CCTV police officer ‘chased himself’ after being mistaken for burglar – Telegraph

The junior officer, who has not been named, was monitoring an area hit by a series of burglaries in an unnamed market town in the country’s south.

As the probationary officer from Sussex Police searched for suspects, the camera operator radioed that he had seen someone “acting suspiciously” in the area.

But he failed to realise that it was actually the plain-clothed officer he was watching on the screen, according to details leaked to an industry magazine.

via CCTV police officer ‘chased himself’ after being mistaken for burglar – Telegraph.

The house in which William Hogarth lived is on the A4, the main road out of London, right up against the Hogarth roundabout with only a beautiful wall between it and six lanes of modern traffic. It’s a lovely place, and I went there for the first time a week ago with a bevy of charming historical authors – Essie Fox, Lynn Shepherd, Kate Mayfield, Denise Meredith, Kate Colquhoun – as well as publisher Lisa Highton and London Historians supremo Mike Paterson. Thanks to them all for organising and being such lovely company, and thanks to Val Bott, who’s been instrumental in organising the recent renovations for the house and who gave us a fantastic introduction (including exclusive access to the attic).

The house is, as you’d expect, festooned with Hogarth prints, which never gets boring. But the real reason for going is to experience the quiet solidity of a comfortable Georgian household, and get a feel for a world where objects were cherished and families were at the centre of life. It’s a long, long way from Gin Lane.

My Flickr slideshow is here, or you can view the pics embedded below. They’re not very good. Go yourself and take better ones….

Yesterday, my wife and I (and the dog) took a wander along Rotherhithe Street and the Thames Path, upstream from Greenland Dock to Rotherhithe proper. It’s an amazing walk, full of history and replete with municipal neglect and the banal crimes of property developers. Strongly recommended.

It was him or Tom Selleck

I’m doing the Movember thing for the first time this year. By which I mean I’ve booked a check-up with the doctor. Oh yeah, and I’m growing a moustache.

I think Movember is one of the nicer things about the modern world. It’s an appealing combination of the silly and the important, and thus approaches “men’s health” in exactly the best way. Because when it comes to health, men are a skittish combination of hypochondria and bravado. Whether it’s man flu or prostate cancer, when we’re not avoiding we’re oversharing. When it comes to health, every man is like an embarrassed dinner party guest, desperately self-conscious and hungry to be perceived in the right way: strong, sensitive, self-aware, sensible.

And yet every man I know has some kind of mad obsession with a part of his body. My best friend has ripped his Achilles tendon. Poke most men in their forties and they’ll tell you about a dodgy knee, a tricky piece of cartilage, a sore back. I’m surrounded by friends with sore muscles and aching bones, and I’m as bad as any of them. A few months ago I completely destroyed (my italics) my feet through running, and needed physiotherapy and orthotics to sort things out. I’m now a walking catalogue of inlays and supports, never happier than when investigating expensive Merrell walking shoes in the same way I used to examine albums in HMV.

So, we’re over-anxious about some things, usually the things related to sport and doing things. But we’re rubbish at stuff down there, and things like Blood Pressure and Cholesterol are only names for rubbish punk bands until something final and dramatic hits.

So Movember performs a valuable service. In a light-hearted way, it puts things like Down There and Blood Pressure on the kind of footing men can discuss, like football scores and wind speeds. So book your check-up today.

(Incidentally, minor gripe: the NHS seems peculiarly bad at encouraging a culture of check-ups. I phoned my GP this morning and queried whether a check-up was sensible and available, and the receptionist politely but rather haltingly said “yes, we do sometimes do that.” Sometimes? Shouldn’t it be the first line of defence in any health system? Read this great article from the most recent Atlantic Monthly about CareMore, an HMO which specialises in preventative care and getting people in front of doctors and nurses quickly and early. They’re much, much more efficient than other HMOs. And much cheaper. So come on, NHS – let’s get people queueing for check-ups.)

A couple of weeks ago, a Twitter acquaintance of mine called Derek Humphries posted this amazing video of a man who’s figured out how to turn old plastic bottles into light. Really.

