[An unoccupied, windowless but otherwise plushly decorated hotel room. The single door opens and a valet escorts Tony Blair, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher into the room. Churchill and Thatcher take seats on either side of the room. Blair stands in the middle.]

Blair: I have no regrets.

Thatcher: I have no regrets.

Churchill: I have many regrets. A man without regret is a man who has done nothing or cared even less.

Blair: Look, what I mean to say is…

Thatcher: Will you keep on doing that? Will you keep on reinterpreting what you say, like a chorus of commentary upon yourself? There’s no voters here. There’s no need to maintain the pretense. Stand by what you say and do. There’s no pretense here - here, of all places.

Blair: The thing is, I really don’t see why I’m here. The decision I took — and frankly would take again — was in the best interests of peace. If there was any possibility that Saddam could develop weapons of mass destruction…

Churchill: Any possibility, do you say? By that principle I assume you’d enslave us all, for the possibility always persists. The man of judgement balances probabilities, not possibilities. When Stalin sequestered half of Europe within his iron curtain, his tyranny was certain. The reason for our not acting was not based on possibility, for we knew what he would do and the threat he posed to our continued security. We did not act because of probabilities, not possibilities. The probability was that further war would have resulted in greater tragedy. It was imaginable to have continued the war, to have kept our forces mobilized and turned them on our allies of convenience, the Soviet war machine. We gave it thought. I had the report written, though in those days we mostly used military intelligence to make decisions, not to make propaganda. We thought about it; I thought about it, but we did not strike against Stalin. To have done so would have done more harm than good, no matter how terrible his tyranny proved to be. Possibilities did not come into it.

Thatcher: I admire you, Winston.

Churchill: Admire yourself, dear lady. I made my choices as best I could, and see where I am now.

Blair: (to Churchill) I admire you too.

Churchill: I’d offer the same advice as proferred to Margaret, but I fear you have no need of it. You’re too full of self-admiration already.

Blair: Now, see, what I did was within the law… (interrupted)

Churchill: You remind me of that manipulating schemer, Gandhi. He knew the law. He was also a wizard who knew how to beguile people. When I compare you to that fakir of fakery, I don’t mean it as a compliment.

Thatcher: You shouldn’t be here, Winston. You saved democracy in World War II.

Churchill: I suppose I’ll find out why I’m here in due course. Perhaps I sent too many to their deaths, or perhaps too few. Perhaps it was the lives lost at Gallipoli, or refusing to turn on the Russians in order to save the Eastern Europeans at the end of the Second World War. Or perhaps it was returning Britain to the Gold Standard, and all the trouble that caused. Who can say. In this universe there’s a judgement wiser than that of men.

Thatcher: You shouldn’t be here, Winston. We all make mistakes. The General Strike, riots, political upheaval, the end of empire… you faced it all. A leader cannot afford to second-guess every decision. If you were brutal sometimes, it is because you had to be firm to be fair.

Churchill: I had to be firm to be fair? Perhaps. But it sounds like you’re justifying yourself more than you’re consoling me. When asked if we make mistakes, we assure that we do, for we are human after all. But when asked to identify a single mistake, our memory fades and not a one comes to mind.

Blair: I made mistakes. The former Yugoslavia for instance… (interrupted)

Thatcher: (To Blair) You would have made a tolerable leader of the Tory party. You’re greatest mistake was to join with Labour.

Churchill: Give the boy some credit. Leaders pick their parties, not the other way around. I was a rat more than once. The boy picked a side and it suited him - at least he stuck to it, unlike me. There’s no great harm in his choosing to sit opposite you. It shows he had the foresight to swim with the tide, not against it. And at least he deserves credit for never being a socialist.

Thatcher: Yes, at least you were never a socialist, were you Tony?

Tony: Look, I think we’re drifting off the point here a little, don’t you think? We should… (interrupted)

Churchill: (Lifts his cane, to point angrily at Blair) The point you say? What point would that be? I was battling with the House of Lords before you were born. I was introducing taxes to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor before it became fashionable. And what, in comparison, did you do? You turned the second chamber into a monstrosity of government lackeys, and the welfare state into a drain on every decent working fellow. The point is that we are here, and by God’s will we deserve to be. That is the only point that I can see, beyond this here point (waves cane) that I’m pointing at you.

Blair: Well, I don’t understand why I should be here. I was a good Christian all my life… (interrupted)

Thatcher: So was I. I was brought up a strict Methodist. We’re here because we failed, to some degree. Perhaps it was the impossibility of the decisions we faced that has led us to be here.

Churchill: I rather suspect that vanity was the deadly sin that pays for our lodging in this establishment. It’s vanity to think a man can rise himself above his fellows and be much better or wiser than the rest of them. A necessary vanity, perhaps, but vanity all the same.

Blair: Listen, we’re not tyrants. We were elected. I was elected to protect and serve the British people, by the British people. To do that, I realized that regime change was necessary and inevitable in Iraq if we wanted to protect… (interrupted)

Thatcher: We don’t have to listen to you. Please stop now. You’re making this intolerable.

(The room falls silent as Blair realizes the truth of this.)

Churchill: That’s the greatest torment the poor boy can imagine - to not be listened to. He has been listened to all his life, as was I. I think only you, Margaret, can understand what it was like to fight for the limelight.

