Everyone gets them these days – phone calls in the early evening from someone either trying to sell something or doing an opinion poll. I like the idea of telling the caller that you're kind of busy right now but if they give you their home number, you'll call them back later. I gather not many of them give their own home number; I wonder why. Usually, the give-away that it's a sales call is the dead air on the line after I pick up the phone; before the automatic dialler realises someone has answered and diverts to the call to a real-life nuisance. Once, as I had some time on my hands and as I feel sorry for the poor sods on the other end of the line, I agreed to help out an opinion pollster. It was a waste of time. You have to answer “yes” or “no” or “agree” or “disagree” (and some the variations such as “more than somewhat” or “strongly”.) There was no room for explaining that my opinion was not so back and white. Inevitably, I agreed with one statement early on and then later in answer to an apparently similar statement, I disagreed. I felt I was coming over as a complete nut-case. The one thing I was sure of was that the poll did not come close to establishing what I really thought.
Anyone who remembers the excellent BBC television series Yes Minister may remember Sir Humphrey's demonstration of how useless opinion polls are. He asks Bernard a series of questions about re-introducing military conscription in Britain. Each answer prompts a certain train of thought and leads to the next answer. I don't remember it exactly but Sir Humphrey asks something along the lines of “Do you think the Government should help teach young men useful life skills”. Other questions follow in apparently logical succession and Bernard answers at the end that he is in favour of conscription. Sir Humphrey then runs through an alternative list of questions, including something along the lines of “Do you think teenage boys should be trained to kill” and this time the sequence leads to Bernard opposing conscription. Opinion pollsters aren't phoning because they really care what I think. Or what you think. Someone is paying the pollster and that someone is looking for a certain answer to back up some point they want made. As Humphrey demonstrated, it's not that hard to get the "right" answer.

There's been a fuss here in North America about a female sports journalist who feels she got a hard time when she visited a male team changing room after a game. I just wonder if female journalists should be wandering around male changing rooms at all. I know if I, a guy, demanded to be allowed into the Canadian women's volleyball team dressing room after a game, I'd probably get short shrift. I might even be branded as some kind of a pervert. Why is it anyway that female sports journalists can demand to be allowed into males sports locker rooms? They argue that they can't do their job properly unless they have the same access as male reporters.
I have a theory. It's that you can't actually do a good job of reporting a sport if you've never played it. That's kind of why I'm not too bothered about not covering female volleyball. I know women and men play the same sports differently. To be honest, I think women's ice hockey is a far more entertaining and skilful game than the men's version. But I've never played women's ice hockey and I don't think I'm qualified to write about it and demand access to their dressing rooms after a game.
Oh, I could know who the players are, who the top scorer is and who everyone played for before they joined the team I'm reporting on: but without ever playing, would I really understand the game? Now, I could win myself a lot of publicity and fame if I did become a women's hockey writer, particularly if I could get some of them to harass me while I was visiting their changing room after the game. But I'd feel that I'd got the job as a gimmick.

I've got an update for those of you who read the blog about fake Martini Henry rifles being sold in Afghanistan. The Afghans are knocking out and selling fakes of the historic British firearm to cash in on a story that hundreds of examples of the real thing ended up in the country illegally after they should have been scrapped in the late 1800s. The rifles were supposed to have been sawn up to make them unusable but legend has it that Afghan craftsmen cleverly re-assembled the scrap parts and the rifles were turned on their former owners. Well, it looks as though the guy who put the botched scrapping story in the public realm was no less a personage than Winston Churchill. The story features in a book he wrote in 1897 called "The Malakand Field Force". I haven't managed to come across any earlier mentions of this illegal arms operation.

