Quote of the day 2nd August 2015
Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria
Please note that the post below was published more than ten years ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by th...
Comments
Well the answer lies in quite a lot of things you may choose to do, for example I want to lay a shed base in the garden but how do i know if its square? well if i use the shutter going north and mark off 3 feet, then i use the shutter going west and mark off 4 feet, when move the distance between my marks closer together or further apart and the distance is 5 feet then I know I have a perfect right angle and can fasten the shutters together. So do that 3 more times and i have a perfectly square shed base to lay.
Im not saying that in itself is knowledgeable or smart, I am saying that is how you apply knowledge you pick up along the way. The smart bit about it is that now i did not have to go out and spend a tenner on a large square rule at B&Q to do that one job, so now, once I am done laying the concrete shed base i can spend that tenner on a well earned beer, that's the bit that makes it smart.
You are, of course, absolutely 100% right that being smart cannot necessarily be measured.
Nevertheless I think Joseph Addison is quite correct to imply that
1) Being ignorant is not necessarily the same as being stupid
2) Having a lot of knowledge is not necessarily the same as being clever
3) Being arrogant because one has a lot of knowledge can be a bad mistake.
to me knowledge is great, but the application of that knowledge creates wisdom. Thats how I always took it anyway.
She was very open about doing it (at least to us her family) though i always thought it was hilarious. "if they insisit on dragging old dears like me out then they may as well be useful, but no one is telling me which box to tick, we fought a war for that"
One of my earliest election memories - I think it would have been 1970 when I was a small boy, though it could have been either of the 1974 elections - I recall the Sunday Mirror published a cartoon which had an elderly lady making the same joke as your gran though of course, the Mirror being a Labour supporting newspaper, it was the other way round.
A rather later election memory, from a council by-election in Wheathampstead, was myself and the local Lib/Dem leader turning up at the same time at the same house to give an elderly lady the lift she had, I think accidentally requested from both of us. I have the impression she was actually a Conservative but she went with the Lib/Dem, Councillor the Revd Robert Donald. I think he thought she was more likely to vote for us too: he gave me a rueful smile as he was about to drive off and said to me (not at all in a nasty way),
"If you win by one vote I think you'll have me to thank."