Dear Volvo Driver On A12: You might want to know that on a two-lane roundabout with dual-carriageway entrances and exits, keeping to your lane and not just driving across the fecking thing as if it wasn't there is a good way to keep the side of your car unblemished by Priscilla's front end [as well as to stop your nose being broken afterwards]. Thank you.

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Marigolds Season. Again that time of year has come around where the house needs a good thorough going-through [but don't we all? ] for when the landlord comes to visit in a bit under three weeks' time.

This time, I've got the big guns coming in. Three women I know who work as cleaners at my town's high school will be doing the job for me [for a fee, natch]; the idea being that if they can cope with the mess and detritus left by delinquent teenagers, they can cope with anything I can throw at them.

Even [and yes, I've checked this first] if they happen to find any, ahem, nefarious items whilst they're doing it…

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Thirty-Eight. For those who don't know, Sunday is my birthday. No, this isn't a plea for you to rush out and post me cards, presents and expensive lingerie*; it'll be a normal Sunday in that I'm working the night before and will be snoozing on the sofa for most of it.

But I do want to say thank you to the gorgeous Esther for the birthday postcard;

….which is apparently a 1m-tall sculpture by this artist which she thinks is an asparagus monkey and I think is an asparagus torso. Although in this photograph I can't quite make out the "bits" at the bottom, so I'd have to go and examine it up close in whatever art gallery it happens to reside in.

It's been far too long since I went to an art gallery. There's nothing of any value round here, it being "sell pretty pictures of Suffolk landscape in Constable pastiche style to urban tourists" country, but there is one outstanding piece of artwork in the area;

Maggi Hambling's "The Scallop", on nearby Aldeburgh beach, which stands as a tribute to the composer Benjamin Britten. Of course, this being Suffolk, when it was put up seven years ago there were complaints. And it's had paint thrown at it a few times.

Some years ago, I was helping out a friend by working in an art materials shop some way further inland. I remember one day serving a woman customer who seemed absolutely fearsome, as if she had an aura six miles wide, who made me want to hide behind the counter. It's good to know I've met the Scallop's sculptor in real life .

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* unless you really, really want to, in which case I definitely ain't saying no.

Ooh, that's better.

I had an emo moment – well, morning and early afternoon – earlier today, but a few hours spent in bed with some appropriate depressing gothy bleak 80s miserableness seems to have done the trick of draining off the worst of it.

[yes, it's that damn badly-lipsticked bloke. If you've not got this album, but would like to try out its utterly divine despairness, give me a shout and...]

There's a difference with me between momentary emo-day-ness, which can be nicely solved by lying down with crap music, and actual depression, in which I can't abide any music at all. You'll know the difference, because with the former I moan a bit about feeling emo, and with the latter I don't talk at all.

Also: with the former, I get momentary fleeting ideations of "hey, a drink would be nice right now". Not the latter. Even if I wanted to – which I wouldn't, because in that mood nothing is thought of as "nice" – I could hardly get out of bed as far as the offie [liquor store].

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Good Things:

The old printer, which died last month by having its cartridge carriage fall off as if it had electronic leprosy, is now in the back of Priscilla waiting to be "recycled"; luckily someone else had just got a new one and asked me if I had a good home for their redundant HP.

Priscilla, by the way, is thankfully not affected by the current "sticky pedal" nightmare – she's too old. Her MOT* reminder has just come through, though, so someone will have to get underneath her and have a good poke around. Lucky girl.

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Another Good Thing:

On Tuesday night, I had an epiphany. For the past few months, I've been drawn into weekly hospital-soap Holby City like a fly around a particularly delicious stool; I found myself rooting for some characters [often evil ones] and booing others.

Then, halfway through the episode the other night, suddenly it dawned on me. "hey, this is utter pish!"

I won't be going back to it.

Promise.

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And A Slightly Surprising Thing:

The people of my little town are, well, they're Suffolk. They're not known for their advanced intellectual abilities; yes, I know, that's a country bumpkin stereotype, but like almost all stereotypes, there unfortunately is a small grain of truth for some people behind what gets blown up into complete bollocks for everybody.

I'm thinking of one particular person of my friendship and acquaintanceage, who has arrived in Suffolk from Essex and whose outward personality and identity sometimes reflects the stereotypes of both regions.

So when, over coffee the other morning, she says "oh, I love Shakespeare", it doesn't quite fit…

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* Note for non-UKers: an obligatory annual roadworthiness check for older vehicles. Despite everyone's moans when the time comes around, it probably saves thousands of lives a year; and if you're the kind of stupid rabid libertarian who thinks this is unwarranted over-Government regulation, then get the fucking fuck off my website now. Seriously.

