Forget WikiLeaks - the big UK news story this winter is... it's cold, icy and we've had snow.

Yes, you read that right - we have had winter weather this winter. Whatever next?

Anyway, as always, the official advice from the police and motoring organisations is "only drive if your journey is essential".

Which means what, exactly? Don't drive at all, unless you're an ambulance driver or someone urgently in need of medical attention? What constitutes an "essential journey" (and I'm not talking about the Best Of album for an MOR band)? 

Either there's a specific category of journey that is deemed essential by officialdom, or the words "to you" are missing from the official travel advice, in which case Mrs Miggins may well deem it essential that she gets another packet of chocolate HobNobs before the vicar visits, Fred Perve might well think that his attendance at the hole in the wall next to the girl's changing rooms are St Busty's Academy for Overdeveloped Young Ladies is mandatory, etc.

We already know that the British public has a tenuous grasp of what constitutes an emergency, as the steady trickle of idiots dialling 999 to report a missing pizza delivery, request ambulance transport because of missed buses, etc. readily testifies. So what makes the police think that "essential" is any more clearly understood? 

Those are the kind of consequences of people deciding for themselves what is essential to them, and I have to assume that police know how quixotic the public can be, and that allowing them to decide how essential a journey is for themselves will have much the same result as not saying anything at all. 

So the other alternative is that there really is a definition of "essential" that police really mean when they say it, but for some reason they are unwilling or afraid to say. 

If I had to guess, I'd say they really mean to say "don't travel unless life depends on it" meaning only health workers, the very sick and/or their drivers should venture outdoors, but they know perfectly well that almost every employer in the country would be outraged to have offical confirmation that what they do is not essential, merely useful.

In most cases, bosses want their workers to think of their jobs as essential, while workers think of it only as an expedient means of securing wages.

For a few years now, weather forecasters have been using the term "sharp showers" in their television and radio forecasts for the UK. Almost all UK weather forecasts get their information from The Meteoroloical Office ("the Met Office" for short), a department of the civil service paid for out of the defence budget.

I've never heard anyone use this phrase except in a weather forecast, so have always wondered what it meant. At a guess, I thought it's something to do with onset and duration, rather than how point or razor-like the raindrops are, but in common public parlance, people use words like sudden, heavy, drizzle, downpour, torrential, fine, thundery, etc. to describe rain, not sharp. It rains quite a lot in the UK, so we have lots of words for different types of rain, hallowed through long use, so I wondered where this comparatively new phrase meant. No lay people I spoke seemed have a definite idea what it meant, and I could find no definition anywhere in the Met Office output.

Back in 2008, I sent the Met Office an email asking what the term meant, but heard nothing back.

I have left the question posted on several public websites and discussion forums, asking if anybody knew what the Met Office meant by the term, to no avail.

Today I phoned their public enquiries line and asked again, and I've finally got an answer.

"Sharp showers" is not an officially defined Met Office term, but the enquiry desk term think it means "sudden heavy showers", which pretty much everyone understands.

<<PAUSE FOR RAPTUROUS APPLAUSE>>

Given that most of their media forecasts are necessarily very brief, I can see why they have saved three precious syllables and begun using "sharp" instead of "sudden heavy". But whenever they did, I missed the memo explaining it. Mainly because, I suspect, it was never written.

Seven Things Men Do That Drive Women Nuts

Relationships are all about give and take, right? Ok, so read the linked article, then...

1. Leave the bloody toilet seat how you found it.
   If it is down, as in a woman's flat, leave it down.
   But if it up, put it down to use it then put it back up when you've finished. How hard is that? Anyone would thing that women reverse knickerless and blindfolded into the bathroom, the fuss they make about seats being left down.
   Look at it this way. If a woman sits on the bare china, she gets a cold arse (no woman I've ever met and no toilet I've ever used have the kind of size relationship that would lead to her falling in, getting wet, stuck, etc.). But if a man pees while the seat is still down, he gets wet shins (and carpet). Which is worse?
   
2. Dust will not kill you; human immune systems are dapted to cope with dirt. But not being able to find the first aid kit where you left it because the lady of the house left it in the spare room when she grazed her knuckles in a dusting frenzy might. Tidy trumps clean, though clean and tidy is even better.
   
3. Be emotionally continent.
   Not uptight or emotionless. Just know that when and how you emote is as important as what you express. Recognise that men need to structure their emotions in some way - a heavy, state-of-the-relationship conversation is best carried out in daylight while both parties are sober.
4. If you don't want us to call you/go out with you/stay married to you, or you want us to call, go out or get married, say so, as directly as possible. We do not know what you are thinking and are fairly linear creatures who set some store by the idea of cause and effect. We carry on in a particular direction, or emotional state, until we get new information that changes it. If you haven't made it so obvious that you want us to call, kiss you just there, ask you to marry us, move out or take out the rubbish that a blind and deaf person sixty miles away would think it obvious, you could always try directly asking us. You know, just for variety to the usual female state of being positive and dynamic in every aspect of life except your relationships with men, where you turn to demanding jelly. Jelly, in that you lose all powers of decision making, and demanding, in which all creativity and entertainment  has to be generated by the man and has to be primarily for your benefit.
   
