tim's experiment

We have all, I suppose, been enjoying the detailed accounts of a divorce case in the newspapers over the past week. The case involves a couple who (I presume by order of the court) cannot be named. The squabble is basically over money, which has led to a great deal of detailed discussion of lavish lifestyles, but there have also been some excursions into the unhappy couple’s love life. It seems he is a real estate tycoon with a rich daddy, which narrows the field considerably, so I suppose lots of people know who is being talked about. But I don’t, so if you find out it was not from me.

The proceedings bring to mind a great scandal of the 1930s, involving the then Duke and Duchess of Argyll. The Duchess wanted a divorce, which in those days was not granted on such meagre pussy-footing grounds as “irretrievable breakdown”. The seeker of divorce had to prove what was called a matrimonial offence, the usual candidates being cruelty, desertion or adultery. The Duchess went for cruelty, and this involved her giving evidence over several days of the “Hunnish practices” to which she was subjected by her husband. I am not sure quite what this euphemism meant in the 1930s, but clearly the Duke’s bedroom tastes were extensive and eclectic, running well outside conventional copulation in the missionary position. Newspapers at the time found this irresistible and of course as it was part of the proceedings it could all be reported. Even the Daily Telegraph devoted a whole page per day to the Duchess’s account of her ordeals. After the case it was decided that rich people should not be required to spread their love lives over the newspapers to get a divorce (poor people could not afford to divorce in those days) so a law was passed restricting reports of divorce proceedings to a few bare bones.

In due course this law was copied in Hong Kong, as was customary in those days. And it is still with us. It is called the Judicial Proceedings (Regulation of Reports) Ordinance, aka Chapter 287. Here is the relevant part:

(1) It shall not be lawful to print or publish, or cause or procure to be printed or published-

(a) (Repealed 68 of 1995 s. 6)
(b) in relation to any judicial proceedings for dissolution of marriage, for nullity of marriage, or for judicial separation, any particulars other than the following, that is to say- (Amended 80 of 1997 s. 85)
(i) the names, addresses and occupations of the parties and witnesses;
(ii) a concise statement of the charges, defences and counter-charges in support of which evidence has been given;
(iii) submissions on any point of law arising in the course of the proceedings, and the decision of the court thereon;
(iv) the summing-up of the judge and the finding of the jury (if any) and the judgment of the court and observations made by the judge in giving judgment. (Amended 68 of 1995 s. 6)

Now I take that to mean that you can publish the list, and only the list. Interesting details of arguments with Daddy, of for that matter arguments between Mr and Mrs, are out. In fact the evidence is out, unless the judge is kind enough to include generous quantities in his summing up. On the other hand the names and addresses of the parties are clearly supposed to be in. And this is as it should be. Marriage and its dissolution are both official events which should be public. So why are we being treated to lots of apparently illegal reports and an apparently extra-legal ban on names? I have no idea. I have written a letter to the editor of the SCMP about this but under the circumstances they may not wish to publish it. We shall see.

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Some months ago the Hong Kong Journalists Association published a carefully researched and reasoned complaint, that the police publicity machinery was not working. Incidents which could and should have been reported promptly in the press were being delayed in the PR pipeline until they were no longer of interest. The HKJA’s complaint landed with a soundless plop in the deep well of public indifference. No politicians took up the matter, official spokesmen denied there was a problem. End of story, we all thought, at least until a noteworthy specimen comes along. This has now happened.
Actually the HKJA was quite right. The system has changed. In the old days police activities were not announced by the police PR Bureau, though that organisation is quite large. News organisations illegally eavesdropped on the police radio channel. As some newspapers also had radio-controlled cars waiting on the street for interesting photographic opportunities they frequently arrived at the scene of some newsworthy incident at the same time as the emergency people, if not before. Under these circumstances there was no question of newsworthy items going unreported. Reporters generally questioned the emergency services men at the scene. Neither the police nor the reporters used the police PR people, who as a result all developed other ways of using up their time.