Thatcher: I am a woman, but I never saw that as a serious impediment.

Blair: Nor should you, opportunity should be for all in equal measure… (interrupted)

Thatcher: You say that without irony, don’t you? And I thought you were only allowed to be Labour Party leader, only had the chance to be Primeminister, because you were a well-spoken, well-schooled white Englishman that the middle classes could warm too. That was the essence of your attraction, wasn’t it? As Primeminister, my government delivered social mobility. Your government eroded it. You talk about reducing social barriers yet you built them higher for all, and took advantage of them for yourself. It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for Gordon Brown.

Blair: I’m not inclined to take a lecture from you on how to reduce division in society. My point is that… (interrupted)

Churchill: (Points with his cane) And this, is my point!

Blair: (Resumes and talks over Churchill) There is a point and I intend to share it, even if you’re unwilling to hear me out. We’re politicians and we did what we thought best. I’ll plead my case and I’ll plead it to anyone who’ll listen. If you’re not listening, then fair enough, I’ll practice and you can talk to each other or sit in silence as you please. I can account for what I’ve done and that’s what I intend to do.

Churchill: There’s no need to give your account. You’re not surrounded by journalists any longer, except in so far as I was once counted an exponent of that profession. No, accounts are not needed here. To atone is what is needed, not to account.

Blair: (Getting angry) Look, I did nothing wrong.

Thatcher: (Grave) I did what I believe was right, but I still sent British troops to their graves. War is not a topic for frivolous equivocation.

Blair: (Gesticulating) We had to deal with this threat of WMD. Because of terrorism, the calculus of risk had changed immeasurably since the two of you were leaders. I believed it was beyond doubt that Saddam had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons. But suppose we put it the other way around. It’s really really important to understand the decision I took, and would take again, was that the primary consideration was not to take any risks with Saddam. This was a man who showed his willingness to use WMDs against his own people, when he gassed thousands of Kurds… (interrupted)

Churchill: In my time, I also ordered the use of poison gas against the Kurdish rebels. They were uncivilized and it proved to be effective if also cruel. (To Blair) I suppose that means you could have justified the overthrow of my regime, if it had suited you.

Thatcher: Please stop with the speech-making, both of you. I think I’d rather like to sit in quiet now.

Blair: I’ll not sit in quiet. (Looks upwards) He is listening to us, as always. He can hear me defend myself…

Thatcher: You’re not the only lawyer in this room. But that doesn’t mean you’re entitled to a judge or jury.

Blair: (Ignores Thatcher) The fact is, force is always an option. What changed after September 11 was that it was necessary — and there was no other way of dealing with this threat — for us to remove Saddam. (To Thatcher) You, of all people, should appreciate that, to stand up to terror and to tyrants. The primary consideration for me was to send an absolutely powerful, clear and unremitting message that, after September 11, if you were a regime engaged in WMD, you had to stop.

Churchill: Unless you’re regime is too powerful or too inconvenient to stop, like the Communists in Korea or the Jews in the Middle East. I think now you should stop. Margaret is right. We’ve had our opportunities to talk throughout our lives. Now may be the time to turn to quiet contemplation of what we did.

Blair: I take responsibility for what I’ve done. I have no regrets.

Thatcher: I’m not for turning back and retracing my steps. However, perhaps now might be a time for looking back and admitting a regret or two.

Churchill: I have many regrets, although I’m also prepared to admit that I did what I thought was right at the time and would doubtless do most, if not all of it again. That’s why I expect we’re here. For good or bad, we’re irredeemably human, and prone to err. I intend to ask for forgiveness. Even if I can’t divine my faults, I’m confident that they exist anyhow.

Thatcher: You must be sincere to ask for forgiveness.

Blair: (Shakes head) There’s no forgiveness that I seek. I’ll be judged by what I’ve done and the consequences, which were good. That’s good enough for me.

Churchill: Perhaps forgiveness is beyond us. We’re tools of the master, or of whatever forces that exist in his place and that we just imagine must take his form. We are made as well as we were intended to be, save for any defects in the exercise of our free will, for which only we can take the blame. For my faults, I’ll take my punishment however it’s administered. I served my short time on Earth, and filled it as best I could. That time I treated not as a gift, but as merely borrowed. If now I must serve as your fellow inmate, locked in this asylum of reflection, I’ll take that as my fit and proper punishment, and my just reward.

If you ever watch children playing football, the preparation for the game begins with locating a ball and picking the two teams. The kids will put down jumpers for goalposts or otherwise agree what the goals are. Then they kick-off. They run around and play football. What they do not do before the game begins is form a committee to review the rules of the game, nominate who will be the referee and his or her assistants, or sit down and familiarize themselves with the Football Association’s handbook in case of a dispute later on. Yes, youthful footballers will break the rules from time to time, but they somehow manage to handle transgressions as they go along. With kids playing football, the model of using common sense to decide who has cheated and what is fair usually works pretty darned well, in addition to saving a lot of time and bother. If children can enjoy a good kick-around like that, what then has gone wrong with adult life?

