We so often encounter negative stories about young people that I thought I would take a moment to present a good news story about some children I recently came into contact with.

As part of Local Democracy Week I and other councillors have been welcoming classes of children into Staffordshire County Council to tell them about our role as councillors and the Council as a whole, and to be on hand as they performed a pretty challenging exercise designed to explore how the council makes its decisions.

The last time I had much contact with ten-year-olds was when I was ten myself, so I was a bit uncertain of what to expect. As it happens I was very pleasantly surprised, with all three of my groups performing very impressively. They were alert, attentive, very polite, broadly followed their instructions, worked well in groups and I would venture to say that their verbal presentations skills were on a par with some Councillors!

The exercises themselves threw up all sorts of situations that the Council itself regularly faces such as how to get things within a budget, and it was fascinating to note the similarities (and some intriguing differences) in how the children dealt with these situations relative to what actually happens. Certainly if some of the pupils on display have been inspired to go on to stand for election themselves in the future (and I hope they do) I think the County would be very well served.

Thanks need to go to the officers who drew up the exercises and lead the sessions, but finally I want to say that all the parents and teachers involved should be very, very proud of these children.

From the BBC News website:

Thousands of teenagers had a total of 5,171 litres of alcohol confiscated in a summer crackdown on binge drinking, the government has said.

As part of a £1.4m campaign, more than 3,500 youngsters in 69 "priority areas" of England were stopped between July and September.

Children's minister Dawn Primarolo said the campaign was a "success story".

No, hang on. What would have shown a success would be if they'd stopped more than 3,500 youngsters and not had to confiscate an average of more than one litre of alcohol per kid...

For no particular reason, I've decided to flag up this question tabled for later this week by a Staffordshire MP:

Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.

Can't imagine why I didn't read about it in the papers...

UPDATE: The Guardian reports that within the last hour the injunction has been lifted.

A quite brilliant cartoon from Moreland of The Times:

I despair of reading tabloid coverage of Formula 1. It's almost always shot through with inaccuracies that seem calculated to drive an F1 aficionado such as myself wild. (Perhaps I get angry because they get paid to fly round the world, watch great racing and then write rubbish)

Case in point, today's Mirror. Apparently if Button succeeds Hamilton as champion "it will be the first time in 59 years of Grand Prix racing that British drivers have won back-to-back titles."

Poppycock.

Between 1962 and 1964 British drivers Hill, Clark and Surtees won four titles on the trot, and Hill's 1968 triumph was followed in 1969 by Jackie Stewart.

If they'd said ENGLISH drivers, however, they would have been correct...

I happened to turn on the BBC News Channel just as Barack Obama brought a close to a UN meeting on nuclear disarmament. As soon as he adjourned the meeting up popped Brown, fawning all over the US President and displaying pretty much the same desperate body language as a 9-year-old autograph hunter at a boy-band concert. Obama patted him on the back but then turned away from Brown several times to acknowledge other world leaders but Brown wasn't to be denied. He relentlessly hung around in the background, looking frankly ridiculous, before manoeuvring himself to be in prime position to follow Obama out of the room.

When I was at school, we had a name for people who displayed such sycophantic behaviour towards the cooler kids. We called them "Dingles", and it certainly wasn't a term of endearment. As I watched my own Prime Minister behaving like this on the world stage at the UN I'm afraid to say I found the spectacle deeply, deeply embarrassing.

(the second in a series of posts on the theme of any old nonsense that pops into my head)

I am often baffled by the activities of Lib Dems, but I am particularly confused by the strategic thinking on display at their conference this year. It seems that they have quite deliberately decided to turn their guns on the Conservative Party, but I can't for the life of me understand why it makes strategic sense for them to focus their attacks so entirely upon us.

The Liberal Democrats are the third party in Britain. That is clear. It has been since the 1920s. They have over the past couple of decades made decent inroads into the two major parties and have got themselves to the point where they are able to begin to credibly think about becoming the second party in the not too distant future. However, the simplest and easiest way for this to happen any time soon is for there to be a catastrophic collapse in the Labour Party akin to what happened to the Liberals following the First World War.

Following this line of thought, the simplest way for this to take place is for the Lib Dems to persuade all those currently disgruntled working class voters who vote Labour simply because they always have done (and who would never, ever vote Conservative) that the time has come when the Labour Party is now irreversibly adrift from any concept of representing the working classes. Lord knows they'd have a wide panoply of ammunition to choose from.

