulls plague the residents with endless squawking, aggressive behaviour and acidic poo.

The bags are woven from tough plastic and have a zip on top to dissuade even the most persistent scavengers.

You pop your black bin liners inside, stick them outside your front door on rubbish day, and the gulls fly off permanently in search of other fodder.

Or at least that's the theory. To be pessimistic for a moment, they'll probably fly back to Bath city centre, where they'll survive quite happily on left-over takeaways scattered across the pavements by weekend party people.

Which brings us to the second strand in this litter-picking Odyssey: solar powered bins.

Everywhere you turn a new one seems to have sprouted up, looking a little like a glorified speak-your-weight machine, with a panel on top to catch that solar energy, a flap in the front for drunken revellers to stuff their unwanted kebabs, and a compactor lurking inside to mash all the rubbish to pulp.

They do have a couple of drawbacks, though.

To start with, the way our climate's going we'll be lucky if we get enough sunshine in the next decade to evaporate a small puddle, let alone generate the necessary megawatts to power a townful of garbage-guzzling mechanoids.

Second, they're just not exciting enough. You open the flap, you put your rubbish in, you close the flap. So far, so dull.

What they should really do when we feed them is play us a merry tune, or spring up on a concealed telescopic pole and do a little dance, or dispense a packet of Haribos.

Something, anything, to reward us for using them.

Because whatever technological advances we may make in the field of urban waste disposal, at the end of the day it's our own responsibility not to make a mess in the first place.

It's just that sometimes, we do need a bit of encouragement.

Brain of Bath update

It just wasn't meant to be. Team Bath Chronicle came a disappointing 10th in Brain of Bath 2011.

The winners were solicitors Thrings, who as far as anyone can make out got almost every question right. Well done them.


Higher up the rankings than Team Chron came those stalwart chaps from The St James Wine Vaults, whose interpretation of the phrase "friendly rivalry" can best be described as loose.


Meanwhile, for those who like that sort of thing, here's a snap of me sniffing one of those plastic pots.

There's always next year...

College reunion: catching up with the lost youth

Advancing age brings its special rewards. Was it really 30 years ago, for instance, that a fresh-faced young Dixon started at college?

Well, the college seemed to think so – although the not-so-fresh-faced Dixon was initially less keen to believe it had been quite that long.

But last weekend those of us alumni (there weren't any alumnae, it was that sort of college) who've managed to survive this long in the real world without utterly disgracing ourselves were awarded a dinner in celebration.

Not a bad deal, you may think. Free food and drink, scintillating (if mostly male) company, historic surroundings. A chance to reminisce and to look back over happier, more innocent days.

Well, maybe so, but first there's the preparation. It's a black tie job, which means burrowing to the back of the wardrobe and digging out the good old Moss Bros surplus suitings. There's a moment of trepidation: has the not-quite-so-much-butter diet been enough to maintain sufficient clearance in the waist area? Amazingly, it would appear so.

Where are the shirt studs? Where you put them five years ago, dear. How do you tie a bow tie? Google it, dear.

Sartorial elegance assured and a not-too-stressful train ride later, we find ourselves in the halls of academe, swapping notes about the past with those we shared it with.

In the course of the conversation it becomes apparent that most former fellow-students have led useful, productive and profitable lives as financiers, lawyers and captains of industry.

Doubts start to form about the wisdom of working life as a walking word processor. You miss out on quite a lot: one- day trips to New York, architect-designed pads in Bavaria... you name it, the other blokes have earned it, and you haven't.

On the up side, you're spared the attentions of the college's fundraising committee, who home in on the money men like killer bees, but studiously ignore those of us who picked up the wrong folder in the careers office all those years ago.

And there is some comfort in the fact that the general public now trust bankers even less than they trust journalists.

Another equally important 30th anniversary is being celebrated this year: that of the birth of hip-hop.

But let's just say that if anyone present last Saturday evening actually remembered Rapper's Delight from 1979, they were keeping pretty damn quiet about it. They (no, we) were greyer, rounder and a lot more world-wearier. But hipper? Maybe we never were.

Jane Austen spreads her tentacles

Jane Austen’s back. Sunday nights, on your telly. And you miss Emma at your peril, because on Monday morning when you get to work you’ll very likely be probed on the details of the inconsequential plot and the jaw-droppingly lush production values.

Probed. Mmmmm. Now there’s a word. It’s quite a Jane Austen word, actually. She’d probably have found a way of slipping it in somewhere, mistress as she was of the double entendre. For it was the sainted Jane who describes, in Emma, Mrs Goddard’s school, “where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity”.