Then the police radios switched to a new system, in which the signals are encoded. Listening in is no longer possible. So unless the police wish to publicise an event they can sit on it while a typed report makes its way through the system, leading eventually to a copy appearing on a desk in the PR department, where they are all already busy doing other things. This is not a plot, just a natural result of changing from the old way of doing things to a new piece of technology. In the last week the results have become clear.

First we had the case of the man who was going around stabbing people at random. Nobody was warned about this interesting new hazard. No announcement was made until — days later —  a suspect was arrested. This was followed by a similar case involving a man who was molesting children. Again nothing was made public for days. Clearly the system is broken. Officers actually involved in the cases sounded as apologetic as they are allowed to be under the present regime, in which the word “sorry” is banned. This is an unsatisfactory situation, and not just from the public safety point of view. A force which is allowed to use lethal force on the public’s behalf cannot expect to be allowed to operate in secret. It should expect, indeed it should welcome, continuing scrutiny. The extent and nature of the problem are now clear. Whether anything will be done about it remains to be seen.

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Our glorious leader seems to be losing contact with reality. Here he is, dog-end of term of office measured in months, would-be successors jostling in the wings, and what does he tell us? He’s going to unveil solutions to Hong Kong’s big long-term problems.

This would have been a good plan six years ago. After all the problems which Mr Tsang belatedly recognises as problems have been around for a long time. What are Chief Executives for if not to devise solutions to long-term problems? While we were fiddling about with trivial constitutional changes, creating jobs for new layers of poliltical placemen, charging ahead with fabulously expensive infrastructure projects, and helping developers to push people out of empty buildings, and so on… We, or rather you, could have been confronting the housing problem, the growing wealth gap, the ageing population, and perhaps the air pollution and the historic buildings and the lawlessness of the New Territories as well. Some of these problems can be put down to history. Some of them, alas, can be put down to Mr Tsang. Putting the chairman of the Heung Yee Kuk on Exco, for example, was a bizarre decision. Did Mr Gaddafi refuse the offer?

Mr Tsang is now, I am afraid, in no position to tackle long-term problems. Long-term problems require long-term solutions. But Mr Tsang does not have a long term left. He is a lame duck. This will be vigorously denied by the duck in question, as it always is. Unfortunately lameness is not a matter in which the duck has a choice. It’s like infidelity – everyone knows except the victim. The lameness of the duck is not a criticism of the holder of the office concerned. It is a natural consequence of the way the world works.

Consider. Mr Tsang has only a few months to go. As an ex-Chief Executive he will no longer have the power to reward supporters or to punish opponents. Avid shoe polishers will spurn his Oxfords and save their brushes for boots with some tread still on them. Acolytes who were willing to bruise their foreheads before Mr Tsang will now grovel to another emperor. Within days of Mr Tsang’s retirement people who treated him with the deference due to deity will be explaining what a duff performer he was. That is, I am afraid, the way some people are. It is not a pretty spectacle.

So let me, in my usual contrarian way, say something nice about him. Extending the $2 public transport ride for fossils to seven days a week is a decent and helpful gesture. Very welcome. Thanks a lot. I will never say that you never did anything for me.

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In the Basic Law it says that appointments to certain senior positions must be approved by Beijing. That may be viewed by some people as a legitimate expression of the central government’s interest in ensuring that competent sycophants are running Hong Kong. But where, I wonder, did the idea emerge that when such persons wish to resign they cannot do so until the resignation is “accepted by Beijing”, as the papers always put it?

