I now know that these hours were the most educational of my childhood. The only ‘use’ my parents could imagine for all this activity was helping me down the road to becoming a computer programmer, which my Maths scores suggested was an unlikely direction. They could not imagine a world where almost every job required a computer.

What it means in my job now, is that when I am confronted with a mass of confusing data that I need to understand, I start a spreadsheet, or a database. Many of my slightly older contemporaries reach for a calculator or start an alphabetised lever arch file.

Today, adults everywhere are telling kids that they are wasting their time. When they should be learning skills that will help them get a job, they are using facebook. Let’s leave aside the fact that having a wide circle of friends is the best way yet discovered to get a job, and ask another question: Which are likely to be the most important skills in the coming century? It’s only a guess, but I would be willing to bet that a list would look something like this:

• Being able to maintain positive relationships with a very large groups of people – predominantly through the written word.

• Managing the time shifting of communications, to keep people in the loop regardless of their availability.

• Keeping a close control on which group of friends knows what, and personal privacy.

• Doing all this without ever having physically met most of the people you communicate with.

As the world economy goes global, and the physical workplace becomes less and less important, isn’t this inevitable?

So, how is a mastery of facebook a waste of time? I have a theory that kids have a knack of spotting what is really the most important skill for them to learn, and they home in on it like guided missiles. Reading novels was the Nineteenth Century equivalent; all the opinion formers of the day considered the reading of novels to be morally dangerous. But the explosion of literacy brought enormous benefits to individuals and the wider economy.

Maybe the kids know what they are doing.

I have – simultaneously – a respect for some of his views, and a loathing for the style with which he presents them. This is the man who campaigned for the right of atheists to present a ‘Thought for the Day’ in ‘God Slot’ of the Radio 4 Today programme, and when he got it, delivered a ‘thought’ of such epic bad grace that I was tempted to join a Greek Orthodox monastery immediately. (A transcript is here: top quote:  ’Humanity can leave the crybaby phase, and finally come of age.’)

But I digress.

The argument for and against faith schools is complex. I won’t try to deal with all of it. I won’t even make the argument that he underestimates children if he thinks they believe what their teachers tell them. I just wanted to add one small part of the argument that I think is often missed.

That is: that the Bible, as a piece of literature, is at the core of western culture. It is impossible to begin to understand renaissance art without having read the gospels. It is impossible to read Milton without having read the New Testament, at the very least. And what about Dante? J. S. Bach’s St Matthew Passion?

How many more footnotes would be required to understand James Joyce, without a grounding in Catholicism?

People are drawn to religion for many complex reasons. A big one is tradition and culture. I was drawn to read the Bible because I wanted to understand the world I was living in. That does not mean that I don’t want to understand science: I do, very much. But I don’t want my children to grow up thinking that Homer was a ‘crybaby’ because he attributes things to gods. In fact, I want them to grow up knowing that a belief in gods does not preclude an understanding of humanity: sometimes the opposite.

When talking about updating the stories, and putting them into a modern context, he uses the example of the classic Sherlock line ‘The game’s afoot!’, saying it would seem odd for a modern young man to say. Quite natural for a Victorian, he says, but odd for a young man of today.

Except: Sherlock was always quoting Shakespeare. One of Shakespeare’s most famous speeches, actually; the ‘Once more unto the breach’ speech from Henry V. A bit more of the speech below:

I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’

Here, ‘game’ takes on a very different meaning. It is the ‘game‘ of a hunter, like gamefowl. Literally, Shakespeare is saying that the hunted creature they are pursuing is on its feet, and that his men must chase it like greyhounds. Not that it was all a game, which ‘The game is on’ seems to mean.

I still think the modern Sherlock would quote Shakespeare: he seems well read enough. His Victorian original was always quoting Goethe in the original german, to my enormous frustration (and awe) as a young person.

So, it seems a (tiny) shame when a link between great writers is broken. Books talk among themselves: it seems rude to interrupt them.

I sincerely hope this isn’t true. If it is, I will consider it to be a terrible decision.

The Food Standard Agency was established to keep those responsible for keeping food safety  independent from those trying to promote and protect the food industry as a whole. It was not established for ideological reasons, but because of a long line of disasters in food safety.

And it is independent. All of its recommendations to ministers are published, and are in the public domain. Its has playing a key role in forcing down salt in processed food.

