It's not going to blow up as in: "fissile chain reaction nuclear explosion blowing up". Right? It's really not. That's not my assessment, by the way. That's the assessment of experts (buried somewhere down in paragraph 19 of most reports) - hat tip to Ben Goldacre for that memorable phrase.

So would everyone mind just skating past the dumbfuck headlines saying "ooh there's been an EXPLOSION and NUCLEAR something something something HEAD FOR THE HILLS WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE" - (tiny print: experts say very little risk mumble mumble).

A nuclear power plant is a highly complex structure with mixed vulnerabilities and redundant protection systems, carefully tailored to the risks they are designed to manage. It has been massively analysed and heavily engineered. Hardly surprising, given the potential for thousands of years of contamination if something goes wrong.

The power plant will, for example, have gas supplies for its kitchens, that may go bang if a gas pipe is fractured, say, by a 8.8 earthquake. That does NOT mean that the bit you really should care about--the fissile material protection and the systems that would prevent dispersal into the environment--is built to the same standards as the kitchens. Or that it is the bit that has exploded.

GET A GRIP. It's not 1954. We should know better by now. Our media, in keeping these wild headlines running, and in glossing over details in reporting (exclusion zone introduced, sure: but how far? 1km, 10km or 100km? It DOES matter) do a disservice to our intelligence and to the people who really do need the headline space: those suffering from very real, very deadly, non-NUCLEAR catastrophe.

*wipes foam from mouth*

PS. I don't know quite why this one has made me so angry. It's not like stupid reporting is new. But this isn't a batshit crazy story like that Mail thing about the Moon buggering up our geology by coming too close (no, I'm not linking to it), or good old homeopathy. This is a proper bit of news obsession with something that actually hasn't happened yet. And almost certainly won't. But still gets described in terms of its potential horror, with a disturbing glee. One realises that many watching and reporting have a fascination which borders on the unhealthy. Setting aside rationality and evidence to revel in gory descriptions of unimaginable carnage etc. etc. And that's just plain ghoulish.

PPS. It will no doubt go up in a big mushroom as I hit "Publish" on this. And I'll look like a right arse.

A few people have asked me for the pie recipe. I’ll say, up front, that I’m fairly anti-recipe myself. Not really sure why – not a very strong principled stance, more a horror of the indignity that befalls adults when they bellow “Four hundred and fifty-FOUR grams, not four hundred and FIFTY” at each other in cramped conditions. Life’s too short.

Recipes are ok for getting ideas, maybe, but my cooking is more a leisure activity than a science experiment. Anyway. This is how I made the pie. I’ve deliberately avoided anything like accurate description of weights and measures – it’s a story, not a formula. OK, as a small clue, this will feed about six people – eight if they’re not greedy knackers like we are.

The pastry

Stick a glass of water in the fridge.

Tip about half a bag of flour into a big bowl. (If your first thought on reading that is: “what size bag?” I really wouldn’t read any further. You know – a normal-sized flour bag, like all the ones in Waitrose). Some lumps of butter and lard – if mushed together they’d be as big as a normal pack of butter, with perhaps a tiny bit more lard than butter. Throw in a decent pinch of salt. Slowly mush the lumps of blard together with the flour, rubbing gently. As you do, the big lumps will disappear and the white flour will start getting thicker and darker. Go on for a while. Every now and then, scoop up what’s in the bowl and turn it over and through, lightly. Don’t want it going all squodgy at the bottom.

When all the lumps are gone, do a final sprinkle of fresh flour over the mixture, and very, very lightly toss the whole lot around, making sure you’ve got no lumps left. Fetch that water from the fridge, tip a tiny bit in, and, with fingers only, mix it in, and roll what you’ve got in the bowl into a big ball. That’s your pastry. Leave it in the bowl and put it in the fridge to think about things.

The filling

You will need: a whole chicken, two big leeks, a chunk of smoked bacon collar joint, some onions, garlic toothpaste, loads and loads of mushrooms (really – twice as many as you think are sensible), a few dried porcini, odd bits of butter and a fair bit of luck.

Chop up the onions and leeks and chuck them in a big pan with a squirt of garlic toothpaste (puree) and a bit of butter. If you don’t use garlic toothpaste, do. It’s very good. Give it loads of heat, so that the leeks burn a tiny bit. It’s ok. Whack the heat down, stir it all around, and let it cook as softly as you can for ages. Don’t turn this pan off until further notice. Boil a full kettle, put a few dried porcini in a mug and fill up with boiling water.