And it was the same Jane, at the beginning of Northanger Abbey, who wrote: “Such was Catherine Morland at ten. At fifteen, appearances were mending; she began to curl her hair and long for balls.”

She was a bit of a naughty one on the side, was Jane. And if you were made to study her works at school, trying to spot those fnarr-fnarr moments was probably one of the few things that kept you going (oo-er missus) among all the fie-ing and wherefore-ing and for shame-ing.

And while we’re on about it, can anyone explain, in words of fewer than three syllables, what’s the difference between Sense and Sensibility?

From the aforegoing you may have picked up a certain ambivalence in this writer’s feelings towards Miss Austen and her works.

The problem is that everything in her world seems just a bit too perfect. Especially, it must be said, in the new TV adaptation of Emma.

Just look at the job titles in the credits at the end of each episode. They don’t just have Gaffers and Best Boys (stop it, Jane). They have Lawn Manicurists. They have Daffodil Wranglers. They have Electric Fan Operators to blow the clouds away from the sun so that early 19th-century England looks spick and span for the American market.

All right, you say. Behind the romantic escapism there’s acerbic social commentary, incisive characterisation, a dash of irony thrown in for good measure. And those double entendres. True enough, and there’s not much wrong with that.

But what grates slightly is that these days the escapism has completely overshadowed the wicked wit. The original characters have married and danced a minuet into the sunset, and we’re left with a candy-coated mother lode for TV and film producers to mine repeatedly.

Without having to pay royalties.

Then there’s the Bath connection. True enough, Jane Austen lived here for four or five years. But Bath wasn’t her favourite part of the world, and she had a fairly unhappy time while she was here.

Yet walk up Gay Street on a sunny Saturday and everyone’s toting an “I Heart Mr Darcy” bag or a “Kiss Me Quick I Bear A Passing Resemblance To Keira Knightley” hat. A bit too ironic, perhaps, even for Jane.

Maybe parody is the cure for an Austen overdose. High on the best-seller list at the moment is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which starts off: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.” And goes on in that vein for two or three hundred pages.

On second thoughts, perhaps you’re better off sticking with the real thing. It’s so much more comforting, really.

Don't bust a glut

Settle down, little ones, and hark to a lovely story. Once upon a time there was a brave but somewhat dimwitted lad called Jack, who swapped the family cow for a bag of magic beans (to the great disappointment of his mum), and sowed them, and grew a mighty beanstalk. At the top of the beanstalk lived a rich giant...
What do you mean you’ve heard it before? And what do you mean the panto season doesn’t start for at least another four months? This is serious stuff, as long as we don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Because what we’re talking about here is glut of vegetables, very much à la Jack up a Gum Tree. Or maybe even several gluts. What’s the collective noun for a glut? We already have a flock of seagulls, a parliament of owls, a piteousness of doves (look it up if you don’t believe it). Logically and self-referentially, it ought to be a glut of gluts.
Regular readers will already have been astounded by the report of the 25ft courgettes in Mrs D’s allotment, an effusion of journalistic licence which is already the subject of close scrutiny by the Press Complaints Commission. The effusion, not the allotment.
And every day it gets better. Or worse, depending on your point of view. Because we now have runner beans coming out of our ears, potatoes tumbling around us every time we open the airing cupboard, onions making the mattresses all lumpy, mange-touts that aren’t getting manged. And the Attack of the Ten-Ton Pumpkins is becoming more of a reality by the day.
We’ve even heard of cases where friends have visited others’ houses and not been allowed to leave without taking at least a bushel of beetroot with them. At gunpoint.
This grow-your-own malarkey is all well and good. You commune with nature, you spend the kids’ inheritance on seeds, some of them grow, you save loads of money on greengrocers’ bills. But why does it all have to come to fruition at once?
Why can’t they use some of this gene-splicing technology that everyone’s on about’s all the rage these days to give a controlled flow of organic abundance throughout the year, rather than concentrated into a six-week period between the middle of August and the end of September?
The timing’s pretty damned inconvenient when you come to think about it, what with the kids going back to school and the ongoing redecoration programme. (On which subject, let’s not get into who has locked themselves into the bathroom how many times this week. It will only end in acrimony.)
If you still don’t recognise the extent of the horticultural glut problem, just turn back to page 22: it’s direct action time.
Last Saturday, The Bear pub on Wellsway is held the Bear Flat Glut, which as well as having a certain gloopy-sounding poetry to its name was also a sort of vegetable Swap Shop at which those with a copiousness of carrots could offload them in exchange for someone else’s munificence of marrows.
What a commendable idea. Next time they have one, if we could swap a couple of our overflowing carrier bags of runner beans for any spare beer that the pub might have lying around, then at least one of us would go home happy.
Hope, like carrots, springs eternal...