The "Pie Fallacy", And Why It's Important.

I don't have a lot of visitors here chez poisson – partly because my house is far too small for holding parties or accommodating more than two at the most for anything more than an hour without tripping over each other, and partly because, I'll admit, I tend to keep my place as my escape from the universe, rather than my window on the universe.

That said, when the bloke arrived from the Office for National Statistics yesterday afternoon, I thought I'd better let him in. They're the people who do the once-every-10-years census, due again in 2011, and since efficient governance in part relies on efficient information1 I feel it's my civic duty to participate in their data collection, subject to the usual privacy caveats.

I sat the bloke down with a cup of tea and he worked through a questionnaire on his laptop. After the usual demographical questions [age, gender3, religion, education, income] it became clear what they were collecting data on; firstly, people's attitude to "road pricing" in the UK, and secondly, people's attitude to mental ill health and the workplace, as set against – say – people's attitude to another disabling condition, chronic back pain.

He smiled as he learnt that the second was my "home territory", something I worked directly in towards the start of the last decade, and the questions – should employers be more sympathetic to / more supportive of / less quick to fear mental health conditions – got easy answers [generally along the "things have vastly improved, but there's still some way to go" kind of lines.]

The former was more problematic.

The main question: "Do you think road pricing [charging motorists by their mileage on busy routes] is a good idea, assuming there's tax reductions elsewhere to offset it so generally you'll end up paying the same amount?"

Ooooh, there's one for the Ben Goldacre "I think it's a bit more complicated than that…" category. I put forward my view, that of "generally it's an okay idea, but you have to use the carrot of decent, fairly convenient, and above all affordable public transport alternatives along with the stick and not just hope a new tax will sort out congestion by itself [because it won't: see London], and in rural areas like this you may as well forget it. And that's a gross simplification of all the issues of actual implementation that the idea of road pricing would bring up, and I could go on for a long time yet."

"Ah", he said. "All I've got is a scale of one to ten."

I shrugged and told him to put six.

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Many moons ago, when I was doing the stats part of my degree, I talked about the difference between quantitative and qualitative data.

The former gives you a nice number ["54% of respondents in East Anglia were not hostile to the idea"] that you can use in a soundbite, and such data is crucial in things like evidence for medical interventions.

Qualitative, however, which is where the bloke would have written down my whole answer and not just ticked a box, gives you a plethora of people's responses, but no numbers. Someone has to sift through the whole data and spot trends, impressions, caveats, themes, rather than just feed the lot through a computer. The results they give are less hard data and more of a point in the general direction of which way the wind is blowing – often, though, showing things that quantitative data doesn't because you didn't think to ask the question in the way it's been answered.

To give you an idea of what I mean, consider the two approaches to this question: what's your favourite sort of pie?

The Quantitative approach to this question will give you some lovely numbers which you can put into an impressive-looking graph, something like -

[Yes, you guessed it; this is a pie chart. Badum-Tish!!!]

This may be useful, but as I've argued elsewhere, certain corporations [both public and private] seem to think that just because apple is the #1 pie, it's the only pie worth pursuing, and were they in charge of the baking and leisure foods industry you'd all get would be a bog-standard individual apple pie; if you wanted anything else, tough titty.

[The industry I can think of most prone to "the pie fallacy" is UK commercial broadcasting4 - just because reality shows and endless "talent" crap look like the biggest slice of the pie, doesn't mean that's license to fill your networks with them 24/7 to the exclusion of anything else that requires more than one brain cell.]

The Qualitative approach to the question, however, gives you no lovely picture to aim at; instead you'd get a long report on "UK Attitudes To Pies And Pastry-Topped Products" which would be very thick and dull to read, but – crucially – doesn't have that "killer data" you can leap on, instead possibly containing a paragraph along the lines of "43. Although the trend was for 'Apple' to be the most-mentioned pie when people were asked to name their favourite, there is no clear trend of pie preference and many respondents expressed their satisfaction with the range of pies available to them at most retail outlets."

Which is a very different piece of evidence to have at one's fingertips when debating and arguing a case.

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Sorry about all that. Ahem. Back to the subject.

A quantitative answer to the question of road pricing may be convenient for bureaucrats and politicians, but – like much public policy – fails to address consequences, to fully capture people's concerns, and to be able to tell how that other crucial bit of good governance – good implementation – will affect which way the political winds blow.

I'm concerned, then, that my being put down as "six" on the "do you like road pricing?" scale will turn out merely as being in the "fairly positive" percentage of a report, perhaps used as evidence that public opposition to a scheme may be softening, ready to drop on the desk of whoever becomes Transport Minister after this year's election.