Henry (forget my mistress) Tang is only the latest senior figure who has said he or she was resigning, only to be told, apparently, that said resignation could not take effect until the panjandrums in Beijing had approved it. There is nothing in the Basic Law to suggest that this is necessary. The right to vet candidates for a position does not imply a right to grant or deny their resignations. You can choose your own domestic helper but if she wishes to resign she goes at the end of her contract. There is no practical advantage to having resignations vetted in Beijing. Leaving aside the level of ignorance of Hong Kong affairs to be expected in the person who actually makes the decision, the whole idea defies common sense. Someone who has submitted his or her resignation has demonstrated the lack of a vital qualification for any demanding job: the desire to do it. These senior officials are not employees of the Central Government. Their wages are paid by us. I do not see why we should be expected to pay some lame duck while he waits for official permission to hobble into retirement — or the Chief Executive “election” as the case may be.

Actually if you ask me it is about time some order was brought into this question of senior people resigning. Most of us have to give a certain period of notice. Top people, it seems, can play peek-a-boo about whether they are running for election or not, and then resign at the drop of a hat when the time is, in their view, right. This is a fairly sordid scene throughout, even without the adultery, but it doesn’t have to be as sordid as it looks now. Can we have a formal period of notice required for people who wish to leave for clearly foreseeable reasons, please? And less nonsense about needing permission from Beijing. Hong Kong does not permit slavery. An official who wishes to resign cannot be prevented from doing so.

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It would probably be too melodramatic to say that we are now witnessing a struggle for the Police Force’s soul.
Organisations do not have souls. At least, though, we must say that a largely submerged struggle is going on, over the question what sort of police force Hong Kong wants. This is the serious question behind the arguments – some of which are rather trivial – about whether particular crowd control measures were legal, whether rude signs about the Force should not be legal, and whether the Chief of Police should, on appropriate occasions, issue an apology.
Questions of this kind usually start with the traditions of the Force, but in this case we can dispense with that because the history of the Force is rather disreputable. In its youth it discharged many of the duties of an occupying army, firmly suppressing any symptoms of restlessness among the natives. It also provided, in the best colonial tradition, an outlet for restless young men of no visible talent who could come out to Hong Koing and become instant officers. The Force was, however, less interested in combating crime. It frowned on violent newsworthy felonies like murder and bank robbery, while casting a more indulgent eye over the sale of protection, vice and drugs to more or less satisfied customers. Winking at these latter industries provided a substantial extra income. Anyone who finds it surprising that the police sided with the government in the Red Guard riots does not realise how lucrative it was to be a policeman in those days. I do not wish to labour this embarassing point. Suffice to say that the band of retired policemen who turned up at Legco the other day to support their current colleagues could have chosen a more appropriate shirt colour than white.
So we will not dwell on the mutiny, the storming of the ICAC headquarters, the part-time jobs as guns for hire, the repeated claims that triads have been eradicated, later withdrawn (without apology), the real estate holdings in Toronto or the MacLennan Inquiry. Suffice to say that the Force, if not Asia’s finest, is at least no longer the Finest Police Force That Money Can Buy. The only point we need take from this murky history is that the Force is not a prisoner of its past. It can become whatever it wants, or we want.
There is a range of choices on offer. At one extreme there is the Carabinieri system, in which the police man a few heavily defended enclaves from which they emerge, usually in large groups and always armed, to deal with major crises. Many European countries used to have police forces of this kind. They were useful in times of war and revolution. But many of the functions of providing everyday security, suppressing crime and resolving minor disputes were simply not attempted in this model. They were left to the citizens, who made what arrangements they could with each other, or with local magnates, bandits or both. At the other extreme is the Dixon of Dock Green dream, in which the policeman is a friendly avuncular figure from whom the most timid individual would not shrink to ask the time. Dixon was of course a fictional person. Still something like this is not impossible, though no doubt easier in small towns than in big cities.
The English police have always recognised in a fuzzy sort of way that they need the public on their side. Citizens must be willing to call for help, to give evidence, to support adequate financing and manpower. Police work is in a sense like counter-insurgency warfare: winning is achieved not by locking up particular people or groups of people, but by gaining the support of the population, after which peace and order follow naturally.
Regrettably, Hong Kong’s police force took after the first of these models more than the second. This is not anyone’s fault. A foreign-officered police force in a colony is never going to be part of the family. And the Hong Kong population’s expectations of police were conditioned by experience in China, which consisted of decades of civil war followed by decades of communism. The idea of the policeman as a servant of the community was not familiar. Still, 14 years after the handover, it isn’t now either. Some of the comments on policing of demonstrations seem to come from people who hanker for the old Chinese system of law enforcement in which the magistrate presided over a large hall in which suspects were beaten until they confessed.
Some years ago there was a suggestion that the Police Force might like to rename itself as a Police Service. This was vigorously opposed from within the Force. Members told me at the time that they wished to remain a “paramilitary force”. The fact that Hong Kong no longer really needed a paramilitary force did not come up. The Force still devotes huge resources to training of a strenuous military kind in riot control, though we haven’t had a decent riot in decades. At the same time many of our police stations still look like small fortresses and attempts at a community presence, though certainly made, look half-hearted. It does not matter if the police continue to be addicted to bagpipes, mess kits, “Mr Vice, the Loyal Toast” and other regimental rituals. The phenomenal standard of foot drill is harmless, though the time spent honing this obscure accomplishment could perhaps be spent on more constructive matters. What is a problem is the number of policemen and admirers who apparently subscribe to the dictum attributed to Lee Kwan Yew: “If people were not afraid of me I would be a nobody.”
The problem for police forces, as for other large organisations, is that the public’s view of them is not decided primarily by their official stance, by the speeches of their senior officers or their media coverage. It is decided by the quality and content of face-to-face interactions with junior members of the body. If they feel they are being treated unfairly, or bullied, then no amount of PR is going to repair the damage. Some help can be provided by an honest apology when things go wrong, but this it seems is not accepted by the new police regime, which does not do apologies, even when a normal law-abiding citizen might think one was appropriate.
The disturbing thing about all this is that we have here an important matter of policy. Do we want a community-friendly police or do we want a fierce force? No doubt there are arguments on both sides but this should be decided by the government and the public, not by the individual whims of successive commissioners of police.
Meanwhile a word about demonstrations. The purpose of demonstrations, as any serious revolutionary will tell you, is not just to air views about public matters, it is to illustrate by a piece of compelling street theatre the essential oppressive nature of capitalism in general and the police in particular. So for the police, success is not looking oppressive. Failure is pepper-spraying primary school kids. OK?