Get to the back of the NHS queue

A letter arrives from the doctors. Your optician has referred you to an NHS consultant to get your eyes checked out, pronto. Do not pass go, do not collect £200.

Ah, the delights of growing middle-aged. Rationally, after nearly five decades on this planet one has to expect some wear and tear on tendons, nerves and other working parts. When it hits home, though, you can be as rational as you like but there's still an element of worry.

At times like this, recourse to the internet is probably not the best idea.

Because as soon as you start Googling your symptoms (headache, yellow tongue, shaky hands, blurred vision, general disinclination to get out of bed – can you tell what it is yet?) you start to believe the worst. Plague, dengue fever and beriberi, all rolled into one, is what you've got. And the only consolation about this eye business, you tell yourself, is that at least they've caught it early.

The worst thing of all about the whole situation, though, is the Kafka-esque NHS bureaucracy that you have to go through to get a hospital appointment. Attached to the doctor's letter is a "Choose and Book" form to guide you through the process.

Section 1 is Your Details: name, number and surgery. So far, so good. Section 2 tells you go to Section 3 to choose your hospital. Well, the Royal United United Hospital, Bath, is just round the corner and the other option is in deepest Bristol, so RUH it is. Back to section 2. And would you like to book by: (a) phone; (b) textphone or (c) internet? It might be fun to choose options b or c, if only to find out what a textphone is. But there's a whopping great sticker over all the details telling you that there is in fact only one option: ring the NHS number in Bridgwater.

Easily done, and you're soon listening to a recorded message telling you that not only can they sort out your appointment for you but if you ask nicely they can offer you help to give up smoking.

After a not-too-prolonged wait, a real genuine person comes on the line and checks your details. Name, address, telephone number, date of birth, shoe size: the usual stuff. And are you a smoker at all? This is damn intrusive. No, not at all, and if you want a top tip for giving up, try nicotine patches, Werther's Originals and raw carrots to keep your fingers busy. It worked perfectly well 13 years ago and there's no reason why it shouldn't still work now. And what's it got to do with lining up an NHS ophthalmologist to have a poke around inside your eyeballs, anyway?

Final question from real live person (who is not to be blamed for the above, she's only following a script): where would you like to go for your appointment? The RUH, please.

Ah well, in that case, you have to ring them on a Bath number. And you can't book online.

Now hang on. We've just spent the last ten minutes going over all these details with someone who doesn't actually need them, and all we've got is another phone number? Right.

There's nothing for it. Ring the Bath number, and be entertained by early Beatles hits while you float slowly to the top of the queue. Eventually the music stops, and you hear the rattling of keyboards, quiet coughs, general office noise. After 20 seconds, the line goes dead. Ring again, back to the bottom of the queue, more 60s chart-toppers to remind you how old you are, more bureaucracy at the end of the line. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

