The window man leaveth

So farewell then, man of windows. And thanks for a job well done (if a little longer than expected). We were expecting three windows refurbished in two days and instead got two windows done in three days, owing to some family crisis (his) and the lack of a mate (his). So yesterday saw the bathroom sill replaced with a stonking great lump of solid mahogany to fill the space left when he took the old concrete sill out:


Yes, you read that right: concrete sill. It seems at some time in the past some bright spark had decided he'd had enough with these wooden sills that kept going rotten. Now what could he use instead that wouldn't rot? I know! Concrete! Brilliant. Except for the fact that it shrinks and cracks and moves away from the rest of the window, so the rain can get in and cause even more damage. Doh!

No matter, we now have a proper hardwood sill that will last longer than either of us, so we're all sorted.

Yesterday also saw the toilet window taken apart, as the bathroom had been the day before, the top half reglazed to match the bathroom and most of the window reassembled. If "mate" had appeared today, we were hoping to get the spare bedroom finished too, but that didn't happen, so Windowman (sounds like a superhero doesn't he?) concentrated on putting the finishing touches to the work in progress, which included patching and filling the woodwork, replacing the beadings around both windows, and fitting the new brass catches and lifts. I've uploaded some "after" pictures to my flickr account so you can see all the new goodies.

It's a very blustery day here in Manchester, and once the windows were all back in place, there wasn't even the merest hint of a breeze in either room. I might even be able to enjoy a relaxing bath in advance of the major refurbishment work due to start in three weeks, instead of the 15-second dips I've been suffering since we moved in. Now where did we put the candles?

Lessons not learned AGAIN

The interim report into the recent train crash in Cumbria has revealed that the derailment was caused by a set of points that were in an appalling state of repair.

Points have to cope with incredible loads. They have to hold a movable section of track (the section that allows the train to go one way or another depending how the points are set) rigid under the weight of several hundred tons of train. Virgin Pendalino trains, like the one which crashed (and, worryingly, like the ones I travel to London on), can travel at up to 125mph, although the line speed for this area was 95mph according to reports.

Points are designed to cope with the immense forces acting on them using 'stretcher bars' to hold the rails in place. An inspection showed that on this set of points one stretcher bar was missing altogether, one was loose, with its nuts lying nearby, and a third was fractured. Because of this, the rails were not held in place as the train passed over the points, and it derailed.

The report also reveals that an inspection of the points, due 5 days earlier, had not been completed. So here we are again. This is effectively the same story as the Bernard Mathews turkey farm and the recent child abuse case, only this time someone died. It's a boring job, I imagine, walking lengths of track examining one set of points after another for damage, wear and tear, or loose nuts. You're examining them to a schedule imposed by someone outside, for reasons you're probably not aware of, and most of the time - probably 99% of the time - there's nothing wrong with the points. Why do they need to be checked so regularly, you wonder, when there's "never anything wrong with them?" Complacency creeps in. You finish early on a Friday - no need to check that last two miles of track. They'll be OK 'til next time, or the time after that.

But engineering works such as railways are no respecter of boredom, complacency or clocking off early. Metal fatigue works to its own timetable. Vibration loosening of nuts is unpredictable and has deadly consequences. Inspections are scheduled so that problems are detected early, and after the Potters Bar crash five years ago where the cause was virtually identical, the schedules were tightened up.

Network Rail are now busy checking thousands of points across the UK. The words "stable door" and "bolted" come to mind. Ironically, over the next few days and weeks, rail travel in the UK will probably reach levels of safety previously undreamt of, as points are scrutinised and Network Rail try to prove they are on the ball. But once again, as before, this is a failure of process. If the engineers at the bottom of the corporate pile - those who actually do the track walking - can't be relied upon to follow the schedules, then a more rigorous system of checks and sign-offs should be introduced. But that's only half the battle. Above all, when travellers' safety - no, lives! - are at stake, what's needed is an old-fashioned sense of pride in one's work. For engineers to be able to stick their chests out and say "there's no loose points on MY section of track!" and get some recognition that their job might be boring and monotonous, but it's nonetheless essential and they are doing it right, every time.

The window man cometh

You might remember me mentioning that our windows need attention, specifically in the bathroom and toilet, whose refurbishment is now only three weeks away! (*thrill!!*) In fact, I ordered the new suite, taps, wastes, lights, shower tray, cubicle and door on Friday. We still haven't chosen any tiles, but that's mainly because the samples are still on order.

So here on the left is the bathroom window the way it looked yesterday, before we took the blind down and removed anything breakable from the vicinity. Our nice window man arrived as planned this morning to take care of things. As it happens, it's a nice dry sunny day here in Manchester. This is just as well, since refurbishing a sash window entails taking the whole thing apart, cleaning it all up, replacing any worn or broken bits, fitting the modern draft-proofing, and putting it all back together again.

For most of the process, you're left with an enormous hole where the window should be, so I'm very glad we didn't have him round a few weeks ago when the outside temperature was hovering around 0°C.

We're hoping that having the windows fitting properly, with up-to-the-minute draftproofing will mean we don't need to have the sashes double glazed. Even though we're not intending to restore the house to Edwardian standards I'm not keen on replacing traditional features like sash windows, or even fitting sealed units in the existing frames. Especially when they're glazed as uniquely as ours.

Here's how the window looks right now. A bit too airy to be having a bath! The draftproofing process involves cutting a channel along the edges of the window frames where they touch either the runners or each other, and sliding in a plastic carrier into which is clipped a neoprene seal. The inside edges also have nylon brushes screwed in place so once it's all done there isn't a gap anywhere between window and wood, but everything still slides as it should.

As part of the process the windows are also rebalanced to cope with any changes to the glazing that may have made the windows heavier than their counterweights. The estimates include 10lbs of lead per window for rebalancing. We're also having new brass lifts and catches, and security screws added, so when complete they should look better than new!

Tubes of celestial joy

Reading my mate's blog about addiction got me thinking about smoking. As early as I can remember thinking about the subject at all, I have never been able to understand why anyone would do it. Surrounded as I was by two smoking parents, I have a bazillion memories of how disgusting it is to be around smoke. The air in our lounge was blue, every night, with the fallout from the countless ciggies my folks would puff their way through while watching TV. I often had to escape to the kitchen just to get a breath of air. These days I'd probably have a case against them for "assault by passive smoking" or something.

My Dad used to call cigarettes "tubes of celestial joy" but there was precious little joy in it as far as I could see. He woke up every morning hacking his lungs up, his fingers were stained dark yellow and he died of a lung disease. My Mum is now virtually housebound by chronic emphysema and has to take an inhaler every 2-3 hours to be able to breathe at all. They both smoked from a very early age - pre-teen, I mean.

She defends starting by saying "everyone" did it back then and no-one knew it would do you any harm. Fair comment perhaps but it doesn't explain why she carried on with it for so long, nor why anyone would choose to start now. I've always thought holding a fag, or having one hanging out of your mouth, looks faintly ridiculous, rather than in any way "cool" or macho.