Perhaps time for a stiff e-mail or three.

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Today's Big Question: What's your favourite sort of pie? [Feel free to answer this question in a qualitative manner.]

============================
1 One of the arguments the revolutionary far-left people I know use is that whilst you can change the politicians, unless you change the Civil Service bureaucrats the status quo will endure2 and the same basic mistakes will happen. Seeing what a mess the Tories made of big IT and data management projects, followed by what a mess the Labour lot made/are making of big IT and data management projects, specifically NHS electronic data, and exactly how much good money has been thrown after bad over the past two decades, gives me quite a bit of sympathy for this view.
2 Cue this. [Sorry.]
3 I decided to cut a long story short and answer "male". I'm not sure he would have had a "genderqueer" box.
4 Though the BBC aren't immune either. "Hey, let's follow the inane dance contest at the end of last year with an inane dance contest at the start of this year!"

Solstice.

For the fourth day running, I've woken up to a scene whiter than an albino who's swallowed a bucket of Daz Automatic, and I've thought "frog that, the car stays at home".

I did enough driving in wintry conditions in my courier days to know that whilst I may be very aware of curbing my appropriate speed for poor road adhesion conditions, there are enough people out there – especially in rural parts like these – who still think 75mph, and hanging three feet from my rear bumper because I'm not doing 75mph, is a bitchenly amazing way to drive to make the whole thing bastardly dangerous on a par with bungee-jumping, lion-taming or Romford-sightseeing.

So, in the absence of any work shifts for a couple of days, I'm taking the official advice, and will only be going out in "an emergency".

[Although of course the Highways Agency's definition of "emergency" probably doesn't match mine, in that it doesn't include the phrase "free sex and money"...]

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I will have to start Priscilla up sooner or later, though, to make sure I can get  to my folks' on Thursday for the "festive" few days.

As usual, I have prepared enough distractions to keep my brain from going completely Radio-Rentals; though as usual, I have to pay for my keep by spending part of Boxing Day with the Evil Sister and family, being a festive "uncle Fish" to her two embryos.

There are a few things on the telly I'm looking forward to, amongst the usual deluge of shitty comedy "Xmas specials" [note to any comedy writer: no lame crap is ever improved by making it a "musical"]*;

* Monday: Victoria Wood night on BBC2. Archive stuff but still knockout brilliant. Also a must-see will be her new special, "Midlife Xmas" on Thursday.

* Tuesday: BBC4 highlights two great, fairly recently deceased, English eccentric geniuses – Oliver Postgate and Sir Clement Freud.

* Wednesday: Ballet Boyz – The Rite Of Spring. A "radical interpretation" of the original ballet, it says here. As regular readers will know, modern dance leaves me cold and perplexed; to me, the Rite's music is enough drama and colour by itself without anybody prancing about in tights, so we'll see if this is an improvement or a distraction.

* Friday: Doctor Who, natch.

* Next Monday: A remake of The Day Of The Triffids, with Eddie Izzard as the evil guy.

I was only nine years old when the 1981 TV version scared the living daylights out of me -

- yes, the plants were rubbery and unrealistic, but I was used to that from early Doctor Who episodes. It was only a year or two ago, when I finally found that series on DVD, that it struck me how little "psychotic vegetation" there actually were in it; most of the time was spent exploring the ramifications of a post-apocalyptic Britain. Maybe time, and the leaps forward in FX, mean we'll get more hot plant-on-plant action in this version.

Whether the 2009 version breaks the normal "remakes are pointlessly pants" rule – most recently confirmed by the insipid, suspense-less US version of The Prisoner – is to be seen, but it may well be, given Eddie's let's-say-chequered acting history, that this will turn out to be either wonderfully watchable or joyfully unwatchable.

I guess that's enough to keep me busy for a few days.

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* or, even worse, an "opera".

Thursday. The time of year for Priscilla to go and have someone slide under her and fiddle about [lucky thing]. Which kind of meant that I was stuck in Ipswich all day with nothing to do; I was going to help F. on the market again, but she's decided – and I think it's the right decision – that Ipswich is not her "target audience" and her energies will be better appreciated elsewhere.

So, once I'd filled up with coffee and finished the Indie crossword, I had about four hours to kill.

There's only so many shoes one can stare at for so long before one starts getting funny looks, and only so much time one can spend in the library before the staff think you're a hobo, so by about lunchtime I went for a long walk around the waterfront developments.