Head straight to the chicken – with a very sharp knife take off the breast meat (not the skin), and whatever you can off the legs (ditto). Ignore the rest. Put the meat aside and stick the rest of the chicken in another big pan. Heat it hard, so it starts to burn a little bit. It’s ok. Splash about half the mug of porcini water into the pan (it’s been brewing while you were cutting your fingers filleting bits of chicken). It will shriek and whiff a bit, but that’s ok. Stir it around then add the rest of the kettle water to fill up the pan. Leave on low heat for ages.

Stick the rest of the porcini mug contents in with the onion and leeks. Scrub all the mushrooms and put them whole into a fresh pan, with the tiniest dab of olive oil. Heat them hard, stirring a bit. They’ll go brown. They’ll also give off lots of liquid – keep decanting this into the onion pan so the mushroom pan keeps fairly dry. Eventually, no more liquid will come off and the mushrooms will be lying there getting nice and brown. Tip them into the onion pan, chuck in some salt and stir everything together. I use Maldon sea salt flakes because that’s what people tend to buy in Waitrose. Don’t judge me. Don’t wash up the mushroom pan either. By this point you’ll have a nice creamy liquid starting to appear in the onion pan. This is a very good sign.

Chop the chicken meat into medium sized bits and the bacon into small bits. Stir-fry them all in the mushroom pan until the chicken is barely, barely done. Transfer everything to the onion pan. Put a few spoons of the boiling chicken stock into the mushroom pan (well, latterly the meat pan, you know). Heat all that up, and use it to boil any remnants of mushrooms and meat that have been glazed on the bottom of the pan, then tip the lot into the onion pan. Which is now your pie filling pan, of course. Throw out the chicken bits from the stock pan, strain what’s left, and boil it down to half its volume. Pour that in with the filling and you’ve got all the pie goo you need. A pie short of goo is a sad thing indeed.

Tip the lot into a fresh big bowl and stick it in the fridge. I’m sure I’ve heard some twaddle about letting things cool before putting them in the fridge. I ignore this. The fridge is for cooling things. Manly cooking brooks no such nonsense.

Go and do something else for a few hours.

The assembly

Switch on your oven to quite hot. My oven is so small and hopeless that it only does “off” and “quite hot”. It doesn’t seem to make much difference. More on cooking in a moment. Just trust me on this one. Take your pastry lump and rip off a third of it. Roll this out to the same size as your pie dish. If you haven’t got a rolling pin, just bash it with your fists until it’s mostly flat. Put it in the pie dish. Stick it in the hot oven for a few minutes until the pastry has just started to go hard. I believe this helps stop the filling soaking through the crust and making the whole thing gooey. I have no rational basis for this belief, I just made it up.

Put in the filling. If it doesn’t fill the casing you have a slightly smaller pie than you were expecting (best you stick some sausages under the grill). If there’s too much you just made yourself a nice pasta sauce for one. Take the rest of the pastry and make a thicker pie top, rolling/bashing according to equipment/anger. Press it down around the edges, trim, make a couple of slits as vents and decorate with a witty bon mot or some garish decorations made out of the pastry trimmings. Brush some milk over the whole thing. If you haven’t got a brush (who has a brush?) flicking and smearing the milk with your fingers works just as well. Unless you’re in a hurry to serve and eat, you can stick it all back in the fridge at this point. No rush.

The cooking

There’s a lot of bollocks talked about the cooking bit. You’ve already cooked anything here that might be toxic, so as long as a) you heat up the middle to a level that will please your guests and b) make the pie crust go golden, you’re fine. So stick it in the oven until these things have happened. Why do you think the oven has a glass door?

That’s it. I’ve really written this for men, who should do more of this sort of thing, without agonising over the details. It'll be fine. I’ll do more if you like it. Let me know. But it’s NOT a recipe, OK?

Mum died just now. Peacefully. Words, themes and images I’ve been running through in my head for weeks now are drying up even as I start to move my fingers. What to say? Should I say anything? Words and images are one way I deal with things these days, so bear with me. You don’t have to read on.

It wasn’t sudden, as such. Yet everything moved terribly quickly towards the end. And agonisingly slowly at the end. Contradictions and paradoxes everywhere.  Two weeks and three days ago I took this picture of her. Admitted to hospital, and very ill, she had a warm, English rose glow about her. Many who’ve seen this picture have kindly commented on how beautiful she looks. I can see that now. I could see it anyway. I can see it more strongly now. I can see lots of things differently now. Right now.