This pool of "habitual" Labour voters is both extremely large and the major plank on which any electoral success for the Labour Party ALWAYS depends. Pull this plank away, and the Lib Dems in one fell swoop can expect to make gains in many urban, northern, Welsh and Scottish constituencies and and in so doing shatter Labour's bedrock and promote themselves to official opposition, and then in time this could become a good platform to usurp the then Government party. But no, they have instead chosen to attack the one party this enormous group of voters would never vote for, at a time when the Conservative Party is at it's strongest level for two decades. That makes no sense to me.

Then there is the debate (or rather lack of engagement in any debate) of what the Lib Dems would do if they have the opportunity to be king-makers in a hung parliament. It baffles me that they have not understood that failing to convey a willingness to consider coallition working undermines any idea that they have a realistic chance of implementing their policies. They may want to say that their aspirations are higher, i.e. forming a Government outright, but this is simply not credible. People aren't stupid - they know the Lib Dems can't hope to gain a parliamentary majority any time soon.

And in attacking personalities within the Conservative Party so personally (Clegg called Cameron a "con-man", while a draft of one of Huhne's speeches contained a bizzare caricature of William Hague) I think the sharper of floating voters will simply see a party wantonly jeopardising personal relationships that would be vital should a Conservative/Lib Dem coalition come into being.

Indeed, I am baffled.

I know, I know, this blog's becoming a bit of an irrelevance because I post so infrequently now... I'm a little bit precious about having something "important" to talk about, so that's held me up a bit. Anyway, thought I'd start writting down any old nonsense on any topic and see where it gets me.

On Friday I was suddenly inspired to finally get my eyes tested and join the massed ranks of the spectacle-wearing classes. Since I stopped wearing contact lenses a few years ago I haven't struggled too much as while my left eye is considerably short-sighted (losing focus at distances of 40cm or so), my right eye is only very slightly LONG-sighted, so I've been able to see perfectly well, just with only the one eye.

Recently though, I've been slightly alarmed that when an object is close enough for both eyes to focus, the co-ordination between the two eyes has not been brilliant, which distracts me when I'm reading. Also I was always aware that problems may arise if I for whatever reason was temporarily unable to use my left eye when driving, since in that case an object would only get within 40cm if I had already crashed...

So I popped into Vision Express in the Guildhall to make an appointment and was seen to half an hour later by a very nice guy who told me that my eyesight when corrected was excellent and that my prescription had changed only very slightly since my last eye test in 2003. I then went out to face the daunting task of picking out frames. There's so many! How the hell do I know which will suit me? Luckily the woman helping me choose gave me some useful advice to narrow things down a bit. Eventually I plumped for some Ted Baker frames, black with dark bluey-green detailing (see photo). Rather expensive, but I think I've got what I paid for.

An hour later and my specs were ready and I wore them to drive home. Rather a strange experience, given that I'd been used to essentially using just one eye for the last four or five years, and hence it was rather strange when suddenly everything was three-dimensional. Also I found it rather tricky to get used to judging distances, and when I parked my car in the drive my first attempt was about a foot further way from the hedge than I thought. Anyway, I suppose it takes time to adjust.

So I've tried them out in the two key constituencies - footie down the pub and a Civic occasion - and thankfully all the comments have been positive, so I don't feel too much of a freak. The only slight problem is since one lens is for short sight and the other for long sight, it does tend to shrink one eye and magnify the other, making me look a little like Quasimodo. Can't be helped I suppose...

Kazimiera Mika, a ten-year-old Polish girl, weeps as she stoops over the body of her elder sister, pleading with her to speak, unable to take in what has just happened.

It is mid-September 1939, and just outside a besieged Warsaw, Kazimiera and half a dozen others had been in a field looking for potatoes to satisfy their desperate hunger. You can see in the picture that Kazimiera herself appears to be slightly emaciated. They dropped to the ground as a German aircraft flew in to drop bombs on a nearby home, killing two. After a while they went back to work before the aircraft came back to strafe the field with machine gun fire, killing two more, of which Kazimiera's sister was one.

I think that now that we are 70 years removed, with most people's ideas of the second world war coming from books and films, it's all too easy to forget this wasn't simply something that happened on a film set. This girl had grown up in a relatively peaceful Poland, her sister had been around her since her birth. They would have laughed, joked, played, argued, had little pet names for each other, and so on, just like any other siblings. One month she's playing with dolls and singing songs, the next month she's wiping her sister's still-warm blood from her hands. I have no idea what happened to this girl subsequently, but at this moment, her life as she knew it has been totally torn apart. In the following six years, many millions more lives would be similarly marked by war.