The results to the Prejudice Guess Who poll are in, and I’m happy to report that the results vindicate my view in all three cases, although not necessarily by the margin I expected.

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Charles, by a majority of 54 per cent, would confront a burglar rather than hide and wait for the police.

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Albert, by a majority of 80 per cent, prefers vinyl to digital as a medium for listening to music.

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And Sally, by a majority of  76 per cent, says “Byeee!” in a high-pitched voice at the end of phone calls.

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The result for Albert is jolly heartening, and the one for Sally far more clear cut than I dared hope, but my moment of trousers-down-buttock-slapping triumph has been marred by a gallingly narrow victory for Charles.

Not only would he confront a burglar, I maintain, he would do so with a walking stick and a shout of: “I didn’t down five Messerschmitts to have my house burgled by the likes of you.” He would beat the hapless burglar, possibly to death, and the local press would run a picture of him with his medals under the headline: “War hero gives youth stick.”

Some friends have claimed that his sad eyes suggest a pensioner too weary to put up a fight, but I would contend that this is more than offset by his moustache, and that any antipathy towards violence would be immediately quashed upon sight of his quasi-antique carriage clock in the hands of some hoodie.

Still, the people have spoken, and I accept the result because to reject it would turn the game from Prejudicial Guess Who into Bigoted Guess Who. And, besides, the majority still agreed with me. Hah.

I may have mistranscribed some of this, but here is what was written as the second story on the front of today’s Evening Standard:

Gordon Brown today vowed to “get tough” on equestrianism as he insisted the Government was right to sack a scientist who said horse riding was as dangerous as ecstasy. The Prime Minister warned against the danger of giving “mixed messages” to young people targeted by dealers. Mr Brown said: “A tough policy on equestrianism is essential and it is what the public want. I’ve seen the damage that equestriansim can do and people can see it in estates in London.”

This is almost exactly what it said, although I may have mixed up the word “drugs” with “equestrianism”. Still, they’re as dangerous as each other, statistcially, so it probably doesn’t make any difference.

On a more serious note, does Brown really think that the public is too thick to take on board that some drugs are dangerous (and can lead to dependency and crime) while others are not? Certainly, it is a marginally more sophisticated idea than the message “all drugs are bad”, but it’s not exactly Fermat’s Last Theorem, is it?*

The message that heroin and crack cocaine are very dangerous but cannabis and ecstasy are not is mixed, but it does at least have the virtue of being true. Furthermore, we have a multi-level drugs classification system. If anyone is giving out mixed messages it is the Prime Minister, who insists that ecstasy should remain in the same category as crack and that cannabis should revert to being in the same category as speed.

Brown says that “everybody knows lives that have been ruined because of drugs”, which may or may not be true, but it is no more valid than saying “everybody knows lives that have been ruined because of alcohol”. He’s got to do better than that, else he’s giving a far more potent message to the public, namely that he thinks we’re stupid.

*I’ve checked. Fermat’s Last Theorem states that no three positive integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ for any integer value of n greater than two.

About 25 years ago I was watching an episode of the children’s television programme Bod when my older sister walked through the room. It was the Alberto Frog section of the show, in which an amphibious orchestra leader and his Amazing Animal Band performed favours for distressed creatures who, overcome with gratitude, would offer him a reward. (Alberto Frog, it occurs to me now, was a cartoon version of Hannibal from the A-Team, or Don Corleone from The Godfather. I digress.)

Alberto would always respond to such offers with the line: “I wouldn’t say no to a milkshake.”

The grateful citizen would say: “Any particular flavour?”

And the Amazing Animal Band would ponder aloud, listing a series of flavours that, to my recollection, were usually chocolate, strawberry or vanilla, but perhaps I am just confusing his choices with the flavours one used to get in “Neapolitan” ice cream tubs.

My sister, who is eight years older than me and who was something of an antagonist during my childhood,  said: “It’ll be chocolate.”

I disagreed, naturally, and insisted that it must be strawberry, or one of the other flavours. She was right, and it wasn’t just luck. This happened on several occasions, and her predictions always rang true.

I never knew how she did it until I brought it up about two decades later. I assumed that there must have been a subtle clue in the way he spoke that gave away the answer, or a mildly complicated algorithm. Would she at last tell me the secret?

“Oh,” she said. “It was always chocolate.”

A worthwhile variant on Guess Who, the venerable board game that involves asking questions to determine which of 24 people’s faces your opponent has in front of him, is the unofficial Prejudicial Guess Who, in which questions must be about personality rather than appearance.

The challenge is to come up with questions that, based solely on players’ prejudices about the characters, allow you to whittle down the field with confidence. For example:

1. Has this person ever rung a sex chatline late at night?

2. When this person sees a plane, does he or she stop and point at it?

3. Does this person use, without irony, the exclamation: “Poppycock”?

The trick is to be sufficiently decisive to eliminate people rapidly without generalising so much that one accidentally excludes the actual candidate.

