The disordered mad of a brain man

When the prosecution in the case I've been asked to be an expert witness declined at a very late stage to accept a whole host of things, including my status as someone who's an expert on male sex work, the person concerned suggested writing to a group of people in the field.

As ever, not everyone likes everyone else in this area, and even the main umbrella group has organisations with fundamentally different approaches and ethoses… so it's been quite amazing to see the comments come in and the various 'sets' be completed (like every significant organisation doing work with male sex workers in London and Manchester).

I was also hugely amused to have a chance to see some communication between the defence team – they were considering a number of people, in particular including someone with a PhD in the field who I have immense respect for. They collected statements from all of us, and the result was "I have to say that I far prefer the witness statement of Ian…"

.. was getting issued with a Penalty Fare for the first time ever.

It is quite amazing to see the difference in how passengers are expected to follow rules, even when almost impossible to do so, but the train operating company thinks it can ignore any bits it finds inconvenient.

So, for example, the regulations covering such schemes insist they make sure that the signage at the station is "noticeable, easy to read and easy to distinguish from other notices and from the general surroundings". Was it? No – the sign was inside a locked room, behind a door with no window. (Shades of Douglas Adams!)

They're supposed to reapply when changing things such as the availability of Permit to Travel machines (when you can't buy the ticket you want, you should be able to buy a 'permit' to prove where you started), but I'll bet money that they did not do so when removing the machine at the station concerned last year.

They're also supposed to make available on request the scheme documents, which go into this sort of level of detail, but only supply a leaflet which could be summarised as 'if we say so, you have to pay up'.

Oh well, they've picked on the wrong person…

By coincidence, I was rereading one of the Flashman novels last night when the news of George MacDonald Fraser's death (I said 'his death' first time!) came on the Radio 4 news. It's not entirely unexpected, but still deeply disappointing – there are still large chunks of the 19th Century missing from the series.

Once the idea of following the career of the expelled bully from Tom Brown's Schooldays was conceived, what made them work so well is that most of the books was true, genuine history no matter how incredible it sounds now. GMF would move a quote around here or there (a quote from one general was made in a different battle, for example), make a judgement about which account of a particular episode was probably most accurate (like who was to blame for the Charge of the Light Brigade), and stick Flashman in it (in more than one sense!)

If you haven't read them, you really should.

One of my email accounts had a 'bounce' yesterday – apparently, I've been sending mails saying:

Hi, gentleman!