5. Don't try to change us
   We don't want you to tell us how to dress, walk, stand, sit, breathe, eat, or groom ourselves. What we DO want you to do is inspire us to change ourselves. Anything else is just nagging.
6. Put together an original night out yourself occasionally. Men are living breathing sentient creatures who have their own sense of self worth, and if you make us do all the chasing around for your entertainment like some performing animal, we will eventually come to resent you for it. 
7. Don't "try us out" for a matter of months, then ditch us because we aren't what you want. Either stick with it longer, or don't sleep with us in the first place. We will sleep with you whenever we get the chance, but generally speaking we won't do that unless we want to be with you more generally. It's critically important to factor alcohol or drugs out of this, for both yourself and us. If we call you back when we're sober, we have already decided it could become serious. We will be very hurt if you play along to see if you feel more for us in future then decide after however long that you don't and that we arn't "the one". Men are not looking for "the one", or at least not the same definition of "the one" as you are. Usually, it's straightforwardly "the one I want to be with for the foreseeable future". "Forever" is not a useful concept.
8. *Bonus* Do not form educational strategy without men in the room. It's doing great things for girls, certainly, but it's killing the life and career chances of boys. Boys NEED competition, and pressure, and all-or-nothing exams and tests, and they need a few male teachers to let them know all of that is ok. Too many women teachers try to stop this, fearing it as something both beyond their understanding and beyond their control. Tru dat - the adrenaline rush you get from mucking about all year and not looking at any books until the week before the exam then studying like mad and acing it suit boys (and men) much better than all this constant assessment guff. Teenage boys do not have long enough attention spans for coursework.
   

Right. I'm fed up of these Westminster types fiddling their expenses but denying that they need to have any external oversight. Indeed, they are denying that they CAN have any oversight external to themselves. 

The central problem here is that Parliament is "sovereign". It cannot, while it remains so, accept any independent outside scrutiny, only scrutiny from a person or agency that is appointed by itself. We don't trust it enough to trust anyone it appoints, so we both spiral ever lower into the depths of contempt and ignorance.

In very simplistic (and probably blasphemous, but what the heck - I'm an atheist) terms, it's like expecting God to submit an expenses claim. God is supreme - to what authority can He defer? In the UK constitution, Parliament is supreme, so there is no authority to which it can defer.

Parliament wrested that sovereignty over many years from the monarch, starting with Magna Carta. This was the right thing to do in the historical context, where a corrupt and unaccountable monarchy was doing things that, despite their corruption, were internally consistent with ownership of sovereignty.

As with MPs today, the problem was not necessarily that every member of monarchy was a corrupt despot, but more that the constitution did not prevent them from becoming one. In other words, it was the perception of what a monarch might do, more than a suspicion of what every monarch really does (spurred by some real abuses), that was at the root of the shift from monarch to Parliament.

Now we are faced with a Parliament that many of the people suspect of corruption. Analogously, we don't generally think that EVERY MP is chiselling, self-serving and only interested in the status quo, but we know that some are. Also, there appear to be no barriers to prevent any MP from behaving in that way, nor any effective punishments for those that do so. It is the suspicion of what all MPs might do, spurred by some real abuses, that is the root of the next constitutional shift I believe the UK needs.

Also, everything that Parliament is doing to clean its own reputation is internally consistent with ownership of sovereignty over itself, despite the obvious desire outside Parliament that it should be a servant of the people, and that it is badly failing in that role.

1. The first action has to be a formal recognition among the people that soveriegnty should now rest with us alone - not the monarch, and not our elected representatives (however they are elected) They work for us, not the other way around.
   
2. The second has to be formal recognition by parliament that it must defer its own soverignty to the higher authority of the people.
   
3. Then, we can have a proper constitutional convention to determine the future roles of people, parliament and monarch in the running of the country and the decision making processes that determine how that can happen.

Government can only happen with the consent of the governed, and it looks increasingly unlikely that such consent can continue to be given without root and branch reform. Parliament has long passed the point where it can reform itself, because the sovereignty that currently defines it is the very thing that prevents it from reforming itself.

So, I think the people should organise an electoral vote ourselves along the lines of:

"We, the people of the United Kingdom, no longer have confidence in the institution of Parliament to effectively represent our foreign and domestic interests, be they individual, social or commercial.

We demand the immediate recognition by Parliament that it must, on a timetable of no less than one and no more than five calendar years from the date of this vote, hand over political sovereignty to us, the people of the United Kingdom.