How to show you love your dad

First, an enormous thank-you to everyone who visited Dixon Towers last Sunday as part of Weston Village Open Gardens day.
They sold 283 tickets in all, and our part of the event saw some 215 visitors treading the hallowed lawns. Thanks to the sterling efforts of the tea and cake volunteers, we raised nearly £200 towards a total of nearly £1,900 in aid of Dorothy House Hospice Care and other local charities.
All credit to Bernard Rymer and the committee for ensuring things went so smoothly, to Mrs D for making our own garden look lovely, and to those perspicacious visitors who realised that the funny-looking bloke sitting outside the gate wearing a straw hat and counting people off was none other than your humble columnist.
Anyway, onwards and upwards to much more serious stuff. Father’s Day. This Sunday. Whatcha gonna do?
Before we go any further, let’s be quite clear about one thing: this column isn’t supposed to be any sort of hint that the aforementioned bloke in a straw hat might be on the cadge for presents or anything like that.
Far from it: this is more by nature of a general Father’s Day warning: What Not To Buy For The Dad Who Doesn’t Quite Have Everything.
Let’s make a start with peripheral items of clothing. In other words socks. Now, there are two sorts of socks: socks that have been lost, and socks that have not been lost yet.
Within those two major categories lie a number of sub-divisions: for example socks which look black when worn with shoes, as is right and proper, but actually have candy-coloured stripes on the heels and toes (Why? Why?); socks with Homer Simpson on them; socks that are too thin; and socks that leave nasty red pressure marks as they cut off the blood supply to your carefully-
pedicured toes. Avoid all of these and you’ll do well.
Perhaps music would do the trick. The risk here is that you end up buying the same compilation CD you bought for Mother’s Day, only with different packaging. Yes, the ’60s were a period of burgeoning musical creativity, but there’s only so much Tom Jones you can listen to at any one time.
So how about a book? A visit to any bookseller will immediately prove that they’ve seen you coming: tome upon volume upon compendium, all stacked up on a special Father’s Day table and all thematically linked to what the vendor imagines to be your typical Dad’s literary interests: war, mayhem, criminality and golf.
If your Pa isn’t into any of those, well maybe a personal grooming product will fit the bill.
The only problem here is that whatever you give him carries with it a tacit and maybe unwelcome message: “You smell” (aftershave); “You look old” (gentleman’s moisturising products); or “You ought to do more exercise” (invigorating after-sport body gel).
Check in the bathroom cabinet before you buy any of these creamy unguents. If last year’s offerings are still on the shelf, you’ll be throwing good money after bad.
Gadgets aren’t a bad idea, but you must satisfy yourself before you buy that your paternal relative isn’t so cack-handed that he’ll either electrocute himself or slice off the tips of his fingers. Anything too dangerous and he may start to suspect that you’re making an early grab for the inheritance.
What inheritance?

Everything in our garden's lovely

It's been a long time coming, but this Sunday is officially Mrs D's Big Day.

No, not a round-number birthday like 20 or 30 (must be careful here). Not the day when her ever-loving and devoted husband eventually gets round to taking her out for dinner without being plaintively hinted at or otherwise cajoled.

Nor indeed the day when the younger Dixons miraculously acquire the skills to cook their own meals and wash their own clothes, leaving their Mum to pursue the glittering showbiz career she denied herself to minister to their needs when they were babes in arms.

No, it's none of these things. Sunday is Weston Village Open Gardens day, and for the past six weeks Mrs D – along with the proprietors of eight other venues around the village – has been buffing up the begonias and organising tea rotas in preparation for her (and indeed our) role in this annual event, which raises funds for Dorothy House and for local voluntary groups.

The horticultural details are a little sketchy to this reporter, whose only endeavours in the field of cultivation lie in turning chilli seeds into insect-riddled twigs. But the disruption to the normally gentle flow of family life is plain to anyone who walks into the house.

First, the cat. Resident feline must be caught and groomed in order to present attractive appearance to paying visitors.

Cat does not mind being caught, and rather fancies the idea of chatting flirtatiously to a series of paying visitors who are as yet unaware of its essentially vicious nature; but objects vociferously and violently to application of comb to fluffy undercarriage. Normal fluff disposal, believes cat, is done by self-grooming and subsequent chucking up on sitting room mat.

Grooming operative (your humble columnist) dons thick leather gauntlets, manhandles cat to bottom of garden and makes with the comb.

Cat calls at top of voice to RSPCA, Cats Protection League, Blue Cross and everyone else in a 500-metre radius, pierces gloves with fangs and claws, and runs for cover under bush.

Cat 1, Columnist 0.

Next, the guinea pigs. Each, it has been decreed, must be individually photographed and labels made up so that the aforementioned paying visitors can identify which is which.

(Luckily, same idea does not apply to the plants, or we'd be here till Christmas. Mrs D is supposed to remember what they are, although she looks doubtful when asked about the botanical credentials of that big green one with all the leaves on it.)

Guinea pigs decline offer of free publicity and lurk under straw in darkest recesses of hutch. Paparazzi- style doorstepping brings unsatisfactory results: all pictures are identical, with cavy red-eye suggesting quite convincingly that the three fluffy creatures are actually the spawn of hell.

Finally, the family. Staff briefing at 10:00 hours sharp. Dixon Junior and Pa, one step forward. Man the gate, take money, repel boarders. Excellent maths revision opportunity for one. Excellent sunburn-on-bald-patch opportunity for other. Because it's bound to be warm and sunny.

Whatever the weather, Weston Village Open Garden Event runs from 1pm to 5pm on Sunday, June 4. Please come along: it's in a very good cause and it's a jolly afternoon out.

