Edinburgh Castle

Yesterday I took my son to visit Edinburgh Castle. We tried to get there last year, but found ourselves at the back of a 3-hour queue for tickets, so thought better of it. Yesterday we took advantage of a truly beautiful day and the slack tourist season, caught the local train from North Berwick, and we were at the Castle gates by 10:30 – excellent.

We had a really good trip. I can’t remember being at the castle for 20 years at least, though I used to go there a lot – for a little while I was doing some research at the Scottish United Services Library, courtesy of Bill Thorburn and Bill Boag, and I was a frequent visitor. Had a temporary pass and everything. That is as near as I ever got to being a military type.

It’s changed a lot. The War Museum is all newly laid out, and I think may be in a different building now – it’s very well done, anyway. I found Sir John Moore’s hat, and duly noted that the caption has been changed. They used to claim that it was the hat Moore was wearing at Corunna, but now it states that it is a hat previously owned by Moore, which was kept as a memento by his friend Lord Lynedoch (that’s Sir Thomas Graham to you and me). Let’s just assume it was on his head at Corunna, shall we?

We visited the Scots Dragoon Guards museum, and also the excellent little Royal Scots museum, which is just next to it, and which gets rather light traffic because the tourists have just done the Dragoon Guards, and it looks like it might be more of the same. Very good, anyway.

We watched the One-O’clock Gun being fired (BANG!), and enjoyed what was obviously an otherwise quiet day up there. Great views over the city and over the Forth Valley. We didn’t bother with the Scottish Crown Jewels – history or no, that’s girly stuff.

It’s good to take the trouble to visit your local tourist sites – it’s so easy to take them for granted.

The Grand Old Duke of York - at the top of the hill

Gunner's eye view - good position to put an 18pdr shot into the

Balmoral Hotel, or the Bank of Scotland, or the fantastically expensive

apartments in Patrick Geddes' lovely Ramsay Gardens

The Royal Scots storm San Sebastian - flat wooden figures

Issued to all storming parties

WW2 poster - I wonder how many servicemen spent their

leave helping with the harvest?

WW1 recruitment poster - the happy boys go off

to fight for the Empire 

To close, an old - and probably apocryphal - tale of Edinburgh's One-O'Clock Gun. I don't know much about the history of the gun, but it has been fired every day except Sunday for as long as anyone can remember, officially as a time-check signal for shipping in Leith Docks, but also as a tourist tradition and a sort of family planning aid for the city's pigeons.

At some unspecified time in the distant past, the story goes, it came to be the turn of some local reservist unit to carry out the ritual firing. The officer in temporary charge of the task found that the procedures, which involved telegraph messages from Greenwich and a dropped signal cone (on the Nelson Monument, at the far end of Princes Street), were far too complicated for the Reserves. Using his service issue binoculars, he could easily see the big clock in the concourse at Waverley Station, and so his boys duly fired the damn thing when that clock said one o'clock, and then, presumably, they retired for refreshment.

Sadly, the railway company also had procedures and traditions, and one of these was that they used to keep their station clocks five minutes fast to encourage their passengers to be there in time. On the first day of this new, improvised system, when the gun went off, a little man appeared at the station, checked his official pocket watch, shook his head and arranged for the clock to be advanced the regulation five minutes. The following day, the same - station clock shows one o'clock, boom, the man checks his watch and fixes the clock. After a few days things were getting very confused - the citizens of Edinburgh were disgruntled with the gun going off earlier and earlier, and the customers of the railway were not happy either. Goodness knows what the ships made of it all.

I think there are lessons there for all of us. If there are established ways of doing things, have a good think before you change anything.

And if you are out at night, wear something white.

Unless it's snowing.

Hooptedoodle #79 - A Trick of the Light

You see, the first problem is that my son (who is 10), is very enthusiastic about astronomy, and the Universe, and all that, and has been since he could first assemble a few words into a question. He is the one who asked me once, after tea, could I explain a few more details of the Big Bang.

Is it true that nothing existed at all before the Big Bang?

Well, you can’t really talk about “before the Big Bang”, since it is widely held that time itself began at that instant. I think you can say, though, that we know of nothing which existed outside the time between the BB and now.

In that case, says the enthusiast, what was it that exploded?

Confound me if he hasn’t put his finger on the one bit of this that I can’t get the hang of.

Remember, I reply, that your grandmother is coming tomorrow, and you have to tidy your room before bedtime.