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Away again, hence the absence of posts. My technical enthuisiasm does not run as far as uploading things here from distant hotels.  This trip was a piping for charity thing in Poznan. Poznan is the city in Poland which historians will remember as Posen, which is still its German name. Whatever you call it, Poznan is worth a visit if you are passing that way. It has everything you hope to find in an East European city: cobbled streets, historic buildings, big parks, pavement cafes and cheap booze. The old part of the town has a huge pedestrianised central square – so big that the town hall, an elegant antique with a performing clock – is actually in the middle of it, with a few other buildings. Round the outside are restaurants which all extend onto the pavement. Either there is no Food and Environmental Health Department in Poland or the local version suffers from common sense.

The interesting thing about Poznan is that this is not an ancient city preserved from warfare by luck and from developers by the accident of communism. This place has always been a fortified city. At the end of World War II the Germans and Russians had an extended slugfest which left the place thoroughly chewed up. But at this point the inhabitants did not call in the local counterpart of Norman Foster. Nor did they invite some real estate shark to treat them to the latest in modern malls. They decided to put everything back the way it was. In fact I’m told that during this process sundry previous “improvements” were quietly reversed, so that things were actually for the most part put back where they were in 1800. And the result is very beautiful. Much more beautiful than anything in Hong Kong, to be brutal about it. Which leads to a rather depressing conclusion: if the Red Army flattens your neighbourhood you can fix it, if you wish to. But once our property Panzers have given you a going over, there is no going back. Shame.