In Britain, professionalism seems to be ever more backed by rules, and ever less backed by professionalism. The nadir came when two Police Community Support Officers, demonstrating little interest in human life, nor support for their community, allowed a young boy to drown because they lacked the training to wade into the water and pull him out. You can only hope and prey that your own life never comes to depend on people who might need to show initiative in the absence of both pay and education, if this is how the professionals behave. The PCSOs had already had a good example set for them. The boy who drowned did so after climbing in to rescue his own sister, yet two adults shirked any sense of moral duty, safe in the knowledge they had no legal duty to get their feet wet. Whilst a child had learnt right from wrong, the cut-price coppers had learned the rules, and the rules said they could not risk their own lives to save another person’s life. The consequence is that they did their job, by doing nothing, and a life was lost. Sadly, this was not an instance where the exception proved the rule.

The worst rules are Health & Safety rules, of course. These rules are in turn fuelled by a litigious blame culture. In a society where every individual is expected to know the endless government rules for what benefits they can claim, what tax credits they are entitled to, and what tax they must voluntarily and cheerily give up for the greater good, it makes sense to create a grey economy based solely on the concept that if something goes wrong, then somebody should be made to pay, and hence somebody must be held to blame. Of course, there are plenty of circumstances where nobody is to blame when terrible things happen. That, however, is uninteresting, so we increasingly employ people so they can be later blamed. If you own a company and allow it to be run by greedy corrupt imbeciles, blame the company’s auditors, not yourself. If you die from heart disease, blame the people who sold you fast food; do not blame yourself for not buying jogging shoes and running off the lard that clogged both your wide ass and narrowed arteries. And if the rain pours and the wind blows, causing your riverside home to flood or the tiles to fall from your roof, blame the builder, blame the engineers who built the flood defences, blame the weatherman, blame anyone - but never blame yourself by buying a rubbish old house in a perilous location. More than anything, Britain has a service economy, and with moving money at a low ebb, the top dog in services is the service in legal advice. We need an economy that keeps lawyers in business. Otherwise, the aspirations of the middle class will be shown to be uncomfortably ill-founded. The foundations are weak because Britain’s service industry is built on a quicksand of its diminished real industry. Lawyers need to be given the right conditions to thrive and multiply, and rules are to lawyers what sh*t is to mushrooms. The greater the number of rules, the greater the need and advantage in engaging lawyers, so obviously we are all better off if there are more rules. All of which means there should be no surprises that lawyers are so keen to be in government, and governments are so keen on adding to society’s inventory of rules.

There is a clue in the world ‘ruler’. Rulers make rules, and they claim to have the measure fo all things. The news is always full of stories of government passing new laws in order to crack down on this and that. But do you remember the occasion when government reduced the number rules, making the rulebook of life lighter, for a change? Despite my ranting, I can think of an example. Small companies no longer need a company secretary that is separate to its single director. That is a good rule change – the company secretary was a cost but not a benefit to anybody but the people who made money from being company secretary. The upshot is that a company can perfectly well exist with only one employee. But even when the rules are changed by government, some institutions reinstate those rules for the back door. Take Britain’s Royal Mail, for example, well-known monopoly supplier of postal services and net drain on the economy because they always make a loss. They charge about £80 to forward business mail for a year. Yet Royal Mail expect businesses to provide signatures from two employees if redirecting a company’s mail. This is despite the fact the service is identical to forwarding a person’s mail, including a sole trader’s mail, yet you do not need two people to say that one person’s mail should be forwarded. If a company with just one employee wants their mail forwarded, they need to get somebody else to write a letter saying everything is okay. The reason given by the Royal Mail for this rule? They want to prevent fraud. Presumably no fraudster has the imagination or resources to provide a Mickey Mouse letter in order to hijack a business’ mail. Or, rather, Royal Mail can contemptuously say they have done everything they could to prevent such fraud. Of course, it is easier for many modern business to just shift all correspondence with banks and suppliers on-line, and avoid relying on the Royal Mail altogether. Hmmm… now what were those Royal Mail strikers saying about the vital service they provided and how they deserve to be subsidized as a result?

The ultimate in rule-driven paradoxes is when Government, the highest rule-imposing body in the land, sets rules for itself. It is the metaphorical equivalent of somebody who counts the calories whilst shoving another cream pie into their face. However ridiculous it is to set rules for yourself, that is what the British government is preoccupied with doing. For example, they intend to introduce a rule which will bind them to pay off the huge national debt they have run up. What is the point of this rule? It is to say they trust themselves to manage the economy, but they do not trust themselves to manage the economy, so they will manage the economy by imposing a rule that they will follow no matter how much they do not want to follow it. This is from the same people who promised an end to boom and bust. Either government needs to borrow or it does not. If they need to borrow, they should, and if not, they should not. Setting a rule blindly of the circumstances is meaningless. The same government already had a rule about borrowing over the economic cycle. First they stretched it, then they broke it, and they justified this by saying they needed to. Fair enough, but that means the rule itself is pointless. Now the government offers a new rule, which is a rule to pay off the debt. It may be a rule, but is not a consistent yardstick for how they will behave.