The other important thing, I discovered today, is not to play with someone who has wildly different prejudices. It was impossible to win against my friend T, for example, because he made judgements that I don’t think anyone else would. To see if I’m right or not, I’d like to conduct a little survey. It won’t be very scientific, I imagine, because unless my fanbase magically increases then the sample size will be too small. Furthermore, T is one of the few people who does read this blog, and so he may try to influence it, but let’s have a go.

I’ll post again in a week or two to say what answers I expected.

There is no need to take seriously any country that has a fish* on its currency.

*unless it is a sturgeon, in which case respect is due (see China and Russia)

That is to say:

Armenia (salmon)

Aruba (seahorse)

Australia (white shark)

Bahamas (bonefish, blue marlin)

Bangladesh (rohu)

Barbados (four-winged flying fish)

Belize (moorish idol)

Bermuda (blue angel fish)

Brazil (acara)

British Virgin Islands (butterfly fish, blue marlin)

Cabinda (an enclave in Angola) (remora, butterfly fish)

Canada (mackerel)

Cape Verde (sea bream, bluefin tuna)

China (Yangtzee sturgeon)

Comoros (coelacanth)

Congo (imperial fish, crown triggerfish, butterfly fish)

Cook Islands (bonito)

Croatia (bluefin tuna)

Cuba (spotted eagle ray, yellow perch, yellow sea bass, blue cowfish, giant gar, swordfish)

Cyprus (swordfish)

Democratic Republic of Congo (mooney, jewel fish, black-banded butterfly fish)

Easter Islands (smooth-headed hammerhead)

Falkland Islands (salmon)

Fiji (grouper)

Finland (herring)

Hungary (unidentified fish)

Iceland (skate, lumpfish, Atlantic cod, capelin)

Ireland (salmon)

Isle of Man (herring)

Laos (unidentified fish)

Latvia (salmon)

Liberia (cylcid fish)

Macedonia (huchen)

Malawi (tilapia)

Malaysia (whale shark)

Maldives (bonito, bluefin tuna)

Mozambique (moorish idol)

Namibia (horse mackerel)

Palau (manta ray, stingray,  sea horse, lion fish, butterfly fish, emperor angelfish, blue-faced angelfish, barracuda, moorish idol, scorpion fish, hawk fish, surgeon fish, box fish, parrot fish, clown fish, blowfish, swordfish, puffer fish)

Papua New Guinea (ornate butterfly cod)

Philippines (goby)

Poland (flounder, catfish, European eels)

Portugal (cod)

Russia (red sturgeon)

San Marino (herring)

Seychelles (squirrelfish, yellow-fin tuna)

Sierra Leone (bonga fish)

Singapore (lion fish, pomfret, yellow seahorse, swordfish)

Slovenia (brown trout)

South Africa (white shark, knysna seahorse)

St Helena (yellow-fin tuna)

St Thomas and Prince (seahorse and crab)

Tanzania (sailfish)

Turks and Caicos (marlin)

Tuvalu (flying fish)

Uganda (hammerhead shark, seahorses, moorish idols, cyclid fish)

Uruguay (meruza)

Zambia (seahorse, coelacanth)

(source: coinlode.com)

It’s a somewhat minor personal triumph, but I have just shattered my personal best in the bat-and-ball game that comes free on a BlackBerry. Did I want to upload my score to the overall rankings, it asked. Hell, yes, I said, quietly, to myself. What if I’m some sort of bat-and-ball prodigy? What if, by a chain of unlikely events, proficiency in bat-and-ball games equates to some urgently needed skill, such as repelling an invading force of alien spacecraft? I’ve seen The Last Starfighter. (For anyone who hasn’t, it concerns a teenager who is selected to save the earth from extra-terrestrial hostility after achieving the highest score on a Government-monitored arcade game.)

It turns out I am about 682,000th.

I’m having trouble interpreting this. How many people are there behind me? And does it matter? After all, those who haven’t played the game probably aren’t going to be very good, so presumably I’m 682,000th out of the world population of 6.7 billion (ie in the top one hundredth of a per cent).

If skill at bat and ball is closely aligned to alien repulsion, will I still be needed? I imagine that in the event of attack it will be all hands to the pump, but how many pumps will there be?

So, to summarise, I am left with a list of questions:
a) What crossover is there between bat and ball, on the one hand, and world-saving duties, on the other?
b) Are there more than 682,000 places for planetary defenders in the event of an attack?
c) Will defenders have to be almost suicidally brave?

If the answers to these are “none”, “no” and “yes”, then I may have to devote my time to doing something more useful.

Ornithology is for amateurs.

