jonathan.rawle.org

David Cameron has announced that competitive teams sports will be made compulsory for all primary school children. Apart from the fact that it allows the government to claim a “legacy” from the London Olympics, I can’t see what this move will achieve at all.

There is clearly a big problem in the UK with obesity and people lacking fitness, and this needs to be tackled, starting from an early age. However, forcing all children to do competitive teams sports is not the answer. It may be great for the ones who are good at sport, are always picked for the school team, score all the goals and are cheered by their classmates. But the ones who are not so capable at sport face misery and humiliation. The experience could well put them off physical activity for life, and yet they are the ones who need encouragement to take up exercise.

If the aim is to tackle obesity and declining fitness levels among the population, the answer should be to provide a wide range of physical activity in schools: both team and individual sports; both competitive activity and ones where people just try to reach personal goals to improve their fitness. Everyone should be allowed to keep fit in a way that suits them and perhaps that they even enjoy: after all, it’s important, as it’s their health at stake.

If the aim is to give children a taste of competition, then spare a thought for those who will either always be on the losing side, or who will be the last to be picked for a team and who will not contribute much to play, if only team sports are on offer. I don’t feel learning to be competitive is as important a goal as increasing fitness, but perhaps it could provide a useful lesson for later in life. If so, this can be achieved by other activities, not just team sports. If some children find they prefer to exercise on their own in the gym, why not allow them to learn to compete by playing chess, or in a quiz team, or through problem-solving exercises? If it’s only sport that is competitive in school, those who excel at academic subjects but struggle with physical coordination will be left feeling like losers, and no doubt will become social outcasts in their class. If classes or houses compete each year not only in sports but in a range of activities, it will teach pupils how everyone has different strengths, and they will come to value the classmate who is good at maths as much as the one who can run fast or kick a football.

And if the aim is to find more potential competitors for future Olympic Games, we need to be realistic. It’s true that there is an issue with such a high proportion of medallists having been privately-educated. Everyone should have a chance to discover they are good at a sport, not only the privileged few. However, I can’t see that making sport compulsory will enable this. If there is no money to improve facilities, it will still be those at expensive, fee-paying schools that have the most opportunities. I would also question how forcing children to play “sports such as football, hockey and netball” will help Great Britain to win medals in rowing or cycling. Perhaps the future Sir Chris Hoys will be put off physical activity after finding they couldn’t contribute much during a football match, and will abandon their bikes in their garden sheds and watch TV instead. It has to be said that while the media is full of praise for “Team GB”, very few Olympic medals are won for team sports. Most medallists compete primarily for their own glory – for their face on a stamp. Putting aside that I don’t think producing a nation of Olympians should be more of a priority than, say, producing scientists and engineers, I don’t think these proposals will do much to increase the medal haul at future games anyway.

Please let’s have a bit more common sense when developing a policy for increasing the amount of physical activity in schools. Let people have a choice when it comes to what form of exercise they take, and let competitions encompass a wider range of activities than just sports. There need be no expectation that everyone wins something, but it would be much better for the youngsters’ self esteem if there is at least the chance to try something they can be competitive at. Unfortunately I can foresee there being yet another generation of couch potatoes, people who when asked will say they hate participating in sport, ever since being made to pay football or netball at school in the freezing cold, where no-one even passed the ball to them. As that new generation of obese people sit at home and watch future Olympics on TV, it will be worth remembering that it’s not a legacy of the 2012 Games as such, but of David Cameron’s misguided policy.

On Wesnedsay morning, people in various parts of the world will have the chance to witness an astronomical event that won’t be seen again until 2117 (that’s the year, not a quarter past nine!)

The transit of Venus will be best seen from east Asia and Australia. In Europe and parts of Africa it will begin before sunrise, and people in America can see it start before sunset on Tuesday. Unfortunately, in the UK we would only be able to see the final hour of the transit in the early hours of the morning, but it looks like it will be cloudy anyway. It begins at 22:09 GMT on 5 June and ends at 4:49 GMT on 6 June. If those times occur during daytime in your time zone, you can see it!

I have to give the usual warning. You must never look at the sun with the naked eye, or through a telescope, binoculars or camera. Doing so could cause sight loss. Either use special eclipse glasses, a camera or telescope with a proper solar filter, or project the image onto a screen. The TransitofVenus.org website has tips on viewing the transit safely, along with details of timings (it’s a bit US-biased; unfortunately the excellent transitofvenus.nl is down at the time of writing due to heavy traffic – they could have anticipated an increase in visitors for the next 24 hours!)