The irony is that this is a government well versed in bending and breaking rules, such as the rules on when you can start a war. The Iraq Enquiry plods along. The inevitable revelations focus on how government lawyers thought the government was breaking international law by instigating an attack on Iraq without a UN resolution. The absurdity of rules is exemplified by they interplay. For example, wars cost money. They cost lots of money (as well as lives). That is why troops get killed for want of helicopters and body armour, because troops are cheap but helicopters and body armour are expensive. And now we have a rule on paying down the national debt. Does this mean that, if the situation were the same and there was another Saddam Hussein pretending to have WMDs, we would not go to war? International law on starting wars would not be the impediment, but heavens forbid we break our own rules on managing public sector borrowing and find ourselves unable to pay the price of more military intervention.

There are rules everywhere you look these days. Keep off the grass. Maximum speed 20 miles per hour. No parking between the hours of 8am and 8pm. Inform the dentist of the need to cancel an appointment 48 hours in advance. Tick the box to agree to the personal user licence for this software. Read this summary of the changes in the terms and conditions for your credit card. On top of the rules, there are yet more rules. If you do not read the reams of paperwork explaining the rules for your bank account, then what of it? You can rely on the reams of rules created by Government and the reams of rules created by the banking regulator to ensure the bank’s rules are reasonable after all. If the government’s rules are no good, then go to Europe’s rules. And if America’s rules get broken, they can also be applied to British citizens, ensuring international rule subservience. Subservience, that is, for common people. Politicians tend to be exempt from the rules, reportedly for the good of everyone they represent.

Remarkably, for all the rules in force in Britain, there is never a rule when you need one. In Doha I queued five hours for tickets to a football game, and not a single person pushed in. If only visitors to the Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Royal Academy were as well behaved as those footy fanatics. On a rainy day, the security guard repeatedly asked people to budge forward in the long and winding queue, for the sake of ensuring everyone was under shelter and the building entrance was not blocked. Without complaint, they did so. Yet despite the visible evidence of a long line of people waiting patiently, two old dears bypassed the long line, strolled straight up to the counter and proceeded to reach into their purses to buy two tickets. So much for rules in nation that supposedly loves to queue. I was thankful that the woman behind the counter was made of sterner stuff than the timorous security guard who had been so confident in instructing people to take two steps forward whenever a gap emerged in the queue. The ticket vendeuse, spying my flabbergasted look at these two rude and selfish old women, challenged their presumption and sent them to the back. From appearances, the ill-mannered duo looked like retired teachers, which might explain the need for endless ASBOs for Britain’s youth.

You cannot entirely blame British government for the purgatory of rules taken to inhuman extremes. In the final reckoning, politicians tend to obey their voters and generally follow the fashions of the era. As far as the average Brit is concerned, football is far more important than politics, and football is far from immune to the chronic disease of the creeping rules. Even little children can throw down their jumpers for goalposts and enjoy a perfectly fun kickabout, but for multimillionaire professional footballers, rules are a constant source of frustration, thanks to their application, non-application or misapplication, depending on which side you play for. It is not hard for kids to referee their own games, because football has so few rules. Do not use your hands. Get the ball in the net. Do not try to defeat an opponent by swinging a machete threateningly in his direction. But listen to the endless drivel of overpaid pundits and cry-baby managers, and you would think that football is the unfairest game in the world, in desperate need of a rules overhaul. TV replays, extra assistants, fitter referees, and even the manager’s right to challenge decisions have all been proposed as solutions to the seeming plague of ‘bad’ decisions. Meanwhile, the rules themselves are tweaked for the good of the game. Level is onside, keepers can move sideways at a penalty, kicking the ball away merits yellow and a foul by the last man deserves red… did these rules really improve the game so much?

The eccentricity of sporting rules is that they apply to the other side, not your own. You still hear people still repeating the delusion that British players cheat less than their European counterparts. Presumably anyone who still believes this must always shut their eyes whenever players with extraordinary strength and balance, people like Heskey, Owen, and Gerrard, make a purposeful run in the penalty box. You are more likely to see Gerrard launch into a stream of upper cuts in a bar than see him trip up whilst walking down the street. But put him in that mysterious zone that surrounds the opponents’ goal, a rectangular version of the Bermuda triangle, and strange forces compel him to collapse to ground faster than a tower of cards built atop a jenga tower on a rickety stool. With the stool on the top flight of Blackpool Tower on the windiest day of the year. In the most debated example of rules confusion in recent weeks, the Irish team expected all rules to be rewritten because one decision went against them. To hear the protestations on behalf of the Irish national team, after being unfortunately defeated in the their World Cup qualification play-off with France, you would think they were odds-on favourites to win the tournament, instead of a hapless marginal team that failed to well enough to go through based on the results from their qualifying league alone. But it is difficult to be too harsh on the Irish, as half of their squad is British after all, reliant on mysterious grandparents and great uncles to be eligible to play for a land which they only tend to visit when playing ‘home’ games for Ireland. And tells you all you need to know about the purpose of rules in international football.

Not everywhere in the world is hamstrung by rules. Being abroad, it is a revelation to discover there are places where you can swim in the sea without disclaimers warning that you might be drowned, and fizzy drinks cans that assume you can pull a ring without severing your forefinger. At the aforementioned queue for football tickets in Doha, they kept the store open an extra hour beyond closing time, because serving customers is considered a higher priority than subservience to the employment contracts of the people paid to sell those tickets. Britain has the mother of Parliaments, and she is the happy matriarch of every Brit. Mother’s been parenting her children for a long time. She does not much enjoy letting them off the leash, never mind trusting them to make their own decisions.

