Displacement activities!

The other day a friend sent me a message asking if it was snowing in our neck of the woods. She was staying with her daughter somewhere in the London area and had looked at the Manchester Evening News website (she spends an inordinate amount of time messing about on her computer) and it had told her it was snowing here. It wasn’t snowing. Maybe it was snowing further north but not on our house. We had a little banter about not believing what you read in the newspapers. Ah, she commented, but they had photos and everything. Further banter ensued about how photos can be doctored, as some famous people have insisted to be the case.

Today I checked the weather on the app on my phone. It told me it was snowing. Which it patently was not! Maybe someone has got at these weather forecasting or reporting programmes and filled them with fake reports! Can such things be hacked? All I wanted to know was if rain was forecast for the next hour as we were going to go and rake leaves in the garden and did not fancy getting wet in the process. We did have to retreat at one point because of hailstones. And snow is forecast for later. We shall see!

The leaf-raking, along with cleaning the kitchen to within and inch of its life, giving the bathroom the same treatment, and changing the beds, is part of a series of displacement activities to avoid reading yet more post-election analysis and blame-casting in today’s newspaper.

As regards the leaf-raking, it was Voltaire’s Candide (no doubt someone will correct me if I have misremembered this) who told us, “Il faut cultiver notre jardin”. He had nothing similar to say about housework but he probably had someone else to do that for him or he would probably have expressed a similar idea.

We are just getting on with things.

Now, a favourite ethical discussion to come up in tutor-group activities is the old question about what you would do if you found a bag with a large amount of money it. If it had the loser’s address, would you return it? Would you take it to the police station if there was no loser-identification? Would you just take it home and consider it your own? So imagine checking your online banking and discovering that almost £200,000 had just appeared in your account. Some poor chap gave his solicitor his bank details with one digit wrong and the money he had inherited went to somebody else’s account. Ouch!

The surprised recipient of the large amount of unexpected cash had some debts and first of all convinced himself it was a belated settling of his grandmother’s estate. So he used some of it to pay off some credit card bills - to the tune of about £40,000 - WOW!! And that was small beer compared to what he owed all round. Then his conscience got the better of him and he tried to give it back to the bank, who initially would have nothing to do with it. How very odd! It all got sorted in the end but the poor chap who thought Christmas had come early and that some of his debt problems were solved had to take out further loans so that he had the full amount to pay back.

The original, and eventual, inheritor of the cash should consider himself very lucky! But it does show that there is some decency left in the world. And that you have to very careful with numbers.