With time, companies scared off by passive smoking lawsuits have gradually banned smoking from the workplace and this has slowly extended to shops and all forms of public transport with the result that there are few places now where I come into contact with it. As a result I'm even more intolerant of it when I do catch a whiff, simply because it is so rare. In the UK we'll soon enjoy a total ban in pubs and restaurants too, and it can't come soon enough for me.

As with many things we take for granted, if smoking were to be "invented" now, it would never be licenced. Imagine that. Leaving aside the balance of the tax revenue argument, there would be fewer deaths from heart disease, lung disease, cancer of all types, pulmonary embolism and stroke. Vast commercial empires that actually deal in death would either never have arisen, or would be diverted to more worthwhile causes. Thousands of hectares of land devoted to growing tobacco could be turned over to food production in areas that need it most.

In fact the more you think about it, the more abhorrent it seems that so many economies can get so badly twisted out of shape, all to feed mankind's addiction to this ... weed.

The simplicity of a structured day

My horoscope for today starts: "You long for the simplicity of a structured day now, so you can just go ahead with your work chores and do them one by one." How do they know? I mean, I don't actually believe that the position of the planets and other heavenly bodies at the moment of your birth influences your life or your character, but it's uncanny how often my horoscope is right on the money.

Is it just that if you serve up enough platitudes sooner or later you'll hit the bullseye, and we have a natural tendency to forget the wrong ones and remember only the "spooky" right ones?

Whatever the answer, there's no denying that yes, I have been longing for a simpler life. One where my work is always in the same place, and I know what the day holds before it starts. And most important, that whatever tasks I have in front of me I know I can do. I'm tired of facing up to "the challenge" of something new. Of having to find answers to problems when I don't even know what the question is.

Trouble is, I know this is just a case of the grass being greener on that other side. Give me two weeks of those structured, predictable days and I'd be climbing the walls, desperate for a change. Something else my horoscope has right is the Sagittarian need to explore beyond the boundaries of the familiar; the need for freedom; the breadth of interests and endeavours. So here I am in my paradox. I don't *really* want to spend the rest of my life in simple, structured days. It's just that every now and then I'd like to be able to take my foot off the gas.

"There's no way of knowing what 'too far' is, if no-one ever goes there."

"Lessons haven't been learned"

Some days, you feel lifted up by demonstrations of fellow humanity all around. Other days, parts of that same humanity can leaving you feeling as if you've been taken to the edge of the pit of Hell and made to look over.

A little over a week ago the 23-year-old mother of a four-year-old girl, and her partner who is 27, were sentenced to 10 and 11 years respectively for the most horrific abuse of the child, who suffers from cerebral palsy. Readers of a sensitive nature may wish to skip over the details to the next paragraph. The systematic violence they subjected the girl to included pouring boiling water over her hands, ripping clumps of hair from her scalp, repeatedly kicking her in the groin and locking her naked in the lavatory every night, sometimes forcing her to eat her own faeces. When she was finally rescued, at the insistence of her grandmother who noticed she was in constant pain, she had to be examined under general anaesthetic. The kickings she received have resulted in permanent liver damage.

Social workers had previously allowed her to return to the "care" of her mother despite strong objections from her foster carers. Once she was home, these same social workers were said to have 'too readily' accepted injuries (including a broken arm) as accidents, and made 'minimal contact' with the father. When attempting to visit the child to check on her welfare, on five consecutive occasions they believed the mother's story that the child was "out with her Dad.".

The case has alarming parallels with the infamous story of Victoria Climbié, the eight-year-old who was tortured in 2000 and who eventually died as a result of her injuries. Campaigners who worked hard to change the system at that time are horrified by this latest incident and incredulous that it can still be happening.

Sadly, I'm not incredulous. The same old platitudes are trotted out every time we hear details of these sickening cases. "Lessons must be learned," they say. Actually someone in a position of authority was finally too embarrassed to use that phrase this time. Instead they said "lessons haven't been learned." No, they patently haven't. But why do these lessons have to wait until after a child is dead, or permanently injured? Have these people never heard of training? There is a mountain of casework on file about abused children. A mass of research into things to look for.

Will anyone be fired? I doubt it. There's been an inquiry, there will be recommendations, a public wringing of hands and declarations of anguish and regret. But what will really change? OK, there are civil liberties issues. I realise you can't go marching into people's homes with no notice, and in the majority of cases there isn't anything untoward going on. Hard cases make bad law, etc, etc.

But for me, this comes back to being all about process. In its most basic sense it's exactly like the Bernard Mathews case where ordinary workers do not follow established processes. Processes that are written by experts, often as a direct result of previous public enquiries or their recommendations, but which cause extra work for already overstretched staff and therefore are skirted around or simply ignored at the coalface. Social workers are lulled into believing they are unnecessary because in the majority of cases there is no abuse going on, so there is no untoward effect of not following process. But the process is designed to catch the 0.1% of cases where there IS abuse. And to work, it has to be followed 100% of the time. It has to be second nature. And it needs to adapt to emerging patterns of abuse.

Abuse like this is systematic. It goes on for months, often years. Alarm bells should be sounded on the second or third visit when a child is missing or "unavailable." A rule like "three strikes and you're out" would seem fair to me. After three missed visits, a warrant should be granted to enter the home without notice and check on the child. How many more will die before this mess is sorted out?

Forward slash

Sometimes, over a cup of breakfast coffee in the restaurant at work, a small group of colleagues and I debate whether we're turning into grumpy old men. Now before you start, I know that there may well exist a school of thought that says we're there already, but most days I would defend my continued youthful vigour with...err...youthful vigour.

It's just that I find small things have started to irritate the hell out of me for no good reason, and one of the worst is people in the media who insist on reading out URLs with FORWARD SLASH in them.

The BBC are appalling for this "...and you can go to our website www.bbc.co.uk FORWARD SLASH radio4 FORWARD SLASH today". God. It's just slash, alright? If it was the other one it would be BACKslash. This one is just slash, plain and simple. Some of the younger more Internet-savvy presenters have cottoned on and will rattle through the domain name quite quickly, even missing off the www sometimes. But the older ones are still in the majority with their FORWARD SLASH and their emphasis on the dots - bbc DOT... co DOT... uk - as if we didn't know they were there.

All this passes John Humphrys by, of course. When he was a lad, this character: / was called a STROKE, and by golly as far as he is concerned, it always will be. So his URLs are the most idiosyncratic of the lot. Nowhere else in the media, to my knowledge, will you hear "bbc dot co dot uk STROKE radio4 STROKE today." It sounds vaguely erotic, but very Radio 4!

