South West London Humanists: Discussion on Overseas Aid

I like to go to the South West London Humanists monthly meetings because the debates there are interesting and cover an unusual range of topics.

This month the topic was "Why spend so much on overseas aid?" and we were very lucky to have the discussion led by Matthew Rycroft CBE, Permanent Secretary at the Department for International Development, and former British Permanent Representative to the UN.

Matthew Rycroft started his talk with the very good news that the number of people in extreme poverty had halved in the last ten years. But that still meant that 10% of people, that is 700,000 persons, are living in extreme poverty today.

asking us three multiple choice questions on the improvements made in recent years on things like girls' education. In all three cases the most positive answer was the correct one and all three times few, or very few, of us knew that.

The point here is that one of the reasons that Overseas Aid is criticised is that its success is not generally known.

While the picture was positive overall not all countries had made the same progress in all areas and, in particular, progress in sub-Saharan Africa has been lagging.

Matthew then gave us more details of the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals which he explained could be summarised as People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace and Partnership.

Having explained what Overseas Aid is for, how it is delivered and what it has achieved, Matthew then opened the floor to questions which led to an interesting discussions. What follows are my views of what various people said.

Corruption is in the eye of the beholder and there is a big difference between government officials siphoning large amounts out of aid projects and poor people having to pay other poor people to get simple things done, like get an appointment with a doctor.

There were various questions suggesting that aid recipient should behave as we tell them and not as we do, e.g. introduce population controls or divert spending from other areas (space programmes were mentioned but are not relevant; India and China do not get any aid from DfID). I think that is a modern form of imperialism, we know what is best for you, and said so. My passion was noted.

The spending of 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI )is an historical number with no hard science behind it, e.g. it is not the right answer but it is a good one. It may have come from a starting point of 1% with the other 0.3% meant to come from other sectors, notably charities, within the donating countries.

That 0.7% equates to circa £14bn for the UK. To compare, our defence spending target set by NATO is 2% of GDP (a slightly smaller number) which makes that almost three times as big.

Several countries match or exceed that target headed by Sweden who give 1.4%. Given the success story we heard earlier I think that this is clearly money well spend and I would rather the UK was planning to increase the percentage donated rather than spending effort trying to justify what is already spent.

It was a very interesting discussion on an important subject and Matthew Rycroft was a very able and knowledgeable speaker.

Willoughby Pub Quiz (January 2020)

I have continued to set the questions for the Willoughby Pub Quiz every six or seven weeks as a group of us take it in turns to set the questions in return for free beer on the night we are quizmaster.

Over the years that I have been doing the quiz the way that I do it has established some sort of pattern with the twin aims of making the quiz interesting, i.e. diverse rounds, and easy for me to compile. Sometimes that works.

Recently I have had a theme for the whole quiz (apart from the final round) again with the aims of making things more fun and also easier.

This week it was trains.

Round one was questions on, er, trains, and you can see those here. Round two was music about trains, e.g. Last train to Clarksville; round three was people related to trains, e.g. IK Brunel, round four was films about trains, e.g. Unstoppable, and round five was places associated with trains, e.g. London Waterloo.

Round six was, as always, on this week's news and sport with several points available on each question.

Every time there is one round that is bit of a struggle and this time it was people connected with trains, while there are many engineers and architects associated with railways not many of them are famous and so there was no point putting them in a quiz. My get-around was to have five engineers and five people in the arts world, e.g. the authors of Railways Children and Night Train.

I used to do a picture round, and I still carry one, but as the main quiz finished around 12:30am I left it out, again. One day we'll manage to start the quiz before 11pm and then I'll have time for pictures.

Joker: Killer Smile is exceptional

I do not read many traditional superhero comics these days but I do most certainly read comics written by Jeff Lemire and drawn by Andrea Sorrentino so I had to give Joker: Killer Smile a try.

As you would expect from that team this is not a traditional superhero comic and it is also very good.

I think that it is fair to say that the Batman and Joker world has been milked for all it is worth in the last few decades and while a few stories have stood out, obviously Killing Joke is one of these, the rest have disappeared in a vast sea of sameness. In such a large sea only the exceptional can stand out.

I think that Joker: Killer Smile is exceptional.

There are only two main protagonists, Joker and his psychotherapists  Dr Ben Arnell. Batman makes a brief appearance, because he had to, but makes no material contribution to the story. This is about Joker, not Batman.

The psychotherapist thinks he can cure Joker and spends hours talking to him in Arkham Asylum. Not surprisingly these conversations do not go the way that Dr Arnell hoped but their consequence is a genuine surprise. It's a tight noir tale that grips from the start and drags you into dark unexpected places.

The story is a good one (so far, I have read two of the three chapters) and the storytelling is excellent. Both Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino are masters in their fields, with the awards to prove it, and as a team they are even better.

Joker: Killer Smile shows how superhero comics can tell great, and scary, stories without relying on people punching each other.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout; a mission too far

Christmas time means watching a lot of films and I caught Mission: Impossible – Fallout almost by accident, I saw it on the TV schedule after it had started and watched from the beginning on my iPad using the All4 app.

I wish I had not bothered.

The film has had consistently good, or even great, reviews Wikipedia tells me but I felt it moved too far from Mission Impossible towards Mission Dynamic. It was more like a poor Bond film with Ethan Hunt very much front and centre and with the usual action movie scenes of car chases, shoot-outs and running across rooftops.

Too often Hunt admitted to not having a plan when having a cunning plan is the whole point of the franchise.

Presumably somebody in the script team had seen 1993's Cliffhanger, with Sylvester Stallone playing the action lead, and thought that they would just steal a scene from that without anyone noticing. Well I noticed and Cliffhanger is a much better film.

How I mention it, Cliffhanger also does big locations better and the dramatic mountain scenery is a key part of the film. Early MI films had given us locations like Prague, Sydney Harbour and the tallest building in the world whereas Fallout seemed to spend most of its time in underground car parks.

The film also felt as though the producers realised that it was not working and so they pumped it full of unnecessary and distracting music to fill the space where the story should have been.

There were a couple of clever rubber-faced screens but these were too short and both too obvious and they had nothing like the impact that they did in, say, MI2.

Apparently there are two more MI films in the works. I'll be watching those too so I hope they are better than this one. I can forgive one dud in a good series.

I averaged 23,908 steps a day in 2019

I last posted my annual walking stats two years ago and then my average for 2017 was 18,047, which I was very happy with.

The substantial increase since then is due to several factors but the main one is the motivation to walk more.

Oddly retirement is, I think, only a minor factor as walking to/from walk and taking a lunch break gave me a bedrock of 14k steps a day which I could then build on in the evening with walks to theatres and pubs.

A lot of the extra distance is coming in the late evening, e.g. after the theatre or pub, when I walk for walking sake, there is usually little to look at in the dark, and also to catch up on my podcasts.

I also do one long walk a week with a friend, but more on that later.