I try not to worry about this stuff, but vertigo lies in wait if I start to reason things out. On a fine, clear night I can stand in our garden and – since we live far away at the Front of Beyond, where there is very little light pollution – I can enjoy a magnificent big, northern sky full of stars.

Wonderful.

So what is it we can see? Each of those tiny points of light is a glimpse of a glowing mass which is (or was) so far distant that the light has taken a long time to get here. Everyone knows this. Even I know this. So the light which I can see – without effort and without getting tense about it – has been heading this way for thousands, millions of years. I don’t know how far away these things can be, but that is pretty impressive for a start. Maybe billions of years? – I can’t say the word “billions” out loud to myself without thinking of Prof Brian Cox, whose BBC books are all lined up on my son’s shelf.

So this means that, whatever else, these distant balls are not now in the positions that the points of light would indicate. They themselves will have moved a long way relative to us in the time since the instant of light I am looking at set out. It also means that all these little dots are of very different ages in the snapshot view I have. They may all be sitting peacefully together in the sky above my garden in configurations which we find familiar (well, my son does), but this is a very complex picture indeed. It is more than likely that some of these stars may have died and switched off long before some of the others started to shine. Before they existed. So nothing is as it seems – the stars are not really where they seem to be, and this deception is somehow arranged in time as well as physical space. The history of the universe is all present at once over my garden, and it is, at best, very misleading.

Hmmm. The only way I can come to terms with any of this is to ignore the actual bits of stuff which are/were shining out there, and just accept that space is also full of light flying about the place. The light is real, and a bit of it is here now, and that’s what I can see up there. It comes from a complicated place, at all sorts of durations ago, but I’m best to shrug at that and just look and enjoy it.

OK – that’s all fine then, but I don’t feel I’ve mastered the subject. I certainly haven’t impressed the boy. We occasionally have discussions in which I may say something like, “Imagine you have a very powerful telescope, and you are standing here looking up at a church clock which is on Saturn...” and then we collapse in laughter because the analogy is just daft.

I am reminded of some old pictures I saw at an exhibition, years ago in Edinburgh – so long ago that the exhibition was in the Waverley Market, before it became a shopping mall, and that is a very long time ago. These pictures were very early pioneering photographs – street scenes, mostly – probably dating from the 1840s or so. One picture fascinated me – it was of Waverley Bridge, just outside where the exhibition was taking place, and the street was clearly recognisable, with the view looking towards the bottom of Cockburn Street (I wonder if the Malt Shovel was open in the 1840s?). The caption explained that the strange, faint smudges on the picture were passing traffic. The photographic emulsions of the day were so feeble that a daylight picture required a very long exposure – maybe as much as an hour, I understand. Passing pedestrians and horse-drawn trams moving through the picture were not recorded properly, but would cause a slight, very blurry streak as they moved through the shot.

I found this absolutely compelling – if the exposure were long enough, I reasoned, some of these trams were not in the street at the same time, yet here they were (albeit unrecognisable) together in the same picture. It was not unlikely that a tram could even turn around at the terminus and come back through the picture again, and so be in the picture as two distinct tram images. On the way home, and for a few days afterwards, this played on my mind. Suppose you had a really long exposure, I thought. Suppose it was a hundred years, and suppose the same rules applied – everything that ever passed along Waverley Bridge in that time would leave a mark on the negative. The streaks would include people who never met, even people who were never alive at the same time. And – of course – I came to no conclusions, and I did not learn anything much, but I enjoyed the game. It’s like the stars – an illusion which has extra interest because it exists in four dimensions – space and time.

If you are still with me and still awake, there is a new development.

A few days ago, Mme La Contesse arrived home after delivering the aforementioned son to his school, and was very impressed by a rainbow she had seen. As she drove up the little hill to the church in our neighbouring village, she had bright sunshine behind her and rain in front of her, and a perfect rainbow appeared, framing the church.

How lovely, I hear you sigh.

Different place, different rainbow, same general idea

Over coffee, we had a short but interesting discussion about rainbows, which mostly proved that, in spite of some formal, classical Optics I did as part of my university Physics course, I know no more than the Contesse, who was spared these scientific excesses. We agreed that a rainbow is an illusion – just a trick of the light – and people will disagree about where exactly it is positioned. Each of us sees it differently – in fact the visual experience we call colours may vary between individuals, though it would seem unnecessarily complicated if that were markedly so. The whole idea of a colour is meaningless without an eyeball to send a signal to a brain. Our main point of agreement was that at any given moment there may be a very great number of places where a human eye could see a rainbow, given the right combination of light, reflecting/refracting water drops and angles, but the rainbow only exists if someone is there to see it. Or does it?