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I was surprised to read of Mr Grenville Cross’s attack on the Secretary for Justice, not because Mr Cross has on so many previous public appearances been a staunch defender of such secretaries, though he has, nor because I disagreed with it. I often disagree with Mr Cross. What surprised me was to see a breach of the unwritten rule which states that those who have retired from the vineyard should speak kindly of those who now toil in their place. This is not a law, of course, and Mr Cross has the usual citizen’s right to throw brickbats at the Secretary for Justice, if he supposes that the rest of us are not doing enough.

Mr Cross had, in effect, two complaints. The first was that it ill behoved the Secretary to complain that people were making public points about the right of abode for domestic helpers case, when he had made an unsuccessful effort to put the same points before the court himself. People had been publicly complaining that if the helpers were accorded the right we would be swamped by hordes of helpers, helpers’children and helpers’ husbands, all of whom would impose mammoth and unmanageable expenses on the education, welfare etc systems. This seems a bit unfair, or at least I hope it is. The objection to the campaign waged by opponents of the helpers is that so much of it is inaccurate. I do not know what points the government lawyers hoped to make in the late submission which the judge refused to entertain, but I suppose they were not going to say that the helpers would have to be paid the minimum wage, which is not true, or that they would all have an undeniable right to land in Hong Kong, which is not true either, still less that their children would have such a right. The whole point of the first right of abode catastrophe was for the government to establish, with the aid of Beijing, that you cannot inherit the right of abode from your mother if she did not have it when you were born. So if 100,000 helpers (who are of course already here anyway) got the right of abode tomorrow the number of children they would be able to import would be … zero. So I suppose, though of course we cannot be sure, that the government’s offerings on the implications of the judgement were going to be a good deal more nuanced than those of, say, Selina Chow.

Still, this is the sort of complaint which someone perhaps ought to have made. There is a whiff of hypocrisy in the official line that if we can’t say it in court nobody else can say it out of it. Mr Cross’s second complaint takes us into deeper waters. This was that people should be allowed to say what they like, as judges would not be influenced by it anyway. Lest I brutalise this by abbreviating it, here is a quote courtesy of the Post: “Strong emotions are sometimes stirred up in the community by particular court cases, both criminal and civil. But judges reach their decision on the basis of the evidence and on the application of the law, Judges are taken to be capable of excluding improper influences from their reasoning process, and this is fundamental to our legal system. His (the Secretary for Justice) whole emphasis should have been upon reassuring people that there is no reason to think that the judge will not reach a true decision on the evidence before him and the law.”

Now it is of course a fundamental notion of the legal system that judges OUGHT to reach their decisions without regard to “strong emotions in the community”, based solely on the evidence and the law. The principle is old enough to be enshrined in a little squirt of Latin: fiat justitia ruat caelum, or Let justice be done though the heavens fall. The maxim is usually attributed to the 18th century judge Lord Mansfield. But while this is a cherished objective Mr Cross is surely going too far when he says that it is fundamental to our legal system that this is what always happens. Judges are fallible human beings, after all. The law may, as Gilbert and Sullivan put it, have no fault or flaw, but people are people,  and judges are people too.

In fact in my explorations of legal history I have found that it is almost an invariable rule that any particularly stirring and cherished statement of the inviolability of human rights and the freedom of the subject turns out on close examination to have been a minority speech by a judge whose colleagues were succumbing to the passions of the hour. Sometimes there is not even a minority. Lawyers now cringe at the flimsy technicality used to justify the conviction for treason of Willam Joyce (aka Lord Haw Haw) in 1946. Joyce, an American citizen, had broadcast for the Germans during the war and been much hated. The people wanted him hanged and hanged he was, with the active connivance of the Court of Appeal and the judicial part of the House of Lords. Judges are part of the community and they cannot avoid feeling the passions which animate it. No doubt in a decade or two we will be embarassed by the contemporary judges in the UK and US who are prepared to trample on rights claimed since Magna Carta because they may impede the “War on Terror”. But that’s the way it goes.