We got it wrong about Noah

History has a nasty habit of catching up with you. More than three years ago, on Friday, March 17, 2006, The Bath Chronicle published in our “This Day in History” column several tantalising nuggets of fact.
On that day in 1845, you will doubtless be fascinated to know, one Stephen Perry patented the rubber band. What he did with it afterwards is not recorded. Pinged it out of the window, probably.
A few short years later, on March 17 1876, Marshall Brooks was the first person to jump over six feet.
The original article didn’t say whether Brooks jumped upwards or sideways. And anyway shouldn’t it have been “more than” rather than “over”?
These deeply trivial snippets pale into total insignificance, though, when compared with the first item on the list. Because, according to the article, it was on that very day more than 5,000 years previously – in 3446BC to be exact – that Noah rounded up his menagerie and boarded the Ark.
Now leaving aside for a moment the question of whether Noah was truly a historical character, whether there really was an Ark, and if so where did they keep the skunks, all this is not really the sort of stuff you’d generally speaking give a lot of extra thought to.
So it was quite a surprise when last Wednesday (May 6 2009, date fans, and more than three years after the publication of the original article) a postcard arrived at Chronicle Towers questioning our dating of Noah’s embarkation.
The card was from someone who signed themselves only as Mark, and was ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS Never a good sign, although not quite as bad as green ink.
It was addressed to the Editor at our former headquarters in the Western Wasteland, but it doesn’t appear to have been delayed by inefficiency on the part of the Post Office. In fact, the postmark suggests that it was posted only one day before it was delivered. Nice one, postie! If anything can keep you from privatisation then this must be it.
The card has a clipping of the original article taped to it, together with a long and complex explanation of why it wasn’t February 17 when Noah took ship, but the 10th day of Zif (otherwise known as Ziv), the second month in the Jewish calendar. According to Mark it started raining a week later on the 17th day of Ziv (otherwise known as Zif) and stopped, 150 days later, on the 17th day of the seventh month, which might or might not be called Ethanim. And probably not in 3446BC either.
Confused? So were we. We had really bought into the 40-days-and- 40-nights thing and weren’t prepared for this 150 days afloat stuff. And be warned: trying to make any sense at all of when, if ever, Noah did his bit for animal conservation will lead you to the depths first of Wikipedia and finally of despair.
Just don’t go there is all.
Goodness knows why Mark was so long in posting his card. Maybe it took him those three years and a couple of months to do all those complicated sums. Maybe the card got stuck behind the sofa. Or maybe he’d only recently stumbled across the paper. (Sherlock Holmes might have made something of the fact that the clipping was curiously unyellow for three-year-old newsprint.)
Whatever the reason, it is the stated policy of The Bath Chronicle to correct mistakes promptly. So we did, although we’re still not sure exactly what it was we were supposed to be correcting.
Noah, consider yourself avenged.

Confusing the meerkat

It’s a funny thing, insurance. Well, it is until you you have to pay for it.
Or indeed, until you have to explain it to someone who never has had to pay for it.
“Daaaad, what’s car insurance?” ask the little ones, as yet another price comparison advert comes on the telly. How best to explain while protecting their innocence?
Well, a good way to teach is in parables: you use an example of something that your pupil is already familiar with in order to explain something more complicated and abstract that they don’t yet understand.
And luckily the younger brethren have a ready-made example right in front of them, in the form of the Grand National.
For was it not their very own dad who a couple of weeks ago forked out his hard-earned dosh on a number of promising nags (well, their names sounded promising), all but one of whom ended up as also-rans, and the other of whom (top grammar) brought home the princely sum of £3 as a disappointing each-way shot?
They understood that all right – or at least they understood the post-race cursing. So why shouldn’t they understand premiums, no-claims bonuses, excesses and courtesy cars?
Because, with apologies to Terry Pratchett, and his “inn-sewer-ants” joke, insurance is nothing more than institutionalised gambling.
You have a middle-sized car and a comparatively small amount of money. The insurance company has a comparatively large amount of money and maybe a courtesy car, which is never as good as yours.
You bet your money that your car will get nicked, or hit by someone else’s dodgy motor after they left the handbrake off at the top of a hill, or blown away to the Land of Oz in a tornado, or one of the other nasty things that insurance companies threaten you with to try to make you sign up with them.
The insurance company bets big money that none of these things will happen, and that your car will survive the year without being TDA’d, scraped or twistered.
You pay your stake (sorry, premium), and if you win the bet you can claim the big payout, which you then get to spend on another car.
The insurance firm meanwhile has taken your money, bundled it up with all the other punters’ dough and laid off an enormous bet on the re-insurance market, which is not explicable by graphs, pie charts, Venn diagrams or any other means at the disposal of your average parent.
Not even rich godfather, who works in it, has ever been able to explain said market to anyone’s satisfaction.
By this point though the kids are starting to lose interest, if not the plot. “Daaaaad, what’s a meerkat?” they venture. “Daaaaad, why are all those scary people staring into webcams on confused.com?”
Again, these questions are best answered in parables.
For it came to pass that a company looked upon the profits made by the insurance companies and saw that they were good, yea even amid a crunching of credit.
And the company said “Lo, let us dress up a cute desert-dwelling member of the mongoose family in a velvet smoking jacket. And lo, let us give it a fake middle European accent and put it in an advert, for verily the punters can’t get enough of that anthropomorphic stuff, like unto the tea-swilling chimps and the bogroll-unrolling puppies. And lo, let us take a tithe of the insurance companies’ wonga even unto ourselves. Lo, lo and thrice lo.”
And the people did look upon the advert, and saw that it was passing good, at least the first time they saw it. But verily, after threescore viewings and ten, they grew vexed and weary with it, and threw the cat at the telly.
“Daaaad....”
A lightly trimmed version of this is due to be my column in The Bath Chronicle on April 16 2009. Or April 19, as I keep thinking of it for some reason.

