I was traveling home to Birmingham on a Virgin train – not something I do often – and I sat at a table with a couple of Pakistani men. They were a fair bit apart in age and it turned out that one was the son of the other. They chatted intermittently for a bit while; I gazed out of the window. I think we exchanged pleasantries.

Then, by chance, the younger man and myself looked at our mobile phones at the same time. They were identical models, and we chuckled at this. The ice was broken just enough.

So when the father excused himself to search for the conveniences (not all that convenient as he was gone some time), his son asked – a little sheepishly – if I’d join him for a drink in the buffet car. If I remember correctly, he felt it a little disrespectful to his father to go alone.

So I did. And we chatted. For some reason I mentioned my Quaker connections and he got excited because he knew some Quakers well. We chatted some more and I learned that he was a member of the Pakistani parliament. He had been in London with his father to negotiate a deal with a large American food chain: the purpose of which, I believe, was to help fund a scheme to get affordable health care (possibly even free, I don’t remember) to vulnerable neighbourhoods in Pakistan.

And then I discovered he had apologised on behalf of Pakistan for the murder of Daniel Pearl.

Ten years ago today, American journalist Daniel Pearl was beheaded by Islamic extremists in Pakistan. Umar Ghuman, this understated chap in a standard-class train carriage, drinking with a stranger out of respect for his own father, had been the man who apologised in public to Daniel’s.

Umar Ghuman, I salute you for that.

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A tried and tested trick (by me, at least) is to run through the alphabet, visualising each letter in turn. It’s a bit like scrolling through a list on a screen: although you focus on one letter at a time you can see its neighbours too; but in this case the rest of the alphabet is always there somewhere, at the periphery.

The ‘A’ chimed with me straight away. I let it go for the moment as I still had 25 letters to compare it with. But the ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘G’ also glowed a little. (They don’t actually glow as such, but it’s impossible to describe exactly how they present themselves.)

The rest of the journey through the alphabet was uneventful, until I hit ‘W’. Everything about it lit up, and it was even bold enough to proffer a word: ‘When’. I tried others, like ‘Will’ and ‘With’, but ‘When’ stuck fast. However, the ‘T’ then started throbbing and spat out the word ‘Time’. That posed a problem: do I trust that sudden, apparently random intervention or do I focus on ‘When’, which had been presented so decisively?

I prodded a little more, playing ‘Time’ and ‘When’ off against each other. And then, like the end of a tunnel approaching unexpectedly, the other pieces dropped into place: ‘A’, ‘Time’, ‘G’ and ‘B’ clubbed together to produce ‘As Time Goes By‘.

How the bloody hell does that work?! It feels like I’m doing physical labour, moving pieces around and slotting things together, but in fact I’m lying perfectly still. My hands are doing nothing; to any observer I’m probably asleep; the only muscle I’m using is inside my head.

And where does ‘When’ fit in? The letter ‘W’ doesn’t feature in that song title at all, yet it was instrumental in solving the puzzle.

I’m not trying to fathom the human brain; lots of very clever people are spending their lives doing that. But I am often paralysed by how incredibly unfathomable and sophisticated it is.

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Eight or nine years ago a man from Immersive Education introduced my colleagues and me to Kar2ouche. He explained it was the result of some Oxford University research into why children enjoyed computer games but not educational software. He finished by admitting that the findings stated the bleeding obvious: games are fun because the kids are in control. It was as simple as that.

He didn’t feel the need to call it ‘gamification’. To do so now is to suggest it’s a Cool New Thing: it’s not; it’s just common sense.

We know from the pain of public consultations that there’s little point involving people if they feel they have no stake in it. If the thing I’m expected to do isn’t relevant enough to engage me in the first place, why am I expected to do it at all? Bribing me might elicit some answers but it probably won’t encourage much meaningful engagement from me.

In other words, sugar-coating something might make it taste better but it doesn’t improve the process. For example, by turning voting into a game you might get more people to vote, but that doesn’t mean you’ve improved the democratic process. Those voters might still feel alienated after the election, meaning that next time you just have to be even more creative if you want them to turn out on polling day.

You don’t build a car from a cake recipe and ask someone to rectify it later. No: you make sure the processes and environment are optimum in the first place. Either that or you’ve decided already that you want a cake and not a car.

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WordPress was playing silly buggers; the front end wasn’t working well and the back end was even more broken. At first it appeared to be a problem with plugins but eventually became apparent that it probably wasn’t. In fact it seems that the latest version of WordPress (and plugins) relies heavily on php5, and my host was still on php4.

It’s taken me since Christmas to discover that was the problem; if you think WordPress is a walk in the park, watch out for the black ice.

Anyway, enough rambling and bad metaphors; I’m off to bed. Good night.

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I upgraded the WordPress installation recently and it seems that a number of the plugins are no longer compatible and are causing havoc with my customised templates. I’ll try and get on top of it soon, but you may need to bear with me for a while.

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The thing is I didn’t discover this news on Twitter. For a start I don’t follow Clarence House, because frankly I’m not that interested in them (and even if I did follow everyone I found interesting I wouldn’t have time left to breathe).

But I am interested in seeing a variety of news stories; if I read only the news I gather myself then I will only ever see what I want to, and never discover anything particularly new or challenging. Curated news is still king for me, be that online or in print (and I’ve yet to find an online newspaper lying discarded in a train carriage).

Also I need to feel confident that I’ll find at least something of interest, and I want it to be written well. That takes skill in both writing and editing, and at the moment it remains the professional media that instills in me the most confidence in those areas.

Anyway, you’ve probably read far too much hot air on this subject; and so I say goodnight.

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Of course you don’t have to buy it, but ‘I’m proud of the BBC‘ is a nice catchy feelgood tune about a great British institution and it’s only 79p from iTunes – possibly even less elsewhere. What good reason have you not to?

If you want to know why he wrote it, there’s more about the song on his blog.

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I’ve always wanted to read The King’s Breakfast out loud to someone. I tried it with my nieces the other week, but they’re still a bit too young. Then yesterday, while I was reciting it in my head, I suddenly realised I could speak it into my iPhone, publish it to the world via Audioboo, and no-one would have to hear it if they didn’t want to.

It’s just occured to me that copyright might law apply to this, so if I’ve broken any rules I’ll take it down. But, for the moment at least, here it is:

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