The point, I think, is that there are some things which an experienced judge can put out of his mind and some which may be more difficult. I do not doubt, for example, that the sundry comments pro and con Nancy Kissel were like water off a duck’s back to senior judges, supposing they heard them. The merits of particular individuals or participants in court cases, the finer points of evidence, whether particular forensic techniques can be relied on, are the sort of things which we expect judges to be able to exclude from consideration. It is harder to be as completely confident when the sentiment being repeated on all sides is that a decision in one particular direction will lead to the end of Hong Kong civilisation as we know it, or indeed that if the decision is made in that direction then a political body in Beijing will be invited to overturn it, at the cost of further injury to our autonomy and rule of law. We may hope that judges will be able to ignore matters of this kind, but we are not required either by the law or common sense to assume that this will always happen.

In the end the rule of law is not just a matter for lawyers. It demands the support of all of us. One of the items of support required is that people should be moderate and circumspect in public discussions about matters upcoming. This is not a matter of law – even in Legco the ” sub judice”  rule is a convention, not a statutory requirement. It is a matter of good citizenship. People who make extreme predictions about the result of upcoming cases make it harder for the judge to deal with the matter dispassionately, and harder for us to believe that he has succeeded. So, unaccustomed as I am to agreeing with the Secretary for Justice about anything, I am with him on this one. People should shut up.

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I was reading a history book the other day, which I often do for fun, when I noticed that something was missing. This is not a serious omission and the book – “Why the West Rules – for now” by Ian Morris, can be recommended as a stimulating read. Still, when I was a fulltime student of these matters the numbering of years followed a simple system. The year you were talking about had a number. Before the number were two letters. If we were in the last 2000 years or so the two letters were AD, which stood for Anno Domini. So we are now in AD 2011. Anno Domini means “in the year of Our Lord”. The Lord referred to was made clear in the abbreviation used for earlier years, which was BC, meaning Before Christ. Now I am not a huge fan of this system because it means that with the older dates you have to count backwards. I often have to remind myself that 2000 BC comes before 1000 BC, and not the other way round, as you might think. But this system has been around for a long time and most of us are used to it.

Mr Morris, though was using something different. Instead of AD he had CE, and instead of BC he had BCE. The numbers were the same. You still had to count backwards in BCE. I had to look this up. CE stands for the Common Era and BCE stands for Before the Common Era. The “Common Era” is a translation of a Latin phrase Aera Vulgaris, which probably did not originally mean common in the modern sense. Alternatively you can ignore the history and say that the use of the Common Era removes a potential source of embarassment to non-Christians. The system is “common” because it is used all round the world by people of many religions or of none. For this reason some publishers recommend it. Humph. The counter-argument is that the AD/BC system was after all invented hy Christians and refusing to use the traditioonal labels is a concession to atheism or political correctness or both.

There are as usual some odd things about all this. The first is that the monk who initiated the system is generally thought to have made a mistake in estimating the year of Christ’s birth. So this event (for those who believe it happened at all – there is an interesting theory that the oldest Gospel was writtan as a fictional allegory and no real person is behind it at all) is usually given as happening between 2 and 4 AD. Or 2 and 4 CE if you prefer. So the year of Our Lord is not exactly the year of Our Lord at all. The system is a convenience. The second oddity is that people who boycott the AD/BC version because of  its religious significance are quite happy to continue with the usual days of the week, which are actually all named after gods of one persuasion or another except Sunday and Monday. The months are also polluted by religion – as well as two rather objectionable Roman emperors.

The Society of Friends (Quakers) seems to be the only religion which has noticed this point, and for many years refused to use the conventional names for days and months, instead managing simply with numbers – as Cantonese still does. Apparently most Quakers now regard the insistence on numbers as a bit unnecessary but they still often refer to Sunday as First Day.  For the rest of us, I don’t know. Apparently the reference to Christ is a problem for some people. The use of the Common Era arrangement was started in the 19th century by Jewish historians who presumably thought (the Lord thy God is a jealous God) that something terrible would happen to them if they mentioned Jesus, even in a date. On the other hand common sense suggests that a label is just a label, and as long as we all use the same one it doesn’t matter too much where it came from. Many physical units are named after scientific celebrities. If we discovered that the Mr Ohm after whom the ohm is named had stolen his results from someone else, and moreover was a nasty piece of work who abused his dog, deceived his wife and robbed his servants, would it matter?