The language of love

Yesterday, after Phil & Vicky had left, we caught up with all the soaps we'd missed while I was away last week. As a result I'm still thinking about Valentine's Day, which was at the heart of many storylines last week: some people trying to ignore it because it's a rip-off; some because they're just too selfish to do anything nice for their partners; others making a really special effort (and some of those being rebuffed); people on the periphery, without partners, feeling left out - the way many people feel at Christmas when the whole world seems to be celebrating.

So I thought it would be a good time to post this love test that I found on the blog of a friend of a friend. It lets you check if you're speaking the same love language as your beau or belle. Haha! Just had a funny thought about that. Yanno when you accidentally overhear people making out?Is that the sound of beau belles?

Anyway, I digress. Not sure I agree with the "love tank" theory expressed below, although if it means you have to feel good about yourself to be in your best giving state I couldn't argue with that. If you have aching ankles, a headache, you've been put upon all day, everything's gone wrong and you just found out you have an important deadline you'd totally forgotten (or not been told) about, that's probably not such a good time for your partner to expect to be serenaded or given a foot massage.

I'm not particularly surprised by my results. I already knew time together and touching were at the top of my list. No, it doesn't have to be that kind of touching! A tender touch when you least expect and most need it can often be enough to move you to tears.

By a strange coincidence when we were in HMV on Saturday I bought a remastered CD of one of my favourite bands of all time - Caravan. This was a continuation of the (slow!) process of replacing my vinyl collection and the first Caravan CD I'd bought, so it was a hard choice which album to go for. In the end I plumped (obscure Caravan reference there for other fans) for Waterloo Lily, primarily because it contains one of the most evocative lyrics of my youth. The first two verses of The Love In Your Eye:

In dreams of you I wish a song on everyone
A gift of love to fill your eyes, to fill your eyes
And if I turn your head awhile, my heart will sing
Thunder songs of love to make you smile

I've travelled far in search of things I didn't know
I could have found as well at home as in the skies
There's so much time misspent in dreams of wealth and fame
When all you need is love in your eye

(Lyrics by Pye Hastings). Those words echo across the years to me now. Now that I've spent the thirty-odd years in between travelling far in search of things I didn't know, and which I could as easily have found at home. At least I remembered the last part, and didn't waste my time on dreams of wealth and fame. Here are my results in the love language test, and a link for you to take it for yourselves:

The Five Love Languages

My primary love language is probably
Quality Time
with a secondary love language being
Physical Touch.

Complete set of results

Quality Time: 10
Physical Touch: 9
Words of Affirmation: 7
Acts of Service: 4
Receiving Gifts: 0

Information

Unhappiness in relationships, according to Dr. Gary Chapman, is often due to the fact that we speak different love languages. Sometimes we don't understand our partner's requirements, or even our own. We all have a "love tank" that needs to be filled in order for us to express love to others, but there are different means by which our tank can be filled, and there are different ways that we can express love to others.

Take the quiz

Manchester's green credentials

There's a problem in the UK. Well, yeah, OK there's more than one, but there's one I want to talk about today. We're running out of landfill space. Quickly. So a few years back local councils started to be measured on the effectiveness of their recycling policies.

As you might expect in Blair's Britain, there was no uniform policy decided from the centre and filtered down to each authority. No that would have been too simple. Never mind that this is supposed to be about the environment, so having everyone do it the same way might have involved some economies of scale?

My Mum, for example, only lives 70 miles away but her scheme is different from ours - a bin for garden waste, one for metal, one for everything else. And although they don't supply a bin for it, she's supposed to separate out the paper and glass too. With our scheme we get a brown bin for glass, blue for paper, and the big grey one for everything else. Metal? No thanks we can't be bothered with that, despite the fact that it's one of the easiest things to recycle AND one of the costliest to produce in environmental impact terms.

So that's how it was until a week or so ago when we were leafleted about "kerbit green." We're to be supplied with a new green bin for garden waste. Whoopee. We're lucky though: we have a long path down the side of the house where all these bins can live. People with smaller houses, no paths or no front garden have a real problem finding somewhere to store the increasing number of recycle bins they need. Besides, anyone who has a garden can compost, so what's the point of taking it away?

Reading the fine print though, you have to doubt the council's green credentials. Here's an excerpt from the leaflet explaining what the green bin is and how we're supposed to use it.

"You can start to use your kerbit green bin for garden waste as soon as it arrives. If you do not produce any garden waste please contact Environment On Call once your bin has been delivered to arrange for it to be removed."

Hahahaha!! So these environmentally conscious council plonkers are going to send a big smelly fume-belching diesel truck loaded with bins out to the houses of people who don't want them, and then send the truck out again to fetch them back. Good grief. Just had to share that with you.

Bathroom before

A lovely sunny day here in Manchester, so I thought I'd take advantage of the rays to capture some "before" pictures of the bathroom/toilet prior to its forthcoming refurbishment.

So here's the loo as it is at the moment complete with high-level cistern with maidenhair fern growing out of it, Indian-inspired stencilling on the walls, seashell toilet seat and pissing-dog loo roll holder. These are all original features that we inherited with the house - for more detailed photos, see my flickr account.

The left wall will be removed during the refit and the toilet replaced with a low-level close coupled modern job. We've tried to maintain an authentic feel by choosing one in an Edwardian style, and kept a ceramic flush handle rather than one of those new-fangled push-button flushes.

The bathroom door will be blanked off giving us a landing that goes nowhere, where we intend to put a linen chest, and an extra bit of wall in the new bathroom where we're going to mount a heated towel rail - right outside the new shower cubicle.


...which is going to be positioned right here, at the end of where the bath is now. Work starts March 19, assuming we've chosen the tiles by then!

Meanwhile, our friends Phil and Vicky are on their way over for the weekend and we'll be taking the bus to town for a short shopping trip as soon as they arrive. I'm not a particularly big fan of shopping so Nikki has sweetened the pill by offering me half an hour in HMV :o)

The UK - not a good place for children

On Wednesday UNESCO published a report that puts British youth at the bottom of the pile in terms of happiness. I must be psychic or something, because I was travelling down on the train Monday afternoon to spend the week working away from home, and writing a blog entry on exactly this topic. Being away from home always turns me a little bit introspective as I sit alone in my hotel room.

Every generation, we often read or hear, looks at the generation that comes after it and thinks some variation of: "I'm glad I'm not growing up today" or "Things were so much nicer/ cleaner/ gentler/ more polite/ easier/ simpler when I was young."

I guess we forget, as we get older, how resilient young people are. But it seems to me that as the world becomes faster and more complex, they need to be resilient to even cope with everyday life. Children and young people need, even more than they did when I was young, to have somewhere where they feel no (or a minimum of) pressure to conform. A place where they can be themselves or, simply, where they can just BE. That place should be home, but for so many "home" is just one more place where they are pressured in one way or another. Maybe their parents have split up, they have stepmothers or fathers or stepsiblings to cope with, vying for attention from their own parent. They may have chosen, or been forced into, various extra-curricular activities, or intensive academic options. They are bombarded from all sides by media and advertising pressures - the need to have "the right stuff" - the latest gadget, the "right" friends, listen to the best music on the newest MP3 player, wear the trendiest clothes.