Transits of Venus always occur in pairs eight years apart, but those pairs are then separated by more than a century. In 2004, the transit occurred in the middle of the day in the UK, and it was a particularly hot, sunny day, unusually perfect for observing (the weather has a habit of spoiling any opportunities to see anything astronomical!) I was fortunate enough to be able to view this transit via the heliostat at the University of Leicester, from which these photos were taken. They still have a webpage about the 2004 transit with more images and animations.

If you are in a part of the world where the transit is visible, do take the opportunity to see a once-in-a-lifetime event if you can, although please remember the warnings about viewing it safely.

Soon to be the Elizabeth Tower?

It has been reported that most MPs are in favour of renaming the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster as the Elizabeth Tower in honour of Her Majesty the Queen, on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee. The large square tower at the other end of the building was renamed the Victoria Tower to mark Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. No other monarchs have reached 60 years on the throne.

I think that’s a fairly good idea, even if I doubt many people will use the new name. The tower is almost universally known as Big Ben, although strictly speaking that is the name of the largest bell it contains, which strikes the hour. Many people believe the official name of the tower is St Stephen’s Tower. I must admit that for much of my childhood and until fairly recently, I also believe this to be the case thanks to the film The Thirty Nine Steps, the ’70s version starring Robert Powell. The climax of the film takes place in the tower, and as they enter a door at the base, there is a sign saying “St Stephen’s Tower”. In fact, the official name of the tower is simply The Clock Tower. St Stephen’s Tower is the name given to the main entrance of the building, which is hardly a tower at all. Given the rather unimaginative name, it’s hardly surprising that most people prefer to call the tower Big Ben. While I doubt people will switch to calling it the Elizabeth Tower, at least this name may finally displace St Stephen’s Tower as what people think the “proper” name for it is.

Going platinum

After 50 years, different sources disagree on the correct names given to anniversaries. “Diamond” is sometimes taken to mean 75 years. It appears it only became popular for Diamond to refer to 60 years when Queen Victoria reached that milestone. At the time, no-one imagined another monarch would reign for that long, let alone exceed it significantly.

This time, it seems perfectly possible that the Queen could reach her 70th year on the throne in 2022. If that happens – and I certainly hope it will – the celebration could be designated the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. I think the books agree more closely on platinum being for 70 years, but that would not matter anyway. As far as Jubilees go, we are entering uncharted territory, so following the precedent of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, we can call them whatever we like!

MoneySavingExpert.com, a site offering consumers tips on reducing bills and finding the best deals, has been sold by its owner Martin Lewis for a reported £87 million. The buyer is Moneysupermarket.com, which already provides the click-through links on MoneySavingExpert.com that make money for both sites. Many users of MoneySavingExpert are furious at the move, which they see as selling out to a site that is more commercial in its outlook, and biased with it, and they claim will mean more spam and unwelcome changes to the site, although Lewis claims the deal includes safeguards against this.

One thing that’s for certain is that Martin Lewis is the one who is now laughing all the way to the bank. To his credit, he’s giving £10 million to charity, which of course he needn’t have done. But then that’s much the same as Bill Gates giving billions to charity. When you have such a large amount of money that most people could not even imagine, you can afford to be generous without having any impact on your own spending power or lifestyle.

I have thought for some time that MoneySavingExpert had lost its way. To me, money saving means finding the best deal, or looking for loopholes that allow the saving of a few pennies here or there. However, the site seemed to have shifted its emphasis towards claiming charges back from banks. First it was overdraft charges, and now it’s payment protection insurance premiums. That’s not money saving; that’s litigation. It’s nothing to do with saving money, but rather getting back money that you were stupid enough to lose in the first place. The advice to those who want to save money should be: make sure you don’t use an overdraft, particularly an unauthorised one; and don’t pay for useless insurance.

Take the analogy of a tradesman coming to do work to your home. The MoneySavingExpert approach would be to obtain several quotes, and find personal recommendations to make sure the one you choose will carry out good work. But the ReclaimChargesExpert approach would be to not bother with any of that, then when the work is complete, claim there is a minor problem with the work, withhold some of the money, and tell the tradesman to sue you. That may well save you money, but it’s not a good way to go about business.