Even when leaving rules Britannia, they give you a parting gift of extended rules impositions to tide you over until you return. A bag that was light enough to be allowed in the cabin on the way in is subjected to a precise weighing to confirm compliance whilst on the way out. See-through bags of toiletries had nestled unmolested in hand baggage prior to arrival, but demand thorough inspection on departure. These transgressions, though, are mere peccadilloes compared to the great bête noire of international travel – believing you should be free to move around this world without a piece of paper that gives you permission. I do understand why there is a rule that says I am supposed to have a valid passport. What I do not understand is the remarkable effort is put into enforcing this rule, which at every turn presupposes that previous checks had been performed by bumbling nincompoops. The airline checks my passport when I check-in. At the border control, my passport is checked in addition to the boarding card I got when checking in. At the departure gate, they check my passport and tear my boarding card in two. In the hour or so from start to finish, my passport has not changed once, but it has been checked three times. Then, when sitting in the departure lounge, two border agency goons are wandering around. What are they employed to do? You guessed it. They check my passport. Clearly not overworked, they would have checked my passport twice if the dozy woman, following the same path trod by her burly male colleague a mere two minutes before, had not been challenged about the need for a passport to be checked twice. Which tells you everything you need to know about the quality of the check – what if I had been lying? She did not check that, but just took my word for it.

Rules are imposed by big people on little people, which is why parents set rules for children, and not vice versa. You and I may not be allowed to drive in the bus lane at any time (unless you are driving a bus) but when Tony Blair comes to town, he should stop the traffic, or so the theory goes. All of which explains why certain rules, like those for claiming expenses or paying tax, are so liable to be bent, twisted, exploited, broken and cheated by the ultimate rule-makers, our Members of Parliament.

Rules turn us into children. Not happy children playing in the park and making things up as we go along. Miserable children, bound and gagged and unable to act or think for ourselves. For adults to depend on rules is troubling, because there are no adults who can be relied upon to be more adult than any other adult. Which means we might as well recite rules in the mirror and enforce them by bending over and spanking ourselves. If kids playing football can get by with few rules, maybe they have more sense than the infantilized grown-ups around them. They get by with a sense of right and wrong, of luck and misfortune, of getting up and getting on with it, no matter what the game, or life, sends their way. Adults, in contrast, substitute lengthier rules for shorter rules and consider this to be a sign of great progress. They are wrong, and with rules, we have long passed the point where less would be more. We need fewer rules and to follow them, not more and to ignore them. The problem is, there is no way to turn the tide and have fewer rules in future – unless we wrote a new rule that makes that happen…

Miserypuss Rupert Murdoch may have decided that deindexing his news content from Google may be good for business, but it would be terrible for Halfthoughts. Whatever people are searching for in life, or at least on the web, a surprising number of them find themselves being pointed the way of this website. Heck knows if they are satisfied but what they find here, but I thought I would share some of the highlights from the public’s searches. Even without Murdoch, Google can send people to over 1,000,000,000 webpages - that is a trillion to those of you who could not keep tracks of the zeroes. Obviously a trillion is not enough unless Halfthoughts is one of them, judged by the wacky search strings that lead people here…

“Poem about being 30″

Entering the third decade leads to a downturn in the prosaic? There are some lyrical consolations for those that turn 30 here.

“Stephen Hawking voice simulator”

Stephen Hawking is so cool, that all the kids want to sound like him. That, or they just want a share of his lucrative voiceover revenues. The readers who came here did not find out much about the NeoSpeech product that Hawking uses, but they did find this.

“Harry Hill beds beds beds”

I am not alone in remembering possibly the longest gag that comedian Harry Hill has ever told. But as the joke revolves around the simple idea of two competing bed shops, each one taking turns to add another word ‘beds’ to their shop’s name, so that ‘beds beds beds’ becomes ‘beds beds beds beds’ becomes ‘beds beds beds beds beds’ and so forth, what did they want from me? The punchline? I remember it well: ‘what a ridiculous situation to find yourself in’. A bit like the situation when people register web domains like www.wwwwwwwww.com…

“Bora Bodur”

Misspelling the name of Borobudur, the Buddhist monument in Java, leads the unwary to one of the comic characters in my series of Star Wars spin-offs…

“bananasplits.com”

If it is not odd enough that people search for a website instead of just going straight to the URL, it is even odder that people looking for a web dose of the Banana Splits’ mayhem end up at Halfthoughts instead.

“Isobel McKendry”

Presumably I am not alone in wanting to get in touch with the Head of Service at internet bank ‘Intelligent Finance’.

“Let em all go to hell except Cave 76″

Searching for this line from a classic Mel Brooks comedy routine will take the unwary to my very first Halfthought.

“Probability of navigating an asteroid field”

Google points people at another one of my parallel universe Star Wars episodes. The real question is who tries to plan their space journey by raking through the internet?

“World without porn”

Whatever this person was looking for, they will not find it on the world wide web. Rather the opposite. But at least there is no porn on my site. For some reason, readers have never asked for me to post shots of myself in revealing poses.