Time to go and tidy my room.

ECW - My Armies Thus Far

I've been asked a couple of times if I could show a picture of my ECW armies, such as they are at present. Since I had the battleboards out today, and the camera handy, I thought a modest team photo would be in order, so here goes.

Parliament - from front to back, the units of horse are Brereton's

Cheshire Horse and Dodding's Lonsdale Regt, and the foot are the

regiments of Rigby, Booth, Holland, Philip Egerton and Assheton. 

Royalists - on the left, front to back, are Prince Rupert's Blews and

Tillier's Regt; in the centre are the regiments of Thomas Tyldesley,

Lord Byron and Robert Ellice, and the horse regiments are those of Lord

Molyneux and Lord Byron.

And - just to attempt the impression of mass which the individual

armies rather lack at the moment - here's an unlikely grouping of

the units of both sides.

Target for completion of the first stage is for each army to have 8 foot, 6 (or so) horse, 1 lot of dragoons and artillery and generals to suit. As you see, my foot units are going well, and the horse are catching up, now that I have the Bold Lee's painting services on my team. Artillery and generals are a bit behind, but I have most of the castings I need - I need some more horses, and Old John will be sending me some more guns shortly, I believe, so everything is going well.

Watch this space.

Solo Campaign - Action at Martin de Yeltes

The 11th Portuguese Cavalry watch as the French enter the valley

It took me a while to recover from the family goings-on at Christmas and set up the wargames table, but I have now fought the little conflict between the two advance guards. I shall publish the revised returns taking account of this action after the next map moves.

Since the battle was small, and used the table lengthwise, I used a modified version of CCN - replacing the Command Cards system with a dice-driven activation system which I have used before and which worked pretty well.

The Allies won rather easily, and there was a cameo appearance by a Major Sharpe of the 95th, who commanded a provisional brigade composed of detached light-company men of the Third Division. I was a bit embarrassed to mention this, but why not, after all?

Action at Martin de Yeltes – 30^th July 1812

The Allied advance guard, commanded by Maj.Gen Long, had been rather outmanoeuvred by a French force under Gen de Bde Pinoteau, having their right flank turned as the French crossed the little river Huebra.

Long had a brigade of King’s German Legion heavy dragoons and a brigade of Portuguese cavalry – all the cavalry being commanded by Lt.Col De Jonquières of the KGL (deputising for the wounded General Bock) – plus a provisional brigade of three “converged” battalions of light companies from the Third Division, commanded by a Major Sharpe (all right, calm down). In addition, Long had the services of Bull’s Troop, RHA. His force was near to the village of Martin de Yeltes when the French appeared on his right, around 10:30am.

Pinoteau had two battalions of the veteran 59eme Ligne, under their colonel, Nicolas Loverdo, and three regiments of cavalry – one of Chasseurs à Cheval, the Italian Dragoni Napoleone and the Lanciers de la Vistule. He also had a battery of horse artillery – that of Capt Faruse, from the artillery park of the Armeé de Portugal. His cavalry were brigaded under the command of Col. Lemoyne of the 14eme Chasseurs.

The French advanced in a businesslike column – lancers at the front, followed by the horse artillery, then the Dragoni, then Loverdo’s infantry and the Chasseurs bringing up the rear.

The 11^th Portuguese cavalry fell back in front of the French advance, and Pinoteau detached his Italian dragoons and his chasseurs to his left, to pursue them behind a small wooded ridge. Meanwhile the French infantry entered some woods on the right, with the intention of taking possession of the large farm at Santa Consuela Parlanchina.

The British light infantry took good advantage of their ability to move quickly, Major Sharpe leading two battalions into the enclosures at the farm and commencing a brisk fire fight with Loverdo’s infantry.

The French cavalry attack – which was approached with great confidence – proved to be a complete disaster. The Portuguese 11^th cavalry were joined by the 2^nd Dragoons of the KGL, and together they routed the two French units, suffering very little loss themselves. Around this time, Col Loverdo was severely wounded on the French right, and Pinoteau decided to withdraw. The fresh lancer unit were detailed to cover the retreat, but they themselves were very badly beaten by the 11^th Portuguese, and the French withdrawal became a panic. Long called off the pursuit – a move for which he was subsequently criticised – but he had won an excellent little victory.