She’s gone, and I am numb. Mum had tremendous spirit. She’s the same person I am in so many ways. We did crosswords together. Listening to the way we approached a puzzle, or a particular clue, could be uncanny. We were thinking the same way. Eyes moving to the same clue, exploring the same blind alleys, finding the same word fragments at the same time. Uncanny. We both loved it. It could bind us together even during the toughest times.

The memories that really stick are relatively few in number, and very powerful. One particular hug, aged about six, by a warm radiator on a cold day. The hard contours of the corrugated metal contrasting with the softness of mum. The time, aged ten, I didn’t get to play table tennis at a sports centre and she took time to find a table tennis table somewhere else so she could give me a game herself. That meant an awful lot, then and now. Out of all proportion, in some ways. Iconic moments of understanding and caring.

And not so good times. Fighting. Misunderstanding. Political differences. Disappointment on both sides at times over some of our life choices. They’re all rushing through me now. Were they worth it? Could we have done better? Does she know how I feel? All that rebellion, all that arguing and reasoning and being rational – that was me learning, mum. And sometimes making a clumsy, bad job of it.

She lived in a different world from me. Had little time for politicians, or London, or superficiality. “Being kind” was her number one goal, and the virtue she most sought and valued in others. If my world didn’t make sense to her (and so many times I just couldn’t make it so, however hard I tried) she’d tell me. Not always easy to hear. At one govcamp-type event last year I hit on the idea that everyone there should have brought a “real person” with them – someone not from the public sector or Westminster bubble, someone with closer connections to real community activities than any of the formal machinery. If our debates and ideas couldn’t make sense to our “real people”, then we might have to accept they needed more work. Mum was my instant choice of companion to do this, as something of a community leader through her endless organising and voluntary activity. I’m sad that it never came to be.

Our last conversation at her bedside, a week ago, was about pastry. I made it with her when I was a small boy, under her instruction. Although I do loads of cooking now – another legacy she’s given me – I held back from making pastry, because I’d forgotten how I did it with her. And I felt a bit silly asking. We had times where communication was not so easy. So many other things that had to be said before we could dare approach the trivia of recipes. All that went out of the window last week. I didn’t want her to go before I’d asked her. I was amused to hear someone say last week how they couldn’t understand why the fans of a famous person kept writing in with questions they could easily get answers to from Google. I kept my peace. They didn’t want to read Google. They wanted to communicate. I could have Googled a thousand pastry recipes. But I only wanted my mum’s. Directly from her, while holding her warm, soft hand. And I got it.

I’ll be baking a pie tonight.

So why are you thinking of taking him out of Grovefield Primary?

Oh, it's only really for the class sizes. They never have more than 14, and it's fantastic, they get so much individual attention at Melville and there's a musical instrument to choose each term for nothing really, well for a big chunk of those fees hahaha but it's all worth it and really there's nothing to beat that sort of start in life for one thing he's going to be surrounded by children who know how to speak correctly. I know we're not as bad here as in London, but really can you imagine being the only one speaking English as a first language? And we have kids from the estate at Grovefield of course, poor things, that's bad enough! It's not their fault but you hear those vowels... and the mothers, quite how I'm supposed to get on with the mothers, I have no idea. And I'd thought about St Peters but it's really not the same is it, having to pretend to be religious just to get in with the right sort, and in later years he'd always feel a bit like we'd scrimped and had to take the holy route and let's face it a religious education is always going to come second to a real one, and it's about keeping standards up, isn't it? You know, the little things, the ones that will always make a difference when you're with the right people - so that the right people will know you're one of them, of course, people like us, you see - and you have to be ever so careful these days - I heard some children in Larchwood uniform the other day and you would not have known - you would NOT have known - that they were at a private, I mean independent, school. I mean, really what's the point? You spend all that money and they talk like they come from the estate. It's not as if we can afford a real public school of course, one of the great ones *sigh*, and I suppose they'll always carry that cross with them through life, but you do the best you can. And that means no regional vowels. At. All. And none of this having to slow down for the non-English, you know, the foreign ones, though of course most of the good schools are so full of Russians and Indonesians these days - rich as Croesus, the lot of them - that even in a good place you're going to have to make some, you know, adaptations for different cultures and so on. When you strip away all the other things that are important, knowledge and skills and so on, the one thing you can't deny is that the more your child sounds like an army officer of the 1950s the better they are going to do. It's a universal currency. Show me anywhere, in any real job (excluding the public sector of course) where the child with good vowels isn't going to be hired and promoted over the lower class one. Because that's what it's about really, if I'm honest. We're middle class and we need to find ways to stay like that. It's hard enough with what the government are doing these days to mess everything up (what IS going on with university places?) but at least if you have your vowels under control you're going to be marked as one of the right sort. And we say middle class and so on, I know, but really it is upper and lower class - and that's all there is to it. In every village around here - in fact in most of England (I can't speak for the North of course, never been there) - you know from the moment someone opens their mouth, immediately, what side of the line they're on. And that's all there is to say, really. I would sooner die than have a child of mine sound lower class. And if it started to happen at Melville, if those Estuary vowels crept in, I'd move him, I really would. So much else follows if one just sounds right - I laugh sometimes and say to Gerald that we should probably just keep him at Grovefield and pay for the elocution classes, as that's really all that matters - you know when you meet someone at church whether they're one of us, and whether we should make friends, and it just saves so much time having to work out if people really are dreary and not going anywhere. Can you imagine, can you really, the leader of a political party these days having a regional accent? Well, precisely. It just indicates weakness, to those who count, anyway. And when one sounds right, so many other things slot into place. You know the words to the right hymns, you know the entire Radio 4 schedule backwards, what to wear at Glyndebourne, how to pronounce Montrachet, the folly of wearing off-the-peg suits, who to butter up in the City and all that. All the important things. The ones that mean you belong. He may well not get into Cambridge now, with all these silly equality things going on, but if we play our cards right, nobody need know. He will walk and talk just as if he did, and can make sure in time that his children do exactly the same. We know our place, and it is not going to be down with the riff-raff.