“Actors that run”

Clearly there is a need for a resource that analyses how well actors run, because actors can act, and they can run, but they cannot hide from how bad they run. This was my breakdown of the best and worst running jokes in acting.

“Did King John sign the Magna Carta mostly because he agreed with it, wanted the barons to stop moaning or did he want to make a date in history?”

That this question generated a hit for Halfthoughts should prove the site deals with the really serious academic questions, as well as what actors look like when they run.

“The Official Report, House of Commons (5th series), 11 November 1947, vol. 444, cc. 206–07.”

Hmmm… I hope they did not confuse Halfthoughts with the parliamentary report they were looking for. Halfthoughts should be taken seriously sometimes. Official reports, in contrast, tend to be works of fiction.

“What if vampires were real?

Whilst you might be amused by my alternative to Vampire folklore the answer to this question is obvious. If vampires were real, they would have their own website and a vampire FAQ.

“Do women objectify men because they like their personality?”

I do not think this question is answered anywhere in Halfthoughts, so let me answer it here. No. They objectify men because they like their firm butts.

“How long would I live if zombies were real?”

A peculiar question if ever there was one. It depends on cholesterol levels, diet, family history of heart disease, whether you look both ways when crossing the road, and if the zombies think you are tasty. My advice would be to turn down offers from zombies wanting to give a massage using olive oil.

“How to draw a charlatan”

Another peculiar query. Just sketch any mainstream celeb claiming they designed their own range of clothes, wrote their own novel, created their own perfume or even gave an interview without twelve handlers lurking behind the scenes.

“What do we have too much of?”

There are lots of right answers to this question, but you cannot have too much of Halfthoughts!

In a swish apartment overlooking London’s Docklands, two scriptwriters, Whale and Purview, sit down to discuss ideas for a new James Bond script.

Whale: Okay, the studio wants four exotic locations for this film.

Purview: Only four? They must be cutting back.

Whale: Nah, they’re thinking about global warming. They want a more responsible Bond who thinks about the impact air travel has on the environment.

Purview: Okey Dokey. Let’s have an early scene where ‘M’ tells Bond that MI6 has adopted a carbon neutral policy.

Whale: Yup. Let’s make this some kind of sexy eco-thriller.

Purview: I’m not sure we can. We did the environment with Quantum of Solace and that plot about controlling water supplies and calling the antagonist ‘Greene’ and having him run an ecological business as a front for his criminal activities. Let’s make this film about terrorism instead. That’s topical.

Whale: We did international terrorism in Casino Royale.

Purview: Then what’s it going to be about? We’ve got to keep it topical and relevant.

Whale: How about making it a combo eco-terrorist story. With nukes. Iranian nukes.

Purview: That’s a good idea. Let’s hang on to that. Let’s start with the four locations.

Whale: One hot, one cold, one pricey, one wild.

Purview: St. Petersburg. We should use St. Petersburg as the wintry location.

Whale: The Winter Palace at Winter. Shots of crisp white snow contrasted with lots of lavish opulence with lots of gold and jewels everywhere.

Purview: We cut from a scene with a Bond girl skating on the ice of a frozen river to her putting on her diamonds in the evening.

Whale: Ice and diamonds - I love it. Okay, St. Petersburg works for me. We can have a Russian oligarch as the baddie. Yeah - good. Now what about the hot location?

Purview: I don’t we should actually set it in Iran. It would be too sensitive to have Bond going there undercover. How about doing a segment in Jamaica?

Whale: Bond’s been to the Caribbean so often that the audience will expect him to end up speaking like a West Indian.

Purview: Western Samoa?

Whale: Nobody knows where that is.

Purview: Nobody knows why you’d build a swanky hotel in the middle of the Bolivian desert but that’s what we wrote into the last script. What about Rio de Janeiro?

Whale: Puh-lease. Pictures of girls in skimpy bikinis and guys juggling footballs. So corny.

Purview: Somewhere in the Middle East then.

Whale: Not a bad idea. Bond can be involved in a chase through a shopping mall in Dubai. He pushes past a lot of Arabs all dressed in white. The baddie’s henchman is dressed in white too, so Bond momentarily loses sight of him in the crowd… I’m liking this idea. Lots of opportunity for product placement, as he throws the henchman through the window of a Louis Vuitton shop. Plus they’ll pay top dollar for the boost to tourism. We can have a scene with Bond flying off the top of that fancy ’sail’ hotel using a one-man helicopter pack on his back.

Purview: I like it. We’ve done rocket packs before, but not helicopter packs. As he helicopters down, Bond can set off some smoke flares, leaving a red, white and blue trail in the skies.

Whale: What about the glamour location?

Purview: New York. Perhaps we could stage a shootout in Grand Central Station. The crowd screaming, people leaping over ticket barriers and Bond having a fight on the roof of a subway train.

Whale: Nah. We’ve got to cut back. And Dubai can double as the pricey location as well as the hot one. We should do somewhere in the UK. You know, to fit with the ecologically responsible ’staycation’ theme.

Purview: How about Bond spends a weekend youth hosteling in the Lake District? He could encounter a hiking troupe of Swedish beauties, and bed them all during a wet afternoon under canvas.

