Are they really our heritage?

A country house in need of rescue

I was watching the quite entertaining Country House Rescue the other night, where bossy hotel and events expert Ruth Watson goes and tries to persuade mildly bonkers country house owners to become more commercial if they want to stop their properties falling around their ears.

So far so good - and I particularly love the derivative background music, which has influences both from the computer game Seventh Guest and from the Harry Potter movies. However, I have two problems with the content of the programme.

One of these applies to almost any of this kind of output. They appear to be made for people with an attention span of 10 minutes. Every time there's a commercial break there has to be a recap when we come back. We were just watching it, guys! We can remember what happened 2 minutes ago. What's more, many of us are watching it on DVRs and have whizzed through the adverts, so in practice, we only have to remember what we heard 15 seconds ago. Give us some credit, please.

However, the thing that was beginning to niggle me watching this particular show was the way that the voice over person kept saying that this work or that effort or whatever was necessary if this piece of 'our heritage' were to be saved. Now, I sorry, but in what sense is a country house in Devon run by an ex-hippy with a penchant for over-the-top childish reactions to GM crops (including dressing up as a failed genetically modified potato) part of my heritage? I'm from Rochdale. My biological heritage is the Co-op, Cyril Smith, Gracie Fields, mill workers and meat and potato pies on a tray with gravy. My intellectual heritage is John Bright and the wonders of science.

This decrepit building is not my heritage. It belongs to that ex-hippy. It's his heritage. I've nothing against that. he's welcome to it. But don't suggest I get any personal benefit from his finances being sorted out, because I don't. Okay?

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense

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