Today's world makes me realise how lucky I was to grow up in a stable loving home, with a Mum and a Dad, some good friends, and never to have to worry about where I would be sleeping. Does time lend those days a rosy glow, when in fact it was never as good as I remember? Sure, we didn't have a lot of spare money, but that's a common story. Listen to any celebrity chat show, and most of the guests will say "we never had much, but we were 'appy." It's a cliché, I know, but it's also true: money doesn't buy happiness. And basically Wednesday's UNESCO report said exactly that.

So what? Well, thing is that this is so close to home for me that I can smell it. My lot have two homes with parents in them (sometimes), sleepovers, boyfriends' houses, school trips, etc, etc. They certainly have more material possessions, and spend more time away from home than I ever did. But are they happier than I was, or even as happy? I don't know. And I worry they're not.

In common with most parents, I never wanted anything for them more than I wanted them to be happy. To have a stable home life and at least one place, one real home, where they could experience that stress-free sense of being able to get away from the cares of the world. When you can shut the front door and just do what you like. Be totally yourself. Even scream and yell if you need to, and know you'll be supported and loved instead of screamed back at.

Seven years ago I finally admitted I'd failed to give them that in the "marital home" and I don't think I'll ever be entirely free of the guilt that goes with knowing a lot of their stresses and worries derive directly from the time I walked out on their mother. I can never know how bad things would have got had I stayed, and I take courage from those who told me at the time and from personal experience that it was better to leave than put them through all the rowing and fighting that would have ensued.

I guess I'm trying to compensate in some small way by giving them some stability and fun when they stay with us, but it's a double-edged sword. Our time together is compressed virtually 14-fold, so it is in essence a false security. It's not permanent (that is, it's not 24x7), no matter how much any of us would like it to be so. That's not to say we don't have great fun - we do - and I look forward to our next weekend together from the moment I drop them off after the last. But real life isn't 100% fun. Often there are things going on for them that mean fun should really be put on hold while we deal with the issue. At least, that's how it would be in a "normal" family. It's natural for young people to have worries and fears. It's part of growing up. Exams, friends, boyfriends, career choices, great philosophical questions, or just feeling down in the dumps and needing a cuddle...any and all of these are put on a back burner because we have to cram 14 days of fun into, effectively, one day.

So I think what I'm slowly getting my head round is that it's unlikely, any time soon, that my kids are going to come to me with their problems. This is a revelation to me, because I always wanted to be able to do that for them. To be the kind of parent they could come to with anything and talk it through. Try to resolve it together, or mitigate it, or just present a united front to the world if it can't be avoided or fixed.

But then I think: did I ever do that with my parents when I was 18, or 13? No, I don't think I did. Half the time they didn't know what I was getting up to. I used to catch the bus into town when I was 12 or 13 and hang around the malls. My Mum didn't find out about that until I was in my twenties. Maybe all my kids need is to know they can bring their problems to me whenever they want to, even though they'll probably never want to. Maybe that's all any of us can ever do. Maybe I should stop worrying about it.

Home!

Well it's dark, late and I'm tired and hungry (by the time I got to the train shop all the sandwiches were gone) but at least I'm home! I love travelling on the train (wry smile).

Actually, it's not bad. For years I avoided train travel, thinking I much preferred to be in control. I drove everywhere. Then I started to realise it was becoming a real pain to get into London, something I was having to do more and more often. I actually used to drive down to one of the outlying tube stations (Hatton Cross, to be precise, just round the corner from Heathrow) and catch the Piccadilly Line into the centre. If you included driving time, rest stops, train waits, etc it used to take me around 5 hours to get from home to anywhere in Westminster.

When I finally woke up to how mad that was and started taking the Virgin service from Manchester to Euston I cut my journey time by about 2 hours and I had chance to work, or write, or read a book. Amazing. For someone with an allegedly high IQ I can't defend how long it took me to come round to the benefits of letting the train take the strain.

Plus there's the added bonus of the amusing announcements from the train manager. Today's was: "The Quiet Zone is located in coaches A and H. These coaches are the Quiet Zone and must...remain quiet."

My funny Valentine

It was a Valentine's Day when I flew over to Toronto to accompany Nikki to England, and since then we haven't spent a Valentine's Day apart. Until today. I hate being apart at the best of times, but not only am I away for an unheard-of THREE nights and four days this week, one of those days is Valentine's.

Some people think business travel is glamorous and I'm sure for some high-flyers it is, but at my level of the pile it's just a lot of damned hard work and lonely nights in a hotel bedroom that looks just the same as every other hotel bedroom you've ever stayed in.

I'm staying in Croydon to be close to the customer's offices, but today the team were working out of our Bracknell offices. Normally I would drive to Bracknell but since I'm already here, and without my car, I had to go by train. Not the best of journeys, it started off with my taxi not turning up. I took the late hotel shuttle bus to East Croydon station, the London Victoria train to Clapham Junction and then had a 25 minute wait for the Reading train to get me to Bracknell. And it was a stopper. Places you've never heard of. "Martin's Heron" FFS. Anyway it took the best part of an hour to get from Clapham Junction to Bracknell so having started off at ten past eight, I got to the office at 11am.

We have to get all our clarifications back to the customer by Friday, so it was shaping up to be a late night. I didn't know exactly how late but I was grateful for the offer of a lift from the Account Manager who happened to be staying tonight at the same hotel. At least I started off being grateful. When 7.30pm rolled round and we still hadn't left I wasn't so grateful, and then when he told me it was at least an hour's drive back to the hotel I became decidedly ungrateful. I could have been sat in front of my dinner long before we even set off for the drive back, had I known.

We finally arrived back at the hotel at ten past nine and I went straight to the bar to order the drinks while he checked in. The hotel stops serving dinner at 9.30 so when he entered the bar, he suggested we go right through to eat.

"You'll be alright, will you?" he asked.
"What do you mean?"
"You won't be embarrassed?"
"Embarrassed?"
"Well...they've got a bit of a Valentine's dinner night going on."

Just as he said that we entered the dining room to be greeted by about a thousand red heart balloons. The wall that had been in place at breakfast had been folded back, making the dining room twice the size, almost every table was laid for a single couple, and all were full.

They had some tables reserved for hotel guests way over on the left hand side of the room, and we made our way towards them, crossing the dance floor on which several couples were already slow dancing.

We took our table with barely suppressed nervous laughter. "They'll have a field day with this in the office tomorrow," he said. Our table was missing its balloon, but it was covered in metallic red heart-shaped sprinkles. The waitress arrived to take our order. I turned to my colleague:

"Well, darling, what would you like to eat tonight?"

Turkey anyone?