Whale: I’m thinking more along the lines of Blackpool. Bond slides down a cable from Blackpool Tower whilst chasing an assassin.

Purview: Blackpool?

Whale: Blackpool. It can work. They’re making it more upmarket these days.

Purview: Perhaps. What if the assassin garrotes his victim from behind, just as they’re looping the loop on the rollercoaster at Blackpool Pleasure Beach?

Whale: That’s a great idea. I love it.

Purview: We just the need the fourth location now. We should think about somewhere really different, somewhere nowhere like Bond’s been before.

Whale: The moon.

Purview: Too far.

Whale: Slough.

Purview: Not far enough.

Whale: Outer Mongolia.

Purview: Too barren, just like Slough.

Whale: Australia.

Purview: Too Australian. Then again, perhaps the nuke can be hidden under Uluru.

Whale: Sorry?

Purview: Uluru - Ayers Rock. They hide the nukes under Ayers Rock so the satellites cannot detect the radioactive signature, or something like that.

Whale: Brilliant. So far we’ve got a plot where Bond’s having a staycation in Blackpool, his old Navy buddy is murdered on the rollercoaster whilst Bond is in the queue for candyfloss, the murderer escapes but resurfaces in St. Petersburg, employed by some super-rich oligarch. His old buddy was entwined in the oligarch’s business interests in Dubai. Bond investigates, realizing it’s a cover operation involved in smuggling nukes out of Tehran. The nukes get hidden under Ayers Rock, where they will be auctioned to the representatives of a variety of rebel nations. And Bond has casual sex with a woman he picks up in Blackpool, shags a Russian beauty in the Winter Palace and then bonks her again in Australia, but only after he does the identical twin PAs to the chief auctioneer.

Purview: That’s the basic plot resolved. We need some more gadgets to add to the heli-pack.

Whale: What about an invisible car?

Purview: Ridiculous. Imagine how many accidents you would have driving an invisible car on the road. People would keep hitting you in the tail.

Whale: And I remember we had one already - in Die Another Day. Maybe we should give the bad guy a gadget. Like an electro suit. And Bond can kill him by pressing a big red self-destruct button placed right in the middle of the suit’s chest plate.

Purview: That was in Die Another Day too.

Whale: The bad guy should have a gun which fires only one bullet, because he’s that good.

Purview: And what if he’s being attacked by two people? He waits until they’re lined up, one behind the other? Anyhow, The Man With the Golden Gun had only one bullet in his gun.

Whale: Okay. How about the bad guy has a fetish for Bond and keeps a mannequin of him in his lair? Then Bond can take the dummy’s place and catch the baddie by surprise.

Purview: That was in The Man With The Golden Gun too. Roger Moore was so wooden it was hard to tell which one was the mannequin. We should think about having some kind of space weapon. They’re very sexy, in a sci-fi style.

Whale: No. Definitely not. You Only Live Twice. Diamonds are Forever. Moonraker. Goldeneye and Die Another Day. Space weapons have been done to death.

Purview: Let’s leave the gadgets for now. Gadgets are passé anyway. We should talk about some set pieces.

Whale: Bond should invite himself to the nuke auction. He quickly drops the pretence as the baddies know who he is anyway. They’ll put him up for a couple of nights in the lavish guest facilities and the Bond’s oligarch antagonist allows him to sleep with his woman, before eventually deciding to kill him. Bond survives and blows the whole place up, leaving the Nukes safely buried underneath Ayers Rock.

Purview: Of course. That all goes without saying. We need Bond’s antagonist to have a sidekick with a special weapon or skill.

Whale: Killer hats.

Purview: Oddjob in Goldfinger.

Whale: Killer teeth.

Purview: Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me.

Whale: Killer thighs.

Purview: Xenia Onatopp in Goldeneye.

Whale: Killer fishing rod.

Purview: Mayday in View to a Kill.

Whale: Killer moustache.

Purview: That would be new. How would it work?

Whale: A gay guy soaks his moustache in poison. It gives off fumes that would kill Bond if he kisses him.

Purview: I’m pretty sure that’s not been filmed before.

Whale: We need some good action scenes.

Purview: Bond is chasing the sidekick in Blackpool, but he escapes and makes a dramatic getaway.

Whale: By miniature jet plane.

Purview: Done before, in Octopussy.

Whale: By stealth boat.

Purview: That was in Tomorrow Never Dies.

Whale: By bobsled.

Purview: Check out On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Whale: By lunar rover.

Purview: See Diamonds are Forever.

Whale: Sliding downhill on a cello case.

Purview: That’s how Bond escapes in The Living Daylights.

Whale: Hot air balloon.

Purview: What kind of ridiculous getaway vehicle would a hot air balloon make? It slowly floats on the wind, there is no way to control its direction, is in plain view to everyone and can easily be followed by the cops who just need to wait until it comes back down to ground. It’s a silly idea. Plus it has been done already, in The World is Not Enough.

Whale: Phew. What’s left?

Purview: Bus. The sidekick jumps on the number 42 bus. Bond would give chase but his car is stuck in terrible congestion. That fits with the environmentally-conscious theme. M can then give her spiel about MI6 going carbon neutral when Bond returns to the office and debriefs.