Make yourself aware of autism

These days there seems to be a day for everything. If it isn't World Sleep Day (dreamed up by a marketing department somewhere) then it's World Maths Day (calculated to send everyone to sleep, even if Bed Day doesn't). And it's all too easy to scoff and be cynical.

But Thursday, April 2, 2009 is (or was) World Autism Awareness Day, and if there's one thing that's worth taking seriously, this is it.

Mention autism to anyone who doesn't live with its effects and a common reaction is "Rain Man". And Dustin Hoffman's portrayal of a man with a genius for numbers but with no emotional or social skills was a truly remarkable performance. But it only showed an aspect of the broader truth.

According to the National Autistic Society, people with autism struggle to make sense of the world and the social rules and conventions which other people take for granted. They see the world as a mass of people, places and events which they struggle to make sense of, and which can make them feel stressed or anxious.

In particular, understanding and relating to other people, and taking part in everyday family and social life, may be hard for them.

Everyone with autism shares what's sometimes called the "triad of impairments": difficulty with social communication, social interaction social imagination.

But people with autism do not "look" disabled: parents of children with autism often say that other people simply think their child is badly behaved. And as a child with autism grows into an adult with autism – because autism is for life – they may find themselves at best understood, at worse considered "weird" and bullied.

So what characterises someone with autism? They may find it hard to cope with change, and may well adopt routines and set patterns in their lives in an effort to stay within a non-changing comfort zone.

They may be over-sensitive to sensory impressions, which can lead to them being frightened by loud noises or bright lights.

Or they may be under-sensitive to these impressions, and may not even give the appearance of feeling pain. Alternatively, they may feel pain and just not want the interpersonal stress of being comforted. They may try to stimulate their senses or relieve stress by flapping their hands or rocking their bodies.

They may be especially interested in one particular field – art, music, trains or computers for instance. And they may be absolutely brilliant within their chosen field.

They may have learning difficulties and need extra help at school.

They can be all of those things, or some of them, or none of them. Sometimes autism is described as a spectrum, and people on it, just like "neurotypical" people, come in all shapes and sizes.

A private member's Autism Bill is currently at Committee stage in Parliament. The Government is in favour of a more general framework of support for disabled people which will cover people with autism.

But it's an uncomfortable fact that Government, local authorities and primary care trusts don't know how many adults with autism there are in England, and without this information they can't plan the services that are needed.

If you're a parent of or carer for someone with autism, a lot of this will be familiar to you already. If you're not, and would like to know more, Google "Autism Awareness Day" and make yourself aware.

The usual inconsequential whimsy returns next week.