If Bernard Mathews famous "bootiful" "Norfolk" turkey business survives this bird flu outbreak it will be more by luck than judgement. I put Norfolk in quotes because it's come out that a lot of his turkey meat is shipped in, partly processed, from Hungary. Not exactly a marketing department's wet dream that, is it?

A representative from Mathews' farms was on the radio last Friday defending the company. The outbreak was originally said to have been contained in one shed. Later it emerged that the H5N1 infection had spread to two other sheds. "Doesn't say much for your bio-security measures, does it?" John Humphrys of BBC Radio 4's Today programme asked.

Well John, as anyone who has worked in industry could tell you, what's written down in the process manual often bears absolutely no relation to what really happens. Processes rely on people, and people will do whatever seems expedient to give themselves an easy life, unless they are incentivised to behave differently. That incentive can be money, comfort, supervision, threat (of loss of earnings, face, or job), kudos, whatever, but there has to be one. It's no good for it to simply be written in a process manual.

If the process is that boots are scrubbed with disinfectant, and that chemical has to be lugged in 50-litre drums from a store on the other side of the compound, then one day, when the juice has run out, someone will think "hey, I can't be arsed to fetch another drum. One day without scrubbing my boots can't hurt." And they move from one shed to another with no scrubbing. And nothing awful happens - no-one even notices, and no-one fetches more juice. So there's no boot scrubbing the next day, and still nothing bad starts up. Pretty soon everyone is leaving their boots unscrubbed and nothing ever comes of it. If it goes on long enough, old workers might even start to say to new hands "oh, yeah, it says in the manual we're supposed to scrub our boots, but you don't need to bother with all that hassle. It's not necessary."

And then one day, H5N1 turns up and all hell breaks loose. If they had been scrubbing their boots like they should have, it would have been kept to a single shed, but instead it's all over the shop.

There's a famous piece of research often quoted on t'Interweb (usually in the context of managers' behaviour). It goes like this: You put eight monkeys in a cage, with a bunch of bananas suspended from a hook on the top of the cage. You place a ladder so that the monkeys can easily climb up to the bananas. Then every time any monkey tries to reach the bananas, you turn on a sprinkler and drench all the monkeys with ice-cold water. Pretty soon the brightest monkeys will cotton on that the water is connected to attempts to get to the bananas, and they will stop any monkey who starts up the ladder. The really dimmest monkeys will carry on trying for a while, but more and more monkeys will join in to stop them, until all the monkeys in the cage have learned that to climb the ladder is a Bad Thing.

At this point, you take one of the original monkeys out of the cage and replace it with a new monkey. This monkey will see the bananas and attempt to climb the ladder. The other seven monkeys will scream and yell, and drag the new monkey off the ladder before the water starts up. For a short time, depending on how bright it is, the new monkey will continue trying to get to the bananas, but eventually it will give up, knowing that it will be set upon every time it tries. Once it's learned this lesson, the process can be repeated, replacing another of the original monkeys.

Eventually, the cage will be completely populated with monkeys who have NEVER been drenched with water, but who will all scrabble and fight to prevent any new monkey from reaching the bananas, and will never try to use the ladder themselves. They don't know why, it's just "the way things are done around here." Learned behaviour. Disincentives (or, in enlightened societies, incentives). The answer to Bernard Mathews' prayers.

Gaseous emissions

We woke up on Saturday morning to a faint smell of gas in the study. So faint, in fact, that we couldn't really be sure it was gas, so we didn't think too much about it at the time and it was faint enough that when we'd been sat in the room a while we didn't notice it any more.

When I got back from picking the girls (and Nat's boyfriend) up though, it was much more noticeable. Faint in the hall but quite strong in the study - which is weird because we don't have any gas appliances in the study, or anywhere outside the kitchen for that matter - and this time definitely gas. I checked the boiler and the cooker in the kitchen. Not only was there no smell near them there was none in the kitchen at all. I made us all some cheese on toast and by the time we'd eaten it and gone back upstairs the smell in the study was even stronger.

I called the National Gas Emergency number and they instructed me to turn off the supply, not turn any lights on or off, and someone would be with us within an hour. We opened the window in the study and our bedroom to get a through draft and air the place out. After twenty minutes of that we were (a) gas free and (b) freezing so we closed the window again. After another ten minutes, the smell was back - just as strong as before.

How could that happen, I wondered, when we'd shut off the supply? Surely there wouldn't be that much pressure in the pipes, even if there was a gas pipe in the study we weren't aware of? Nikki wondered if it might be coming through from next door. Our neighbour is in his eighties and lives alone. We guessed it was quite possible he'd left a gas tap on - maybe even on a bedroom gas fire on the other side of the party wall? This theory was given added credence when I knelt down near that wall and discovered the smell was even stronger there.

True to his word the gas engineer was with us in around 40 minutes and took only a few minutes to declare the house gas-tight (which was a relief as the evening's large pan of chilli hadn't quite finished cooking!). We explained where the smell was and he fetched his gas "sniffer" device up to the study. He waved it around all over the room, even near the wall where the smell was worst. Not a peep out of it. "I'm not even sure that smell is gas," he said. "It doesn't really smell like gas to me, and if there was any gas in here at all, this thing would be going crazy."

Well it sure smelled like gas to me, but I wasn't about to argue with him. He's the expert, right? We mentioned the guy next door, and the gas man asked me to go with him to explain why we were there. The chap is Polish and although he understands English quite well, he's a little slow with it. As soon as he opened his front door, you could smell it - really strongly. When we walked into the hall it was unmistakable and in the kitchen it was overpowering - you literally could hardly breathe. He'd left his oven on, unlit. He'd been at home all afternoon and not noticed!

I had a chilling moment when the gas man went to check the meter and our neighbour helpfully turned the light on for him. As you can tell by the fact I'm writing this, there was no explosion.

I found it slightly disturbing that an expert gas engineer had doubted that the smell was gas, and that his detector had not detected it. For the gas to have seeped through to our house it must have been on for some time. Maybe even since the night before. But what was even more disturbing was when I later telephoned his son to report what had happened. I just thought he should know, you know? He might want to buy his Dad a replacement cooker. An electric one. He didn't seem too concerned. "Oh," he said, "thanks for telling me. He doesn't do that very often."

!!!

Hunger Site update

You remember I exhorted you a couple of days ago to support the Hunger Site (link over there on the right)?

I visit there and click daily and this week I noticed they had a banner up declaring that they have donated a staggering HALF A BILLION cups of food to starving people since they started up in 1999. We did that! I love the Internet.

New baths for old!

Chorlton Players did Aladdin this year for their panto. You can see some of my photos on their website. Anyway it was Abanaza's cry of "new lamps for old" that inspired the title of this post. We're getting quite excited here as the prospect of our new bathroom draws closer.