Whale: After which, Q gives Bond a special folding bicycle to use on future missions.

Purview: Good idea, and its the extra gadget we were looking for.

Whale: Exactly.

Purview: I think we’re nearly there. We just need to write a few double entendres. Bond is as ‘hard’ as Ayers Rock. Bond is as ‘hard’ as Blackpool rock. That kind of thing.

Whale: Yeah, and we need a title. How about ‘Golden Day for the Kill’?

Purview: ‘Tomorrow’s the Day I Licence to Die’.

Whale: ‘Diamonds Never Die’.

Purview: ‘Dr. Thunderfinger’.

Whale: ‘A View to a Killing Licence, in Gold’.

Purview: ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Gold’.

Whale: ‘Her Majesty’s Secret Solace’.

Purview: ‘The Spy with a Love Licence from Russia’.

Whale: ‘Moonfingering the Octopussy’.

Purview: ‘Eye Spy Golden Die’.

Whale: ‘Die Today, Kill Tomorrow’.

Purview: ‘The Spy Who Kills in Gold Blood’.

Whale: ‘Live to Kill Another Day’.

Purview: ‘Licence to Live, Dying to Kill’.

Whale: ‘Never Say Die’.

Purview: That’s it. ‘Never Say Die’. That’s our title.

Whale: You know, sometimes I think we should try to be more original. But after twenty-two Bond films, what would be the point? ‘Never Say Die’ - we’ll make another killing at the box office…

Time was that if you typed:

“I’d like to throttle Bill Gates for his monopolistic business practices”

into Microsoft Word and then checked the phrase against its built-in thesaurus, it offer the following phrase in response:

“I’ll drink to that”.

Theories about fifth columnists within Gates’ business empire were unfounded. A few quick experiments was enough to demonstrate that any phrase beginning with “I’d like to” would generate the line “I’ll drink to that”. With any dumb string match, comparing a sequence of letters to similar sequences within a database, there is the potential for serendipity. Those suggested substitutes of similar letters may deliver unexpected but revealing meaningful commentaries on the world around us. Take the German philosopher Martin Heidegger as an example. He was one of the most original thinkers of the 20th century. Heidegger wrote cryptic texts that are almost unreadable, crammed full of familiar old words given esoteric new meanings. How appropriate then, that the spellchecker returns ‘headgear’ in response to the Heidegger’s surname. This was a man who turned people’s minds inside out and stuffed them with new mental apparatus - metaphorical head-gear if ever there was.

More modern examples of spellcheck serendipity include the name of seemingly the world’s most popular man, Barack Obama. The spellchecker thinks his name should be ‘bema’, which means a raised platform in a synagogue from which the Torah is read. Obama is not Jewish, but he does have quite a way with delivering sermons. Obama’s erstwhile and would-be future opponent, the Republican Sarah Palin, generates some rather more straightforward hits. The word ‘pain’ is offered, perhaps referring to feelings she inspires in so many. ‘Palling’ is offered, which reflects the diminishing support for her as a result of her never-ending gaffs and scandals. Another suggestion is ‘plaint’ which means protest or complaint, something which has become the raison d’être for Palin with respect to Obama’s plans for health care. The spellchecker also has an eye for current affairs on the British side of the Atlantic. Foreign Secretary David Milliband’s name prompts the response of ‘mulligan’, meaning a do-over shot in golf. Milliband looks set to lose his job as British Foreign Secretary, should Labour lose the general election as expected. However, this week we discovered he is on the list for that most ideal do-over for failed European politicians - a plumb job with the EU. In Milliband’s case he may be offered another Foreign Secretary position, but this time for the whole of Europe. What a ‘mulligan’ that would be for a man who was mediocre at playing the same role for Britain.

Casting an eye over the rest of the world, we find that destiny may have played a hand in forcing Afghan President Hamid Karzai to run in a second election after overwhelming evidence of polling fraud in the first. The spellchecker proposes ‘karma’ for Karzai. We should all hope that Iraqi Primeminister Nouri al-Maliki will live up to spellchecker’s suggestion and be the man to ‘nourish’ his troubled nation back to health and prosperity. Spellchecker is less optimistic when it comes to the Far East. It fears that Chinese vice-premier Xi Jinping, likely to become China’s leader in 2012, might be ‘jinxing’ the hopes for progressive reform in the world’s largest country.

Turning to the stars of screen and stage, spellchecker seems to regularly hit the nail on the head. Angelina Jolie is doubtless ‘jolly’ about being married to Brad Pitt, loaded with cash, surrounded by children of all hues and adored the world over. The spelling suggestion for Beyonce is ‘become’, a very appropriate choice for someone whose manners and dress are always becoming. Mick Jagger has for many years been a ‘jigger’ on the stage, given his jerky dancing moves. And Johnny Depp’s film career may deservedly be described as both ‘deep’ and ‘dippy’, especially when he collaborates with director Tim Burton.

It was with trepidation that I completed my exercise in contrived serendipity by reading the spellchecker’s runes for myself. Typing my own surname into MS Word, I discovered spellchecker identifies me as a ‘prizeman’. I may not have received any awards yet, but I will interpret the sign from spellchecker as a very good omen…