The Rifles officer was Major Norman Sharpe, by the way.

De Jonquiere's KGL Dragoons

French advance

Dragoni Napoleone - did not impress

Lancers of the Vistula Legion

General View of the field at the start

A Thought for Today

Captain Faruse's horse battery

Pinoteau brings up his cavalry

Major Sharpe with the Light Bobs

Bull's Troop, RHA

The French take the initiative

Loverdo takes the 59eme into the woods

General view around midday

French cavalry attack the 11th Portuguese

Pinoteau watches in disbelief as his cavalry falter

Meanwhile in the woods...

Allied cavalry drive back the French

French cavalry beaten back with heavy loss

Double crossed-sabres mean that Loverdo is wounded

The Dragoni are just about still there

The Lancers cover the withdrawal...

...but not for long

OOBs

French Force – Gen de Bde Pierre Pinoteau

Infantry Bde – Col. Loverdo (59e)

59e Ligne [2 bns]

Cavalry Bde – Col. Lemoyne (14e Chasseurs)

14e Chasseurs à Cheval [3 sqns]

Dragoni Napoleone [3]

Lanciers de la Vistule [3]

Horse Artillery battery – Capt Faruse

Total force engaged 2475 men with 6 guns. Loss approx 200 infantry, 620 cavalry. Col. Loverdo was severely wounded during the firefight in the woods at Santa Consuela, and was taken prisoner.

Allied Force – Maj.Gen RB Long

Provisional Brigade – Maj. Sharpe (95^th)

3 bns of light infantry from Third Division

Cavalry Brigade – Lt.Col De Jonquières (KGL)

1^st Dragoons, KGL

2^nd ditto

1^st Portuguese Cavalry (Alcantara)

11^th ditto

Troop ‘A’, RHA – Maj. Bull

Total force engaged, approx 2300 men with 6 guns. Total loss 325 infantry, 90 cavalry.

Detail losses:

French – 2/59 (-1 block), 14e Chass, Drag Nap, Lanciers de la Vistule (-2 each)

Anglo-Portuguese – 1^st Ptgse Cav, 1^st & 2^nd Prov Lt Bns (-1 each)

Pickin’ & Scratchin’

eBay, the Spares Boxes and a Museum of Glue

Cuirassiers – maybe by Alberken – soon to have a nationality transplant

I recently won some French cuirassiers on eBay – Alberken/Minifigs 20mm OPC jobs – enough for a unit. A couple of points here in the interests of accuracy (after all, standards have to be maintained). Firstly, I am not really sure whether they are Alberken or Minifig 20 – I have read the debate about strict definitions a few times now, and sometimes I understand it, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes – like this week – I understand it but have forgotten what it says. They do not have horizontal, sticky-out tails on the horses, which suggests they are not Alberken (or not Minifig 20, perhaps?), but the horses are recognisably from the same gene pool as Hinton Hunt, so they must be pretty early Minifigs.

Secondly, since I am doing the Peninsular War (as in doing the Lambeth Walk), I already have all the cuirassiers I need – the bold 13eme, in fact. Well, the truth is that my search for suitable Spanish cavalry has become desperate enough for me to embrace the idea of recruiting the famed Coraceros Españoles. Previously I had dismissed this as something of a cop-out, but a quick study of the magnificent database of JJ Sañudo has convinced me that this was an active unit with a long and worthy war record in the relevant period. They look pretty much like French cuirassiers (most of their hardware was nicked from a French provisional regiment), but they wear red jackets with green facings. Easy peasy – this should be just a paint conversion – and my ex-eBay figures have little enough paint on them to enable me to paint over what is there. I need command figures, but the castings do not have carbines, which simplifies conversion work, so the officer will just be a trooper with a bit of extra silver paint. The trumpeter was manufactured last night. Razor saw and superglue on a broken spare figure turned his head a bit to one side and replaced his right arm with one from a spare Kennington trumpeter. The join is a little crude, to be honest, since the arms were of slightly different diameter, but some gloopy paint can hide a lot of misery. I even did a little botchy dowel jointing of the grafts with brass wire, so by the normal house standards this is almost over-engineered.