We've booked the guy to come and refurbish the sash windows in bathroom and toilet first. I may have mentioned this before, but most of our windows need some attention. A lot of them don't open at all, and of those that do open, some of them don't close properly (!). The bathroom being a case in point. The top sash has dropped slightly, and the bottom one has a gap on one side with the result that the bathroom suffers a semi-permanent force 9 gale and baths are extremely rapid! Anyway since the bath is to be repositioned under the window, these need sorting out before any other work can be done.

We now have a firm booking for the window work, so we've been trying to make our minds up on the new suite. After much to-ing and fro-ing we eventually decided on the Westminster suite from Imperial. We're keeping our original bath and having it resurfaced, so even though the Westminster is quite expensive we only need a loo and a wash-hand basin. Then we've to add in the cost of a heated towel rail, shower tray, door and mixer, tiles and lights so all-in-all it's a lot of money but it will be worth it to be able to shower again and to be warm in the bathroom.

If you take a look at this post of Nikki's, which is actually talking about the study, then you'll see where we intend to pinch a bit of space from the study to make the shower enclosure. Looking at her floor plan, the bathroom occupies the space above it in the middle. By moving the walls around to enclose the other two sides of that rectangular area behind the door, we can make it part of the bathroom. It will have internal dimensions of 1345 x 945mm - perfect for a nice big shower :) The work is scheduled to begin on March 19 so I'll post before and after pictures nearer the time.

BT Call Minder

Someone left a message today on my BT answering service "BT Call Minder" and it reminded me how piss-poor their IVR messaging is.

"BT Call Minder. Thank you for calling. You've...ONE...new message. Main menu. To listen to your messages...press ONE or say ONE after the tone, to change your personal options..."
[1]
"FIRST...new message. Message. Received...TODAY at...NINE...FORTY-FOUR...A.M."

This is such a long-winded way of getting to your messages I'm amazed they aren't inundated with complaints. Let's just break it down:

BT Call Minder.
Yes, thanks I know who you are. I called you, remember?

Thank you for calling.
I'd like to say I appreciate your manners, but you're not real are you? You're a machine that has been programmed to thank me for calling. You don't really care if I call or not do you? You don't truly appreciate my call. So pretending you do is just another waste of my time. Get on with it.

You've...
If you thought the pauses at the end of the first two sentences were long, welcome to the variable part of the message, where the pauses are so long you can go away and make a cup of tea and still not miss anything meaningful. Really. I've used an ellipsis (...) to show where the pauses are, and variables are in uppercase. Full stops indicate shorter pauses. Wherever a spoken variable appears in the system - like the number of messages that is about to be revealed - you could grow a beard in the gaps. Come ON! Edit these pauses out!

ONE
Here's the first place where the 80/20 rule should be applied. 80% (at least!) of the users of this service will never acquire more than ten unread messages. So the quality of service for the majority of users could be vastly improved by recording these as specific messages rather than using a variable every time.
You've one new message
You've two new messages...etc
I can say "you've one new message" in less than a second and it's still easily intelligible. Instead we have to put up with TWO pauses - one each side - just so the system can pull out details of exactly how many messages are waiting.

Main menu.
What? I called up to hear my message FFS! Why are you presenting me with all these options? This is why this service appears SO bad at the side of, say, the Vodafone Recall service (which is essentially the same thing). BT have not designed their service quickly to deliver what the majority of users will call up for, while still retaining access to all the other features they might want to use once a year, or once only when they set the service up. Vodafone have got it right (never thought I'd say that) - when you call to retrieve a message, you get straight to your messages: "You've one new message" and you're straight into it. The time and date of the call are revealed at the end of the message, so in the majority of cases you never need to wait to hear that - you can suss out what it's all about during the message and deal with it much more quickly. If you take an option to listen to the message again, the Vodafone service simply adds "for the main menu, press 1" - snappy, quick, and it doesn't get in the way.

You can see where I'm going with this, so I'll skip the rest of the first part. The fact is that if you're not bothered to find out how many messages you're going to have to listen to, you can skip this part by pressing 'one' as soon as Call Minder connects. But this next bit you can't avoid:
FIRST...new message
Same rule as above. Record ten separate messages for the first ten messages
First new message
Second new message...
And then you only need to use a variable when there's more than ten messages - i.e. almost never.

Message.
This is just totally superfluous, and by now you're getting really annoyed with it. Or at least, I am. We already KNOW we're going to listen to a MESSAGE because you've just told us it's the first new MESSAGE for Chrissake! Jeez. Get on with it.

Received.
No! Really?

TODAY
Another 80/20 rule must surely apply here. I imagine 80% of messages will be retrieved the day they are left, or the next day. So the two messages
Received today
and
Received yesterday
should not use variables. If they were edited properly to remove pauses, then the whole of
"First new message received today at "
could be over in just short of two seconds instead of the six seconds it takes now.

And let's not even bother with the message timestamp. Hours and minutes as separate variables with associated pauses? AM and PM? God.

The Call Minder service has been in operation for at least twenty years. I don't think it's had a revamp in all that time. Other IVR systems have improved out of all recognition while BT have carried on oblivious to the march of technology with their massive long pauses and their "Thank you for calling." It can't be a lack of investment funds that drives this refusal to upgrade their service. At one point in the not-so-distant past BT were making £90 A SECOND profit. That's ninety quid every second of every day of the year. Would you MIND awfully spending some of that mountain of cash on a decent voicemail service?

BT - whose strapline should really be: "the most shit service we can possibly get away with before OfCom come down on us like a ton of bricks."

A bad day for travelling back

You'll remember the "fun" I had getting down to Euston yesterday morning. I thought I'd struck lucky with the return journey though. My rescheduled 3pm meeting finished earlier than expected and I arrived at Euston in time to catch the 4.35. Woohoo! I should have realised that my original title was going to hold true for the whole day.

Prior to departure the train manager announced that, in common with other trains today, we would be diverting via Stafford and Crewe on the way back (the 4.35 normally only calls at Macclesfield, Stoke-on-Trent and Stockport) owing to a gas leak in the Macclesfield area. The train was still expected to meet all of its normal arrival times though, so everything still looked pretty good. Except for those travelling to Macc and Stoke of course, who were now going to have to change at Stafford onto a local service.

Laptop deployed as before, game of Spider Solitaire successfully concluded, I noticed that 4.35 had come and gone and there was no sign of movement. After a few minutes the tannoy crackled into life once more to apologise for the delay in departure which was caused by a fault on an external door. It refused to close properly, with the result that the automated system wouldn't give the driver the all-clear to leave, or release the computerised lock on the brakes. An engineer was, we were told, on his way...

We finally departed Euston at 4.55 and delays en-route meant we were a full 30 minutes late back to Piccadilly. I guess it could have been worse. I could have been travelling today and incurred the snow-instigated delays. We don't normally deal with snow very well in this country. Public services are disrupted out of all proportion to the amount of snow, and most drivers take one look at a white pavement and engage overcautious mode, refusing to take corners at anything above a walking pace.