The unexpurgated version of Winston Churchill’s “The End of the Beginning” speech at the Lord Mayor’s Luncheon, Mansion House, on November 10, 1942:

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end.
It is not the middle of the end, nor the end of the end.
It is not the beginning of the middle, nor the end of the middle, nor the middle of the middle.
It is not the middle of the beginning, and certainly not the beginning of the beginning, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

H, a girl I’ve been going out with for three months, tells me I’m a cad. It’s a running joke. Or it is for her and her friends. I contest it, particularly the implication that I treat women badly, but they insist that it doesn’t mean that. A cad, they say, is merely a rake with a suspiciously self-confident manner with women.

Their definition doesn’t match the one in the dictionary, but values do seem to be different in their adopted city of Bristol. I didn’t think that Bristol was all that different from London until recently, when H said that most of her friends had snogged about four people in their adult lives before settling down to get married. To them I must seem like Face from The A-Team.

Anyhow, during one session of impugning my character it was suggested that I could be a bounder instead. I wasn’t keen. So far as I knew it meant the same thing. No, H said, a bounder is a low-life who uses his charm to pretend he is more of a gent than he is, while a cad is a high-status rascal who ought to know better. Or, to put it another way, H believed that a bounder is a pseudo-gent while a cad is a crypto-gent.

It’s an interesting interpretation, but doesn’t have any basis in etymology. There is no longer a distinction between “cad” and “bounder”, and it’s debatable whether there ever has been. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of bounder is “an ill-bred person; a cad”. Its definition of cad is “a vulgar, ill-bred person; a person guilty or capable of  ungentlemanly behaviour; a blackguard”.

The origins of the words also suggest that they have always been interchangeable.  Bounder probably comes from the notion of someone who strays outside the bounds of behaviour expected in polite society, although it has also been attributed to a person attempting to bound into a higher social circle. Cad comes from cadet; it was a reference to servants, and a snobbish term used by students to distinguish town boys from gowned ones in university towns. Both cads and bounders, therefore, had connotations of low-status individuals aiming high.

Both words seem to have lost their low-status origins. Alan Clark, the late Tory minister, is for many people the archetypal cad and was certainly of high status. He is also commonly referred to as a bounder.

The most notable attempt to distinguish between the two words was made by the late Queen Mother in her description of Lord Boothby, the almost impossibly raffish peer who conducted a homosexual affair with one of the Kray twins and a heterosexual one with Harold Macmillan’s wife. To the Queen Mother, he was a “cad but not a bounder”. It is unclear what she meant, but she evidently thought that the former was preferable to the latter.

Perhaps she thought that bounders are acutely aware of their lack of social status while cads don’t care whether they have any or not, but if this meaning was ever commonplace it seems to have been lost.

The principal problem with suggesting that the words have different meanings is that they are commonly paired in descriptions of men as “a cad and a bounder”, which have been around for at least 50 years (including by Agatha Christie, in Back Numbers, in 1954). It cannot be that one means a crypto-gent and the other means a pseudo-gent because those definitions are mutually exclusive.

The two words have become one. And I’m neither.

This week in lyrics analysis corner it is my pleasure to welcome one of the few successful pop songs sung by someone named Cecil: Here Comes the Hotstepper, the solitary hit of the artist best known by his stage name Ini Kamoze.

There are two schools of thought on the meaning of Cecil Campbell’s ode to a murderous thug. The most common interpretation is that the narrator is a gang member patrolling the streets with his crew, partaking in gang warfare and generally letting blood as if juicing strawberries.

A more in-depth study, however, suggests that Cecil has spent an unsatisfactory evening at the opera with his crew, whom he has found loitering “in A-D area” of the auditorium. He boasts that anyone testing him will “hear the fat lady sing”, suggesting that he is able to emulate the leading lady’s performance note for note.  Having admonished his friends Rico and Bo for failing to  follow the plot (“Act like you know, Rico / I know what Bo don’t know”), he announces his intention to buy a strawberry-flavoured (“Juice like a strawberry”) ice cream in the interval from an usherette with his spare change (“Ch-ch-chang-chang”). However, learning that the ice cream is £4 for a very small tub, he murders the vendor, noting that the price is “extraordinary” and asking whether she thinks he has “money to burn”. Flushed with regret, he entreats appalled opera-goers to “dial the emergency number”, possibly to call the policeman he accidentally bumped into on the way into the performance (“Excuse me Mr Officer”).

Here comes the hotstepper, murderer
I’m the lyrical gangster, murderer
Pick up the crew in-a de area, murderer
Still love you like that, murderer

No, no, we don’t die
Yes, we multiply
Anyone test will hear the fat lady sing
Act like you know, Rico
I know what Bo don’t know
Touch them up and go, uh-oh
Ch-ch-chang-chang

(chorus)

Extraordinary
Juice like a strawberry
Money to burn baby, all of the time
Cut to fade is me
Fade to cut is she
Come juggle with me, I say every time

Here comes the hotstepper, murderer
I’m the lyrical gangster, murderer
Dial emergency number, murderer
Still love you like that, murderer