After watching it, Derek and I and a few other people were discussing the wonder of what this fellow had done, and I said something like “what we need is a place where stories like this get collected.” Someone on Derek’s list jumped in and said “why don’t you make it, then?” and, because of the wondrousness of the world we live in, five minutes later a new Tumblr was launched, called (on the spur of the moment) Smart Humans.

What I’d like to happen now is that people submit examples – like the water-bottle-to-light story – of humans being really smart. It’s probably worth a mild diversion into what I think being “smart” means. It means something more than clever or intelligent; it probably places more of a premium on what my mother always calls “common sense” (she usually deploys this phrase when indicating what I’m deficient in).

Inspiration let us living, by jijis008 on Flickr

So being “smart” means employing a combination of imagination, creativity, revelation and, perhaps most important of all, resourcefulness. Whether it’s being diligent in looking at data, determined in seeking answers to the recycling of plastic, or figuring out the best way to turn bottles into light, being “smart” means making a material difference to the world through the application of intelligence, resourcefulness, creativity, imagination and, perhaps, revelation.

So, do you know of a story of Smart Humanity? Either leave a comment here, or add it to the Tumblr using the submission form.

And Get Smart. It’s a Dumb Jungle out there.

Picture by jijis008 on Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons.

Gjelane being assessed, watched by her Dad

Back in March I blogged about an extraordinary project established by my friend Elizabeth Gowing in Kosovo – a school, started from scratch, with the single aim of helping poor local kids to learn enough reading and writing to get them into the local schools and out of the horrible Catch-22 situation which had seen them fall so far behind that they couldn’t get back into the system. The blog was called Getting Gjelane to School, because that was what the project was all about – giving a young girl called Gjelane and other kids like her the tools they needed to get moving in life.

Elizabeth moved mountains, hassled parents, raised cash, gathered volunteers and essentially created a school from scratch. And the outcome?

GJELANE IS GOING TO SCHOOL!

Hans Zimmer’s orchestra crescendoed and the camera whirled around the room, my grinning face, panned to Gjelane out in her yard playing with their new puppy and looking up with a small confident smile, wiped to Ajnur saying ‘ueh!’ which is Fushe Kosove speak (now adopted by me) for ‘wow’, and then went wobbly round the edges so we know that this is an image of the future showing Besmire, who always wanted to be a doctor, all qualified and standing in the door of her surgery in 2030 welcoming a different generation of children for their vaccinations.

While London is recovering from a night of looting by children who have forgotten what it means to be part of a community, I can’t think of a better tonic. Congratulations, Elizabeth and everyone involved. An amazing, amazing achievement.

In other news from Kosovo, Elizabeth’s friend Paddy McEntaggart has established a lovely little photography project which he emailed me about last week. This is what he said:

My girlfriend Su and I are based in Yorkshire and are coordinating from here using the internet. We have sent out some digital cameras that have been donated (most of which are pretty old), the volunteers on the ground give some basic instruction to the children in Elizabeth’s school (there are around 100 taking part). Most days groups of 4 – 5 children in the morning and afternoon go on photographic walkabouts in the community taking pictures. These are then uploaded by the volunteers to an ftp site, that evening they are downloaded by us here in Yorkshire. We organise and sort through them, after which 29 are uploaded to a website.

Personally we have been amazed at some of the images they capture since they have never used cameras before, amidst rubbish and poverty they find beauty, humour and moving moments in the everyday life of the community, rather than me go on and describe it maybe you can visit the site, there already 5 days of 29 images http://www.neighbourhood29.com/ 

The aim of the website is to give their photographs exposure and give a voice to a community that usually has little chance to be heard. So it would be great if you could spread the link around to anyone you think would be interested or suggest contacts of anyone who might wish to run a piece on it.

It’s a lovely and compelling piece of work and well worth spending some time on – again, consider it a tonic from the images of violence and greedy despair spilling out of London.

And finally, can I strongly recommend Elizabeth’s superb book Travels in Blood and Honey, about her adventures in Kosovo. It’s a sane, human account of that blood-stained but defiant region written with all the care and carefully-orchestrated passion of a George Orwell piece. Very, very good.