Oh, of course, don’t let my RSI get in the way of your deadlines! I’ll just rely on the NHS then, shall I? ;-)

I have autofill turned on in the Mac but for some reason it was off at work: didn’t notice before now for some reason. (Maybe I fill in fewer forms at work.) Anyway, I think it’s a pretty good alternative.

I can teach you the handshake if you like ;)

Oh, of course. These things are inevitable.

Incidentally, Stephen: I’ve tried and failed to get commenter recognition to work, but FWIW my copy of Firefox is happily remembering the details via its autofill feature. Not ideal I know, but the alternative is about ten years of template fiddling and unfortunately I’m under deadline mountain just now.

I’d probably be up for parole about now.

From the point of view of trying to get a conviction, the more CCTV footage of the crime, the better. The earlier the police turn up and break up a fight, the more leeway for the accused’s lawyer to argue that the crime wasn’t that serious or that the police misunderstood the situation. Get the entire mugging on tape and you stand a better chance of convicting. Of course, this involves not helping the victim, but hey. Incentives matter.

See also the police’s official advice about what to do when you’re attacked: on no account ever fight back; curl up in a ball so that potential witnesses are left in no doubt as to who’s the victim.

Widespread police CCTV coverage was first tried in Newcastle, because they had a serious closing-time fisticuffs problem, and, by all accounts, it worked brilliantly: the police could see trouble as soon as it started, and up they would promptly turn. But what they were doing was applying pre-CCTV thinking to CCTV technology. Fine at first, but trouble occurs when the technology becomes more widespread and the thinking starts to catch up with it. I wonder who was the first bright spark to realise that CCTV enabled the police to get a very high chance of arresting a criminal without having to confront them mid-crime. And then someone realised that the police could get more arrests and solve more crimes if they concentrated their efforts on reviewing footage — i.e. staying in the station — rather than going out.

True. And the laws are definitely applied selectively, so you’ve got more chance of being done for drinking a bottle of wine on a picnic than slugging back Bucky before stabbing someone in the eyes. I can’t speak for the whole of Scotland, naturally, but when I lived in Ayrshire the cops were widely regarded to have an attitude of “let them all kill each other then we’ll come along when it’s all over”. And when I worked in Clydebank the people I worked with made the scurrilous suggestion that the CCTV in the town centre was used by the cops so they could watch trouble and, again, wait until it was over before turning up.

Whether that’s true or not I have no idea, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me.

I’m sure I’ve told you this before but my old home town was something of a performance car capital, with sierra cosworths and the like hammering around the place. The cops were given a diesel Maestro (famously one of the slowest cars you could ever drive) with a strict 35-mile maximum per shift.