Coracero

A good wash and they’re ready for painting. However, since I’d built up a little momentum, I decided to revisit one of my plastic freezer boxes – this one is labelled Extra Chasseurs a Cheval. Inside are two batches of old Garrison line chasseurs, which are intended to be the raw material for the last two such units in my Grand Plan. I already have three regiments of chasseurs (13eme, 22eme and 26eme), but the theoretical OOB also includes the 14eme and 15eme (yes – I know) so I’ve sort of got used to the idea.

I got busy hacking flock and surplus glue off the chasseurs, checking the paint job and straightening swords and scabbards – no breakages – good so far, though I got bits of glue and stuff all over the place. It turns out that one of the batches is really pretty good – some minimal touching up and a couple of convincing command figure forgeries and they are good to go. The other batch, even after quite a lot of cleaning up,  really are not up to it. The paint job is not brilliant, and they appear to have been liberally coated with thick gloss varnish which has turned an amber colour – so a thorough strip is required. Also, close examination reveals that the horses for this batch are actually cuirassier horses, with the shabraques covered in thick cream paint. Since I have enough new, unpainted Garrison castings to make a full unit anyway, I decided to cut my losses and ditch the worse of the two old batches. I can make command figures by gluing chasseur heads onto Kennington line chevauxlegers, so I now have a detailed plan for my two proposed additional units, so that feels like progress of some sort.

I got quite interested, while I was hacking and scraping last night, with the variety of glues on display, and it got me thinking about glues in general. The figures I was working on have been fastened onto numerous generations of bases over the last 40 years or so, and the riders have been stuck back onto their horses at odd times with products ranging from Copydex to something like Uhu. The base glues included some thick, yellow slabs like barley sugar, and there were traces of Araldite, which is a sadistic thing to use to mount figures on cardboard bases.

Over the years my own favoured glues for use with toy soldiers have changed considerably. I started out using Araldite, I recall, but I was always terrified to try to heat it in case I melted the castings, so I did a lot of jobs which required 24 hours to set, with everything strapped together with wire clips and Plasticene girders. I briefly became attached(?) to Plastic Padding, which was pretty horrible stuff for small scale modelling, but had the big advantage that it set faster than Araldite.

Since then I have had occasional dalliances with the stringies, such as Uhu, which are useful for filling gaps and sticking non-flush surfaces, but almost impossible to make a neat job with. Nowadays I use two different consistencies of superglue, white PVA for base-gluing, and sometimes Serious Glue for fiddly jobs.

When I was a boy, my dad was a great glue enthusiast. We always had supplies of very earnest glues. I remember Durofix clear glue (which was like a less stringy version of Uhu), something called Croid, which had a more industrial relative named Croid Aero, which I think came in tins. There was also something very scary indeed which was in orange and blue tins (can’t remember the name), and it needed to be melted by placing the can in a pot of boiling water. It smelled like the old glue-pot stuff we used in school woodwork classes, so I guess it was derived from dead horses or similar. I’m sure modern glues are superior in many ways – a friend of mine who is a manufacturing biochemist says the best glues are American ones if you can get them, since the US is a lot more relaxed on the subject of eco-friendly solvents.

I also used to use Cascamite, a casein-based glue which you mixed with water, for joinery work. It was hard and strong if you could get it to set properly – much recommended by luthiers and the like.

Anyone remember Croid? It’s probably still on sale in B&Q, and I just haven’t noticed.

ECW Regiments of Foot - more recruits

This afternoon I gave up on any outside jobs, and finished off and based a further two units of Foot. Here are Robert Ellice's RoF [R], with the red flag, who have rather unwisely allowed Philip Egerton's [P] to stand behind them.

The armies are shaping up nicely now - the artillery needs to catch up a bit, but I'm almost ready for a group photo. There's still a fair way to go, but I'm pleased with progress. First anniversary of the ECW lead mountain will be in March, so by my standards this is all very rapid indeed. I want to try to finish this first phase by the end of the Summer (which seems remote enough at the moment to be a safe target).

My starting OOB will have each army comprising 8 foot, 6 (or maybe 7) horse, a unit of dragoons and some artillery. I am also thinking about a unit of firelocks for the Royalists and a clubmen-type militia unit for the Parlies, but I'm still working out what figures would work for those. I recently received a photo of some very interesting Scottish foot figures from Old John, so there may be an extension to the shopping list.