I have long thought that campaigns to abolish overdraft charges are misguided as they could mean an increase in the cost of banking for the very sort of people MoneySavingExpert is supposed to be for, and could even mean the poorest in society would be unable to afford to use a bank account. And indeed, the banking industry is still trying to chip away at the free banking we enjoy in this country, under the guise of increasing competition.

Whatever other changes there are to MoneySavingExpert.com, perhaps one good thing will come out of the takeover. Hopefully they will remove Martin Lewis’s name and picture from the masthead of the site, and that will mean we no longer need to endure the incorrect apostrophe that features there. Just as every transaction has pennies to save, every cloud does have a silver lining.

Every year since 1996, British classical music station Classic FM has held a poll of the nation’s top 300 pieces of classical music, the Hall of Fame. Unlike the weekly charts that exist for both classical and other genres of music, the Hall of Fame is not intended to rank the best-selling recordings of the day, or to promote particular performers. It is concerned solely with composers and their compositions, with listeners voting for their top three works, not for specific performances. Inevitably, the chart looks fairly similar each year, with the number one spot occupied for many years by Bruch’s violin concerto, with works such as Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto, Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending and Mozart’s clarinet concerto also taking their turns. As classical music is supposed to be timeless, it’s only to be expected that the chart should evolve slowly year by year as tastes change without seeing any major changes.

The chart has always contained a fair amount of contemporary music, including film music, with examples of the latter being real movie classics by John Williams such as Star Wars and Schindler’s List. I do think film music has a place in a classical poll, as the film music of today may be tomorrow’s classical music. When defining contemporary classical music, I feel we have to ask whether the music is likely to still be played in 50 or 100 years’ time. Some of the contemporary music in the Hall of Fame – whether film music or not – may well fall into that category. Much of it is likely not to.

The first sign of something being wrong with this year’s chart what when they played a piano piece by Helen Jane Long. Who, you may ask? Good question. There are actually three pieces by Long in this year’s chart. It turns out that she is a pianist who performs her own compositions, and who has done quite well in the classical album chart this year. Unfortunately it seems listeners who are not immune from the short-term celebrity culture that engulfs most other media these days have voted for music that even they are likely to have forgotten in a few years’ time.

However, at least those people voting for Helen Jane Long may well have heard her on Classic FM and are genuine listeners to the station. One could argue that it is their democratic right to vote in that way. Worse was to come. There had apparently been a campaign amongst members of the video game community to try and get the soundtracks from some of their games into the chart. Their campaign has proved a success, with two such pieces making it into the chart: Jeremy Soule’s Skyrim and Nobuo Uematsu’s Aerith’s Theme, which was right up at number 16. Now, these are decent pieces of orchestral music that are in my opinion just as worthy of being included in a classical chart as film music. What I find wrong is that many of the people voting for them have probably never heard of the Hall of Fame before, and may never have even listened to Classic FM. So their votes meant the chart no longer reflects the tastes of Classic FM listeners, but instead has been distorted by outsiders who ordinarily have no interest in the radio station. In political terms, it is not the equivalent of an election campaign, but rather of bussing in extra voters from a neighbouring constituency who shouldn’t be entitled to vote.

The final insult this year was that the chart was said to contain the highest ever new entry in the history of the Hall of Fame. Indeed, the new entry would be in the top five. Speculation turned out to be correct, and the piece in question was Paul Mealor’s Wherever You Are. This work is clearly only at such a high position in the Hall of Fame because it has been popularised by the “Military Wives”, a choir that initially featured in a BBC television series, and became the Christmas number one in the UK singles chart (that is, the pop chart). I find it hard to believe many people would vote for Wherever You Are because they consider it one of the best pieces of music ever written. Rather, they have voted for it because they saw the TV series, or because they like it at the moment in the way that people buy the Christmas no. 1 single. It isn’t actually that good a piece of music from a purely musical point of view, and it isn’t really classical music. It’s a song. I don’t mean any disrespect to Professor Mealor. In fact, I’m sure he’s a much better composer than this. After all, he was commissioned to write music for the royal wedding last year and has several pieces in the Hall of Fame. This simply isn’t his best work.

The Hall of Fame has always been a rare refuge from the pervasive celebrity and personality culture that is far too common in every other aspect of life. Perhaps they need to subtly tweak the eligibility criteria to ensure it remains true to its origins, although admittedly I can’t see an easy way of doing that. If the Hall of Fame just becomes a clone of the weekly classical chart, or even the pop chart, I see little point in it continuing in its present form.