Patchrobe

The original site for matthewhancock.co.uk has been completely rebuilt and is now a Drupal installation supporting Matthew's campaign for West Suffolk. We wish Matt all the best as he engages in the general election campaign over the coming weeks.

The new version of the webcam for Dick's Sand Bar has just gone live.

The old javascript controls have been replaced with a new AJAX interface, which provides much looser coupling of the webcam and the site providing greater security for the system. The webcam has also moved to our dedicated server providing much faster performance and a longstanding cabling issue has been tracked down.

Check out the new version at http://www.dicks-sand-bar.com/webcam

In his book Mortal Questions Thomas Nagel famously asked "what is it like to be a bat?".

In this blog entry I would like to ask "what is it like to be French in England?" but, if Mr.Nagel is correct, I must necessarily fall short of the perspective required for I am, at heart, English and have merely spent two years in France. However, returning home was a bit of a shock after a long time away and I can, I believe, start to shed some light on the following which have been raised with me over and over again by gentlemen of a gallic persuasion:

I like to think of myself as a reasonably high-brow kind of chap. I actually finished The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose, though I confess I understood moderately little of it. I've tried (and failed) to complete Gravity's Rainbow on at least 5 separate occasions; I've owned two copies of it having lost the first somewhere, I think, in the US and still think of it as some kind of magical talisman, the completion of which will bring to a close one of the more anti-climatic romantic non-interludes of my life.

The French nation has a fearsome mathematical pedigree. Fermat, Coriolis, Descartes, Mandelbrot, Poincaré, Poisson, Laplace, Lagrange, Carnot, Pascal - just let me know when you want me to stop.

I have a theory why.

Most languages have their annoying little quirks. For example, you can get confused between 14 and 40 in at least three European languages (forty/fourteen, quatorze/quarante, vierzehn/vierzig) and the difference between the two words in English is pretty trivial.

Mobbed, shagged rotten, "stoked"

Actually the competition is still running, so...

'Triple filter?' asked the acquaintance.

Ok, so I haven't actually been in the sea for about a week. Last time I was out I got the waggy finger treatment for being somewhere deeply beyond my skill level. This was a little unsympathetic on the other guy's part, I feel - it was clear I'd just been worked and the next wall of water was just seconds away. "Je connais", I said gasping and paddling desperately for shore, the finer points of French grammar escaping me for a moment there...