Furthermore, a constitutional convention must be convened over the same period to determine how this handover of sovereignty is to be effected, and how the soveriegn will of the people of the United Kingdom is to be determined and applied.

This constitutional convention must involve representatives from among the people, selected fairly and randomly, in the final decision-making capacity. The people's involvement must not be a purely consultative or advisory one.

All the institutions of the state - including, but not limited to: the legislature, executive, judiciary, and monarchy; the armed forces and security services; and all departments and tiers of government, both local and national - must be aligned with this peaceful and ordered handover of sovereignty during the course of this process."

Providing the turn-out was more than about 50% of eligible voters, a simple ballot of "Yes I agree with this demand" or "No I do not agree with this demand" would have no legal or constitutional force under current laws, but it would have such a degree of moral force that I don't think any British government or Parliament could ignore it without formally becoming a dictatorship.

It does, of course, mean we'd have to take some responsibility back for the way we are governed. The argument that "all politicians in all parties are equally useless, so there's no point taking part or even paying any attention to politics" would be moot, because almost by definition we would all become politicians ourselves.

Especially if part of the constitutional settlement was to make the people's final decision-making powers permanent, through some kind of jury selection system (as I've argued would be the best way to reform the House of Lords before now).

It's our democracy, not theirs. Let's take it back from them and make sure they can't mess about with it any more.

Think about the text in blue. Would you vote in favour of it or against it? And if you think it's worthwhile, tell your friends and send them here. Maybe this is where it all starts - it's as good as anywhere else, surely?

So, here we are.

I'm sitting here in the UK typing, while the minutiae of the US Presidential Primaries form the bulk of the broadsheet and non-tabliod TV news stories.

Shurely shome mishtake?

I mean, it's a big story - of course it is. But is it really the sort of story that the British media should be spending quite so much time on? Isn't there something else that could or should be given airtime? I don't know what that something should be, natch - if I did I'd be a news editor, not an armchair grumbler.

I can't help feeling that what's really going on - givne the way that the Democrats have so far dominated the coverage this side of the pond - is some sort of vicarious thrill that the GOP is going to finally "get theirs", as it were. No doubt they are, but I'm not sure the Dems are going to wave any magic wands and make the "liberal intelligentsia" feel all warm and cuddled.

Not least because it ain't the Yanks or the Neocons or any of our cherished lefty bogey-men that's fucking the dearly-held principles of woolly intellectuals like me (you know, like habeus corpus, freedom of information, the right to privacy, rolling back the worst excesses of consumerism rather than extending them into every sector of public life).

Nope. It's our very own Labour government (I draw a distinction between the NuLabs in Westminster and the party, because the party long ceased to have much influence over what happens in Government. We probably had more in Opposition.) that's doing all of that, and the Tories are, at least initially, unlikely to do anything to rock the boat.

Worse, they'll start undoing the few good things Labour has managed to do as soon as they've lulled us into the false sense of security we'll (by then) have, off the back of relief at getting rid of a tired NuLab government. 

They'll want to cut back on "waste", naturally. So bye-bye Arts funding, one of the few things that has kept the middle classes quiet these past 10 years. "Well, the country might be going to shit, but at least we can go and see Sir Iain on the South Bank/go to the National Gallery/etc." 

And the "waste" that's been pissed away on the Public Sector under NuLab (and there has been collossal amounts - not on "poltical correctness" or even on bureaucracy but straight into mostly off-shore company accounts under the banner of PFI) will be cut back. PFI contracts themselves will be untouchable (the fucking bloodsuckers made damn sure of that) so all new investment will be frozen.

Most of the management consultancy drones that are ruining every part of public life vote Tory, or at least they will if they sniff a tax cut on their MBA-bloated salaries, so they won't touch their gravy train. No, it'll be nurses, teachers, and other people likely to vote some way other than Tory that get fucked over, just like it was last time.

Give it a parliamentary term or two, and we'll be right back where we started. The whining classes won't be writing to the Daily Mail to whinge about the postcode lottery in NHS-funded plastic surgery clinics, and at-death's-door people won't be on the teatime news complaining that the NHS won't fund their homeopathic remedy of distilled water with an expensive label, or the experimental cancer drug that hasn't even been cleared for testing on animals yet, or the extra tuition for little Shanxi's recently-diagnosed syndromia madeupica ad explanitium ex being-a-little-shittico et obtainicum-mea-feei.

Nope. We'll be back to the good old days, when public sector complaints were about the rats running around everywhere and the fucking great big holes in the ceiling of the local clinic/classroom/waiting room.

Maybe then we'll be happy - the best bit about being in opposition is you can rant and rave and protest all you like and it doesn't do anything dangerous like change anything.

Then, when you get back into government, you can be utterly timid because you're scared that if you do what you really know you should, something will break.

...

Blimey. That was all over the place. I told you I was rusty...