The part of the marina that's been done is, yes, very nice, except that they've completely taken out any public seating. My guess is that this is a deliberate decision to keep out the "oiks" – to sit and admire the view one has to buy something from one of the four or so little bistros, specialist food shops and expensive kitchenware emporia that look like they've just opened. At £1.90 for a cup of coffee they were, deservedly, virtually empty even at lunchtime, whilst the greasy cafe a hundred yards away was doing a roaring trade.

Apart from the overpriced apartments, the two focal point buildings are the University and the new headquarters for DanceEast.

The Uni is a striking building, but it doesn't interest me. Ipswich is not an academic town and all previous attempts to make it so have fallen on their respective arses – you can call it a University, I guess, in the same way that you can call my house a mansion; but it doesn't make it any bigger.

I can't say that dance has ever engaged me either – certainly in "popular" dance for reasons I've outlined earlier, and in "art" dance because I've never given it enough time or attention to understand its form, outside of the Firebird ballet.

I'm glad art/modern dance exists, in that I'm glad a proctology ward exists in Ipswich Hospital – but I don't plan to ever spend any time there in the forty or so years left in this life.

Obviously it needs a certain amount of organization to distribute the grants and correlate whatever "dance action" is going on north and east of London. But does it really need the whole of what in Ipswich terms is a skyscraper? Did it need £9million spent on it?

Decrying state spending on the arts is a frequent bugbear of right-wing gits. Obviously I don't share their penny-pinching myopia, since my experience tells me that there's more to life than the balance sheet…

[...whilst we're talking stupid gits - also see: Rupert Murdoch's son moaning because our mixed-economy broadcasting system makes it difficult for his corporation to utterly dominate our airwaves and spread right-wing bollocks. Boo fucking hoo; go call a waaaaamublance....]

…but in a town with significant social problems [and services for them faced with large cuts], a low-cost housing shortage, creaking transport links [A12 and main railway lines overburdened in their current state], etc etc, one does necessarily question whether it's the best use of public monies.

The whole waterfront development overall looks like it's geared towards getting Ipswich a mini-version of trickledown – if "we" attract a certain amount of rather rich people into town, a certain part of their cash will come down to the general populace. It didn't work in the Eighties, and it won't work now.

And when it doesn't, I'll be sure to compose a modern dance piece to express the sentiment "I Frogging Told You So".

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Friday: Was supposed to be at the premiere of Behind The Moon: Making "An American Werewolf In London".

A week ago I was emailed by the person who said they were getting the tickets, although told that I'd have to be kept updated as to getting to the event.

And nothing since then.

Last night I found that said person has gone off to Korwich for the weekend to see *person from other social networking site that I no longer post on but still read occasionally*.

Which is fine. Plans change, people change. A little communication, though, would help, n'est-ce-pas?

Still. The DVD of AAWIL is still fantastic, and it's probably better that Jenny Agutter stays in my head as she was in that film, and not twenty-eight years older…

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Saturday. Nothing on the telly, little on the radio, Ipswich 1 – 1 Preston…

Frog it. Time to pile up the Kate Bush CDs…

FX: The flicker of a TV set being switched on.

PRESENTER: And finally this week, let's take a look on how you should use the hard shoulder in an emergency.

CUT TO VT: Grainy CCTV footage of a motorway. Time and date are stamped on the bottom of the screen.

PRESENTER [V/O]: This is a northern stretch of the anticlockwise M25 on a fairly busy Saturday afternoon, with traffic flowing normally. It's not far to the next junction…

A silver car pulls over to the hard shoulder and stops.

PRESENTER [V/O]: …but sometimes that's too long to wait.

The car switches on its hazard lights: a man scrambles out of the passenger-side door, and drops on all-fours on the grass verge.

PRESENTER [V/O]: If you have to stop, use your hazard lights, and if you get out of the car use the offside door if you can.

The man uses one hand to pull his long hair back behind his head as he copiously vomits up a mixture of cheese sandwich and black coffee.

PRESENTER [V/O]: Obviously this is classed as an emergency. If you can, stay on the motorway until the next junction or service area.

MIX TO: Timestamp shows a couple of minutes later. The man swigs out of a water bottle, spits it out on the grass verge, and climbs back into the car via the passenger-side door.

PRESENTER [V/O]: As soon as you can, vacate the hard shoulder: it may be needed for other emergencies.

The silver car indicates right, and after a brief pause rejoins the traffic.

PRESENTER [V/O]: He continues to the next exit, where a traffic car found him in a petrol station just off the motorway and checked he was fit to continue driving. He was, so no action was taken.

CUT TO: Studio.

PRESENTER: That's all from Police Camera Action! this week. 'Bye for now.

CUT TO: Credits and music roll over slow-motion CU of the vomit action in all its projectile parabola glory.