When the diet went to pot

Regular readers of this column (and there are some, or so we’re led to believe) may still be recovering from the trauma induced last January when we went into a little bit too much detail about Spam fritters, and the role they once played in the courting rituals of your humble columnist when he was a younger, although possibly a wiser, man.
For anyone who missed it or would like a second bite, as it were, just Google Dixon fritters. That’s the power of Search Engine Optimisation, and there’s money to be made from it if you know what you’re doing. Although none of it seems to be coming into the Dixon family coffers.
What’s frightening, though, is that Dixon Senior’s predilection for what might be called paradoxical cuisine – foodstuffs which are at the same time both savoury and unsavoury – has been passed down to Dixon Junior.
He, at the tender age of 13, went out with his Scout troop last Friday and spent the night, in temperatures which dropped to -4°C, in a field just outside Bath with nothing to protect him from the elements but an orange plastic survival sack, a thick sleeping bag and several layers of thermals. It was all in aid of Julian House, and very commendable too.
But what was his chosen food to sustain him through this ordeal? A Pot Noodle. Chicken and mushroom flavour, if you please.
His request shocked his parents to the core. Had he become a university student five years too early? Because Pot Noodles are, if nothing else, the ultimate student fare. Had all our hard work during his formative years promoting a healthy diet of carrot sticks and wholemeal bread come to naught?
To be quite honest, it didn’t really matter, because anyone who is prepared to sacrifice a comfortable night in a warm bed for a freezing one in a muddy field deserves whatever they want when it comes to an evening meal that’s going to keep them warm inside until breakfast.
But this week there’s been some sort of synchronous serendipity going on. (Or possibly serendipitous synchronicity. Only time will tell. And possibly a large dictionary too.)
Because a couple of days after the Scouts’ survival sleep-out, noodle extruders Unilever announced the launch of a new flavour to complement traditional chick and mush or beef and tom, and more adventurous curry and chow mein: the Doner Kebab.
Gastronomic multiculturalism, thy name is Pot Noodle. Only the chicken tikka masala pizza can come close to thee in the New World Order of food combinations that one wouldn’t necessarily describe as “natural”.
(Yes, such pizzas do exist. We saw them on sale once in Portsmouth. What better introduction to British cuisine for all those continentals fresh off the ferry? And what better welcome home for us Brits?)
The real problem with Pot Noodles, though, isn’t that the name of the flavouring on the outside of the pot bears only a tenuous relationship to the toothsome chunks of soya protein that lurk within.
And it isn’t that no matter how much you stir your noodles, and no matter how long you leave the hot water to infuse, you always end up with a dry and inedible mess of broken noodles and intensely salty grit at the bottom of the pot.
No, the real problem with Pot Noodles is that once you’ve begun to write about them – or even begun to read about them – the temptation to eat one gets stronger and stronger.
Because when all’s said and done, you can take the noodle out of the man – but you can’t take the man out of the noodle.

Escape from the smallest room

There comes a time in every householder’s life when unwelcome tasks can be ignored no longer.
In our case it was the smallest room in the house, the downstairs loo, which after five and a half years of occupation finally got scheduled for redecoration.
All the other rooms in the house had been done. The previous owner’s taste in acid shades of apple green had been washed over in more Bathonian tones of cream and white, courtesy of those jolly expensive paint people at Farrow and Ball. (No doing things by halves in our house.)
We’d even added a loft extension and decorated that, but somehow the loo had escaped the loving attention of the sandpaper, brush and roller.
But your ever-willing columnist had a week off at home, and top of the list of Hugh’s Jobs put together by Mrs D in celebration was the inevitable: Pull Your Finger Out and Sort Out the Downstairs Loo. Nothing for it but to break out the decorating kit, chisel the lids off the half-empty paint tins that have been cluttering up the garage for the last three years, and get splattering.
It’s a well-known fact that the painting bit of home decoration takes up the least time: what really bites into your day is the preparation, which in the case of our loo meant getting the old school and college pictures off the wall (it’s quite eerie doing the necessary with the beady eyes of PKB Noseworth bearing down on you), and temporarily removing all the door furniture, ready for a light zapping with the orbital sander.
Now here’s a top tip for aspiring loo decorators everywhere, gleaned from personal experience: do not, under any circumstances, take the inside door handle off, leave it outside the loo, go back inside and close the door.
Can you guess what’s coming? You’re right. To paraphrase that lovely old song: “Oh, dear, what can the matter be? One middle-aged man locked in the lavatory.”
Inside the loo were the spindle thing which turns the latch, a screwdriver and a berk.
Outside, in no particular order, were freedom, lunch, Mrs D who needed picking up from work at 4pm, and various smaller Dixons who had to be collected from educational establishments all over town.
The spring in the latch was too stiff to be turned with the fingers, even using the spindle thing. The screwdriver wouldn’t go in far enough to push the catch back. And barging the door down wasn't really on the cards, as the potential damage to the hall would have meant further redecoration projects stretching away for at least to the middle of 2015.
Initially the only way out seemed to be shouting. But the loo window is at the back of the house, and even if anyone heard there was the nagging fear that letting the neighbours know about the situation would clear up any doubts they might previously have had about the complete and utter idiocy of him next door.
Eventually, after a bit of digging and poking around in the door frame with the screwdriver, the latch worked loose. Freedom at last, but at what cost? Embarrassment, extra filling round the door frame, and complete paranoia about letting the same thing happen twice.
(The trick is to keep the door handle inside the room, and slide it back onto the spindle thing when you want to get out. But then you knew that, didn’t you?)
The project is finished, bar a couple of small patches of acid green still grinning through the subtle Dorset Cream, and yours truly has got over his sudden fear of confined spaces. But all further decoration projects are on permanent hold.