This time round though, Virgin Trains were prepared. They announced during the journey home that owing to the expected snowfall, they would be running a reduced service! The wonders of modern weather forecasting - now companies can cancel services before a single flake has fallen!

A bad day for travelling

Getting down to London and being established in the office for a 10 o'clock meeting is in some ways harder than for 9 o'clock. There are more choices. If I need to be there first thing, there's only one choice - the 5.20 - and although it's an excruciatingly early start, at least the train is guaranteed to be almost empty at Piccadilly. It fills up around Rugby because by then it's not stupid o'clock and it's the commuters train of choice, but at our end you have your pick of seats.

To arrive later, there's almost too much choice, but I've learned that the 6.05 is very heavily booked and it's hard to get a seat at a table. There are two reasons for this. First, the time is (a little) more sensible. Second, and probably more important, it's fast to Euston - stopping only at Stockport - so it gets in shortly after 8. Ironically only a few minutes later than the 5.20, because that makes several stops and goes via Crewe which is a longer route. However in the past I've discovered that the 6.15 is almost as empty as the 5.20. Leaving only ten minutes later than the 6.05 it's not a good bet for those in a hurry. It's a stopping train and gets in almost an hour later. But for those of use wanting only a relatively early start, it's ideal. Or so I thought.

This morning's journey started on the wrong foot when the taxi I'd ordered for 5.40 arrived at 5.30 and rang the bell. I was still in the middle of a post for TV Scoop and was annoyed that the bell had woken Nikki. The taxi driver confirmed that the controller had given him 5.40 as the time booked but said I needed to specify "don't knock" on the call if I wanted him to wait outside.

Arriving at Piccadilly I noticed the early train times had been pushed back two minutes. The 6.05 was now the 6.07 and was on the board. The 6.17 was waiting on Platform 6. I bought a magazine, sussed out the table seat I wanted and stood on the freezing cold platform waiting for the doors to be opened, feeling very glad I'd decided to leave a T-shirt on under my shirt. A few minutes later I was settled in to my seat, laptop deployed and waiting to set off. The train manager started his usual announcement: "This train calls at Stockport, Wilmslow, Crewe, Birmingham, Birmingham New Street, Coventry and arrives at Euston at 9.42."

9.42?? That's (works it out on fingers) 3 hours and 25 minutes! Trains from Piccadilly normally take about 2 hours 15. The train manager continued: "passengers with first class or standard open tickets may want to travel on the 6.35 which gets into Euston almost a full HOUR earlier."

I was off that train like a shot. Had to be: it was only two minutes away from leaving! Having warmed up nicely I spent another cold ten minutes on platform 8 waiting for the doors to open again. I spotted a table seat with no reserved ticket on it and bided my time. Being late onto the platform I wasn't in pole position for the door, and a woman with a suitcase was already waiting by the closest door. I didn't want to get stuck behind her so I walked further up and stood by the door at the other end of the carriage. Strictly, according to unspoken platform etiquette, I was "behind" the guy waiting there but when the doors pinged to indicate they'd been unlocked, he hesitated for a split-second too long giving me the social permission to activate the button and hence get in before him.

As I swung into my chosen seat I glanced up at the electronic seat reservation displays. Damn! The seat was taken! Not just that seat, but every seat at that table. I grabbed my bag and started back up the coach. The next table was taken and the next. And it wasn't only the tables. Every seat was taken; even the ones without paper "reserved" tickets. I should explain that Virgin trains don't have an awful lot of success with their automated booking service, so the displays are often wrong, or not working at all. When this happens they use the fall-back manual system of sticking bits of paper in the back of the seats, but these can be a trap for the unwary traveller. The presence of tickets in the seat backs does not necessarily indicate a malfunction of the displays. However, on walking through to Coach E and discovering that the displays in there also showed every single seat reserved I began to suspect the signs were indeed wrong. Other passengers were beginning to mill about in the aisle in confusion, so I quickly made my way back to Coach D, dumped my bag back on my original seat, and went to find the train manager. He confirmed the sign information was "still downloading" and we should take notice only of the paper reservations in the seatbacks. My seat didn't have one (the reason I'd picked it out while still on the platform) so once again I settled in for the journey, albeit a little wary of anyone walking past in case their name happened to be S Clark or A Chilton.

The seat information never did download properly, neither Clark nor Chilton ever turned up and eventually the train manager began to tell boarding passengers to ignore the displays. At Crewe a besuited gentleman boarded and asked if he could sit down. I moved the bag containing the remains of my breakfast onto the table and wedged myself against the window. Sitting four to a table is always uncomfortable. The seats are just too narrow to easily accommodate two and sitting opposite someone inevitably means legs can't be stretched and discomfort results. The suit squirmed around in his seat for a few seconds, tugged at his jacket as if I was sitting on it (I wasn't), waved his arms around to test the space available to him and then declared sotto voce "not really enough room here, is there?" and stood up again. I really don't think I'm that wide, but he found alternative accommodation at the next table down on the other side of the carriage, next to a lady who must have been somewhat narrower than me, since he settled there without further trouble.

The views from the window were pretty this morning though - everything painted white with frost. Even the train yards and scabby factories lining the track look more attractive when they're rimed with cold.

I had to look for some silver - or in this case white - lining to the journey. Train problems at Crewe held us up for 15 minutes and signalling problems outside Watford delayed us even further, so in the end we arrived at Euston at 9.54: twelve minutes later than I would have arrived if I'd stayed on the 6.17. >sigh<

Naturally I'd texted my manager to let him know I was going to be late for the 10am meeting. "It's OK," he replied, "it's probably going to be at 3pm now." I love my job.

Rituals

Rituals or ritualistic behaviours run through every human and animal society like the string that holds a pearl necklace together. Whether it's the annual rut of the deer, the mating dance of the bird of paradise, the coronation of a monarch or a common man's funeral - the ritual ceremony, the dress code, the formally observed "rules of engagement" all come together to mark whatever occasion is being celebrated, the most obvious ones being Christenings/Baptisms, weddings and funerals, or "hatch, match and despatch" as they are sometimes called. The sense of a familiar order to the events can make what might otherwise be an extremely stressful time for the "main players" into a more relaxed, enjoyable affair (or, in the case of funerals, forms a framework of support for the mourners).

If you can take a step back from occasions such as these and act as an impartial observer, they can look faintly ridiculous. Especially weddings. Perhaps with two failed marriages behind me I have a tendency to look on them as the triumph of hope over experience, but of course in the case of first-time couples, like the ones whose evening wedding party we attended last night, there is no "experience" that needs to be triumphed over.

It was with thoughts like these that I drove Nikki through thick freezing fog last night to Statham Lodge, to celebrate the marriage of Charlotte & Paul. While I don't particularly enjoy driving in fog I do love the way it makes everything feel mysterious and special.