I suppose it is all part of the march of euphemism, which requires us to refer to the blind, the halt and the maimed as “differently abled”, prostitutes as sex workers, and robber barons as the Real Estate Developers’  Association. I must declare an interest here. Having wasted so much of my youth mastering the intricacies of Latin I am often irritated to see this accomplishment becoming even more useless than it was in the 60s. Sic transit gloria, as we used to say.

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Ahoy there, South China Morning Post! Time for a few brief words about some basic pieces of nautical terminology. On Page 2 today, in that silly column called “talking points” (our editors will be looiking ahead at these developing stories…) we are told that “All eyes will be on the northern port of Dalian, with wide speculation that China’s first aircraft carrier will be launched to mark the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army.”  Well some of those eyes are going to be sorely disappointed. On the opposite page fans are rushing to Dalian to see the aircraft carrier, the Varyag, which is already “at anchor” about a kilometre from the shore. To launch a boat means to put it in the water. If the Varyag is at anchor it is already in the water.

Is there another aircraft carrier on the slipway, or is the SCMP just bad at boat stories? Well there was another clue on the same page as the story, a picture of the aircraft carrier concerned. This was captioned “The Varyag lies anchored yesterday at the shipyard in Dalian ….” But the Varyag was not anchored in the picture. Both anchors could be clearly seen stowed in the usual place, one each side of the bow. And indeed you would not, after all, drop anchor in a shipyard, supposing you were in one. You would simply tie up. By a delicious coincidence, the story and picture on page 3 are right under a story headlined “Press council to look into newspaper errors”.

I am trying not to be too hard on the Post, but clearly some people have stopped relying on it for information. One of them is apparently its own columnist, Michael Chugani, who thinks that democratic countries should abandon democracy so that they can become prosperous and efficient … like China. ROFL.

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It is not often I feel moved to write, or even read, about competitive swimming, but a story the other day was provocative. Readers will recall that a year or two ago swimmers started appearing in a new suit, which covered everything, and was constructed from some high tech material which made them a bit faster. Records tumbled, people who could not afford the new duds complained, and the speed suits were eventually banned.

Now everyone is back in the old gear, records are no longer tumbling. In fact they are not being broken at all. This is apparently disappointing for spectators, who like to see records broken. I can’t think why, as you can’t tell until the announcement afterwards whether a record has been set or not, but there it is. We may note in passing that spectators are in for a disappointment sooner or later because speeds will hit limits set by biology. Racehorses, which have been racing a lot longer than human swimmers, have reached this stage. They go as fast as a horse can go without turning into a Pegasus and speed records are rarely broken.

Anyway, in the meantime, according to the story, the swimming authorities are wrestling with some way to keep crowds interested in a record-free meeting, and also struggling with the sponsors. It seems that the cover-everything Superman suit provided plenty of space for advertising. Now the male swimmers have gone back to something more like traditional briefs there is nowhere to put a logo on the upper half of the body, which is the only part likely to appear on television.

Now in the first place it seems clear that the suit problem is not going to go away. Hundredths of a second make a difference at this level so people are always going to be looking for an edge. The answer, it seems to me, is that the swimmers should wear no clothes at all. This would also solve the problem of attracting an audience, though no doubt it will not be exactly the same as the audience they get now. I suppose in the interests of hygiene they could keep those funny hats. They won’t be wearing much less than the beach volleyball people do.

This will considerably reduce the demand for competitive swimwear. But I suppose other sponsors will be interested. Of course there will be nothing to stick a logo on but where there’s a profit to be had people find a way. Some sort of removable tatoo?

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