daveydave

(or motorbike for that matter) and get away with it. Just read an interesting article on the BBC website . Apparently some theives made off with this young chap's moped. The police refused to make chase because the theives weren't wearing helmets. The logic being that if there was an accident and the thieves injured themselves, they'd sue the police. So it would seem the more laws you break the more likely you are to get away with it. If I went out on my motorbike without a helmet on I'd quite rightly get stopped. If I went out and pinched a bike but foolishly wore my helmet, I'd get arrested. Break both laws however, and I'd be fine. Personally, if there is an accident and the theives get mashed up a bit, I don't much care. Involving innocent bystanders is a different matter of course, but just to let people go for fear of being sued is ridiculous. Firstly, it's just another example of the law abiding types getting no useful support from the police and...

On a recent trip to London, a friend and I spent a very enjoyable evening at Sadler's Well Theatre watching some Kabuki. Kabuki is a peculiarly Japanese theatre tradition, where all the parts are played by men. It is an arresting sight, hugely colourful and massively skillful. The story is played out by the many tiny details of posture, costume and music as much as the dialogue. Most of the subtleties were well beyond my grasp, but this did not spoil what was a truly fabulous experience We were fortunate in having two of the best known Kabuki actors gracing the stage, and tickets very close to the front. It's quite difficult to explain Kabuki unless you have some knowledge of Japanese traditional arts - being highly stylised, it is a very different experience to anything you'd expect to see in the West. Basically though, you have a small number of actors on stage, as well as the musicians. There isn't much in the way of dialogue, and what there is is not exactly deliver...

While most of the nation's sports fans are focused on events in Germany, other national teams are also playing their respective games. Yesterday I was at Durham CCC's Riverside ground in Chester-le-Street to watch the third in a series of one day internationals against Sri Lanka. This is the second time I've seen an England ODI at the Riverside, the first being a couple of years ago against New Zealand. We were soundly beaten then and were even more so yesterday. I know the squad is short of key players and I know Steve Harmison is only just getting back after injury, but this was an awful performance. Ian Bell put in a handy 77, but did it at a very leisurly pace - it took him over 100 balls to get there. In comparison, Sri Lanka's Jayawardene piled on 126no from 127 balls. On the plus side, it was a good day out and a great atmosphere. We also saw some fabulous cricket, it's just a shame it was pretty much all from the Sri Lankans. Look out for them in next year...

Right, this is going to be a long post, so grab yourself a cold one. Those of you who persevere with this blog may have read a post back in November about the search for my ancestors. You may recall that I was having a spot of bother with my great-great-great-great-grandfather. A couple of weeks ago I was in London for the weekend - one of the main reasons being to visit the National Archives at Kew and browse the mariner records for the mid 19th century. The plan was to go in there, find one William Miller of South Shields in the master mariner lists and that would be job done. Well, obviously it wasn't that easy. The list of masters wasn't yielding anything useful, so I had to trawl through the standard seamen indexes and found 16 William Millers from South Shields. After some further work I managed to get this list down to 5, any of which could have been the man I was after. I was stuck. Anyway, that was the Saturday and I was in London until the train left on Monday afterno...