Two more cavalry units are away to be painted, so I may be getting far enough ahead of myself now to think seriously about getting some ECW buildings ready. One big obstacle to starting that at present is that all my scenic paints (mostly Dulux emulsion) are Mediterranean-type shades, so I must put together a list of more mossy, thatchy, slatey colours and go and visit my nearest colour-matching service in Dunbar. 250ml sample pots are the boys.

Late Edit: I forgot to mention that if anyone is interested in 20mm ECW figures, Old John has the Les Higgins range in full production, plus the Marlburians and lots of other 20mm wargame figures. Please contact him through his blog.

Hooptedoodle #78 - Snobbery as an Art Form

Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.

Alexander Theroux

An elderly man I once knew used to like to show off his garden to visitors. He didn’t get many visitors, in fact, but when he did, if the weather was at all favourable, they would get the grand tour.

It was a large, unusually beautiful garden, so this sounds like an attractive proposition, you would think, but the reality was rather different. During the tour, he would tell them everything – everything – he knew about each plant, plus most of what he knew about gardening in general. To emphasise the superiority of his vast knowledge, he would punctuate the tour with complicated quiz questions which the guest could not possibly answer. I don’t know if anyone ever actually died during the circuit, or ran away screaming, but I do know that no-one ever exposed themselves to the risk of repeating the experience.

In other ways – and I have to say I did not know him well – he appeared fairly normal. I know quite a lot of enthusiasts who inflict this odd kind of sadism on inoffensive strangers – I have even been known to do a bit of it myself – and I sometimes wonder why.

The old man with the garden did it, I think, because he liked the garden and liked to talk about it, which seems healthy enough, but also because it reassured him to prove how clever he was, which is a little darker. In the realm of gardening, he was an appalling snob.

While attempting to sort out the contents of my sock drawer the other day, I switched on the bedroom TV, and caught a bit of daytime programming. I got to see a little of Masterchef (the UK BBC version), and it had reached a final stage or something, so they had Michel Roux Jr (no less) in the studio, plus some noted food critics as a judging panel.

Two of the Masterchef judges

Now I quite like Masterchef – I can live without the Reality TV overtones, but I am generally interested in good food, and I like to see the techniques and the dishes. Michel Roux looks scary, but he was pretty good value – personable and supportive to the budding chefs under stress, interesting and informative about the food. The critics on the panel were something else again. If we try for a moment to overlook the fact that anyone who gets paid for eating on television is intrinsically ridiculous, they reminded me why I have always hated professional critics. Po-faced and disapproving throughout, they took it in turns to say something even more pretentious than the others about the dishes on offer. It would have been deeply satisfying to slap the lot of them – in fact that should be a feature of the programme. Or else Michel Roux should ask them to cook something themselves while he stands over them.

What they had to say had much more to do with their own cleverness than about the job in hand or what they were stuffing into their sad faces. There it is again – the old man with his garden. These people get paid for telling us what they know, what they think – which is all about themselves. It has no relevance to the context or the audience, unless, of course, we wish to learn from their style and become snobs too.

I played in jazz groups, both professional and semi-professional, for a good many years, and jazz critics were the arch-demons of that world. As my grandmother used to say, “If you can’t do something, then stand in the wings and criticise others – that’ll keep you amused”. There are many muso jokes about critics. You can spot the critic at a concert, they would say, because he is the one tapping his foot out of time with the music. A critic, they would say, is a man who can tell you who played valve trombone in the Benny Moten Band in 1930, whether or not you wish to know, and who will tell you that “Indiana” is actually called “(Back Home in) Indiana”, though he will not be able to whistle the tune.

Generally speaking, critics like to write about themselves. Perhaps it gives them peace.

Art snobs, film snobs, antiques snobs, WINE snobs (aarrgh!), hobby snobs, know-alls, self-appointed experts of any and all disciplines, members of golf clubs, Former Pupils’ associations, churches....   it’s all about excluding people, finding some reason to discriminate – the more petty or far-fetched or contrived the better. We belong (don’t we?) and you don’t.

I had a boss once who used to have an annual get-together with his senior people which involved a dinner and a wine tasting. That’s right – a wine tasting. He used to bring in a professional organisation who would do a wine tasting in your own home if you wanted one – rent-a-snob. He did it, of course, because he fancied himself as an expert and wished to demonstrate this in front of his subordinates. Sadly, he eventually lost his job because he was an alcoholic, which a less charitable person than me would find amusing.