We quickly found the bar and secured a comfy sofa and a couple of pints, greeted those members of Charlotte's family we knew and sat back to await the main event. The guests had all made an effort to follow the ritual dress code (with one notable exception, who drew sidelong glances and muffled tuts from the older guests which I found extremely amusing) and the penguin suits of the principal players were quite restrained, looking smart and slightly Edwardian, rather than completely buttoned-up and over the top, as they sometimes can.

Being a bloke I'm not about to wax lyrical on how beautiful "the dress" was. Suffice to say that Charlotte, when she appeared, looked radiant as only a bride can and provided proof, if proof were needed, that fat-bottomed girls do indeed make the lovin' world go round. She and Paul did a very thorough job of touring the floor and making sure they spoke to everyone during the course of the night, which I thought was a nice touch.

When the function room (the Gainsborough Suite) opened around 8pm it wasn't long before the happy couple took the floor for the first dance. Immediately following her dance with her new husband, Charlotte had arranged one with her Dad to the strains of This Is The Moment from Jekyll & Hyde ("This is the moment! This is the day, when I send all my doubts and demons on their way!"). I couldn't help wondering if either of my daughters will ever want a massive do like this, complete with "proper" dancing. I'd be in bits before I ever got anywhere near the dance floor.

Gradually Nikki & Charlotte's other workmates and their partners started drifting in. We'd grabbed a table which seated a perfect ten - just enough for us all since our party also included Anita and her husband, who Nikki worked with at Sage a few years back. It was good to catch up with them again. We sat and watched a lot of traditional wedding "Dad dancing" - including one guy who looked a lot like Buzz Lightyear and danced about as convincingly. To infinity and beyond! Nikki persuaded me up onto the floor for one slow number, but as I was driving it was always unlikely I'd get drunk enough to spend much time dancing :)

The evening had a lovely warm, friendly feel to it, which I guess isn't really surprising for a wedding party. Indeed, Charlotte's whole family is a warm and friendly one. Not that a strong family is any guarantee of a happy lasting marriage (living proof of that is sitting right here), but you just had to wish them well - which I did, in writing, when the Guest Book came round.

A study in scarlet

Well, maybe not scarlet. Not yet at least. We haven't painted it yet. But we have moved it around a bit. Unpacking a few more boxes gave us room to put Nikki's desk in the corner where she wanted it, and although her real desk still hasn't arrived (due to even more delays from the supplier, but now we're promised it by the end of February) it's still made a big difference to how the whole room looks. You can get a feel for how it will be when it's all replastered, redecorated and carpeted.

It's amazing too what you find when you unpack after four months! Chopsticks!

What I haven't been able to fathom is how to put a PC together without a rat's nest of cables all over the place. Don't say "cable tidy" because I have one of them, but the darn cables go every which way, so none of them will fit in it. It does help having the PCs in different corners of the room. When we first moved in we just dumped them in a temporary position - both on one desk - which meant under the desk was more like an elephant's nest than a rat's! It was good to finally sort all that out. I love the sense of progress and achievement even such a small step as we made today can give.

Off out to a wedding reception this evening - one of Nikki's workmates. Sounds like it might be fun, but if it isn't it's only twenty miles away so we can just bail ;o)

What goes around comes around

It's funny, but even though our new house still needs work on just about every room, I've been working 70-hour weeks since Christmas on a bid for a large contract (which went in on Wednesday) and we're saddled with the biggest mortgage we've ever had, recently I've been thinking that I have never been more content.

The feeling started to gel for me last Saturday night when we took Natalie and Blythe out to celebrate Nat's 18th. I get such a buzz from being around my girls. I guess you have to be a Dad to understand it - and a Dad of daughters too. It's wonderful to see the people they are becoming; to hear them crack jokes (and realise that the famous Beresford sense of humour that I inherited from my Dad is alive and well and has made it safely to the next generation); to talk about their plans and dreams. This was especially poignant now that Nat is "officially" an adult. Naturally she doesn't feel like one. Hell, I'm 50 and I don't!

That feeling grew stronger on Tuesday night. It was the first book club meeting of the year and I was there on my own. Nikki had been invited for a girlie night out with the neighbours. I was enjoying the company of the ladies in the club (as it turned out, I was the only male member there that night). They really are a cracking bunch - excellent company - and I thoroughly enjoyed the evening. Nikki had a great time with our neighbours too.

Then on Wednesday we received confirmation of our booking at the Great Orme Lighthouse. We spent a fabulous couple of days there in October with my mates and we've arranged a repeat visit later this year. There was a time when I didn't see these guys or their WAGs from one year to the next and now we're enjoying a wonderful rekindling of the friendship we've shared for 30+ years. Like someone has stoked the ashes of a dormant fire and it's burst back into flame as if to prove that it was always there and never went out. And that's the point of this post really - friendship. We're surrounded by it at the moment: old friends, new friends (both in Chorlton Chapters and Chorlton Players), new neighbours, and great relationships with working colleagues too, some of which also go back almost 30 years.

One of the fundamental Principles of Spiritualism is that one is "compensated" for all the good one does and one has in turn to compensate for any bad. There is so much love around us at the moment, I can't help feeling I must be doing something right! That time, now thankfully long past, when I had to curtail my sociable nature...it seems like that was someone else's life I was living and now I've got mine back. Cheers!

Bloody IE7

I upgraded to Internet Explorer 7 before Christmas. Why? Ha! I've begun to ask myself the same question. IE6 was relatively stable (or at least, it seems that way now!) but having experienced tabbed browsing in Firefox I wanted it in IE.

Fool.

I've never been one of those who "hates" Microsoft and engages in constant bashing and sniping at their products, their market strategy, their treatment of independent software companies, but at best my experience with IE7 can be described as annoyed exasperation. How a company with their resources can put out a product - a SEVENTH-GENERATION product - that hangs up completely every couple of days, is utterly beyond my comprehension. MS have been developing IE for well over ten years. They employ armies of designers, coders and testers. They use the product for years internally before letting it anywhere near the market. And yet when we eventually get our hands on it, it's shit.

Maybe it's my own fault. I don't turn my PC off. Ever. I like my Windows desktop to behave like my real-life desktop - when I get up, walk away, and then come back, everything is still where I left it. So I'm at the mercy of memory leaks and creeping death, and it looks like IE7 has both of these in spades. I also like to have a lot of tabs open at the same time. Isn't that the point? I do a lot of stuff. I blog here, and on TV Scoop, I like to have a Google tab open, some of the Entertainment sites like Digital Spy, NewsNow and MediaGuardian, and some of my friends' and family's blogs. I usually run with about 8-10 tabs up. And the crock that is IE7 stops dead every other day.

Would I like to send an error report? You bet your sweet bippy I would. It might be exactly the SAME error report as I've sent 30 times already, but I will keep sending them until they send me a fix. Roll on SP1! Or even better...maybe it's time to dust off that Linux distro?