Ah. When you said it was all about class sizes - right, now I get it. Those class sizes.

A new mind is a bit like an early embryo – neither male nor female, but capable at the flick of a chemical switch into settling on one option or the other.

Before we have any political beliefs, dogma, doctrine – call it what you will – we’re pretty much the same. And then at a very early age a little fleck of belief lands on that mind-seed and sticks. It can float down from parents, books, friends, media – but the bit that sticks will likely have one of two flavours.

If it’s the flavour that says “You’re a person, just like everybody else. Respect them, support them, for it could be you” you’re a Type A.

If it says “We’re all individuals, and though we need to support each other, the best way of doing that is by getting out of the way and letting people make their own choices” you’re a Type B.

These are not fixed types, of course. Many flip between them several times over their lives. Some of us do it many times a day. Because both propositions are flawlessly logical. Of course there’s a natural justice which means we should think and act at a level greater than the individual. So the Type As are right, and create state and society in that light. Of course there’s irrefutable evidence that creating the machinery to do so causes waste and can even keep people worse off. So the Type Bs are right and head off down the path of cutting and liberating.

But being human, and liking a little clarity in our lives, that early ‘click’ into Type A or Type B mode is hugely comforting. A defence mechanism in the face of difficult decisions. When we read a headline, or hear about one country’s actions towards another, or see a Budget announcement, we’ve already got a pre-formed response ready and waiting. Lined up for us, without us having to do all the difficult business of working things through from scratch every time. That would take ages.

There's are nice little kickbacks from each position: Type As have the assurance that they'll always be doing the nice thing – helping and supporting; they get their reward in intangible ways. Type Bs are reassured by the fact that though some may suffer, overall, things are better for the great majority, and usually for the Type Bs at a tangible, personal level.

We don’t even have to use the labels ‘Left/Right/Socialist/Conservative’. We know what we believe, right down inside, at that seed level. Don’t we?

I don’t. Not really. Does that make me indecisive? Does that mean I never ‘clicked’ properly into my type? Does that mean I really enjoy jumping beyond the immediate ‘easy’ reaction and trying to think a little harder about what’s really going on?

I hope it’s the latter. It definitely helps me in my working life, in and around public policy. But I do feel a bit odd in an overtly political setting where having at least some certainty is de rigueur. And I’m crap at demonstrations. “But you do realise that X will lead to Y will lead to Z?” goes my whisper unheard amidst the chanting. (Truth be told, I’m a little bit jealous of those who do have – or at least can display – this certainty.)

So – my political confession. I don’t have a clear inner badge, of Conservative, Labour or Liberal. I’m all of them. I am a person.

[This isn't really what I put on my blog. So a first try at using Posterous for something that's not quite a blog, not quite a snippet.]

In one of his first few days at school, a small boy looked down at his feet. His shoelaces were undone. He didn't know how to tie them. His mother had shown him, but he'd forgotten - or hadn't really understood what he'd been shown. Other kids had their shoelaces tied. He didn't understand. He looked down. He cried. He thought he wasn't clever enough. He can't remember any more than that.

He knows exactly where it happened. The precise spot. Next to a school wall which 38 years later carries pictures of lots of different emotions.

He smiles wryly at that irony.