Yesterday 3 magpies landed on the lawn. Just a few hours later Spurs won. In a ‘brilliant’ match (though reports may vary due to the pro-Arsenal stance of much of the so-called ‘neutral’ press) my boys grabbed the points at West Ham.

So are those magpies responsible for my team’s victory? Doh. I don’t even think my team are responsible for my team’s victory, that was really in the hands (and certainly feet) of West Ham’s collective ineptness and profilgacy, and so the world can hear Sam Allardyce’s excuses in the ‘start the season as you mean to go on’ kind of way.

Back to the plot. Must stay focussed.

Suppose I noticed that every match day magpies landed on my lawn, but 6 times out of 10 when it was 3 of them, Spurs won their matches. Could I then state that Spurs victories (may it please The Lord) are due to the magpies? Rather than to our clueless (on yesterday’s showing) players, or new, Argentinian and very exitable manager?

Of course not. All it would show was there was some bizarre, coincidental correlation between the number of magpies on my lawn and Spurs results. At which point, for the Arsenal, Chelsea and certain other big matches, I’d be in the park with a net hunting for little black’n’white fuckers to nail to my lawn.

And that’ because I’m a sports fan and we’re all stupid, optimistic against all logic and tragically superstitious. Anything for the slightest advantage the gods might bestow.

Because, as we learned: correlation is NOT causation. There might be some odd, random connection between magpies (shitting) on my lawn and Spurs success, but they sure as that shit ain’t causing it.

Every time there’s a hold up on the A1 my wife ends up with bruises. Do those hold ups cause her to spontaneously bruise? No, of course not. They’re not responsible. But I get held up, become very angry and do what any man would do, and she ends up bruised. (Please note; this is just an illustration, put the phone down, social services do NOT need to be contacted. Not at this point anyway). So again, correlation between hold-ups on the A1 and spousal bruising but not direct causation. Even though they both correlate to me.

Then there’s Anjem Choudary, leader of… well, various groups of horrible hate-mongering tossers, until they get banned and his job is to work out new names for those groups so they can carry on peddling thier evil legally again. He was previously a lawyer. Then stepped up the moral ladder to become a purveyor of terrorism. But he’s ‘clever’ in that annoyingly horrible way that legal people have of never saying anything with any substance in front of a camera. Sam Allardyce could learn a lot from him. But Sam is not who he preaches to. No. Choudary preaches to young, susceptible Muslims, lost souls looking for some ‘meaning’ in their lives. And he gives them a cause, a path, a view. And turns them into instruments of death, reduces them from humans to mere actions even if those actions kill the human within.

Which is why the guys who beheaded the soldier, Lee Rigby, in broad daylight on a London street, they were students of Choudary. The Maida Vale DJ who was filmed with ISIS holding up a severed head in Iraq, was one of the preacher’s prodigies. The handing out of ISIS leaflets inciting young Muslims to ‘join up and do God’s work’ was done by Choudary’s students.

The man himself never critisised the actions of his ex-students. In fact in all cases he spoke with pride whilst invoking the inevitable distance from them and their wicked and illegal actions. Because he’s a lawyer. And he knows that ‘correlation is not causation’ and to be illegal you need a causative connection. He’s allowed to preach that Britain should be a sharia state. That’s free speech. Which oddly would be banned under Sharia. I never said he had a sense of irony, just that he’s clever.

So for once, under any kind of ‘three strikes and you’re out’ kind of rule, we must look at the link between dire acts, poisoning of minds, death and destruction and the man with whom they seem to correlate. And surely, in a world awash with awful terrorism, special needs arise so that we can get that awful fucker off the streets and lock him up indefinitely so he can’t peddle his evil poison to others.

Otherwise, have a happy Sunday,

A xxxx