Obesity is an enormous problem in the western world, and is getting worse. At the most callous level, there are billions of pounds a year to be saved in public health if we can improve the nations diet.

The last Conservative government deregulated what agricultural feed manufacturers could feed cattle. In no time at all, we were feeding cows, (who are natural herbivores, lest we forget) the brains of other cows. Which resulted in Mad Cow Disease. Bad for public health, obviously, but also a disaster for the food industry.

The government will claim this is all about cutting back on quangos and saving money. I wonder. If the Food Standards Agency is abolished, I wonder how long it will be before Genetically Modified crops are in our fields.

When I was about 9, my favourite book in the world was Milliganimals by Spike Milligan. It was full of silly poems about animals (many of which I can still recite from memory), silly drawings of animals, and, best of all, the silliest story ever written, called Bald Twit Lion. It starts like this:

“Once, twice and thrice upon a time there lived a Jungle. It started at the bottom and went upwards till it reached the monkeys, who had been waiting years for the trees to reach them, and as soon as they did the monkeys invented climbing down. Most trees were made of wood, and so were the rest. Trees never spoke, not even to each other, so they never said much (actually one tree did once say “much” but nobody believed him), they never said “fish” either, not even on Fridays. It was a really good Jungle: great scarlet lilies, yellow irises, thousands of grasses all grew very happily, and this Jungle was always on time. Some people are always late, like the late King George V. But not this Jungle.”

I can remember getting about this far as a child before I started laughing out loud, and before the end of the page I had succumbed to that delicious condition, so rare in adulthood, of being completely unable to breathe from helpless laughter.  I would try to read passages to my parents, only to dissolve into hysteria after a few words. If I remembered a bit in class I would have to bite my lip to stop myself from laughing.

I was reminded of this recently, because I read a bedtime book to my son which provoked very much the same reaction in him. And I felt the writer might have had some familiarity with the Bald Twin Lion. See what you think.

The book, You’re a Bad Man, Mr. Gum by Andy Stanton, starts like this:

“This is the story of the Battle of Lamonic Bibber, or as it became known, the Dinnertime Wars or, as it didn’t become known. Ghostbusters III. And know this, my friends – it was a terrible conflict indeed. Like all wars it was full of madness and anger. Like all wars there were courageous heroes and dastardly villains. Like practically all wars there was a dirty little monkey called Philip the Horror.

But I know what you’re wondering. You’re wondering how the Dinnertime Wars got started in the first place, aren’t you?

‘How did it all start?’ you say.

‘Where did it begin? you ask.

‘What do you mean, a monkey?’ you enquire.

‘Shut up,’ I reply. ‘Stop bothering me with all these questions, and I will tell you.”

You get the idea. The Mr. Gum books are lovely to read out loud: they are very funny, and get a belly laugh from any child – or adult – who happens to be listening. Bald Twit Lion and Mr Gum are little Silly Symphonies of nonsense, in which nothing really happens, but I suspect that they are more educational than a sackful of encyclopaedias, because they play games with words, and help to instil a love of language. Or not. Who cares? They make us laugh, which is an end in itself.

Clay Shirky, says the opposite here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jul/05/clay-shirky-internet-television-newspapers I have read a lot in the last few months which takes it for granted that the paywall experiment will fail. The blogosphere has decreed that Murdoch does not ‘get’ the internet.

I am not so sure. My reasons are as follows:

1. Murdoch is very rich. Clay Shirky is not. Clay Shirky claims to have done the maths, and found that the numbers do not add up. I hope I can be forgiven for trusting the maths of a billionaire, especially when counting money.

2. Murdoch has done this before, with great success. In 1993, Murdoch brought Sky TV to Britain. Satellite television was quickly established as a national joke. The quality was poor, the monthly costs were high, and the papers gleefully reported years of huge losses. Why would people start paying for something – television – they could get (without paying extra) from the BBC, widely considered one of the best broadcasting organisations in the world?

But Murdoch is patient, and has deep pockets.

Now, Sky TV is massively profitable, and, relying less on advertising revenue, has come out of the recession stronger than ever.

Also in Murdoch’s favour is the recent arrival of a very conservative Conservative government, many members of which are openly hostile to the BBC.

I hope I am wrong, and the Mr Shirky is right. But despite what everyone is saying, Murdoch is not stupid.

I think I made my first mistake expecting it to be a puzzle game. It has many elements of the genre: you have to combine elements to make new elements, and I was looking for some guiding logic that governed why some elements can be combined, and others not. But there is none. You just have to randomly drag elements together until you get a combination. And that is it.

