Having been tagged by Rhetorically Speaking with “one of these terrible memes””, five facts about myself designed to add a touch of creative incoherency:

1. I may be the only person ever to have arrived at their “surprise” 21st birthday party and been utterly surprised. I seem to recall that I thought I was going to a Trivial Pursuit party, which is probably dating myself rather badly. I was very short on social skills and social understanding in my youth.

2. I once got drunk with a group of Han Chinese tourists from Hohhot outside the mausoleum of Genghis Khan (with whom I didn’t have a word of language in common). But vodka shots, it seems, speak a universal language.

3. I taught myself to bowl left-handed at cricket (although I’m otherwise strictly righthanded) because I’d done serious damage to my right shoulder with a weird tennis service action. I can still trundle down slow left-armers, the emphasis being on trundle.

4. I get blisters on the bottom of my feet very easily. One excuse for not being a runner – the other is that I don’t actually know how to run. I can’t work out how to put down my feet.

5. Much of my “leisure time” in my teenage years were spent sorting sheets of sandpaper into retail packs. This may be related to No 1.

I’m not going to directly tag anyone else for this – it seems a bit prescriptive – but, hey, if you’re reading this, why not give it a go …!

* The market for organic food, cosmetics and clothing is becoming mainstream. Broadly to be applauded, but the trick is going to be maintaining regulation and ensure that organic “factory farming” and the mulitnationals, which would destroy many of its environmental and social benefits, don’t take over.

* Even The Economist has decided declining populations might not be a bad thing.

* Radio 4’s Broadcasting House is, as I write, playing a Fifties-sounding song called “Goodbye Charlie … cashing in his chips”. Yes, Charles Kennedy, as I predicted yesterday, has resigned as leader of the Liberal Democrats. I wasn’t perhaps expecting it to only take six hours from the time I wrote – but Kennedy’s failure to resign immediately has done, I suspect, a lot of damage to the Lib Dems. I suspect bar-takings in Westminster may be seriously down for the next week or two.

* Simon Jenkins (for whom I have much respect as a columnist) is, however, showing his age, in this piece on computers and “dead tree” newspapers. Interesting that he feels the need to assert that they will survive.

The BBC is this morning reporting on both Radios 4 and 5 news on Prince William starting at Sandhurst, describing him as “the man who will one day be head of Britain’s armed forces”. Surely that is making a rather large assumption about what Britain’s constitution might be in 40-plus years’ time?

Champ and I had our first encounter with an urban fox on this evening’s walk. The fox was trotting out of a commercial parking area (no doubt with good rubbish bins) and came around a blind corner about 10 feet from us.

Now I don’t know if it is possible to conduct intelligence tests on foxes (the BBC’s dog intelligence test can be found here), but I’d reckon as a rule of thumb that, like Bangkok street dogs, their lifestyle puts pretty strong selection pressure on brains.

The fox turned instantly and high-tailed* it back the way it had come. By contrast, when I met foxes when walking with Beanie, when she was a stout and elderly Staffordshire bull terrier, they would usually just stand and watch her, even when this close.

Not conclusive, but I suspect they’ve got some sense of the different threats presented.

And Champ? Well I don’t think he’s read the government’s Hunting with Dogs Act, put it that way.

* I was wondering about the origin of the phrase – it was variously given as a reflection of the behaviour of white-tailed deer and mustangs on this site.

My 19th-century “blogger” Frances Williams Wynn (who has been a bit slack lately – sorry) today has a brilliant post, if I say so myself, about the early days of ballooning and deep sea diving.

She calls the former “aerostation” – a curiously modern-sounding word, and while she’s not actually going up herself, she gets a detailed account of what it involves. And you can see why she might not been keen to try it, given this tale:

The descent was very perilous: the young man — almost a boy—having asked Graham how high they were, and being told, I forget what, asked ‘whether they could not ascend a little higher before they began their descent?’ Graham said. Certainly they could, but that he was averse to the idea of expending any more gas, because a small quantity in reserve might be essential to the safety of their descent. “When once the ballast is all thrown out and the descent begun, the only means of avoiding any dangerous spot on which the balloon might chance to fall, is by admitting a little more of the inflammable gas, rising, and trusting to the wind to convey the machine out of the dangerous neighbourhood. The young man still pressed for a farther ascent; Graham weakly consented; and the danger he had foreseen actually occurred.

As soon as the earth became visible through their glasses, it was evident that they had their choice of dangers only: they were coming down between the river and some lime-kilns. The kilns were certain destruction ; the moment the balloon approached them. The inflammable gas must have ignited, and they must have been burnt to death. The only alternative was to rise and trust to the wind for conveying them out of this dangerous neighbourhood.

They had no gas left, and the only means of lightening the balloon was by cutting away the car—without the power (as George observed) of saying ‘ heads below’—-and trusting themselves to the ropes of the balloon itself, which of course rose, having a lighter weight, made still lighter by being close to it, instead of being attached at some distance. At last they fell into the river, and being both good swimmers, escaped.

(Probably not very practical in a skirt.)

Seems to me that Charles Kennedy, who has admitted that he is an alcoholic, although he says “dry” for several months, is finished as the leader of the Liberal Democrats, and the longer he hangs on the worse for the party. The current state of play:

More than half of his 62 MPs told a BBC Newsnight survey that Mr Kennedy should go or said his position was untenable.
Twenty-one frontbenchers have signed a statement saying they will resign if he does not quit by Monday. Another four MPs are refusing to serve under him.
Mr Kennedy insists he has overwhelming support from ordinary party members and says he will not abandon his duties.

Pity that there is apparently not one woman even in the long-list to replace him. And all of the people saying he was “brave” to admit it do make one worry slightly about the human race; he “chose” to admit it a few hours before it would be broadcast to the world. That’s not choice; it’s news management.

I don’t particularly care about the Lib Dems as such; although it is a natural effect of the British first-past-the-post, one-member-one-seat electoral system, a party that can’t decide if it is to the left or the right is a bit of a worry. Still, the only thing that is going to improve the electoral system is a hung parliament and a consequence change to some form of proportional representation (even a single transferable vote would help). And that, for the foreseeable future, will probably require the Lib Dems to do reasonably well.