Seen but not heard

On the wall at Chronicle Towers hangs a flatscreen TV that almost constantly keeps the resident newshounds informed of the world’s goings-on, with BBC1 first thing in the morning and Sky News for the rest of the day.

But there’s a fine line between being informed and being distracted, and for this reason the sound is always turned down, with the instant subtitles kept on.

Sometimes the newshounds get so immersed in their work (it does happen) that we end up half-way through Cash in the Attic before anyone gets round to changing channels.

But when it does eventually get switched on, Sky New can lead to some odd misapprehensions.

First off there are the adverts for the iPhone 3G. It’s a jolly desirable piece of kit, with a touch screen and all the shiny smoothness you’d expect from Apple.

Just shake it, the adverts imply, and you’ll be instantly in touch with your Facebook friends, you’ll be Tweeting like a second Stephen Fry (as if one wasn’t enough) and you’ll have at your fingertips all the data you need to make an informed decision about where to eat at what price within 500 yards of your current location.

As long as that location is London.

And then comes the televisual equivalent of the small print, in very spidery low-contrast letters at the end of each ad: “Steps removed and sequence shortened”.

Ah, those cruel words. Remember the moment in Toy Story when Buzz Lightyear, whose self-confidence and swagger are founded upon his conviction that he’s a real spaceman with a flying jetpack, collapses into depression after he sees a TV advert – for himself – that ends with the words “Not a flying toy”?

So it is with the iPhone ads: it takes a lot more fiddling about to get the most out of an iPhone – or indeed any electronic device – than the publicity would have you believe.

Then there are the bizarre adverts for old pennies, polished up and enamelled in red, white and blue. They’re fronted by a man who exudes deep and unnerving psychological menace: not the kind of qualifications you’d normally associate with salesmanship. He has dark, staring eyes, hair that appears to be carved from plastic and a complexion modelled on offcuts from Madame Tussauds. He does not smile; he does not even appear to blink.

Get one of these pennies, he seems to be saying, or your grandchildren will suffer. Even if you haven’t got any grandchildren.

But what are the pennies for? Why does the robotic hive culture represented by the quasi-human in the advert want us to have them?

Even in their heyday, when you could buy a tanner’s worth of gobstoppers and still get change from fourpence, old pennies were only worth 1/240th of a pound, and they haven’t exactly appreciated in value since then. So they’re not exactly future heirlooms – you could rustle up your own in five minutes with a can of Brasso and some poster paints.

And in terms of patriotic significance they’re hardly up there with a ten-foot Union Flag and a CD of Rule Britannia.

So it’s far more likely that all these reconstituted coins of the realm are the physical manifestations of a global communication network. They're not friendly or fluffy like an iPhone, they're a conduit for beaming robotic instructions direct to your brain: resistance is futile, join the Collective.

Sky News gets even weirder, though, when the adverts finish and the subtitled news starts over again. Because the subtitling software, clever though it is, doesn’t always get things right.

Earlier this week we were told about some people in Tasmania battling to “Keep Wales wet with water and Howells.” The mind began to boggle: Who is this Howells character? And isn’t Wales wet enough already?

When the boggling had boggled, it transpired that what these kind-hearted people were really trying to do was save nearly 200 beached whales by covering them with wet towels.

Now there’s usually an unspoken suggestion in reports about stranded whales that somehow it’s All Our Fault, but this time it seems more likely that they got caught out on their annual migration by a very low tide. Luckily, most of them were returned to the sea: an accident of nature with a happy ending.

Either that, or they were trying to warn us about the robots and the pennies. Before they take over the world.

This (or something like it) will be my Bath Chronicle column for March 5 2009.