pumpkinstrokemarrow

To be on the safe side we checked in our elderly Romer - probably still good for facts of this sort, not that susceptible to the wafts and whims of fashion. Which is not quite the whole story as it turns out that there is room for debate about which vertebrae are cervical and which are thoracic and so on and so forth. Not always as clear as one might have hoped. Nevertheless, Romer does confirm that while birds, fishes, amphibians and reptiles are a bit relaxed, proper animals, that is to say mammals, pretty much all have seven cervical vertebrae, with the small number of exceptions including tree sloths and manatees. But certainly not giraffes or pigs.

Now it is a well known feature of intelligent, that is to say human, life that seven is a magic number. There are seven ages of man, seven hills of Rome and seven layers in the ISO reference model for digital communications. In the beginning, before the rot set in, there were seven electors for the Holy Roman Empire. Not to mention the seven dials near Leicester Square. All kinds of important things come in sevens.

Which clearly demonstrates the presence of the deity at the time of the design of mammals. The deity being intelligent is into sevens, just as we are. Whereas if it had been left to natural selection we could have wound up with any old number. So OK, the deity was out to lunch when the trees sloths and manatees were on the slab, but that does not detract from the argument as a whole. He is present and correct!

Having sorted that one out we then moved onto a piece by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian about how it is not a good thing that the difference between top pay and bottom pay has got so large and is continuing to grow. Most unhealthy. A line I agree with, but then I thought you are a presumably decently paid journalist and you are chairman of the National Trust. So you are copping a fair packet yourself and see fit to bang on. So I go to check my handy copy of the National Trust Annual Report for 2009-2010 where I was pleased to discover that the large numbers of national trustees are not paid. They collect a very modest amount of expenses and that is it. The only fly in the ointment is their director general - one Fiona Reynolds - who appears to be on something like £150,000 plus final salary pension scheme. The pay of a senior civil servant. I suppose the trustees would argue that they are a serious organisation which needs a serious person at the helm, for which one has to pay a reasonable salary. I am inclined to agree.

But it would be interesting to do some work on the way in which the public servants in devolved bodies of various sorts have managed to whack their salaries up big time over the last twenty year or so; how bosses in local government, bosses of educational enterprises and bosses of hospitals have managed to transform their pay scene. From being the Cinderellas of public service they have become the Snow Queens. Much better paid than the heads of departments, the god calls me god lot (aka GCMG, but not the Greater Covina Medical Group), who used to be top of this particular heap.

PS: and if you are bored, you can ponder on the two rather different anatomical uses of the word 'cervix'.