Maybe the problem's that I'm not many people's idea of what a writer should be like. I'm just an ordinary guy from a bog-standard Scottish home. Maybe I don't seem bright enough. “You don't write the way you speak,” one relative told me years ago, giving the one and only indication I heard from him that I might be a disappointment to him.
I went along recently to what they call here a “short story slam”, in which would-be writers compete for a prize at a local pub. The winner is chosen by a jury randomly selected from the audience and is based on a 10 minute “performance” of a short story. I say “performance” because many of the competitors realise that simply reading their story out aloud isn't going to cut it. I never enter because the jury always picks the most pretentious piece of tosh performed that night over some really excellent stuff. 
Anyway, this night I'm there on my own. The only table left is a table for four and I can have no objection when three other people plonked themselves down. In between stories I chatted with the three. They were all wannabee writers and I think at least two of them had had things published in some university arts magazines. I find out a lot about them. I am shocked by their lack of curiosity about me – I thought writers were supposed to be interested in other people. I don't think it occurred to them that I was a writer – never mind the author of a national bestseller.
Something similar happened recently when the local library played host to well known Canadian playwright Marty Chan. I wanted to ask Marty about writing dialogue. A famous, and I suspect reasonably rich, thriller writer I used to know has an absolute tin-ear when it comes to dialogue. I know that the standard advice is to listen to how people speak. But I also know from my time as a journalist and from transcribing interviews with politicians that many people don't speak in coherent sentences. I think there's a trick to realistic dialogue in fiction and I hoped Mr Chan could give me some pointers when I approached him. I mean, as a former journalist and writer of non-fiction, the stuff I’ve put between quotation marks so far has actually been spoken by a real person. Anyway, another Edmonton playwright interrupts me and says “Speaking of self-published, blah blah blah” and then monopolizes the conversation. Only, of course he didn't say “blah blah blah”. It was pretty obvious he was of the opinion that if I'd had a book published, it must have been self-published.  At the weekend, I was at another event hosted by the local library and featuring an Edmonton author who is doing really well for himself at the moment. I know, you want names. Maybe. I had a book in my pocket because I was expecting to have time to do some reading before a lunch-hour assignation later in the day. It was Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham. If you haven't read it, it's about the creepy “you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours” lives lived by professional writers. I remarked to this Edmonton author that it was enough to put a person off the business. It didn't seem to occur to him that I might have some notion about that of which I spoke. Once again a member of the Edmonton literary community showed a depressing lack of curiosity about an Ordinary Joe.
I really would have liked to have spoken to Marty Chan.  Years ago I read a book on beach in British Columbia and though it was in Standard English I was pretty sure it had been written by a Scots guy. It was called “The Camp” and his name was Williams or Williamson, or something like that. Years later I spotted another of his books in a second-hand shop in Edinburgh and this one had an author biography. Not only was the guy Scottish, but he was brought up close to where I went to primary school. Now I'd hate it if all the fictional dialogue I tried to write came over as being spoken by some guy from just outside Wishaw.

 A long long time ago a friend of mine went into the Army recruiting office in Inverness and inquired about joining the Queen's Own Highlanders as an officer. He'd a few Highers under his belt and felt he could serve Queen and Country best as an officer.
The Colonel Blimp character who was wheeled out to chat with him suggested that he lacked “life experience” and perhaps he might be better to come back when he'd served a couple of years with the police in Hong Kong. It sounded like fair comment. But then my friend learned that two private schoolboys from Ampleforth in Yorkshire had just been taken on as officers. He couldn't help feeling that the Sixth Form Dorm at Ampleforth hardly compared with the slums of Kowloon when it came to teaching life lessons. One would almost think that kids from comprehensive schools were not welcome to be officers. There may be a case for saying that a kid from pretty much the same background as the rank-and-file Jocks might prove a liability, especially when it came to ordering men to almost certain death. But I think I'd rather base my confidence in an officer on him knowing what he was doing, rather than his parents being able to afford to have him privately educated.
Of course, it's not just the Army that had some odd ideas when it comes to recruiting people. Another friend of mine went for an interview with the Scottish Office. This was in the days before the creation of the Scottish Parliament, when Scotland was still ruled by a colonial administration split between London and Edinburgh. In the latter days of Thatcher Rule there were not enough elected Tories in Scotland to hold all the ministerial posts available in administration. Anyway, my friend was shocked to be asked at the interview who she would invite to a dinner party. She'd had never been to a dinner party in his life and felt the interviewers might as well have asked what he felt were the qualities required of a good fox hunting horse. She didn't get the job. Although one of the key qualifications was a sound knowledge of Scotland the job went to an English woman who'd been in the country three weeks. Her hobby was hosting dinner parties. And although she'd been told not to discuss her interview she blabbed to all the other candidates about the dinner party question. The interviewers knew she'd ignored the instruction, my friend somehow managed to let that slip to them, but that didn't prevent them appointing her.
There are days when I'm very glad I live in Canada.