My ideal of puzzle game has the following elements: no luck, no randomness and no need for fast reactions. Word puzzles can be fun, but lack the purity of number puzzles, where no spelling difficulties (or national differences) have any influence. Strimko, pictured below, is ideal, but Sokoban is another example.

It is just you against the puzzle. If you can’t solve it, there is no-one to blame but yourself.

When I realised that Doodle God was not a puzzle game at all (in fairness, it is just listed as a game on the app store) I became overly agitated. It was like someone had violated a sacred principle. But what really amazed me was reading the (almost) uniform praise that the game gets from other people. What are these people thinking? Doodle God has a relationship to a real puzzle game as a toy steering wheel has to driving a car.

Thinking about it, I think the difference goes to the heart of my character. I like to think of the universe as governed by physical laws, with no supernatural influences. I like to think that all the answers to all the questions are just waiting to be discovered, some more obvious than others, but all waiting for the right mind to unlock the secret. All the seeming chaos is governed by science. This is the enlightenment view. If you don’t understand the universe, it is because you have not thought hard enough.

The other way of thinking is that the universe is governed by an unseen intelligence, whose ways are mysterious and inscrutable. This is the medieval view. That you do not expect to understand the universe, that understanding the universe is not possible for humans.

I am not saying that one way is right or wrong: my knowledge of science is limited to popular science paperbacks, and thus constitutes nothing more than a belief system for me. I just reflect that you can tell a lot from someone by which puzzle games they find satisfying to complete.

They both have websites, with links to twitter and facebook accounts. They both pay handsome tribute to the idea that we, the people, should let them know our thoughts, ideas and suggestions.

Except:

• Ed Miliband’s website has no email address on it.

• David Miliband’s ‘blog’ has comments switched off.

They both seem to want us to enter our details – phone number and everything – but when it comes down to it, don’t seem awfully keen on us telling them anything. The sites are focused on the more urgent task of how they can efficiently talk to us.

If they were serious about taking on board people’s ideas, and really wanted to help people collaborate on the future of the country, then the internet has some tried and tested tools that help people work together.

Perhaps they could install MediaWiki? Wikipedia is based on it, and it’s free. Imagine dozens of people reviewing and discussing a manifesto, line by line. Maybe a forum of some kind? Some pretty small groups manage to maintain a forum.

Administering such sites would be time consuming, of course. But that is like arguing that surgery is too time consuming for doctors to waste their time with.

Listening to the people is a politician’s job. We want to talk to them. Do they really want to listen?

One of the lists was a 1001 movies you must see, which is ordered chronologically with the oldest films at the start.

The two oldest were filmed in 1902 and 1903, and are well worth watching. Many of the oldest on the list are out of copyright and available on either archive.org and YouTube.

Here is one: The Great Train Robbery, by Edison’s studio.

A couple of things stood out for me, a couple of cinematic conventions, one of which has been retained, and one amended.

Firstly, the convention that if you hit someone on the back of the head with a pistol, they will instantly lose consciousness until someone splashes water in their face. I have no personal experience of being clubbed, but I imagine it is rather difficult to judge a blow so perfectly that you do more than leave a nasty bruise, render someone unconscious,  but still stop short of permanent brain damage.

Secondly, how people react to being shot. People seem to die instantly when shot in movies (expect for important characters, who linger quietly, without vomiting or convulsing, until they have said their piece), and indicate that they have been hit by hunching and falling, and remaining still. But in one of these movies, they do not hunch: they all throw their hands vertically into the air as they fall.

Perhaps that is more realistic: heck, in 1903 you might have a people around who could draw upon personal experience of western gunfights. But it looks odd to modern eyes.

Surely it would help in negotiations with publishers (who are being pulled between Amazon and Apple) if they could point to sales from iPhone/iPod Touch users, and possibly even Mac users as well?

There are two possible explanations that I can think of. One, Apple are trying to use the iBook app as bait, so that existing iPhone users will buy the iPad as well. I don’t believe this: Apple always seem to play the long game. Which feeds into my second theory: That Mr Jobs just doesn’t think that reading a book on your iPhone is a compelling enough experience, and he doesn’t want to give people the opportunity to dismiss ebooks as a result.

I have no idea, of course. But I can’t imagine any other company that would deny themselves the sales: with one free download they could sell a lot of ebooks.