• PiratesIf you read my entry about School Stacking Chairs on Monday, you may wonder about the game of Pirates that I mentioned. I don’t know if everyone played it or if it was peculiar to my school, which was a boarding prep school in Surrey.

    It was Mr Turner, the new PE teacher, fresh from Loughborough College, Who spiced the game up and made us take more risks.

    The Wall bars were swung out and all the gym equipment was strewn around the floor. These were islands and were places of safety. If you “fell in the water” by putting your foot on the ground, you were drownded and out of the game.

    One boy was chosen to be the Pirate and he had to tag someone else. That person then became a pirate too. The winner was the last boy to be tagged – who then went on to be the pirate for the next game.

    Each time we played it, we became a bit more adventurous. Soon the we found it was possible to cling onto the window frame and inch your way around the room. The stacked chairs became a very dangerous haven. Too much rapid movement could bring them all crashing down on the floor.

    The favoured starting place was on the low beam that connected the two sets of wall bars. Here you were safe for ages, holding onto the ropes that dangled from the connecting bar at the top of the wall bars.

    Mt Turner was a great Teacher and soon soon turned us into fearless gymnasts. One day One of the Pirates just walked across the beam tagging everyone on the way. He’d learned to balance in Gym Club. The ropes were no longer safe. We took to shaking the beams and wall bars, to try and knock them off, but Mr Turner had trained us well. The best gymnasts could walk across a beam even though it was being shaken violently from side to side.

    The high beam then became the new reserve, but not for long. It must have been two meters high, but still one foolhardy boy decided to walk across it. I remember the room going silent. Everyone held their breath. The Pirate inched out along the beam. His quarry, was paralysed. He couldn’t believe his place of safety was being compromised. When the Pirate got his man, there was huge cheer. We knew the game had moved onto something more serious.

    The last hiding place was at the top of the ropes. The bravest would shin up to the top and hang on to the steel bar. A pirate, gaining control of the ropes, would fling the ropes around in the hope of dislodging his quarry. If the pirate climbed up the rope, the boy at the top would try to knock him off. It had become quite a serious game by now.

    It was when the ambulance came and got the third child with broken bones that the rules were changed, and the game petered out. It wasn’t fun anymore!

    Were we tougher? Probably not. Put today’s children in the same conditions and they would do exactly the same. Its our nature to push the boundaries until we get hurt. We used to have to learn by our mistakes. Now, Health and Safety make sure we can’t make the mistakes to learn the lessons from. All our risk taking is done in the safety of computer simulated environments these days.

    That’s probably why the banks crashed. All those bankers never played pirates when they were young. They’ve never learned that some mistakes have very real and painful outcomes. Playing with other people’s money on computer screens is not real life. It’s pretty much the same game as the guys who are playing games on the net to try and get your pin numbers. They are all playing to win your money.

    A bit more Rufty-tufty child’s play is what we need! Oh I haven’t mentioned British Bulldog 123! Maybe another time.

  • You are probably not interested in my website statistics, but I am. I just thought I’d have a look at my latest visitors. I found that someone had just been trying to access my (now) non-existent wordpress folder. This is the folder that contained my old blog before I was hacked.

    The user asked for 700 different pages in under two minutes, this suggests a program running around the net, looking for known insecurities.

    One request, for instance, was: /wordpress/wp-includes/Text/update.php?act=f&f=www.wildlifesystems.co.uk%3A80.cnf&d=%2Fusr%2Flocal%2Ff

    You may notice a website address in there. www.wildlifesystems.co.uk has nothing to do with me and I never heard of them before this. They are suppliers of webcams for watching wildlife. Quite innocent and it would seem from my stats, someone is after them for something – and the other 699 other websites that are mentioned in all the other requests to my wordpress folder.

    This must be going on 24/7 all over the web. Who are these people? The web is such a wonderful resource – but I fear it will be brought down by the rampant crime and deceit that seems to go on under the surface. We only the see the part of the web that we want to see.

    I’m reminded of the chickens I used to keep. A fox would visit them every day, checking the perimeter fence for holes. One day, a hole had rusted just enough to let him in and kill all but one of them. He didn’t eat them, just killed them in a pointless frenzy.

    Knowing that people are trying to infiltrate and take over my site all day long is like sitting inside, watching the zombies outside trying to find any way in.

    And they are zombies – these people are so removed from real life and the people they are attacking, that it has just become a mild computer game to them. They think they are like James Bond villains, sitting in their control rooms, stroking their cats, trying to achieve world domination, or the domination of its bank accounts.

    Actually the main driver behind a lot of this hacking is kudos. While you may imagine an arch villain, it’s more likely to be a spotty young man with no social skills, whose real kick is to post his success on hacking websites, (that really should be monitored by the police), so that he can prove to the other kids how cool he thinks he is.

    This innocent is probably encouraged by Fagin-like mentors, (that the spotty youth thinks are kids like him – it’s another form of internet grooming), who then swoop in on the cracked site to set up their scams.

    I suppose it was ever thus – it’s just so much easier to do and on a wider stage than ever before. If anything will destroy the internet, it will be the virus of scammers, spammers and stupid hackers.

  • Tables
    What a great day at the auction! We’ve been wanting to change our dining room table for years. We inherited my Mother-in-law’s Ercol dining room set, which may well be a design classic, but isn’t very functional. When we have friends or family round, we have to put an old fire door on top, which makes it a bit too high for comfort and seems too big and yet somehow not big enough at the same time.

    I saw a perfect table at the auction rooms yesterday, took a photo and convinced Mrs Rayner that I should have a go for it. Okay, so it’s repro, but I’m not proud. It’s a very good quality repro in perfect showroom condidtion. The original catalogue came with it telling me it was made in 1983 of solid wood and veneer, no chipboard in sight and originally cost £350! How much would it cost now?

    I knew that similar things might come up in 7harity shops for £75-100 and set my limit at £100. There’s 12.5% buyer’s premium plus VAT on top of that, which comes to about £130. The old pine table, the lot before, went for £150 so I wondered if I should set my level a bit higher.

    I waited to see where the other bidders came in. “Come, on!” said the auctioneer. “Someone start me at £5.” I flashed my card. Some one else flashed theirs for £8. I flashed mine again for £10… and that was it! £10 for perfect regency mahogany repro – I couldn’t believe it.

    I was so pleased that I bought the lovely little pine writing desk that I had admired too. It sat in a dusty corner and was referred to as a school desk. It’s much posher than that. I got it for £12 brought it home, cleaned it up and gave it a dose of beeswax. Now it’s looking beautiful.

    My friend, Andy came with me in his estate car to fetch it home. He’d not been to the auction before and was fascinated by the way the worlds of agriculture and home furnishings collide in such a place. We turned it into a day out by having a fry-up in the canteen – chips and all.

    So why so cheap? For one thing, no one sits down to eat anymore. People eat standing up or from a tray on their lap. We sit down as a family every night and have a roast on Sundays. How do you get the family gossip if everyone is watching the telly? So who needs a dining table? And who needs a repro? The pine kitchen table was obviously going to a old house, to traditional, farmhouse-kitchen kind of people – so there is a demand for tables like that. But not for repro dining room tables. That’s why they usually end up being given to charity shops.

    As for the writing desk. Well, who writes anymore? Who needs a sloped desk? We all take the supper trays off our laps and replace them with laptop computers now. That’s why so cheap. Supply and demand. There just ain’t no demand anymore.

    Incidentally, my best bargain was the sideboard behind the table in the photo. It cost me £20. When I got home I found an envelope hidden under a drawer that contained 2 £10 notes. I got it for free!